Cities of the Red Night

  I pack the clothes and toilet articles into the bag.… fishhooks, leaders, sinkers, lines, floats, minnow seine.

  Now for the guns. Colt Frontier six-inch barrel 32-20 caliber, a snub-nosed 38 inside belt holster (this I pack in the bag), double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. I look at the lever-action rifles.

  “It would be handy to have a 32-20. Same shells for pistol and rifle. Anything around here need a heavier load?”

  “Yep. Bear. It isn’t often a bear attacks … when he does, this”—he tapped a box of 32-20 shells—“would just aggravate him.”

  He paused and his face darkened. “Something else needs a heavier load and longer range.…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Folk across the river.”

  I picked up the Colt 32-20 and holster. “Any law against packing a gun in this town?”

  “There’s no law in this town, son. Nearest sheriff is twenty miles from here and keeps his distance.”

  I loaded the gun and strapped it on. I picked up the Gladstone bag.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  He calculated rapidly. “Two hundred dollars and forty cents plus a two-dollar delivery charge. Sorry about that. Things keep going up.”

  I paid him. “Much obliged. Delivery buckboard leaves at eight tomorrow morning. Best get here a bit early. Likely think of a few more things you’ll need.”

  “Any place to stay here?”

  “Yep. Saloon Hotel three doors down.”

  Drugstore next door. Old Chinese behind the counter. I bought tincture of iodine, shaving lotion, permanganate crystals for snakebite, a tourniquet, a scalpel, a five-ounce bottle of opium tincture, a five-ounce bottle of cannabis extract.

  Saloon Hotel. The bartender had russet hair and a face the same color. A calm slow way about him. Two drummers at the bar drinking whiskey, talking about the rising wholesale cost of fencing. One fat and clean-shaven, one thin with a carefully trimmed beard. Both of them looking like they stepped out of an old photo album. Poker game in one corner. I buy half a pint of whiskey and a stein of beer and carry them to a table. I measure myself some cannabis extract and wash it down with whiskey. I pour myself another shot, sit back and look around. A boy turns from the bar and looks at me. He is about twenty with a wide face, eyes far apart, dark hair and flaring ears. He has a gun at his hip. He gives me a wide sunlit grin and I push a chair out with one foot. He carries a glass of beer over and sits down. We shake hands.

  “I’m Noah.”

  “I’m Guy.”

  I hold up the bottle of cannabis extract. “Want some?”

  He reads the label and nods. I measure it out and he drinks it with a splash of beer. I fill two glasses with whiskey.

  “I hear you’ve rented the Camel shack on the river,” he says wriggling his ears.

  “That’s right.”

  “Could you do with some help fixing it up?”

  “I sure could.”

  We drink in silence. Frogs croaking outside. It’s dark when the bottle is finished. I call to the bartender.

  “Got anything to eat?”

  “Passenger pigeon with corn bread, hominy grits and fried apples.”

  “Two orders.”

  He steps to the end of the bar and taps on a green panel. The panel opens and the Chinese from the drugstore looks out. Bartender gives him the order. When the food comes we eat ravenously. Time travel makes you hungry. After dinner we sit, observing each other with impersonal attention. I can feel the chill of silent space and for a second we see our breath in the air. One of the drummers shivers and looks around at us then turns hastily back to his whiskey.

  “Shall we take a room?” I ask.

  “I’ve got one already.”

  I pick up my bag. The bartender hands him a heavy brass key. Number 6, second floor. He goes in first and lights a kerosene lamp on a table by the bed. Room contains a double bed with brass bedstand, faded rose wallpaper, a wardrobe, two chairs, copper luster washstand and pitcher. I see a Gladstone bag like mine but this one has seen a lot of wear. Travel-stained, the stains unfamiliar. We take off our guns and hang them on the bedstead.

  “What caliber?” I ask.

  “32-20.”

  “Same here.”

  I point to a rifle in one corner: “30-30?” He nods.

  We sit down on the bed and take off our boots and socks. Smell of feet and leather and swamp water.

  “I’m tired,” I say. “Think I’ll turn in.”

  “Me too. I’ve come a long way.”

  He blows out the kerosene lamp. Moonlight streams in through the side window. Frogs croak. An owl hoots. A dog barks in the distance. We take off our shirts and pants and hang them on wooden pegs. He turns towards me, his shorts sticking out at the fly.

  “That stuff makes me hot,” he says. “Shall we camel?”

  When I wake up sunlight is streaming in the front window.

  We get up, wash and dress and go down to the bar for a breakfast of ham and eggs, corn muffins and coffee. We walk up to the store, where a youth of fifteen or sixteen is loading the buckboard. He turns and holds out his hand.

  “I’m Steve Ellisor.”

  “Noah Blake.”

  “Guy Star.”

  The boy wears a Colt Frontier at his hip.

  “32-20?”

  He nods. He has russet hair and skin the same color. I figure he must be the son of the saloonkeeper. I go into the store and buy a slicker, mess kit and bedroll for Guy, a two-man tent, a can of white paint with three brushes, a bushel of apples, corn on cob and three stools. We give the Ellisor boy a hand loading the gear, climb in back and sit on the stools. The boy takes the reins and we move off down the road. When we come to the turn the boy points to the saloon.

  “Get some bad hombres in there sometimes. Not that he wants their custom. They come anyway looking for trouble.”

  I remember the pale gray eyes of the saloonkeeper and wonder if he is related to the store owner in Far Junction.

  “Yep,” the boy says, reading my mind, “brothers. Only two families hereabouts, the Bradfords and the Ellisors … except for those who come in from outside.…”

  “Anybody else on the riverfront?”

  “Two Irish and a girl if you could call her that … end house by the inlet … expecting more visitors in a few weeks.…”

  “These bad hombres you mentioned. Where they come from?…”

  “Across the river.” He points. I can make out the outlines of a town through the morning river mist. “When the fog lifts you can see their fucking church sticking up.” The boy spits. He stops in front of my shack.

  “I could help you fix the place up.… Just one delivery to make down the road.…”

  “Sure. We could do with some help.…”

  “Would a dollar be too much?”

  “Sure not.”

  “All right. I’ll drop the gear off and be right back.…”

  Guy and I get out with broom, mop, bucket, carbolic solution and washrags. Guy goes to river with bucket. Up steps, new hinges for screen doors, new screening for door and front porch. Unlock door which is heavy oak. Heave old stove into brambles followed by coffeepot, bean and tomato cans, preserves. Guy is back with a bucket of water into which he pours carbolic. He is mopping up bathroom and cleaning toilets while I sweep. Under the dust the floor is yellow pine in good condition. Yellow pine paneling on walls and ceiling. Trapdoor leads to attic.

  Guy is cleaning table and shelves when the Ellisor boy returns with buckboard. Boy unhitches horse and hobbles the strawberry roan.

  Now to unload in sequence. We don’t talk, we know what to do. Water container by stove. Fill container from two five-gallon cans. Fill boiler with river water. New stove on table. Fill stove with kerosene. Fill burner under boiler with kerosene, put in new wick. Groceries and cooking utensils on shelves and stove and nails. Mattress and blankets on walnut bedstead. Trunks along wall, bedclothes packed in trunks, Gladstone bags out of t
he way in the attic. We take off our shirts. Steve’s body is red-brown like his face. Guy’s body also tanned but tanned in overlaid blotches like dab painting.

  “Star tan,” he tells me.

  Steve and Guy start screening the porch. I take ladder outside and scrape the walls for paint. Old paint comes off easy. One wall scraped. Screen door on hinges, porch half-screened. Time for lunch. Lemonade, apples, flapjacks. Screening finished on porch. New screen for the two side windows. Scraping. Painting. No wasted movements, no getting in each other’s way, no talking. Time laid out in screening, painting, putting things away in trunks, storing cases of food and ammunition in attic. At four o’clock we are looking at a neat house, white and shining like a ship in the afternoon sun. I mix a copper-luster pitcher of lemonade. We go out and sit on the porch steps. There it is in the afternoon sun, a white church steeple with a gold cross on top. I can see the mean pinched hate-filled faces of decent church-going women and lawmen with nigger notches on their guns.

  Steve retrieves the bean and tomato cans I have thrown away and puts them up on a beam of the loading shed about thirty-five feet from the porch steps. He walks back towards us, pivots in a crouch, draws, aims, and fires, gun held in both hands and extended at eye level.

  SPLAT

  A tomato can explodes dripping tomato juice down the beam. Steve sits down. Guy stands up, draws, and aims and fires.

  SPLAT

  Bean can explodes.

  I stand up, arms relaxed, both eyes open. Look at target. See bullet hit. Release draw mechanism. Gun jumps into my hand.

  SPLAT

  We fire six rounds each and reload.

  Smell of black powder, smoke, beans and tomatoes. Steve gets a shovel from porch corner, walks around by side of house tapping ground with his feet. He stops and digs, fills can with earth and thick red worms. We get three lines on spools with hook, leader, float. Guy and I take our 30-30s. We walk down road to the tributary which is about forty feet wide at junction with river. As we pass the end house I see three people sitting on the porch which is overgrown with vines. A dark Irish boy grins and waves. Sitting on either side of him are a boy and girl, obviously twins. They both have casques of bright orange hair and blank inhuman expressions. They wear green shirts and pants and yellow shoes. They look at us, faces twitching. Across the inlet the road continues overgrown with weeds and bushes. I start to take out my line. The boy shakes his head.

  “Catfish here.”

  He leads the way along a path through undergrowth by the inlet. A water moccasin thick as my arm slides into the water.

  “Here.”

  We stop by a deep blue pool, bait hooks and drop lines in. In a few seconds floats are jerked down out of sight and we are pulling out bass and jack salmon. We are cleaning the fish when I hear a deep growl. We turn, picking up 30-30s. Twenty feet away a huge grizzly stands on his hind legs, teeth bared. Cock guns.

  Click

  Click

  Steve slides his Colt out. We freeze and wait. The bear drops to all fours, growls and lumbers away. As we pass the end house I see that there is no one on the porch but the door is open. I call from the road.

  “Want a fish?”

  The dark youth comes to the door naked with a hard-on.

  “Sure.”

  I toss him a three-pound bass. He catches it and goes back inside and I hear the fish slap flesh and then a sound neither animal nor human.

  “Strange folk. Where they come from?”

  Guy points to the evening star in a clear pale green sky.

  “Venusians,” he says matter-of-factly. “The twins don’t speak English.”

  “You speak Venusian?”

  “Enough to get by. They don’t talk with the mouth. They talk with the whole body. It gives you a funny feeling.”

  We light kerosene lamps, cut boneless steaks off two jack salmon. While the fish cooks, Guy and I drink whiskey and lemonade.

  There is a hinged table with folding legs attached to the wall opposite the stove. We sit on stools, eating the jack salmon which is perhaps the best pan fish in the world if you prefer the more delicate flavor of freshwater fish. We sit on the porch in the moonlight looking across the river.

  “Be all right if they stayed there and minded their own business,” Steve said.

  “Ever hear about smallpox minding its own business?” Guy asks.

  The boy slept between us light as a shadow. Thunder at dawn.

  “Have to get started. The road floods out.”

  Smell of rain on horseflesh. The boy in a yellow slicker and black Stetson waves to us and whips the horse to a trot as rain sluices down in a gray wall.

  We make a pot of coffee and sit down at the table. We sit there for an hour without saying anything. I am looking at two empty stools. Going zero, we call it. A gust of wind knocks at the door. I open the door and there on the porch is the boy with orange hair from End House. He is wearing a slicker and carrying a gallon can. He points to a five-gallon can of kerosene in a corner of the porch. I get a funnel and fill his can.

  “Inside? Coffee?”

  He steps warily into the room like a strange cat and I feel a shock of alien contact. He twitches his face into a smile and jerks a thumb at his chest.

  “Pat!” He ejaculates the name from his stomach.

  He throws open his slicker. He is naked except for boots and a black Stetson. He has a hard-on straight up against his stomach. He turns bright red all over, even his teeth and nails, an idiot demon from some alien hell, raw, skinned, exposed, abandoned yet joyless and painful like a prisoner holding up his manacles, or a leper showing his sores. A musky rotten smell steams off him and fills the room. I know that he is trying to show us something and this is his only way to communicate.

  The words of Captain Mission came back to me.

  “We offer refuge to all people everywhere who suffer under the tyranny of governments.”

  I wondered what tyranny had led him to leave his native planet and take refuge under the Articles.

  The rain stopped in the late afternoon and we walked down to the inlet in a gray twilight and shot two wood pigeons from a dripping tree.

  A sharp sickening smell. In the middle of a red carpeted room I see a plot of ground about six feet square where strange bulbous plants are growing. Centipedes are crawling among limestone rocks and from under a rock protrudes the head of a huge centipede. I arm myself with a cutlass and someone I can’t see clearly picks up a piece of firewood. I kick the rock over but the centipede digs deeper and I can see that it is huge, perhaps three feet long. Now it is under my bed and I wake up screaming. I know that I must make preparations for a war I thought had ended.

  PLEASE TO USE STUDIO POSTULATED TO YOU

  We arrive at Ba’dan around midnight local time. The space front is stacked with garbage under sputtering blue arc lights. Garbage collectors’ strike. Someone is always on strike in Ba’dan.

  Smugglers of every variety are moored at Ba’dan. The skippers all get together at the annual Skipper Party and award a gold cup to the all-around “Vilest Skipper of the Year.” Skipper Krup von Nordenholz will win hands down. There are also cops of every variety making deals with the skippers and arresting anyone who doesn’t have the fix in.

  We hail a cab. “Where’s the action here, Pops?”

  “Wal, I reckon you boys want to go to Fun City. Better pick up some artillery first.”

  He stops at a neon-lighted all-night gun shop. The shopkeeper has all the old western models and some of the newfangled double-action 38’s. These guns shoot an aphro charge that can disable or kill. Neck and heart shots are fatal, stomach, solar plexus and genital hits are knockout shots.

  Audrey selects a snub-nosed 38 in a quick-draw holster. Pu slips a 41 Derringer into his vest pocket and straps on a Smith & Wesson 44.

  “It’s a much better load than the 45, old sports.”

  Fun City is on a plateau that falls steeply on one side down to the river that sepa
rates Ba’dan from Yass-Waddah. On this slope is a vast casbah—the houses are connected by catwalks, trapdoors, and tunnels—that contains the largest per capita criminal population ever seen anywhere. Ba’dan breaks a lot of records.

  We walk into a leather bar called the Stretch Nest. A goodly crowd is there—four feet deep at the bar, waiting in line for openings at the gambling tables, going up the wide red-carpeted stairs to private hanging rooms followed by waiters with trays of drinks and buckets of champagne.

  The usual costume is boots and chaps, bare ass and crotch. Some have tight-fitting chamois pants up to midthigh and shirts that come to the navel. Many are naked except for boots, gun belts, and hang-noose scarves. Nooses dangle every ten feet from a beam down the center of the room.

  A hang fistfight draws a circle of cheering onlookers, as two kids smash each other in the face—lips cut, eyes black, noses broken, spurting blood. One kid is down—he tries to get up and falls on his side.

  The winner bends down and ties his arms with a noose scarf. Next thing, the kid is hanged and his semen spatters the bar. The bartender wipes it off with his bar rag.

  Now an old rooster, strapped into his corsets, comes in a-gunning for some kids to hang at his debutante daughter’s coming-out party. He settles on Pu who has seen him a-coming and has the Derringer palmed.

  “Fill your hand, you young varmint,” the old gun drawls. Pu shoots him in the neck with the Derringer and he falls farting and shitting, the corsets bursting off him.

  “Lucky thing he had his clothes on, old sports.”

  A naked fifteen-year-old sticks his head in the bar. “The Clantons and the Earps is shooting it out at the O.K. Corral.”

  A great bestial whoop goes up from the bar. The patrons shove and jostle out past hanged corpses, slipping in sperm. And they head for the O.K. Corral … there it is and right beside it a gallows that can service thirteen at a time.