Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Read online

  The Merkabah Rider

  Tales of a High Planes Drifter

  Episodes 1-4

  By

  Edward M. Erdelac

  For Adonai and my family.

  Thanks to Bob, Joe, Richard, Larry, Louis, and Howard for the inspiration.

  Table of Contents:

  Episode One - The Blood Libel

  Episode Two - The Dust Devils

  Episode Three - Hell’s Hired Gun

  Episode Four - The Nightjar Women

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Episode One - The Blood Libel

  The Merkabah Rider passed into the San Pedro River valley on a narrow, stony path through the Huachucas. It was an old road white men and Mexicans wouldn’t use. They dreaded the Apache purported to skulk in the rocky places drunk on tiswin, plotting the rape of virgins and devising new ways to make the blue bellied soldiers scream.

  The Chiricahua shunned it too, reckoning it too arduous and remote a pass. Some among them believed it sank into the heart of the mountains and passed through the shadowy worlds of wicker and web where only Coyote dared, to finally open up into the dark place where it was said the ravenous thunderbirds of old nested, dreaming lightning dreams, and stirring at the smell of a man’s terror.

  The Rider had encountered none of these things.

  Thirst and shifting stones and steep paths were all the evils that plagued him. As for the shaggy white onager he led, perhaps it had sensed all manner of evils. It had balked and shivered enough times on the journey, but whether that was from preternatural unease or inborn wild ass stubbornness, he couldn’t say.

  He had spent the day passing through the foothills and trekking across the flat anvil of the baking valley floor in the direction of the river. There was a town there, haphazardly arranged as if some ungainly colossus had tripped over the ribbon of water and spilled the clapboard and adobe buildings from its arms, then stumbled on.

  DRUCKER & DOBBS MINING COMPANY

  WELCOMES YOU TO DELIRIUM TREMENS

  POP 180

  The letters were carved into a plank sign bolted to a boulder set along a road, which appeared quite suddenly. It was a rutted swath that slashed through the rough tumble of ominous saguaro and mean dry brush and drove down the center of the town. The Rider followed it.

  It was on a dying, red sun Friday when he passed into the town; only the black gummed growl of a scrawny, long-nippled cur that slid from underneath the shadows of a boardwalk, welcomed him. Though there were people locking up stores and heading for their homes, they greeted him in much the same way as the bitch, but in their own, more insidious manner.

  Curtains drew. Fleshy lips moved behind lily hands. Whispers carried words he’d heard a hundred times before in towns better than this. Questions both bemused (What do you make of that?) and pregnant with fear-born threat (Who does he think he is?). Speculations (Some kinda Mennonite?A Mormon? A Mexican-Mormon?). Then, probably from some drummer who had been out of the valley once or twice—maybe as far as Tombstone or Bisbee he heard another; Jew.

  That was all it took to tip the murmurs spilling. They came gushing over curled lips like the salivation of wagging dogs smelling a kill. They crawled up, pestilent and envenomed, from the throats of shopkeepers—men in aprons, who if they knew whom they were addressing, would have hunkered down behind the counters of their stores and averted their gaze like peons before a passing maharajah. They squeezed through the gritted yellow teeth of posturing men with wide belts and big pistols who thought themselves hard, but would have scrabbled with their fingers in the earth to hide their eyes from all The Rider had seen.

  The words meant nothing to The Rider. They were just more words.

  Christ-Killer.Heeb. Dirty Jew.

  He knew what he was to them, in his strange black garb and his long, blue-black beard and curled payos. He knew they looked on the four white fringes of his prayer tallit with nervous hatred. He was alien to them who knew only mine dust and horse stink, faded calico, and the red faced brimstone clamor of the gospel peddler. He was a weird apparition that stoked distrust in the most neighborly breast. He was a strange mirage shimmering down the desert road, salted in moon dust and smelling of foreign lands.

  As he passed a sundry, where a fat clerk leaned in the doorway speaking with a rail thin man in overalls who straddled a barrel, he heard the clerk say;

  “One of them. And right down the middle of the street! Someone should...”

  The Rider paused in his walk, feeling the onager nuzzle against the small of his back and snort, wondering why they were lingering when water was so near. The Rider fixed his stare on the fat clerk, looking at the man’s pinched face over the golden rims of the blue tinted spectacles he wore. The clerk gave pause, and his eyes flitted to The Rider’s frock where he saw the gilded pistol strapped to his waist. Those eyes met The Rider’s once more, then darted with sudden interest to a sign on the wall—an advertisement for Proven Gall Bitters, which promised a relief to habitual feminine maladies. Neither the clerk nor the barrel rider spoke again till he was gone.

  The Rider was a man who understood the root of fear, but would not suffer its fruits.

  He went on towards the looming shadow of the two-story building that stood like a promontory, splitting the dry river of the dusty street in two. It was the El Moderado Gambling Hall and Saloon, a backwater palace—the shining citadel of Delirium Tremens. The second story wood edifice, bearing the fancy painted sign, rose transcendent above its humble adobe beginnings, as it did above its shoddy neighbors. The pale walls of its baked mud foundation were chipped, the edges streaked with black from a long ago fire. The second floor had been a recent addition, a rakish hat of slatted brilliance.

  On the long plank balcony above the sign, Cut Tom Duggan stood smoking in his sweat stained long johns, leaning over the flaking white railing. He fingered the namesake scar that split his face diagonally and watched the man in black leading the onager down the street.

  The dull-eyed Chinee whore, sitting with her narrow hips pressed against the inside of Tom’s bare feet, pressed her painted face through the bars to watch the newcomer while she kicked her stocking legs back and forth girlishly over the edge. Cut Tom glanced down at the tangled nest of black hair beneath him. Through the sheer camisole, fresh cigar burns could be seen on her bare, pockmarked shoulders.

  It never failed to amaze him what a woman would let a man, or two men, do to her for money.

  As the man in black reached the hitch and trough in front of the porch, Cut Tom leaned closer, eyeing him from above. He was dressed like a preacher, in a long black frock and wide hat. He clinked when he walked, but had on no spurs. Not even boots, just a pair of dusty, black shoes. The onager had saddlebags and a bedroll, but little else. The man was no prospector.

  He had long, John Brown whiskers. They were black like his clothes, blue where the sun gleamed; a long nose poked out over them. Displayed on either side of his head was a pair of womanly curls, long enough to sway when he worked at tethering the animal.

  Something in the man’s appearance stirred up the catamount in Cut Tom. He knew a Jew when he saw one. This one was some kind of Jew priest. Come to read the last rights to his folk? Maybe the ones cowering in their rat holes down in Little Jerusalem had wired for him to talk Billy Shivers and the Reverend Shallbetter out of slaughtering the whole lot of them. Maybe all that clinking he heard was Jew gold come to buy them an exodus.

  Then, as a gust of dry wind blew up the Jew’s coattails, he knew what it was that put him off. Strapped to the Jew’s waist, as brazen as if it were a standing challenge t
o all Christian men, was a pistol.

  So that’s what he was. Those Heebs had hired themselves a Jew killer to come down and save them from the fire. He tightened his grip on the rail and it creaked. The Jew looked up at him. The setting sun flashed for a minute on his fancy blued spectacles, his pale face drawn and expressionless, like a mask.

  Cut Tom drew up the rust and tobacco taste from the back of his throat and spit it over the rail. It landed with a smack on the boards at the Jew’s feet. The man didn’t move. He stared up at Cut Tom through those blue glasses. As they caught the sun again, Tom thought he glimpsed a design etched into them, like a pair of big, circled stars. He held the empty look and squinted at those big blue glasses. His daddy had told him never to look away from any man, and he hadn’t ever. Not even from the one who’d given him his scar.

  Then the Jew lowered his face and disappeared under the awning. Cut Tom could hear his clinking step on the boards, and the creak of the bat wing doors swinging open down below. The Jew’s onager dipped its nose in the trough.

  Tom smiled.

  The Chinee girl turned her broad face to look up at him, a hint of sharpness in her expression. The bruise in the corner of her mouth was a shining plum.

  “You want somethin?” he said, feeling big again, feeling mean.

  She looked away.

  Cut Tom flicked his smoke off the balcony and turned to the doorway where his partner lay, still passed out naked on the bed, the greasy bottle tucked into the crook of his meaty arm like it was the Chinee girl’s neck. Bull Bannock was so called because he was a steer of a man, covered head to toe in greasy black hair and pale flesh that sagged on his gargantuan frame like bread dough on a Greek statue. Tom didn’t like to wake his partner, not when he was close up. Sometimes Bannock woke up flailing like a startled baby, and one of those tree trunk arms could knock a man sideways whether Bull meant it or not.

  “Hey Bull!” Tom called.

  It only took once. The big man’s slitted eyes creaked open, bright and blue in his ruddy face. He blinked once and stared over his brushy moustache. He snorted like a roused bear.

  “Get dressed. Let’s go downstairs.”

  * * * *

  The dying light shined in dusty shafts through the sugared glass of the saloon. It crept across angular men in dirty coats huddled over stained tables, squinting at smudged cards while sleepy, immodest women, trailing sheer yellow-white fabrics, moved like phantasms unnoticed among them lighting the lamps, their rising sun. The dealers were tired looking women in their underwear, their bosoms bulging ridiculously over the lips of their lurid corsets. White and red and brown and yellow skinned, they shined with sweat and spilt whiskey. They smiled brightly through painted, chapped lips, but their eyes were as dead as the dreams of murdered men.

  Burly Holt pretended to read the daily edition of the Pure Life Picayune but watched the tall man in the black coat push in from the failing light, the same as every other man and woman in the Moderado. He was a sight in all that black and beard. A real Jew, such as Burly had seen in his youth back east, though he had never known them to go around heeled.

  By God, this one had picked the wrong time to visit. When he reached the bar, turning the heads of even the most dedicated gamblers in the process, Burly folded his paper and told him so.

  The Jew said nothing, but put his hands on the bar.

  “Maybe you misunderstood me, Shylock,” Burly whispered. “We don’t cater to your creed here.”

  “Of course we do.”

  The voice came from Dan Spector, the owner, who sat at the end of the bar sipping coffee and smoking a thin cigarillo. Dan got up from his seat and slid down the bar to stand beside the Jew, who still had not looked anywhere but at Burly since he’d spoken. Burly was no coward, though his fighting prowess had mainly been tested against dallying drunks and whore beaters. But the way Dan could not see the Jew’s eyes through those blue spectacles...it put him a little on edge.

  “Aw...but Dan....”

  “But nothing,” said Dan, sparing him a look of stern disapproval that his carefully groomed whiskers seemed to emphasize “This man’s a newcomer to town, nothing to do with that business. If he has money...” Dan paused, and looked the Jew up and down, from the top of his dusty black hat to the gold gilded pistol and finely tooled belt at his waist, “and his kind always does, then he’s welcome and you’re to serve him.” He smiled up at the stoic stranger, nodded to Burly, and said in a voice loud enough for the rest of the saloon to hear;

  “Commerce knows no creed. If you knew that, you’d be running this place, not tending bar, Burly.”

  Burly bit his lip. Dan was too smart for his own good. He was an alright sport, but Burly hated to be cowed in front of everybody that way. He swore to himself, the first regular who tried any lip with him tonight would wind up kissing the bung starter.

  “What’ll it be then?” he hissed at the Jew.

  The Rider shook his head at the curly blonde man behind the bar. “I don’t want a drink,” he answered evenly.

  The well dressed one’s face fell a little then. His hospitality only extended so far.

  “Is it a room then? Ah. Sorry. We’re full up. You can try the settlement east of town.”

  “Jewtown?” laughed the bartender. “Yeah. Good luck getting in.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, The Rider watched the stubby man who had spit at him from the balcony descend the staircase. He was an ugly little man with a crooked scar that ploughed from one corner of his forehead to the opposite corner of his chin, disrupting his nose in between. There was a large, swaggering man at his side. The Rider ignored them, even as the ugly little one called out above the murmurs of the gambling;

  “You got a lotta sand comin’ here askin’ for a room, Christ killer.”

  The Rider spoke for the first time to the well dressed man, whom the bartender had called Dan.

  “What does he mean about me needing luck to get into the settlement?”

  “I’m talkin’ to you, dude!” the ugly man on the stairs shouted again. “Or can’t you hear me through them pretty, pretty pigtails?”

  “Pretty pigtails,” the big one repeated, chuckling.

  Slowly, The Rider turned his attention to them. He put his elbow on the bar. The other hand, he hitched near his belt line. The pistol on his jutting hip spoke a clear warning.

  The ugly man only seemed incensed and practically skipped the rest of the way down.

  “Never known one of your kind to favor a pistol before. That’s a real fancy lookin’ one too.”

  Truth be told, it was an exceptional weapon. The ugly one was like a fool bird who only saw a shiny something. It was an antique, a Volcanic pistol. They had gone out of favor some years back. Its finish was gold gilded and silver chased, stamped with intricate designs and glyphs of a nature none in the saloon would have understood even if The Rider had the patience and time to explain.

  “I wanna touch it,” said the big one.

  The ugly one and his partner stopped at the end of the bar, and the ugly one put his foot on the brass rail casually. He had a pistol too, a newer model, the blunted horn of its handle curving out of the lip of his stripy pants. The big one was likewise heeled, some heavy horse pistol sagging in his right hand pocket.

  “That’s too pretty a pistol to be shootin’,” the ugly one quipped. “Why don’t you slide it down the bar and let me and my partner take a gander at it?”

  “If you keep at it,” The Rider said, “you’ll see it soon enough.”

  The ugly one’s face got uglier. The scar flushed red. He slapped his hand on his pistol belt, hollering;

  “What’d you say to me?”

  But he stopped, for as promised, The Rider’s pistol now rested naked in the lamp light for all to see, its squarish barrel angled somewhere in the direction of Cut Tom’s forehead.

  Bull Bannock blinked.

  There was a crash behind the bar. Burly had snatched up a sawed off shot
gun from beneath it, but the alacrity of The Rider’s movement had so startled him, he’d jerked it back and upset a shelf of brandies and sent it smashing to the floor. It should have been enough noise to start both men shooting, but The Rider only aimed. Cut Tom’s hand still gripped his pistol butt, though he didn’t draw it out. Two by two his fingers uncurled and straightened.

  A few chairs groaned in the background. A few breaths hissed out. Someone dropped a poker chip into a pile on a table.

  “Left hands,” The Rider said after a moment. “Both of you, leave your pistols on the bar.”

  Tom complied, putting up his right hand and easing the pistol out with two fingers of his left. It clunked on the bar top.

  Beside, him Bull Bannock reached for his gun with his right hand and The Rider’s hammer cocked back.

  “The other hand, jughead,” Tom warned.

  In a moment, the big man’s pistol lay beside his compatriot’s.

  The Rider motioned to the front door.

  “Don’t come back for them until after I’ve gone.”

  Silently the ugly one and his big partner shuffled chins down through the gaping card players and blinking drinkers. The bang of the bat wings told all they’d reached the street.

  The Rider slipped the silver and gold pistol back into its holster.

  “It looks like we just got a vacancy, mister,” said Dan.

  The Rider turned once more to the man with the pomaded hair and carefully sculpted moustache.

  “It’s alright. Tell me now, why do I need luck to enter the Jewish settlement?”

  The man’s shoulders shrugged beneath his silken shirt. “Your religious persuasion isn’t exactly popular around here right now, not since a few months ago when the pig farmers started complaining about their hogs going missing.”

  The Rider listened as Dan told the rest.

  It began with livid pig farmers, cursing over their sows’ empty teats. The poor blacks were blamed first, then the vagrants and the street gamins. But no one really missed a few piglets enough to bother rooting through the hovels and shacks for their little bones.