The Six-Gun Tarot (29 page)

“Kiss me,” Holly whispered in his ear, her tongue flicking like a serpent’s. Otis pressed his mouth to the lips of his goddess, his Black Madonna. He was an animal in heat, whimpering, begging. Her tongue was strong, grinding, writhing against his own. It pushed deeper into his mouth, deeper, insistent on reaching his core, his soul. His eyes opened wide for an instant, as the tongue felt like it tore loose from her mouth and wriggled eagerly down his throat.

His last human thought was of the Widow Proctor and how he wished he could warn her.

The moaning stopped. The room was silent. The Mother shuddered at the pleasure of fission, of birth. Their lips parted, sticky ropes of black stretching, breaking. Otis’s eyes were ebony mirrors of the Mother’s leaking black tears. She took his hands and steepled them together. With her new tongue, her next child, she licked the animal blood off his hands like a cat lapping at milk. The black, oily worm shuddered and vibrated eagerly as it fed off the juices of life, the by-product of murder. It nestled into her mouth and waited for its time.

Some tiny corner of Holly Pratt that had not yet decayed, had not yet lost itself to the sweet oblivion of madness, realized with sick joy that she finally had the children she had always wanted.

“Let us pray,” she said.

Outside, the storm stalked angrily through the dark streets of Golgotha, spitting, raging. A lone, feeble yellow light filtered through the single filthy window in Otis Haglund’s shack, defying the darkness and the storm. The light guttered, then failed.

The Five of Cups

He cleared the dead grass and dirt off the small pile of stones that marked his mother’s grave. The rain had passed and was already forgotten to late morning heat.

Mutt crouched at the edge of the simple stone ring. He remembered placing each rock carefully. Before that he had dug the hole, and before that was the memory of wrapping her in her favorite rabbit fur blanket. Before that came the end of the whispered words fighting their way past dry, cracked lips, the closing of the eyes damp with love and fever. And before that …

Whichever way he looked at his time here, it ended and began in pain.

He ran his hand over a smooth, flat stone. Laying this circle was the last time he had truly felt like a human being. Until Maude … No, that had to be pushed away, dismissed, for her sake, and for his.

He stood and examined the remains of his mother’s
gadu
. Collapsed and overrun with small bushes and tall grass, the small, slatted summer shelter had been abandoned since he had buried his mother and gone off into the white man’s world. Muha munched casually on some grass near the
gadu.
He was tired from the ride from Golgotha to the lake country south of Reno. It was near the water that the We’lmelti camped and it would be dark before Mutt would reach it today.

He was in no hurry. He was sore and thirsty and still angry. This was a fool’s errand. His people had nothing to do with Holly Pratt’s disappearance. This was just that jackass Harry’s revenge for pushing him so hard. Mutt knew it was stupid to taunt the mayor so much, but he had never been very good at kissing ass. Ran in the family.

He removed his kit from Muha’s saddle and tried to dismiss the anger. Mother was here and he didn’t want to disturb her. She always tried to soothe his anger with soft song and gentle hands stroking his hair. Loneliness stabbed him like a dull knife. He was so alone in this world. For a second, he remembered his other family, his father, then dismissed them all with a hiss. He was alone.

He cleared out a spot in the
gadu
and put down his bedroll, blankets and rifle. He built a fire in the same spot he and his mother had for over ten years. The moon rose over the tree line, bright and bloated. Mutt squatted by the fire and watched it writhe. The planet spun dizzily under his feet.

Far, far off he could smell the cool, damp air above the water, almost taste it. He sensed the movement of a big, fat jackrabbit about a mile out in the scrub; its big feet thudded like drums.

He licked his lips, felt the night slip into his bones, like cold. He shrugged himself off, like shucking off a coat that was too tight. It always felt like taking off horse blinders; he always forgot so quickly how unaware he was most of the time. Now, again, the night was his eyes, his ears; the booming of the jackrabbit as it ran for its life was the tattoo of his heart. Here, in this, lost in instinct, lost in the hunt and the wordless beauty of the world, pale in weird moonlight and wrapped in a fog of living, dying smells—here there was never any doubt, never any fear or loneliness—there was only need and the power to fulfill it. He thought of Maude Stapleton as the warm spray of the rabbit’s blood filled his mouth, and he wished he could feel ashamed, but he had forgotten how, already.

Later, by the fire, nude, warped back in the tightness of his skin, Mutt looked across the flames and remembered the night his mother had died, the night he had met his father. For a moment Mutt thought he saw something move on the other side of the fire, but there was nothing there but flickering shadow.

He knew he should get up, clean off the blood and go to sleep inside the
gadu,
like his mother had taught him, like a human being. Instead he curled up beside the fire and let the night’s music lull him to sleep.

The children saw him coming. Most of them ran beside Muha, shouting and laughing. They had been gathering
ta gum
for the
goom sa bye
ceremony, to be held in the fall. The older boys ran ahead to warn the camp a stranger was coming. The camp seemed smaller than he remembered it—a few dozen
gadus
clustered near the sandy banks of the Da’ ow lake. Women were busy tossing the cones into fires to open them and extract the
ta gum.
Others were grinding the
ta gum,
or pine nuts, into flour. They sang stories as they worked. His mother had sang those songs as well, when she was young, before they drove her out because of him.

A group of men made their way toward Mutt. Only one was mounted, from the looks of it on a stolen Shoshoni bangtail. He led the way, with a Winchester rifle in his hand. Mutt stopped at the edge of the village path and waited for him, his hand resting on his own six-gun.

“Kote,” Mutt said with a nod. “You the
deu bay u
now, huh? Suits you. Guess the other bosses forgot all that stuff we did when we were boys.”

Kote narrowed his eyes as he brought the bangtail to a stop. The rifle didn’t drop any. “You never earned a name here; what do you call yourself these days?”

“Mutt.”

“What do you want here, Mutt?”

“You’re still scared of me, aren’t you? You don’t even want to me to set foot in the camp. It’s been over twenty years, Kote. You and the old women still think I’m a witch?”

Kote cocked the rifle. The other men of the camp caught up to him and several of them followed his lead, aiming their guns at Mutt.

“What do you want here?” Kote said.

“A white woman with yellow hair. She went missing a few days back outside of Golgotha. I’m out here looking to see if anyone has been a’raiding.”

“Your name fits, Mutt. You’re out here sniffing around like a dog for the white man. Accusing your own people of—”

“Spare me the indignation, especially when you’re sitting on a stolen horse. I grew up around here, remember? Now, has anyone been bragging about taking hostages?”

“You make me sick,” Kote said, his eyes dark and hot. “First the Paiute come and crush us—take away our horses, take away our honor—then the white men steal our lands out from under us to dig their precious silver. They can’t even keep their promise to move us to better land. You serve them, like a dog. You should be ashamed.”

“As ashamed as you were of me? Of my mother?” Mutt said, staring unblinking into Kote’s eyes. “You bastards chased her out because you thought she had given herself to a man from another tribe and the ‘holy elders’ were pissed they didn’t get anything for it. You treated me like a diseased animal, and you treated her like a whore. You and your ‘noble people’ are a bunch of freeloading parasites, too scared of the Paiute, too scared of the white man, to do anything but complain, and steal whatever you can in the night.”

The singing by the waters had stopped and many of the women and children were approaching the men. Mutt lowered his voice to a growl.

“You think I’m a
Hanuh wui wui
—a monster? Then you pull that trigger, Kote, and when the bullets pass right through me I’m going to take that gun and stick it up your ass.”

The men were all silent. Many lowered their heads. Kote looked away.

“I got my answer,” Mutt said, turning Muha away from his childhood home. “None of you is man enough to kidnap a white woman. I knew this was a waste of time.”

He rode off. He didn’t look back.

He knew the whiskey would burn in his throat. He also knew it would take the ache away, eventually. Mutt had bought the bottle off a Nogaie trader. After leaving the We’lmelti, he had ridden to a few other camps—the Nogaie, the Paxai-dika. No one knew anything about Holly.
Happy now, Harry?

The most interesting thing Mutt heard was from a half-blind old Paiute with eyes like milk mixed with ink. The old man told him about a teacher and healer up in Smith Valley, near Carson City, name of Hawthorne Wodziwob. This Wodziwob was organizing circle dances among the tribes and talking of visions—visions of the spirits promising the return of the Paiute dead in the next few years, if the people honored the tradition of the dance. He was traveling around with a medicine man named Tavibo who was helping him organize the dances, along with Tavibo’s son, a thirteen-year-old named Wovoka.

“They will heal the land,” the old man had said. “They will drive out the whites.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it, old-timer,” Mutt had said. “You can’t count on the spirits for a damned thing, ’cept maybe to have a good laugh at your expense.”

Now he was back at his mother’s home, once again sitting at the edge of the fire and eager to head back to Golgotha and leave his past behind. The night called to him like it did the night before, like it did every night. The pain in him, the human pain in his human heart, dulled its song.

He took a long draw on the bottle and closed his eyes. He felt the smoky liquor burn, then numb, his mouth. Suddenly he saw how he had been when he had met Jon Highfather—the only man who’d ever given him a fair shake—how deep into a bottle he had crawled before Jon pulled him out.

He spit out the whiskey and the flames roared, jumped and hissed. They died down. A large gray coyote now sat across the fire where only a second ago there had been shadow.

“Waste of good firewater, you ask me,” the coyote said. He had eyes the color of gray sand, shifting. “How are you, boy?”

“What the hell do you want?” Mutt said, chucking the bottle in the coyote’s general direction. It missed and landed in the brush with a rustle and a clank. The coyote didn’t move an inch.

“This is about where we were sitting around this very fire pit about, how long ago was it? Oh yes, twenty-two years. Long time for men and coyotes. Not long at all for mountains or gods.”

“Say your peace,” Mutt said. “Then git.”

“Your brother told me you refused my warning to get out of Golgotha. I’m curious, why?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“I’m not going to abandon my friends.”

“Oh, of course, I can see that. After all they’ve done for you. Touching. Very human. Stupid.”

“I didn’t ask what you thought about it,” Mutt said.

“Then you’ll get this for free,” the coyote said, licking his chops. “This theatre stage, this playground we call the world, may die in the next few days. If it does, it will all begin in Golgotha, and if you are there, then you will die too, along with all your friends. How noble, how sad. Did I mention the stupid part?”

“What is it?” Mutt said, leaning forward toward the fire. “What’s got the great fire stealer himself so scared?”

The coyote snorted indignantly. “Not scared, boy, just not stupid. When you hear thunder and you see storm clouds, you know well enough to find a shelter out of the rain. Least most folk do.”

“What is it?” Mutt asked again. “I can smell it, strong medicine, in the soil, in the wind. Something unnatural, even for Golgotha. Seen the signs too. That boy I found in the desert, he reeked of death medicine, powerful stuff. You sent the others out to fetch whatever it is he’s got. He was drawn here, but he doesn’t know it.”

“They seldom do,” Coyote said with a dry chuckle that sounded more like a hiss. “Golgotha keeps calling and they keep coming. This thing is the reason for that. It straddles all the worlds built by gods and men. Older than me and a damn sight less pretty. Older than any god man has ever been able to dream up in his skull, balls or heart. It’s got something to do with how things got started. Back in the beginning of this world … I was part of all that, you know?”

Mutt sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard the stories.”

“Even the one about me and the—”

“Yes. Several times.”

“How ’bout the one about me and the—”

“Yes! Go on!”

“’Cause that’s a real old one and not many—”

“Will you just—”

“Okay, okay. You know, all that time on two legs—it’s really damaged your patience, and your sense of humor.”

The Coyote paused for a second. The fire crackled. Mutt realized his father was preparing to tell a story, and even though he hated this creature, resented him terribly for all he had put Mutt’s mother and him through, he felt a thrill of anticipation because he also knew nobody, nobody, told a story like Coyote.

“Back when this world was dark water and mud,” Coyote began, “back before men, or time, back when all places were one place, this creature lived in the darkness between all the worlds, all the possibilities. It wasn’t man or woman—it simply was. It was the time before naming things, but later, the people would call it the great and terrible serpent—the Uktena.