CHAPTER 1 #5
The old man, meanwhile, had gone back to his table. He spun the gold piece on the gouged wood, and the dead-alive eyes followed it with empty fascination. He spun it a second time, a third, and his eyelids drooped. The fourth time, and his head settled to the wood before the coin stopped.
“There,” she said softly, furiously. “You’ve driven out my trade. Are you satisfied?”
“They’ll be back,” the gunslinger said.
“Not tonight they won’t.”
“Who is he?” He gestured at the weed-eater.
“Go fuck yourself. Sai.”
“I have to know,” the gunslinger said patiently. “He—”
“He talked to you funny,” she said. “Nort never talked like that in his life.”
“I’m looking for a man. You would know him.”
She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet gleam he had seen before.
The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to itself.
A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited.
She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth.
“I guess maybe you know my price,” she said. “I got an itch I used to be able to take care of, but now I can’t.”
He looked at her steadily. The scar would not show in the dark.
Her body was lean enough so the desert and grit and grind hadn’t been able to sag everything.
And she’d once been pretty, maybe even beautiful.
Not that it mattered. It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb.
It had all been written. Somewhere some hand had put it all down in ka’s book.
Her hands came up to her face and there was still some juice left in her—enough to weep.
“Don’t look! You don’t have to look at me so mean!”
“I’m sorry,” the gunslinger said. “I didn’t mean to be mean.”
“None of you mean it!” she cried at him.
“Close the place up and put out the lights.”
She wept, hands at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not because of the scar but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not her maidenhead. The pin that held the strap of her dress glittered in the greasy light.
“Will he steal anything? I’ll put him out if he will.”
“No,” she whispered. “Nort don’t steal.”
“Then put out the lights.”
She would not remove her hands until she was behind him and she doused the lamps one by one, turning down the wicks and breathing the flames into extinction. Then she took his hand in the dark and it was warm. She led him upstairs. There was no light to hide their act.
VI
He made cigarettes in the dark, then lit them and passed one to her. The room held her scent, fresh lilac, pathetic. The smell of the desert had overlaid it. He realized he was afraid of the desert ahead.
“His name is Nort,” she said. No harshness had been worn out of her voice. “Just Nort. He died.”
The gunslinger waited.
“He was touched by God.”
The gunslinger said, “I have never seen Him.”
“He was here ever since I can remember—Nort, I mean, not God.” She laughed jaggedly into the dark.
“He had a honeywagon for a while. Started to drink. Started to smell the grass. Then to smoke it. The kids started to follow him around and sic their dogs onto him. He wore old green pants that stank. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“He started to chew it. At the last he just sat in there and didn’t eat anything. He might have been a king, in his mind. The children might have been his jesters, and the dogs his princes.”
“Yes.”
“He died right in front of this place,” she said.
“Came clumping down the boardwalk—his boots wouldn’t wear out, they were engineer boots he found in the old train-yard—with the children and dogs behind him.
He looked like wire clothes hangers all wrapped and twirled together.
You could see all the lights of hell in his eyes, but he was grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their sharproots and pumpkins, come Reap.
You could smell the dirt and the rot and the weed.
It was running down from the corners of his mouth like green blood.
I think he meant to come in and listen to Sheb play the piano.
And right in front, he stopped and cocked his head.
I could see him, and I thought he heard a coach, although there was none due.
Then he puked, and it was black and full of blood.
It went right through that grin like sewer water through a grate.
The stink was enough to make you want to run mad.
He raised up his arms and just threw over.
That was all. He died in his own vomit with that grin on his face. ”
“A nice story.”
“Oh yes, thankee-sai. This be a nice place.”
She was trembling beside him. Outside, the wind kept up its steady whine, and somewhere far away a door was banging, like a sound heard in a dream.
Mice ran in the walls. The gunslinger thought in the back of his mind that it was probably the only place in town prosperous enough to support mice.
He put a hand on her belly and she started violently, then relaxed.
“The man in black,” he said.
“You have to have it, don’t you? You couldn’t just throw me a fuck and go to sleep.”
“I have to have it.”
“All right. I’ll tell you.” She grasped his hand in both of hers and told him.
VII
He came in the late afternoon of the day Nort died, and the wind was whooping it up, pulling away the loose topsoil, sending sheets of grit and uprooted stalks of corn windmilling past. Jubal Kennerly had padlocked the livery, and the few other merchants had shuttered their windows and laid boards across the shutters.
The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.
The gunslinger’s quarry came in a rickety rig with a rippling tarp tied across its bed.
There was a big howdy-do of a grin on his face.
They watched him come, and old man Kennerly, lying by the window with a bottle in one hand and the loose, hot flesh of his second-eldest daughter’s left breast in the other, resolved not to be there if he should knock.
But the man in black went by without slowing the bay that pulled his rig, and the spinning wheels spumed up dust that the wind clutched eagerly.
He might have been a priest or a monk; he wore a black robe that had been floured with dust, and a loose hood covered his head and obscured his features, but not that horrid happy grin.
The robe rippled and flapped. From beneath the garment’s hem there peeped heavy buckled boots with square toes.
He pulled up in front of Sheb’s and tethered the horse, which lowered its head and grunted at the ground. Around the back of the rig he untied one flap, found a weathered saddlebag, threw it over his shoulder, and went in through the batwings.
Alice watched him curiously, but no one else noticed his arrival.
The regulars were drunk as lords. Sheb was playing Methodist hymns ragtime, and the grizzled layabouts who had come in early to avoid the storm and to attend Nort’s wake had sung themselves hoarse.
Sheb, drunk nearly to the point of senselessness, intoxicated and horny with his own continued existence, played with hectic, shuttlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.
Voices screeched and hollered, never overcoming the wind but sometimes seeming to challenge it.
In the corner, Zachary had thrown Amy Feldon’s skirts over her head and was painting Reap-charms on her knees.
A few other women circulated. A fever seemed to be on all of them.
The dull stormglow that filtered through the batwings seemed to mock them, however.
Nort had been laid out on two tables in the center of the room. His engineer boots made a mystical V. His mouth hung open in a slack grin, although someone had closed his eyes and put slugs on them. His hands had been folded on his chest with a sprig of devil-grass in them. He smelled like poison.
The man in black pushed back his hood and came to the bar. Alice watched him, feeling trepidation mixed with the familiar want that hid within her. There was no religious symbol on him, although that meant nothing by itself.
“Whiskey,” he said. His voice was soft and pleasant. “I want the good stuff, honey.”
She reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of Star.
She could have palmed off the local popskull on him as her best, but did not.
She poured, and the man in black watched her.
His eyes were large, luminous. The shadows were too thick to determine their color exactly.
Her need intensified. The hollering and whooping went on behind, unabated.
Sheb, the worthless gelding, was playing about the Christian Soldiers and somebody had persuaded Aunt Mill to sing.
Her voice, warped and distorted, cut through the babble like a dull ax through a calf’s brain.
“Hey, Allie!”
She went to serve, resentful of the stranger’s silence, resentful of his no-color eyes and her own restless groin.
She was afraid of her needs. They were capricious and beyond her control.
They might be the signal of change, which would in turn signal the beginning of her old age—a condition which in Tull was usually as short and bitter as a winter sunset.
She drew beer until the keg was empty, then broached another.
She knew better than to ask Sheb; he would come willingly enough, like the dog he was, and would either chop off his own fingers or spume beer all over everything.
The stranger’s eyes were on her as she went about it; she could feel them.
“It’s busy,” he said when she returned. He had not touched his drink, merely rolled it between his palms to warm it.
“Wake,” she said.
“I noticed the departed.”
“They’re bums,” she said with sudden hatred. “All bums.”