The Drop Edge of Yonder (39 page)

"Nothin' comes to mind." Zebulon drained the last of the bottle. "And I ain't about to go back to the mountains."

"Let the cards decide," Delilah said. "Winner takes all. The losers promise to go away and never come back."

"You people are crazy," Dorfheimer said. "Poker isn't a hundred-yard dash with a brick wall at the end of it, or some dumb shoot-out. It's a marathon. A game of skill and endurance. Otherwise, why bother?"

When neither Hatchet Jack nor Zebulon replied, she shuffled the cards.

"One hand." She dropped her gold and ruby necklace and all of her money on the table. "All or nothing."

"Count me out." Dorfheimer gathered up his winnings and marched towards the door.

"One winner," Delilah repeated. "Two losers. Or one loser and two winners, depending on your view"

Delilah shuffled the deck and placed it in front of Zebulon, who slowly cut the cards and shoved the deck to Hatchet Jack, who cut them again.

"Why do you have to be the dealer?" Zebulon asked Delilah. "Why not cut for high card to see who deals?"

"I'm the dealer," she said. "I have been from the beginning, whether you know it or not."

Zebulon placed the Warden's fossilized walrus penis on the table, along with all the money he had just won from playing billiards. Hatchet Jack matched him with Ivan's pocket watch, the Warden's Lakota Sioux rattle and Mandan war club, and finally, the Colt.

From the moment Delilah slid the cards across the table, Zebulon felt caught inside a repetition that he was unable or unwilling to back away from. He had been trapped here before, over and over, ever since he had first seen Delilah in the Panchito saloon. Once again he was in the same dimly lit cantina with most of the oil lamps smashed or burned out, the same restless piano chords, a mural of an unfinished journey over the bar, a deck of nubbed and bent cards, two whores staring at them from their bar stools, and now, Delilah dealing a hand where winning or losing had already been decided. And there was something else. Something that he felt doomed never to be able to realize or acknowledge.

The thought made him laugh rather than run out of the room, as if he and everyone else were part of the same joke: not knowing what they or anyone else was really up to.

When the saloon door opened, letting in a sudden blinding shaft of sunlight, he slammed his hand on the table, causing a glass to shatter on the floor.

"Quien es?" the kid at the door asked as his Pa rushed up behind him, holding him back.

Zebulon answered out loud: "One who comes, and has already gone, and is not ready to come again, but is goin' to anyway.

When his eyes finally focused on the door, the kid and his Pa had disappeared.

"You've cracked wide open," Hatchet Jack said.

"That happens when a crack lets in too much light," Zebulon said.

Hatchet Jack studied Zebulon's eyes, the line of his mouth, and finally, his hands. There was no sign of confusion or doubt.

"It won't play, messin' with my head," Hatchet Jack said. "Not when you're holding an empty hand."

Everything, including life itself, was on the table.

As Delilah dealt the last card face down, Zebulon noticed a shiver travel down her sleeve, then flow through her fingers.

Hatchet Jack turned over a ten of spades, giving him a full house with three tens and two eights.

Delilah showed a queen of hearts, giving her a queen-high straight flush.

"Why ain't I surprised?" Hatchet Jack said.

Zebulon's last card was a seven, filling a low straight.

Delilah took her time looking at each of them, then scooped up everything on the table and stood up. "I'm leaving, and I won't be back. Now you two will have nothing left to fight over."

As she walked towards the door, the bandy-legged man stumbled past her, firing a pistol at the ceiling.

"It's Zebulon Shook, all right," he shouted. "In the goddamn flesh. Wanted dead or alive for a one-thousand-dollar reward, and this old coon is here to pick it up!"

Hatchet Jack's hand reached for the Colt lying on the table, but before he could pull the trigger, the bandy-legged man shot again, blowing out an oil lamp.

Zebulon was aware of picking up the Colt and firing a blind shot towards the bandy-legged man. Then two more shots were fired, followed by screams as another oil lamp exploded.

Then the room went black.

EBULON LAY ON HIS STOMACH IN THE MIDDLE OF A DITCH full of whiskey bottles and stinking fish guts. He didn't see the layers of fog floating over him like torn blankets, or the goat feeding on the garbage, or the silhouette of the kid standing at the end of the plank peering down at him.

"Is anyone down there?"

He turned over on his back, his head pounding as if locked inside a giant church bell.

"I saw you in the saloon," the kid said. "Are you dead, Mister, or are you a ghost?"

Who was he anyway? he asked himself one last time. And where was he coming from? And where was he going? He sat up, wiping the blood from his eyes. A man lay next to him, surrounded by smashed bottles, his mouth stretched open in rigor mortis. There was a hole in the man's forehead. Zebulon looked closer. A fly was crawling across one of Hatchet Jack's eyeballs. It was a long journey, the way the fly was crawling, then stopping, then crawling on. Caught in the middle of nowhere, he thought, drifting between worlds, from life to death and back again. He shut his eyes. He remembered a full house and a queen of hearts, then a shot followed by more shots. At least he wasn't dead. Not that it would be so bad to be dead, the way things had been going. And if he really was dead, and it had been that way all along, then he no longer gave a damn which way the cards played out.

The kid's voice floated through the fog. "Can you hear me, Mister?"

Could he hear? Could he speak? Could he smell? He had always been able to track changes in the wind; to smell the wet earth and his horse beneath him, the horse pounding on, always on; and he knew by heart the ritual mumbles of drunken highrollers as their cards slapped across the table; and the bartender's windy tales; and the musky scent of Delilah as she surrendered her body to his. On the road to nowhere, he thought, drifting between worlds ever since - He remembered Not Here Not There, as her eyes found his before she disappeared through the ice. And now he, too, had disappeared. Suddenly he knew that he was no longer trapped between the worlds. That he had lost all that he had ever been attached to, and there was no going back to what no longer existed. The goat stepped closer, calmly staring down at him, as if reminding him that his string had run out, and that it was time that he accepted that fact and got on with it. He didn't bother reaching for his Colt, but stumbled to his feet and crawled up the side of the ditch towards the kid, who was running down the street, laughing and laughing, as he pretended that a ghost was coming after him.

EBULON WALKED TOWARDS THE SALOON WHERE LARGE Marge was sitting alone at the end of the porch, smoking a pipe and drinking from a nearly empty bottle of screech. The morning sun had burned away most of the fog, and the saloon was covered with milky light. Two planks were nailed across the saloon door, and a KEEP OUT sign was painted to one side in large red letters. He looked in one of the blown-out windows. The only signs of a shooting were two shot-out lamps, a bullet hole through the piano, and another bullet hole through the shot-out eye of a moose.

He sat down on the bench next to Large Marge, who wasn't surprised to see him.

"They told me you was dead," she said. "`Course I didn't believe it. They been sat'in' that ever since I had the misfortune to meet up with you. I can't say the same for Hatchet Jack."

"Who shot him?" he asked.

"You don't recall?"

"I remember a queen-high straight flush to Hatchet's full house. Then a shot. Maybe two. And a lamp blown out. Nothing else."

"You didn't shoot nobody?"

"I might have. It went by like a dream."

"Ain't that the truth?" Large Marge said. "Lately I come to see life like that, one damn dream after another."

Large Marge sighed and looked out across the harbor, where the last strip of fog was drifting over the horizon.

"When I heard the shots, I took my time comin' downstairs. No sense gettin' myself killed over a card game. Everything was dark when I come in the room. One of the floozies was kneelin' behind the bar havin' a fit. When I asked about you, she said you and Hatchet Jack had yourselves a shoot-out. No one had a clear picture about what went down. The barman said Hatchet shot that bow-legged man comin' for the reward, and then someone shot you as you followed Hatchet out the door, or maybe it was the other way around. One of the Ruskies said it was you that shot Hatchet, but the planer player says it was Delilah who picked a gun off the floor, plugged you, and then went after Hatchet. The whole thing happened too fast for anyone to know who was doin' what to who."

She sighed and drank a last long gulp of screech. "I always knew one day you two would go at each other. Crazy mountain lunatics. That's what you all do. Shoot each other straight to hell. Now the whole place is zippered up and everyone's spooked. Looks like you got away with it, ornery and stubborn bastard that you is."

"What about Delilah?" he asked.

"She sailed away on The Khinelander. You'd think she would have waited to see if you was dead or not, but I guess she knew all along, bein' a witch and all. Anyway, she had all that money from the poker game to pay for her passage"

Zebulon pulled the planks off the door and walked into the saloon to the billiard table, where he picked up a cue stick and knocked a few balls around, just to see if he still could.

An hour later, when he still hadn't come out of the saloon, Large Marge peered through the window There was no sign of Zebulon, and she didn't have the courage to try to find out what happened to him. The way things had been going, she suspected that she might have imagined him, and that he might not have been there at all.

She never told anyone about seeing Zebulon on the porch, preferring to keep at least one part of the legend for herself, out of old-time sentiments, if nothing else.

'HEN THE WARDEN RODE UP TO THE TRAIL'S END SALOON a week later with the Sheriff, the photographer, and a halfa-dozen soldiers, there was no sign of Zebulon. Reports of his whereabouts varied. Some said that he had gone up to Canada to the newly discovered gold strike on the Frazier River, which by all accounts promised to be the biggest in the history of the world. Others were convinced that he had returned to the high mountains of Colorado. And there was another rumor that he had set sail for the Aleutian Islands with a renegade band of Kwakiutl or Tlingit cannibals.

The Warden and his soldiers, along with the photographer and the Sheriff, rode back to San Francisco.

Large Marge, who had avoided capture by hiding in a storage shed, became the madam of the whorehouse above the Trail's End Saloon; it was a successful enterprise that was staffed almost entirely by Asians and Negro runaway slaves.

Delilah died on the Isle of Wight at the age of one-hundred and five, having lived a reclusive life translating Sufi poetry from Arabic into French and Portuguese, and growing medicinal herbs in the sanctuary of an enclosed garden. She was survived by a son, an actor and theatrical entrepreneur celebrated in most of the major capitals of Europe, as well as New York, Boston, and San Francisco.