Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Read online

  The Rider’s thoughts went to the golden Volcanic pistol on his hip. He had dealt with men like Behan before. Sadie was right. He would not talk this way if he wasn’t drunk. The liquor hadn’t buoyed his courage, it had drowned his sense. He had an urge to lay the barrel of his gun alongside this pimp’s nose.

  Then Sadie let out a shriek.

  At first The Rider thought it was directed at him. Maybe she had seen his hand brush his pistol and thought he was going to gun her Johnny Behan down. He easily could have. The Rider doubted Behan was sober enough to get to the .44 and cock it.

  But then he realized she had been startled by something else. Following her eyes, he turned toward the door.

  There in the doorway leaned the haggard figure of a woman. She was dead pale and hollow eyed, her sandy hair soaked with sweat and clinging about her neck. Her grayish nightdress was plastered to her thin body. She clutched something wrapped in a black and orange afghan to her chest. Everything from below her waist to the ankles of her spindly, wobbling legs was bright red with blood. It was trickling down the insides of her knees in such copious amounts they could hear it puddling on the floor between her bare feet. Her face was screwed up into a trembling grimace, dark eyelids drooping, cheeks slashed with tears.

  Sadie overcame her shock and rushed forward. The bloody woman staggered into the room, crashed against a chair, overturning it, and fell into Sadie’s arms.

  “Oh my God.” Sadie sunk to the floor with the woman across her lap. “Oh my God, she’s dead!”

  The Rider wasn’t looking at the woman. Her bundle had slipped from her arms as she collapsed, and its bloody little burden rolled out onto the dirt floor. It was an infant, or the beginnings of an infant, only a little less than nine or ten inches long. Gray and half-formed, it was curled like a salamander on the floor. The overpowering sea reek of it made The Rider touch the back of his hand to his lips.

  “Good God almighty!” whispered Behan, making a cursory sign of the cross.

  Protruding from the barely formed shoulder blades of the fetus were a pair of knobby protrusions, bent like spindly little elbows. The crooks of these growths were webbed with thin, fleshy membranes, like bloody, featherless wings.

  * * * *

  By the time Henry Wager the constable could be found, roused from sleep, and urged to put on his star, a crowd of noisy miners had already gathered. Behan stood at the door and kept them at bay, while Sadie wrapped the dead woman in a blanket and The Rider stood at the bar considering the thing in the afghan.

  Constable Wager was a squint eyed, rawboned desert dweller with graying hair and baked skin. He could have been thirty or sixty. He arrived at last in only his long underwear, boots, and coat, with his belt and holster over his shoulder, but no gun in it.

  He knew the dead woman right off.

  “Whalp,” he said over his shoulder as he stood over the body, idly scratching his behind, “somebody go wake up Alph Gersten and tell him his sister’s layin’ here in the No. 2 dead.”

  To Sadie, he said;

  “You find her?”

  “She found us,” Sadie said. Her arms were covered in the dead woman’s drying blood.

  Wager went over to the thing lying half covered in the afghan and exposed it with the toe of his boot. His eyes widened and he took a step back at the sight of it.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “She carried it in here,” Sadie said dully. She had covered it herself, and she came over and did it again, gently. “Getting it out of her is probably what killed her.”

  “But what the fuck is it?” Wager pressed. “Some kinda…”

  There was a commotion from the street, and a booming voice drew closer, calling out a name over and over again in a thick German accent.

  “Rica? Rica? Where is she?”

  Wager gestured hurriedly to Sadie.

  “Come here and stand over it, girl, don’t let Alph see this damn thing.”

  Sadie wrinkled her nose.

  “Let him see it,” she said.

  The man that appeared at the doorway was broad shouldered and red faced, with close cropped hair, huge ears, and a great, bushy mustache. Roused from his sleep like Wager, he had on only his trousers and braces, and great heaving muscles worked beneath the bushy hair that sprouted from his chest, belly and arms. He swept aside the miners and Behan and came into the room like thunder, calling his sister’s name over and over.

  When he saw her lying on the floor at Sadie’s feet, he paused, then gave a great wail and fell to his knees beside her, lifting her easily in his arms. He commenced to shake her, as if to wake her, and called her name again.

  Sadie came over and slapped him.

  He stared up at her, his blue fire eyes gushing tears, and looked to Wager.

  “What happened?” he managed.

  “She did what you wanted,” Sadie answered coldly. “She got rid of it. It’s layin’ over there,” she said, pointing out the small form in the afghan. “Go on and look.”

  Alph got to his feet and shook his head.

  “I don’t want to see it.” He turned and went to the door.

  Sadie took off her shoe and flung it. It bounced off the back of Alph’s head, hard enough to leave a red mark, but he didn’t stop. The men at the door stood aside and he bore the corpse out into the night.

  Behan shot a disapproving look at Sadie, then his eyes went to the fetus, and he called out after Alph.

  “Well somebody better come and get this thing outta my place, goddammit!”

  Wager scratched the back of his neck.

  “Whalp,” he said. “I guess…I can take it.”

  “I’ll bury it tomorrow,” Sadie said. “It’ll just wind up in a jar of whiskey at a penny-a-look otherwise.”

  She stooped and wrapped the little corpse up in a tight bundle.

  Behan came to stand by her.

  “Say…” Behan began.

  “Good night, Johnny,” she hissed. She went into the backroom with the bundle and drew the ragged curtain shut.

  Behan put his fists on his hips and called after her.

  “Hey!”

  The Rider dragged a chair from one of the tables across the floor and propped it against the wall beside the curtained doorway. He stared at Behan until the man broke into an uneasy grin and turned to the other men gathered in the doorway.

  “Hey fellas, how about some drinks while you’re all clutterin’ up my front porch?”

  As the men filed in, all talking at once, The Rider put his hat over his eyes and leaned back, the chair against the wall.

  * * * *

  He dreamed in red, as if through rock candy. All was the color of the lantern he had seen in the dark distance on the edge of Tip Top. In his dream it was night, the full moon scarlet in the sky.

  He was naked and chasing a pale figure across a bed of stony, unending desert. The figure was a woman, one he had never seen before, or perhaps he had glimpsed once in the Jerusalem market. Her features were Palestinian. She had a long, prominent nose and bold eyes with a wide, full lipped mouth. There was an ecstatic smile on her face as she looked at him over her shoulder, a smile almost mad in its sheer abandon. She was naked too, and entirely hairless. She had no eyebrows, even. The red moonlight shone on her smooth head and on the curve of her ample posterior as she scampered lightly across the stones.

  Although he was certain he had never seen her before, in the manner of dreams, she was Sadie.

  His bodily excitement increased as his pursuit continued, and though the ground between them lessened, she never quite slowed, and so the distance was perpetual. She laughed, a high, titillating laugh, like clashing anklets, and shot him gleeful looks over her bare shoulder. It maddened him.

  They passed through a grove of cactus, and the curved arms of the saguaros were suddenly alive with movement as dozens of perching birds taking to the night sky. Their fluttering, speckled wings blotted out the moon.

  Then he stood before
a still, feminine figure entirely amorphous because of her long hair, which brushed the ground and was so full as to entirely obscure her.

  He felt ashamed by his nakedness and arousal. Then the figure before him sprouted slender, pale arms on either side, and lowered to the ground. From the mass of hair, a pair shapely hips and well formed legs appeared. She fell into a swaying, shaking dance that slowly built into a whirling frenzy. She turned graceful circles and wove mesmerizing patterns in the air with her twisting arms. He was aware of a tune, gentle and melancholy, almost courtly, and a beauteous voice whose operatic words he could not quite catch.

  The Rider’s dream self turned in a dizzying circle and peered intently at the brazen form, desperate to catch a glimpse of her body and face. As her hair flew about her, he was rewarded with flashes of shuddering breasts, freckled shoulders, of a heaving belly and smiling, painted lips barely covering rows of straight white teeth.

  He reached out to touch her and the dancing and singing abruptly ceased. She stood before him once more, frozen in a spraddle-legged, squatting pose, fingers interlaced above her head.

  Then, from between her legs, through the curtain of hanging hair, a giant, shining black scorpion tail lashed out.

  As the venomous stinger pierced his body, his chair slid out from under him and he crashed to the floor of the No. 2 with a fearful exclamation.

  Behan peered over at him from the bar, as if he had never moved. Maybe he hadn’t.

  “Whatever you had last night, I wish I could bottle it, cousin,” he said.

  The Rider got to his feet and righted the chair. He was bathed in sweat and his body was still in a state of excitement brought on by the torridness of the dream. Pete would have laughed it off and told him to go behind a rock and take care of it. Pete would not have had an inkling of what The Rider knew. Dreams were not random mental associations for The Rider. He knew that the self sometimes slipped from its physical shell during sleep and that at such times, all manner of forces could assail it. Normally he took careful preventive measures including nightly prayers with the tefilin. But last night he had been so tired he had dozed off.

  “Where’s Sadie?” he managed. His throat was dry. He nearly asked Behan for a whiskey.

  “At the funeral,” Behan said.

  The Rider went out the front door of the No. 2 with his saddlebags over his shoulder into a cool and windy morning. A few men were hawking tools and supplies in the street, and he deflected an offer for the onager as he fed it. Then he headed off down the road, back to the cemetery he’d passed in the night.

  There was a decent turnout. Alph Gersten was there, and Constable Wager. Some men bound for the mine and the mill had stopped to pay their respects. There were women there too, four of them, scattered among the mourners on the arms of their husbands. Nine more women stood at a respectful distance from the open grave, in various states of dress, ranging from stylish silks and bustles, to simple shifts of cotton and shabby homespun dresses. They were of every race, but shared a common, dull eyed expression, as if the world were a thing to be weathered.

  Sadie stood off alone. The Rider came up beside her as a balding man in a patched grey frock coat, who looked so much like the constable that The Rider’s eyes passed quickly between them both to reassure him they were not the same man, took out a Bible and began to read lowly over Rica Gersten’s simple coffin. His voice hardly carried above the wind and the churring of the birds, oddly enough, the same birds he had heard when he’d passed the graveyard last night.

  Sadie looked at him, but said nothing.

  The Rider’s eyes passed from the man in the frock to Alph Gersten, whose thunderous grief of the night before had burned down into a glowering resentment, which he directed solely at his sister’s coffin with glistening, heavy eyes. An older man with a graying red beard stood beside him, a straw hat pressed to his chest and a solemn, stocky woman with almost albino blonde hair and invisible eyebrows clutching his arm.

  “The baby?” The Rider whispered.

  Sadie looked at him again.

  “I buried him with the other infants,” she said, and nodded to a row of small plank headstones in the back of the cemetery, near a stand of brush.

  “It was a boy?” The Rider asked.

  She nodded.

  “How many infants have died in this town?”

  She shrugged.

  “Count the headstones…four.”

  “The woman…Rica. Did you know her well?”

  “Not well. I don’t know why she would’ve come to me. Last March a troop of soldiers stopped here for a couple days. She told her brother she intended to go off with one of ‘em. I guess she meant to follow the troop to their fort, work as a washerwoman so she could be close to him. He told her he wouldn’t have it, locked her in her room.”

  “And the soldiers left?”

  “That’s the sad part. All of ‘em left but her soldier boy. He ran off from his troop to stay with her. Hung out a couple of days. I think he really meant to take her away.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nobody knows. Johnny thinks Alph ran him off, or killed him. Some soldiers came back looking for him, but nobody could say what happened to him.”

  “And she was found to be with child?”

  “She hadn’t been with anybody else. A girl like that? She could hardly speak English. ‘Course Alph let her have it when he found out. Told her he would disown her and run her out of town himself. I expect that’s why she…tried to get rid of it. Goddamn, but the things men will drive a woman to and then turn around and blame her.”

  The Rider looked at her fully.

  “Listen to me, Sadie. This is important…”

  The preacher had ceased his reading and the gathered mourners began to sing a disorderly version of “Shall We Gather at the River” as some of the miners began to lower the box in the grave. Alph suddenly shook off the comforting hand of the man beside him and went to the lip of the grave and spun on the others.

  “Who done it?” he yelled above the singers until they petered out one after another. “Who done this to my sister?”

  He paced back and forth before the grave like a caged animal, and then went toward the group of women at the back. They shrank before him, all except a group of three out front who were a little better dressed, a little more powdered and well kept than the others. The Rider couldn’t see them well from where he stood, but among them was a sharply appareled, slim man in a wide, pancake hat, who stepped between Alph and red haired woman with a peacock feathered parasol and black velvet bustle.

  “Which one of you whores done it? Which one of you?”

  The slim man held up one manicured hand and with his other, flung back the tails of his crushed blue velvet frock to display a silvery, pearl handled pistol in a holster on his left hip.

  The big German paused, red in the face, and threw his impotent fury over the women with a withering but useless glare.

  No one said anything, and The Rider noted that several of the men and women mourners looked away as though embarrassed.

  The red bearded man and his sunny haired wife came over at last and took Alph by his elbows and led him away. The woman spared a glance at the slim man and the prostitutes, but quickly dropped her eyes.

  “Who are they?” The Rider whispered.

  “Pete and Eileen Arnold. They run the brewery. Alph works for them,” Sadie said. “They’re Germans too.”

  “No, no,” said The Rider. But he caught himself, for he almost said ‘the prostitutes.’ He felt suddenly embarrassed again. He didn’t know just what to say to Sadie.

  As the coffin was lowered, the hymn was forgotten, and many of the mourners replaced their hats and dispersed as the mill whistle blew sharp and steady. The women went off in different directions. Many of them were a sickly, tired looking lot who gave off an air of being beaten down. Their eyes never left the ground. It was nearly in the morning, but several were painted for their work already. Perh
aps they had never retired for the night.

  The trio of well dressed women, one Oriental, the other yellow haired, and a red head, turned almost as one and went out of the cemetery together with their garishly dressed escort. These were not like the others. They were remarkably attractive and well kept considering their profession and location. They were like fine drapery in a shack, or blooming flowers in a dry gulch.

  They walked amid lace and silk and feathers, more like dolls than real women. They did not hang their heads either, but walked with a haughtiness that was undeniably intriguing. In the middle of them, the slim man led the red headed woman with the peacock feather parasol with the crook of his arm. She wore a pair of blackened glasses and stumbled slightly, betraying her own significant if slightly matronly beauty with a strange lack of grace…no. Not a lack of grace. The Rider watched the upwards tilt of her head which he had mistaken for haughtiness, and the overly trusting way in which she drew herself close to her thin escort. She was blind.

  The man at her side could hardly be called such, except that the gun he wore and the manner in which he had interposed himself between his mistress and the raging German said plainly that he would not suffer to be questioned on the matter. His garb was outrageously over-stylish. He contended with the women around him in the deportment of lace and silk. It poked out from his collar and sleeves. His pale face and expression were respectively smooth and womanly, and the trim, golden mustache over his noticeably red lips was ridiculous when taken into account with his tightly curled blonde hair, just visible beneath the tremendous brim of his rakishly tilted navy and white trimmed pancake hat. He wore leather trousers that accentuated his waifishness, and shining, high heeled boots with silver spurs that caught the light. The most euphemistic word The Rider could have mustered to describe the man would have been ‘dandy’— something he had heard in his western travels.

  He watched them pass as he might watch a colorful parade. They went off down the road past the No. 2, toward the buildings on the far outskirts of town.