The Very Best of F & SF v1 (36 page)

When he came
through the hut’s door and walked down the steps (the hovel proper was set
below ground level, designed to catch and hold the coolness of the nights),
Brown was poking ears of corn into the embers of a tiny fire with a hardwood
spatula. Two ragged plates had been set at opposite ends of a dun blanket.
Water for the beans was just beginning to bubble in a pot hung over the fire.

“I’ll pay for
the water, too.”

Brown did not
look up. “The water’s a gift from God. Pappa Doc brings the beans.”

The gunslinger
grunted a laugh and sat down with his back against one rude wall, folded his
arms and closed his eyes. After a little, the smell of roasting corn came to
his nose. There was a pebbly rattle as Brown dumped a paper of dry beans into
the pot. An occasional
tak-tak-tak
as Zoltan walked restlessly on the roof. He was tired; he had been
going sixteen and sometimes eighteen hours a day between here and the horror
that had occurred in Tull, the last village. He had been afoot for the last
twelve days; the mule was at the end of its endurance.

Tak-tak-tak.

Two weeks, Brown
had said, or as much as six. Didn’t matter. There had been calendars in Tull,
and they had remembered the man in black because of the old man he had healed
on his way through. Just an old man dying with the weed. An old man of thirty-five.
And if Brown was right, the man in black had lost ground since then. But the
desert was next. And the desert would be hell.

Tak-tak-tak.

—Lend me your
wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.

He slept.

III

Brown woke him
up five hours later. It was dark. The only light was the dull cherry glare of
the banked embers.

“Your mule has
passed on,” Brown said. “Dinner’s ready.”

“How?”

Brown shrugged. “Roasted
and boiled, how else? You picky?”

“No, the mule.”

“It just laid
over, that’s all. It looked like an old mule.” And with a touch of apology: “Zoltan
et the eyes.”

“Oh.” He might
have expected it. “All right.”

Brown surprised
him again when they sat down to the blanket that served as a table by asking a
brief blessing: Rain, health, expansion to the spirit.

“Do you believe
in an afterlife?” the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot
corn onto his plate.

Brown nodded. “I
think this is it.”

IV

The beans were
like bullets, the corn tough. Outside, the prevailing wind snuffled and whined
around the ground-level eaves. He ate quickly, ravenously, drinking four cups
of water with the meal. Halfway through, there was a
machine-gun
rapping at the door. Brown got up and let Zoltan in. The bird flew across the
room and hunched moodily in the corner.

“Musical fruit,”
he muttered.

Afterward, the
gunslinger offered his tobacco.

—Now. Now the
questions will come.

But Brown asked
no questions. He smoked and looked at the dying embers of the fire. It was
already noticeably cooler in the hovel.

“Lead us not
into temptation,” Zoltan said suddenly, apocalyptically.

The gunslinger
started as if he had been shot at. He was suddenly sure that it was an
illusion, all of it (not a dream, no; an enchantment), that the man in black
had spun a spell and was trying to tell him something in a maddeningly obtuse,
symbolic way.

“Have you been
through Tull?” he asked suddenly.

Brown nodded. “Coming
here, and once to sell corn. It rained that year. Lasted maybe fifteen minutes.
The ground just seemed to open and suck it up. An hour later it was just as
white and dry as ever. But the corn—God, the corn. You could see it grow. That
wasn’t so bad. But you could
hear
it, as if the rain had given it a mouth. It wasn’t a happy sound.
It seemed to be sighing and groaning its way out of the earth.” He paused. “I
had extra, so I took it and sold it. Pappa Doc said he would, but he would have
cheated me. So I went.”

“You don’t like
town?”

“No.”

“I almost got
killed there,” the gunslinger said abruptly.

“That so?”

“I killed a man
that was touched by God,” the gunslinger said. “Only it wasn’t God. It was the
man in black.”

“He laid you a
trap.”

“Yes.”

They looked at
each other across the shadows, the moment taking on overtones of finality.

—Now
the questions will come.

But Brown had
nothing to say. His smoke was a smoldering roach, but when the gunslinger
tapped his poke, Brown shook his head.

Zoltan shifted
restlessly, seemed about to speak, subsided.

“May I tell you
about it?” the gunslinger asked.

“Sure.”

The gunslinger
searched for words to begin and found none. “I have to flow,” he said.

Brown nodded. “The
water does that. The corn, please?”

“Sure.”

He went up the
stairs and out into the dark. The stars glittered overhead in a mad splash. The
wind pulsed steadily. His urine arched out over the powdery cornfield in a
wavering stream. The man in black had sent him here. Brown might even be the
man in black himself. It might be—

He shut the
thoughts away. The only contingency he had not learned how to bear was the
possibility of his own madness. He went back inside.

“Have you
decided if I’m an enchantment yet?” Brown asked, amused.

The gunslinger
paused on the tiny landing, startled. Then he came down slowly and sat.

“I started to
tell you about Tull.”

“Is it growing?”

“It’s dead,” the
gunslinger said, and the words hung in the air.

Brown nodded. “The
desert. I think it may strangle everything eventually. Did you know that there
was once a coach road across it?”

The gunslinger
closed his eyes. His mind whirled crazily.

“You doped me,” he
said thickly.

“No. I’ve done
nothing.”

The gunslinger
opened his eyes warily.

“You won’t feel
right about it unless I invite you,” Brown said. “And so I do. Will you tell me
about Tull?”

The gunslinger
opened his mouth hesitantly and was surprised to find that this time the words
were there. He began to speak in flat bursts that slowly spread into an even,
slightly toneless narrative. The doped feeling left him, and he found himself
oddly excited. He talked deep into the night. Brown did not interrupt at all.
Neither did the bird.

V

He had bought
the mule in Pricetown a week earlier, and when he reached Tull, it was still
fresh. The sun had set an hour earlier, but the gunslinger had continued
traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky, then by the uncannily clear
notes of a honky-tonk piano playing “Hey Jude.” The road widened as it took on
tributaries.

The forests had
been gone long now, replaced by the monotonous flat country: endless, desolate
fields gone to timothy and low shrubs, shacks, eerie, deserted estates guarded
by brooding, shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty
shanties where the people had either moved on or had been moved along, an
occasional dweller’s hovel, given away by a single flickering point of light in
the dark, or by sullen, inbred clans toiling silently in the fields by day.
Corn was the main crop, but there were beans and also some peas. An occasional
scrawny cow stared at him lumpishly from between peeled alder poles. Coaches
had passed him four times, twice coming and twice going, nearly empty as they
came up on him from behind and bypassed him and his mule, fuller as they headed
back toward the forests of the north.

It was ugly
country. It had showered twice since he had left Pricetown, grudgingly both
times. Even the timothy looked yellow and dispirited. Ugly country. He had seen
no sign of the man in black. Perhaps he had taken a coach.

The road made a
bend, and beyond it the gunslinger clucked the mule to a stop and looked down
at Tull. It was at the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, a shoddy jewel
in a cheap setting. There were a number of lights, most of them clustered
around the area of the music. There looked to be four streets, three running at
right angles to the coach road, which was the main avenue of the town. Perhaps
there would be a restaurant. He doubted it, but perhaps. He clucked at the
mule.

More houses
sporadically lined the road now, most of them still deserted. He passed a tiny
graveyard with moldy, leaning wooden slabs overgrown and choked by the rank
devil-grass. Perhaps five hundred feet further on he passed a chewed sign which
said: TULL.

The paint was
flaked almost to the point of illegibility. There was another further on, but
the gunslinger was not able to read that one at all.

A fool’s chorus
of half-stoned voices was rising in the final protracted lyric of “Hey Jude”—“Naa
naa-naa naa-na-na-na... hey, Jude...”—as he entered the town proper. It was a
dead sound, like the wind in the hollow of a rotted tree. Only the prosaic
thump and pound of the honky-tonk piano saved him from seriously wondering if
the man in black might not have raised ghosts to inhabit a deserted town. He
smiled a little at the thought.

There were a few
people on the streets, not many, but a few. Three ladies wearing black slacks
and identical middy blouses passed by on the opposite boardwalk, not looking at
him with pointed curiosity. Their faces seemed to swim above their
all-but-invisible bodies like huge, pallid baseballs with eyes. A solemn old
man with a straw hat perched firmly on top of his head watched him from the
steps of a boarded-up grocery store. A scrawny tailor with a late customer
paused to watch him by; he held up the lamp in his window for a better look.
The gunslinger nodded. Neither the tailor nor his customer nodded back. He
could feel their eyes resting heavily against the low-slung holsters that lay
against his hips. A young boy, perhaps thirteen, and his girl crossed the
street a block up, pausing imperceptibly. Their footfalls raised little hanging
clouds of dust. A few of the streetside lamps worked, but their glass sides
were cloudy with congealed oil. Most had been crashed out. There was a livery,
probably depending on the coach line for its survival. Three boys were crouched
silently around a marble ring drawn in the dust to one side of the barn’s
gaping maw, smoking cornshuck cigarettes. They made long shadows in the yard.

The gunslinger
led his mule past them and looked into the dim depths of the barn. One lamp
glowed sunkenly, and a shadow jumped and flickered as a gangling old man in bib
overalls forked loose timothy hay into the hay loft with huge, grunting swipes
of his fork.

“Hey!” the
gunslinger called.

The fork
faltered and the hostler looked around waspishly. “Hey yourself!”

“I got a mule
here.”

“Good for you.”

The gunslinger
flicked a heavy, unevenly milled gold piece into the semidark. It rang on the
old, chaff-drifted boards and glittered.

The hostler came
forward, bent, picked it up, squinted at the gunslinger. His eyes dropped to
the gunbelts and he nodded sourly.

“How long you
want him put up?”

“A night. Maybe
two. Maybe longer.”

“I ain’t got no
change for gold.”

“I’m not asking
for any.”

“Blood money,” the
hostler muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” The
hostler caught the mule’s bridle and led him inside.

“Rub him down!”
The gunslinger called. The old man did not turn.

The gunslinger
walked out to the boys crouched around the marble ring. They had watched the
entire exchange with contemptuous interest.

“How is it
hanging?” the gunslinger asked conversationally.

No answer.

“You dudes live
in town?”

No answer.

One of the boys
removed a crazily tilted twist of cornshuck from his mouth, grasped a green cat’s-eye
marble, and squirted it into the dirt circle. It struck a croaker and knocked
it outside. He picked up the cat’s-eye and prepared to shoot again.

“There a
restaurant in this town?” the gunslinger asked.

One of them
looked up, the youngest. There was a huge cold-sore at the corner of his mouth,
but his eyes were still ingenuous. He looked at the gunslinger with hooded
brimming wonder that was touching and frightening.

“Might get a
burger at Sheb’s.”

“That the
honky-tonk?”

The boy nodded
but didn’t speak. The eyes of his playmates had turned ugly and hostile.