Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Read online

  The Rider turned and looked on the grisly scene on the porch.

  J.T. Lessmoor was dying. His guts had been ripped open and gnawed at savagely by the industrious devil-hogs. His blood ran in a pool over the porch, mingling with that of the scattered, dead pigs. His limbs were crooked and useless and his wound was quivering and gaping. Yet his face was calm, his eyes aware. He stared up at The Rider.

  “By the Bible, and the sword,” Japheth wheezed weakly. He shook his head in one final intonation. “Glory be.”

  The Rider closed the old man’s eyes with his fingertips. Here was a righteous mensch, one of the hasidei ummot ha-olam. No less burdened by guilt than Tooms had been, in his way, surely he had found redemption at last. This strange old goy had healed him, body and soul, both with the raw, miraculous power he had called down from The Lord, and with a stranger’s objective insight into his prideful failing. Before this man, The Rider had doubted his purpose on a fundamental level. Now, he knew that one day he would stand before God as surely as this Christian, this Noah. Japheth had taken away The Rider’s doubt. He thought too, that in the end, he had lost his own. It was written in the Tosefta Sanhedrin that the righteous of the nations of the world have their portion in the world to come. He grieved, but he felt sure would see this man again in the world to come.

  The Rider bound his own open wounds and gathered the old man up, slowly, painfully. He wrapped him in a blanket from the buggy. The ground, he thought, would be too cold to break with a shovel, but after securing a spade from the tool shed, he found the earth near the grave of Tooms’ wife and child to be surprisingly yielding, as though it had been kept warm and waiting, like the bed of an absent loved one.

  It took him until sunset, and it was back breaking work, but he buried the old preacher and Medgar Tooms and said the Kaddish over them. As a marker for Tooms, he left the Whitworth rifle, bayonet buried in the little mound beneath which he lie. For the preacher, he broke the hitch of the buggy and fashioned a crude Christian cross.

  “Tell the angel Metaton I’ll see him again, reverend,” he whispered.

  The hogs, he put into a heap and doused with old oil from a lamp in the house. He could still smell the odor of their immolation as he walked into the sleepy main street of Gadara and collapsed in a doorway.

  He slept, though fitfully. Animal shrieks sounded in his dark dreams, and he kept jerking awake, a nervous anxiety about the mysterious Hour of Incursion. Each time he opened his eyes, he feared it had already come.

  When he awoke, he realized he was sleeping in the doorway of his vision, the door to the old church, Japheth’s church. It was here that he’d heard the screams and the desperate pounding; the people of Gadara, pleading with their preacher to be let inside God’s house.

  The town was empty, the buildings and shops and homes peppered with large bore bullet holes.

  He made his way back to Japheth’s cabin, where the onager waited.

  Episode Four - The Nightjar Women

  The Rider shared a desert camp with an unimaginably dirty prospector from Mobile, Alabama with the unlikely name of Pete Boggs. Pete had taken him for another prospector because they shared the same long growth of beard. Whereas The Rider’s chin whiskers were a matter of halakha, to this vagabond it was necessity; he plied his trade far from a regular source of water and couldn’t afford to waste it on ablutions.

  Pete offered to buy The Rider’s onager right off, citing its pale color and singular black stripe as ‘the damndest thing he’d ever seen,’ but The Rider declined. The animal had come all the way from Jerusalem, after all. To get rid of the faithful, if obstinate, creature now would be like betraying his oldest friend.

  It had been a difficult visit at first. The Rider could not share the man’s food, or his whiskey, or even his cup.

  “By God, you are a conspicuous son of a bitch, ain’t you?” Pete finally said, throwing up his hands as The Rider took his own crockery off the onager, then proceeded to brew his coffee after refusing Pete’s own. “A more sensitive feller might get his feelings hurt campin’ with you.”

  Pete put voice to a nearly constant concern of The Rider in his travels. His customs made it difficult to associate with the world through which he walked. He couldn’t share a meal or drink with most people because of the kashrut, couldn’t travel or work on the Shabbat, couldn’t even ride a horse or give his name because of his oath to the Sons of the Essenes. It made for a lonely existence. Sometimes it led to violence. He still remembered the drunken drover he had crippled for trying to shave him with a Bowie knife in Leadville.

  The Rider did his best to explain his ways to Pete, as he had to dozens of other goyim in the past. Of course, in his life, he had committed sins both large and small, and sometimes he had slipped in his observance of the mitzvah. Traveling in the desert made it particularly hard to immerse oneself in a naturally occurring mikvah, for instance. But his Merkabah abilities in part depended upon remaining shomer shabbo; they could wax or wan according to his spiritual purity.

  And he had need of the skills The Sons of the Essenes had taught him. Adon, his renegade teacher, was still loose in the world. Seven years now he had hunted him, following his murderous track across the world, and finally back to America where he had begun his blasphemous career, baptizing himself in the blood of the American enclave.

  It was because of that, he sometimes felt an even greater need to adhere to the mitzvah than perhaps he had before. He was the last to come out of his yeshiva.

  “How about women?” Pete asked out of the blue as they lay across from each other, the fire spluttering low between them.

  “What?” The Rider asked. He had almost been asleep.

  “I said how about women? Can you…”

  The Rider cut him off.

  “Yes, but not with unmarried women.”

  Pete was quiet for a moment.

  “You mean…a woman you ain’t married to yourself.”

  The Rider smirked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, but everybody’s s’posed to stick to that one,” Pete mused. “I mean…bein’ way out here…don’t you never think to take it as you can get it?”

  The Rider turned his head sharply.

  “I mean with a woman,” Pete said quickly. “There’s women to be had. You know, hurdy gurdy gals…town women.”

  “No,” The Rider said, closing his eyes. “Technically I’m supposed to cover my ears if I hear a woman singing.”

  “By God,” Pete chuckled sleepily. “You Jews are harder on yourselves than priests even.”

  Why had he volunteered that? He knew Pete would ridicule the notion. To him it was absurd. Maybe The Rider even felt it was a little absurd himself. Was it confirmation he was seeking?

  He slept fitfully.

  In the morning, Pete did not offer The Rider breakfast. He ate his own and watched him wind his tefilin straps around his arm and head and don his fringed prayer shawl. He listened curiously as The Rider recited his morning prayers.

  When The Rider had packed up his onager, Pete patted the animal and shook his hand.

  “You take care of yourself, Rider.”

  “And you, my friend.”

  “Keep skirtin’ them mountains, you’ll come to Cottonwood Creek. Follow it and it’ll come up along a road. That’ll take you to Tip Top.”

  “I’m not going to Tip Top,” The Rider said.

  “Sure you are. There’s women in Tip Top,” Pete winked. “Six or seven the last I heard.”

  The Rider broke into a grin and shook his head. Pete stood waving for awhile until he was out of sight.

  Yet when the time came to turn towards Prescott, The Rider instead chose to edge along the mountains as Pete had suggested. The way was rugged and seemed to physically discourage him and the onager. He had an uneasy feeling. He did not know, or did not claim to know why he had turned from his course. He reasoned that Adon, as a fugitive, would surely not flee to a town as large as Presc
ott. He had long suspected that if ever he found his teacher, it would be in one of these ramshackle frontier camps. The last he had heard of him was that he was in Arizona Territory…but he knew this was all self-delusion. In truth, he had lain awake for a long time thinking of his conversation with Pete.

  He prayed often while he walked, but there was shame in his heart, for he still didn’t turn aside. It was foolishness. He had never before sought the company of a paid woman, had on occasion even rebuffed their advances, and this had made him sinfully proud in his worst moments.

  But he was a man, and he had been alone for a long time. A man craved company. The importance of his mission had caused him to shun companionship of any sort for so long. In a way, he was like the onager, far from home, far from its own kind, far from attaining any sort of normal life.

  He walked into Tip Top in the dead of night, into the narrow valley the creek had cut into the rocky hills centuries ago. He would have been there sooner, but he had actually stopped to bathe in the creek, reinforcing in his mind his intent to forswear his vows.

  God, what was this? He had felt such temptations before, but never like this. Maybe the frustration of his long and so far fruitless search for Adon was compounding it. He felt like breaking all his vows, just casting off all the tradition, shaving his beard and walking away from the responsibility.

  While a soldier in Ford’s Company (later, the 2nd Colorado Cavalry), he had broken many of the commandments, often out of necessity. Yet always, when his comrades had sought out women, he had remained shomer negiah. While some of them had spent the nights leading up to a battle cavorting and finding solace wherever and with whomever they could, he had confined his attentions solely to prayer and usually alone. He might have died a hundred times in battles from New Mexico to Kansas and never known a single feminine gesture. It seemed madness to him now. Now he longed to touch a woman, and perhaps more.

  He walked swiftly down the street, which was crowded with drunken miners even at this late hour. He was confounded. He listened for the sound of a woman’s voice, the telltale shrill giggle or snatch of bawdy song he had gone out of his way to avoid in the past. What was he doing?

  The onager lagged behind as if counseling him to tarry and think. He pulled its lead taut, urging it to quicken its pace as he doubled his own in his eagerness.

  He passed a corral and a dark candy store before he came across a squat stone hotel and a saloon. The hotel was dim and silent. A clerk could be seen with his head down beside a failing lamp on the desk through the open door. The saloon was bright and alive with male voices. Foolishness. This was foolishness. What was he looking for? A whore not surrounded by men? Even in sin he was too particular.

  He walked down the stony, winding road past a dark cemetery alive with the strange churring of some night birds and a lonesome, silent windmill. He spared a glance at that, hunched his shoulders, and went on. He passed more stone houses, miner’s tents and frame huts, lit from within like paper lanterns, then past more glowing, busy saloons, dim businesses and a sprawling, silent mill. Soon he found himself clear on the other side of town.

  He was uncomfortable and walked with his head down. He was considering a red lamp burning in the distance, when a dark haired young woman in a green and violet dress crossed the street in front of him.

  She wasn’t much more than eighteen, but her smooth face had a pursed, knowing expression. Her dark, deep set eyes were bold and didn’t flinch from the shambling drunks who ogled her. She gripped the skirts of her dress in white fists as she hustled across the road, dark stockings showing on her small ankles. She had night black hair, unsuccessfully piled on her head, threatening to burst into a long and full bodied mane. Her lips seemed almost the same color as her white face, and The Rider was struck by the definition of her form.

  Sensing they would collide given their pace, he stopped in front of the unimaginatively named No. 2 Saloon (so called, although it was the fourth he’d seen) and stared at her as she came closer. Even this simple pleasure of watching a beautiful woman, he thought sourly, was a violation of the halakha.

  She met his eyes as she made for open door of the saloon, and her black eyebrows knotted.

  He found himself opening his mouth to speak, embarrassed she had caught him looking.

  “Ah…excuse me, miss,” he began hurriedly.

  “Look,” she snapped, “I’m going in for the night, alright? I’m going to bed. Alone.”

  He touched the brim of his hat and his eyes fell. He lowered his head slightly to hide his own blushing. He had been face to face with demons of hell. This was somehow worse.

  “I’m sorry…please…I was just looking for a place to stay.”

  “You blind, mister? You passed the goddamned hotel,” she muttered. “Why…”

  And then she stopped. She stood poised, one small foot on the plank board in front of the No. 2. She came over and stood in front of him.

  Miserably, he ventured to raise his head, and saw she was staring at him, looking him up and down, even as he had her.

  “My God,” she said, and her face went from furrowed curiosity to a hint of hesitant pleasure, as if he were an old friend. “You’re Hasid?”

  Her inflection, her pronunciation was unmistakable. He smiled slightly and nodded, amazed at the coincidence. She was Jewish.

  Her own smile split her face. It lit up the night.

  “Well! You’re not from around here. Where are you from?”

  “San Francisco.”

  Her cheeks swelled and she clutched her hands like a little girl in obvious enjoyment.

  “I’m from San Francisco too. Near South Park.”

  “My father was a dry goods clerk,” The Rider said. Strange, that he should tell a stranger all that. “We lived south of the Slot.”

  She smirked.

  “You caught me in a lie. My father was a baker. We lived south of the Slot too.”

  It was hardly a lie. South of the Slot was a working class neighborhood, surrounded by industry and immigrant slums. South Park was more affluent, and he’d known a lot of proud Jews who had claimed to live ‘near South Park.’ The two areas were close, after all.

  “Well, you told me yourself,” The Rider smiled, “so it’s not a lie.”

  “I’m Sadie.”

  He faltered. He wanted to tell her his name, but he said;

  “Rider.”

  She cocked an eyebrow.

  “What kind of name is Rider for a Hasid on foot?”

  “Well,” he shrugged, “what sort of name is Sadie for a Jewish girl from south of the Slot?”

  She giggled. It was absolutely musical.

  “Alright, alright,” she said, warming to him. “What happened? They wouldn’t let you in at the hotel?” She didn’t let him answer. “Those bastards. Come inside.” She nodded to the No. 2. “It’s not very nice, but I know the owner, and there’s a cot you can sleep on in the back. Tie up your mule out front for now.”

  He did, as she went inside, smiling fetchingly over her shoulder, oblivious to the lustful thoughts she conjured in his head.

  The onager seemed to sense it, and threw back its head suddenly, catching him in the chin.

  “Alright!” he hissed at the animal. “So you’re not a mule,” he whispered. “Neither am I.”

  He took his saddlebags and went in after her.

  There was no door on the place, just a dusty muslin curtain that was drawn to the side. The floor was hard packed earth, the ceiling low and hung with straw. The bar was plank and barrel, candlelit. Behind it, a thin haired man with a large moustache in a nice, but rumpled, shirt and pinstriped trousers stood pouring himself a glass of whiskey with an unsteady hand. There was a .44 lying on the bar beside the bottle.

  “This all you brang in tonight?” he was saying as The Rider walked in. Sadie was standing at the bar across from him, and she had laid a couple of coins on the wood. “You still just usin’ your hand? Didn’t I tell you you can’t make
nothin’ just usin’ your hand?”

  The man looked up at The Rider and fixed him with a pair of dark, bleary eyes. He scraped the money off the bar and tucked it into his pants pocket.

  “We’re closin’ up,” he slurred. Then his eyes shot to Sadie and back. “‘Less you’re here for somethin’ quick, bud.”

  The Rider felt his ears burn, and his fists balled at his sides. The money on the bar, his rough talk…

  “Johnny, this is my cousin from San Francisco,” Sadie said quickly. “Rider, this is Johnny Behan.”

  “Cousin?” said Behan, staring at The Rider and taking a moment to slam back his whiskey. “What the fuck does he want?”

  “Just a place to sleep tonight,” Sadie said.

  “What’s the matter, your cousin can’t talk for himself? Or does he only speak Heeb?”

  “I speak English,” The Rider said, crossing the floor.

  “What’s the matter with the hotel up the street?”

  “They wouldn’t take him, Johnny,” Sadie said.

  He shot her a look, then leaned on the bar and looked at The Rider.

  “What makes you think I will?”

  “Please Johnny?” Sadie said. “He’s got no place…”

  “He stays in the cot and he’s got to pay, same as everybody else.”

  “He’s my cousin.”

  “C’mon now, I ain’t sayin’ he’s got to do nothin’, I’m just sayin’ that cot’s a place of business and no matter what he wants it for, I lose money if it’s occupied.”

  “You’re drunk,” Sadie said, stepping away from the bar. She looked pleadingly at The Rider. “He wouldn’t talk this way if he weren’t drunk.”

  Behan lunged across and caught her arm, pulling her back.

  The Rider took a step forward.

  “Let her go,” he said.

  “You can keep your filial piety, cousin. You just show me the color of your money or you can turn your Yid ass around and sleep out there with the pigs.”