The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Pinkerton men came through a week ago,” the coyoteman explained, pointing to another pole a quarter-mile or so distant. “Five of ’em. They didn’t smell like rabbits either. Not until Mr. Gerlach got done with ’em, that is. Skinned rabbits was what they smelled like at the end. And believe you me, they was ready for the stew-pot.” He giggled. “You ever hear a rabbit scream? Well, have yuh?”

If he had known what the coming hours would bring, the stranger might have searched his memory for an answer to that question. But though he knew many things that other men did not, he did not know the future, so he tugged the reins.

The horses moved forward. The coyoteman walked beside the wagon, his hand raised against the rising sun. “You listen to me,” he said. “You pay attention! Mr. Gerlach, he treated them Pinkerton men just like I treat the coyotes.” The black man slapped the ribbons, the team broke into a trot, and so did the coyoteman. “Mr. Gerlach’s got a fever in his blood, even worse than mine. But his misery ain’t from a coyote… it’s from his family.” The wagon passed another pole crowned with a severed head — generous golden tresses in imitation of George Armstrong Custer, bullet hole three inches behind the left ear in imitation of Abraham Lincoln. “People tell stories just like coyotes, but these stories are true! The whole Gerlach family done been blood crazy for years… cousin marryin’ cousin… brother and… it just ain’t what’s meant to be.” The coyoteman was sprinting now, nearly breathless. “Why, you just look in the family plot and you’ll see… Mr. Gerlach’s granddaddy buried right next to his own daughter… and… ”

The driver hollered at the team, cracking the ribbons with real authority now. The horses raced forward, and the coyoteman tried to keep the pace. There were many things he wanted to say. He wanted to tell the driver about Midas Gerlach’s granddaddy, how Midas’ grandma had taken after him with a butcher knife. Cut off the old reprobate’s willie and tossed it right down the shit shaft one cold winter’s night, shortly after the old fool had threatened to bless his daughter with a baby brother for thirteen-year-old Midas. The coyoteman wanted to say all these things, just as he wanted to keep on running, but his lungs were working like a bellows with a couple of holes in it, and his legs were like those of a sickly kitten, and all he could say was, “Midas is… Midas is… he’s crazy with the blood… ”

The coyoteman stumbled to a stop and doubled over, dropping the rifle and the coyote-head helmet, hands locking over his knees as he gasped for breath. The coyote was hiding in his blood, and he couldn’t keep up with the wagon, which was gone with the shadows, with the last cool breath of morning.

The sun beat down and there was nowhere to hide. “You got to understand,” the man said, because he had to finish even if no one could hear him. “How it is… with Mr. Gerlach and folks around these parts. It’s like me and the coyotes… it’s like… ”

But he was bone-tired now, like he always was after a hunt. Ready for the cool hollow of his burrow. He mopped his forehead with the coyote tail. Then he shed his furry shirt, wrapped the coyote headpiece around it, and tucked the bundle under one arm. Rifle in hand, he trudged up the road.

And though he panted, he kept his tongue in his mouth.

Late afternoon. The unrelenting sun beat through the window, warming the young woman’s nakedness like the fires of heaven.

Her tits were truly the color of alabaster. That the Chinaman had promised, though Midas Gerlach hadn’t believed him until now. Midas had bought the woman through the mail — bargaining, waiting as each offer and counter offer traveled by stage and train from Fiddler to San Francisco or vice versa. He had committed the Chinaman’s descriptive poetry to heart, but he hadn’t dared believe it. He’d read plenty of yellowback novels and he knew that, numero uno, Chinamen were given to poetic excess and, numero dos, Chi-nee women were as yellow as the first corn of the season.

But it wasn’t like that with the woman who lay on Midas’ bed. If you judged by her, the Chinamans promises were as bankable as cash on the barrelhead. Lie’s tits were the color of alabaster, and they were round and perfect and as hard as any rock God had put on His green earth. Better still, Lie went on from there, her body pure poetry that Midas hadn’t found in any letter. Her nipples were as meaty as jerky, and she complained not at all as he took each in turn between his tobacco-stained teeth, stretching those tiny mounds of Chi-nee jerky into a ten-course meal, which was an image that had never crossed the poetic Chinaman’s mind.

Quick corner-of-the-eye glances filled Midas’ mind with other images. Lie’s fingers digging into the feather bed, knuckles bleached bone white, nails chewed to the quick. Her fan lying open on the floor in a puddle of sunshine, a heavy iron thing that only an inscrutable Chi-nee would invent. His gun belt hanging from the bedpost just above her left hand, but she wasn’t the kind to go reaching for it even though she carried an iron fan that could probably bust bones as efficiently as a railroad brakeman’s club. No. She was hiding. Eyelids closed, brow straining for high cheekbones like fingers strain for palms when a desperate man makes a fist. Lips drawn back, lavender tongue clamped between her teeth with the same studied effort Midas trained on her nipples.

Thin tangle of brush between her legs like an undertaker’s dark thread, like the crimped legs of a dozen dead black widow spiders.

Nipple between his teeth, Midas grinned. Hell and damnation and dreams that come true. A woman who’d take her man without question or complaint. A woman who wasn’t capable of such nonsense. A woman who had been as mute as the day was long since she’d slipped from between her mama’s legs below decks on a ship bound for the land of gold mountains.

The beauty and voice of a flower. That was the Chinaman’s poetry, as haunting as the work of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.

A ten-course jerky meal and the music of smacking lips. That was Midas Gerlach’s poetry. A barroom limerick.

Yessiree. The Chinaman had taken the ass-end of the deal, all right. And the best waited below. Midas’ tongue traveled the length of Lie’s belly. Through the tangle of undertaker’s thread, down one firm alabaster thigh. He threw back the sheet — a clean one, catalog-bought and saved expressly for this occasion. Two teeny little stumps waited at the base of Lie’s ankles, both of them just as white as white could be, each one dotted with five little nubbins twisting this way and that, wriggling this little piggy went to market, this little piggy went to town…

Midas took one toe between his lips, then another. This little piggy had roast beef… this little piggy had none. Suckled like a contented baby. Wee wee wee… all the way home.

Home. China was a world away, but in his heart of hearts Midas knew that he belonged there. With his face buried in yellowback adventure novels he’d loved since he was just a sprout, he often dreamed of foreign shores even though his dead granddaddy’s voice still rang in his head. Those books ain’t manly things. Maybe that’s the way it was in the San Joaquin Valley shitsplat called Fiddler, California, but it wasn’t that way everywhere. Midas liked to read about Chinamen and their ways. He understood them — them with their dungeons and concubines and silk robes heavy with the perfume of opium. Even though he was a white man and a Christian, he understood the things those yellow men liked to do.

Wonderful things. Outre oriental practices that the book writers barely dared relate. Veiled descriptions which trapped Midas’ breath in his throat. Wicked scimitars that could split a man dandruff to dingleberry with one stroke. Opium dreams that taught a man the truth of his heart. Wives by the dozen, each one familiar with the taste of the whip. And best of all, feet sculpted like those at the base of Lie’s alabaster legs, tender young feet wrapped with long strips of silk. Ribbons circling tighter, tighter, tight as a Merry Christmas that never comes.

Bound feet. Saving part of a little girl for ever and ever in a grown woman’s body.

Midas closed his eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t the biggest fish in the little pond called Fiddler, California. He wasn’t a man who ate flapjacks for breakfast and broke horses with a brakeman’s club and drank cheap tequila out of a whore’s high-button shoe and shot down drummers in the local saloons if they so much as cracked a smile when he got to studying their assortments of ladies’ footwear.

For in his mind’s eye Midas was a man who eschewed denim, preferring garments fashioned from the finest oriental silk. His hair was oiled with strange perfumes instead of barber’s tonic. His bed