Dead Man’s Hand (23 page)

My neck cramped up, but now something had taken hold of me, some wild thought that
this was the right thing to do, to stare at the sun for as long as I was able. Releasing
the post, I drifted around in circles there in the dirt, admiring the shapes and colors
as they spun in my vision. I saw purple. I saw strangers swim through the sky. When
my lids clamped down involuntarily, I used my fingers to pry them open again. The
burn and pain went straight through me until it felt like an itch being scratched.
I spun and spun and felt the barbed wire catch at my trousers. The fence would keep
me in. I thought of Collins spinning around in his little Indian hut. The barbs were
suddenly those sticks, poking at me, corralling me. The light shone right through
my eyes, down to the base of my skull, and deep into my neck where words are formed.
My face grew warm, but now the bright light was cool as it swam through me. I could
hear myself laugh. The horse drew away further, and I cared little.

When the vision came, it was a thunderclap. A sudden roar, though I realized the words
had been there before. They were the buzzing in my brain, nonsense words, but I knew
what they meant. I saw them like shapes and things, like swirling dreams. There was
shouting, someone on the road with me, a man with my own voice. Crying and crying,
fingers pinned my eyes open, and I never wanted to look away from the sun again. I
loved it in that instant. I wanted it to fall out of the sky and enter me through
my eyeballs; I wanted to let it blow me across the prairie and set everything on fire,
to burn that land ahead of its coming, to make room. I saw men and women and children
fall before me. I saw an infant thrown into the flames, blood in everyone’s eyes.
And the voices, these words foreign and understood that came like pictures directly
into my head, this voice on the road that spoke as I spun and spun between the barbed
wire and my skittish horse, they sounded like the tongue of a Red Man.

* * *

I woke up and men were dead. My men. Something told me there had been a killing. My
head throbbed like my heart was trapped in my skull, had swollen up, and needed out.
It took a moment to realize my eyes were open but I wasn’t seeing anything. I could
barely make out a shape in front of my face when I waved my hand before it. Groping
about, I felt a bunk beneath me, a wall of steel bars behind. I was in the pen. I
could feel the firing squad lined up, instruments of death aimed at my chest, could
see the men I’d killed.

“Sir, he’s done stirred.”

Voices and shuffling feet. I had Arapaho on my tongue, the taste of silver and fire,
words like pictures drawn in the dirt, telling me what to do. Something alien had
communicated with me. A part of it lived deep inside.

“Drink some water, son.”

There was a hand on my wrist, a hand reaching through the bars. A tin of water was
pressed into my palm, sloshing cool on my forearm. My lips stung as I drank. I pulled
the cup away and touched my mouth, found my lips swollen and cracked. My throat burned.
But the horrible throbbing in my eyes and my brain drowned out these lesser hurts.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Major?” My voice was a pale shadow of its old self. I drank more, ignoring the sting
of my fouled lips. “What did I do?” I asked.

“They found you face up in the dirt, babbling like you had a few too many. Your horse
came back to the fort without you.”

“I can’t see.”

“That’s what you’ve been sayin’. Doc said to put you in here where it was dark, that
it should come back. You rest up, okay? Can’t afford to lose any more of my men.”

“How many?”

I could hear the boards creak as the Major shifted his weight. “How many of what,
son?”

“Did I… how many dead?” Memories and visions were mixed up in my head. Words I knew
and words I didn’t. There were flashes of green and swimming lights in my eyes like
an angry campfire. Something was telling me to kill or that I already had, hard to
tell which.

“Get some rest. I’ll send some food over.”

I nursed my water and decided I hadn’t done the things I thought I had. But I could
feel the urge. Some silent screaming beneath my skin, something directing my bones.
I was reminded of a visit to Richmond when I was a boy. A friend of my mother’s was
a pastor there, took us to his great big church. There was a belfry terribly high
off the ground, a circuit of rickety stairs, and at one corner you could peer down
at the street like a bird. And something in me felt this urge to jump out and go plummeting
down, something so strong that I had to back away and clutch my father, even though
I was too old to be holding his hand. And now this demon was in my blood again, but
this time to hurt others.

Long after the tin cup was dry, I continued to pass it back and forth between my hands.
It was Collins who brought me my supper.

“You gone and blinded yourself,” Collins said, a voice in the darkness. Hinges peeled
as he let himself into the pen, and I realized the door had never been locked. I hadn’t
killed no man. Not that day, anyhow.

The plate was warm as he rested it on my knee. A fork was pressed into my palm. “You
manage all right?” he asked. “See anything yet?”

I shook my head. I saw things, but not like he meant.

“I blame myself,” Collins said. “But what was you thinking?”

“I weren’t,” I admitted. “Just started and couldn’t stop.”

Collins laughed. “Most take a glance and know it’s a bad idea.”

I groped around the plate with my fork, found some resistance, some weight. Took a
sniff of potatoes and blew on ’em in case they was hot. How anyone lived with such
blindness, I couldn’t fathom.

“I heard voices,” I told Collins. I wasn’t sure I’d ever tell anyone, but it just
came out. “Voices and… I had a vision.” I swallowed the potatoes and shook my head.
Patches of murk swam in the darkness, a vague discernment of shapes. I’d welcome just
seeing my own hands.

“You heard voices. You mean when they scooped you off the road?”

“Before.” I peered at where I thought Collins stood, where I heard him. “They were
telling me to do awful things. I think Randall was poisoned by the sun.”

“Randall was poisoned by the Arapaho. He was babblin’ that nonsense right up until
we shot him. You just need some sleep is all.”

I nodded and ate, and Collins gave me silent and invisible company. By nightfall,
it felt as though some of my eyesight was returning, but not much. I fell asleep on
that cot for drunkards, madmen, and murderers—and wondered which one of them I was.

* * *

When I awoke, it was not yet dawn. My internal clock had unwound from the late shifts
and lack of sleep. But I could see my hands, and my lips only part ways stuck together.
Groping about, I let myself out of the pen and sought my own bunk.

Along the way, with my fingers brushing cedar clapboards to keep from spinning in
circles, I noticed the pinpricks of tiny lights in my vision. It was pitch black across
the fort, and it was like somehow the brightest of stars were able to penetrate my
blindness. But no: it was my eyesight returning.

I stopped and marveled at the tiny spots of light in that infinite darkness. The voices
were out there, straining to be heard. There was a madness in my soul, an invader.

It hadn’t taken a full hold of me, but its claws had left marks. It was the same madness
I’d seen in the war cries of the natives we fought with. It was the madness Randall
had seized upon. A cry from some distant throat telling me that this land was someone
else’s and that a reckoning was coming. That was the sight I’d seen: a land wiped
clean and taken by those who didn’t belong, a land of dead and missing cattle to starve
us the way we’d done with the buffalo, a time of great sickness and men dying beyond
counting, with infection rained down from the heavens like some poisoned blanket.

This was the calling. I heard it clearer that night than I ever would again. I stood
there for what felt like hours, searching for those pinprick stars and marveling at
how our own sun was said to be one like them. Our sun, where native tribes stood sentinel
in the morning so we couldn’t see them coming, where they would watch and watch and
plan their deadly raids. Many a time, they had brought hell on us from the east with
the rising of the sun, the Arapaho and the Sioux and the Apache, but I reckoned we’d
done the same and that others might do it to us one day. Generations back, a man with
my name had crossed a wide sea and brought his own hell from the east. Others would
come. It were folly to think we’d be the last.

That was my vision, what I saw clearly that night in my blindness and with an earful
of strange voices. I saw the night and its lights like never before. There was a far
and dark sea out there, hanging over me. A dark sea that ships sailed on, scouts arriving
at dawn to watch over us, vast fleets to rain down by dusk. But it was not yet dusk.
It was early yet. And those stars were like campfires impossibly distant where strange
men spoke in strange tongues and conjured war. They spoke with words that I could
not fathom but could see like scratches in the dirt, could see like a calling to do
bad things on their behalf.

I tried to explain this to whoever would listen, but they would only lock me up for
my troubles. They would lock me up before I ever got the chance to heed those voices
the way Lieutenant Randall had. I was locked up years later and therefore not a part
of that massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, which put an end to the war with our red kin.
I was locked up while more cattle went missing and a great sickness swept the land,
millions and millions of people dying like my brother had. It has not yet come, this
thing from the east that whispers for me to clear the land in preparation. It has
not yet come. But something stirs and will talk to those crazy enough to look and
listen. There is something across that dark sea, across that expanse of space that
men saner than me say no one will ever cross, but I wager my red brother thought the
same thing of the deep blue Atlantic that lapped their former shores—and here we are.
We who hailed from the east, who came from that rising sun too bright to see, who
came first with scouts across the pitch black, standing tall and ignorant and proud
atop some deadly ridge.

Quentin Ketterly stood in the Gold Star Saloon and lit his cheroot with one hand,
the other resting lightly on his hip, very close to his waistcoat pocket. He stared
across the room at the five men playing poker at a nearby table. His eyes tracked
the movement of the cards that they held and played, though his mind was on another
set of Cards entirely.

The lion’s share of his attention was focused on one Hiram Tetch—an itinerant and
idiot, who happened to be Quentin’s charge. Not for the first time, Quentin cursed
the promise that had led him to become… what? Hiram’s teacher? His chaperone?

Whatever the title, he had promised the old man that he would look after the lad,
and without the old man, Quentin wouldn’t have become a Card Sharp and wouldn’t have
discovered the Cards. Taking care of Hiram was payment for that debt. That the old
man had a halfwit for a son was just part of the price.

The dealer dealt out a fresh hand and Hiram looked surreptitiously at the cards, then
tugged at the brim of his bowler hat. Quentin recognized it as one of Hiram’s tells.
It meant he had a good hand. Unfortunately, the money in front of him was meager.
He could have gone all in, but that likely would have scared off the skittish players
at the table. Hiram liked to draw out the play, reel in the others, then clean up.

Hiram reached into the inside pocket of his dusty black coat and removed a gold cigarette
case. He held it down in his lap and fitted a cigarette to his lips. As he struck
the match on the underside of the table, Quentin saw two lights flare—one from the
match, the other from inside the case. Quentin stifled a curse and his hand moved
closer to his waistcoat pocket.

Quentin couldn’t see the Card Hiram had just Played, the one that had come from inside
the cigarette case, but he would bet it all that it had been a Diamond. Diamonds were
associated not only with wealth, but with trickery. Illusion. What in the damned Hell
was the boy playing at?

A moment later, Hiram reached into his coat pocket (an outside one this time) and
removed a small pouch of clinking coins. Quentin knew with certainty that the pouch
had been empty just moments before. “My emergency supply,” Hiram said and spilled
shining coins onto the table. The other men grunted, but seemed pacified. They had
no reason to know of Hiram’s notorious lack of foresight, his inability to look even
an hour into the future.

The hand continued.

Hiram reeled them in.

When all was said and done, Hiram had more than tripled the money he’d started with.
He sat back, a wide grin etched on his face. He looked at Quentin and winked. Quentin
frowned back. It was an expression all too familiar to him these days.

A cry went up from one of the other men at the table. While Hiram had won back most
of his “emergency supply,” some of the coins had made their way into the others’ piles,
and the man who had cried out held one of these between two grimy fingers, his face
puckered into a grimace. The coin flexed between his fingers, to the astonishment
of everyone except Quentin and Hiram.

Then the room erupted into chaos.

Hiram swiped at the paper money in front of him, scooping up as much as he could,
then ran for the front door of the saloon as his fellow players reached for their
guns.

Quentin cursed and tossed the cheroot, his hand reaching to his waistcoat pocket and
his Deck. It was a reflex action in times of stress, but he would be damned if he
would waste one of his Cards on that fool of a boy.