Stories (2011) (124 page)

Deel turned his head slightly, like a dog trying to
distinguish what it sees. “You’re a bad shot.”

“Ain’t no cause to do this, Deel.”

“It’s not a matter of cause. It’s the way of man,” Deel
said.

“What in hell you talkin’ about, Deel? I’m askin’ you, I’m
beggin’ you, don’t kill me. She was the one talked me into it. She thought you
were dead, long dead. She wanted it like it was when it was just me and her.”

Deel took a deep breath and tried to taste the air. It had
tasted so clean a moment ago, but now it was bitter.

“The boy got away,” Deel said.

“Go after him, you want, but don’t kill me.”

A smile moved across Deel’s face. “Even the little ones grow
up to be men.”

“You ain’t makin’ no sense, Deel. You ain’t right.”

“Ain’t none of us right,” Deel said.

Deel raised the shotgun and fired. Tom’s head went away and
the body drooped in the clutch of the vines and hung over the edge of the
ravine.

* * * *

The boy was quick, much faster than his father. Deel had
covered a lot of ground in search of him, and he could read the boy’s sign in
the moonlight, see where the grass was pushed down, see bare footprints in the
damp dirt, but the boy had long reached the woods, and maybe the town beyond.
He knew that. It didn’t matter anymore.

He moved away from the woods and back to the field until he
came to Pancake Rocks. They were flat, round chunks of sandstone piled on top
of one another and they looked like a huge stack of pancakes. He had forgotten
all about them. He went to them and stopped and looked at the top edge of the
pancake stones. It was twenty feet from ground to top. He remembered that from
when he was a boy. His daddy told him, “That there is twenty feet from top to
bottom. A Spartan boy could climb that and reach the top in three minutes. I
can climb it and reach the top in three minutes. Let’s see what you can do.”

He had never reached the top in three minutes, though he had
tried time after time. It had been important to his father for some reason,
some human reason, and he had forgotten all about it until now.

Deel leaned the shotgun against the stones and slipped off
his boots and took off his clothes. He tore his shirt and made a strap for the
gun, and slung it over his bare shoulder and took up the ammo bag and tossed it
over his other shoulder, and began to climb. He made it to the top. He didn’t
know how long it had taken him, but he guessed it had been only about three
minutes. He stood on top of Pancake Rocks and looked out at the night. He could
see his house from there. He sat cross-legged on the rocks and stretched the
shotgun over his thighs. He looked up at the sky. The stars were bright and the
space between them was as deep as forever. If man could, he would tear the
stars down, thought Deel.

Deel sat and wondered how late it was. The moon had moved,
but not so much as to pull up the sun. Deel felt as if he had been sitting
there for days. He nodded off now and then, and in the dream he was an ant, one
of many ants, and he was moving toward a hole in the ground from which came
smoke and sparks of fire. He marched with the ants toward the hole, and then
into the hole they went, one at a time. Just before it was his turn, he saw the
ants in front of him turn to black crisps in the fire, and he marched after
them, hurrying for his turn, then he awoke and looked across the moonlit field.

He saw, coming from the direction of his house, a rider. The
horse looked like a large dog because the rider was so big. He hadn’t seen the
man in years, but he knew who he was immediately. Lobo Collins. He had been
sheriff of the county when he had left for war. He watched as Lobo rode toward
him. He had no thoughts about it. He just watched.

Well out of range of Deel’s shotgun, Lobo stopped and got
off his horse and pulled a rifle out of the saddle boot.

“Deel,” Lobo called. “It’s Sheriff Lobo Collins.”

Lobo’s voice moved across the field loud and clear. It was
as if they were sitting beside each other. The light was so good he could see
Lobo’s mustache clearly, drooping over the corners of his mouth.

“Your boy come told me what happened.”

“He ain’t my boy, Lobo.”

“Everybody knowed that but you, but wasn’t no cause to do
what you did. I been up to the house, and I found Tom in the ravine.”

“They’re still dead, I assume.”

“You ought not done it, but she was your wife, and he was messin’
with her, so you got some cause, and a jury might see it that way. That’s
something to think about, Deel. It could work out for you.”

“He shot me,” Deel said.

“Well now, that makes it even more different. Why don’t you
put down that gun, and you and me go back to town and see how we can work
things out.”

“I was dead before he shot me.”

“What?” Lobo said. Lobo had dropped down on one knee. He had
the Winchester across that knee and with his other hand he held the bridle of
his horse.

Deel raised the shotgun and set the stock firmly against the
stone, the barrel pointing skyward.

“You’re way out of range up there,” Lobo said. “That shotgun
ain’t gonna reach me, but I can reach you, and I can put one in a fly’s asshole
from here to the moon.”

Deel stood up. “I can’t reach you, then I reckon I got to
get me a wee bit closer.”

Lobo stood up and dropped the horse’s reins. The horse
didn’t move. “Now don’t be a damn fool, Deel.”

Deel slung the shotgun’s makeshift strap over his shoulder
and started climbing down the back of the stones, where Lobo couldn’t see him.
He came down quicker than he had gone up, and he didn’t even feel where the
stones had torn his naked knees and feet.

When Deel came around the side of the stone, Lobo had moved
only slightly, away from his horse, and he was standing with the Winchester
held down by his side. He was watching as Deel advanced, naked and committed.
Lobo said, “Ain’t no sense in this, Deel. I ain’t seen you in years, and now
I’m gonna get my best look at you down the length of a Winchester. Ain’t no
sense in it.”

“There ain’t no sense to nothin’,” Deel said, and walked
faster, pulling the strapped shotgun off his shoulder.

Lobo backed up a little, then raised the Winchester to his
shoulder, said, “Last warnin’, Deel.”

Deel didn’t stop. He pulled the shotgun stock to his hip and
let it rip. The shot went wide and fell across the grass like hail, some twenty
feet in front of Lobo. And then Lobo fired.

Deel thought someone had shoved him. It felt that way. That
someone had walked up unseen beside him and had shoved him on the shoulder.
Next thing he knew he was lying on the ground looking up at the stars. He felt
pain, but not like the pain he had felt when he realized what he was.

A moment later the shotgun was pulled from his hand, and
then Lobo was kneeling down next to him with the Winchester in one hand and the
shotgun in the other.

“I done killed you, Deel.”

“No,” Deel said, spitting up blood. “I ain’t alive to kill.”

“I think I clipped a lung,” Lobo said, as if proud of his
marksmanship. “You ought not done what you done. It’s good that boy got away.
He ain’t no cause of nothin’.”

“He just ain’t had his turn.”

Deel’s chest was filling up with blood. It was as if someone
had put a funnel in his mouth and poured it into him. He tried to say something
more, but it wouldn’t come out. There was only a cough and some blood; it
splattered warm on his chest. Lobo put the weapons down and picked up Deel’s
head and laid it across one of his thighs so he wasn’t choking so much.

“You got a last words, Deel?”

“Look there,” Deel said.

Deel’s eyes had lifted to the heavens, and Lobo looked. What
he saw was the night and the moon and the stars. “Look there. You see it?” Deel
said. “The stars are fallin’.”

Lobo said, “Ain’t nothin’ fallin’, Deel,” but when he looked
back down, Deel was gone.

One moment he had been comfortably reading, for the
umpteenth time, Alice in Wonderland, and the next moment it was too stuffy and
hot to concentrate. The words seemed to melt and re-form before his eyes, and
he found himself slipping in and out of sleep like nervous fingers first
filling, then withdrawing from a glove.

Sleepy, but being a man of strict routine, he put the book
aside, left his tacky hotel room - the Egyptians here in Cairo thought it a
fine place - and took to the streets in the dead of night.

It was warm out, but more comfortable than his room. Out
here was like sitting in an oven with the door open, as opposed to the room,
which was more like sitting in an oven with the door closed.

Yet, in spite of the stickiness of the night, the air had an
intoxicating feel. The streets, buildings, all that should be familiar, had an
oddly haunting, slightly alien look about it, as if they had been replaced with
facsimiles of the originals. Even his footsteps on the cobblestones seemed
strangely distant. Odder yet, there was neither street urchin nor curled
sleeping beggar in sight. More often than not, they lay against the walls of
buildings, or in the doorways, like abandoned curs. But tonight... no one.

Wally Carpenter knew that to walk these streets late at
night was to invite trouble, but he was not a fearful man. And besides, he
carried in his coat pocket a fully loaded,.38 snub-nose revolver, with which he
was rather proficient.

So it was with caution, but no particular dread, that
Carpenter stalked Cairo's dark streets and pondered upon the seeming emptiness
and uncharacteristic silence of the city. He wandered in a nearly aimless
fashion, feeling for all the world as though he had been hijacked by space
creatures and set down in a replica of the city he knew and loved; and
presently his footsteps brought him to that area of Cairo known as the City of
the Dead.

The place was quite a marvel. An entire city - houses,
streets, and walls - devoted to the spirits of the recent and the long
departed. It was said that there were men in Cairo who had the ability to speak
with these dead and for a fee they would summon the spirits of loved ones and
communicate questions to them, and return their answers.

It was a mystical place, a place shrouded in legend, and not
a good spot for a person, especially a non-Egyptian, to wander late at night.
Robbers and lepers were said to frequent the city, and it was also said to be
the home of demons and ghouls.

Carpenter was well aware of this, but it did not concern
him. His revolver could dispatch robbers, and as for ghouls and such, he did
not believe in them; they were the stuff of opium dreams and fevered
imaginations, nothing more.

Once Carpenter had been a student, a promising one at that.
He had majored in anthropology and archaeology, and those fields of endeavor
had brought him to Egypt, land of antiquity, land of dreams.

But once he had dug in its sands and prowled its tombs, he
lost interest in the physical work of the profession, decided he was more
suited to the academic side of the subject. He determined to write a book, to
deal in paper and ink instead of dirt and sweat.

That decision made, he often walked the streets at night,
made his mental notes and later consigned them to paper, saved them up against
the day he would write his book on the wonders and marvels of Egypt. In the
meanwhile, he read his archaeology, mythology and anthropology texts, and in
his spare time, for pure amusement, he read and reread Lewis Carroll's Alice in
Wonderland, as well as its sequel, Through the Looking Glass. Carroll's was the
only fiction he truly cared for. It relaxed him, made him smile, and each time
he read the books, he found something new and fascinating within. In fact,
Alice and her adventures were still in his head as he reached the City of the
Dead and made his way within.

Walking among the ruins he could smell the rank ripeness of
decay, as well as the mixed and confusing odors of Cairo proper. But the smells
seemed oddly received by his senses, as if they were being filtered to him from
another dimension. It was quiet and peaceful here, like stepping off the earth
and standing on the face of the moon.

But even as he dwelled on the solitude, there came a
scuttling sound to his right. Carpenter turned quickly, saw a figure move from
one clump of shadows to another, flitter once in the moonlight, then disappear
totally into darkness.

Carpenter almost pulled the revolver from his coat pocket.
It could be a robber, but most likely it was a beggar or a leper who had taken
refuge here, much in the same way tramps back in the states slept in graveyards
to avoid being disturbed. If the latter were the case, then there would be
little to fear. If it was a robber, then he had his revolver.

He strained his eyes into the darkness, but saw nothing.
Presently, he began to walk again. He had not gone ten feet when he heard the
scuttling again, and this time, as he turned, he saw the author of the noise.

Out of the shadows hopped a huge white rabbit wearing a
checkered waistcoat and vest. The rabbit stopped, gave Carpenter a
disinterested glance, then plucked a pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket.

"Oh my goodness, goodness," the rabbit said in
remarkably plain English. "I shall be late. Yes, yes, yes, so very
late."

Turning, and with a succession of rapid hops, the rabbit
disappeared back into the shadows.

Carpenter shook his head; blinked a few times. Yes, it was
an intoxicating night, all right, but this was ridiculous. Six-foot rabbits in
Cairo? In the City of the Dead? Shades of Harvey. He must be dreaming.

Suddenly there came the sound of melodious humming.
Carpenter recognized the tune. It was the song that George Armstrong Custer had
adopted as his personal theme. What was it called? "Garry Owen"? Yes,
something like that.