A PAUNCH FULL OF PESOS

by Norman Crane

About the Author, i.e. me

I live in Canada. I write books. I’m also a historian, a wise guy and a cinephile. When I’m not writing, I’m probably reading or trying to cook. Philip Dick, Haruki Murakami and Graham Greene are some of my favourite authors. I enjoy fiction that makes me curious because curiosity makes me creative. I peer under mossy rocks, knock on hollow trees and believe in hidden passageways—not because I have proof of their existence, but because imagining them is itself the reward. I like non-fiction for the same reason. I also like computers, text editors and mechanical keyboards.

For more info and links to my writing, please visit my website: normancrane.ca

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Dead Pedro

The first bullet drilled a hole clean through the bandito’s sombrero, through which the rays of the hot noonday sun fell like whips on the glistening muzzle of Fenimore’s rifle, peeking out from between two dusty rocks a good hundred paces away. The bandito didn’t move. He’d already drawn his revolver. He merely cocked his head, and the sun’s rays slid from the muzzle to a thick bead of sweat gathering on Fenimore’s brow. Fenimore didn’t say a word. He just chomped down on his cigar, moved the muzzle slightly to the left, squinted—and made sure the second bullet didn’t miss.

It hit straight into the bandito’s forehead like an Ash Wednesday cross.

The rays disappeared.

The bandito crumpled to the ground.

Fenimore slung his rifle over his shoulder, took one last drag of his cigar and tossed it aside. It hit the ground no less dead than the bandito.

Fenimore rose from his crouch, watched—no dust rose on the horizon—and listened. There was no beating of hooves. Nobody else was coming. They’d underestimated him. He grinned and looked forward to wearing clothes again. Save for the timepiece on his wrist he was naked, and the relentless sun had burned his skin brown.

He lowered himself down the side of the outcropping from which he’d shot, and circled to where he’d hidden his tired, thirsty burro. There’d be water in the bandito’s pack, he thought, untying the burro and patting its warm chest. He still hadn’t decided what he’d do with the bandito’s horse. Take it with him and sell it, probably.

The bandito’s corpse lay on its back, its eyes half open and still fully plastered over by the sheen of surprise. Bright blood trickled from the hole in its head.

Fenimore recognised the dirty face underneath: Pedro—a hired gun who rode with Ulrich’s gang, but not one of the dangerous ones. Pedro, as far as Fenimore remembered, had been a brave bad shot. Good qualities for a foot soldier, but bad ones for staying alive. Not that it mattered anymore. What mattered was that Ulrich had underestimated him. As for Pedro, he wouldn’t ever shoot a gun again. It was good to be underestimated. It was bad to be dead.

Fenimore pulled off Pedro’s boots, followed by his wide leather gun belt, cotton pants, worn shirt and navy-white poncho.

The dirty body underneath was flabby and hairy, and for a few seconds the sight of it made Fenimore wonder whether any woman loved it, whether the small time Mexican gunslinger had had a small Mexican wife who’d given birth to thin, barefoot Mexican children. But then the stink of death hit so hard that Fenimore ripped his eyes away. Each man chooses his own path. In doing so, each also chooses the way—if not the exact circumstance—of his death.

The bright blood flowing from the hole in Pedro’s head had turned still and dark.

Fenimore put on the dead man’s boots and clothes, tied the dead man’s horse to his own burro, and took a long drink from the dead man’s canteen. When his lips were wet and throat no longer dry, he let the burro drink the water, too. Its ears shot up at the first refreshing taste. The horse turned its emaciated snout to beg for a sip, but Fenimore didn’t let the horse drink. If it died, so be it. He wouldn’t get much for it anyway. He then tied Pedro’s gun belt around himself, inserted Pedro’s revolver into the holster and mounted his burro.

He looked ridiculous on the little animal, but he felt good.

The burro began its lumbering walk.

Pedro’s horse followed.

Eight hooves made eight dull sounds on the tough ground and as he rode Fenimore felt a few coins rattling around in his new pants pocket. They made a rhythmic jingle-jangle that somehow matched the monotony of the landscape around him. Jingle-jangle. The sun moved. Jingle-jangle. The shadows lengthened. Jingle-jangle and jingle-jangle and nothing except the passing emptiness…

When he finally stopped for the night, Fenimore took the coins out of his pocket and held them, one-by-one, between his thumb and forefinger against the darkening sky. He observed each in turn. The coins were seven. Six were old and grimy, probably whore money or poker winnings, but the seventh was clean and beautiful: freshly minted, and even more freshly stolen.

Seven coins for seven faces.

Six grimy ones for the six men who’d taken from him—Constanza, The Slovak, Butcher Bellicose, Tartaro, The Little Pimp, and Ulrich—and the seventh for the woman he’d loved, who’d sold him for a future full of dollars, and who now went unnamed, even in his head.

When he was done brooding, Fenimore stacked all seven coins in the palm of his hand and squeezed them into a fist as hard as he could. He would crush them. One-by-one, he would hunt them down and kill them.

He wanted to toss the coins into the air and massacre them with Pedro’s revolver.

But he was getting ahead of himself.

He was letting his emotions take control of his mind.

He focussed his thoughts, relaxed his fist, uncurled his long fingers and dropped the coins back into his pocket. There would be a time and place for revenge. Paths would cross, even on a continent as great and untamed as this one, but that would be many days and many adventures from now. Tonight, he needed rest. Tomorrow, he would formulate a plan. In the coolness of the present evening, although he finally felt safe enough to close his eyes, he was also broke and hungry.

As he lay himself down to sleep, Fenimore felt weaker and more alone than he’d ever felt. Even during the survival days he’d not felt this way. He’d had company. Tonight was also the fourth consecutive night that he was spending alone, and he wasn’t used to it. A man gets used to the female shape. Sleeping without a woman’s body—without his woman’s body—next to him was as strange as riding without a horse. He had nowhere to put his arms and no one with whom to share his warmth. He was swimming without water. He was a fire without heat. He was the empty landscape and the day’s heavy, closing eyelids. They had taken everything from him, but it was she who had taken his soul, leaving him as bare and exposed as he’d left Pedro, with just the one-hole sombrero on his head and all of America chomping at the bit to swallow him up.

He imagined a pair of vultures pecking away at Pedro’s body, pulling at long, elastic bits of flesh.

He remembered Master Taki once telling him, “Everything breaks. Give something enough time, and it cracks.” Then Master Taki had—click—opened the safe. “Everything breaks.”

Even trust.

Even love.

A shot rang out.

A bullet bit the rocky ground a few paces from his body and ricocheted away.

Fenimore scrambled behind Pedro’s gaunt horse.

The horse took the next bullet to its chest, its knees buckled, and down it went. Fenimore went down with it: unslinging his rifle and using the struggling horse’s overturned body for cover. Better the horse than the burro, he thought. Thinking kept him calm. He scanned the dark horizon with the muzzle of his rifle for shapes, for movement.

There was nothing.

There was another shot.

This one whizzed by just above Fenimore’s head.

Instinct made him duck.

The horse was still breathing: wheezing.

At least he knew the direction the shots were coming from. It wasn’t the direction from which he’d come. Unless someone was intentionally playing at disorientation, the shooter wasn’t someone who’d been in pursuit.

Fenimore unloaded a blind rifle shot into the darkness to keep the shooter on his toes.

It was returned immediately along with the words, “You goddamn bastard cocksucker!”

The burro started braying.

The words continued, punctuated by bullets. “I seen you in your blue poncho. I seen you through the sky glass, cocksucker. Goddammit. Goddamn, thief fuck.”

Blue poncho? Fenimore peaked out, saw a lone figure on horseback in the distance—closing in on him—and hugged the ground again. He gripped his rifle.

“The man you’re looking for is dead,” he said toward the murky sky. “I took his clothes.”

He was thinking: estimating the horse’s speed, trying to calculate the best moment to stand up, aim and shoot the rider down.

“I bet you killed him, you lying fuck.”

“I’ll kill you, too.”

To keep the rider talking, that was the most important thing. To judge the distance by his approaching voice.

“And if you did kill him, which I ain’t saying I believe in, what so? Does killin’ my enemy make you my friend?”

A gunshot clipped the sentence.

The voice didn’t seem any louder than the last time.

Fenimore peeked over the horse again.

The rider had stopped closing, but he was still too far and the evening was too deep.

“It makes nothing. Keep the peace and move on,” Fenimore said. If the rider had stopped, perhaps he could be persuaded to turn around.

“Well goddamn, but I don’t believe it.”

“Then believe there are more rifles on you.” It was worth a try. “Come closer and you’ll be face-down dead.”

The rider laughed. He had a hee-hawing, old man’s laugh. “I do believe you are alone, cocksucker thief fuck. My sky glass told me so, and I do believe what my sky glass tells me.”

The horse expired.

“The way I see it, the only cover you got is that ugly horse of yours, and I got enough bullets on my person and the person of my pretty horse to keep your noggin’ right down till ten mornings from now, which, goddamit, means I got enough bullets to rip through that wall of meat you think you can hide behind, bone by brittle bone. Else I’ll just watch the sun dry you up.”

“Everything breaks,” Master Taki had said.

Even me.

Fenimore considered leaping to his feet, locking his knees, taking the best possible early shot, and suffering the consequences—probably more than once, and probably to the head and to the chest and to the gut.

It was a brave idea, going out in a hail of bullets, but a dumb one. Pedro had been dumbly brave. Fenimore wasn’t Pedro. That was precisely the problem.

“Ask me a question,” he yelled.

“You don’t interest me in any way except dead.”

“Have you ever killed an innocent man?”

“Ain’t worried about that.”

Fenimore wiggled out of Pedro’s navy-white poncho and draped it over the end of his rifle, which he lifted above the horse, waving it like a flag.

Three shots rang out. Straight through the poncho they flew, and far, far away.

Then nothing.

Then, “Where’d you get that?” the rider asked.

“I don’t interest you.”

“That’s right, cocksucker, but I am interested in whoever you stole that gadget from. And dead men don’t talk, even nonsense. Speak the fuck up, now.”

Fenimore realized the rider was talking about his timepiece. He lowered his arm, the rifle and the shot up poncho. The timepiece had been his father’s. A prototype, there wasn’t another like it in the world, and none at all on this side of the ocean. In Europe, they had them for women, or so Fenimore had been told once, a long and hazy time ago.

“Toss it over, along with yer rifle and that revolver you got on yer belt, and maybe I’ll let you live a few hours.”

The rider truly had been watching him. It wasn’t a bluff. But at least this was a chance. If the rider wanted just the timepiece he could as easily get it off Fenimore’s dead wrist as his live one. And if getting rid of the timepiece—he pressed stinging sweat out of his eyes—meant saving his life, that was a gift that his father would have gladly given, had already given him once.

He slid the timepiece off his wrist and let it fall into his hand. Its face was silver, circular and covered by a thin layer of glass. The glass was dirty, and the sky reflected in it was distorted. When Fenimore adjusted the angle, his reflection, too, became a distortion.

“Don’t try nuthin’ funny.”

Fenimore tore a square of material from the shirt he was wearing, wrapped it around the timepiece and tied a tight knot. He unloaded Pedro’s revolver and his rifle, and lobbed both over the dead horse, in the direction of the rider. Finally, he palmed the makeshift cloth sack and lobbed it over, too. What he would have given for just one grenade…

When he heard the rider’s horse come within stomping distance, Fenimore stood. There was no more point in hiding. Either the rider had been bluffing or not, and if there was a point to a bluff Fenimore couldn’t figure it out. There was certainly a value to the timepiece. Thievery was reasonable.

Fenimore’s burro had stopped braying.

The rider, who was indeed an old man, had dismounted his horse, which wasn’t actually very pretty at all, and was unwrapping the cloth sack with the nimble fingers and excited expression of a boy touching his first pair of breasts. When he saw the timepiece, his eyes lit up and spittle nearly dropped from between his lips.

He looked up at Fenimore.

And hooted!

“Well damn myself to fuck sideways cunt face, you ain’t the thief bastard, truly. Hoo hoo hoo!” But when Fenimore lifted a boot off the ground to take another step forward, the rider raised his bony arm just as fast to point the barrel of a strange looking gun in Fenimore’s face. “You sure got the burnt skin, though. How long you been out in the elements? You one of them crazies from Gulliver’s Participle?”

The rider’s eyes darted back and forth from the timepiece to Fenimore to the timepiece to Fenimore to—

Fenimore ducked, leapt and grabbed the rider’s gun.

It went off.

With a deafening blast.

And a cloud of choking black smoke.

But when the cloud cleared and both men regained their breathing, it was Fenimore who was holding the right end of the gun and the rider who was staring into its barrel.

“Hoo hoo hoo! Well I be goddamned. Not one of them crazies, neither. I got to admit my mistake. I do believe I am interested in you.” Without waiting for a response, he disregarded the gun pointing at his gut and went back to inspecting the timepiece, which he still held, carefully, in his left hand. “What do you say we trade your story for my soup?”

Fenimore didn’t answer. He stepped to the side to collect the rifle and the revolver he’d thrown over. “The man whose poncho I was wearing, why’d you want to kill him?”

“Wasn’t innocent,” the rider mumbled while wiping the timepiece with the outside of his shirt sleeve. When he was done, he looked up. “This”—He held up the timepiece like women sometimes hold up their favourite babies.—“is remarkable workmanship. What so of the soup, do you say? Fuck.”

Fenimore’s trigger finger twitched.

“Apologies,” the rider said. “Goddamit!” He stomped his feet. “It’s only a tiny problem with the communication, cocksucker, that’s all, ain’t nothing to give you the fears.” He was apparently referring to his predisposition to cursing.

He wrapped the timepiece and slid it into his pocket, then extended his other hand to Fenimore.

They were two strangers standing in the middle of a vast nowhere, surrounded by darkness, who between them had at least three guns, one experimental timepiece, a burro, and two ugly horses, one of which was dead. The one positive aspect of the situation—at least for Fenimore—was that the rider wasn’t one of Ulrich’s.

“What’s your name?” the rider asked.

“Fenimore.”

When Fenimore didn’t offer his hand, the rider smiled and let his own drop with understanding to his side. “They call me The Starman.”

Fenimore pointed with the gun to The Starman’s horse, which had found a rare desert plant and was chewing on it. “Tie him to my burro and get on. And hand me my timepiece.”

The Starman shrugged his shoulders. Without losing his smile, he did as he’d been told.

Fenimore slung his rifle over his shoulder and slid Pedro’s revolver back into the holster. He’d started the day naked, holding a single rifle and being pursued by a hired killer. As night fell and the stars spread themselves across the inky sky above, he held a strange gun, still had the rifle, had added a revolver, a full set of functional, albeit smelly, clothes and was now in possession of a sort-of prisoner of his own.

“You know, Fenimore,” The Starman said after he’d connected the horse to the burro with a series of unusual knots, “if you pull that trigger, cocksucker, gun won’t fire worth salt. You better switch up yer weapons.”

Fenimore jerked the gun well clear of The Starman and fired: a thin, quiet wisp of smoke.

“That, too. Hoo hoo hoo.” He reached over and pushed a mechanical piece on the side of the gun barrel. “Now you got the fuck back to long distance firin’ mode.”

Fenimore squinted an eye, aimed at the moon—

And the recoil smashed so hard into his unsuspecting shoulder that he nearly yelped. The bullet shot out fast and true, and maybe all the way to the lunar surface.

“Hoo hoo hoo! Try again now. Point her at me.”

The Starman grabbed the gun and put it flush against his chest. Through the gun, Fenimore felt how wiry the old man was. He didn’t want to pull the trigger.

“I pointed her at you. Now you point her at me. Send me to the heavens and hells, bells, fucker.”

The trigger gave just as easy, but the gun didn’t fire, not even a pathetic wisp.

The Starman smiled, mumbled something about soup, and leapt onto the back of his horse. “Ain’t she a beaut,” he said after he’d gotten settled, pulling in a loud lungful of air. “That cocksucker of a starry sky, I mean. Did you know some of them stars is dead. Still shinin’ brighter than you or me, but deader than the thief fuck you say you killed, which I do believe to be the case indeed.” He seemed to have captured the stars’ sparkle in his eyes, which were at once crazed and brilliant. “But tell me, Fenimore, you bitch’s son, are you really gonna ride that ass?”

The Starman and the burro both looked at Fenimore.

He answered by getting on the latter and prodding The Starman’s horse to start moving. “Lead the way, Starman.”

“I get it, I get it. I stay in front so that you can murder me in the back with yer rifle if I try somethin’.” He pulled out the timepiece, which Fenimore had forgotten was still in the Starman’s pocket, and started rubbing it again.

And as they strolled along—The Starman on his high horse, cursing softly under his breath to nobody in particular, and Fenimore behind, riding on a burro so squat that his legs were almost dragging along the ground—Fenimore closed his eyes and finally fell hard and fast asleep.

Chapter 2. The Starman

What woke him was the smell of coffee.

He was in a small room on a bed. In the room, beside the bed, was a window. Outside the window the world was dark. Fenimore’s rifle was in his arms but the belt and holster hung on a roughly made wooden chair next to the bed. Use had rubbed the varnish off the chair’s seat. Through his sunburned nose, Fenimore smelled the aroma of food: not good food, but edible. With the smell of food came heat, and then a door opened into a rectangle of light, a figure stood in the door, and The Starman walked in holding a dinged up metal cup. He took a seat in the chair, sliding down until he was almost lying in it, and handed the cup to Fenimore.

“Don’t you be worried,” he said. “I made sure you kept yer rifle on me at all times so I wouldn’t get away.”

The coffee tasted bitter but good.

“How long,” Fenimore gasped between hot gulps, “was I asleep?”

The Starman shrugged. “Three hours, I reckon.”

“And my burro?”

“The ass snores outside. Shouldn’t ever wake up, the beast was so tired.”

Fenimore finished the rest of the coffee, swallowing the grinds as greedily as he had the liquid, and handed the cup back to The Starman.

“Soup’s on the fire.”

“Why do they call you The Starman?”

“Who calls me that?”

“You said—”

“I know what I says, but there ain’t hardly a point in asking why if you don’t know who.”

“All right. Who calls you The Starman?”

The Starman looked into the cup. “I see yer so hungry I can’t even read your fortune from the blacks.”

“You’re a fortune teller.” Fenimore’s lips curled into a snarl. If his voice was a thing, it would have been sandpaper.

“Hoo hoo hoo! An astereologist, me? It’s not far down the road from truth, but never! I don’t give them horroscopic arts the time of night they deserve. And I mean when I get ‘em. I wouldn’t ever give ‘em. Bunch of cocksucker hogwash fuck if you ask me.”

The fire crackled from the other room.

“But you were asking,” The Starman said, more serious, “about who calls me by my name. The answer is the folks over in Hope Springs.”

Fenimore realised the man wanted to talk. Based on his rough manners and growing list of eccentricities, he wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. Based on the taste of his coffee, he didn’t have a woman in the house.

A woman.

The thought stabbed Fenimore in the temples until he sucked in air through his clenched teeth. The pain reminded him of the one whose name he refused to remember. The seventh, cleanest, coin weighed heavily in his pocket. “Why do ‘the folks over in Hope Springs’ call you The Starman?”

“It’s because of my sky glass. I’m an astereonomer, which is what the Latins called themselves when they looked through their tubes at the stars. Of course”—The Starman bit his lower lip. Fenimore couldn’t decide whether he was seeing genuine insanity or merely a very convincing act.—“my sky glass has other uses too. Like seeing men in blue ponchos ride their burros onto my property of land, goddamit.”

Fenimore had forgotten about Pedro, about killing him. He shuddered. He was still wearing the smell of the dead man on his clothes.

“The man in the blue poncho, what did he do to you?”

The Starman’s fingers tightened around the ear of the metal cup until both the fingers and the cup started to shake. “Oh, I seen him riding with the Rhodes boys. Don’t like me them Rhodes boys, cocksuckers. Especially that old Iron Rhodes…”

For a second, The Starman was violence itself.

Then he smiled real wide and tall, revealing both rows of missing teeth, and Fenimore knew why The Starman liked soup so much.

“And that gun of yours?”

The Starman rose from the chair. “Tit for tat, tit for tat, goddamn. I told you about my name, now I want to hear about that timepiece of yers.” He pointed with his crooked nose through the doorway. “We’ll eat my legume soup and you’ll tell me a story about it, and then I’ll tell you the story of my gun.”

Fenimore must not have looked convinced because The Starman added, “And an end to all these killin’ looks. I had my chance to make you dead, and I didn’t do it. You had yer chance, too, and you didn’t do it neither. So now the killin’ chances are passed and we is friends and guests and I will be treating you to feastin’ real well. Hoo hoo hoo!”

A gun went off.

Fenimore slid off the bed, landed with a thud on the floor, and was massaging the trigger of his rifle.

“Take as them my apologies,” the Starman said. He hadn’t even budged. “But I guess I got to remember to be more careful when I do my hootin’!”

Again Fenimore was treated to the sight of The Starman’s wet gums.

They lead him off the floor and into the living room, which was significantly larger than the bedroom, had all of its windows boarded up, a large fireplace in the corner, and two long handmade tables, the surfaces of which were covered with springs, gears, cogs and other mechanical doodads. In the corner opposite the fireplace stood about two dozen tall rolls of paper.

“Maps, land and sky,” The Starman said while swiping clean an area on one of the tables. Next he retrieved a sooty pot from the fire and placed it, steaming, on the place he’d cleared. He also retrieved two stone bowls from a cupboard, motioned for Fenimore to sit on a rickety bench, and poured both bowls full of thick, green sludge. There was ample soup for seconds but Fenimore’s hunger, rabid as it was, allowed him to wait for a spoon.

It never came.

“Dig in, guest, cocksucker!” The Starman roared, taking a seat on the bench on the other side of the table, and dipped his fingers into the sludge. He lifted it greedily to his mouth, closed his eyes, licked, lapped and swallowed. The swallowing made his Adam’s Apple extrude to an unnaturally hideous degree.

Fenimore dipped two fingers into his own bowl of sludge, lifted them slowly, and tasted.

The sludge was vile.

But it was food, and so he ate it.

“The timepiece,” The Starman mumbled between handfuls of soup. “Tell me its story.”

“Where is it?” Fenimore asked. The soup was starting to burn both his tongue and the underside of his mouth. “And what’s in this soup?”

The Starman stopped eating and answered with pride while licking drops off his upper lip. “Legumes, mostly. Chicken cocksucker legumes and frog goddamit legumes. Sometimes I get me a pig if I barter, so I mixtures them in too. And bones of general kind. Don’t usually use any beaks though. Don’t like the taste. And of course then I pestle it up and disinfecate it with water and moonshine so that it’s healthy in the medical way.”

Fenimore almost choked.

“As for yer timepiece,” The Starman was saying, “it’s on that table there right behind you.”

Fenimore looked. The timepiece was on the table; but, more properly, all the parts of the timepiece were on the table without themselves comprising a timepiece.

“Now don’t get yer blood veins all burst, I didn’t break it. I took it apart.”

Everything breaks.

“And everything that I take apart I can put back the way it was. I’m just good that way. Born nature, as folks say. Always have been and, goddamn, always will be. Excuse me.” He passed several toots of gas. “It’s all in the old noggin’ up here.” Tap-tap-tap he went against his head. “This timepieces of yers though, ain’t never seen a thing like it. Precise cocksucker, real good, real interesting. Lots of tiny little springs, real delicate. If you ask me, anything worth beans be made from lots of springs.”

“My father built it,” Fenimore said.

“He dead?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess them’s the words to the end of the story.”

“The end of the story.”

All the soup was gone from The Starman’s bowl. Fenimore still had half of his left. “Listen to this here offer I’m giving,” the Starman said. “I know a man won’t sell no heirloom built by his father, now dead, God rest his, cocksucker, soul—pardon me—but if I would pay with bread, board and company just for some time to investigate the heirloom, without ownership passing…”

Fenimore angled his brows. He felt the need for a cigar he could chomp down on. “You’re going to let me stay here and eat your food if I let you fiddle with my timepiece?”

“Yes.”

“And what am I going to do here?”

“Rest?” The Starman suggested with a salesman’s smile.

“Tell me about that gun.”

“A trade?”

“Tell me its story.”

The Starman wiped his mouth and rubbed his hands together, before setting the palms flat on the table. He had bulbous knuckles.

“Well, see, that gun she’s a little spring filled contraception of my own making, if I do say so myself. And I do say so.” He almost hooted. “Goddamn, if she ain’t a funny one too. Most of my contraceptions don’t quite function the way I design them, but this here gun, you see, once upon a time, when I still had me a wife before that bastard Iron Rhodes notarised them yellow belly papers—”

“Give me the short story.”

“Apologies. It’s just I ain’t had a soul to talk with for a long time.”

“Real short.”

“Real short says she’s yer rifle, yer shotgun, and yer dynamite all in one pretty little metal package, controlled by springs of course. Flip her switch to change her from long distance to short distance to real short, real cocksucker-go-boom distance. If you wanna lock her up, for safekeepin’ say, you hoot: three times.” He hoo hoo hoo’d very quietly. “Another three such same hoots wakes her up. Or, if she be in cocksucker-go-boom range, you hoot and she gets gone along with whatever mishappens to be within her boom range.”

“What range is that?”

“I guess a circumcision of a fair sized twenty five foot, or a radius of half of that in metres, dependin’ on your brand of mathematics. Metres is what they use in France.”

A man could go far with a gun like that, Fenimore mused. “And this town you mentioned, Hope Spring.”

“Springs.”

“Yeah.”

“Yep.”

“Is it far from here?”

“Thirty minutes ridin’, maybe more if you go by ass.”

Now Fenimore’s bowl was empty, too. Despite himself he reached for another helping. The moonshine in the soup was getting to him, mixing with the tiredness that still hadn’t gone. Sometimes a man is nothing but a slave to his own rumbling stomach. “Could a man find work in this town?”

The Starman stared at him.

“Work—for money,” Fenimore repeated.

The Starman made fists of his hands, which were still resting on the tabletop. “Only thing a man will find in Hope Springs these days is a feud. She used to be a fine little town in the Rodriguez days, but she ain’t one no more. I suggest if it’s honest work a man is after, he turn his self east and ride on to Gulliver’s Participle.”

Nobody had asked about honest work, and Fenimore knew from experience that feuds could be lucrative. They provided business opportunities of a particular kind for men of a particular disposition who possessed the right, very particular, set of skills.

“How far is Gulliver’s Participle?”

“Five days ridin’.”

“And what kind of work is a man likely to find there?”

“Ditch diggin’,” said The Starman. “In Gulliver’s Participle they like their ditches. Goddamn, they like ‘em cocksucker long and gravely deep.” The soup was starting to get to him, too. “You ever dug a long, gravely ditch?”

“If I ride out to Gulliver’s Participle to dig ditches I’ll take my timepiece with me.”

“I reckon.”

Fenimore glanced at the fire and the The Starman got up and poured them each a second cup of coffee.

After he sat back down, he took a sip and said, “I find yer timepiece interesting and there’s value to me in takin’ it apart and fiddlin’ with its springs, yet still I recommend a man take his horse—or ass, as the beast may be—and go ridin’ on his way to Gulliver’s Participle to earn his money diggin’ ditches. A man might consider that what you call advice.”

“I like to see a place before I pass judgment.”

“Sounds mightily fair coming out the face of a man who, goddamn, killed another and took his horse, his gun and his clothes.”

“I like to see a man before passing judgment on him, too. But then I pass it.”

“Why’d you pass judgment on the man in the blue poncho?”

“I liked what he was wearing.”

Fenimore had no intention of talking about the past and The Starman understood and didn’t press. It was the quiet understanding of a man whose own past was too painful to talk about, even with a brain drenched by moonshine soup. They finished their coffee in silence.

“How long until the sun comes up?” Fenimore asked.

“Four hours will see you the morning light.”

Fenimore stood up from the table, nodded in recognition of the meal and the company, and took steps toward the bedroom. Balance was trickier to keep than he’d remembered. His legs wobbled.

“Wake me up in four hours,” he said.

“And then?”

“And then I take your gun, your horse and I ride to pass judgment on Hope Springs.”

The Starman shook his head. “It ain’t a good idea, I tell ya. It’s a damn bad idea. Bastard bad, goddamit…”

“And you keep fiddling with my timepiece until I come back.”

“…ain’t such a bad idea. Not at all. I heard worse. “And,” he said, making big saucer eyes, “if you don’t come back none at all?”

“You keep the timepiece.”

“Full ownership property passes and them trader’s marks too?”

“That’s right.”

The Starman wasn’t satisfied. “One more condition.”

Fenimore growled.

“If you do come back, and I ain’t sayin’ I believe in it, but if such does come to pass, I also want the story of the timepiece.”

“It’s already been told.”

“You told the end of the story, not the beginning nor the central parts, and an ending ain’t a whole story, otherwise we’d all just be telling each other endings.” He squinted into the fire. “You ever hear of a child lay eyes on an ending book?”

“Who are you, Starman?”

The only answer was the crackle of the fire.

Chapter 3. Lola

The Starman was a man of his word. At dawn, as the morning light peeked above the horizon and into the bedroom window, he shook Fenimore awake.

Fenimore grumbled before opening his eyes, then forced his aching body to sit.

His head was numb but the thoughts inside it were clear. The night had been filled with nightmares and the clanging of hammers. The Starman handed him a cigar. “For yer ride,” he said. “I also filled yer canteen and cleaned and loaded yer guns. The rifle I kept, ‘cause a man’s got a right to defend himself and his own, but the revolver and my hootin’ gun is yers. The horse is ready outside. She’s groggy from yesterday’s legumes but it’s a short ride and she’ll make it.”

Fenimore put the cigar between his lips, got to his feet and stretched out his arms. The first thing he’d do in town was get a room and take a long, hot bath. Afterward, he’d wash his clothes and come up with a plan.

The Starman handed Fenimore his poncho. “I patched up the holes I blasted.”

The holes had indeed been patched. The entire inner surface of the poncho had also been covered by a layer of chainmail. The resulting poncho-armour was heavy, but not unbearably so.

“I want more than an ending,” The Starman said in response to Fenimore’s look of surprise.

The word “thanks” didn’t quite make it out of Fenimore’s throat, but he thought it, bless his soul, and at least to himself that was some kind of moral progress.

“It ain’t none of my business, of course, what a strangerman does in a feudin’ town, but if that man was me I’d bed down in the Olympus Hotel in the morning and stay in my room like a bastard till the noon redeemin’ was over, after which I might make my discreetin’ way to the tavern and listen to the drunks before ending my night with a fuck at the Rodriguez Widow’s place. But be careful what you say, ‘cause them whores there got razors and no compunctions about cuttin’ yer face with ‘em.”

“Don’t break the timepiece.”

With that, Fenimore slid the poncho over his head and put on his belt. He took out the revolver and checked the cylinder. Six bullets, and it did look clean. It spun even cleaner. He replaced the revolver into the holster and stepped into the living room. The Starman followed him.

In the living room, the shutters in all the windows had been opened and everything was awash with pale light. The fire was dead.

The Starman rushed ahead and pushed open the door.

Fenimore shaded his eyes.

Outside, The Starman’s horse stood already saddled and with the hootin’ gun hanging from a special leather holster tied around its shoulders. Although the horse didn’t look any prettier today—its eyes were hung over and its colour was still a dull, cloudy grey—at least it was mobile. Every once in a while, it lurched forward and burped.

Fenimore hopped into the saddle.

He considered it a success that the horse didn’t fall over.

The Starman stuck a tin filled with brewed coffee in front of the horse’s snout and petted the animal’s neck with genuine affection. “She sure likes her coffee in the mornin’,” he said.

As the horse drank, Fenimore took in his surroundings. The emptiness looked different in the morning than it had at night. Less foreboding, vaster. A soft fog also hung in the air and the horizon, instead of being the sharp gash from which the bad men threatened to come into the world to make pain on you and your loved ones, looked as fuzzy as the Gates of Heaven through which God Himself would emerge on Judgment Day to bless some and strike down others for the pain they’d inflicted upon their own kin and kind.

Fenimore’s hand drifted naturally to rest on the grip of his holstered revolver.

“Return, goddamnit,” was all The Starman said, before slapping the horse on the hindquarters, sending both it and Fenimore barreling towards the east, toward Hope Springs, and straight into the pale flaming orb of the rising sun…

The barreling didn’t last. Within minutes it became a jog, and then a definite stroll as the horse lost its breath and regained its appreciation of yesterday’s moonshine. It wobbled. It swayed. Somewhere between The Starman’s cabin and Hope Springs, it stopped and threw up, then refused to budge its hooves until Fenimore dismounted and walked alongside it. This seemed to make it happy, and definitely made Fenimore regret not taking his burro instead. Burros didn’t believe in equality.

The fog thickened.

Soon, they came upon a wooden sign:

“Welcome to Hope Springs,” it said in badly painted gold letters on a faded purple background. Below, “where even strangers is eternal,” had been carved into the wood and more recently painted over with white.

Beyond the sign, the silhouettes of the town’s outermost buildings faded greyly in and out of view like a drowned rat bobbing up and down in a pail of milk.

Fenimore pulled the horse by the reins and they continued onward until the buildings sharpened into focus, followed by the blurred parts of others: acutely-angled corners, worn edges and desolate porches. They weren’t particularly exciting buildings, but they weren’t rundown, either. They were ordinary. A farmhouse, a wagon repair shop, a distillery, a grave-maker’s workshop. Fenimore had expected worse. There was still money to be had here.

As the ground became a hard packed dirt street, the horse’s hooves beat louder and echoed. There was hardly another sound to drown them out. The fog was silent, the street empty, and only an occasional, dull, knock from within the grave-maker’s workshop interrupted the slurred clickety-clack of a man strolling alongside his ugly, drunken horse.

But Fenimore’s eyes were slits, and he was keenly sensitive to the flash of sudden movements. He held the reins in his left hand while keeping his right just above his revolver.

His revolver. It was the first time he’d thought that way. He’d given Pedro his due and the vultures were surely done with him by now, having picked him white and clean—a swarm of them taking flight after being frightened away by a stray gunshot, exposing a skeleton wearing a sombrero, which itself would eventually be taken by vultures of a more human kind. Nature isn’t wasteful. Dead men aren’t, by nature, possessive.

The gaps between buildings closed. Their closing pushed the fog above the town into a thick cloud that dulled the sunlight.

Although no people walked the streets, faces began appearing behind unclean window panes, taking stock of the stranger appearing in their midst. Women’s faces, children’s faces. Scared, scarred faces. Faces from a feuding town.

Fenimore came to a statue.

The horse and its clickety-clack stopped.

The road was bisected by another running left—where the buildings were squat and architecture more Mexican—and right—where a single man dressed in a navy suit was crossing from a barbershop to a notary’s office. Fenimore imagined this was the centre of Hope Springs. It was the kind of place where children gather after Sunday mass to torture scorpions with the converging power of magnifying glasses.

Beyond the statute, a two story hotel beckoned:

“The Olympus.”

The statue was of a man so tall that his head was barely visible on this side of the fog cloud and Fenimore had to look up to see the place where his massive legs joined together to form a marble crotch. He could have been Zeus. Except that his arms, whose hands both held revolvers, had been ripped off and laid in a cross at his feet, where a small, oxidised bronze plaque described him as:

Rafael Rodriguez

Founder of this here town.

May he live.

Between the statue and hotel stood a raised platform maybe ten metres by ten metres wide.

The man in the navy suit slammed shut the door to the notary’s office.

The horse upchucked on Rafael Rodriguez’ boots.

Fenimore pulled it by the reins, crossed the empty town square toward the hotel, tied the horse to a horse-tying log, grabbed the hootin’ gun from its special holster, and walked inside.

The lobby smelled of leather and polished steel. It was filled with ornate antique furniture and floating particles of dust but otherwise as deserted as the street. Still, a few voices floated in from behind closed doors and a hotel-keeper was leaning his elbows against a polished counter, flipping through the pages of a book. He paid no mind, but when Fenimore was a few steps from the counter, “Morning, there. Rooms available. Creative forms of payment accepted,” he said without taking his eyes off his reading.

“I need a room for tonight. I’ll have money tomorrow.”

“That’s not creative. That’s freeloading.”

“I’ll pay twice your regular rate.”

“That’s freeloading thinking you can take advantage of my greed.”

“I give you my word.”

“Got lots of those right here. Don’t need more.”

Fenimore growled and put the hootin’ gun on the counter. “There’s my promise, to go along with my word.”

The hotel-keeper slid his gaze from the book to the gun, and squinted. The gun piqued his interested. “Haven’t seen one like that before. It German?” Fenimore piqued his interest, too. “Haven’t seen one like you before, either. But you don’t look German at all.”

“The gun’s yours if I don’t pay by sundown tomorrow. And there’s a horse outside. Not a pretty horse, but it walks well enough when it’s sober. If I don’t pay, the horse is yours, too.”

Neither the horse nor the gun were Fenimore’s to bargain with, but on the other side of both was the timepiece, and that was Fenimore’s to bargain with, and he wanted the timepiece back, so he didn’t consider it wrong to let the hotel-keeper close his fingers on the hootin’ gun and hide it under his desk.

“Tomorrow by sundown,” he said.

A slight black-haired boy bolted down the hall, stopped in the lobby long enough to stare at Fenimore’s face, and scurried outside. Definitely one of the town’s scorpion tormentors, Fenimore thought.

“Don’t mind him,” the hotel-keeper said. He’d gone back to reading his book. “He’s everywhere.”

“The horse is tied up outside,” Fenimore said.

“Don’t care about the horse.”

Fenimore drummed his fingers on the hotel-keeper’s desk, right above the hotel-keeper’s book. “I care about a room. You going to give me a key?”

“Don’t suppose you care one way or the other where I put you…”

“As long as it has a tub and the possibility of it being filled with hot water, I suppose I don’t.”

The hotel-keeper reached below his desk, pulled out a key with “13E” etched onto it, and slid it toward Fenimore’s impatient hand. “Second floor, good view of the square.”

The key looked banged up. “And suppose I’m superstitious?”

“Then I can’t put you in any room above the first floor, and the first floor’s all booked.”

Fenimore wasn’t superstitious, but there was something about the hotel-keeper’s disinterested manner that made Fenimore want to spit stomach acid in his face. “Suppose you put me in the room next to 13E.”

“Would that be 13D,” the hotel-keeper said, looking up from his reading with a smirk, “or 13F?”

Fenimore dropped his hand from the table.

The hotel-keeper did the same.

With their hands hovering, hidden, above their respective firearms, they met eyes like men are sometimes wont to do: in silent, masculine and primitive battle—waged between male creatures since before the time men were turtles. To look away was to lose. To win meant to fill one’s eyes with more cold potential for bloody and merciless violence than one’s opponent.

Fenimore narrowed his eyes and snarled, and the hotel-keeper looked away first.

Both men raised their hands back to the desktop. The battle was over. The two turtles had established their hierarchy. Civility could ensue. The hotel-keeper flipped to page one hundred twenty three of his book. “Every time someone gets killed in one of my rooms,” he said, “I change the room number to thirteen. Such is the Ironlaw. Isn’t a room above the first floor that’s not thirteen.”

“Strange law,” Fenimore said. “Dangerous hotel.”

“Dangerous times.”

Fenimore swiped the key from the desk and put it in his pants pocket. It clanked against his seven coins. “Have somebody bring me up enough hot water to fill that tub.”

He climbed the lobby stairs and walked the second floor hall until he found 13E, into whose lock he inserted the banged up key after making sure he was the only one around. When he turned the key, the lock clicked like a successfully cracked safe, and Fenimore walked carefully inside. He kept the door open, however, until he was sure the room was empty. After he closed it, he slid off his poncho and tossed it onto the bed.

The mattress was hard.

Thick curtains were drawn across the window. Fenimore parted them to let in a hazy volume of morning light. The hotel-keeper had been right, the room did have a good view: of the back of Rafael Rodriguez’ ample thighs and his big ass and all the square around both, which was as empty and forlorn as when Fenimore had left it. Immediately below the window the Starman’s horse swayed on its four unsteady legs, having drank all the water in the trough in front of it.

Fenimore pulled off his boots, took off his shirt and stepped out of his pants. The boots he left where they stood, but he tossed the shirt and pants next to the poncho.

Being nude in the shady comfort of a hotel room was much different than spending four long days naked under the burning desert sun while being pursued by a deadly gang of double crossers. Only one of those nudities was pleasant. Fenimore tramped to the room’s small bathroom and, for the first time in weeks, looked at himself in the mirror.

The face that stared back wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t the face he remembered. It was a dark face, ragged, with an unkempt beard and vengeance weather-beaten into its taut cheeks. It wasn’t the face his mother had loved—a son’s smiling innocence—but a man’s face, motherless and not to be trusted.

Fenimore spat into the sink and turned toward the tub, which was made of metal, and heavy. He grabbed an edge, sighed, and dragged the tub out of the bathroom, into the main room, where he positioned it next to the uncovered window. The only thing better than a long overdue bath, he told himself, was a long overdue bath with a view.

When he’d finished the dragging, he was so out of breath he realized that tiredness was taking its cumulative toll not only on his face but on his entire body. Still, the thought that tonight he would finally sleep long and well kept him sufficiently awake. Tomorrow he would make money, and making money was the first step of his plan. That his plan so far consisted of only that first step and a vague coda—the destruction of each of his six grimy coins—didn’t bother him. Patience was a virtue. Neither did it bother him that he didn’t yet know what he would eventually do with the seventh, pristine, coin.

Someone knocked on the hotel room door.

A woman’s voice said, “Hot water.”

Fenimore grabbed his revolver out of the holster lying on the bed, crept toward the door, waited a full minute with his back to the wall, then, setting his bare foot in the door’s path as a precaution, slowly turned the knob and pulled just far enough to create a crack through which to stick the revolver barrel and one of his bloodshot eyes. He saw the lovely back of the figure of a black-haired girl surrounded by several steaming metal pails. “Leave them,” he said.

For a second the girl was stunned—she froze. Then she turned to face the door. Fenimore had withdrawn the revolver from the crack but his eye remained.

He blinked.

The girl brought her smooth face so close to the crack that only the wooden thickness of the door separated her eye from Fenimore’s.

He licked his parched lips and swallowed the puddle of saliva that had gathered in his mouth. She batted the thick eyelashes of her brown eyes and smelled like honey and spiced Caribbean rum. It had been too long since Fenimore had smelled a woman.

“I was told to bring hot water and fill your tub,” she said.

“I can fill my tub myself.”

“I can fill it for you better than you can fill it yourself. I can fill it without wasting a single drop. I can fill it without any of it dripping on the floor.”

Fenimore felt his revolver harden.

There’d be time for women, he told himself. Maybe even tonight. Certainly tomorrow. The Starman had recommended a whorehouse. There was no point risking anything now, when his wits weren’t as sharp as they should be.

The girl pushed the door. He felt it stop against his ready foot.

“What’s the matter, you shy?”

Fenimore concentrated on keeping his foot planted. “Leave the water,” he said. It was a sentence that took more effort to say this time than it had the last. He imagined it would take even more effort if he were to say it a third time, and with each saying his engorged revolver would hate him just a little more.

“Don’t be that way, mister. I’ve been told to bring the water and fill the tub, and I sure do hate to disappoint. I always do as I’m told. Always. Truly, nothing makes me happier than to obey…”

A gruff voice said: “The girl’s got a point.”

It was a man’s voice. But, more importantly for Fenimore, it was a man’s voice behind him.

Fenimore sp—

“Drop the gun, then turn around. Nothing funny.”

Fenimore heard the click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back. “Drop it and kick it over with your heel,” the gruff voice said. The pressure against Fenimore’s foot grew by an extra pair of hands, magnified by two more hammer clicks from behind the door. Fenimore dropped his revolver and back-heeled it.

When the sound of the revolver sliding over the floor ended, he turned slowly around.

The man standing in front of him was short, squat and Mexican. He wore a large black sombrero that matched his immaculately waxed and curled moustache. In his right hand, he held a comically large pistol. In the background, a strong breeze ruffled the window’s heavy curtains and the top rung of a ladder was visible just above the bottom part of the window frame.

Behind Fenimore, the door to the hotel room opened and several figures poured inside.

The mustachioed Mexican looked at Fenimore’s face, then at Fenimore’s erection, then said, “Looks like you’re all cocked and loaded, stranger.”

Laughter erupted, which Fenimore didn’t share, followed by a rifle being dug painfully into the small of his back.

“Lola,” the moustachioed Mexican said, “be a good girl and show this gringo what he’ll be missing.”

The beautiful black-haired girl circled Fenimore, twirled a few times in her thin Spanish dress, which flared at the bottom edge, and assumed her position at the left side of the moustachioed Mexican. He wrapped his arm possessively around her waist.

“What do you want?” Fenimore asked.

“No entiendo, stranger. You ride into our town, take up in our hotel, and you ask us what we want. It seems to me that your gringo brain has it all mixed up. The question, stranger, is what do you want?”

Fenimore’s erection drooped, but he refused to let that, or the fact he was naked, lessen his glower. “I’m passing through.”

“He’s just passing through, Ezekiel,” Lola said. “We shouldn’t make trouble for passersby. They pass, and then they go on their way, isn’t that right?”

Ezekiel scratched at his smooth chin with his big pistol. He was pretending to be deep in thought. Lola kept her big brown eyes on him, pretending to be riveted. Fenimore hoped the pistol would go off blowing a hole through his jaw. The two other men who’d entered the room with Lola—goons, no doubt—chuckled at both performances like obedient henchmen.

“I don’t know,” Ezekiel said, before turning his attention and gun dramatically toward Fenimore. “Will you pass, and go on your way, stranger?”

“I will.”

“And passersby don’t cause trouble, else they wouldn’t be passersby any longer, but troublemakers.” Lola said.

“And you’re not a troublemaker, are you, stranger?” Ezekiel asked.

Fenimore said he wasn’t.

Ezekiel took off his sombrero and held it against his chest. He had a full head of almost artificially lustrous black hair. “Do you, stranger, swear to be a passerby and blablabla not cause any trouble in this here town of Hope Springs, and be gone and on your way by tomorrow’s sundown?”

“I swear,” Fenimore said, “on the memory of Rafael Rodriguez.”

Ezekiel shoved the sombrero back on his head and spat.

The goons spat, too.

“Gringo’s got a sense of humour.”

“Don’t got no gun, though.”

“And he won’t have his gun,” Ezekiel said. He brought his pistol to Fenimore’s face and started rubbing it against Fenimore’s beard. “Anyone swears not to make trouble doesn’t need a gun to not make trouble with, isn’t that right, Lola?”

“That’s right.”

If Fenimore wanted to grumble, he didn’t let his lips or vocal chords show it. He did still want that long hot bath and the water in the pails was cooling, and as much as he hated having ridden into town with two guns and being left, temporarily, with none, it wasn’t an insurmountable hatred.

“And when I leave town—before tomorrow’s sundown—where do I pick up my revolver?”

Ezekiel removed his pistol from Fenimore’s face, spun it twice, and shoved it expertly into his holster. “When you’re ready to leave, you come calling on la casa Picasso.” He extended his left arm and pointed. The arm was too long for his body, like a guerilla’s. “Walk that way. You’ll come to a big white house with red shingles on the roof. Hop up the front stairs, knock, and then get on your knees like a good gringo and say you’re the stranger passerby got his gun taken away by Ezekiel Picasso.”

“Entiendo?” Lola said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s good to come to common understandings,” Ezekiel said. He took a few steps toward the window and kicked the rungs of the ladder that were sticking above the bottom part of the window frame. The ladder crashed to the street below.

The henchmen chuckled.

Lola lifted her arms so that Ezekiel could put his arm around her waist again, and the four of them left the room.

“Also,” Ezekiel yelled from down the hall, “I slit your horse’s throat.”

They all laughed.

The laughter faded away.

Only the pails of water remained in the hall. They were still steaming as Fenimore carried them into the room one by one. Although he had felt no sentiment towards The Starman’s horse, something about the throat cutting riled him, and he had no need to look out the window to see if it was true. He’d been told enough by the timbre of Ezekiel’s laugh. Boys who roasted scorpions grew up to be men who slit the throats of horses. The reasoning behind both was the same: because they could.

Once all the pails were inside, Fenimore closed and locked the door and poured the hot water into the tub. Once the tub was full, he got in. He enjoyed the relaxing change of temperature, and reclined until his back rested against the curve of the tub. He then lowered himself until only his head and the tops of his knees were above the surface of the water. Then he submerged those, too.

Underwater, the world was silent and slower.

When he came back up for air, his skin felt cleaner and he combed his hair back from his face with his hands. He washed his beard, his eyes, and the desert sand from between his toes. He scrubbed the remnants of the last few weeks from his body and watched them settle on the bottom of the tub like coffee grinds.

Through the window he saw three men drag The Starman’s dead horse’s body across the square. After they’d pulled it off the main street, they maneuvered it up a ramp onto a wagon, and the wagon master whipped his two living horses and the wagon pulled away. “Fresh Meat” was scrawled onto its side.

The slight black-haired boy whom Fenimore had seen in the hotel lobby ran across the square, between Rafael Rodriguez’s legs. He looked up at Fenimore’s hotel room window, smiled, and ran off. Even still he gave the impression of being in perpetual motion. The whole world was in perpetual motion. The water in the tub was comforting. Fenimore drifted between thoughts, fantasies and sleep, and as the water cooled, the sun rose from morning to midday, burning away the fog and bringing Hope Springs into ever sharper focus.

By ten o’clock, people started to gather in the square.

By eleven, the water in the tub was so cold that Fenimore started shivering. He stepped out, dried himself with a cloth and threw his clothes into the water to finally rinse and squeeze the dead Pedro out of them.

By noon, the laundry was done and drying, and the square teemed with bodies. Fenimore took the cigar that The Starman had given him, lit it with an old match and leaned against the wall next to the window, smoking and watching. He needed to find work. Down there was the person who’d give it to him. The trick was to find that person.

At least judging by the activity in the square, most of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs were women and children. Regular inhabitants were of little interest. They lived their lives honestly, with their heads hung down, and their joy held close to their chests. They barely had enough money for themselves, so could offer little to anyone else. Whatever happened, they just went on with it. There was a sad purpose to their movements: buying food, selling wares, hoping their latest disease wouldn’t be their last. But that this was so in Hope Springs didn’t strike Fenimore as strange. It was so in every town he’d ever visited.

The lack of men was, on its own, also not unusual. Men often worked during the day. This wasn’t unique to Hope Springs. What was unusual was that the men who did appear, weaving between the women and children like slavers, held their chins high and their hands close to their revolvers and were distinguishable into two groups. The men belonging to the first had darker skin and wore more colourful clothing than those in the second. The men in the second were pale-skinned by comparison, often lighter-haired, and dressed in identical long grey coats. That one group suspected the other was as apparent as the disdain with which both treated everyone else.

Fenimore took a long puff of his cigar. He had no doubt that Ezekiel Picasso fit squatly into the first group, which meant he more easily pictured himself doing work for the second.

He held the cigar out the window and let a few centimetres of ash fall below, where the street was stained with horse blood. The Starman’s suggestion of honest work in Gulliver’s Participle flickered briefly through Fenimore’s mind, but he’d never been good at digging ditches. Even when Ulrich had made him dig his own grave, he’d been so piss poor at it that Butcher Bellicose got impatient and grabbed a second shovel to dig it with him. All while she watched them dig—watched him dig. If only he’d found himself a woman who lived with her head down. If only he’d…

His daydreams were interrupted by a commotion and the stomping of hooves.

Three grey-coated riders rode into the square.

Fenimore reached instinctively for a revolver that wasn’t in his holster.

The people in the square parted to make way for the riders, whose horses reared and stopped in unison. On the back of one of them sat a man with bound hands whose skin was covered by so much black soot that he looked like a shadow. The grey-coated riders dismounted and pulled the shadow to the ground behind them. He landed with a groan that could have come from the square itself.

They marched him onto the ten metre by ten metre raised platform.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the riders said, “it is time for the redemption.”

The crowd cheered.

The shadow crawled forward.

“This man,” the rider continued, “was caught last week stealing mining rations. Caught, I remind you, stealing them from you, from your husbands and your sons. This man”—The shadow got momentarily to his knees, then dropped back to his chest, still crawling.—“considered his luxury to be more important than your needs. Because of his thievery, others went hungry. Because of his selfishness, others risked injury and death.”

The crowd hissed—

With the exception of one plain woman, who rushed forward, clambered onto the platform and fell upon the shadow, hugging him with as much love and affection as she could muster, sobbing, “Joseph, my beautiful, beautiful Joseph…”

The crowd drowned out her sobs with curses and spit.

“He has a name,” the rider said, “but does that make him innocent?”

“No!” the crowd erupted.

“You know the law. This man has already been judged guilty. The punishment for theft is amputation of all four limbs.”

“Cut ‘em off!” someone yelled from the anonymity of the crowd.

“And his pecker too!”

Fenimore let another column of cigar ash tumble to the ground below. He watched with special interest the reactions of the few dark skinned, colourfully-clothed men who were watching the spectacle unfold from beyond the mass of the crowd. There were three of them, and all three were disinterested and neutral.

The rider was saying, “But mercy can still be showed this man, because mercy is good and the law, being better than any man, is merciful.”

The slight dark-haired boy was there, too.

“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”

All eyes converged on the woman who was sobbing into the shadow’s sooty chest. When she returned their gaze, half of her face was shadow, too. “He’s my husband,” she cried “I will take his punishment.”

Fenimore pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall. Once, someone had taken a punishment in his name, too. The circumstances were different, but the sacrifice had been the same. His jaws tightened. He felt as powerless now as he’d felt that day.

“Very well. The woman has made her choice. She has chosen to pay with her own pain for mercy to be showed to this man, Joseph, her husband.”

The crowd whistled and hissed.

“Do we accept her choice?”

The crowd clamoured.

“Do we accept her pain?”

“Strip ‘er down!”

Two of the riders grabbed the woman by the arms and lifted her to her feet. The shadow clutched at her legs. “Don’t,” he was repeating, “Don’t, don’t…”

One of the two riders kicked him in the face.

He crumpled.

The rider who’d been orating strode toward the woman—the crowd tightened around them—retrieved a dagger from somewhere inside his coat, and sliced open the woman’s clothes: the top of her dress, exposing her sagging breasts, followed by the bottom, exposing her trembling legs, crotch and belly.

“Kill me,” the shadow wheezed.

Although the woman wasn’t ugly, there was nothing sexual about her to Fenimore. The riders and her own brave desperation had stripped her of that along with her clothes, which lay like detritus about her feet. To see her as an object of arousal felt to Fenimore a betrayal of his own history. Her nudity was tremendously moving, but except for her shaking and her sobs the woman didn’t move, nailed to the spot by her love of the body of the shadow beside her. As tears streamed down her cheeks, one clean, one sooty, not once did she look weak—not when the first belts were unbuckled, not when the first lashes arched her tender back, and not even when the full fury of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs, Rhodes, women and children, fell upon her with the full goodness and approval of the law.

Fenimore backed away from the window and shut it. He drew closed the curtains. His hand was slightly unsteady, but he convinced himself that it was due to a lack of sleep.

His urge to fuck, which had been so strong in the morning with Lola, was gone, and somewhere along the way he had also lost his intention of visiting the whorehouse. At least for today.

The redeemed woman screamed.

Fenimore finished smoking his cigar and threw the stub into the tub. Although he’d satisfied his need for a bath and even washed his clothes, he didn’t feel cleansed. So much for hot water. Perhaps only boiling water would reach those places that still felt soiled.

He sat on the bed and let his fingers feel the chainmail that The Starman had sewn to the underside of his poncho. Ring by ring his fingers travelled, like on a rosary. But if The Starman thought this would ever stop a bullet, Fenimore wondered how the hootin’ gun managed to function. The chainmail wouldn’t even stop a stiff stab. The tip of any decent dagger would slip between the rings and penetrate the wearer’s flesh. If it penetrated in the right place, it would leave him bleeding out to die. The only type of attack the chainmail would be effective against would be a slice, and the days of sword fights were over.

Yet the poncho had value, even in its weakness. An illusion could buy a lapse in judgment, which could lead to a moment of indecision. And for a man who knows another’s weakness, a moment could be plenty.

By late afternoon, the redemption was over and the crowd in the square had cleared. Fenimore didn’t know what became of the woman or her beloved shadow.

In evening, the square was empty save for a few stray dogs and men—ones in colourful clothes or long grey coats, with heads held high and hands always hovering just above their guns. A feuding town was apparently no place for the arthritic.

As evening became night, shots rang out occasionally, sometimes further and sometimes closer to the hotel, but Fenimore didn’t pay much attention to them. His mind wasn’t presently interested in bullets. Behind drawn curtains, to the leisurely hiss of a lantern, he was manufacturing an idea.

Chapter 4. The Sack-Headed Man

Fenimore lay in bed until three hours past sunup, then put on his clothes, which had dried overnight on the back of a chair, rolled up his poncho and stuck it under his arm, and walked down the stairs to the lobby of the The Olympus, where the hotel-keeper was standing at his desk, flipping through the pages of the same book as yesterday and wearing the same apathetic expression. “Found my money yet?” he asked.

“Tub water’s gone cold.”

Outside, the sun was bright. There was no trace of fog. The Starman’s horse’s blood had mostly faded from the surface of the dirty street. One more day and it would as if the horse had never lived and never died.

Higher, Rafael Rodgriguez’ marble head and wounded shoulders contrasted with the clear blue sky.

In the square around his broken-off, revolver-wielding arms, regular people were milling. They were the same people who’d milled yesterday, but being among them was different than looking down on them had been. This morning, their bodies pressed against Fenimore’s and he felt their heat, their fear and their confusion.

The raised platform was empty, but a few of the more commercially minded millers had put up makeshift booths or overturned crates on which they’d laid out salable goods: apples, trinkets, old silverware, salt, ragdolls.

Fenimore browsed to kill time.

The ragdolls were ugly, the silverware unpolished. The apples were bruised and browning. Only the salt looked unspoiled, but Fenimore didn’t have money anyway, except for the seven coins in his pocket, with which he wasn’t about to buy something that came out of the ground.

One of the seller women yawned. “You ain’t from around here by the looks of you. Can I interest you in a fork?”

“Maybe you have a knife instead.”

“Nah,” she said, “ain’t allowed to sell those. They weapons, says the Ironlaw.”

“A spreading knife.”

She looked at him queer. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the laws. I just follow ‘em on threat of punishment. If the Ironlaw says a knife’s a knife, spreading, cutting or otherwise, I don’t ask questions and I don’t sell it. You sure you don’t want a utensil?”

Fenimore had never seen a man spread another to death with a knife, but he had seen an angry wife stab a whore in the eye with a fork. Nevertheless, he declined the offer.

“Suit yourself. There’ll be plenty of takers later. A good fork always tugs at the purse strings.”

“At the redemption.”

“That’s right,” she said, smiling, and whispered, “speaking of which, I hear they got a real young one today. Got caught trying to run for it cross the desert. Didn’t make it, of course. And word is he’s an orphan, which is why I got my good wares out. Redeemin’ is all right, and everyone likes a good punishment, but there ain’t nothing like a bullet to the head to get people’s money flowing.”

“Is there a redemption every day?”

“Lately it’s so. Lots of crime in the world these days. Maybe a spoon?” She held one up.

“Ever heard of a man named Ezekiel Picasso?”

She let the spoon drop and crossed her arms under her breasts. “I ain’t got nothing to say about him or his family. Not a one good word.”

She looked around to make sure there weren’t any men in colourful clothing around, then leaned in closer and like any good gossip said something anyway: “Bandits, the lot of ‘em. Killers with cold blood. Not like the Rhodeses. Now, I know some of the folk, they get nostalgic for how it was in the days of the Rodriguezes, and I remember them days, too, but for me the Ironlaw is at least some form of culture and civilisation, which we never had under the Mexicans, if you know what I mean. And as a trader woman, I care about that. If you ask me, everyone keeps calling it a feud but there’s only side to back, at least if you got a good head on your shoulders and no bad ideas of your own inside. Know what I mean? The quicker those Picassos are all dead, the better for the rest of us.”

Fenimore was about to ask her about working for the Rhodes, when a Picasso goon strolled by and the woman shut up. Her thin lips wouldn’t budge. The goon slowed his stroll, eyed her with about as much affection as a fisherman eyes a barnacle, and continued on, eying Fenimore with the same plus a lip curling dose of savage distrust. Fenimore reflected it right back at him, curl for curl. He’d known plenty of men like these: stupid men. Sometimes bravely so—like Pedro—and sometimes suicidally so, the most dangerous kind, but mostly just wandering foot soldiers who got by on intimidation and raw numbers and who’d call a snakepit home just as long as they could be on the side of the snakes.

“Careful, gringo,” the goon said. “I see any more of your teeth I might be tempted to knock them down your throat.”

Fenimore smiled and bowed. “My apologies, senor. I’m a simple trader here for the business and show.”

The goon puffed out his chest.

“You don’t look like you’re selling nothing.”

Fenimore unwrapped his poncho and held it out for the goon to see.

The square was getting lively. Around them, people were hocking goods, banging pots and haggling over prices.

The goon said, “That’s ugly.”

“We can’t all be good looking.”

The goon scratched his head and contemplated, unsure whether that had been an insult or not.

“I wove it myself,” Fenimore said. “I’m a travelling weaver.”

“It’s still ugly.”

“I’m still learning the trade.”

The trader woman, who’d been watching them in silence, packed up her forks and spoons into her crate, lifted the crate, keeping it up with her knees, and ambled away bowlegged to find a new place to set up her shop. “Forks,” she called out, “Silverware, forks and spoons. I got them all…”

“I suggest you do the same, gringo. Else we might end up engaging in a confrontation.”

Fenimore noted the double holster the goon was wearing, each filled with a shiny revolver whose grip the goon had begun stroking with the tips of his fingers. The holster seemed to be standard Picasso issue. “You think I should stop weaving ponchos and start making forks?” Fenimore asked.

The goon widened his stance. “I said I suggest you do the same, as in take paces backward, gringo.”

Fenimore bowed again.

But when he straightened, the goon’s attention was already elsewhere: on the sound of incoming hooves. The grey-coated riders, whom Fenimore now identified as the lawmaking Rhodes, were arriving.

If he’d had a gun, Fenimore could have taken advantage of the situation to send a bullet into the goon’s belly to make a lovely commotion. Because he was gunless, the commotion would have to wait. He’d have to be more creative. Chaos would have to be patient.

The riders were followed by a cloud of thick dust, which overtook them when they reared to a stop and made it momentarily difficult to see and breathe. Fenimore lifted the poncho to his face. The crowd, which through the dust was but a single black mass, swelled and converged on the riders, leaving their ragdolls and trinkets unattended. The ones not already in the square ran out of the surrounding buildings. Fenimore moseyed over to the trader woman’s crate and slid one of her forks into his pocket. He’d found a good deal after all. Her bloodlust ran deeper than capitalism.

The goon had retreated to lean against the wall of a nearby building. He was focussed on the riders more than on Fenimore, who was focused on everyone. A few other Picassos lingered nearby, equally attentive but separate from the crowd. Fenimore wondered why the Picassos, if they were feuding with the Rhodes, acquiesced to the Rhodes making such a show of their enforcement of the law. Fenimore had seen his share of feuds and this struck him as unusual. This feud was cold. But he’d also seen that it doesn’t take much to turn from cold to hot what’s already dry, and the earth, Fenimore noted, dried quickly in Hope Springs. Things were prone to evaporating.

When the dust settled, the riders were in the process of unloading a bound figure from the back of one of their horses and prodding it up the platform steps. Although a potato sack covered the figure’s face, it was obvious to Fenimore that the figure was a man, and young. Perhaps the trader woman had been right about her orphan.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the riders said, “it is time for the redemption.”

The hooded man struggled against the two grey-coated Rhodes holding him by the forearms. Unlike yesterday’s shadow, today’s victim had some kick left in him.

The crowd roared.

Fenimore stole an apple to go along with his fork and glanced back at the Picasso goons, who were tense but disinterested. One of them fought with a fly that buzzed in the vicinity of his sweaty head. Two others, including the one Fenimore had talked to, just were. The three of them stood spread out about a hundred paces apart, one in the middle of the back edge of the square, directly behind the marble Rodriguez, and the two others in the back corners. If push ever came to shooting, they’d have an easy time blasting into the densely packed bodies in front of them.

Fenimore took a bite of the apple, which tasted as soft and rotten as it looked, swallowed one mouthful, and discarded the rest of the fruit. It was less edible than The Starman’s soup.

In the centre of attention, the Rhodes riders had forced the sack-headed man to his knees, but he was still fighting, still trying to save himself, though instead of words to go along with his stunted jerks, he just made sounds—bestial wails and inhuman ululations.

The Picasso in the middle of the square was the one playing catch with the fly, and that’s the one Fenimore approached. He did it with a smile, which was the inverse of the Picasso’s frown, and said, “Good afternoon, senor. May I interest you in a poncho?”

The question stunned him.

Fenimore lifted his arm and draped the poncho over it.

The fly settled in the Picasso’s greasy hair.

One of the riders backhanded the sack-headed man in the face. That shut him up. He fell backward. He hadn’t even seen it coming.

“The poncho,” Fenimore said, “do you want it?”

The trader woman felt behind her and felt wood where a metal fork should have been. Her nostrils flared.

“The man you see before you”—The sack was puffing out and contracting at the mouth. Blood was soaking into its light brown fabric.—“was a caught trying to flee his work duties.”

The crowd hissed.

The Picasso smacked himself in the head, crushing the fly, which fell to the ground, and said, “Why would I want to buy your poncho? I got more than one of my own. Better ones. I ain’t a poor man.”

The goon to his right, the one Fenimore had already irritated, took a few steps closer to his comrade. “Git back to up front where you belong,” he barked. “I told you we don’t need your weaving, and you don’t want our attention.”

The goon to the left glanced over. He was chewing on a long piece of dry grass.

The rider was orating: “…to abandon his duties as a citizen of Hope Springs, to avoid the lawful labour that is good enough for your sons, your brothers and your husbands. To transgress the Ironlaw. To freeload.”

“Hurt him deep!”

Fenimore inverted the poncho so that the chainmail was showing. It shone in the daylight. “You don’t have one like this.”

“What’s that?” the Picasso asked.

He extended his neck to get a better look. He shone in the daylight, too, like a kidney bean.

The goon was closing in on them. “I told you already, or don’t dumb gringos learn their lessons with nothing other than a beating?”

The other one spat out his grass.

One of the riders grabbed the bloody, puffing sack and pulled it off the figure’s head. The young face beneath was bruised gruesome. Its nose was broken and its swollen eyes slits, hurt by the light and defiant in the mad faces of the angry, merciless crowd.

“And what is the only just punishment for the crime of freeloading, for dereliction—nay, for complete abandonment, of duties that are necessary for the survival and thrival of this here our town, duties parcelled out in equal proportion to the abilities of each and performed by the majority for the good of the all?”

The Picasso fisted a bunch of the poncho. The rings of chainmail pressed against each other, making a sound like heavy rain. “Nah,” he said to the goon, whose hand was reaching for one of his two revolvers, “ain’t ever seen one like this before.”

He asked Fenimore, “It stops bullets or knives?”

“It stops both.”

“Death!” the crowd shouted.

The Picasso waved at the one who’d been chewing grass. He started walking on over.

“Death!”

The figure threw up on the platform floor, a mess of yellow, pink and white, then straightened its back without getting off its knees and spat words no one could understand through lips so purple, black and thick that they looked like a fish’s.

“Look what this—”

“Passerby,” Fenimore said.

“—what this passerby wants to sell.”

The goon snatched the poncho off Fenimore’s arm, tried ripping it apart, couldn’t, and he and his two comrades ogled the craftsmanship, as if the fact that poncho had withstood the goon’s strength meant there was truly something to it. “Says it’ll stop blades and bullets.”

The crowd roared with approval as the orating Rhodes removed a pistol from the inside of his grey coat and brought the end of its long barrel to rest on the kneeling figure’s forehead.

“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”

There was silence.

“If he says it let him show it,” the goon said, grinning and reaching for a knife he kept hidden in his leather boot. It was a curved knife with a carved ivory handle. It was, Fenimore had no doubt, stolen.

The grass-chewer watched with quiet interest.

“Put it on, gringo.”

Fenimore put on the poncho.

The Rhodes’ pistol travelled down the figure’s beaten face to the groove between its fat lips.

The goon slid the knife blade gently over the navy-white material of the poncho.

“Open your mouth, boy.”

The figure refused.

The goon slashed at the poncho. Fenimore narrowed his eyes. The blade ripped through the navy-white wool, but not the chainmail.

“Open.”

When the figure still refused, the Rhodes pulled back his pistol—and smashed it straight through the figure’s bloody teeth.

The figure recoiled, spitting white shards.

The goon sliced diagonally. But, again, the knife failed to penetrate the chainmail.

“Looks like gringo got weaving talent,” the grass-chewer said. He traced along the two cuts in the material that the knife had made, with his finger.

The goon tossed the knife from his right hand to his left and placed the former on his revolver, ready to draw. The middle Picasso stayed his wrist. “Boss said no shooting, remember.”

Fenimore pulled off the poncho.

“So, senors, what do you say, shall we do business?”

The goon glowered.

“One more try,” the grass-chewer said. “Toss me the knife.”

The Rhodes inserted his pistol barrel into the figure’s smashed mouth through what remained of his teeth. He inserted it so deep the figure gagged.

The goon switched his knife back to his right hand, sent it looping once above his head, caught it, then palmed the blade and threw it handle first toward the grass-chewer.

Fenimore saw his chance.

The Rhodes cocked his pistol.

The blade floated, slicing, through the air.

And in that one moment of anticipation, as the goon watched the knife and the grass-chewer waited for it and the middle Picasso followed its trajectory with the pupils of his eyes, as the crowd waited for the Rhodes’ trigger to be pulled and the figure’s young skull to be as smashed as his teeth, Fenimore:

Threw the poncho at the goon’s face.

Snatched the knife.

Spinning, drove it into the grass-chewer’s gut.

And, having spun behind the middle Picasso, unholstered both of his revolvers.

The poncho caught on the goon’s face like a net. He bent and clawed at it.

The grass-chewer clutched at the knife.

Fenimore pulled back the hammers of both revolvers.

The middle Picasso bent his legs.

Fenimore aimed one arm left—at the grass-chewer, whose tongue was flapping out of his mouth—and the other right—where the goon had managed to rip the poncho off his face—and fired one bullet in each direction.

Both bullets hit.

As the middle Picasso sprung himself backward, taking Fenimore with him.

The goon scratched weakly at his revolvers.

Fenimore and the middle Picasso landed on their backs on the ground.

The grass-chewer fell against the wall of the building he’d been leaning against. His boots kicked out at an unnaturally painful angle.

And as the middle Picasso tried to flip from his back onto his knees and chest, Fenimore lifted one of the revolvers straight ahead, squinted—and put a bullet into the knob on the back of the Rhodes orator’s head.

His knees buckled, his grey coat creased, he let go of his long revolver, which remained firmly between the figure’s teeth, and fell flat on his face on the platform floor beside the figure’s kneeling body.

The grass-chewer slid down the wall until the only thing propping him up was his head.

The crowd became a single, intensifying scream.

The goon pulled out his revolver with twitching fingers and with a weak wrist raised it to the level of his eyes.

Fenimore dropped his revolvers, grabbed the middle Picasso by his half-turned neck and scampered backward into the darkness between two buildings.

The goon’s head exploded.

Smoke spilled from the long barrel of a pistol held by one of the two remaining Rhodes riders.

Bodies ran.

In the narrow alley, Fenimore kept up the pressure on the Picasso’s neck. The Picasso tried to pry himself free. He couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe. Fenimore didn’t stop moving until he felt the comforting tap of a wall against the back of his head and knew he was as deep in the alley as the alley went.

The deepness dulled the noise of the chaos erupting in the square and amplified the hoarseness of the Picasso’s struggle to breath.

Through the vertical slit of light at the alley opening, Fenimore saw flashes of criss-crossing motion.

The Picasso was flopping like a boiled snake.

Fenimore flexed the muscles in his left arm, the bend of which further constricted the Picasso’s throat, and reached with his right hand into his pocket. His fingers dug through seven coins before finding the shaft of the trader woman’s fork.

They closed on it.

“Gringo,” the Picasso wheezed, “I’ll kill—”

But he didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Fenimore stabbed him in the neck with the fork.

The Picasso gurgled.

Blood sprayed out of four small holes in his skin.

Fenimore stabbed him again.

The Picasso flopped more weakly and his grip on Fenimore’s left arm loosened.

Blood now poured from eight fork holes.

Some of it got on Fenimore’s cheeks, into his eyes, his mouth. The blood was warm. It tasted of rusted iron.

Fenimore stabbed again.

This time, he kept the fork tongs buried inside the Picasso’s flesh until the Picasso’s blood pressure fell, the squirting became a trickle, and the Picasso—gripping, flopping, gurgling—finally stopped living.

Chapter 5. Iron Rhodes

When the commotion had hushed down and there were no more flashes at the alley entrance, Fenimore let go of the handle of the fork buried within the Picasso’s neck and stood up. He stomped on the Picasso’s stomach in case the dead man was faking it, but he wasn’t. There was no breath left in his chest.

Fenimore turned his back, lifted the dead Picasso’s legs to his hips, one on either side of him, and began the trudge through the alley to the square, dragging the corpse behind him.

As he got closer he heard three voices.

When he emerged from the alley one of them yelled, “Stop!”

Three Rhodes riders stood by the statue of Rafael Rodriguez—four if you counted the one Fenimore had shot, whose face was still on the surface of the platform. Except for the dead one, who was calm, they all gave the impression of having drawn the short straw, of not wanting to be there.

The headless body of the goon, still holding one of its revolvers, and the unnaturally angled body of the grass-chewer were where Fenimore had left them. Otherwise, the square was empty. The figure with the sack on its head was gone and the crowd had disappeared, though a few frightened faces did peek out from the surrounding windows.

Fenimore’s chainmail poncho was draped over the shoulder of the Rhodes rider, who repeated his command and cocked his pistol. “Stop.”

Fenimore stopped.

“I believe this is the man you’re looking for,” he said. The Picasso’s corpse had left a snaking trail behind him from being dragged.

“Drop him,” the Rhodes said.

Fenimore let the Picasso’s legs drop to the ground. They fell like pounds of flesh.

“Put your hands behind your head and step aside.”

Fenimore wasn’t one to argue.

The two other Rhodes kept watch on the street leading to the Picasso’s side of town while the third kept his pistol trained on Fenimore. The feud between the Picassos and the Rhodes, which had been cold, was heating up. A killing was apt to do that to a feud: kindle it. Fenimore was a decent arsonist.

Down the Picasso street and down the Rhodes street nothing moved except the wind, which had found a hole through which to whistle and enough loose grains of sand to pick up and twister around.

When Fenimore had moved far enough for the Rhodes riders to see the Picasso’s corpse, one of them asked, “Did you kill him?”

The fork in the corpse’s neck glinted.

“I did.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because he killed a man,” Fenimore said. “He killed a man who was carrying out the law.”

The speaker moved closer without lowering his pistol.

“What’s your name?”

His long grey coat snapped in the breeze and the wind tossed dust into his eyes. Above his head, Fenimore saw the window of his own hotel room. Its curtains were open and the small black-haired boy’s face was behind the glass. The boy smiled and shut the curtains.

“Fenimore,” said Fenimore, looking ahead again.

“If you have a weapon on you, Fenimore, I advise you take it out and lay it on the ground. It’s against the law for strangers to carry weapons in Hope Springs.”

Fenimore pointed with his bent elbows at the dead Picassos. “What about them?”

“I advise you follow my instructions.”

“I don’t have a weapon.”

One of the other Rhodes took his eyes off the Picasso street, approached Fenimore, and patted him down. “He’s telling the truth,” he said after he was done. “Doesn’t have anything on him but seven coins in his pocket.”

“Where are you quartered?” the Rhodes asked.

“The Olympus.”

“And what’s your reason for being in Hope Springs?”

“I had things stolen from me,” Fenimore said, “outside of town, a few nights ago, by a man with big guns and a sombrero. Took my things but left my horse, which I rode into town, where I figured I might get a good night’s rest, food, and maybe find a week’s work to fill my pockets. Man at The Olympus put me up on my word, but another slit my horse’s throat, and now I’m here with no money and no way of riding out, with a debt to pay and not a way of paying it. You might say I’m still looking for work—more than a week’s worth now—to pay that debt, buy a horse and earn myself some travelling money.”

“It takes a certain kind of man to stab another to death with a fork. That’s not in every man’s nature. Where did you say you come from?”

“I didn’t.”

The Rhodes holstered his pistol. “Tell me, Fenimore. Are you competent with a firearm?”

“Competent.”

“Have you ever killed a man, before this afternoon?”

“Once or twice.”

“Were they lawbreakers, too?”

“Always.”

One of the lookouts whistled. A mob of Picassos had appeared at the end of the street.

The wind swept across the square.

The speaker said to Fenimore, “You can lower your hands. You’ve killed a man, so we’ll have to take you in and make sure you’re telling the truth. Being a law abiding man yourself, you understand. Due process demands it. But after that we may have certain work for you.” He looked at the dead Rhodes on the platform. “There’s recently been made a vacancy.” He looked at the Picassos growing larger on the street. “And we anticipate an increased workload.”

The two lookouts rounded up the four Rhodes horses. They lifted the dead Rhodes onto one and themselves mounted two others. The third Rhodes hopped onto the fourth horse, leaving only Fenimore with his feet on the ground. “Suspects walk,” the Rhodes said, and all fourteen legs set off at a brisk pace.

The Rhodes part of the town was as grey as their coats. The buildings were clean but plain, with an air of bureaucracy to them. They passed a barbershop and a notary, a Solicitor’s Saloon and something called the department of future development. They trotted beside a men’s fine clothing store, a savings and loans bank, and a square cement building that looked like a bunker and was called The House of Uncommons.

The further down the street they went, the more the riders’ faces relaxed.

At the end of street stood a haunted looking white colonial mansion surrounded by a thick concrete wall that made the mansion into a compound and made the compound look like a fortress or prison.

The four horses stopped.

Their three riders dismounted.

Fenimore saw the blue sky turning grey reflected in the mansion’s windows.

“Have you ever been north, Fenimore?” the Rhodes speaker asked when they were alongside each other.

“Once or twice.”

“Would you believe that they built this house in the New England and rolled it to this spot over the course of years?”

“No,” Fenimore said, “I wouldn’t believe that.”

The Rhodes stopped and grabbed him by the arm. “Hold out your hands for me. I’m going to have to tie them. Protocol, you understand.”

Fenimore nodded and the Rhodes tied Fenimore’s wrists together in front of his body. He tied them with rope, but not tightly. He left Fenimore’s ankles unbound.

There was a metal gate in the concrete wall in front of them and as they approached, the Rhodes yelled, “Antoninus Pius,” and the gate rolled open with a head splitting whine.

After the four of them had gone through, the gate rolled back into place. It was controlled by a mechanism of gears and pulleys operated by yet another man in a long grey coat. This one had a thick beard and wore goggles. Fenimore noted that on this side the concrete walls were fitted at regular intervals with metal ladders. However, no one patrolled their summits.

The Rhodes speaker led the way to the mansion’s front doors. Two guards with rifles kept watch on either side. He nodded to them as he climbed the front steps. “Mr Rhodes,” they said in unison. “Messrs Rhodes,” he said back.

They stepped aside.

He knocked on the right-most panel of the door—three light taps followed by a hard one—something clicked, at which point he waited—Fenimore counted five seconds—before grabbing the door handles and pulling open both doors at once to reveal:

A high ceilinged, beautifully furnished room at the top of which hung a spider web of a gold-and-crystal chandelier, whose reflection graced the polished hardwood floors, which gave the illusion of four, rather than two, sets of mirrored staircases leading to what Fenimore surmised must be the third floor. The entire interior smelled of pipe smoke and possessed the aura of a long forgotten past.

On the ground floor, two halls shot off to the sides and a heavy wooden door loomed ahead. Nearby, a pair of men in bespoke suits were drinking brandy and discussing something, seated on a steel bench with red velvet cushions.

The Rhodes speaker bowed to them. “Messrs Rhodes,” he said.

“Mr Rhodes.”

They looked at Fenimore, then at the speaker again. One of them said, “Justice Rhodes is waiting, and he is not pleased. They still have not found the young man.” The other added, “How is the shot Mr Rhodes?”

“Deceased,” the speaker said.

“A tragedy.”

They looked at Fenimore again.

“No,” the speaker said, “he’s not the one. He’s the one who caught the one who murdered Mr Rhodes.”

They looked behind Fenimore, where no other prisoner was waiting. “Caught and executed,” the speaker corrected himself. “With a fork to the neck.”

One of the men on the bench took a sip of brandy. “I see. Perhaps we should refine ‘weapon’.”

The other laughed. “The extent of human ingenuity, I do say.”

The speaker said something to the two riders who’d accompanied him into the mansion and then said to Fenimore, “You’ll be taken to a holding cell downstairs, where you’ll be tried. Afterward, you may be given what we discussed. Tell the truth and the truth shall set you free.”

The speaker excused himself, bowed to the seated men again, and walked toward the heavy door.

Fenimore felt the two riders grab his arms and the three of them walked the left hall together. They said nothing. He asked no questions.

The hall became a set of descending stairs that lead to the mansion’s underground. It wasn’t as richly decorated as the main floor had been. There were no chandeliers or velvet cushions, and the air was danker, which caused the wallpaper to peel off the walls. Everything seemed to be sweating.

The riders stopped Fenimore at one of many similar looking doors. He didn’t resist. He looked instead at the place where the doorknob had been replaced by a metal loop that was connected to another metal loop, this one attached to the doorframe by a single-dial padlock. The technology impressed him. One of the riders spun the padlock twice right, landing on 12, once left, landing on 1, and once more right, landing on 5. Fenimore remembered the combination: 12-1-5. Once the padlock was off, the rider opened the door and pushed Fenimore inside.

The door shut.

The padlock was replaced.

The room was barren. The only light came from a small rectangular window near the ceiling. Too small for anyone but a child to crawl through, it was nevertheless reinforced by vertical steel bars.

Fenimore took a seat on a chair—the only furniture in the room—set his bound wrists on his lap and wondered whether he’d gotten himself into a bad spot. The wondering made him uneasy, so, like he always did at times like these, he started thinking. After a few minutes of thinking, he decided there was no reason for the Rhodes to kill him or even keep him locked up. If they’d wanted to kill him, they could have done it when he’d come out of the alley. Therefore, he reasoned, he was safe. He might also be on the verge of finally making some money.

He reasoned that way on the chair for hours.

His stomach grumbled.

Through the barred window he saw the day pass and the daylight become evening light.

Then the padlock clicked open, the door was swung, and the Rhodes gatekeeper with the beard and goggles said, “It’s time for justice to be done,” and ushered Fenimore out of the cell, up the stairs, into the main room, past the bench with the velvet cushions where the two men in bespoke were no longer sitting, and to within a few paces of the thick door through which the Rhodes rider had entered in the afternoon. The door was made of mahogany.

Goggles knocked. “Justice Rhodes, I’ve brought the suspect.”

“I have brought,” a deep voice said.

Goggles squirmed.

“Well, enter.”

Goggles bowed to the mahogany, saying much too quickly, “Of course, Justice Rhodes. I’m sorry, Justice Rhodes. As you command, Justice Rhodes.”

Fenimore imagined the deep voice sighing, and found himself doing the same, realising that he was getting tired of doors—open or closed—as Goggles gently opened this one, bowed once more, and left.

“Please close the door behind you,” the deep voice said.

It was sitting with its back to Fenimore in a steel armchair, behind a wide steel desk, facing a steel fireplace in which half a dozen logs and a few hundred sheets of paper were burning. Indeed, almost everything in the room was made of steel, including the floor, the walls and the ceiling. The voice, too?

Fenimore closed the heavy door.

The voice spun in its armchair. It belonged to a human body, flesh and bones, about sixty years old, dressed in an elegant grey suit, with a head of short silver hair above a creased, masculine and handsome face. “Good evening, Fenimore,” the voice said. “My name is Justice Iron Rhodes. Welcome to Hope Springs.”

Fenimore said nothing.

A portrait of a red-headed woman holding a green parasol and gazing wistfully out of the frame adorned the wall behind Iron Rhodes. The woman was beautiful, and the surrounding steel only made more vibrant the red and green pigments with which she’d been painted.

Iron Rhodes smiled. “A man of few words. That is admirable.”

He rose out of his armchair to a height of over two imposing metres. Standing, he was one of the tallest men Fenimore had ever seen. He offered Fenimore his right hand for the shaking.

Fenimore raised both of his, which were still tied.

“Right, let us dispense with that first. You have been accused of killing one Marcos Ulrida, a known associate of the Picasso family. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that he killed a lawman and didn’t deserve to live.”

“So you admit that you killed him.”

“Justice killed him, acting through me.”

“Are you a tool through which justice often acts?” Iron Rhodes asked.

“I don’t often kill.”

Cold radiated from the steel insides of the room. Fenimore shivered. The underground cell had moistened him up.

Iron Rhodes took two massive steps and was at a steel bookcase. “Do you often read?”

Fenimore scanned the spines of the books whose letters were big enough for him to see: Roman histories, engineering texts, a shelf devoted to books about the law, and snuggled just below, The Opening of the American West by J.S. Taki. Fenimore’s hea