Last Plane to Heaven (24 page)

Here is where Eustace Prudence McAllen showed what a clever man he was. He smiled back at the Devil, though his guts liked to turn to water, and said, “Except folk are setting the blame on me for them range fires. You ain't getting the credit you rightly deserve.”

At those words the Devil's teasing of McAllen vanished in an eruption of wounded vanity. He stomped one great, clawed foot, what shook the ground so hard they felt the tent poles rattle over in Laramie. “By all that's unholy, I shan't be having you take the credit for my deeds, son of Allen!” His shout smoked the air blue and called dark clouds into swirling overhead. Flames snapped at the broken tips of his horns, and his wings spread wide with a creak like a barn in a tornado.

No, no, they ain't had no real buildings in Laramie till after the war was done and the railroad come to town. Of course it ain't a camp
now
.

Anyway, I got a story to tell, if you don't keep aggravating me like that. Who taught you manners, anyhow?

“That's why I come to you, your worship.” McAllen somehow kept his voice steady, though he nearly voided himself in his drawers from sheer, raw terror. “It ain't right, and I reckon to set the record straight.”

“I'll straighten the record,” roared the Devil. “I'll show them who's Prince of Flame and Darkness around these parts.”

At this point, McAllen realized he might of overshot his mark just a little bit. He hadn't aimed to set Old Scratch on the folks of Fort Caspar and the Broken Bow Ranch. He hadn't aimed for much at all, except to live a minute or two longer in the face of such wrath.

He had his second fit of brilliance. “Before you go wreaking havoc across the land, your worship, maybe you ought to partake of your dinner.”

Well, those words brought the smell of barbacoa back to the Devil's nostrils, along with a strong whiff of the sulfur that has been his natural estate since he first fell from Grace. Like I said, there ain't many that can resist the crackling lure of the slow-cooked meat.

“Be damned if I won't,” the Devil replied, then began to laugh at his own joke.

McAllen, he laughed along with the Devil, because what else is a man to do in such a moment? The two of them stood there, cackling and howling like two lunatics, even the lesser demons capering and giggling through their needle-toothed mouths.

Old Scratch strode with a purpose to the roasting cow and tore off a long, lean, juicy strip of meat, all crisped dark on the outer edge and dripping fat within. The smell that came off the carcass like to set McAllen's brain on fire, reaching right through his nose and his tongue and lighting up the sin of gluttony as nothing else in the world could have done.

“You want some?” the Devil asked, drippings running down his face from both sides of his mouth, his rotten fangs chewing the soft, sweet meat like it was manna fallen from God's hand.

The scent nearly undid McAllen. He was tempted, knowing he'd taste of the finest meal ever to be eaten by himself or any other man. Knowing likewise if he took food from the Devil's hand, he'd be a servant of darkness for the rest of his days here on Earth, and damned for eternity beyond.

He never was a churchgoing man, McAllen, but anyone who's stood when the bullets fly or watched over the herds when the wolf packs are hunting down the moon knows better than to disbelieve. Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world.

Yes, even now. And I know none of you knotheads ever dodged a bullet in your young years.

No, acorns out of a slingshot do not count.

McAllen looked at that most perfect barbacoa steaming in the Devil's grip, and reckoned if he didn't take it from Old Scratch's hand, he'd be next up on the spit. But like I said, he reckoned if he
did
take it, he'd be bound then and forever more in service, like that Faust fellow out of the old days in the Germanies.

Death, or barbacoa?

That right there was the temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen.

What would you have done? This here's the point of the story, ain't it?

What would you have done?

Really and truly, on your best swear, what would you have chose?

*   *   *

They heard the shot at the Broken Bow Ranch, clear as if someone had loosed a round off the porch of the bunkhouse.

Folks heard it in Fort Caspar, too.

Later on some claimed they heard it in Laramie, reckoned the noise for a boiler explosion or some such, but the railroad ain't reached Laramie yet that year, so you can figure on them being liars or at the best misguided in wanting to be part of history their own selves.

But the howl that followed, everyone heard that clear on to Fort Benton in one direction and Omaha in the other. Like a storm off the plains grabbing up sod houses and snapping telegraph poles it was. Anger and pain and rage and loss that caused drunks to stop beating their wives for a day or two, and sent even the randiest cowpokes scurrying into the revival tents for a good dose of prayer and preaching.

You see, Eustace Prudence McAllen shot the barbacoa spit right off the posts and dumped the Devil's dinner into the ashes and sand of the firepit below. He resisted temptation and bought himself a ticket straight to Heaven on account of nixing Lucifer's vittles and vexing the ambitions of evil that day, in that place. Hell didn't let out for dinner, see, on account of what he done.

The Earth split open so that the Devil and his minions could chase themselves straight down to Hell, taking that ruined carcass with them.

When Williamson and a posse of his hands came the next morning on the bay mare's backtrail looking for McAllen, they found him lying flat on the ground deader than a churchyard dance party. His clothes were nearly burnt off his body, his hair turned white as the Teton glaciers.

One last piece of crispy barbacoa was stuck between his teeth, and Eustace Prudence McAllen had the expression of a man who'd died with his hands on the gates of Heaven.

They buried him where he fell, on account of none of the horses would sit still for the body to be slung across. Williamson kept the LeMat revolver, which the metal of them double barrels looked to have been frosted but never did thaw, and dropped that piece of barbacoa into a leather pouch to take home and study, for even then he knew it for what it was.

There weren't no more range fires for a long time after that. Some folks took that to mean McAllen had been the torch man, but Williamson and his hands knew better. They kept their dead compadre's name clear, and they kept the herds well away from the edges of the badlands.

Even now, if you ride out west of Casper toward Hell's Half Acre—for the Devil don't cook there no more, so it ain't his kitchen now—if'n you ask around and folk like the set of your shoulders and the light in your eyes, there's a barbacoa pit run by some of Williamson's daughters and granddaughters. McAllen's Barbecue, they call it. Place ain't on no signpost or writ down in no tax rolls, but it's there.

Head for the badlands and follow the scent. Just mind who's eating on the porch when you get there, because even the Devil himself can be tempted back to this corner of Wyoming when the wind is right and the cuts of meat are just good enough.

 

That Which Rises Ever Upward

This was part of a shared project that editor Phil Athans put together. We never did get much traction with the concept, but I had a lot of fun writing this.

The Dreams of a Boy

Attestation clutched his glowing fists tight and stared out into the pit, his mind aboil. His two khilain coins, clutched one in each hand, were not hot—whatever mystery of magic or technology lent them their light was more akin to the phosphorescent scum on the cave walls of his home village than it was to the bright heat of the Sunstrip that lit their days and glowered through their nights.

Khilain. Nihlex Watershed.
Up
. Those tricky winged bastards could fly. Even the little lantern-plants bobbed up and down the pit's air column when they were in fruiting season, flying in groups ranging from a dozen or so to occasional releases of a hundred or more. Though only fourteen, Attestation was a birthright Pitsman, like his father, and his grandfathers before them. He could no more spread wings and fly than he could set his face to glowing like the coins.

All he could do was cling to the wall and dream.

His village, Ortinoize, wasn't much of a place. Built into a crack in the pit wall that ran roughly upward at a thirty-degree angle, it had all the charm of a staircase on which someone had dropped a great deal of junk. Not that Attestation was all that personally familiar with junk. Everything in Ortinoize was reused, repurposed, recycled. It was just old Sammael that taught the kids—he was an infaller, from someplace called Canada, outside the pit—he had a lot to say about the world and the way it was used, and was full of mysterious ideas like “junk” and “oceans” and “flight.”

Except flight wasn't so mysterious. The nihlex did it every day of their lives. And everyone knew
they
were dumb as rocks.

That some dumb old monkeys could find their freedom in the air of the pit was an offense to his spirit. Attestation knew this like he knew the back of his own hands.

Eventually the Sunstrip faded to nothing more than a warm presence. The cooling air brought smoky scents and reinforced the ever-present flinty odor of the pit. Attestation slipped the coins back into his goat leather neck pouch, careful to fold them into a precious scrap of satin, then picked his way among the bamboo tubes that formed the foundations and scaffolding of Ortinoize and onward up through the warrens of the village to his own sleeping mat just a little too deep inside Marma's Cave for him to see the dawning of each new day with his own eyes. This night, like every night, he flew only in his dreams.

*   *   *

Ortinoize had been founded, depending on whom you believe, by
communards
escaping bloody retribution for their utopian ideals, or by a group of drunken priests of some stick-god now forgotten except in the cruciform symbol that represented the village on those rare occasions when the village required symbolic representation. In either case, someone had gotten lucky in finding this crack in the pit wall, because a solid stream of fresh water flowed there that had never failed yet. Those founders had been smart about their water, and built an intricate system of cisterns and pools into which rock footings were braced so the inhabitants of the village were always above a water source.

The rules on waste disposal were vigorously enforced. “Protect everyone's water” was the cardinal law of Ortinoize. Everything always reeked of damp and dank and night soil and the strange green dreams of bamboo that sometimes grew so fast you could almost watch it unfold.

This focus on water and architecture meant the village was in effect one giant building. It ramshackled on like Sammael's staircase, with sleeping alcoves and pantries and little foundries all mixed together. A family might hold rights in half a dozen places, their linens and shoes closeted amid someone's potted beans while they took their meals three ladders higher and slept in three other locations depending on mood, gender, and who was in disgrace with whom.

Sammael had suggested more than once during lessons that this argued for a
communard
ancestry to the village. But then everyone knew Sammael was troubled by protestations of faith. Given that the elderly infaller was the only person in the village with anything like an outside education, he'd been given responsibility for the children in the likely vain hope that some of that education would rub off on them like the reeking coal dust.

As Attestation's father Redoubtable often said at meetings of the village council, they were poor and lost, but that did not mean they needed to be weak and stupid.

Still, Redoubtable often treated his son as if he were weak and stupid.

*   *   *

Marma's Cave was one of three lava tubes leading back from the fissure. Many of Ortinoize's children and young adults slept in there. Some nights Attestation couldn't rest for all the giggling and slurping that seemed to go on, accompanied by gasps and occasional salty smells. Not that any of the girls or boys ever wanted to giggle or slurp with him. He'd never quite found the trick of being likeable.

Besides, he spent his time dreaming of flying. Not like a nihlex, but like a human. Everyone knew that was stupid. People who passed by in the air were always going in one direction and one direction only: falling
down
. Sometimes screaming, sometimes in resigned silence, occasionally laughing with maniacal glee. But down was the constant.

No one ever fell back up. That was the part that counted as flying. What the lantern-plants and the nihlex did.

There were trails and ladders and ropes. A determined fellow who was strong, coordinated, and a bit lucky could pass up-pit to the small khilain way station of Clings-Too-Low, or down-pit to the next human village of Mossyrock. Presumably, similar arrangements went on beyond in both directions, but for the hundred or so people who lived in Ortinoize, those were the boundaries of the known world. Clings-Too-Low when trade was required, Mossyrock when brides needed to be exchanged. Sammael had been very firm on that last bit of business, for reasons that had never quite made sense to Attestation.

Maybe if he got some giggling and slurping in, he'd understand that better.

But climbing up and down the pit walls didn't count as flying either. He would be just a bug then. Not even as good as a plant. What Attestation wanted, wished for, desired, was to
fly
out there, to travel freely upward, at least to the Smog, and downward, though not quite so far as all the monsters everyone knew lurked far below.

Fly.

*   *   *