Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  A persistent tapping at Imala’s right knee pulled her from her thoughts.

  She looked down. Three grains of sand, one red as the devil, one black as night, and one pale as the moon, rattled with insistence. She scooped them into the palm of her hand, and they chased each other in dizzying circles.

  Imala would never be alone, so long as she had the sands to keep her company.

  2

  Railroad

  Matthew J. Hockey

  August 1885 – Harker’s Hill – Dunnswood County – Dakota Territory

  Carson dismounted his horse and flipped open his filigree pocket watch. He’d timed the ride perfectly. It was exactly thirty minutes to midnight. The bluff above town afforded him an unrivalled view of the whole valley, dark at this time save for the fires burning in the isolated gold claims out in the pines.

  He muzzled the horse and tied the reins to a tree; it had taken many months to train the animal to keep quiet once they were up there. He installed himself in the camouflaged blind that he’d built at the specified location between the lumber camp and the third loop of the river. He settled down to wait for exactly thirty minutes as per the instructions the previous Station Master had given him the day he landed.

  He checked the straps on the satchel hidden in the hollow tree stump at the center of the blind. Once he had satisfied himself that they hadn’t been tampered with, he concentrated on the vigil proper. The satchel was full of ladies’ clothes for the next Station Master: a smock, winter coat, boots, and a bonnet. Buying them had been a great exercise in deception. He’d had to invent a sister out east as an excuse for the seamstress at Kim’s general.

  It was a town of tongues: tongues that gossiped, tongues that tattled, and tongues that told outright untruths. A bachelor, a bachelor living alone in a ranch house, a bachelor all alone in a ranch house without cattle, dogs, or any interest in the town’s one prostitute, buying women’s hosiery no less. God knows what they’d say about him.

  He hoped they would fit her, whoever she was. The only things he knew about her were that she was a woman and that she had set off two minutes behind him. Now sixteen months later, he was still waiting for her to arrive.

  He’d ridden the horse up onto that bluff every night without fail, always to the same spot, always at the same time. He hadn’t missed one night in sixteen months. Sixteen months. Four hundred and eighty-five nights of rain, mud, wind, snow, stinging wasps and horse bites and all, so far, for nothing. Always the same flat silence. Always the same uninterrupted darkness.

  The thirty-minute window closed for another night. He snapped the pocket watch closed. He mounted the horse, whipped it to a fair clip, and headed for his stead. He rode the first four miles before realizing he was not looking where he was going; the horse was guiding them through dense woods, over estuaries, and down steep ravines. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the sky, off the stars.

  He watched the stars whenever he got the chance; he had never seen anything so beautiful. Where he was from, he was lucky if he saw even one star through the clouds and the lights, yet there on the horse, in that moment, the sky was so full and so bright that there seemed to be barely a gap between the galaxies. As if space was vibrant and meaningful instead of the cold, dead emptiness he knew it to be. He held onto that thought. He held onto it until his fingers were blue.

  He arrived home, stabled the horse, and hung his gun belt on the doornail. He checked every room of the house from the parlor up into the attic, then he checked them again. No intruders. No bogeyman under the bed. He shuttered the windows, drew the curtains, locked the doors, and let the fire die in the hearth. Even in the dark, he held his breath before taking the chest from its place in the earth wall of the cellar. He unlocked the chest with the key from the chain around his neck. Inside was a gunny sack, inside that a Smith and Wesson ammunition case, inside that a box of matches and his watch.

  He struck a match, the last in the box, and used it to light a foul-smelling candle. He sat cradling his watch in the shifting light. It was a Casio digital with a black rubber strap and buckle. Its screen was gray and lifeless, its battery long since dead and irreplaceable in this timeframe. He would never throw it away, could never throw it away. It was the only tangible proof that he was not insane. He came to be with it at least once a day. On bad nights, he would come down every hour just to hold it and rub his thumbs across it. He had long since worn the decals to illegible hieroglyphs.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when he went to bed.

  Friday came and he made his weekly amble into town—‘town’ being a big word for what was essentially just a few buildings sprung up round a well and a crossroad. There was a clapboard stable, part horse-trader, part smithy, complete with a belching stack that painted the air rust red for miles around. There was a post office and telegraph center, Kim’s general, and Tabatha T’s mercantile. No sheriff. No mayor. No politics save for that which spilled out the doors of the saloon “The Diamond Hostelry.” He didn’t let himself go in there, not since the first time. He’d ended up drunk and holding long, fully coherent discussions on all sorts of scientific topics. It had taken a long time to rebuild himself as the harmless boob after that.

  The town’s children ran out to gawk at him as he rode in. They pointed and laughed as they always did. His horse didn’t suit him; it was far too big for such a short man, and he had to jump to get off it. It was flighty and nervous even on the calmest of evenings, prone to biting if its impatient hoof stamps were ignored. That, in part, was the reason why he’d gotten it so cheaply from the stableman; its previous owner had been shot out of the saddle, and the experience had left an ugly brown powder mark on its temperament. He chose it precisely because they were so incompatible. He’d seen it bucking around the paddock like a dog with its ass afire and pointed. “Yessir, that’s the one.”

  Like the frayed elbows of his shirt or the loose waist on his trousers, the horse was just another brush stroke to the impression he was trying to convey. Ask anyone in Harker’s Hill, and they’d say he was a harmless, maybe even dull-witted, recluse.

  He drew up outside Tabatha T’s mercantile. The door had a few lovingly tended bullet holes; they were twenty-year souvenirs from the taking of some forgotten road agent who had plagued the valley. The road agent was dead, the triumphant lawmen were dead, and Tabatha T was dead longer still. These days the shop was run by a family of Germans who had never met the old crone but kept her name over the door. They had rather judiciously decided that Schneidermann-Adlersflügel might be hard for the locals to pronounce.

  The sheer variety of goods inside always amazed him: .65 rifle ammunition butted up against imported European candies, sacks of coffee beans spilled onto a delicate photographic apparatus, the shop’s trained bird hung talon-deep from strings of smoked sausage. Clocks, fuses, taxidermy, maps, naval charts, opiates, and children. Children. Children. Children. The German family could not stop having children. Though from the look of them, they were both pushing sixty.

  “Good morning?” the storekeeper said. Carson wasn’t sure if it was a greeting or a heart-felt question. The storekeeper had never really mastered inflection.

  “Good. How’s your wife?”

  “She’s just swell. Just swell. Somebody came in asking about you.”

  “About me?” He turned his back, pretending a sudden interest in a display of non-patented remedies, boxed cataplasms for helping women get through the monthlies.

  “Ja. He asked for you by name. Wo ist Carson? Wo ist Carson? He was very insistent, sniffing around like a dog after a dead skunk.” The shopkeeper came around the counter and kicked one of his daughters from where she was eavesdropping. She ran outside laughing.

  “Did he look a good sort?” Carson piled his things on the countertop, and after a moment’s tabulation, he added a box of .44 Russian to his haul as casually as he could.

  “He smelled of witch-hazel and wore an outmoded hat. Between you and I, I think
he is being a Pinkerton.” The shopkeeper clapped and wriggled on the spot.

  “Which would make you an outlaw, no?”

  “I take it you didn’t tell him anything? What I look like? Where I live?” He placed his money on the counter.

  “Of course,” the shopkeeper said. Carson’s sigh of relief strangled in his throat. “I even drew him a map. He took a room in the Diamond, not slept there but once by all accounts.”

  Carson left the store, a paper bag gripped in one fist and the two dollars walking jerkily over the knuckles of the other. One of the shopkeeper’s sons had joined the daughter on the duckboards out front. Carson waved the money in their direction, and they looked up from the dead rodent they were examining.

  “You little’n’s seen that new fella around, been asking questions on your pa?”

  “We seen ‘im,” the freckled girl said, hands tucked into her dungarees.

  “Two dollars says you can’t follow him, find where he goes, who he visits with.”

  “Two dollars each?” the boy said, high color in his cheeks like scarlet fever that never went.

  The girl slapped the boy quiet.

  “Two dollars gets you four days. If’n you want us any longer than that, the price is one dollar a day,” she said.

  “One dollar up front. You get the other the first time you tell me something good.” Carson told her. They shook and he knew from the girl’s handshake that one day she was going to turn her pa’s store into an empire.

  The kids scattered and he rode home, taking a strange route and stopping every now and then to check his back-trail. A low down sick feeling started in his underparts and didn’t show any sign of stopping.

  The next day, he awoke to a hammering on his front door. He’d slept with his Schofield model 03 pistol next to him on the nightstand; he took it down and held it tight as he squatted with his ear against the keyhole. The knocks were coming from stomach height. He laughed, hid his gun in a sash at his belt, and opened up.

  It was the oldest of the shopkeeper’s daughters. She was carrying a baby of no more than a year with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for toting sacks of coal.

  “Morning Mattie,” he said.

  “That ain’t my name,” the girl stepped inside. “It’s Lizzy.”

  “I know that. Just a little joke of mine,” he said. “You got here alright then?”

  “Sure. Everybody knows the Carson place.” She put on an arch, Germanic voice supposed to be her father. “You kinder better behave, or Mr. Carson will get you.”

  “Cute,” he said. “You thirsty? I only got coffee.”

  “That’ll do it.” She looked away from him then, his purpose served, and set about changing the baby into fresh duds. He came back from the stove with two tarnished tin mugs. The girl drank a big gulp, and though it obviously burned her, she tried not to show it.

  “We found your man,” she said.

  “What does he look like?” He put her dollar on the table.

  “Like he don’t eat none. Nor sleep neither. And what you call these?” She grinned and pointed to the lines that appeared from the sides of her nose down to her chin.

  “Nasolabial creases,” he said before quickly changing his mind. “Laugh lines.”

  “Yeah them. He had real deep ones of them. He weren’t old though. Hair still black.”

  “Has he been back to his room?”

  “Maybe. Not while we was watching. I got three of my brothers on it. There’s a big rock out back, and if you stand on it, you can see right inside. His stuff’s there, but he hasn’t so much as glanced at it.”

  “What stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Bags. A… like what my ma calls her Valise. Keeps all her knickknacks in it from when she used to live in Germany.”

  “That’s good work. Worth every cent. There’ll be a bonus if you answer me this. If they aren’t sleeping in their room, where are they sleeping?”

  The baby cried; the girl picked it up and went to the door.

  “Soon as I know, I’ll come back for another dollar.”

  She set off on her long walk with the baby crying on her shoulder. After she had gone from view, he realized that he was sad she’d left. It was one of the few conversations he’d had that had lasted more than a few minutes.

  Lizzy came back the day after. She didn’t have the baby with her this time and had a smug smile on her face. She strode in with her hands on her hips, picked up the coins, and slid them into her bib pocket.

  “He’s bivouacked down in Werner’s wood. Him and another fella… a nigger,” the girl said, seeming to enjoy the special flavor of it.

  “Don’t say that word.”

  “Why not? That’s what he is.” The girl’s brow creased up, and her lips pursed.

  “No, he ain’t. He’s a person. Like you and me.”

  “But… you’re white. I’m white.”

  “Only hateful and ignorant people use that word, and you aren’t either.” He ruffled her hair to show her no hard feelings. She brushed his hand away.

  “I just thought I’d let you know is all. They’re set up away from the road near the big lightning-struck oak.”

  He gave her another dollar, enough to buy all the candy in her father’s store four times over. She walked as far as the doorway, then stood shuffling her feet. She was trying hard not to say something.

  “Spit it,” he said, it was like popping a balloon.

  “I seen your book on the table and… well, I weren’t snooping, I promise. I just wondered if maybe you needed somebody to show you how to read on account of you being backward is all.”

  “And I suppose that’d be you would it? Show me how to read.”

  “I read just fine. A missionary learned me how last year gone, and I didn’t tell nobody because my brothers would have beat me, so I never got a chance to read nothing but the Bible.” She took a huge gasp and waited.

  “Let you in on a secret? I read just fine, too, and I got plenty of books that ain’t the Bible.”

  “Show me,” she said, almost mocking. He motioned her to a chair and picked the nearest heavy book off the table.

  “The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Chapter one. The arrival at Marseilles. On the twenty-fourth of February, 1815, the Marseilles port lookouts signaled that the three-master Pharaoh was coming up the harbor…” He tried to put the book down at the end of the paragraph, but she twirled her hand for him to keep on. And he did keep on. He kept on for hours, stopping only when it got time for him to leave for his vigil. She promised to be back the next day. He offered to walk her back to town, but she ran off hooting before he could get his boots on.

  He felt eyes gaping on him as he waited in place, though whether they were real or his own paranoia, he couldn’t tell. Either way, nothing happened.

  The next day he made the effort to cook a proper breakfast; he rustled a few eggs from the coup out back and fried them on the skillet. They tasted so good that as soon as he had finished sopping up the last of the busted yolk, he went outside and rustled himself two more.

  He boiled water and washed up his plates, and once he’d done that, he cleaned the big pile of dishes that had been gathering for months by the back door. Where before he had seen character in the unkempt corners of his house—the unmade bed, the cobwebs in the corners, the weeds growing up round the windows—now all he saw were faults to be corrected. He busied himself all morning and then partway into the afternoon. Sweeping dust into the yard, beating out rugs, and straightening furniture. When Lizzy arrived, he was up a ladder clearing an abandoned bird’s nest from the eaves.

  “Didn’t your momma ever tell you that’s bad luck?” she hollered behind him. He startled and had to grab the coving to keep from falling off the ladder.

  “Didn’t your momma ever tell you there ain’t any such thing as luck?”

  She had a few bits and pieces to report. The two men didn’t have horses and were getting low on supplies; she surmised
that they’d be making a trip into town within the next day or two.

  “That’s real fine. Have you managed to get a looksee in that room yet?”

  “I’m fair shamed to admit I haven’t. I do have a plan though. Lyle, the innkeeper’s son, well, he’s kind of sweet on me. He’s two years younger, but I said I’d trade him a kiss on the cheek for ten minutes snooping.”

  “Lizzie, I don’t want you doing something like that on my account.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it was entire on your account. Lyle isn’t bad to look at.”

  He rushed her through the rest of the report so he could read her the next part of the book. He’d made his front room out to look like Dantè’s cell. It hadn’t taken much effort; there was barely any furniture in there to begin with. The first reading had been stiff and awkward, but this one was flowing and theatrical—he paced up and down the room as he talked, flourishing his arms, and putting on different voices for the characters. Lizzy loved it. She laughed at the right parts, cried at the right parts, and toward the end, she took the book from his hands and stumbled over a few chapters. She read well, but she mangled many of the longer words and ended up throwing the book across the room in frustration.

  His days went on like that. He’d tend the house and garden in the day, read in the afternoon, and then ride up onto the bluff at night. Here and there a tiny mention of the two men intruded on his routine. Inconsequential details mostly; the black man had the crown of his hat repaired, the white man went into town for a sack, nothing useful.

  “Did you ever get into his room?” Carson asked.

  “No. Lyle ended up welching on our agreement. I seen in the white man’s bags though. They was dumped out in the street when he never came back for them. Empty. Always been empty. Still got the store ticket on one of them.”

  Weeks went by like that. They evolved a system for their readings. They’d each take a turn reading aloud; their turns lasted as long as they could go without stumbling or making a mistake. Then the other one would take over. It took a long time for her to realize that he was tripping on purpose, though once she had calmed down, she didn’t really mind.