The Drop Edge of Yonder (3 page)

n his way back to the mountains, he planned to give himself the luxury of a pause in Panchito, a squalid high-desert settlement that he had hid out in more than once - gut shot or on the run from a war party or a round of horse thieving from one of the sprawling Spanish ranches south of Santa Fe. It was a place where he could wet his beak and lay out with a seasoned whore without worrying about being drilled in the back or skinned in a crooked poker game.

Two days outside of Panchito a storm slammed down from the north and twice he was blown off his saddle by gusts of ice-blue wind and sleet that slashed against his cheeks like razor blades. Not able to make camp because of the rocky terrain, he let his horse and mule drift beyond boundaries or any sense of direction. Several times he looked back as if he were being followed, but nothing moved beyond the heavy scrim of falling snow When he finally reached a sheltered hollow he picketed the horse and mule and burrowed into a snowdrift, covering himself with a buffalo robe.

The next day the storm passed and he continued on through heavy drifts, his moccasins and leggings frozen solid, the eyes of his half-dead horse and mule covered with icy sleet. In the evening the skies parted and he could see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, their cold vermilion peaks promising a measure of deliverance, enough anyway, to keep him plowing on towards Panchito and a rest-up in the town's two-bit cantina.

The promise of refuge ended with a low rumble followed by a rushing mass of up-rooted trees, rocks, and snow that swept him off his horse as easily as a matchstick tossed over a waterfall. Running, tumbling head over heels, he rolled along the edge of the boiling avalanche until he landed in a deep drift.

Half-conscious, he lay spread-eagled on his back, waiting for a second eruption or last exhale, whichever came first. He wasn't exactly a stranger when it came to facing the misty beyond, or the jornada del muerto, as he had heard death referred to south of the border. There had been other times: when he'd been lost and half-frozen in a blizzard, wounded in more than one saloon shoot-out, nearly scalped by an Apache war party, fallen headfirst off a butte, to name a few.

He was interrupted by a second avalanche that sounded, as it roared upon him, like a dam busting loose. Slammed forward, more dead than alive, he crawled towards a small clearing of spruce and cedar, where he managed to construct a crude wickiup out of fallen branches.

He woke to find his horse staring at him with bewildered eyes. A mile away he found his mule, its legs sticking straight up inside a huge drift.

DAY LATER HE REACHED PANCHITO, A FORLORN CLUSTER of adobe buildings grouped around a cantina. Inside the moan of biting wind, he heard the distant maniacal chords of a runaway piano, punctuated by bursts of mindless laughter.

An empty stagecoach was pulled up in front of the cantina. Near the stagecoach a small bandy-legged man, wearing a sheepskin coat and a whore's feather boa around his neck, was doing his best to mount a horse. Halfway into the saddle, his foot slid out of the stirrup and he fell headfirst on the frozen mud.

He looked up at Zebulon through glazed, shifty eyes. "I seen you somewhere."

"I don't think you did," Zebulon said.

The bandy-legged man tried to mount his horse again and then gave up. "Maybe you come in last night with Hatchet Jack," the bandy-legged man said. "Folks say that half-breed weaselhead should be tarred and feathered. Not me. I'd give the bastard a long rope and a short drop."

Zebulon dismounted and pushed past him into the cantina.

Three oil lamps hanging from a rafter cast a dim light over the narrow low-ceilinged room. Hatchet Jack sat at the bar wearing a red and white Mexican army coat and a black bowler with a raven feather slanted over one side of the brim. A scar shaped like a long S ran down his left cheek from a wound Zebulon had carved a long time ago.

Hatchet Jack looked at him through one blue eye, one black.

"You're a hard buzzard to track. I looked for you at the rendezvous, but you had already lit out. They told me you was ridin' a hot streak but quit while you was ahead. That didn't sound like you."

"It was a hard winter," Zebulon said. "I'm holdin' on to what I can."

"I ain't askin' for no hand out," Hatchet Jack said, "if that's what you're thinkin'."

The piano player's gnarled fingers rolled over the broken keys with mechanical precision. Further down the bar, two playedout whores sat staring at a rattlesnake coiled up inside a glass jar. When the piano player struck a dissonant chord the snake shifted its head back and forth looking for a way out.

Zebulon poured himself a shot from Hatchet Jack's half-full bottle of Taos White Lightning, a slug that burned into his gut like a branding iron. While he waited for Hatchet Jack to say what was on his mind, he focused on three stuffed moose heads lined up on the wall behind the bar. All of their marble eyes except one had been shot out, and their antlers and heads were punctured by tomahawks and darts.

"I need help with your Pa," Hatchet Jack said. "I want his forgiveness."

Forgiveness: it was a word Zebulon had never used before, much less thought about.

"It's been seven years since you been up to see them?" Hatchet Jack said.

"More like two."

Hatchet Jack shook his head, pouring himself another shot of Taos White Lightning. "Last time I rode up I went all the way loco and then some. The week before, an Arapahoe war party had buried Pa up to his neck in a swamp with the water rising. Me bein' of mixed blood didn't help. He told me not to call him Pa. Said he never should have taken me in after he won me in that poker game and he wanted me gone. That's when I cleaned his plow"

"You cleaned Pa's plow?" Zebulon asked.

"I told him to dig a hole and go fuck himself. Those were my words. Then I took off with his big sorrel horse and a mess of his traps."

"How did Ma take it?"

"She brained him with an ax handle before he could smoke me. Said she was glad to do it, but that she'd look forward to when I took off and didn't come back. Which is what I done. Until now"

Hatchet Jack downed another shot of Taos White Lightning. "I been told to make it up to him by an old Mex brujo. Name of Plaxico. You wouldn't know him. After I left the mountains I rode straight to the end of myself, doin' the usual bad mischief before I signed on with him. He has big medicine, that old man. Big sack of power. Learned me all about the spirit world. What to do and not to do. How to find and hold on to your power without sellin' it on the cheap. He said someone put a curse on me after your Pa took me in and that if I wanted to shake it loose I'd have to make it right with him."

"How do you aim to do it?"

"Damned if I know"

"What kind of curse?"

"Somethin' about being stuck between the worlds. Not knowin' which end is up. He went on about a woman. When I asked him about that, he wouldn't say"

"Pa will plug you just for showin' up," Zebulon said, not wanting to know any more about curses.

"Unless you ride up there with me," Hatchet Jack said. "I'm askin', Zeb. This one time. You be the only one that knows how to stretch the blanket with the old bastard."

"I used to know how to stretch it. No more."

Hatchet Jack shook his head. "I went to a whole lot of trouble stealing a prime horse and a bunch of traps to give back to him. Thing was, I got taken bad in a game of stud. A full house to some white nigger's straight flush. I lost the horse and the traps and everything else."

He paused. "Look. I'm ridin' the rump of somethin' I don't know about and I need your help."

When one of the whores banged her shot glass on the bar, Hatchet Jack signaled the bartender to give her a refill.

"That's how it goes," he said. "Ever since I poked her, she been on me like the last squirrel of winter. I'd be better off spendin' time with Ma Thumb and her four daughters."

The piano player pounded out another tune. The back of the room was full of all-or-nothing gamblers, along with three heavy-lidded vaqueros sitting on the floor against a wall, drunk or half-asleep. Four other men sat at a table, speaking in whispers as they looked Zebulon over. Out-of-work ranch hands, Zebulon figured. At the next table a large-bellied rancher was playing poker with the stagecoach driver, a busted up man with a handle-bar mustache and a soiled patch over one eye. Behind them a man sat slumped over a table; either drunk or possibly dead, his face lay across his forearms and a black cape was draped across his emaciated shoulders. A woman sat next to him wearing a dark green high-busted dance-hall dress and long silver earrings that drooped in a long bow to her neck. Her bronze high-toned face, as luminous as ancient rice paper, was framed by spills of medusa-like hair, blacker than black. Zebulon had never seen anyone like her, not even in his usual rut of Denver whorehouses known for specializing in mixed colors. She was smoking a long Mexican cheroot and appeared, as she looked over at him, more weary than curious. Or perhaps she was just bored.

"Spooky," Hatchet Jack said. "They come in on the stage, goin' south to old Mex. Looks to me like the old rooster owns her. Or maybe it's the other way around."

The woman removed a deck of cards from her purse. Cutting the cards with one hand, she spread them on the table for a game of solitaire. The first card up was the queen of hearts, which she quickly buried in the deck.

"Are you goin' to help or not?" Hatchet Jack asked.

Zebulon's eyes were on the stagecoach driver and one of the vaqueros as they sat down at the woman's table. "Right now I need to skin some cards and rest my bones"

Hatchet Jack started to object, then changed his mind. Picking up the bottle of Taos White Lightning, he headed slowly up the stairs. After a short consultation, the two whores knocked back their drinks and followed him.

Zebulon considered and then rejected what it would mean to join them, then downed another shot and walked across the room to a battered billiard table, its patched green covering stained with spilled whiskey and vomit. Sliding around the table like a two-step dancer, he maneuvered the cue ball around the table just to prove that he still could. Then he made his way over to the woman who was dealing a hand of poker to the vaquero and stagecoach driver. "Room for one more?" he asked.

She kept her eyes on the cards. "There's always room for one more: as long as one more ends up one less."

She spoke with what he took to be an English accent, along with a softer, more spaced-out inflection that Zebulon figured came from some kind of African lingo.

He placed a stack of silver dollars on the table.

"A word of advice," the stagecoach driver said. "Delilah don't take prisoners."

"But I do take prisoners," Delilah replied, looking at Zebulon with the hint of a smile. "It's what I do after I take them that causes problems."

"I second that statement."

The black-cloaked man sitting next to her raised his head, revealing a small-boned face highlighted by a thin mustache and long pointed goatee streaked with white.

"I suggest caution if you don't want to find yourself falling over a cliff," he mumbled, his head slumping back to the table.