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“Mister… Mister, wake up.
Wake up,
I said.”
The old man’s eyes crack open, all cold and narrow. He’s quiet, probably waiting for Raoul to explain himself.
But how can he? In the blue desert moonlight streaming through the thick window, amidst the cricket songs, before the patient but annoyed gaze of the old man, his dreams dissolve into childish nonsense.
“Forget it,” Raoul wipes his nose and curls his lip without meaning to, and slips his knees off the creaking cot to crawl back to his side of the room. He hears a squeaking whine. When he gets to his own cot he turns around and sees the man’s turned onto his side now, the cot’s rusty frame shaking from the slight movement. Still he doesn’t say a word.
Raoul can’t stand to turn his back on a stranger, not one who sleeps with his weapon holstered by his hip, so he just stares back until the sound of crickets becomes unbearable.
“Bad dream, is all,” Raoul blurts out, “I coulda sworn something was trying to sneak in here.”
The old man’s mouth barely moves when he speaks:
“Something, or someone?”
“I don’t remember. Must be something in the food.”
“You shook me awake because you had a nightmare,” he says, and not as a question. Raoul answers anyway.
“Yeah. That’s why.”
“May I offer some advice?”
Raoul snorts, to hide his embarrassment.
“Yeah, why not.”
“The waking world gives a man enough to worry about. Don’t let the sleeping world trouble you.”
Raoul settles back into bed, pulling the thin blanket up to his chin.
“You don’t think it… means nothing?”
The old man shifts in the cot to lay on his back, paying no heed to the squealing metal. Raoul winces. Sounds like a pig’s scream.
“I think the only ones who give any meaning to such things are superstitious old women and traveling apothecaries. The former get their beliefs from the latter, who don’t believe anything in the first place.”
“My mama said sometimes dreams were God’s way of telling us something important,” Raoul offers.
“One would think He’d be less opaque with His messages. At the very least, He’d let you remember who was sneaking into this room.”
Raoul suddenly doesn’t like the old man and his easy arrogance.
“You think you know a lot, huh?”
The old man doesn’t answer for a while. They both stare up at the dusty rafters.
“I talk too much,” he finally says, “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s one of those vices which harm those around the sinner more than the sinner himself.”
Raoul almost ignores him, but the old man’s eyes roll away from the ceiling rafters to look straight into Raoul’s soul. He tries not to shudder.
“S’okay,” he offers half a shrug.
Even the crickets are falling silent, it’s so late. Raoul shuts his eyes. Goes through another round of nightmares. But in the morning he can’t remember what’s trying to get in.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Judge Pollicut shaves off a near-translucent slice of apple, brings the knife to his face and flops it between his lips. He slurps it into his mouth and chews twice before swallowing. Then repeats, like an apple-slicing machine. He doesn’t seem to care that the white fruit flesh grows more dappled with every new cut. Nor does he seem to notice the sheriff, the deputy, and two Yankee soldiers stationed like a chess set, perfectly spaced and motionless around his desk.
“Missus Boo-quette,” he begins. The new widow bristles at his butchered pronunciation. He seems to savor voicing the t-sound, and almost smiles before catching another soggy cut of fruit between his teeth.
“The sheriff told me you refuse to testify. What’s that about?” he asks mildly.
“I’d testify,” she says carefully, “But I’m an honest woman.”
Sheriff and deputy exchange smirks. She bunches her skirt in clenched fists, then releases and smooths it out.
“What’d you mean by that, dear?” the judge has gone through half the apple now, and he slides the knife across the whole plane of the fruit, the soft scraping noise irritating her frayed nerves further.
“I don’t lie,” she says.
“Nobody’s askin’ you to lie,” the deputy cuts in, “Just tell ‘em
exactly
what you saw.”
“I told you both, and a man is still in jail!”
“Because he’s a murderer,” the sheriff says.
“Actually,” one of the Yanks clears his throat. The others turn to him with fire in their eyes. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Mister Buquet, was it?” he doesn’t wait for her response, “His death was cholera. No doubt about it.”
“And I s’pose the Chinaman on the scene just fell from the sky,” the judge’s smile cracks, and shatters when he slices open his finger.
“The Chinaman broke in, probably found the fellow and panicked,” the Yank says, “Punish him for thieving if you want, but he did not kill Joseph Buquet. Not directly, anyway. Maybe he’s a carrier.”
“So he
did
kill him.”
The Yank, a medic, rolls his eyes.
“If we arrested people for spreading plague the jails would be full to bursting with his kind.”
“My husband was sick well before I found that man in my house,” she insists, “And it wasn’t cholera. I… I saw something.”
“Yeah, that mark on his neck,” the sheriff cuts in, “Cholera doesn’t explain that.”
“It’s a simple bruise,” the medic snaps back, “Could’ve been from anything.”
“Look, I don’t know what killed him,” the woman smooths her skirt down again, “I know who didn’t kill him, and that’s the Chinaman. I won’t testify when my words will be twisted against him.”
The judge sucks on his cut-open finger like a sullen child, eyes flicking to the sheriff. The sheriff shrugs.
“Missus Boo-quette, please allow the doctor to escort you to the lobby.”
The medic looks as displeased about this as she is.
“You as well, Captain,” the judge doesn’t even spare a glance to the other Yank, who just smiles patiently and shakes his head. The judge scowls at the little reminder of who’s in charge.
With the woman gone, the judge turns his seat to fully face the sheriff and deputy.
“What do you say, Sheriff?”
“Ain’t worth the trouble, is what I say.”
“Dep?”
“Agreed, Judge. No one’ll listen to a Mexican anyway, pretty as she is.”
“Don’t get too charmed with her,” the sheriff prods the young man with an elbow, and they snicker.
“And the Chinaman?”
“We have him locked up handily, sir. Noose is ready when you are.”
“Good. See if we can schedule the trial this afternoon.”
Meanwhile at the jail, the prisoner in question paces the length of his cell in two strides, so fast it’s like he’s just spinning in circles. His warden, a gawky creature barely broken into adolescence, watches him in fascination. The boy’s never been to a zoo or nothing, but the image of an antsy lion or tiger comes to mind. The pigtail even looks a bit like a cat’s tail. But the thought of a graceful cat is sort of ruined every time the boy sees the fellow’s face. It looks a bit like his uncle’s face, which for a little while after the war was the talk of the town because nobody knew how the man still lived without none of his breathing organs.
The prisoner stops and glares so the boy gets a too-good view of the man. What’s not missing is pockmarked, what’s not pockmarked is liver spotted, what’s not liver spotted is papery. Another thing about the man that was catlike were the eyes. They flash at the boy, who pulls out his weapon.
“Do it. Kill. It’s hardest the first time.”
He’s never heard a Chinese speak American, albeit with a heavy accent. Takes a second to chew on what the man said.
“Your eyes are like a cat’s. That’s devil stuff.”
“If I belong to the devil, I wouldn’t have this.”
He pulls on a rough piece of twine that hangs off his neck. The warden braces himself for something awful to rise from under his shirt, a shrunken head or a monkey’s paw, and is disappointed that it’s just a crucifix.
“Where’d you get that?”
“In China from a Jesuit.”
“A what.”
“A priest.”
“Oh. Then why do your eyes do that?”
The man shrugs. The boy ponders something else to say, but he’s got nothing. Stumped, he scratches his sideburn with the hand not holding the pistol. Comes away with blood on his blunted fingernails. Must’ve popped another acne spot, he thinks, just as he feels the sting.
“Damn you!” the prisoner shouts, sudden enough that the boy jumps back and runs into the wall. The man slips into Chinese and yells and yells. The warden notices his gun on the floor; he dropped it when he got startled.
“Clean! Clean the–” he holds up his own hand and bends his fingers, “the blood. Get rid of it.”
“Why?”
“You get sick. You die and you don’t go to heaven.”
He looks so serious the warden doesn’t question it, and rushes to the front office to clean up with the sheriff’s pot of water he uses for coffee.
Erik does the arithmetic of scoundrels. If the gallows wait for him no matter what, is it such a risk to break out? He wouldn’t even have to kill the boy, which is usually something he’d not think much about. But the woman who walked in on his work insisted to the lawmen that he was no killer. She didn’t know
what
he was, she said, but not a killer. Her naivete gives him a pang of conscience, for only a moment. He barely recognizes the feeling. But he’ll honor it, just for a change of pace.
He fumbles with the crucifix until he removes a long, thin piece of metal from its small compartment, and picks the lock in five seconds flat. Just as the boy returns with a scrap of cloth pressed to his pimply face.
Both of them stare at the boy’s gun, which remains on the floor. The boy is closer, so instead of going for the weapon, Erik targets him, flinging his whole body into the boy’s chest. They tumble onto the dusty floor. Erik spies a big spider in the corner, wrapping up a beetle in its web, and grabs both it and its lunch, putting them right on the boy’s face. He doesn’t bother to see what happens next, but if he did, he would see the spider trip into the boy’s mouth for a brief second before scuttling right back out, onto dry land, so to speak. In all the commotion, the beetle’s prison is unspooled just enough for him to kick off the web and roll onto the floor, where he falls into another prison: landing on his own shelled back.
The warden is unconscious, having a reasonable terror towards anything with more than four legs. Meanwhile, Erik is trying to tame the burro tied up outside. Two and a half of this particular burro would barely match Erik’s height, but they’re roughly the same level of mean and stubborn, only this little beast has hooves.
So Erik sprints in the vague direction of the site of his arrest, hampered by a throbbing hip with a brand new hoof-shaped bruise forming. It’s almost noon and Sunday, so the town is practically empty, which he’s grateful for.
Then he turns the corner of some building or another and trips over a long skirt. The woman, who’s almost as hurried as he is, trips over his trousers, which are of the loose variety often worn by migrants from the Guangdong province. The remarkable thing is that he acquired a pair that didn’t end at his calves, being so unusually tall.
They both fall to the ground, twisting through the air as they do, so that when they land in the hard dirt, they’re stacked on top of each other the way they stacked the dead soldiers into freighters on the Mississippi. Erik is frozen, strands of his unraveling braid falling into his face and onto her face.
“Ay – that’s why you wore the bandana!” she snarls, rocking side-to-side to push him off. He’s too stunned and ashamed to do much, otherwise he would get up and keep running. But her disgust reminds him that his bandana is back at the sheriff’s office. Thinking about it, that boy was probably using it to clean up his blood.
She shoves him to the side with an unusual amount of strength, and crawls backwards, trailing her clothes through the dust. A piece of hair falls into Erik’s eye. It burns terribly, but he doesn’t move it.
“I was born this way,” he says. He thinks her face softens a bit.
“But you can’t go out like this. You could still spread it.”
“It’s not what you think it is. My mother and father were clean.”
“Then what is it?”
He shrugs.
“Did they let you out?”
He nods, barely considering his lie until he hears the shrill cry of the child-warden, who rides the untamable burro bareback.
“I left my horse at your house,” he says, “Can I fetch it?”
“Senora! Senora, don’t associate yerself with–”
The boy, clearly unused to riding without a saddle, slides right off the burro and lands face-first into the hardpacked dust. Erik laughs until the woman gives him a look.
“They didn’t let you out.”