Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Read online

  He was dressed in a short, embroidered jacket that did not suit him, and a pair of dusty leather chapaderos that did. His feet were sheathed in fine boots with ornate silver spurs in the shape of smiling sunbursts on the heels, and his ample waist was surrounded by a sharp red sash. The butt of a pistol peeked over the lip of the sash, and a basket hilt cavalry saber hung at his side from a baldric slung over his shoulder. The tarnished buckle bore the seal of Old Mexico.

  When he walked, the sunburst spurs laughed like girls.

  The two banditos behind him were nondescript gunman—cholos with murder on their minds. They looked anxious for their jefe to throw them the gringo, like dogs wishing for a scrap. They kept their rifles trained on The Rider’s heart.

  Scarchilli walked over the bodies of his men and paused to look down on them.

  He wrinkled his nose at the half-spilt bag of gold dust that lay beside Fiero. He spied the gold pocket watch and shook his head.

  “Greedy goddamn ladrones. You saved me the trouble of killing these two myself.”

  He stooped down to retrieve the watch.

  The Rider cleared his throat.

  “That’s mine. I won it honestly.”

  Scarchilli let the watch dangle idly from his hand and peered at the gringo. He raised his eyebrows. The Rider did not waver.

  Scarchilli walked up to The Rider and reached one hand out and took the lapel of his black coat between two fingers.

  Close up, Scarchilli watched the gringo’s blue tinted eyes for a hint of objection or threat. Had he seen it, he would have killed him before the look could have become an action. But the gringo just stared, and allowed Scarchilli to lift back his coat, revealing the many magic wards and talismans strung about his neck.

  Scarchilli frowned, and peered at The Rider.

  “Superstitious, aren’t you?”

  “I like to be prepared.”

  Scarchilli dropped the watch into The Rider’s inside coat pocket, then let go, resting his hand on the pommel of his sword.

  “Who are you, eh?”

  “The Rider.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “North.”

  “And what brings you here?”

  “The storm.”

  “That is what brought us here.” Scarchilli grinned, but it was not the oily grin of Fiero. It was more calculating, like the tight lipped smile of the rattler before it strikes. “But I saw no horse.”

  “I don’t have a horse,” The Rider said.

  Scarchilli chuckled.

  “A Rider who walks.”

  With a whirl that was slightly theatrical, Scarchilli turned his back on The Rider and took the few steps to the doors.

  He motioned for his men to lower their rifles, and then faced The Rider once again, his hands resting lightly on his waist and on the sword.

  “I am Hector Scarchilli,” he said with a note of haughty pride.

  The Rider put his gun away.

  “Scarchilli...is that a Mexican name?” He asked because the man was not like other Mexicans he had encountered.

  “My father was un Italiano,” Scarchilli said. He raised his prominent eyebrows. “And what are you, Rider? You don’t look like no gringo. Not really.”

  “I’m a Jew.” The Rider shrugged.

  Scarchilli laughed a lively, rapid laugh.

  The Rider waited.

  “Well, come with me. I got somebody you’ll want to meet.”

  Scarchilli pushed through the bat wing doors and left them banging in the howling wind. The two rifles receded. The Rider did not glance back to see if the boy still hid behind the bar. He followed Scarchilli outside onto the boardwalk.

  Four banditos lined the boardwalk besides Scarchilli and the two riflemen. They stirred as he came into their midst, like coyotes sensing a rabbit in their den. The fangs in their murderous hearts slavered, but when they saw their jefe slow and walk side by side with the gringo, they parted for them, watching him with eyes of quiet hunger. They knew he had killed two of their number, and though their master kept them in check, they would devour him at the first opportunity.

  The Rider did not bother to glance at them. He just walked along the dusty boards beside their chief, talismans clinking beneath his coat.

  “Where are all the people in this town?” The Rider asked yet again.

  “They are all at work,” Scarchilli said simply, and offered no more.

  Behind them, the banditos fell into a disorderly column like children itching to see a fight.

  The whole of the procession marched along the boardwalks towards the half-built manor house at the far end of the town, and though the bandit chief had attested to it, The Rider saw no shopkeepers peering from the windows of the stores they passed. No sounds came from Bailey’s Bath and Shave, and no miners stepped out of their way outside the assayer.

  It was as if the entire town had packed up and left the buildings in perfect condition.

  Only the dust, Scarchilli, and the Mexicans passed through the empty streets.

  The big house loomed closer, ominous. Its peaked roof was fairly a mountain among the plain, squat buildings of Polvo Arrido. Skeletal platforms and scaffolds clung to its sides. They swayed with the incessant gusts, and the planks groaned like the ghosts of the trees that had fallen to make them. It looked almost as though a great tall ship had run aground in the desert, its rigging tangled, its spars snapped, its crew long deserted to forage for food. They had died somewhere out in the trackless sands, their gasping throats filled with dust, their eyes stinging with granules of blowing grit and barren earth; or else, they were these Mexicans, and Scarchilli their laughing captain.

  The roof was unfinished, and the great canvas tarp that had covered the gap had blown free and now hung from the eaves, billowing like a torn sail, enhancing the illusion of a hapless shipwreck. The veranda, so out of place for this part of the country, was a deck. The Rider half-expected to see ship’s guns poking through the ornate banisters, stacks of cannon balls and barrels of powder waiting alongside.

  Scarchilli motioned for The Rider to follow and walked out into the street, towards the house. The Rider held onto his hat and followed, feeling the wind whip around him in the unprotected street. The Mexicans came behind him.

  Scarchilli did not flinch from the stinging sand, as though it were his element. It blew through his curly hair and scraped across his rough cheeks. It rippled his shirt and caused his chaps to flap like leather flags.

  They came into the yard through an iron gate, in a half erected fence. The tools of the workers—their wheelbarrows, lumber, sacks of nails—lay half covered in the dust. No one labored. No one scurried to rescue a favorite hammer from the sand.

  Scarchilli stepped onto the veranda and opened the double oak doors upon which there was an empty hole where a knocker would have gone.

  The Rider imagined an unveiling ceremony for a grand white house that would never be. He saw great silver scissors cutting a bright red ribbon, photographers doing their magic, people clapping as a brass band played.

  He stepped into the house, behind Scarchilli.

  “Be careful where you walk,” Scarchilli warned.

  The house was dim in the afternoon light that sifted through shuttered windows, so it took a few moments for The Rider’s eyes to adjust. He took off his blue spectacles and folded them in their case. The brightest light came from the great hole in the roof, through which blowing dust intruded continually, though not as harshly as it had outside.

  They were in what was to be a grand foyer, modeled in the tradition of the great southern plantation houses, with a long staircase, sweeping banister, and tile floors. The stair was there, but the banister was of rough, unfinished wood, as was the floor, which had probably been intended for shellacking and a high polish. The house would remain unpainted and bare. What had befallen the workers?

  The Rider’s attention was directed to a series of shapes traced in some kind of fine, dark powder upon
the whole expanse of floor. It was not a picture, he realized, so much as it was a pictogram. Four joined Archimedean spirals intersecting over an equilateral cross, the ends of which were capped with four sectioned kite and leaf shapes, the east-west arms ridden by a pair of saltire intersected with Greek crosses. Eight small circles were arranged along its length. At specific points, stubby candles stood awaiting the flame, lodged securely in bases of cold molten wax.

  “Do not step through it, señor,” Scarchilli warned. “Muy peligroso.”

  His own Merkabah training had acquainted him with the nature of mystic circles and the inherent dangers of crossing them. Yet these specific glyphs were entirely alien to him.

  He heard a creak from somewhere above him, and inclined his gaze up the staircase. He saw two pale, vaguely feminine forms move somewhere in the upper dark.

  Then something stirred in the dim light that made him jump inwardly.

  Something sat hunched on the floor near the edge of the pictogram. Some dark human form that now regarded him with black void eyes, in which the low afternoon light sparkled as it died.

  The figure rose from its haunches and set aside some shadowy implements that clattered lightly on the wood floor. It came quietly over, skirting the edge of the pictogram, until it emerged from the shadows into a shaft of dusty light cast down from the unfinished hole in the ceiling.

  Whoever the strange-looking man was, he seemed to have left his natural element as he entered the light. His skin was coal black. There was no blue sheen to it, as The Rider had seen some dark skinned men bear, nor was their any hint of brown. He seemed like a living shadow; his skin swallowed the light whole.

  He wore wire framed spectacles such, as The Rider himself favored, but his left eye was hidden behind a shroud of milky, whitish fog, while his other was masked by a black tinted lens. His head was bald beneath the brim of his tall stovepipe hat. The arms of the spectacles reached back and over two large apricot ears, which stuck out like open coach doors and drooped with their weight of two great gold hoops.

  His face was long, and sloped down into a pointed chin and curling lips lined with the stretching of old age. The Rider thought that he was smiling slightly—a toothless, prim-lipped grin, though it was hard to make out his expressions in the dimness.

  He was thin, and his long arms were bent like charred chicken wing bones, his oyster-like hands clasped before him as though in satisfaction. They poked out from the threadbare sleeves of a patched red flannel shirt. Dangling from around his thin neck were many bones and teeth, some flowers, and little plates of metal bearing half moons and symbols like the ones in the pictogram. A woven straw satchel hung over his shoulder. His pants were checkered and loose on his frail form, and his long feet were bare.

  He swiveled the hinged dark glass over his right eye open and regarded The Rider with one startlingly light, amber pupil. Then he closed the lens and mechanically raised the other, revealing a lighter, milky gray eye.

  The Rider stared at the strange eye. It seemed to possess two irises, which when focused upon, created a mesmerizing concentric effect, like gazing too long at a bullseye.

  “This is Kelly,” said Scarchilli. “We call him El Crepusculo. He is a brujo, señor, A ju-ju man. He can see both into the real world and into the world of the spirit. He can see people as they appear and as they really are. Mira—that is his spirit eye. Do you see it?”

  The Rider felt waves of drowsiness assailing him suddenly.

  He nodded dimly, as Scarchilli reached over and neatly took his gun from its holster. He did not protest or lift his hand. He was surprised to find that he didn’t want to. Somewhere, something in the back of his mind screamed for action.

  Kelly just stood there, staring at The Rider with that swirling, clouded gray-blue double eye, his crooked hand poised above the shutter of the glass lens.

  The Rider wavered where he stood, eyes unblinking. Something in that eye filled him with dread. He felt all that he was retreating slowly away from it, lolling sleepily in the back of his mind until his vision was like a bright window at the end of a long, dim hall.

  Scarchilli grinned beside him and admired the gold and silver chased Volcanic pistol with its intricate etchings and peculiar filigree. He tested the feel of it and watched the little jewels set into the handle catch the light before he stuck it through his sash.

  “And now tell us, señor,” Scarchilli said, drawing his saber in a rasp of steel on dry leather, “how you came to Polvo Arido.”

  The Rider’s eyelids drooped heavily, and he tottered on drunken legs. The voice seemed to come from the milky double eye and would suffer no lies. He was lost in a dreamy place between wakefulness and sleep, and he only wanted to please the voice so it would leave him be and let him rest.

  His lips were rubbery as a sot’s, and he formed an answer with difficulty, not knowing why or how he answered;

  “Walked.”

  Scarchilli sneered, and held the yard of sharpened steel up to his face, admiring his own reflection in the scratched mirror of the blade.

  “I’ve spitted more Christians on this sword than a Roman emperor, señor” and he glared at The Rider pointedly. “A Jew would not be too much trouble.”

  With that, he pressed the sharp tip of the saber to The Rider’s throat, and raised his lolling head up by his bearded chin. He stared with the reserved fury of the man used to red-handedness into The Rider’s eyes, which were fixed on the pale eye of Kelly, fluttering with an effort to keep from rolling in their sockets.

  “How did you get here through the storm, pendejo?” Scarchilli hissed.

  The Rider’s chin began to fall to his chest, and Scarchilli brought it sharply back up with the sword.

  “Walked,” he repeated.

  “He’s not lying,” said the black man in a musical, French accent. “He can’t.”

  The conjure-man peered at the white man through his spirit-eye. The mystic field of the strange, bearded blanc was stained with the manipulation of magical energy, like a baker dusted with flour. He cast no shadow upon the floor, which meant that like a man at midday, his soul had disappeared or was hidden. In both the penumbra and the real world, he stood unchanging. He was not a zhambi, for his ti bon ange spirit was intact. He was a walker between the worlds, his shoes muddy with either.

  Kelly Le Malfacteur had been a conjure-man of great renown among the slave huts of lower Arkansas when he had decided to leave his shoddy cabin and find his fortune as a traveling sorcerer. Powerful magic swam the hemic channels of his veins.

  His grandfather had been an outlaw bokor in the mountains around Port Au Prince in the early days of San Dominique, in the Black Republic—a favored horse of wicked Kalfou, the loa of the crossroads. His African born grandmother had married that knowledge to the ways of Hoodoo and taught them to her son. They had fled Haiti not long after the revolution, only to have their ship overtaken by slavers. Kelly’s father had been auctioned to a cotton planter. His grandmother had died on the passage to America.

  Kelly’s father had embraced the white man’s religion for the love of his goodly Christian wife, and disdained the application of magic for many years. There, Kelly had been born in a ramshackle slave cabin under the shadow of the metrize’s great house, the toil song of the field hand his baptismal canticle.

  His mother had been beautiful; dark as a creek bed with glorious, feral hair—her blood untainted by the touch of a white man. His father had been the same. When night fell they had become invisible in each other’s arms. As a boy he had thought it was a special kind of magic that bound them to the darkness and made it their constant protector. He had never been afraid of the dark. Not ever.

  Then came the day when the metrize’s foul attentions had turned toward Kelly’s mother, and the metrize’s wife had beat her ugly with a stick of firewood and sold her down the river. His last sight of his once lovely mother had been as she tried to wipe the bloody tears out of her blind, swollen eyes with broken fi
ngers, her bruised arms draped in clinking chains, struggling for one last look at her family as the trader’s wagon lurched off down the country road.

  Kelly’s father had turned angrily from the white God and looked once more to the old ways. Fingers dipped in black cock’s blood and weaving dark energies, father and son had together wandered down dark roads, calling in the witching hour upon the left handed forces to give their hatred black tentacles with which to wring the churlish metrize and his hated wife free of their baleful souls.

  He himself had laced their breakfast with the yellow poison his papa had taught him to draw from the cotton—that which the blancs called gossypol—creeping through the kitchen on bare feet, invisible to the fat house mammy who later had the audacity to wail and tear her apron when she found the metrize, his lady, and their two fat white weevils scattered and purple faced in the dining room, as if she had lost her own children.

  While theblanc's young and old lay dead, Kelly and his papa had drawn out their ti bon anges and sealed their vile souls in the cotton crop. The night their bodies were laid out and wept over by their neighbors and kin in the candlelit house, he and his papa had stood before the quiet field. He remembered how his papa had pointed to the pale bolls waving on their stems in the evening breeze and bid him light the brand for the love of his lost mother. They had set fire to the field, and Kelly had imagined (or had he?) he heard the metrize and his children screaming on the night wind as their souls were consumed. How he had loved his papa then; how he had loved the twisting flames in his dark eyes and the strong hand that gripped his shoulder as the fiery field blazed high and bright in the dark, a crop of vengeance sown with bitter seed and watered with white blood in the cursed, ashen soil of hell.

  They had set out to find his mother then, but the dogs had caught them in the swamp. The whites had boiled his papa alive in a great laundry kettle until the dark flesh slipped from his bones, while the Methodist preacher read words over his screams and the white children pelted him with horseshit. When they dumped out the big black iron pot the dogs fought for what was left, searing their long tongues in their eagerness.