The Six-Gun Tarot (12 page)

“I tell you, Willie, all you have to do is meet this fella over in Carson City with your long iron,” the portly man said to his sphinx-like companion. “You do a few hours work over there, and then—”

“Howdy, Deputy,” the leather-faced man said, looking past his companion’s shoulder.

“Willie,” Mutt said. “Good to see you back in town. I hear you had some trouble down south for a while.”

“Mexico,” Willie said. “I was a road agent. Shot a fella and his family didn’t cotton to it too well. Had to pull foot, full chisel, and this seemed as good a place as any to prop up my bones.”

“That it is,” Mutt said. He turned to the barkeep. “Give me a baldface, and trust me, I’ll know if you’re cutting it.” He turned back to address the back of the man in the bowler. “You’re not cutting it, are you, Wynn?”

Wynn spun to face the deputy. “I resent the insinuation, Deputy! You know I run a first-rate grog shop up here. I don’t cut my whiskey, and I don’t do anything to get Mr. High-and-Mighty Sheriff Highfather sending you up here to impugn—”

Mutt laughed. He drained the whiskey in a single gulp. “Hell, Wynn, I don’t even know what that word means. I’m here because a lot of folks from up here on the ridge have been coming down with a case of the bughouse crazies. Sheriff figures maybe you are brewing up something that is making that happen. What do you say, Wynn? Maybe a little turpentine in the old mash pot just to make it go a little further?”

Wynn frowned. “You’re talking about what happened to old Earl yesterday, ain’t ya?”

“And Daniel Basham, week ’fore that, and Squinty Mary Holt three weeks ago. They all live up here, Wynn, and that makes them your customers.”

“I swear to you, Mutt, as the Almighty is my witness, I ain’t been making bad mash. ’Sides, Earl and the other two haven’t touched a drop by my hand in months.”

The barkeep nodded as he refilled Mutt’s glass. “It’s true, Deputy. Lots of folks been staying away since that Holy Roller showed up. I say a man that lets his religion git in the way of his drinking is a fella with his cart ’fore his horse.”

“Preacher up here?” Mutt said, sipping his whiskey. “Since when?”

“’Bout three months ago,” Wynn said. “He and that squirrelly deacon o’ his came into town and set up shop at the old Reid homestead over on the northwest slope. Started preaching and next thing I know, some of my best customers are too busy shouting ’bout the dang Raptur to tie on a decent one.”

“Preacher got a name?” Mutt asked as he stood and put his empty glass on the scrub-pine bar.

“Ambrose,” Wynn said. “Reverend Ambrose.”

“Much obliged,” Mutt said as he headed for the door. “Oh, and, Willie?”

“I know,” Willie said. “‘Get out of town.’”

“Much obliged.”

Earl’s house was about a quarter of a mile from the saloon. It was four thin walls and a roof of stretched and tattered tarpaper. It huddled with some other shanties near the turn onto the western face. His neighbor, a toothless old lady named Lizzie, said no one had messed with the place since word had made it up here about Earl’s confrontation with the law.

“He’s a good, God-fearing man, that Earl,” Lizzie said. Her face was a map of the hardship of her life, deeply grooved and weathered by the wind and the dirt. “Poor lamb, just lost his way after he lost the missus and the little girl. It’s a hard life to travel alone.”

“Yes.” Mutt nodded. “Thank you.”

Inside Earl’s hovel it smelled of cool dirt and misery. There were a few rotted planks lying haphazardly over the earthen floor. A molded and worn rug that must have once graced the parlor of a happy family a million years ago partially covered the planks and the earth—like ribs poking through the rotting skin of a cadaver.

A pile of straw, burlap bags and rags filled up one corner of the single room and was obviously Earl’s bed. Mutt saw a rat scurry across the floor and disappear inside the hay pile.

A rickety table and chair was near the other side of the room, away from the door. Earl had been a carpenter once, Mutt had heard tale at the Paradise one night, but when he lost everything and fell into a bottle his talent had abandoned him too. It wasn’t very good, Mutt thought as he ran his hand along the chair’s rough back. But considering a dead man had made it, some allowances could be made.

The table was covered with pain. Children’s slate tablets: letters, numbers and doodles, all in an innocent, clumsy hand. Lithographs, shielded from time and elements by wood and glass. A serious-looking young man with a stock of dark hair and a smiling young maiden—their lives ahead of them—ghosts, now. One dead, the other in some hell—between life and peaceful death. A marriage certificate, some letters from his wife written while Earl fought in the war. Scraps of a life. Mutt discovered he envied the old man in the jail cell down in the valley.

On the table was a well-traveled Bible. Mutt flipped it open. The onionskin pages crackled like dry leaves. In the front was the family history, names and dates of what white men considered important in life—birth, death, marriage, baptism. The handwriting was delicate, intricate, beautiful—a woman’s mark. The dates of Earl’s wife’s and daughter’s passing were written in thick, ugly letters, a scrawl shaky with grief and DTs.

Mutt’s eyes widened as he noticed the other addendum to the document Earl had made in the holy book. At the top of the tree of names and dates, he had added two new lines. One traced his oldest male ancestor to
Adam
and the other linked his female ancestor to
Eve;
above the mythical progenitors, the old man had added a single line in a barely legible tracery of trembling strokes that said:
Demiurge.
Next to it Earl had scribbled in the margin:
the Greate Olde Wurm.
The handwriting was different, almost calligraphy. It was Earl’s hand, but it wasn’t. Staring at it made Mutt’s head ache and spin.

The deputy blinked, snorted the sudden, odd, odor of rotten meat from his nostrils and flipped through the rest of the Bible. The pages were unmarred until he reached the Book of Revelation—the white man’s biggest ghost story. In every gap in the text, in every virgin inch, Earl had filled the book with more of the intricate, alien tracery. Some of it Mutt could cipher, but most of it just made his skin crawl and his eyeballs itch.

He closed the book and picked it up to take with him. He was sure Jon would want to see this. He halted, sniffed, circling the room like it was a hungry predator ready to pounce.

“What in the…”

The room was darker. The sun was not where it should have been. His ten minutes in Earl’s place were hours to the rest of the world. This was wrong, all wrong. The room was cold, colder than an icebox. His breath swirled like a ghost in the darkness. His hand fell to his gun, but his guts told him this was nothing a gun could kill. They told him to run like hell.

So he did.

Out, into the sunlight and the afternoon heat. He looked down at the Bible in his hand. Faint wisps of smoke were escaping from between the pages, as if the sun itself were trying to eradicate the thing. He quickly slipped it into his saddlebag and headed for the home of the next errant ridge resident. It took a while for the sun to warm him.

On his way to take a look at Daniel Basham’s digs, Mutt noticed the fresh wagon tracks he had spotted earlier in the day were leading up to the summit—where the entrance to the mine was. The gunpowder smell was stronger. Maybe because it was a fresher scent this time, or maybe because his senses were tweaked by the fear summoned up in him in Earl’s shack, he could identify it—dynamite, lots of it. He spurred Muha and raced for the top of the mountain. It took less than ten minutes to reach the summit. Two wagons were parked in the center of what had been the old mine camp. Men, at least a dozen, were in the process of rebuilding the camp. The sun was slowly becoming a bloody eye in the west as Mutt reined Muha to a stop. In a clatter of oiled gunmetal, the men leveled rifles and drew pistols, all cocked and aimed at him. Mutt rested his hand on the stock of his sheathed rifle and regarded the strangers.

“Before you decide to do something that will get you dead by a bullet, or a rope, you ought to know I’m part of the law in these here parts and y’all are trespassing on privately owned land.” He looked at hardened face after hardened face in the circle of death he had rode into. “Now you-all best be putting those irons away, or else I’m going to have to write you a citation.…”

Two men strode up with six more behind them. The two leading the charge were Fancy Dans—brocade vests, gold watch fobs, but with shirtsleeves rolled up and dirt on their hands. One was tall and redheaded, with chipmunk teeth, so pale it looked like the noon sun could make an Indian out of him; the other was short, olive skinned and fat, mopping his brow with an embroidered handkerchief. A few of the entourage behind them were carrying large rolls of charts and surveying tools. The rest cradled rifles. They all looked right tickled to see Mutt.

“What is the meaning of this?” Olive Skin said. He had the tone you give a waiter when you find a mouse turd in your soufflé. “You are trespassing here.”

“Actually, that’s my line,” Mutt said, his hand not wavering from his rifle. “This is private property. Owned by a fellow named Malachi Bick, down in the town below. I’m the deputy sheriff in these parts and you and your crew gotta move on.”

“This is outrageous!” Olive Skin bellowed.

Chipmunk held up a hand to calm his partner and turned to address Mutt. “Look, Chief, there’s a misunderstanding. Where’s your hoss? Maybe we could talk to him?”

Mutt slid the rifle clear of the sheath in one fluid movement, natural as stretching. He cocked the lever with a flick of his thick wrist, one-handed, as he brought it down to bear straight at Chipmunk’s horrified face. There was an instant of stunned silence as all the armed and ready gunmen realized Mutt had somehow gotten the drop on them.

“Sure thing,” he said, locking eyes with Chipmunk. “This is him, right here. Oh, and it’s ‘Deputy,’ not ‘Chief.’ Now you say it, hoss.”

Chipmunk swallowed hard, a lump of anger and fear that was sharp going down.

“Deputy, not Chief,” he said.

“Now I’ve tried being nice and I’ve tried being reasonable,” Mutt said. “And for my trouble I’ve had guns pointed at me and been treated in a disrespectful manner. Now I want all of you to drop your guns on the ground, now, or I will surely blow this man’s head clean off his shoulders. And I reckon that will affect all of y’all come payday.”

“Do it,” Chipmunk said to the men. A thin line of sweat now covered his upper lip. The crew looked to Olive Skin. He nodded quickly and made dropping motions with his hands. Pistols, rifles and shotguns all thudded onto the hot dust.

“Show him, Jacob,” Chipmunk said to Olive Skin. Jacob, formerly known as Olive Skin, slowly reached into his inside vest pocket and withdrew a folded packet of papers. He stepped toward Mutt, gingerly offering the packet to the deputy.

There was no way in hell Mutt was going to confide in this crew of lick-fingers that he couldn’t make heads or tails of this legal mush. He examined the papers while he kept the rifle on Chipmunk with his other hand. They looked official, with lots of places to put your mark and stamps and even gold seals. He nodded and looked for words he recognized. He spotted the word “deed” as well as the sweeping signature of Malachi Bick.

“You see the land was deeded to us by Mr. Stapleton a few weeks ago,” Chipmunk said, trying to get out from in front of the rifle’s barrel. “That’s my signature there, see, ‘Oscar Deerfield,’ and there is my partner, ‘Jacob Moore.’” He gestured toward Jacob, who was nodding eagerly.

“
Arthur
Stapleton, the banker?” Mutt said. Mrs. Stapleton flowed through his mind like cool, sweet water. He lowered the rifle. “Land ain’t his to deed; it belongs to Malachi Bick.”

“Used to,” Deerfield said, plucking the papers out of Mutt’s hand. “Bick deeded it to Art and he deeded it to us.”

“Fair and square,” Moore said. “All handled up in Virginia City by a first-rate lawyer.”

“Why would anyone want the deed to a busted silver mine?” Mutt said. The men with charts were chasing off the hired guns. They paused long enough to pick up their shooting irons and then shuffle back to work with hard sideways glances at Mutt. The storm had apparently passed.

“Because, Chie— Because, Deputy, it is most certainly not busted,” Deerfield said.

“Come again?”

“It’s not busted,” Moore repeated the claim, his wide face splitting into a grin. “And we intend to open ’er back up again and prove it.”

The Queen of Cups

Maude was cleaning up the last of the dinner dishes when Arthur arrived home. He slammed the door and then locked it.

“Have you eaten?” she asked. It was the first words they had spoken since he had struck her yesterday. He ignored her and made straight for the liquor cabinet, pouring a glass tumbler full of scotch. He downed it as he strode to the window by the front door and glanced furtively past the curtains, into the decaying daylight.

“Has he been by?” he asked, squinting out the window. “Him or his horse of a bastard-mulattoo son, or one of his other ruffians?”

“Who?” Maude said, walking toward Arthur, sensing the creeping fear building in him.

“Bick!” He spun and shouted at her, “Goddamn Malachi Bick! Tar-souled villain’s coming for me. I know it.”

Maude frowned. She wasn’t scared of Arthur. She hadn’t been in a long time. He was terrified and, like many men, his fear was usually wrapped in anger.

“Bick? Arthur, he’s your friend. You two have been partners for years. He needs you to run his interests.”

Arthur pushed past her and refilled his glass.

“Partner,” he spit out the word like it was a bad taste. “More like his goddamned pet. Malachi Bick doesn’t have friends; he has assets. And you are either a valuable asset to him, or a liability. I just became a liability.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Arthur, let me help you.”

Arthur snorted again. “What the hell do you think you could do to help, Maude? Snivel at him?” He hurried down the hall and disappeared into their bedroom.