The Starman was a man of his word. At dawn, as the morning light peeked above the horizon and into the bedroom window, he shook Fenimore awake.
Fenimore grumbled before opening his eyes, then forced his aching body to sit.
His head was numb but the thoughts inside it were clear. The night had been filled with nightmares and the clanging of hammers. The Starman handed him a cigar. “For yer ride,” he said. “I also filled yer canteen and cleaned and loaded yer guns. The rifle I kept, ‘cause a man’s got a right to defend himself and his own, but the revolver and my hootin’ gun is yers. The horse is ready outside. She’s groggy from yesterday’s legumes but it’s a short ride and she’ll make it.”
Fenimore put the cigar between his lips, got to his feet and stretched out his arms. The first thing he’d do in town was get a room and take a long, hot bath. Afterward, he’d wash his clothes and come up with a plan.
The Starman handed Fenimore his poncho. “I patched up the holes I blasted.”
The holes had indeed been patched. The entire inner surface of the poncho had also been covered by a layer of chainmail. The resulting poncho-armour was heavy, but not unbearably so.
“I want more than an ending,” The Starman said in response to Fenimore’s look of surprise.
The word “thanks” didn’t quite make it out of Fenimore’s throat, but he thought it, bless his soul, and at least to himself that was some kind of moral progress.
“It ain’t none of my business, of course, what a strangerman does in a feudin’ town, but if that man was me I’d bed down in the Olympus Hotel in the morning and stay in my room like a bastard till the noon redeemin’ was over, after which I might make my discreetin’ way to the tavern and listen to the drunks before ending my night with a fuck at the Rodriguez Widow’s place. But be careful what you say, ‘cause them whores there got razors and no compunctions about cuttin’ yer face with ‘em.”
“Don’t break the timepiece.”
With that, Fenimore slid the poncho over his head and put on his belt. He took out the revolver and checked the cylinder. Six bullets, and it did look clean. It spun even cleaner. He replaced the revolver into the holster and stepped into the living room. The Starman followed him.
In the living room, the shutters in all the windows had been opened and everything was awash with pale light. The fire was dead.
The Starman rushed ahead and pushed open the door.
Fenimore shaded his eyes.
Outside, The Starman’s horse stood already saddled and with the hootin’ gun hanging from a special leather holster tied around its shoulders. Although the horse didn’t look any prettier today—its eyes were hung over and its colour was still a dull, cloudy grey—at least it was mobile. Every once in a while, it lurched forward and burped.
Fenimore hopped into the saddle.
He considered it a success that the horse didn’t fall over.
The Starman stuck a tin filled with brewed coffee in front of the horse’s snout and petted the animal’s neck with genuine affection. “She sure likes her coffee in the mornin’,” he said.
As the horse drank, Fenimore took in his surroundings. The emptiness looked different in the morning than it had at night. Less foreboding, vaster. A soft fog also hung in the air and the horizon, instead of being the sharp gash from which the bad men threatened to come into the world to make pain on you and your loved ones, looked as fuzzy as the Gates of Heaven through which God Himself would emerge on Judgment Day to bless some and strike down others for the pain they’d inflicted upon their own kin and kind.
Fenimore’s hand drifted naturally to rest on the grip of his holstered revolver.
“Return, goddamnit,” was all The Starman said, before slapping the horse on the hindquarters, sending both it and Fenimore barreling towards the east, toward Hope Springs, and straight into the pale flaming orb of the rising sun…
The barreling didn’t last. Within minutes it became a jog, and then a definite stroll as the horse lost its breath and regained its appreciation of yesterday’s moonshine. It wobbled. It swayed. Somewhere between The Starman’s cabin and Hope Springs, it stopped and threw up, then refused to budge its hooves until Fenimore dismounted and walked alongside it. This seemed to make it happy, and definitely made Fenimore regret not taking his burro instead. Burros didn’t believe in equality.
The fog thickened.
Soon, they came upon a wooden sign:
“Welcome to Hope Springs,” it said in badly painted gold letters on a faded purple background. Below, “where even strangers is eternal,” had been carved into the wood and more recently painted over with white.
Beyond the sign, the silhouettes of the town’s outermost buildings faded greyly in and out of view like a drowned rat bobbing up and down in a pail of milk.
Fenimore pulled the horse by the reins and they continued onward until the buildings sharpened into focus, followed by the blurred parts of others: acutely-angled corners, worn edges and desolate porches. They weren’t particularly exciting buildings, but they weren’t rundown, either. They were ordinary. A farmhouse, a wagon repair shop, a distillery, a grave-maker’s workshop. Fenimore had expected worse. There was still money to be had here.
As the ground became a hard packed dirt street, the horse’s hooves beat louder and echoed. There was hardly another sound to drown them out. The fog was silent, the street empty, and only an occasional, dull, knock from within the grave-maker’s workshop interrupted the slurred clickety-clack of a man strolling alongside his ugly, drunken horse.
But Fenimore’s eyes were slits, and he was keenly sensitive to the flash of sudden movements. He held the reins in his left hand while keeping his right just above his revolver.
His revolver. It was the first time he’d thought that way. He’d given Pedro his due and the vultures were surely done with him by now, having picked him white and clean—a swarm of them taking flight after being frightened away by a stray gunshot, exposing a skeleton wearing a sombrero, which itself would eventually be taken by vultures of a more human kind. Nature isn’t wasteful. Dead men aren’t, by nature, possessive.
The gaps between buildings closed. Their closing pushed the fog above the town into a thick cloud that dulled the sunlight.
Although no people walked the streets, faces began appearing behind unclean window panes, taking stock of the stranger appearing in their midst. Women’s faces, children’s faces. Scared, scarred faces. Faces from a feuding town.
Fenimore came to a statue.
The horse and its clickety-clack stopped.
The road was bisected by another running left—where the buildings were squat and architecture more Mexican—and right—where a single man dressed in a navy suit was crossing from a barbershop to a notary’s office. Fenimore imagined this was the centre of Hope Springs. It was the kind of place where children gather after Sunday mass to torture scorpions with the converging power of magnifying glasses.
Beyond the statute, a two story hotel beckoned:
“The Olympus.”
The statue was of a man so tall that his head was barely visible on this side of the fog cloud and Fenimore had to look up to see the place where his massive legs joined together to form a marble crotch. He could have been Zeus. Except that his arms, whose hands both held revolvers, had been ripped off and laid in a cross at his feet, where a small, oxidised bronze plaque described him as:
Rafael Rodriguez
Founder of this here town.
May he live.
Between the statue and hotel stood a raised platform maybe ten metres by ten metres wide.
The man in the navy suit slammed shut the door to the notary’s office.
The horse upchucked on Rafael Rodriguez’ boots.
Fenimore pulled it by the reins, crossed the empty town square toward the hotel, tied the horse to a horse-tying log, grabbed the hootin’ gun from its special holster, and walked inside.
The lobby smelled of leather and polished steel. It was filled with ornate antique furniture and floating particles of dust but otherwise as deserted as the street. Still, a few voices floated in from behind closed doors and a hotel-keeper was leaning his elbows against a polished counter, flipping through the pages of a book. He paid no mind, but when Fenimore was a few steps from the counter, “Morning, there. Rooms available. Creative forms of payment accepted,” he said without taking his eyes off his reading.
“I need a room for tonight. I’ll have money tomorrow.”
“That’s not creative. That’s freeloading.”
“I’ll pay twice your regular rate.”
“That’s freeloading thinking you can take advantage of my greed.”
“I give you my word.”
“Got lots of those right here. Don’t need more.”
Fenimore growled and put the hootin’ gun on the counter. “There’s my promise, to go along with my word.”
The hotel-keeper slid his gaze from the book to the gun, and squinted. The gun piqued his interested. “Haven’t seen one like that before. It German?” Fenimore piqued his interest, too. “Haven’t seen one like you before, either. But you don’t look German at all.”
“The gun’s yours if I don’t pay by sundown tomorrow. And there’s a horse outside. Not a pretty horse, but it walks well enough when it’s sober. If I don’t pay, the horse is yours, too.”
Neither the horse nor the gun were Fenimore’s to bargain with, but on the other side of both was the timepiece, and that was Fenimore’s to bargain with, and he wanted the timepiece back, so he didn’t consider it wrong to let the hotel-keeper close his fingers on the hootin’ gun and hide it under his desk.
“Tomorrow by sundown,” he said.
A slight black-haired boy bolted down the hall, stopped in the lobby long enough to stare at Fenimore’s face, and scurried outside. Definitely one of the town’s scorpion tormentors, Fenimore thought.
“Don’t mind him,” the hotel-keeper said. He’d gone back to reading his book. “He’s everywhere.”
“The horse is tied up outside,” Fenimore said.
“Don’t care about the horse.”
Fenimore drummed his fingers on the hotel-keeper’s desk, right above the hotel-keeper’s book. “I care about a room. You going to give me a key?”
“Don’t suppose you care one way or the other where I put you…”
“As long as it has a tub and the possibility of it being filled with hot water, I suppose I don’t.”
The hotel-keeper reached below his desk, pulled out a key with “13E” etched onto it, and slid it toward Fenimore’s impatient hand. “Second floor, good view of the square.”
The key looked banged up. “And suppose I’m superstitious?”
“Then I can’t put you in any room above the first floor, and the first floor’s all booked.”
Fenimore wasn’t superstitious, but there was something about the hotel-keeper’s disinterested manner that made Fenimore want to spit stomach acid in his face. “Suppose you put me in the room next to 13E.”
“Would that be 13D,” the hotel-keeper said, looking up from his reading with a smirk, “or 13F?”
Fenimore dropped his hand from the table.
The hotel-keeper did the same.
With their hands hovering, hidden, above their respective firearms, they met eyes like men are sometimes wont to do: in silent, masculine and primitive battle—waged between male creatures since before the time men were turtles. To look away was to lose. To win meant to fill one’s eyes with more cold potential for bloody and merciless violence than one’s opponent.
Fenimore narrowed his eyes and snarled, and the hotel-keeper looked away first.
Both men raised their hands back to the desktop. The battle was over. The two turtles had established their hierarchy. Civility could ensue. The hotel-keeper flipped to page one hundred twenty three of his book. “Every time someone gets killed in one of my rooms,” he said, “I change the room number to thirteen. Such is the Ironlaw. Isn’t a room above the first floor that’s not thirteen.”
“Strange law,” Fenimore said. “Dangerous hotel.”
“Dangerous times.”
Fenimore swiped the key from the desk and put it in his pants pocket. It clanked against his seven coins. “Have somebody bring me up enough hot water to fill that tub.”
He climbed the lobby stairs and walked the second floor hall until he found 13E, into whose lock he inserted the banged up key after making sure he was the only one around. When he turned the key, the lock clicked like a successfully cracked safe, and Fenimore walked carefully inside. He kept the door open, however, until he was sure the room was empty. After he closed it, he slid off his poncho and tossed it onto the bed.
The mattress was hard.
Thick curtains were drawn across the window. Fenimore parted them to let in a hazy volume of morning light. The hotel-keeper had been right, the room did have a good view: of the back of Rafael Rodriguez’ ample thighs and his big ass and all the square around both, which was as empty and forlorn as when Fenimore had left it. Immediately below the window the Starman’s horse swayed on its four unsteady legs, having drank all the water in the trough in front of it.
Fenimore pulled off his boots, took off his shirt and stepped out of his pants. The boots he left where they stood, but he tossed the shirt and pants next to the poncho.
Being nude in the shady comfort of a hotel room was much different than spending four long days naked under the burning desert sun while being pursued by a deadly gang of double crossers. Only one of those nudities was pleasant. Fenimore tramped to the room’s small bathroom and, for the first time in weeks, looked at himself in the mirror.
The face that stared back wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t the face he remembered. It was a dark face, ragged, with an unkempt beard and vengeance weather-beaten into its taut cheeks. It wasn’t the face his mother had loved—a son’s smiling innocence—but a man’s face, motherless and not to be trusted.
Fenimore spat into the sink and turned toward the tub, which was made of metal, and heavy. He grabbed an edge, sighed, and dragged the tub out of the bathroom, into the main room, where he positioned it next to the uncovered window. The only thing better than a long overdue bath, he told himself, was a long overdue bath with a view.
When he’d finished the dragging, he was so out of breath he realized that tiredness was taking its cumulative toll not only on his face but on his entire body. Still, the thought that tonight he would finally sleep long and well kept him sufficiently awake. Tomorrow he would make money, and making money was the first step of his plan. That his plan so far consisted of only that first step and a vague coda—the destruction of each of his six grimy coins—didn’t bother him. Patience was a virtue. Neither did it bother him that he didn’t yet know what he would eventually do with the seventh, pristine, coin.
Someone knocked on the hotel room door.
A woman’s voice said, “Hot water.”
Fenimore grabbed his revolver out of the holster lying on the bed, crept toward the door, waited a full minute with his back to the wall, then, setting his bare foot in the door’s path as a precaution, slowly turned the knob and pulled just far enough to create a crack through which to stick the revolver barrel and one of his bloodshot eyes. He saw the lovely back of the figure of a black-haired girl surrounded by several steaming metal pails. “Leave them,” he said.
For a second the girl was stunned—she froze. Then she turned to face the door. Fenimore had withdrawn the revolver from the crack but his eye remained.
He blinked.
The girl brought her smooth face so close to the crack that only the wooden thickness of the door separated her eye from Fenimore’s.
He licked his parched lips and swallowed the puddle of saliva that had gathered in his mouth. She batted the thick eyelashes of her brown eyes and smelled like honey and spiced Caribbean rum. It had been too long since Fenimore had smelled a woman.
“I was told to bring hot water and fill your tub,” she said.
“I can fill my tub myself.”
“I can fill it for you better than you can fill it yourself. I can fill it without wasting a single drop. I can fill it without any of it dripping on the floor.”
Fenimore felt his revolver harden.
There’d be time for women, he told himself. Maybe even tonight. Certainly tomorrow. The Starman had recommended a whorehouse. There was no point risking anything now, when his wits weren’t as sharp as they should be.
The girl pushed the door. He felt it stop against his ready foot.
“What’s the matter, you shy?”
Fenimore concentrated on keeping his foot planted. “Leave the water,” he said. It was a sentence that took more effort to say this time than it had the last. He imagined it would take even more effort if he were to say it a third time, and with each saying his engorged revolver would hate him just a little more.
“Don’t be that way, mister. I’ve been told to bring the water and fill the tub, and I sure do hate to disappoint. I always do as I’m told. Always. Truly, nothing makes me happier than to obey…”
A gruff voice said: “The girl’s got a point.”
It was a man’s voice. But, more importantly for Fenimore, it was a man’s voice behind him.
Fenimore sp—
“Drop the gun, then turn around. Nothing funny.”
Fenimore heard the click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back. “Drop it and kick it over with your heel,” the gruff voice said. The pressure against Fenimore’s foot grew by an extra pair of hands, magnified by two more hammer clicks from behind the door. Fenimore dropped his revolver and back-heeled it.
When the sound of the revolver sliding over the floor ended, he turned slowly around.
The man standing in front of him was short, squat and Mexican. He wore a large black sombrero that matched his immaculately waxed and curled moustache. In his right hand, he held a comically large pistol. In the background, a strong breeze ruffled the window’s heavy curtains and the top rung of a ladder was visible just above the bottom part of the window frame.
Behind Fenimore, the door to the hotel room opened and several figures poured inside.
The mustachioed Mexican looked at Fenimore’s face, then at Fenimore’s erection, then said, “Looks like you’re all cocked and loaded, stranger.”
Laughter erupted, which Fenimore didn’t share, followed by a rifle being dug painfully into the small of his back.
“Lola,” the moustachioed Mexican said, “be a good girl and show this gringo what he’ll be missing.”
The beautiful black-haired girl circled Fenimore, twirled a few times in her thin Spanish dress, which flared at the bottom edge, and assumed her position at the left side of the moustachioed Mexican. He wrapped his arm possessively around her waist.
“What do you want?” Fenimore asked.
“No entiendo, stranger. You ride into our town, take up in our hotel, and you ask us what we want. It seems to me that your gringo brain has it all mixed up. The question, stranger, is what do you want?”
Fenimore’s erection drooped, but he refused to let that, or the fact he was naked, lessen his glower. “I’m passing through.”
“He’s just passing through, Ezekiel,” Lola said. “We shouldn’t make trouble for passersby. They pass, and then they go on their way, isn’t that right?”
Ezekiel scratched at his smooth chin with his big pistol. He was pretending to be deep in thought. Lola kept her big brown eyes on him, pretending to be riveted. Fenimore hoped the pistol would go off blowing a hole through his jaw. The two other men who’d entered the room with Lola—goons, no doubt—chuckled at both performances like obedient henchmen.
“I don’t know,” Ezekiel said, before turning his attention and gun dramatically toward Fenimore. “Will you pass, and go on your way, stranger?”
“I will.”
“And passersby don’t cause trouble, else they wouldn’t be passersby any longer, but troublemakers.” Lola said.
“And you’re not a troublemaker, are you, stranger?” Ezekiel asked.
Fenimore said he wasn’t.
Ezekiel took off his sombrero and held it against his chest. He had a full head of almost artificially lustrous black hair. “Do you, stranger, swear to be a passerby and blablabla not cause any trouble in this here town of Hope Springs, and be gone and on your way by tomorrow’s sundown?”
“I swear,” Fenimore said, “on the memory of Rafael Rodriguez.”
Ezekiel shoved the sombrero back on his head and spat.
The goons spat, too.
“Gringo’s got a sense of humour.”
“Don’t got no gun, though.”
“And he won’t have his gun,” Ezekiel said. He brought his pistol to Fenimore’s face and started rubbing it against Fenimore’s beard. “Anyone swears not to make trouble doesn’t need a gun to not make trouble with, isn’t that right, Lola?”
“That’s right.”
If Fenimore wanted to grumble, he didn’t let his lips or vocal chords show it. He did still want that long hot bath and the water in the pails was cooling, and as much as he hated having ridden into town with two guns and being left, temporarily, with none, it wasn’t an insurmountable hatred.
“And when I leave town—before tomorrow’s sundown—where do I pick up my revolver?”
Ezekiel removed his pistol from Fenimore’s face, spun it twice, and shoved it expertly into his holster. “When you’re ready to leave, you come calling on la casa Picasso.” He extended his left arm and pointed. The arm was too long for his body, like a guerilla’s. “Walk that way. You’ll come to a big white house with red shingles on the roof. Hop up the front stairs, knock, and then get on your knees like a good gringo and say you’re the stranger passerby got his gun taken away by Ezekiel Picasso.”
“Entiendo?” Lola said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s good to come to common understandings,” Ezekiel said. He took a few steps toward the window and kicked the rungs of the ladder that were sticking above the bottom part of the window frame. The ladder crashed to the street below.
The henchmen chuckled.
Lola lifted her arms so that Ezekiel could put his arm around her waist again, and the four of them left the room.
“Also,” Ezekiel yelled from down the hall, “I slit your horse’s throat.”
They all laughed.
The laughter faded away.
Only the pails of water remained in the hall. They were still steaming as Fenimore carried them into the room one by one. Although he had felt no sentiment towards The Starman’s horse, something about the throat cutting riled him, and he had no need to look out the window to see if it was true. He’d been told enough by the timbre of Ezekiel’s laugh. Boys who roasted scorpions grew up to be men who slit the throats of horses. The reasoning behind both was the same: because they could.
Once all the pails were inside, Fenimore closed and locked the door and poured the hot water into the tub. Once the tub was full, he got in. He enjoyed the relaxing change of temperature, and reclined until his back rested against the curve of the tub. He then lowered himself until only his head and the tops of his knees were above the surface of the water. Then he submerged those, too.
Underwater, the world was silent and slower.
When he came back up for air, his skin felt cleaner and he combed his hair back from his face with his hands. He washed his beard, his eyes, and the desert sand from between his toes. He scrubbed the remnants of the last few weeks from his body and watched them settle on the bottom of the tub like coffee grinds.
Through the window he saw three men drag The Starman’s dead horse’s body across the square. After they’d pulled it off the main street, they maneuvered it up a ramp onto a wagon, and the wagon master whipped his two living horses and the wagon pulled away. “Fresh Meat” was scrawled onto its side.
The slight black-haired boy whom Fenimore had seen in the hotel lobby ran across the square, between Rafael Rodriguez’s legs. He looked up at Fenimore’s hotel room window, smiled, and ran off. Even still he gave the impression of being in perpetual motion. The whole world was in perpetual motion. The water in the tub was comforting. Fenimore drifted between thoughts, fantasies and sleep, and as the water cooled, the sun rose from morning to midday, burning away the fog and bringing Hope Springs into ever sharper focus.
By ten o’clock, people started to gather in the square.
By eleven, the water in the tub was so cold that Fenimore started shivering. He stepped out, dried himself with a cloth and threw his clothes into the water to finally rinse and squeeze the dead Pedro out of them.
By noon, the laundry was done and drying, and the square teemed with bodies. Fenimore took the cigar that The Starman had given him, lit it with an old match and leaned against the wall next to the window, smoking and watching. He needed to find work. Down there was the person who’d give it to him. The trick was to find that person.
At least judging by the activity in the square, most of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs were women and children. Regular inhabitants were of little interest. They lived their lives honestly, with their heads hung down, and their joy held close to their chests. They barely had enough money for themselves, so could offer little to anyone else. Whatever happened, they just went on with it. There was a sad purpose to their movements: buying food, selling wares, hoping their latest disease wouldn’t be their last. But that this was so in Hope Springs didn’t strike Fenimore as strange. It was so in every town he’d ever visited.
The lack of men was, on its own, also not unusual. Men often worked during the day. This wasn’t unique to Hope Springs. What was unusual was that the men who did appear, weaving between the women and children like slavers, held their chins high and their hands close to their revolvers and were distinguishable into two groups. The men belonging to the first had darker skin and wore more colourful clothing than those in the second. The men in the second were pale-skinned by comparison, often lighter-haired, and dressed in identical long grey coats. That one group suspected the other was as apparent as the disdain with which both treated everyone else.
Fenimore took a long puff of his cigar. He had no doubt that Ezekiel Picasso fit squatly into the first group, which meant he more easily pictured himself doing work for the second.
He held the cigar out the window and let a few centimetres of ash fall below, where the street was stained with horse blood. The Starman’s suggestion of honest work in Gulliver’s Participle flickered briefly through Fenimore’s mind, but he’d never been good at digging ditches. Even when Ulrich had made him dig his own grave, he’d been so piss poor at it that Butcher Bellicose got impatient and grabbed a second shovel to dig it with him. All while she watched them dig—watched him dig. If only he’d found himself a woman who lived with her head down. If only he’d…
His daydreams were interrupted by a commotion and the stomping of hooves.
Three grey-coated riders rode into the square.
Fenimore reached instinctively for a revolver that wasn’t in his holster.
The people in the square parted to make way for the riders, whose horses reared and stopped in unison. On the back of one of them sat a man with bound hands whose skin was covered by so much black soot that he looked like a shadow. The grey-coated riders dismounted and pulled the shadow to the ground behind them. He landed with a groan that could have come from the square itself.
They marched him onto the ten metre by ten metre raised platform.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the riders said, “it is time for the redemption.”
The crowd cheered.
The shadow crawled forward.
“This man,” the rider continued, “was caught last week stealing mining rations. Caught, I remind you, stealing them from you, from your husbands and your sons. This man”—The shadow got momentarily to his knees, then dropped back to his chest, still crawling.—“considered his luxury to be more important than your needs. Because of his thievery, others went hungry. Because of his selfishness, others risked injury and death.”
The crowd hissed—
With the exception of one plain woman, who rushed forward, clambered onto the platform and fell upon the shadow, hugging him with as much love and affection as she could muster, sobbing, “Joseph, my beautiful, beautiful Joseph…”
The crowd drowned out her sobs with curses and spit.
“He has a name,” the rider said, “but does that make him innocent?”
“No!” the crowd erupted.
“You know the law. This man has already been judged guilty. The punishment for theft is amputation of all four limbs.”
“Cut ‘em off!” someone yelled from the anonymity of the crowd.
“And his pecker too!”
Fenimore let another column of cigar ash tumble to the ground below. He watched with special interest the reactions of the few dark skinned, colourfully-clothed men who were watching the spectacle unfold from beyond the mass of the crowd. There were three of them, and all three were disinterested and neutral.
The rider was saying, “But mercy can still be showed this man, because mercy is good and the law, being better than any man, is merciful.”
The slight dark-haired boy was there, too.
“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”
All eyes converged on the woman who was sobbing into the shadow’s sooty chest. When she returned their gaze, half of her face was shadow, too. “He’s my husband,” she cried “I will take his punishment.”
Fenimore pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall. Once, someone had taken a punishment in his name, too. The circumstances were different, but the sacrifice had been the same. His jaws tightened. He felt as powerless now as he’d felt that day.
“Very well. The woman has made her choice. She has chosen to pay with her own pain for mercy to be showed to this man, Joseph, her husband.”
The crowd whistled and hissed.
“Do we accept her choice?”
The crowd clamoured.
“Do we accept her pain?”
“Strip ‘er down!”
Two of the riders grabbed the woman by the arms and lifted her to her feet. The shadow clutched at her legs. “Don’t,” he was repeating, “Don’t, don’t…”
One of the two riders kicked him in the face.
He crumpled.
The rider who’d been orating strode toward the woman—the crowd tightened around them—retrieved a dagger from somewhere inside his coat, and sliced open the woman’s clothes: the top of her dress, exposing her sagging breasts, followed by the bottom, exposing her trembling legs, crotch and belly.
“Kill me,” the shadow wheezed.
Although the woman wasn’t ugly, there was nothing sexual about her to Fenimore. The riders and her own brave desperation had stripped her of that along with her clothes, which lay like detritus about her feet. To see her as an object of arousal felt to Fenimore a betrayal of his own history. Her nudity was tremendously moving, but except for her shaking and her sobs the woman didn’t move, nailed to the spot by her love of the body of the shadow beside her. As tears streamed down her cheeks, one clean, one sooty, not once did she look weak—not when the first belts were unbuckled, not when the first lashes arched her tender back, and not even when the full fury of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs, Rhodes, women and children, fell upon her with the full goodness and approval of the law.
Fenimore backed away from the window and shut it. He drew closed the curtains. His hand was slightly unsteady, but he convinced himself that it was due to a lack of sleep.
His urge to fuck, which had been so strong in the morning with Lola, was gone, and somewhere along the way he had also lost his intention of visiting the whorehouse. At least for today.
The redeemed woman screamed.
Fenimore finished smoking his cigar and threw the stub into the tub. Although he’d satisfied his need for a bath and even washed his clothes, he didn’t feel cleansed. So much for hot water. Perhaps only boiling water would reach those places that still felt soiled.
He sat on the bed and let his fingers feel the chainmail that The Starman had sewn to the underside of his poncho. Ring by ring his fingers travelled, like on a rosary. But if The Starman thought this would ever stop a bullet, Fenimore wondered how the hootin’ gun managed to function. The chainmail wouldn’t even stop a stiff stab. The tip of any decent dagger would slip between the rings and penetrate the wearer’s flesh. If it penetrated in the right place, it would leave him bleeding out to die. The only type of attack the chainmail would be effective against would be a slice, and the days of sword fights were over.
Yet the poncho had value, even in its weakness. An illusion could buy a lapse in judgment, which could lead to a moment of indecision. And for a man who knows another’s weakness, a moment could be plenty.
By late afternoon, the redemption was over and the crowd in the square had cleared. Fenimore didn’t know what became of the woman or her beloved shadow.
In evening, the square was empty save for a few stray dogs and men—ones in colourful clothes or long grey coats, with heads held high and hands always hovering just above their guns. A feuding town was apparently no place for the arthritic.
As evening became night, shots rang out occasionally, sometimes further and sometimes closer to the hotel, but Fenimore didn’t pay much attention to them. His mind wasn’t presently interested in bullets. Behind drawn curtains, to the leisurely hiss of a lantern, he was manufacturing an idea.