The Six-Gun Tarot (19 page)

“I don’t. Don’t say it because it’s not true. You’re smart, James. Smarter than those half-wits I sit across from in town council. You’ve seen more of the world, know more, than anyone I’ve ever met. You play … when you play, it’s like God is speaking through you.”

“God and I, we don’t cotton to each other too much, I figure.”

“I don’t believe that. I believe in you.”

Harry stood and slipped on his vest. He didn’t bother to button it. He slid his father’s watch into its small pocket. He paused and then turned to Ringo, who was stretched out on the rumpled bed.

“What if we just go?” Herry said.

“What foolishness are you talking about, Harry?”

“Just go. Leave Golgotha. Find a place where we can be together, where no one cares who we are. I could empty out the town treasury. We could run off; it would be a wonderful scandal!”

Ringo sighed.

“No, Harry. First of all, you are far too good a man for any of that. I’ve known a lot of thieves in my time and you ain’t one of them. Second, you got responsibilities weighing on you. I hate your old man for dumping all that on you, but you are a leader in this town; people look up to you. You couldn’t run away from that any more than you can leave your families without a provider. If you ran away from all that, it would eat you up the rest of your life. You’d end up hating me for it and I just couldn’t stand that.”

He sat up in the bed and watched as Harry slipped on his coat. “And finally, there ain’t a place in this whole wide world that would ever accept us. I wish there were; I really do. But I’ve looked and it just ain’t there.”

“I’d never hate you, you know that? And I’d do those things for you in a second, you know that too, don’t you?”

“I know, Harry, I know.”

Pratt could see Ringo’s eyes shine in the guttering light of the lamp. They shared an awkward silence. The door opened, then closed.

Pratt rode home in the darkness. He had left Lam, the Chinese boy who tended the small stable behind the Lotus Lantern, a gold half eagle—a princely sum for minding Harry’s horse. Lam had been dozing in a dry bale of hay near the entrance. It was late and the boy was exhausted, oblivious to the recent commotion outside.

Harry tucked the coin into the boy’s pocket and admired his sleeping face for a moment. He lived a life in that instant: a son, the person Harry loved with them, together—a family, a real family bonded by love, not duty and guilt. The freedom to bury his father’s horrible burden. The freedom to live his life, to finally be able to breathe, really breathe. To live his own life.

Harry put that world to rest, burying it under the dirt pile of his life. He snorted the cold night air off the 40-Mile and made his way down Prosperity Street, and slowly ascended Rose Hill. The houses, mostly built by his fellow Mormons, were all dark, save his family’s home, his father’s mansion—the one Harry shared with Holly. The lights burned in the windows.

She met him in the entry hall, cold fury wrapped around her like a cloak.

Holly Pratt was a beautiful woman. Her hair was the color of sunflower petals; her eyes, honeyed darkness. Even in her simple chemise of white silk, with her mother’s shawl covering her shoulders, Holly had an astonishing figure. He remembered the first time he had run his hands over her body: the taunt weight of her breasts, the flutter of her drum-tight stomach. The heat. It had been intoxicating. She was a beauty and side-by-side they were the handsomest couple in town.

He remembered it all—the days before they hated each other. It seemed a lifetime ago. He honestly felt sorry for her, trapped with him, trapped in this house. It was a crime to lock up something so wild, so beautiful.

The anger radiated from her dark eyes. She smelled of her favorite pastime—brandy and sugar, flavored with lemon peel.

“Where have you been!” she said, staggering toward him as he hung up his coat.

“Had a few too many of those bimbos again, Holly? You should be asleep.”

“Don’t you dare! What else do I have here? You tell me! Attend my loving husband? Care for our children? Tell, me, Your Honor, what do I have to do with my time when you are out whoremongering and I’m alone in an empty house?”

Harry looked away from her pain and hate. “I had town business to attend to. A man was killed tonight down in Johnny Town. A white man.”

“You can go to Hell,” she said. The slap should have stung his cheek, but it seemed far away and diffused. “You were down there seeing your damn gal-boy. It’s disgusting, Harry! Your father, bless his soul, would turn in his grave if he knew what you and that piano player were doing.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, madam.”

Harry walked past her, through her, into the parlor. The fire still licked at the crumbling logs in the fireplace. He lifted a mostly empty cut-glass decanter of imported brandy and poured a tumblerful. Holly stood at the door; her shawl had fallen to the ground. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders, like spun gold.

“You can lie to me, Harry. You can lie to yourself and the church elders and all the good, good people in this shitty little town, but we all
know,
Harry; we all know what you are and what you’re not.”

“Go to bed, Hol; you’re drunk.”

She ran her hands up her body, pausing to lift her breasts and stroke her nipples through the thin gown. She tossed her hair from side to side, like a lion’s mane. A cruel smile stitched her lips.

“Maybe I’ll go find me a boy too, Harry. What do you think of that? Find someone who actually wants to look at me, wants to touch me, wants to lay with me, to give me children, like a normal, healthy,
real
man.”

Harry sat back in the French-made upholstered chair, stretched his legs out in front of him and drained half the tumbler. The anger in his breast was hotter than the burn of the liquor.

“You ever think, maybe it was
you
? That
you
made me like this?” he said quiet as a scalpel slipping into flesh. “Maybe you’re the one who’s the freak, Holly, m’dear.”

All the viciousness fell away from her and she stood like a condemned criminal. She fought to control the sobs that tried to shake her body. “You’re a bastard,” she said. “I was a good wife to you. Not always, but at first. I tried to be what they all told me to be. I tried.”

She disappeared from the doorway and Harry heard her leaden, uneven steps padding up the carpeted stairs. He also heard her crying.

“So did I,” he muttered as he drained the glass. “So did I.”

He finished off the remains of the decanter and then wandered into his father’s study, his study now. He shut the doors and locked them.

From his window, he could still see fires up on Argent Mountain from the squatter camps. It was hard to believe anyone else would be up and about now, in the Devil’s hour. He envied them, the drunks and malcontents, cowboys and whores. They could be exactly what they wanted to be and no one cared; no one judged them. They didn’t have a destiny. He did, a divine one.

He rolled back the Oriental rug on the floor and found the large knot on the third floorboard from the left wall. He pulled it up and turned it clockwise. There was a soft click and a well-disguised panel popped partially open in the floor. Harry slid it aside and sat down, dangling his legs into the opening. His foot found the first rung of the metal ladder and he slowly began to climb down into the darkness.

At the bottom, he felt his way along the shelf that held the bull’s-eye lantern and the metal box of safety matches. The light from the study above was enough to prepare the lantern and then rub the match to its special striking pad. There was a flare of red phosphorus and then the rich, focused light of the lantern illuminated the far tunnel wall.

Harry remembered the first time his father had taken him down here twenty years ago, when he was thirteen. His father had carried the oil lamp then and had told him the story as they walked down this rough-hewn hall to the chamber.

Harry remembered the day well because Father had caught him with the smell of Ollie Hayward’s corn mash on his breath. After the punishment with the strap and the hour-long sermon, the right-revered Josiah Pratt, Priest of the Second Order, the Patriarchal Authority, showed his son the secret that had brought them to Golgotha.

Harry Pratt, thirty-three, moved along the stone corridor, feeling it grow cooler as he descended deeper under Rose Hill. The tunnels his father had blasted and dug in the first few years they arrived in this land grudgingly gave way to natural caves.

Soon Harry began to see the writing on the walls. It seemed to drink up the light of his lantern and grow brighter from its passing. Just like always, he tried to hold the symbols in his vision and memory, but they shifted and flowed on the walls, like silver fish, darting in a dark pool. He had never been able to read them or understand them. He didn’t think anyone on earth could.

“It’s Reformed Egyptian, boy,” Harry, thirteen, was told by his father. “It’s the language the Lord has saw fit to instruct us in. It’s for the eyes of the prophets, not us, Harry. We’re only caretakers, watchmen.” Josiah said it was like the writing found on the great golden plates given to Joseph Smith, by the angel Moroni, to transcribe. The elder Pratt had been an old friend of Smith’s and had been one of the first to join his new faith.

“I went to see him in chains, in the darkness,” Harry’s father had said as they made their way through the hallways of shimmering, shifting light-language. “The Prophet himself. He told me he had a dream, Harry, a dream about me, about my son, about you. He told me Moroni had come to him and told him that even if he fell before the hatred and misunderstanding of others, the church must endure, that it must prepare for the days to come. We headed into the frontier, as many of us as could travel with our families, seeking out the lands of milk and honey. But there would be none of that for us, m’boy. No, our family is of the Second Order. It is our commission to build the temple and fill it with God’s power, to keep that power safe and secret until the days when the unread plates are opened, until the end of days.”

His father had led him into the same chamber he now entered. And now, just as twenty years earlier, the walls themselves came to life, glowing with soft, white light, illuminating the treasures that filled the cave.

There were the golden plates, taken away by the angel Moroni, resting on a natural stone pedestal. Against a wall rested the Sword of Laban—the first sword in the world, from which all other blades descended. Wielded by prophets and kings, warriors and heroes, its golden hilt and short, flawless, silver blade shimmered like it was not entirely in this world. The Urim and the Thummim, the seer stones used by Smith to translate the plates given to him by God, rested in the glasses frames he had set them in. The odd spectacles rested on a low, flat rock next to the breastplate they had originally been set into and the brass plates written by Laban that made up the Law of the Lord. There were more here, esoteric treasures from across the world and the ages, all touched by God. Harry regarded the cup he was fairly certain was the Holy Grail.

His father had always insisted on stripping down to only church vestments to enter the cave, but Harry hadn’t done that since his parents’ deaths, five years ago. It seemed a silly ritual. The things in this room didn’t seem to care either way what Harry was wearing, and God hadn’t bothered to weigh in on the controversy either.

Harry moved the seer stones off the low rock, setting them gently on the ground before the breastplate. He sat on the rock, looked around and then lowered his head, running his fingers over his neck and hair. When he looked back up it was all still here. No dream, no madness. Bits of the divine, hidden away in a cave under a hill. His duty, his destiny, to guard and protect them. They were proof of his father’s faith, his damnable infallibility. He should be happy. Most men spent a lifetime longing, looking for proof of the infinite. Here was all the proof you would ever need—magic swords, holy rocks and shining transcripts direct from Heaven.

Harry began to roll himself a cigarette.

He didn’t recall the entire trip to Golgotha when he was a boy. He definitely remembered the hellish crossing of the 40-Mile and he remembered thinking many times that they had found a place to settle only to have his father and the elders decide it wasn’t what they were looking for. That first night in this cave his father had told him what they had been looking for.

“The Prophet himself ordained me in the priesthood,” Josiah said. “He told me his vision and gave our family its commission. We were to head west, to keep going until we found the evidence, the signs. Ruins, my son, ruins of the Nephites’ final city—an ancient place of those long-dead God-fearing people. It was also the secret resting place to all the divine treasures of our faith. When we saw the ruins here, we were excited, but when I had the dream that led me to this cave, Harry, we knew this was where we were called to abide.”

Harry lit the cigarette with the flame of the lantern. He took a long, deep draw on the tobacco and immediately felt better, calmer.

Most folk who even gave a damn figured the few abandoned cave dwellings, the old wells and crumbling piles of hewn rock columns, the disintegrating walls and arches that dotted the area and were clustered at the base of Methuselah Hill, were the remains of some old Indian city. In the parlance of his faith, they were descendants of the Lamanites—lost “red sons of Israel.” Angels or Indians, it seems someone had always been here on the land that his father and the elders named Golgotha.

Silently, in the chapel of Harry’s mind, he asked God, for the millionth time, why. Why, with all the tangible proof laid at his feet, with all the training and preparation in the laws of the church his father had beat into him, why, with all of the pure and the holy and the just, why had the Almighty seen fit to choose him. Why couldn’t his belief, his certainty, in the knowledge that there was a God and that His laws were the laws of the universe, why, with so many cold, hard facts, change his mind? Why did he still love James Ringo? Why was he still a sodomite? And why had the creator of Heaven and Earth, maker of desert sunsets and flowering cactuses, poxes and plagues, picked old sodomite Harry Pratt to guard His earthly treasures until the end of days?