Dead Man’s Hand (47 page)

I didn’t need any further orders. I was out of the cave. In a split second, I decided
to take the Arabian—it had the rifle, was bred for the desert, and had no stinking
weight of Bastard George tied on back. I jumped up into the saddle. Before giving
the horse my heels, I turned to the mine entrance to see if Sandro might emerge. Instead
of the Mexican, two other figures came out of the mouse hole. They were tall and thin
with long heads. One got down on the sand and sprang toward me like a human rabbit.
It bounded twice, and I was in shock, watching it. Then it snarled and leaped high
in the air. I saw it flying toward me, watched for only a heartbeat its deformed face
and sharp teeth, before I lifted the LeMat, flipped the little lever, and shredded
that face with a barrel of grapeshot. The creature made a high pitched whimper that
set my horse to running. I tried to look back and see if the monster’s companion was
coming after me, but by then the mine opening was lost in the dark, and I was flying
across the desert on the Arabian.

I don’t know what direction I rode in. I may have gone in circles for a day or two.
At one point I woke and found the horse gone. I staggered along, cradling the Sharps
in my arms like a lover. After that, I remember falling into the sand. There was a
dream of being run down by Apache. A woman’s voice in an odd language. Water.

I woke in the Apache village. They’d found me unconscious in the desert and, since
I was alone, they decided to rescue me. I spoke to them through an Indian fellow,
Goyathlay, who knew English very well. When I was finally well enough to speak to
the elders, I was brought before them and asked to tell about what happened to my
friends.

They saved my life, so I couldn’t lie to them, although I wanted to. I told them everything
that happened.

Goyathlay told me they wanted me to describe the thing from the mine. Through him
I told them, “I only saw it for a second. Around its eyes and down across its nose
and lips it had the beaded skin of a viper. Its eyes, just black buttons.” I made
a circle with my fingers. “Skin looked pale and leathery, and it had a kind of fish
fin at the back of the neck. Webbed fingers, I think. Other than that, and the fact
its teeth were all sharpened, it could have been a man. Oh yeah, and it leaped like
a rabbit.”

When I was done, the chief looked around at his council and shook his head. Looking
over to me, he spoke, and it was translated. “The white man is not good for much he
said, but they do have fierce demons.”

“Do you know it?” I asked.

The chief listened to the question and said, “No. It must have come with the Spanish.
Slaves for their gold digging.”

A few days later, I was better. They took the Sharps and told me if I ever came back
they would kill me. The chief wanted to know what I was going to do. I knew I couldn’t
return to Las Cruces what with the deputy and the whole posse dead and no Bastard
George. They’d think I did something wrong. I told the old Mescalero that I was going
to California and make a killing on gold.

He spoke a few words and laughed raucously.

I asked Goyathlay what the chief had said, and he told me, “He says you’re stupid.”

I relayed to him that my parents had told me the same thing.

When I left the village, the chief handed me a roll of folded American money and patted
me on the shoulder. I inquired where they came across the cash and was told, “Dead
white men are generous.” They also gave me back the LeMat but caught and kept the
Arabian. Two men and Goyathlay took me a three-day journey on horseback to a spot
where I could cross the Colorado River on the rope ferry by Fra Cristobal.

I made it to California and took to prospecting near John Fremont’s gold fields in
Mariposa. After spending two years at it (I won’t say how much gold I dug or didn’t),
I heard a story from a fellow prospector about a situation at one of Fremont’s mines
where an entire crew of Mexican workers he’d brought in were slaughtered and eaten
by something that came up from deep in the Earth. No one else believed the tale, but
it was enough for me to pack up and head back East. All the way across the country
those creatures pursued me in my dreams, and even now, safe at my dead ma and pa’s
homestead, Deputy Gordon, Sandro, Fat Bob or the monsters themselves sometimes emerge
from the darkness of my mind.

AMOS

The ray of light came over the eastern horizon like a sunrise, like the door to a
dank jail cell cracking open, like the sweeping fiery sword before an angel of judgment.
It elongated into a thin, bright, yellow wedge that washed out the stars and revealed
the shining parallel tracks before it, dividing the vast, dark continent into halves,
leaving behind the endless vegetal sea of the Great Plains and plunging heedlessly
toward the craggy, ancient, impassive peaks of the Rockies.

Only then did the piercing cry of the steam whistle finally reach Amos Turner on the
hill a half-mile away. His mass of untrimmed white beard and shaggy hair was momentarily
illuminated, making his face—full of deep lines carved by the winds of many winters
and summers spent in a saddle in the open—seem like a snow-capped mountain in the
wilderness.

“Whoa,” Amos said, and patted Mustard’s neck as the mare snorted and skittered back
a few steps. The ground trembled as the locomotive rushed by, pulling behind it cars
laden with the goods and people of the East, contentedly dreaming of free land and
fresh starts.

But to Amos, the train seemed a malignant serpent, a belching, unfeeling monster,
a long and heavy chain that ended in shackles.

“Time to go on.”

Gently, he turned Mustard west and began the long journey into the unknown. Soon,
the sound and light of the locomotive faded away, and he was again alone with his
thoughts under a sky studded with brilliant stars, the way he preferred.

* * *

The ponderosa pines and Douglas firs grew denser as the days passed. This used to
be gold-mining country, and from time to time the horse and rider came upon abandoned
mining camps next to streams, now full of the late spring meltwater. Some nights,
Amos chose to camp in one of them, sitting alone amidst the abandoned shacks while
he fed Mustard a handful of oats; chewed a rabbit leg or sipped venison stew; and
puffed on his pipe long into the night as he sat by his lone fire, the light dancing
against the shadowy cliffs of his face, the crackling of logs the only sound in the
darkness.

This particular morning, the fog had rolled in, and Amos felt as though he and Mustard
were floating in a sea. The deer trail that they had been following also seemed to
dip and twist more than usual. Since he had no particular destination in mind, he
allowed Mustard to go wherever she pleased.

“Slow down, girl,” Amos advised. “Don’t rush and hurt yourself.” He felt uneasy, being
unable to see more than a few yards into the fog.

But Mustard liked the taste of the grasses and shoots along the trail, many of which
were new to her, and she picked her way slowly through the mist and carefully sniffed
each plant to be sure it wasn’t poisonous.

“Smart,” Amos said, leaning forward and lightly scratching her withers.

He looked up at the sky, trying to see the sun, but the fog refracted the light so
that it came from every direction at once, and he could not tell east from west.

A passing breeze momentarily revealed a ghostly figure in the mist, like a fish seen
through murky water.

“Who goes there?”

There was no response. Amos straightened in the saddle and reached for his Winchester.
Is it a mule deer, a bear, or a Shoshoni hunter?

A stronger breeze tore away more of the mist, and a man appeared, standing between
two trees. He was tall and lean, and there was a long white scar dividing his face
diagonally. He politely tipped his hat to Amos, but Amos noted the gleaming handles
of the pistols at his belt, ready to be drawn.

Amos drew back on Mustard’s reins, signaling her to back up. He kept the rifle pointed
at the sky.

“Just passing through,” Amos said. “Fog here always this thick?”

The man between the trees chuckled. “It’s especially bad today.” But his voice held
no mirth. “Not the best day for hunting,” he muttered in a lower voice.

The man’s tense posture hinted at something darker. Amos didn’t want to linger. “I’ll
be on my way then. Anyone else down the trail I should know of? Don’t want to be shooting
at shadows in the fog.”

“There are a few more of us if you go down that way,” the man said. “We’re hunting
vermin. You don’t want to be hurt accidentally. Best you go back the way you came.”

Amos sat still on his saddle. “I reckon it’s best I keep going where I’m headed. You
see, I’ve already been where I came from.”

“Suit yourself,” the man said. “But don’t get involved in business which ain’t yours.”

* * *

As Amos went on, the trees grew denser, the trail turned more twisty and the fog thicker.
Mustard moved forward gingerly.

He noticed bits of paper fluttering in the branches lining the trail. Reaching out,
he took hold of a few. They were full of dense, tiny print, and appeared to be pages
from law pamphlets of some kind.

Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese
laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the
territory thereof…

…the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended;
and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come,
or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the
United States…

Like most matters pertaining to the law, the crooked, impenetrable sentences seemed
to Amos to pile one upon another, twisting and turning, writhy and snakish, growing
foggier and foggier the more he read. He threw the papers away.

Mustard splashed across a small stream. Amos gazed at the water, looking for fish.
Maybe this would be a good place to camp for the evening. It was getting late, and
Idaho spring nights were chilly.

A clump of bushes rustled somewhere up the hill.

Amos was just about to shout out a warning not to shoot, that he was no vermin, when
the bushes parted, and a human figure stumbled out and rushed at him.

He almost shot at the figure before realizing that it was a woman, who wasn’t dressed
like the Indians and not like the settlers either. She had on a loose, gray dress,
cut in a manner Amos had never seen, long strips of cloth that wrapped around her
legs like large bandages, and black cloth shoes.

A few steps from him, she collapsed to the ground, and a knife fell from her hand.

The woman thrashed and struggled to sit up.

They stared into each other’s eyes.

Amos saw that she was probably in her fifties, short and lean. Her clothes were drenched
in mud and her left shoulder was a bloody mess.

Some kind of Oriental
, Amos thought.

“Damn it,” the woman croaked. “Thought the words would hold you longer.” Then she
collapsed and stopped moving.

* * *

YUN

Yun dreamed.

In her dream she was again fifteen, a Hakka girl lying—dying really—under the hot
sun.

But she did not sweat. The field she was in was as dry as her body. It hadn’t rained
for three years, but the governor still refused to release the grain from the Imperial
warehouses.

All around her, the lifeless land was stripped bare, as though a swarm of locusts
had passed over it. Every shred of tree bark, every blade of grass had been eaten,
and the bodies of men and women were strewn about, their bellies filled with dirt,
the last meal of desperation to assuage the demons of hunger.

Could it be?
A line of ants appeared in the distance. She licked her lips, her tongue dry and
heavy as a stone. She would wait until the ants got closer, and then she would eat
them.

The ants came closer, grew, and became a line of marching men, their banners flapping
and shimmering in the heat. She watched them approach, thinking they were like soldiers
descended from heaven, like wandering
hsiake
that the traveling storytellers always spoke of, who toured the land to right wrongs.

“Drink, Sister,” one of the men said, and held a cup to her lips. She drank and tasted
rice, as cool and nourishing as
ganlu
dripped by Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. She felt every pore in her body scream
with the almost-forgotten pleasure of food and water.

“We’re soldiers of the Heavenly State of Taiping,” the man said. “We worship the Heavenly
Father and Jesus, His Son.
Tienwang
, Jesus’s Brother, has been sent to deliver us from the Manchus.”

Yun remembered the tax collectors who had come the fall before, warning the villagers
about the Taiping Rebels and their dangerous leader Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, who called himself
Tienwang
, the Heavenly King. Anyone who dared to oppose the Manchu Emperor and support the
rebels—really just brazen bandits—would be put to death by being sliced a thousand
times by a knife. And oh, of course the Emperor’s taxes still had to be paid, even
if it meant taking away the last cup of rice left in the family’s grain jar.

“Thank you, Master,” she tried to imitate the unfamiliar words of the man. “If you
give me another drink, I will join the Heavenly State of Taiping and become your servant
forever.”

The man laughed. “Call me Brother, and you shall be my Sister. In the Heavenly State
of Taiping, there are no masters and servants. All of us are equal before the Heavenly
Father.”

“All of us?” This made no sense to her. The world was made up of chains, hierarchies,
rules that ranked superiors and inferiors. At the top was the Emperor, his Throne
held up by the noble Manchus; below them came the servile Han Chinese, with the Hakka
lowest of all among them, their lot to till the rockiest fields. And a Hakka woman?
She was like a worm, a nothing, barely worth the air she breathed.