Chapter VIII
BENEATH THE PEDDLER’S MOON
1
The town of Ritzy, nearly four hundred miles west of Mejis, was anything but. Roy Depape reached it three nights before the Peddler’s Moon- called Late-summer’s Moon by some-came full, and left it a day later.
Ritzy was, in fact, a miserable little mining village on the eastern slope of the Vi Castis Mountains, about fifty miles from Vi Castis Cut. The town had but one street; it was engraved with iron-hard wheelruts now, and would become a lake of mud roughly three days after the storms of autumn set in. There was the Bear and Turtle Mercantile amp; Sundrie Items, where miners were forbidden by the Vi Castis Company to shop, and a company store where no one but grubbies would shop; there was a combined jailhouse and Town Gathering Hall with a windmill-cum-gallows out front; there were six roaring barrooms, each more sordid, desperate, and dangerous than the last.
Ritzy was like an ugly lowered head between a pair of huge shrugged shoulders-the foothills. Above town to the south were the clapped-out shacks where the Company housed its miners; each puff of breeze brought the stench of their unlimed communal privies. To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit.
Once there had been freehold mines up there, but they were all gone, regulated out by the Vi Castis Company. Depape knew all about it, because the Big Coffin Hunters had been a part of that little spin and raree. Just after he’d hooked up with Jonas and Reynolds, that had been. Why, they had gotten those coffins tattooed on their hands not fifty miles from here, in the town of Wind, a mudpen even less ritzy than Ritzy. How long ago? He couldn’t rightly say, although it seemed to him that he should be able to. But when it came to reckoning times past, Depape often felt lost. It was hard even to remember how old he was. Because the world had moved on, and time was different, now. Softer.
One thing he had no trouble remembering at all-his recollection was refreshed by the miserable flare of pain he suffered each time he bumped his wounded finger. That one thing was a promise to himself that he would see Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath laid out dead in a row, hand to outstretched hand like a little girl’s paper dolls. He intended to unlimber the part of him which had longed so bootlessly for Her Nibs these last three weeks and use it to hose down their dead faces. The majority of his squirt would be saved for Arthur Heath of Gilead, New Canaan. That laughing chatterbox motherfucker had a serious hosing-down coming.
Depape rode out the sunrise end of Ritzy’s only street, trotted his horse up the flank of the first hill, and paused at the top for a single look back. Last night, when he’d been talking to the old bastard behind Hattigan’s, Ritzy had been roaring. This morning at seven, it looked as ghostly as the Peddler’s Moon, which still hung in the sky above the rim of the plundered hills. He could hear the mines tink-tonking away, though. You bet. Those babies tink-tonked away seven days a week. No rest for the wicked… and he supposed that included him. He dragged his horse’s head around with his usual unthinking and ham-handed force, booted its flanks, and headed east, thinking of the old bastard as he went. He had treated the old bastard passing fair, he reckoned. A reward had been promised, and had been paid for information given.
“Yar,” Depape said, his glasses flashing in the new sun (it was a rare morning when he had no hangover, and he felt quite cheerful), “I reckon the old bugger can’t complain.”
Depape had had no trouble following the young culls’ backtrail; they had come east on the Great Road the whole way from New Canaan, it appeared, and at every town where they had stopped, they had been marked. In most they were marked if they did no more than pass through. And why not? Young men on good horses, no scars on their faces, no regulator tattoos on their hands, good clothes on their backs, expensive hats on their heads. They were remembered especially well at the inns and saloons, where they had stopped to refresh themselves but had drunk no hard liquor. No beer or graf, either, for that matter. Yes, they were remembered. Boys on the road, boys that seemed almost to shine. As if they had come from an earlier, better time.
Piss in their faces, Depape thought as he rode. One by one. Mr. Arthur “Ha-Ha” Heath last. I’ll save enough so it ’d drown you, were you not already at the end of the path and into the clearing.
They had been noticed, all right, but that wasn’t good enough-if he went back to Hambry with no more than that, Jonas would likely shoot his nose off. And he would deserve it. They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are. Depape had said that himself. The question was, what else were they? And finally, in the shit-and-sulfur stench of Ritzy, he had found out. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to allow him to turn his horse around before he found himself all the way back in fucking New Canaan.
He had hit two other saloons, sipping watered beer in each, before rolling into Hattigan’s. He ordered yet another watered beer, and prepared to engage the bartender in conversation. Before he even began to shake the tree, however, the apple he wanted fell off and dropped into his hand, neat as you please.
It was an old man’s voice (an old bastard’s voice), speaking with the shrill, head-hurting intensity which is the sole province of old bastards in their cups. He was talking about the old days, as old bastards always did, and about how the world had moved on, and how things had been ever so much better when he was a boy. Then he had said something which caused Depape’s ears to prick up: something about how the old days might be coming again, for hadn’t he seen three young lords not two months a-gone, mayhap less, and even bought one of them a drink, even if ’twas only sasparilly soda?
“You wouldn’t know a young lord from a young turd,” said a miss who appeared to have all of four teeth left in her charming young head.
There was general laughter at this. The old bastard looked around, offended. “I know, all right,” he said. “I’ve forgot more than you’ll ever learn, so I have. One of them at least came from the Eld line, for I saw his father in his face… just as clear as I see your saggy tits, Jolene.” And then the old bastard had done something Depape rather admired-yanked out the front of the saloon-whore’s blouse and poured the remainder of his beer down it. Even the roars of laughter and heavy applause which greeted this couldn’t entirely drown the girl’s caw of rage, or the old man’s cries when she began to slap and punch him about the head and shoulders. These latter cries were only indignant at first, but when the girl grabbed the old bastard’s own beer-stein and shattered it against the side of his head, they became screams of pain. Blood-mixed with a few watery dregs of beer-began to run down the old bastard’s face.
“Get out of here!” she yelled, and gave him a shove toward the door. Several healthy kicks from the miners in attendance (who had changed sides as easily as the wind changes directions) helped him along. “And don’t come back! I can smell the weed on your breath, you old cock-sucker! Get out and take your gods-cussed stories of old days and young lords with you!”
The old bastard was in such manner conveyed across the room, past the tootling trumpet-player who served as entertainment for the patrons of Hattigan’s (that young bowler-hatted worthy added his own kick in the seat of the old bastard’s dusty trousers without ever missing so much as a single note of “Play, Ladies, Play”), and out through the batwing doors, where he collapsed face- first into the street.
Depape had sauntered after him and helped him up. As he did so, he smelled an acrid odor-not beer-on the old man’s breath, and saw the telltale greenish-gray discolorations at the comers of his lips. Weed, all right. The old bastard was probably just getting started on it (and for the usual reason: devil-grass was free in the hills, unlike the beer and whiskey that was sold in town), but once they started, the finish came quick.
“They got no respect,” the old bastard said thickly. “Nor understanding, either.”
“Aye, so they don’t,” said Depape, who had not yet gotten the accents of the seacoast and the Drop out of his speech.
The old bastard stood swaying, looking up at him, wiping ineffectually at the blood which ran down his wrinkled cheeks from his lacerated scalp. “Son, do you have the price of a drink? Remember the face of your father and give an old soul the price of a drink!”
“I’m not much for charity, old-timer,” Depape said, “but mayhap you could earn yourself the price of a drink. Step on over here, into my office, and let’s us see.”
He’d led the old bastard out of the street and back to the boardwalk, angling well to the left of the black batwings with their golden shafts of light spilling out above and below. He waited for a trio of miners to go by, singing at the top of their lungs (“Woman I love… is long and tall… she moves her body… like a cannonball… “), and then, still holding the old bastard by the elbow, hail guided him into the alley between Hattigan’s and the undertaking establishment next door. For some people, Depape mused, a visit to Ritzy could damn near amount to one-stop shopping: get your drink, get your bullet, get laid out next door.
“Yer office,” the old bastard cackled as Depape led him down the alley toward the board fence and the heaps of rubbish at the far end. The wind blew, stinging Depape’s nose with odors of sulfur and carbolic from the mines. From their right, the sounds of drunken revelry pounded through the side of Hattigan’s. “Your office, that’s good.”
“Aye, my office.”
The old man gazed at him in the light of the moon, which rode the slot of sky above the alley. “Are you from Mejis? Or Tepachi?”
“Maybe one, maybe t'other, maybe neither.”
“Do I know you?” The old bastard was looking at him even more closely, standing on tiptoe as if hoping for a kiss. Ugh.
Depape pushed him away. “Not so close, dad.” Yet he felt marginally encouraged. He and Jonas and Reynolds had been here before, and if the old man remembered his face, likely he wasn’t talking through his hat about fellows he’d seen much more recently.
“Tell me about the three young lords, old dad.” Depape rapped on the wall of Hattigan’s. “Them in there may not be interested, but I am.”
The old bastard looked at him with a bleary, calculating eye. “Might there be a bit o’ metal in it for me?”
“Yar,” Depape said. “If you tell me what I want to hear, I’ll give you metal.”
“Gold?”
“Tell me, and we’ll see.”
“No, sir. Dicker first, tell second.”
Depape seized him by the arm, whirled him around, and yanked a wrist which felt like a bundle of sticks up to the old bastard’s scrawny shoulderblades. “Fuck with me, dad, and we’ll start by breaking your arm.”
“Let go!” the old bastard screamed breathlessly. “Let go, I’ll trust to your generosity, young sir, for you have a generous face! Yes! Yes indeed!”
Depape let him go. The old bastard eyed him warily, rubbing his shoulder. In the moonlight the blood drying on his cheeks looked black.
“Three of them, there were,” he said. “Fine-born lads.”
“Lads or lords? Which is it, dad?”
The old bastard had taken the question thoughtfully. The whack on the head, the night air, and having his arm twisted seemed to have sobered him up, at least temporarily.
“Both, I do believe,” he said at last. “One was a lord for sure, whether them in there believe it or not. For I saw his father, and his father bore the guns. Not such poor things such as you wear- beggin your pardon, I know they’re the best to be had these days-but real guns, such as were seen when my own dad was a boy. The big ones with the sandalwood grips.”
Depape had stared at the old man, feeling a rise of excitement… and a species of reluctant awe, as well. They acted like gunslingers, Jonas had said. When Reynolds protested they were too
