The Six-Gun Tarot (11 page)

The clasp snapped free with a metallic pop and Auggie opened the box. He lifted the heavy jar out of its velvet fitting and placed it on the table. It was full of a cloudy, greenish fluid. Small particles, disturbed by the movement, drifted in the liquid, like silt. The thing inside the jar bumped awkwardly against the sides. Black strands, like seaweed, drifted lazily, suspended in the filthy soup.

Auggie noticed that the fluid was getting cloudy again. He’d need to add the chemicals again soon. He opened the small velvet-lined drawer at the base of the case and removed a large silver key. He fitted it into the keyway, at the base of the jar, which was surrounded by a complex maze of clockwork gears and spider-strand wires, like the glittering oiled guts of a music box. He turned the key three times; each time there was the loud groan of springs and gears. He slid the key out and the mechanisms began to spin and hum. The smell of warm brass encircled the room. A dim light filled the murky tank as the thing in the jar shuddered and then held itself erect. Auggie closed his eyes and prayed for God to forgive him once again.

“Au … gus … tus?”
the thing in the jar said.
“It … is … you … ja?”

Her eyes were covered by milky cataracts; they looked greenish through the water and the yellow light. To Auggie they were still the color of virgin sky.

“
Ja,
beloved, it is only me.”

“I missed you so much. How long were you away? How long was I in the dark?”

“Not long, my love. It’s only been a day; it’s always just a day. Can’t you remember?”

Her lips moved, but no air bubbles escaped to the surface of the jar. Her voice came from out of the machine at the base of the tank. It sounded like it was trapped in a tiny box full of wires, echoing, bouncing off the tight walls of steel and brass.

“
It’s hard to remember time here, darling,
” she said.
“I get so lonely away from you, from the light. It’s like some horrible dream that I cannot awake from until you return
.
I miss you, Augustus, very, very much. You chase the darkness away.”

The whiskey kept the tears at bay, as it usually did, but he felt the hot poker of guilt dig into his innards and twist. Surely he was a damned man; surely he was lost for his weakness and his selfishness.

“I love you, Gerta,” he croaked “I miss you too.”

And then the husband told the wife about his day, like he always did.

The Three of Swords

He wept for the first billion years. His tears turned to steam.

The place was like a forge—sticky clumps of this clumsy stuff the Almighty called matter bubbled up out of the alchemy of cosmic fire and wind. Everywhere there was chaos, deafening noise and blinding light—a symphony of hard radiation and the collision of violent young worlds. It was horrible, no order, no peace.

Eventually it all cooled off in the frigid night, the former home of the Darklings, now a graveyard littered with God’s newly hung stars. Biqa looked up at the ethereal chip of lunar rock hanging in the dark sky and his heart ached for home.

But he couldn’t go back. Not until this duty was done. God and His attendants had made that very clear to him. He was to stand watch, to guard and to wait.

So he waited. Time passed and the Earth greened. He waited.

He came to think that God had created this place as a prison, a punishment for those in the Host who displeased Him. It was so awful here, so cold and unconnected. Every time he remembered with his perfect crystalline memory the glory that was God’s presence, he fell to the dirt and ash and shook with sadness and regret. Nothing was worse than being away from He who had willed him to exist.

Other times he grew so angry that he nearly hurled his flaming sword into the darkness of space and cursed the name of the Lord, but he knew his duty; he knew to Whom his loyalty remained. So he did nothing.

He waited. He watched mountains rise from valleys and oceans cut continents in two. The rain and the snow kissed his skin, like a balm that made the pain, the loneliness, the despair, ease in him.

Each day he watched the sunrise like it was a letter from home.

In time, he came to appreciate what God was trying to do here and he marveled at the creator’s aesthetic. He had crafted from offal, from cosmic refuse and the basest of atoms, a re-creation of Heaven that could move an angel to song or tears. Bravo.

Biqa was less impressed with the parade of living things the Almighty frittered with on the surface. When they didn’t work out He would wipe them away with a shrug and a comet. The world would be wiped clean of life in blood and fire and then back to the drawing board. Biqa noted that one extinction led to the next refinement of whatever tenacious life managed to cling to the cold, broken rock. So there was no wasted motion; each ending moved toward a new beginning. Truly, God was a sculptor beyond reproach.

Biqa knew others from the Host were moving upon the Earth, on various missions commissioned by God. None of them ever visited him. They avoided him, partly, he was convinced, due to his odious duty and partly out of fear of angering the Lord and sharing his outcast fate.

Some nights, when it was quiet and clear, he could hear them singing up in Heaven and his cheeks would grow wet.

He waited. But the feeling of abandonment clung to his shoulders like heavy stones. He counted the grains of sand upon the ground as best he could until he lost count. He longed to play a game, to chase his brethren among the stars, laughing, the solar wind kissing his face. His father, looking down upon His playing children, giving them His approval, His unconditional love.

Biqa’s face fell to his hands, hands capable of splitting atoms, and he cried in his utter loneliness and his regret. He wished he had never questioned, wished he had never thought.

Something small and soft touched his knee. Startled, he looked up to see three of the little furry creatures that hid so shyly in the tree line had braved the ground and had actually padded up to him. They seemed curious about what he was doing.

“It’s all right,” he whispered to the tiny, expressive faces of the little mortals. “Fear not. Fear not.”

He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. The creature that had touched him reached up and took it gently. Biqa was speechless. The little climber’s hand was the same as the angel’s, only smaller and lined with random swirls and loops carved into the skin. It shook him, dreadfully. He had seen nothing of himself in all the eons that life had fought for dominance on God’s arena. He had seen beauty, to be sure; he had seen the will to endure, the beginnings of order. But in this tiny hand the angel finally saw his own legacy. He looked up to the face of the tiny, hairy creature. The tears began anew when he looked upon its full regard. The little thing patted his hand, gently, comfortingly.

In this foul, matted little creature the angel saw God’s love, God’s mercy and pity, God’s eyes.

“I … I … Thank you…,” Biqa said, and tried to embrace the creature. All three of them shrieked at the rising giant and skittered off into the high grass and eventually back to their trees.

And Biqa understood why he was there and why God had chosen him. He was more than just a warden, an exile. He was the critic, the skeptic who had to be shown.

He took up his sword of fire and he waited.

But now he no longer waited alone.

The Ten of Pentacles

It was after noon when Mutt ascended Argent Mountain. He rode up Prosperity, passing the narrow maze-like alleys of Bick Street that made up most of Johnny Town, on the right. Prosperity became less of a road and more of a rutted path as his horse, a darkly dabbled paint named Muha, began to climb up the winding trail. “Muha” meant “moon” in Mutt’s mother’s language. He sometimes wanted to name the horse Crazy, because he was the only animal that had never been spooked by Mutt.

When he was a child, his mother’s people, the Shoshokos, were looked down on by the other Shoshoni tribes because they were too poor to have horses and had to dig in the dirt for their food. Once, Mutt and a few of the other young men of the village went out with a party of the older men in an attempt to steal horses from a bunch of arrogant Ute merchants who had passed through the village a few days earlier. The plan failed miserably when the horses screamed like frightened women at Mutt’s approach. The Ute were alerted to the attempted theft and nearly killed several members of the raiding party. Back home Mutt was beaten half to death by the elders and lived alone at the edge of the village for two months. Mutt had learned to stay upwind from horses.

Argent was a gentle slope for the first few hundred feet. The trails were well worn and wide enough for wagons, or several riders side-by-side. Some sagebrush and Indian rice grass sparsely covered the sides of the path. A few yellow flowers managed to fight their way out of the sagebrush’s thin branches. Their existence in such a hot, desolate place made them all the more beautiful. Mrs. Stapleton pushed her way into his thoughts again at the sight of the desert flowers, but only for a moment.

The squatter camps were another few hundred feet up. To his left, the deputy could see Golgotha below him, bustling with goings-on. The town was busy enough still, even with the closing of the silver mine a few years back. Enough people passed through here on their way to California or headed back to the East. The town’s location at the edge of the 40-Mile made it a last stop for many before the days of hell began. But it was still a far cry from when silver was first discovered. If that boom had lasted, it would have put Golgotha on the map with places like Carson City, Virginia City and Reno. And he would have been long gone from here.

He stopped and sniffed the air. He smelled gunpowder, or something like it. Lots of it too. Wagon tracks, fresh from today and weighted down, deep in the dirt were tangled up with the scent. He urged his horse gently on and picked up pace as he headed for the squatter camp.

About twenty small cabins, shacks and lean-tos clung to the side of Argent Mountain. Another fifteen or so tents were also scattered across the mountain’s face. About half of the squatters chose to live on the eastern side of the mountain, looking down on Golgotha. They were a pretty independent bunch, for the most part.

In the years that Mutt had been here, he had come to understand the ways the tribes worked in this town. He had learned long ago that an outsider, someone without a pack to call his own, was often better at seeing the invisible divisions between people than a participant in the social dance.

At the top were the Mormons—mostly wealthy folk who had built up many of the businesses in town. The wealthiest lived on the other side of the town from Argent, up on Rose Hill. They were bankers, cattlemen, schoolmasters, merchants and priests. One even had something to do with the railroad barons back east.

Below them were the majority of folk in town. They probably owned a small house they had built—maybe a horse or two. They scraped by working for themselves or for the folk up on Rose Hill.

Then there were squatters up here on Argent—they were mostly down-on-their-luck prospectors, grifters and cowboys who had bet their last dollar on Malachi Bick’s silver mine and had lost. They worked odd jobs for people in town; a few were crooks and small-time rustlers. Word had gotten around Nevada that Golgotha’s squatter camp was a good place to lay low for a spell if you needed it. Many folks made a living supporting that small cottage industry. Others, like poor old Earl, had lost almost everything coming out west in the quest for a better life. Earl lost a wife. Many had lost their entire families. In the end they didn’t really care where their bones rested, as long as they could kill the pain with cheap rotgut and solitude.

After them came the Chinamen. Alien, secretive and stoic. They almost didn’t count, just like Mutt and his mother’s people. It was a toss-up who a white man would rather string up first—an Indian or Chinese. They were outside any tribe but their own and that was just they way they liked it. Just like Mutt.

The camp was up and staggering about. Those who did an honest day’s work were already down the mountain and had been since before sunup. These were the old, the infirm, the wives and the criminals.

“Hey, Dep-u-tee!” Grinning Alice shouted to him from her rocker on the uneven porch of her shanty. She was dressed in a filthy chemise. The few teeth she still had were black and there was an ugly scar that looped from the left side of her mouth up to her ear. “Y’all haven’t been back to visit me in a spell. What’s the matter, darlin’, you don’t love me no more?”

Several of the old men walking up the street guffawed at the whore’s remarks. Mutt shook his head, nodded with a sly grin and kept on riding.

He stopped and tied Muha to a post in front of the Mother Lode saloon. A half-dozen men, mostly Earl’s age or older, slumped on the porch. They were passing bottles of rotgut back and forth. They all avoided Mutt’s gaze. A hungry-looking young man eyed the Indian’s horse, working out the calculus of hunger and risk behind his lidded eyes. Before he got too far into his equations, Mutt stopped in front of him, and rested his hand on his pistol.

“If I come out and my horse is gone, I’m going to shoot you. I don’t care who took it—you are the one who ends up dead for it.”

The kid was silent, but his eyes had grown darker and wider.

“But if my horse stays put, there’s a short bit in it for you.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the tattered trail blanket that was the Mother Lode’s front door.

Inside it was dark, hot and stuffy. The place smelled of mold, stale sweat and rancid fat from the cheap lamp oil. The floor was dirt and sawdust. A half-dozen squatters sat at the bar and at the few tables that the saloon had. Two old men played checkers at one of the tables—there wasn’t enough money up here for much gambling.

Mutt’s eyes quickly adjusted to the light. He made his way toward a portly man in a dirty brown vest, seated at the far end of the bar and deep in conversation with another man whose face looked like cracked leather. A small bowler rested on the portly man’s head; the hair peeking out from beneath it was thin, with the color and consistency of oil. He sported muttonchops. A mug danced in his hand as he wildly gesticulated while he talked. The beer in it occasionally splashed out.