The Gunslinger

"Blood money," the hostler muttered.



"What?"



"Nothing." The hostler caught the mule's bridle and led him inside.



"Rub him down!" the gunslinger called. The old man did not turn.



The gunslinger walked out to the boys crouched around the marble ring. They had watched the entire exchange with contemptuous interest



"How they hanging?" the gunslinger asked conversationally.



No answer.



"You dudes live in town?"



No answer.



One of the boys removed a crazily tilted twist of corn-shuck from his mouth, grasped a green cat's-eye marble, and squirted it into the dirt circle. It struck a croaker and knocked it outside. He picked up the cat's-eye and prepared to shoot again.



"There a restaurant in this town?" the gunslinger asked.



One of them looked up, the youngest There was a huge cold-sore at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes were still ingenuous. He looked at the gunslinger with hooded brimming wonder that was touching and frightening.



"Might get a burger at Sheb's."



"That the honky-tonk?"



The boy nodded but didn't speak. The eyes of his playmates had turned ugly and hostile.



The gunslinger touched the brim of his hat. "I'm grateful. It's good to know someone in this town is bright enough to talk."



He walked past, mounted the boardwalk and started down toward Sheb's, hearing the clear, contemptuous voice of one of the others, hardly more than a childish treble:



"Weed-eater! How long you been screwin' your sister, Charlie? Weed-eater!"



There were three flaring kerosene lamps in front of Sheb's, one to each side and one nailed above the drunk-hung batwing doors. The chorus of Hey Jude had petered out, and the piano was plinking some other old ballad. Voices murmured like broken threads. The gunslinger paused outside for a moment, looking in. Sawdust floor, spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables. A plank bar on saw-horses. A gummy mirror behind it, reflecting the piano player, who wore an inevitable piano-stool slouch. The front of the piano had been removed so you could watch the wooden keys whonk up and down as the contraption was played. The bartender was a straw-haired woman wearing a dirty blue dress. One strap was held with a safety pin. There were perhaps six townies in the back of the room, juicing and playing Watch Me apathetically. Another half-dozen were grouped loosely about the piano. Four or five at the bar. And an old man with wild gray hair collapsed at a table by the doors. The gunslinger went in.



Heads swiveled to look at him and his guns. There was a moment of near silence, except for the oblivious piano player, who continued to tinkle. Then the woman mopped at the bar, and things shifted back.



"Watch me," one of the players in the corner said and matched three hearts with four spades, emptying his hand. The one with the hearts swore, handed over his bet, and the next was dealt.



The gunslinger approached the bar. "You got hamburger?" he asked.



"Sure." She looked him in the eye, and she might have been pretty when she started out, but now her face was lumpy and there was a livid scar corkscrewed across her forehead. She had powdered it heavily, but it called attention rather than camouflaging. "It's dear, though."



"I figured. Gimme three burgers and a beer."



Again that subtle shift in tone. Three hamburgers. Mouths watered and tongues liked at saliva with slow lust Three hamburgers.



"That would go you five bucks. With the beer."



The gunslinger put a gold piece on the bar.



Eyes followed it.



There was a sullenly smoldering charcoal brazier behind the bar and to the left of the mirror. The woman disappeared into a small room behind it and returned with meat on a paper. She scrimped out three patties and put them on the fire. The smell that arose was maddening. The gunslinger stood with stolid indifference, only peripherally aware of the faltering piano, the slowing of the card game, the sidelong glances of the barflies.



The man was halfway up behind him when the gunslinger saw him in the mirror. The man was almost completely bald, and his hand was wrapped around the haft of a gigantic hunting knife that was looped onto his belt like a holster.



"Go sit down," the gunslinger said quietly.



The man stopped. His upper lip lifted unconsciously, like a dog's, and there was a moment of silence. Then he



went back to his table, and the atmosphere shifted back again. His beer came in a cracked glass schooner. "I ain't got



change for gold," the woman said truculently.



"Don't expect any."



She nodded angrily, as if this show of wealth, even at her benefit, incensed her. But she took his gold, and a moment later the hamburgers came on a cloudy plate, still red around the edges.



"Do you have salt?"



She gave into him from underneath the bar. "Bread?"



"No." He knew she was lying, but he didn't push it. The bald man was staring at him with cyanosed eyes, his hands clenching and unclenching on the splintered and gouged surface of his table. His nostrils flared with pulsating regularity.



The gunslinger began to eat steadily, almost blandly, chopping the meat apart and forking it into his mouth, trying not to think of what might have been added to cut the beef.



He was almost through, ready to call for another beer and roll a smoke when the hand fell on his shoulder.



He suddenly became aware that the room had gone silent again, and he tasted thick tension in the air. He turned around and stared into the face of the man who had been asleep by the door when he entered. It was a terrible face. The odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma. The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of those who see but do not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.



The woman behind the bar made a small moaning sound.



The cracked lips writhed, lifted, revealing the green,



mossy teeth, and the gunslinger thought: �C He's not even smoking it anymore. He's chewing it. He's really chewing it.



And on the heels of that: �C He's a dead man. He should have been dead a year ago.



And on the heels of that: �C The man in black.



They stared at each other, the gunslinger and the man who had gone around the rim of madness.



He spoke, and the gunslinger, dumfounded, heard himself addressed in the High Speech:



"The gold for a favor, gunslinger. Just one? For a pretty."



The High Speech. For a moment his mind refused to track it. It had been years �C God! �C centuries, millenniums; there was no more High Speech, he was the last, the last gunslinger. The others were  - Numbed, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a gold piece. The split, scrubbed hand reached for it, fondled it, held it up to reflect the greasy glare of the kerosene lamps. It threw off its proud civilized glow; golden, reddish, bloody.



"Ahhhhhh... "An inarticulate sound of pleasure. The old man did a weaving turn and began moving back to his table, holding the coin at eye level, turning it, flashing



it.



The room was emptying rapidly, the batwings shuffling madly back and forth. The piano player closed the lid of his instrument with a bang and exited after the others in long, comic-opera strides.



"Sheb!" The woman screamed after him, her voice an odd mixture of fear and shrewishness, "Sheb, you come back here! Goddammit!"



The old man, meanwhile, had gone back to his table.



He spun the gold piece on the gouged wood, and the dead alive eyes followed it with empty fascination. He spun it a second time, a third, and his eyelids drooped. The fourth time, and his head settled to the wood before the coin stopped.



"There," she said softly, furiously. "You've driven out my trade. Are you satisfied?"



"They'll be back," the gunslinger said.



"Not tonight they won't."



"Who is he?" He gestured at the weed-eater.



"Go �C "She completed the command by describing an impossible act of masturbation.



"I have to know," the gunslinger said patiently. "He - "



"He talked to you funny," she said. "Nort never talked like that in his life."



"I'm looking for a man. You would know him."



She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet gleam that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to itself. A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited. She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth.



"You know my price," she said.



He looked at her steadily. The scar would not show in the dark. Her body was lean enough so the desert and grit and grind hadn't been able to sag everything. And she'd once been pretty, maybe even beautiful. Not that it mattered. It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb. It had all been written.



Her hands came up to her face and there was still some juice left in her �C enough to weep.



"Don't look! You don't have to look at me so mean!"



"I'm sorry," the gunslinger said. "I didn't mean to be mean."



"None of you mean it!" She cried at him.



"Put out the lights."



She wept, hands at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not because of the scar but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not head. The pin that held the strap of her dress glittered in the greasy light.



"Put out the lights and lock up. Will he steal anything?"



"No," she whispered.



"Then put out the lights."



She would not remove her hands until she was behind him and she doused the lamps one by one, turning down the wicks and then breathing the flames into extinction. Then she took his hand in the dark and it was warm. She led him upstairs. There was no light to hide their act.