The Six-Gun Tarot (26 page)

Sarah didn’t primp; she didn’t adjust her bonnet to capture the stray gray hairs that had fallen loose, or to straighten her hem or smooth her skirts. She spit some of the desert’s dust out of her mouth and wiped the sweat of the morning’s chores off her brow. Her husband pulled his mount to a stop by the fence post she was propped against.

“Good morning, Harry,” she said to Golgotha’s mayor and her husband of eight, almost nine, years. “Coffee’s waiting up at the house, if you have the time. I know it’s a sin, but it’s a good one.”

She was amazed, as always, by the sheer beauty of him in the sun. His red hair caught the sunlight peeking over Methuselah Hill. His eyes were burning sapphires, and when he looked at you,
really
looked at you, you were the only thing in creation. She put such schoolgirl nonsense away. She loved Harry, more than any other man she had ever known, but she knew it would never be that way, could never be that way.

“Sarah,” he said. He wasn’t smiling and now, after the initial surprise of seeing him had passed, she realized he was tired. There were dark circles under the blue eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Holly’s missing,” he said as he dismounted. “She left yesterday evening and never made it home. I’ve got Jon Highfather out looking for her. She took the carriage but no clothes, not much money.”

“Maybe she figured what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

“Sarah!”

“Well, Harry, it’s true. How long did you expect her to sit up there in that house and wait for you to be a real husband to her?”

They walked along opposite sides of the fence, headed toward the main house. Harry led his horse by the reins.

“Dammit, Sarah, that isn’t fair. You know how much I’ve tried with her.”

“Tried to what, Harry? Pretend to be something you just aren’t? To put up with her wanting children with you? You lied to her, Harry. You lied to yourself and you lied to her.”

They walked in silence. The sky got brighter as the last of the night’s chill burned off. The cows groaned blandly. A vulture glided silently out into the desert, following death.

They reached the house. Calvin Evans, one of the farmhands Harry had hired to help Sarah keep the place up, tipped his hat to the mayor. Harry returned the greeting with a nod. Calvin was hitching up a pair of gray draft horses to an Owensboro wagon, in preparation for a trip into Golgotha, probably to Auggie’s store.

Harry hitched his horse to the post next to the water trough, and joined Sarah on the porch.

“Sure you don’t want the coffee?” she asked, settling into a rocker with a groan.

Harry knelt next to his first wife. “Sarah, please, I’m worried about her. Have you seen her?”

“Not for a while, Harry,” she said. “She came by a few weeks ago. We talked for a spell. She had been drinking; I could smell it on her.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s none of your business, Harry. Any more than where you go and who you spend time with is ours. You set the rules for this; we just followed them.”

“You’ve never seemed to mind them before,” he said.

She smiled. “Of course I didn’t, Harry, my sweet. I am very grateful to you for all you’ve done for me and the children. When Gabriel passed, I was out in this wilderness alone with little James and Rebecca. I thought I wouldn’t make it. I prayed to the Lord for deliverance, and He sent me you, my golden boy.”

Harry remembered his father’s face, and the faces of the temple elders, when he told them that he had finally decided on a wife and that she was twice his age and had two young children by her recently deceased husband—an old friend of Harry’s family. The memory made him smile. They had pushed him, tried to control him, and he had pushed back. He had never regretted marrying Sarah.

“You have always been the one person in this pissant town that I could ever really talk to, Sarah,” he said. “The only one who ever accepted me for what I am, and what I’m not.”

“You’re selling Holly short,” she said, shaking her head. “That girl loves you. She’s loved you her entire life, since you two were children. I remember when you and Holly used to sneak away at any social function you could. I remember how you held her when you two danced. You love her too, Harry. Talk to her. She deserves the truth and, who knows, maybe you‘ll have two people in Golgotha you can trust.”

Harry rubbed his whiskers. Calvin was up in the wagon. He called out to them that he’d be back in an hour. The wagon clattered through the open gate and down the road toward Main Street.

“She knows,” Harry finally said. “She’s known for a while. I didn’t tell her in a very sweet way. She had been drinking and I had been out all night again and she pushed me. I just kind of blurted it out. I’ve … I’ve been blaming her for it ever since, saying she wasn’t woman enough.”

“Oh, Harry, you didn’t?”

Pratt rubbed his face. His eyes were red and sore. He was fighting to control the quiver in his voice.

“I know, I know. If anything happens to her, Sarah, if she actually listened to my damn fool pride and gone off and hurt herself…”

He let the words hang in the morning air, which was becoming staler and hotter by the minute. Sarah took his hand, patted it. She leaned in close to his face, resting her head against his.

“My poor boy,” she whispered. “She’s in a cage, Harry, just as much as you are, love.”

“I know that. I tried; I
really
tried to be what she wanted, what everyone wanted me to be—good son, good husband, loyal servant of the temple, defender of the damned faith. But I’m none of those things, Sarah.”

“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Harry. And a good husband, to boot. Your whole life you’ve fought against the people who have tried to define you, pin you down. But at the same time you’ve always carried whatever load they dumped on their shoulders. You are a good man, Harry—you’ve just never really met yourself, is all.”

Harry held her in the cool shade of the porch as the sky brightened, the air warmed. Finally, he sniffed and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief from his pocket.

“What did she say to you, Sarah?”

“She wasn’t planning on leaving, that was for sure. She loves you, Harry, and she figured in the end you would love her too. I didn’t know if she knew about you and Ringo, so I was kind of vague. I told her the same things I’m telling you now, that you were both trapped in cages of your own making. I told her to leave you. I even offered her money and as much help as I could. She wouldn’t have it.

“She was so lonely, Harry. I told her what it was like for me when Gabe died. That was a scary, lonely time for me, till you came riding in to save the day. Everyone in this town thought what you did for me was a kindness—except for your father, of course, and that was because you got one up on him and the elders. To everybody else, Harry Pratt was a regular Sir Galahad!”

“Hell I am. You’re the one that did me the kindness, Sarah. You kept my secret. Made me feel like it wasn’t sick to feel … the way I do. If I hadn’t had you to talk with, I’d have blown my head off a long time ago.”

There was a cloud of dust on the main road coming from the direction of the desert.

“If she’s gone, it wasn’t of her doing,” Sarah said. “Maybe someone who wants to hurt you, Harry, or blackmail you—you are mayor, you know. Maybe it’s got to do with Arthur Stapleton’s murder.”

“Sarah, you’ve been reading too many of those dime romances they churn out back east. This is Golgotha: people tend to end up dead in these here parts; it’s kind of a town tradition. Besides, if anyone wanted to blackmail me, there are damn easier ways to do it than snatch Holly, and if someone were gunning for me, why wouldn’t they have come after you too?”

Sarah laughed. She patted Harry on the knee. “That’s very flattering, dear, but everyone knows you took me in as a mercy, nothing more. I hate to disappoint you, but you’re not fooling anyone.”

“They’re the fools,” he said, standing and regarding the small smear of color that preceded the cloud of dust. “You’re my treasure, Sarah, more valuable than any wealth, any secret.”

“I already voted for you, Harry. Save it.”

The smudge had taken shape. It was a lone rider, moving fast toward town. As the rider reached the bend in the road where Sarah’s ranch was, they recognized it was Jon Highfather. Harry ran out to the road and waved for him to stop.

“I was looking for you,” the sheriff said, pulling the dusty kerchief from his face. “Mutt found Holly’s carriage. It’s out at the edge of the Forty-Mile. Come on!”

“I have to go,” Harry said to Sarah as he unhooked his horse.

“I’ll pray for her, and for you, Harry. Please let me know if I can do anything to help.”

“If you see her, fetch me, Sarah. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her to come home.”

He climbed onto the palomino. He and Highfather raced back out into the desert, gone in a clatter of hooves and dust.

She watched them diminish into the burgeoning curtain of heat.

The Chariot

Horses screaming. They heard the sound before they saw the search party. Highfather had led Harry about an hour outside of Golgotha. The 40-Mile did not fully claim this land. There were patches of strawberry cactus, stick leaf and sagebrush, like defiant sentinels urging on the lost souls who might have found themselves consigned to this corner of Hell—
hold on; keep going! There is life here; don’t stop and die
.

“What the hell is that?” Harry said, slowing down.

Highfather slowed as well and turned to the mayor. “Your horses, Harry. When we found Holly’s carriage, the horses were going out of their minds. The carriage had crashed into a deep ditch and the horses and their yoke were a mess. They won’t calm down, not for nothing.”

“Maybe it’s Mutt—”

“Nope. I sent him away to backtrack the carriage’s trail. Didn’t do a lick of good.”

The two cleared the shelf of rock that had had blocked their view. There was a search party of a dozen townies Highfather had rounded up. Harry knew all of them well. He felt a disturbing amalgam of appreciation and shame gel in him, as well as a hot stab of anger at Holly for causing this whole mess with her damn fool drinking and her tantrum. But when he saw the overturned carriage, looking like the desert had tried to swallow it whole and had choked on it, and the frantic, frothing state of his two most gentle and well-trained saddlebreds the anger was quickly quenched in fear.

Besides the posse, crazy old Clay Turlough was out here with his wagon and a pair of brown drafts, trying to pull the carriage out of the deep gap it had been wedged into. That boy who was working for Highfather, Jim something or other, was here too, trying to help Clay attach a thick coil of rope to the axle of the carriage.

“Mr. Mayor,” the boy said as Harry dismounted, handed the reins of his horse to one of the towns folk and approached. Clay grunted and nodded as he wiped his already-sunburned head.

“Harry.”

“What happened here, Jon?” Pratt asked the sheriff, who had also dismounted and tied his horse a good distance away from the shrieking animals. It was taking four men with strong ropes to hold the two animals in place. “What’s wrong with my horses and where is my wife?”

“Mutt found it. Holly wasn’t here and there are no tracks or signs that she ever was. No indications she jumped out before the crash or climbed out after. No signs anyone came along and helped her or abducted her. Nothing. It looks like the horses were just running crazy out into the Forty-Mile and the wagon hit the ditch, flipped and trapped them here.”

“If they were spooked about the crash, they should have calmed down by now. They’re acting like there’s a rattler in their saddle blanket.”

Harry eased his way toward one of the horses. It was the older of the two, a mare named Dolly. She had always been Holly’s favorite. He stroked Dolly’s nose as she continued to struggle and shriek. Her teeth snapped at him and flecks of foam flew as she shook her head.

“Easy, girl,” he whispered. “You’re safe, now. Easy.”

Dolly’s massive brown eye rolled, until only the white, veined with bloody, spidery lines, was visible. The pupil and iris slid back into view from the interior of the horse’s skull. Harry noticed how glassy, how wide and black, the horse’s eye was. Dead eyes still moving. There was no frame of reference, no common shore, no lexicon of experience between what this poor animal had gone through and the world Harry was walking through. He patted Dolly and lowered his head, dizzy with the notion of where Holly was, of what was happening to her.

“They’re both gone.” It was Mutt’s voice, tight like a drum skin, so close it startled Harry. The half-breed was next to him, alongside Highfather, Clay and Jim.

“They got the spirit-sickness,” Mutt said. “Worse than anything that can be done to their bodies. Their hearts, their minds are broken, full of black bugs and dirty water. No coming back from that, ever.”

“Where the hell is my wife?” Harry said, looking back to the dry ground.

“She was never here,” Mutt said. “The carriage was driven out of town, and then the horses had … whatever was done to them done. They ran wild until they got tangled up here. I’d say your wife is still in town somewhere, Harry, probably sleeping it off.”

Pratt’s eyes flicked from the dust to Mutt; they shimmered with hatred.

“Jon, rein in your animal or so help me, I’m taking his badge. I’m mayor of this town and I won’t have my wife spoken about in that manner by this … trash.”

Mutt chuckled. Highfather shook his head to the deputy, curtly. Mutt shrugged, but shut up.

“None of this is going to get Holly back any faster,” the sheriff said. “So let’s all settle down and review. Arthur Stapleton was murdered by poisoning, but it’s not any kind of normal poison, right, Clay?”

“Yes,” Turlough said, nodding. “It shares properties with numerous organic compounds, including insect venom, mammalian milk and some kind of blood. In some properties, it bears striking similarities to the vital fluids of the cestoda.”

“I’m sorry,” Mutt said. “Could you speak a little less crazy, white man?”