The Drop Edge of Yonder Read online

  The bandy-legged man tried to mount his horse again and then gave up. "Maybe you come in last night with Hatchet Jack," the bandy-legged man said. "Folks say that half-breed weaselhead should be tarred and feathered. Not me. I'd give the bastard a long rope and a short drop."

  Zebulon dismounted and pushed past him into the cantina.

  Three oil lamps hanging from a rafter cast a dim light over the narrow low-ceilinged room. Hatchet Jack sat at the bar wearing a red and white Mexican army coat and a black bowler with a raven feather slanted over one side of the brim. A scar shaped like a long S ran down his left cheek from a wound Zebulon had carved a long time ago.

  Hatchet Jack looked at him through one blue eye, one black.

  "You're a hard buzzard to track. I looked for you at the rendezvous, but you had already lit out. They told me you was ridin' a hot streak but quit while you was ahead. That didn't sound like you."

  "It was a hard winter," Zebulon said. "I'm holdin' on to what I can."

  "I ain't askin' for no hand out," Hatchet Jack said, "if that's what you're thinkin'."

  The piano player's gnarled fingers rolled over the broken keys with mechanical precision. Further down the bar, two playedout whores sat staring at a rattlesnake coiled up inside a glass jar. When the piano player struck a dissonant chord the snake shifted its head back and forth looking for a way out.

  Zebulon poured himself a shot from Hatchet Jack's half-full bottle of Taos White Lightning, a slug that burned into his gut like a branding iron. While he waited for Hatchet Jack to say what was on his mind, he focused on three stuffed moose heads lined up on the wall behind the bar. All of their marble eyes except one had been shot out, and their antlers and heads were punctured by tomahawks and darts.

  "I need help with your Pa," Hatchet Jack said. "I want his forgiveness."

  Forgiveness: it was a word Zebulon had never used before, much less thought about.

  "It's been seven years since you been up to see them?" Hatchet Jack said.

  "More like two."

  Hatchet Jack shook his head, pouring himself another shot of Taos White Lightning. "Last time I rode up I went all the way loco and then some. The week before, an Arapahoe war party had buried Pa up to his neck in a swamp with the water rising. Me bein' of mixed blood didn't help. He told me not to call him Pa. Said he never should have taken me in after he won me in that poker game and he wanted me gone. That's when I cleaned his plow"

  "You cleaned Pa's plow?" Zebulon asked.

  "I told him to dig a hole and go fuck himself. Those were my words. Then I took off with his big sorrel horse and a mess of his traps."

  "How did Ma take it?"

  "She brained him with an ax handle before he could smoke me. Said she was glad to do it, but that she'd look forward to when I took off and didn't come back. Which is what I done. Until now"

  Hatchet Jack downed another shot of Taos White Lightning. "I been told to make it up to him by an old Mex brujo. Name of Plaxico. You wouldn't know him. After I left the mountains I rode straight to the end of myself, doin' the usual bad mischief before I signed on with him. He has big medicine, that old man. Big sack of power. Learned me all about the spirit world. What to do and not to do. How to find and hold on to your power without sellin' it on the cheap. He said someone put a curse on me after your Pa took me in and that if I wanted to shake it loose I'd have to make it right with him."

  "How do you aim to do it?"

  "Damned if I know"

  "What kind of curse?"

  "Somethin' about being stuck between the worlds. Not knowin' which end is up. He went on about a woman. When I asked him about that, he wouldn't say"

  "Pa will plug you just for showin' up," Zebulon said, not wanting to know any more about curses.

  "Unless you ride up there with me," Hatchet Jack said. "I'm askin', Zeb. This one time. You be the only one that knows how to stretch the blanket with the old bastard."

  "I used to know how to stretch it. No more."

  Hatchet Jack shook his head. "I went to a whole lot of trouble stealing a prime horse and a bunch of traps to give back to him. Thing was, I got taken bad in a game of stud. A full house to some white nigger's straight flush. I lost the horse and the traps and everything else."

  He paused. "Look. I'm ridin' the rump of somethin' I don't know about and I need your help."

  When one of the whores banged her shot glass on the bar, Hatchet Jack signaled the bartender to give her a refill.

  "That's how it goes," he said. "Ever since I poked her, she been on me like the last squirrel of winter. I'd be better off spendin' time with Ma Thumb and her four daughters."

  The piano player pounded out another tune. The back of the room was full of all-or-nothing gamblers, along with three heavy-lidded vaqueros sitting on the floor against a wall, drunk or half-asleep. Four other men sat at a table, speaking in whispers as they looked Zebulon over. Out-of-work ranch hands, Zebulon figured. At the next table a large-bellied rancher was playing poker with the stagecoach driver, a busted up man with a handle-bar mustache and a soiled patch over one eye. Behind them a man sat slumped over a table; either drunk or possibly dead, his face lay across his forearms and a black cape was draped across his emaciated shoulders. A woman sat next to him wearing a dark green high-busted dance-hall dress and long silver earrings that drooped in a long bow to her neck. Her bronze high-toned face, as luminous as ancient rice paper, was framed by spills of medusa-like hair, blacker than black. Zebulon had never seen anyone like her, not even in his usual rut of Denver whorehouses known for specializing in mixed colors. She was smoking a long Mexican cheroot and appeared, as she looked over at him, more weary than curious. Or perhaps she was just bored.

  "Spooky," Hatchet Jack said. "They come in on the stage, goin' south to old Mex. Looks to me like the old rooster owns her. Or maybe it's the other way around."

  The woman removed a deck of cards from her purse. Cutting the cards with one hand, she spread them on the table for a game of solitaire. The first card up was the queen of hearts, which she quickly buried in the deck.

  "Are you goin' to help or not?" Hatchet Jack asked.

  Zebulon's eyes were on the stagecoach driver and one of the vaqueros as they sat down at the woman's table. "Right now I need to skin some cards and rest my bones"

  Hatchet Jack started to object, then changed his mind. Picking up the bottle of Taos White Lightning, he headed slowly up the stairs. After a short consultation, the two whores knocked back their drinks and followed him.

  Zebulon considered and then rejected what it would mean to join them, then downed another shot and walked across the room to a battered billiard table, its patched green covering stained with spilled whiskey and vomit. Sliding around the table like a two-step dancer, he maneuvered the cue ball around the table just to prove that he still could. Then he made his way over to the woman who was dealing a hand of poker to the vaquero and stagecoach driver. "Room for one more?" he asked.

  She kept her eyes on the cards. "There's always room for one more: as long as one more ends up one less."

  She spoke with what he took to be an English accent, along with a softer, more spaced-out inflection that Zebulon figured came from some kind of African lingo.

  He placed a stack of silver dollars on the table.

  "A word of advice," the stagecoach driver said. "Delilah don't take prisoners."

  "But I do take prisoners," Delilah replied, looking at Zebulon with the hint of a smile. "It's what I do after I take them that causes problems."

  "I second that statement."

  The black-cloaked man sitting next to her raised his head, revealing a small-boned face highlighted by a thin mustache and long pointed goatee streaked with white.

  "I suggest caution if you don't want to find yourself falling over a cliff," he mumbled, his head slumping back to the table.

  They played seven-card stud, nothing wild. The betting remained more or less even, with no one falling very far be
hind except for the vaquero, who bet every hand as if it was his last. When the vaquero finally lost his stake, he bowed his respects to the woman and left the room.

  "I am privileged to fill the empty space," the black-cloaked man said, looking at them as if he had no idea where he was or what space he was meant to fill.

  Most likely a Rusky, Zebulon figured, having heard the accent before. Either that or a Turk or Polack.

  From the moment that Ivan, as Delilah referred to him, sat down, Zebulon suspected that she was dealing off the bottom: It was the way her fingers manipulated and spread out the cards with practiced ease, cutting the deck with one hand while knuckle-rolling a stack of coins with the other.

  Her precise movements cast a spell, a dreamy ritual, and no matter how much he tried to resist, he found himself unable to break or even interrupt it. As the night wore on and the hands flowed back and forth with no clear winner, he surrendered to a strange sense of relief. It was as if he had been through this before, in the same dimly lit cantina with most of the oil lamps burned out, listening to the same restless chords from a bangedup piano with cracked and missing keys, the same row of moose heads with their eyes shot out, the same low murmur of betting and raising, the same slap of shuffling cards whose numbers and faces had become so bent and rubbed that they were barely visible. He was dimly aware that he might be in trouble because winning and losing no longer seemed to matter, as if the results had already been decided.

  The game was watched over by the bandy-legged man and a few drifters and ranch hands, all of them making side bets. Hatchet Jack, who had come downstairs with the two whores, was watching from the end of the bar.

  When Delilah turned over three kings, beating his three jacks, Zebulon's loss emptied most of his pouch, sending him back to the billiard table, where he won three games from one of the ranch hands and then two more from the bandy-legged man, more than doubling his money.

  When he returned to the table, Hatchet Jack walked over and sat down opposite Delilah.

  The new arrivals caused Ivan to slam his hand on the table with such force that a glass jumped and shattered on the floor. "All the way to the end, gentlemen," he said. "No exceptions or discounts allowed. So says one who comes and has already gone and is yet ready to come again."

  "You're crackin' wide open, Count," the stagecoach driver said. "I know the signs."

  "Not cracking, my friend," Ivan replied. "More a glimpse from the pit of darkness into the terror of endless space. That happens at the end of a long night when one is bored and foolish enough to abandon the reins of control."

  "I say you're bluffin'." Hatchet Jack pushed his money into the center of the table.

  "Bluffing, you say? Well, well, well." Ivan stacked twenty gold eagles next to Hatchet Jack's raise. "What is life if not a bluff? I see your call and raise you one-hundred silver dollars."

  When Delilah and Zebulon matched Ivan's raise, Hatchet Jack threw down his cards and walked over to the bar.

  As Delilah dealt the last of the cards face down, Zebulon noticed a shiver run down her sleeve into the tips of her fingers.

  Ivan turned over three aces.

  The stagecoach driver turned over a ten of spades, adding to the two that were on the table.

  Delilah produced a queen of hearts, filling out a straight flush to Zebulon's full house.

  As she gathered in the biggest pot of the night, the bandylegged man staggered towards Zebulon, waving his pistol. "I remember you all right. You're that same mountain scum that stole my bay horse in Galisteo. You and that breed."

  "I never been to Galisteo," Zebulon said, reaching for his pistol.

  Before either of them could fire, three shots from the other side of the room blew out two gas lamps and one of the windows.

  The last thing Zebulon remembered was staggering out of the cantina and trying to make it down the street before he collapsed.

  EBULON DIDN'T SEE THE STARS SHOOTING ACROSS THE SKY like silver bursts of rifle fire, or the goat feeding on garbage next to him, or the Mexican kid sitting on the lip of the arroyo waiting to steal his boots.

  ' Quien es?"

  He turned over on his back, his head pounding as if it was locked inside a giant church bell.

  "Quien es?" the kid asked again.

  Who was he anyway? And where was he? And where was he going? He sat up, wiping the dried blood from his eyes. A man lay next to him, surrounded by smashed bottles and scraps of rotting meat. There was a hole in the man's forehead and his matted yellow hair fell in bloody strands over his face. Zebulon looked closer. There was something familiar about the man's fringed buckskins and torn moccasins and the fact that he was clutching the queen of hearts in one hand. Zebulon watched a fly crawl across the man's cheek. It was a long journey, the way the fly was crawling, then stopping, then crawling on. From life to death, he thought, and back again. And how was he doing on this journey? Was he dead or alive, or was he trapped between the worlds like a blind man? When he shut his eyes and opened them again, the man was no longer there.

  He remembered a full house and a queen of hearts, a shot followed by more shots, then staggering out of the cantina and falling headfirst into the arroyo. He took a deep breath. He wasn't dead. Not that it would be so bad to be dead, the way things had been going.

  The goat's chewing made him think of his Pa. Or maybe it was the smell of stale urine. If the old bastard was still alive, he and Ma would be getting their winter pelts ready to sell. He ought to ride up and help them. Anything to be shut of this town of aging outlaws and second-rate card cheats - one of whom had tried to kill him. Or was that another time in another town?

  ' Quien es?" the kid was asking.

  On the road to nowhere. On the drift ever since he had left his family in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains five years ago. The goat stepped closer, staring down at him with dull insolence, as if to remind him that his string had run out. "Not hardly," he muttered. Not yet. Just to make sure, he raised the Colt and fired a bullet through the goat's eye. One way or the other, he was back. The stinking garbage and the dead goat and the way the Colt felt in his hand convinced him of that, enough anyway, to stumble past the Mexican kid who was sliding back on his haunches as if he had seen a ghost.

  e staggered down the deserted street towards the cantina. Above the moaning wind, he heard the faint chords of a piano.

  The stagecoach was gone. His horse wasn't where he had hitched it and he mounted the first one he came to. Before he could ride down the street, the bandy-legged man staggered out of the swinging doors to take a leak, an act that was causing him trouble with one arm wrapped in a sling.

  Shaken, he looked up at Zebulon. "I swear you're dead, only you're on my horse. Listen. It was a long night, and I didn't see what went down. But it weren't me that smoked you. I tried. Sure. But I got nicked before I called you out. It might have been that whore, the one that dealt the straight flush. She and that ferriner that owns her. Take my word, they're some devilish act, them two. Slicker'n three-headed snakes. When she won that last hand, all hell broke loose. What I recall anyways. Like I said, I wasn't in the best of shape."

  The man's confused, cloudy eyes reminded Zebulon of the goat.

  "I'll take your horse," Zebulon said, "for settlement. And maybe I'll blow off your trigger finger for tryin' to take me out."

  The bandy-legged man looked back at the saloon where the two whores were laughing at him through a broken window There was no help from either of them.

  His hand shook as he raised his pistol. "No one takes a horse from me, or even thinks about it. And I never jacked it. It was that ferriner or one of them vaqueros or ranch hands at the billiard table. Or that breed. Hatchet Jack. Ask him. He's in there now. I can take a loss. Hell, that's my middle name. Lost and never found. If you don't believe me, we might as well slap to it here and now"

  "It's your call," Zebulon said. "But if you dry-shoot me, do it with your whizzle in your pants."

  He dismounte
d and pushed past him into the cantina, not giving a damn one way or the other.

  "No sense to it," the bandy-legged man said to the two whores. "The man come back from the dead. What do you want me to do, send him straight to hell again?"

  Inside the cantina, the only signs of a shoot-out were dark stains on the floor, a few smashed chairs, and a blown-out window.

  Hatchet Jack was sitting at the bar, a bandage wrapped around his head.

  Zebulon shoved Hatchet Jack's money towards the bartender, motioning for a bottle of Taos White Lightning.

  "No hat size to this town," Hatchet Jack said. "Only thing left is to get shut of it."

  "Who shot me?" Zebulon asked.

  "You don't recall?" Hatchet Jack rolled a shot glass between his palms. "When I went over to the bar I heard someone, I don't recall who, sayin' the woman was dealin' off the bottom - snakin' a queen of hearts straight flush to your full house. Or maybe it was the other way around. A bunch come in the door and I was too pissed and likkered to notice. Next thing, I'm cold-cocked. When I come to, you was gone and I went upstairs and slept it off. I don't recall the rest. Who gives a damn. We're still on the dance floor, ain't we? More than some."

  "You see anything?" Zebulon asked the bartender, a squat man with a bushy mustache and wide red suspenders.

  "Not a thing," he replied. "I was out back haulin' likker stock. When I come in, it was all over and everyone had cleared out. I don't remember. Hell, that was two nights ago."

  "Anything can happen in two nights," Hatchet Jack said. "Or one, for that matter. Or none."

  "You been here two nights?" Zebulon asked.

  Hatchet Jack poured himself another shot. "Like I said, I was upstairs. Now everyone's zippered up or rode off. You might have noticed I ain't in the best of shape myself. If someone don't try to plug you, he might settle for me. And that ain't why I rode down here. How about it? You want to ride up to see your Ma and Pa? It ain't like you got anything better to do."