CHAPTER 1 #4
The gunslinger led his mule past them and looked into the dim depths of the barn. One lamp glowed sunkenly. A shadow jumped and flickered as a gangling old man in bib overalls forked loose timothy hay into the hayloft with big, grunting swipes of his fork.
“Hey!” the gunslinger called.
The fork faltered and the hostler looked around with yellow-tinged eyes. “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 or two. Maybe longer.”
“I ain’t got no change for gold.”
“Didn’t ask for any.”
“Shoot-up money,” the hostler muttered.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.” The hostler caught the mule’s bridle and led him inside.
“Rub him down!” the gunslinger called. “I expect to smell it on him when I come back, hear me well!”
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.
“Long days and pleasant nights,” the gunslinger offered conversationally.
No answer.
“You fellas live in town?”
No answer, unless the scorpion’s tail gave one: it seemed to nod.
One of the boys removed a crazily tilted twist of corn-shuck 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 cafe 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 both the same size, and full of an innocence that wouldn’t last long in this shithole. 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. “Yar.” The eyes of his mates had turned ugly and hostile. He would probably pay for having spoken up in kindness.
The gunslinger touched the brim of his hat. “I’m grateful. It’s good to know someone in this town is bright enough to talk.”
He walked past, mounted the boardwalk, and started down toward Sheb’s, hearing the clear, contemptuous voice of one of the others, hardly more than a childish treble: “Weed-eater! How long you been screwin’ your sister, Charlie? Weed-eater!” Then the sound of a blow and a cry.
There were three flaring kerosene lamps in front of Sheb’s, one to each side and one nailed above the drunk-hung batwing doors.
The chorus of “Hey Jude” had petered out, and the piano was plinking some other old ballad.
Voices murmured like broken threads. The gunslinger paused outside for a moment, looking in.
Sawdust floor, spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables.
A plank bar on sawhorses. A gummy mirror behind it, reflecting the piano player, who wore an inevitable piano-stool slouch.
The front of the piano had been removed so you could watch the wooden keys whonk up and down as the contraption was played.
The bartender was a straw-haired woman wearing a dirty blue dress.
One strap was held with a safety pin. There were perhaps six townies in the back of the room, juicing and playing Watch Me apathetically.
Another half-dozen were grouped loosely about the piano.
Four or five at the bar. And an old man with wild gray hair collapsed at a table by the doors. The gunslinger went in.
Heads swiveled to look at him and his guns. There was a moment of near silence, except for the oblivious piano player, who continued to tinkle. Then the woman mopped at the bar, and things shifted back.
“Watch me,” one of the players in the corner said and matched three hearts with four spades, emptying his hand. The one with the hearts swore, pushed over his stake, and the next hand was dealt.
The gunslinger approached the woman at the bar. “You got meat?” he asked.
“Sure.” She looked him in the eye, and she might have been pretty when she started out, but the world had moved on since then.
Now her face was lumpy and there a livid scar went corkscrewing across her forehead.
She had powdered it heavily, and the powder called attention to what it had been meant to camouflage.
“Clean beef. Threaded stock. It’s dear, though. ”
Threaded stock, my ass, the gunslinger thought. What you got in your cooler came from something with three eyes, six legs, or both—that’s my guess, lady-sai.
“I want three burgers and a beer, would it please ya.”
Again that subtle shift in tone. Three hamburgers. Mouths watered and tongues licked at saliva with slow lust. Three hamburgers. Had anyone here ever seen anyone eat three hamburgers at a go?
“That would go you five bocks. Do you ken bocks?”
“Dollars?”
She nodded, so she was probably saying bucks. That was his guess, anyway.
“That with the beer?” he asked, smiling a little. “Or is the beer extra?”
She didn’t return the smile. “I’ll throw in the suds. Once I see the color of your money, that is.”
The gunslinger put a gold piece on the bar, and every eye followed it.
There was a smoldering charcoal cooker behind the bar and to the left of the mirror.
The woman disappeared into a small room behind it and returned with meat on a paper.
She scrimped out three patties and put them on the grill.
The smell that arose was maddening. The gunslinger stood with stolid indifference, only peripherally aware of the faltering piano, the slowing of the card game, the sidelong glances of the barflies.
The man was halfway up behind him when the gunslinger saw him in the mirror. The man was almost completely bald, and his hand was wrapped around the haft of a gigantic hunting knife that was looped onto his belt like a holster.
“Go sit down,” the gunslinger said. “Do yourself a favor, cully.”
The man stopped. His upper lip lifted unconsciously, like a dog’s, and there was a moment of silence. Then he went back to his table, and the atmosphere shifted back again.
Beer came in a cracked glass schooner. “I ain’t got change for gold,” the woman said truculently.
“Don’t expect any.”
She nodded angrily, as if this show of wealth, even at her benefit, incensed her. But she took his gold, and a moment later the hamburgers came on a cloudy plate, still red around the edges.
“Do you have salt?”
She gave it to him in a little crock she took from underneath the bar, white lumps he’d have to crumble with his fingers. “Bread?”
“No bread.” He knew she was lying, but he also knew why and didn’t push it.
The bald man was staring at him with cyanosed eyes, his hands clenching and unclenching on the splintered and gouged surface of his table.
His nostrils flared with pulsating regularity, scooping up the smell of the meat. That, at least, was free.
The gunslinger began to eat steadily, not seeming to taste, merely chopping the meat apart and forking it into his mouth, trying not to think of what the cow this had come from must have looked like.
Threaded stock, she had said. Yes, quite likely!
And pigs would dance the commala in the light of the Peddler’s Moon.
He was almost through, ready to call for another beer and roll a smoke, when the hand fell on his shoulder.
He suddenly became aware that the room had once more gone silent, and he tasted tension in the air.
He turned around and stared into the face of the man who had been asleep by the door when he entered.
It was a terrible face. The odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma.
The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.
The woman behind the bar made a small moaning sound.
The cracked lips writhed, lifted, revealing the green, mossy teeth, and the gunslinger thought: He’s not even smoking it anymore. He’s chewing it. He’s really chewing it.
And on the heels of that: He’s a dead man. He should have been dead a year ago.
And on the heels of that: The man in black did this.
They stared at each other, the gunslinger and the man who had gone around the rim of madness.
He spoke, and the gunslinger, dumbfounded, heard himself addressed in the High Speech of Gilead.
“The gold for a favor, gunslinger-sai. Just one? For a pretty.”
The High Speech. For a moment his mind refused to track it. It had been years—God!—centuries, millenniums; there was no more High Speech; he was the last, the last gunslinger. The others were all . . .
Numbed, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a gold piece. The split, scabbed, gangrenous hand reached for it, fondled it, held it up to reflect the greasy glare of the kerosene lamps. It threw off its proud civilized glow; golden, reddish, bloody.
“Ahhhhhh . . .” An inarticulate sound of pleasure. The old man did a weaving turn and began moving back to his table, holding the coin at eye level, turning it, flashing it.
The room was emptying rapidly, the batwings shuttling madly back and forth. The piano player closed the lid of his instrument with a bang and exited after the others in long, comic-opera strides.
“Sheb!” the woman screamed after him, her voice an odd mixture of fear and shrewishness, “Sheb, you come back here! Goddammit!” Was that a name the gunslinger had heard before? He thought yes, but there was no time to reflect upon it now, or to cast his mind back.