Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  Ayatas crawled to the opening and studied the main room of the saloon, which was lit with two lamps, one on either side. A piano was on one wall. Roughhewn round tables made from broken wagon wheels with boards atop them were everywhere. Stools and a few chairs were scattered. A small stage took up the space beneath the stairs to the upper floor. On it stood a man, part Mexican, wearing a fancy suit and two guns on his hips. There was an air of ownership about him, the saloon owner, surely. He watched as the two white men carried the bound woman up the stairs. She was kicking, fighting, screaming behind the gag. Ayatas could not help her. He remained in place, watching, learning the room the woman was placed in—room seven at the hall’s end. The white men carried her in and shut the door. The sound of blows and muffled crying followed.

  The other men were each poured a shot of whisky by the saloon owner, who said, “Turner, you sure—”

  “I’m sure.” Turner was slim with a curling blond mustache and blond hair slicked back. His clothing was expensive, his boots shiny. He pulled two cigars, offering one to the saloon owner, and snipped off the ends with a small silver clipper. The two men lit their cigars from a taper placed in the flame of the nearest lamp.

  “If you want her back,” the saloon owner said, “I’ll make sure she comes away a more contrite and pliable female. The women sold through this house are valued up north and eager to pleasure a man.”

  Turner said, “I’ve had enough of her sass. And her money’s mine now, so I don’t need her. According to the sheriff, law’s on my side.”

  Turner was the man who had held the buckboard reins. Ayatas studied him the way he studied prey when he was jaguar. Turner had delicate hands, un-calloused with rounded nails. He was dressed in city clothing, the kind Ayatas had seen in San Francisco, worn by the wealthy. This man had taken his wife’s property, her gold, and had sold her into abuse.

  The saloon owner was part Mexican, a handsome man with a pockmarked face. He had grown wealthy on the labor of women slaves. Ayatas had heard the words himself. He would tell his Everhart woman. They would decide what to do.

  Ayatas stayed for an hour, listening to the men talk. Long enough to learn the name of the stolen ranch. Carleton’s Buckeye Springs Ranch. When the men left, Ayatas tried to get into room seven, but the door was locked and he did not have a key. So he disappeared into the shadows, following the buckboard to the ranch. It was only three miles away, a short run.

  Dawn came quickly, and Ayatas had already checked the horses when the liveryman and his sons arrived. The sore place on the leg of Etsi’s mount was better, the heat pulled out by the liniment. Their piss smelled healthy, and their eyes were bright despite the days with low water rations. The liveryman began shoveling out the stalls, giving the horses hay, feed, and fresh water. Knowing that the mounts were cared for, Ayatas wrapped his scarf around his waist to help hide the weapon he wore strapped to his leg and went in search of the inn. His Everhart woman was still asleep, so he left word with the small Mexican child who came to the door, and sought out the bakery. He approached the back door and knocked.

  A large woman came to the door and looked him over, head to foot. Her skin was white; her lips were full and fleshy. She smelled of wood smoke, sweat, and sourdough, and she mopped her face with an apron she pulled up. It was already warm in the desert air, and the heat in the room where she toiled was stifling from the wood-burning stove and oven. She dropped the apron and heaved a breath. “Not Apache. Not Ute. What are you?”

  “I am a man.”

  The white woman blew out a breath. “A traveling storyteller, full of comedy. What tribe, injun?”

  “Tsalagi or Chelokay. Cherokee as you might say the tribal name.”

  “Long as you ain’t Apache, I don’t care who you are. Apache killed my father when we first came out west.” She waited, as if to give him time to think and speak. Ayatas shrugged with his shoulders as the whites did. White men had claimed and invaded lands that belonged to others. The people who lived there had fought back. People on both sides died. The white man was winning that war. There was nothing else to say, and the white woman would not understand his reasoning. Those who grieved seldom did.

  “You want food?” she asked gruffly. “I got fresh loaves coming out of the oven shortly. Fifty cents for a fresh wheat loaf. Yesterday’s bread is half that, and I got one left. Dime for a square of cornmeal.” She held out her fingers in a square to show him the size. “I can toast the bread, and I got eggs I can skillet-cook, mix ‘em up with yesterday’s beans, five cents for three.”

  “Your prices are low.”

  “I charge three times that for the ranch hands.” She pulled off her kerchief and finger combed the sweat-damp hair. It was gray and wet with sweat. She leaned against the jamb of the door, resting. “Ranch hands pay more for my cooking. People like you eat cheap.”

  People like him. Nonwhites, so long they were not Apache. Or perhaps men who had bathed and were not drunk. Ayatas tilted his head, wanting clarification. “You charge more to feed a white man?”

  “Cowboys are always drunk and causing trouble, so they pay more. You have a problem with that, I can charge you more.”

  “No.” Ayatas waved one hand between them, as if to wave away the smoke of a fire. “Cornmeal bread and three eggs with beans. Yesterday’s please.” He pulled the necessary change from a pocket that held little and gave the coins to the baker.

  “Coming up.”

  “Thank you, baker of bread.”

  “Name’s Mrs. Lamont.” She shut the door in his face.

  Ayatas sat on the stoop to wait and to think about women and their power in the world. They were often weak because of childbirth and because of the blood they shed each month to bring life. But when they were no longer burdened with children, they were stronger than any man. The baker, Mrs. Lamont, ran the only place for many miles where the men of the land could go to buy bread. The baker would be a woman with influence and power in the town, even though the male leaders would not know it. His mother and his grandmother had been such women of power. He had been gone from Indian Territory many years. He did not know if they still lived.

  The door opened and Mrs. Lamont handed him a tin plate wrapped in a frayed cloth. Ayatas took the offered food and bowed his head. “Thank you, Mrs. Lamont.”

  “Leave the cloth on the hook by the door and the plate on the step when you’re done. The chickens’ll peck it clean.” She shut the door, and Ayatas sat back on the stoop. He ate with his fingers, and the food was delicious, filled with salt and spices and red peppers. When he was done, he wiped his hands clean on the cloth, hung it on the hook, and placed the pan on the stoop. As soon as he did, four laying hens and a small rooster raced out from beneath the house and attacked it, pecking at each other as often as at his leavings.

  Hunger satisfied, Ayatas decided to look over the town. It was the biggest place he and his fire woman had been to since they went to San Francisco. He had been lost there. Surrounded by wealth and filth, amazing things to buy, countless new things to eat, many different ways to live, and dead men lying in the streets. He never wanted to go back. He and Etsi stuck to the smaller settlements where she could gather information and send it to the newspaper that paid her half pennies for the words she sent in. The stone and adobe town of Agua Caliente was small and cleaner than most places white men lived. Someone here knew how to build a decent latrine, and the abundance of hot water meant clean people and clean clothing. The hot springs meant wealth would come.

  A prospector riding a mule, leading a heavily laden donkey, passed him at a slow walk, tin pans tied to the pack on long tethers, clanking softly. A woman wearing a starched blouse beneath a well-mended waistcoat and full skirts swept by him, carrying a satchel. A cowhand lay in a pool of vomit in a small alley, his pockets turned out. Three children passed, faces clean, clothes mostly so, metal lunch tins dangling, heading for school. He passed the church, its shutters closed; the saloons, which stank of piss, alco
hol, and vomit; the site of the inn, walls rising as stonemasons and bricklayers were already at work, trying to get as much of the day’s construction completed as they could before it became too hot to labor. They would sleep in the heat and return to work in the cool of evening.

  He had the layout of the town in his mind, a mental map that told him where the wealth was, where the power was, and where the poor and the victims were. He returned to the inn and sat in the street to wait, as was expected of people of his race. Fortunately, a small screwbean mesquite tree had grown up, and it cast some shade.

  “Are you sleeping, Aya?”

  “Dreaming of you, my Igohidv Adonvdo.” Ayatas didn’t open his eyes, but let a small smile cross his face.

  “And if I had not been alone and you had been overheard?”

  “The white men in this town would have dropped me into tar and then rolled me in the feathers of Mrs. Lamont’s chickens. I would have shifted into my jaguar to heal. And then I would have killed them all.” He opened his eyes and smiled up at her. Her face was no longer as taut as when he first met her, her eyes not quite so brilliant blue, her hair not so fiery, but she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Though she always wore a hat, her face was tanned and lines fanned out from her eyes. She smelled clean again, and her hair was down in a long braid. “Beautiful woman, such torture would have been worth this single vision,” he murmured.

  “Oh, pish.” But she blushed like the girl he remembered. “Come. Walk with me. What have you discovered? The wind told me you have been out and about for half the night.”

  Her magic was the power of the air, and it would have told her. Ayatas stood, his body long and lean, lithe as the day he left the tribal lands. He took his place a little behind her, his hands behind his back. Etsi wore her dark blue dress and matching short jacket with a white shirt. She carried a matching dark blue parasol and wore a wide brimmed hat against the sun. Her gloves had been washed overnight and were nearly white again. Her leather shoes scuffed the earth, and her skirts swung with the motion of her strong legs. She smelled of the blue flowers she loved, lavender.

  Etsi said that barring accident, she was likely to live to one hundred years of age, which meant that if he could keep her safe, they might be together for many years. While he … Skinwalkers never aged. He still looked like a young man of less than twenty years.

  Speaking softly, he told her about the men at the baths. About the captive woman and her vile husband. Described the Peacock Saloon and the location of room seven. He shared about Mrs. Lamont. About the workers and the inn. Described the ranch and the town to her.

  “Dreadful,” she murmured when he was done. “But it will make a wonderful story.”

  His Everhart woman sent in stories of the Wild West to the newspapers of the east, using the name E.V.R. Hart, stories that were a strange mixture of truth and lies and were called fiction. When the newspapers published her stories, Etsi made much money. E.V.R. Hart had been approached by a publisher about writing a novel set in the Wild West, and she had begun the story. His best memories were the two of them at the fire at night, while she read the day’s words aloud.

  “Did you hear the name of the rancher’s wife?” she asked.

  “He called her Amandine. His name was Jessup Turner.”

  “Interesting names for the owner of Carleton’s Buckeye Springs Ranch. I postulate that Amandine’s father owned the ranch, and when he died, he willed it to his daughter. And when she married, the husband assumed ownership. Let’s take a walk out toward the ranch before the sun is too hot so that I might visit my dear old friend Amandine. Then perhaps I’ll stop by Mrs. Lamont’s bakery and ask some questions.”

  “Perhaps,” Ayatas said, amused.

  “You have your gun?”

  “It is strapped to my leg inside my pants, hidden beneath my shirt and scarf.” Ayatas wore his shirt outside his pants in the Tsalagi warrior way, tied with a scarf that could double as a turban, and could be tied about his neck when he shifted shape, so he might carry his clothing to dress in when he shifted back. Today, he wore boots, which they had purchased in San Francisco, but his moccasins were tied in his scarf, and his skinwalker necklace was tied around his neck, strung with the teeth and bones of predators. Should he need to shift, to fight or heal, he could choose from among several big cats, a gray wolf, and a young boar. He preferred the jaguar. The cats were strong and swift, though rare in the desert. As they walked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat trickled down his spine and darkened Etsi’s clothes.

  It was near ten a.m. when they reached Carleton’s Buckeye Springs Ranch. The house was long and lean, with thick adobe and stone walls and narrow windows that kept out the heat. There were arches in the Spanish style around the wrap-around tiled porch and plants in large clay pots. He called to the house, and when the door was opened, he stepped into the shade and passed the small child the business card of his Everhart woman. The card summoned a small, pretty, dark-skinned woman in an apron who told them that Mr. Turner was out on the range.

  Etsi pulled on her magic.

  A small dry whirlwind sprang up, bright and hot, and entered the house. A moment later Etsi’s words and magic had convinced the housekeeper that she was an expected visitor. The girl told Etsi a tale of woe about the troubles of the ranch as she let them into the coolness to wait.

  A man took a fast horse to find Mr. Turner while the maid brought tea to the study where Etsi insisted she be allowed to wait. Ayatas was given a metal cup of water and sat on the cool floor in front of the closed study door, the place a man of his color and race would be expected to wait. In reality, he was his Everhart woman’s lookout and guard while she searched the office and desk for important papers and evidence of Amandine’s past.

  A little over an hour later, he heard horse hooves coming at speed. He scratched on the door. Etsi opened it a crack and said, “This man is a rascal and a scoundrel. I think he’ll make a wonderful story for back east. I’m ready to bring him down,” she said.

  “You will be cautious,” he murmured as the sound of boots rang on the front tile stoop.

  “I most certainly will not.”

  Ayatas sighed. Etsi made a harrumphing sound and closed the door. Moments later, the man who had sold his wife entered and stomped to the back of the house to wash up and to use foul language to the pretty housekeeper. And to hit her. Ayatas placed his hand on the hilt of his knife, ready to help the woman, but Turner slammed a door and stomped toward the study, Etsi’s business card in his hand. The white man ignored him as trash. It galled Ayatas when fools though him unworthy of notice, but it was a useful tool.

  The door opened, and Turner started to speak, but Etsi demanded, “You will tell me where my dear friend Amandine is, Mr. Jessup Turner, and you will tell me this instant.”

  “Who the bloody blazes are you, and what kind of woman works for a newspaper?” He spun the card across the room.

  Ayatas caught the door with one hand and slid inside, into the shadows behind a chair. The door closed softly on its own. The room was dim, but his eyes had adjusted. Turner’s eyes had not or he would not be still standing in the room. Several strands of Etsi’s hair had come free from her bun and from beneath her hat, and they spun in the wrath of her magics, a slow tornado about her head.

  A cool breeze blew through the room, carrying the smell and tingle of power. “Amandine and I graduated together from San Francisco Girls’ High School in 1865. Now that I am out of mourning for my dear departed husband,” her voice trembled as if she had begun to cry, “I was invited to visit her and her father at their ranch, to do a story on the daily life of a young female rancher. And as my publisher’s own daughter went to school with us, he was most eager to send me. As of our last correspondence, all was arranged. However, I arrive and poor Mr. Carleton is dead and buried, and Amandine is both married and missing, all in a matter of two months.” She lifted a hand as if to wipe away a tear. “All my … wealth is no protect
ion against the vicissitudes of life and fate.” The power of compulsion surged through the room. “You must tell me what has happened,” she finished.

  Ayatas smiled into the shadows. She had told the man that her whereabouts were known to the wealthy back east, and that she had wealth of her own, yet was foolish enough to travel into dangerous territory. His fire woman appeared to be in need of protection. A victim. Which she was not nor ever would be.

  “My dear Mrs. Everhart, my heart breaks to tell you that my father-in-law died only last month after a horse fell on him. It was most unexpected and sad for us all. Yet yesterday’s news has proven much worse. Please be seated.” He indicated the leather sofa where Etsi had been sitting, and when she sat again, he sat beside her and took her hand. Ayatas gripped his knife at the man’s presumption, though Etsi did not indicate that she needed his help.

  “There is no good nor kind way to speak the news,” Turner said. “Amandine and her personal servant rode out into the desert to bring me a picnic dinner yesterday. She never returned. I and all of my men have been out searching for her, all night and all day. All we found was a dead horse and a place of struggle. I fear a mountain lion or a small band of Ute or Apache may have taken her.”

  “Oh. Oh no! What did the sheriff say to the attack? We saw him in town last night. He wasn’t leading a search? This is truly dreadful. You must tell me more!”

  Ayatas smiled and listened as the man wove a tale of lies, and what his fire woman called seduction—his words leading her to trust when there was nothing to trust at all. As they talked, Ayatas slipped from the room and learned the layout of the house. He found the room where Turner slept. He found the location of the ranch’s gun collection. He discovered that the housemaid was covered in bruises and cried softly in a tiny crevice of a room at the back of the house. He controlled his rage. Wrath would help no one.