Stories for Chip (3 page)

Hey, fat man, Billy says, you playing that for me? Fat man shakes his head. No, he says, I play what's on the hymn sheet is all, and sure enough there it is written out. Turn the page, Billy says, give me a preview. Fat man does and growls, it's a fight scene. Brawling or guns? Well, that's kinda hard to tell, you better ask me what you want to know in the next few bars.

Where's the new guy, Billy says. Lotsa new guys in town, fat man replies. No, Billy says, there ain't, there's only one. My height and taller, black hat, solitary fella don't like to make friends. Oh, that new guy, fat man says. That new guy got hisself a room above the hardware store, has Missus Roth bring him food and all. He armed? Billy Tumult asks, and the fat man says that a patron that tough don't go about without some manner of weapon but the fat man don't know what kind.

Fat man turns the page on his hymn sheet and one of the poker tables flies up in the air. Fistfight, bottles flying and you goddam cheating bastard and blahsedyblahs. Dissolve to later.

Billy Tumult, walking down the street. Tips his hat to the ladies, bids the fellas good afternoon. Going to the Marshall's office. Want to be in good with the local force. No stink-of-armpit law-keeper, this one, but a high buttoned pinstripe and waistcoat number, almost a dandy. What are the chances, Billy Tumult growls. Man might could be Billy's brother, might could use him for shaving around that dandy moustache. Patient's been thinking about coming to see Billy Tumult for long enough that he's got hisself a tulpa in here, a little imaginary robot doing what the patient thinks Billy'd do. Ain't that just the sweetest thing?

Marshall William says hello, and Billy says hello right back and they shake hands. It's like icebergs colliding. The Marshall's got two shooters on his hips, of course, just like in the brochure. What's behind his back, Billy wonders, maybe a third gun, maybe a humungous nature of a knife. That would figure. But when they get into the Marshall's office and the fella takes off his coat, mother of Christ, it's a dynamite vest, a bandolier. The guy so much as farts wrong and they're all in the next county over and fuck if he doesn't actually smoke. Laws of sanity have been suspended for Billy's oversold publicity-and-marketing hardassery. Thank God if the thing goes up the worst that happens to Billy is a damn reset and the whole surgery to redo from start, pain in the ass, but if this was the real world or if Billy was really part of this whole deal then he'd be pasta sauce.

Pasta sauce is inauthentic. Billy tweaks the filter again. He prefers the gangster aspect, can't keep this horses-and-mud shit straight in his brain. Well, if the patient can have Eskimos, Billy can have pasta sauce, call it fair play.

I'm Billy Tumult of the Pinkertons, he tells Marshall William, come lookin' for a dangerous man. We got plenty, says the Marshall, which one you want? Or take ‘em all, I surely won't miss ‘em. I want the new guy, Billy says, the one in the black hat living over the store. The one Missus Roth has an arrangement with. Now hold on, begins the Marshall, no not that kind of arrangement, the feedin' kind is all I mean, I got no beef with the Widow Roth.

Widow my ass, parenthesizes Billy Tumult, if I know how this goes, but never mind that for now.

He's an odd one, sure, says the Marshall. Odd and I don't like him and he don't much like me. But I figure the one he's looking out for is you, now I think on it. He offered me a whole shit-ton of gold, I saw it right there in that room, to tell him if a fella came askin' about him. You say yes? Billy wants to know. No, Marshall replies. ‘Course not, he says, and rolls his shoulder.

Cutaway: a thin man naked in a room full of gold, lean like a leather-gnarled spider stretched too tight on his own bones. He tilts his head and listens to the sound of the town, and he knows someone's coming. Slips down the gold rockface into his pants and shoes—demons evidently need no socks—and buckles on his gun. Not much of a thing, this gun. Small and dirty and badly kept. Buckles it on, long black coat around his shoulders. Tan galàn on his head: bare-chested Grendel in a hat, and that's as good a name as any. Arms and legs too long, Grendel spidercrabs out of the golden room and into shadow, gone a-huntin'. Too fast, he's under the balcony across the street, flickers in the dark alley by the blacksmith, by the sawbones, by the water tower. Too fast, too quiet. All of a sudden: it's not clear at all who's gonna win this one.

Billy Tumult doesn't exactly see all this, not being present in the mis-en-scène, but he gets the gist because that's the benefit of narrative surgery. You pay a price in hella stupid costumes and irritating dialogue, but you get it back in inevitability. Sooner or later they will stand in the street and one of them will outshoot the other, and Billy can do it over and over and over and over until he nails it; the other fella has to get it perfect every time. That's the thing about your average cognitive hiccup or post-Freudian crise: they just don't learn. That said, on this occasion there's a sense of real jeopardy, contagious fear, and it takes some stones to go out on Main Street and walk down the middle, spurs clankin'.

Billy Tumult has those stones. He surely does.

Half-naked Grendel comes on like blinking, like he doesn't really understand physical spaces. Which he don't, but all the same he's fast and he's focused, he sees Billy the way they mostly can't, sees him as an external object rather than part of the diorama. Not your common or garden mommy issue, this fucker, but a real nasty customer, maybe even a kink in the standing wave. Blink! Walking outside the smithy. Blink! Hat shop, dressmaker. Blink! By the trees outside the mayor's place. Blink! Right there, dead on his mark where he should be for the showdown, except it's too soon. Can't draw down on him, not yet, the patient's mind will fracture him away. It's not the right time. Got to earn your conclusions. This is the chit chat segment, bad guy banter.

Heard you might be in town, Billy says, figured I'd come and see if you were that stupid.

White teeth under thin lips. Patient presents with anhedonia: can't feel joy, can't even feel pleasure, just nothing. Only pain and less pain, sadness and more sadness. Whole top half of his spectrum is missing. Grendel is stealing all the best stuff like a leech, keeping it in that room back there above the store.

Figured you'd stay out in the wilderness, Billy suggests, figured you had maybe a cave out there, livin' on human arms and all, figured you'd feel safe being a wild beast. No place for you in here, you have to know that. It's time to give it up. I'll go easy on you. Like hell he will. Ugliest fucker Billy's ever seen, standing there without moving his eyes, turning his head like a goddam owl. The weird face twists and tilts, and off somewhere behind there's a laugh, an old woman cackle. Billy looks for her, can't find her. Always check your corners.

Patient says he's being watched, all the time, can't shake the feeling, paranoia with all the trimmings.

There is no patient, Grendel whispers—Billy can hear it like he's right there behind him, and then he is, actually is right there, cold breath on Billy's neck—there's just us.

Oh, shit, Billy Tumult thinks, like a lightbulb just before it pops.

◊

This is the cave where Grendel lives. Right now it's in a room over the hardware store, but it could be anywhere because it's basically a state of mind. It's a cave because Grendel lives in it. If you went in—well, if you went in you'd probably die, but if you went in without dying—you'd see it as a great dripping space full of twisting faces drawn in black on shadow, lit by the glimmer of a solitary camp fire and the reflected sheen of bullion. By the fire you'd see Grendel, crouched in his long coat, roasting fish for his mother for her dinner. On a stout stick you'd see a head that looks a lot like Billy Tumult's. It would be unclear if it's a trophy or a dessert.

What Grendel sees, if Grendel sees or even thinks at all, we do not know.

◊

Billy Tumult, on his stick, takes a moment to contemplate the forgotten virtue of humility.

Goddammit.

He was operating on his own self. How did he ever get that stupid? And why can't he remember? Well, he can think of reasons, reasons for both. Can't be much of a psychic surgeon if you've got your own crippling issues, can't exactly trust the competition much, can't be seen to go to a therapist. How'd that play on cable? Not well.

And as to forgetting, well, that could be a mistake or a choice he's made, maybe the stakes are high and he doesn't want to cramp his decision making. Maybe he wanted to be sure he'd do what it took, deliver a cure even if some of the loss was painful. Maybe Grendel's got roots in something Billy'd ideally like to hang onto, good memories from the old days, whatever. But clear enough: this fucker needs to be got, because he is one terrifying sumbitch.

Which is going to be hard to arrange from the top of a goddam stick in a goddam cave.

◊

Top of the morning to you, Missus Roth, Marshall William says, tips his hat. And to you, twinkles the merry widow on her horse, thirty five years of age at most, sure in the saddle and a fine figure of a woman. William wishes she'd stop and pass the time a little but she never does. I hear there was some excitement earlier, she tells him, I hear it was quite unsettling. Oh, well, yes, there was some excitement, William says, but it's all done now. A man come to town lookin' for a fugitive, your Mister Grendel as it happens, but it was all a misunderstanding if you can believe it, and the fella's gone on his way and no harm done. Is that right, says Evangeline Roth, is that right, indeed? And Marshall William assures her that it is, misses the flicker in her eyes, the hardness that says he's just fallen in her estimation, fallen a good long way and may now never resurface. That's fine, she says then, for Mister Grendel is a gentleman I'm sure. And she goes on her way to market. That's a fine figure of a woman, William murmurs, and bold for a respectable widow to wear a vermillion chapeau to go out riding, bold and quite suitable on her to be sure.

Evangeline Roth married a young preacher in Spokane, Missouri, when she was only twenty, loved him more than life, saw him die on the way out west of a snake bite. The thing had lunged for her and he put out his hand to take the strike, the wound festered and that was that. They had no children: they were waiting for the right time. She learned to shoot from a carnival girl, learned to sit a horse the same way, has no intention of being a second class anything, not here or in any other town. Owns the hardware store in her own name and takes in lodgers when it suits her, knows fine well there's a darkness in her house now, a bad place that needs dealing with the way you'd bag a hornet's nest and put it in the river. Looks back over her sharp shoulder at Marshall William and growls. Useless.

But speaking of the river—she taps her heels to the flanks of the horse—well, now, wasn't there a place once? A wide strand where all manner of things wash up, jetsam and littoral peculiars. Yes, indeed, some distance out of town, a half day's riding and a little more. Widow Roth, with a few necessaries in her saddlebags, makes her way along the old mule trail and past the abandoned mines, across the yucca plain to the very spot, where the wide blue water winds about the sand, and removes her clothes to work magic. She has no idea if nudity is requisite, but likewise no intention of making a mess of things for the sake of crinolines and stays.

That night on the white sand she draws all manner of significant ideograms, according to her strongly-held opinions. She dances—furtively at first, for it is one thing to be discovered nude by a river where after all anyone might reasonably bathe, but quite another to be seen cavorting—but eventually she stretches out her hands to the world and spins and leaps with her whole remarkable self. She invokes angels and local gods she has heard about from local people, performs whatever syncretist rituals are in line with her understanding of divinity. Overall, indeed, she does the best she can with what she has, promising a small sheep if such is required, or good strong whisky and tobacco, or a life of virtue and contemplation on the other hand, and heartfelt apologies for this behavior. The point is, this thing must be done, she repeats over and over to the wind. It must be done.

The night seems not to care. In the end, she lies exhausted and dusty on her back and just shrieks at the sky, conscious that here at last she has perhaps finally come to an understanding of what magic and religion truly are. And at dawn, through gummed eyes, she sees the result of her exhortations and exertions washed to shore by the breeze: a strange contraption like a sword or flintlock, to be worn as near as she can tell in the small of the back. Inscribed upon the hilt are occult symbols: Combine Medical Industries: NIS 3.1.a.

This is a river in a dream, and as such washes through all caves and all valleys, and will in good conscience respond to such desperation as it can.

◊

Grendel springs from his sleep, from his golden bed, jointless neck twisting. Snatches up his coat. Pauses to strike at Billy Tumult's living head. Ow, Billy Tumult says in the empty cave, and hears Grendel's mother chortle from the dark. She must be able to fly, thinks Billy Tumult on his stick. That must be it. She's never where she should be and always where you don't want her.

No time for that now: through the shadows skitters spidery Grendel, owl eyes bright and fingers grasping. Blink blink here and blink blink there, but he has no idea what to look for, knows only that something is wrong. Peers in through the high windows of the saloon, looking for another lawman. Perhaps Marshall William's found his steel? But no. There he is, stuffed shirt presiding over a poker tournament, the Yupik winning, yes, of course. Where away?

So very close, did he but know. Evangeline Roth stands in her boudoir, scant yards from the door she rents to Grendel, the entrance to the cave. A sensible jacket and good trousers are important in such moments. She doesn't bother to put the scalpel in its holster, doesn't propose for one moment to let it out of her hand until she's done with her task. No idle oath, this, but pure practical terror, which she feels sure is a better guide to questing behavior than any bold pledge or pretty couplet.