The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Gerlach clan from Midas’ granddaddy on down damn well knew that the whole bunch of them couldn’t control their passions when the brandy had them by the balls. Peached or straight it did not matter.

But it wasn’t the cutting up part that had bothered the good citizens of Sacramento City. It was the simple fact that Midas (in the pixilated afterglow of a frolic similar to the one he’d just enjoyed with Lie) had sauteed the slut’s feet in the French chef’s best skillet, cooking her little toesies to a golden brown in a rich sauce of champagne and wild mushrooms and plenty of butter. When the hotel staff found him after the deed was done, sixty-two bones lay stripped clean on the hotel’s finest Staffordshire Blue china, and Midas was working his bicuspids with a toothpick. His disposition was later described as more than agreeable by the concierge, certainly polite despite a few discreet belches. In fact, everything seemed just fine and dandy until the hotel doorman peeked into the kitchen and confronted the untended remains of Midas’ gustatory extravaganza, at which point the hale and hearty Irishman promptly lost the half-pint of whiskey that had insulated him against the surprisingly intemperate June weather.

The Sacramento City papers played it up big. Said that Midas was worse than that Alferd Packer fellow out Colorado way, worse than the miserable wretches who called themselves the Donner Party. And then the gentlemen of the press got to embellishing the story, and pretty soon Midas found that he had consumed not only the whore’s feet but also the French chef’s privates — cooked up with a big mess of oysters was how the story went — and that little tale put the noblest son of the house of Gerlach off his feed for a full week. Such embellishments continued, each revelation helping to jack the bounty on Midas’ head to Tower of Babel proportions, until it got to the point where Diamond Jim Brady himself might get all wet in the mouth and strap on a gun, let alone some buck with a scarred Colt that had most-likely seen its last duty at Gettysburg.

Such memories aroused a man’s thirst. Midas stepped across the courtyard of the Empress Dowager’s palace, bent low and removed the roof of a building that had housed the Empress’ eunuchs. He snatched up a bottle of tequila, taking dim satisfaction, as always, in his choice of hiding place.

He washed the taste of Lie’s toes from his mouth, one pleasure eclipsing the other, while he watched the nigger work.

Hell and damnation. Diamond Jim was going to have to get in line. Discounting the Pinkerton men, the buck was the third gunman to come looking for Midas just this month. He was the only one to get as far as the ranch. Or maybe he was just the first one to get to the ranch. And him with shaggy boots that looked to be made from dead rats and tattered clothes that maybe fit him when thirty or forty pounds of extra meat hung on his bones.

Midas drank. This buck wasn’t scarecrow skinny, though. He was what you’d call rangy. Tough — all hungry- eyed and Sunday-serious. He made those Pinkerton men look like weepy choir boys. Took his beating like one of Midas’ prize horses, all proudlike. Even the ranch hands — trigger-happy desperados, every one — had to admit that this buck had a different stripe to him, and they were the kind of men who hated niggers more than any other creatures that walked on two legs.

The buck could shoot, too. Clipped Midas’ ear, but that wasn’t anything to get excited about. Hell, it was Midas who shot the gun out of the buck’s hand just as slick and cool as Deadwood Dick.

But all Midas had to do was take one look at the buck to know that the bastard was as good as finished. Buck out there digging a hole. Digging his own grave.

Well that wasn’t rightly true. Not quite.

Midas took a final swig of tequila, crunching the worm between his teeth as he glanced at Lie. She’d dried her buttocks with a towel. They didn’t shine like pearls anymore. No, now her sweetcheeks had the look of cool marble monuments that might have been carved by Michelangelo himself.

Midas swallowed the worm. Such unsullied beauty as that of his bride-to-be couldn’t be forced to sit upon the outdoor privy Midas and his boys had employed lo these many years. That wasn’t to be. By God, the bride of Midas Gerlach would not suffer a splinter in her behind. Neither would she breathe the unseemly combustulations of a dozen sworn profligates.

So the buck bounty man wasn’t digging his own grave. He was digging a new shit shaft for Midas Gerlach’s bride-to-be. The old shit shaft would be the buck’s grave, though Midas worried that it was slightly sacrilegious to bury a nigger in the same spot where lay Granddaddy Gerlach’s pecker, be it shit shaft or no.

But he also figured that the buck could go to his final reward knowing that his last task on God’s green earth had been a noble one, for there was no nobler effort than shielding true beauty from the undeniable vulgarity which thrived within this vale of tears. At least, that was the opinion of a certain poet from the Mysterious East.

Midas figured that the stranger wouldn’t understand that, though. It didn’t really matter, because the stranger didn’t have a whole lot more understanding to do.

All he had to do was dig a hole.

Then he had to take enough bullets so that he’d fall into another one.

Then he had to die.

Maybe not in that precise order. Midas chuckled. If the stranger was really smart, he’d stomach as much lead as he could, just to be sure he was dead through before he plummeted into the fetid abyss.

The barbed wire had gouged a raw trench through the flesh of his wrist just as thoroughly as a crown — or more properly, a bracelet — of thorns might have done, and the bullet hole through his hand had the angry look of a cheap steak dredged in pepper and Louisiana Tabasco, but the stranger didn’t feel any pain. After hours of digging in the hot sun without water or a single minute’s rest, he barely felt anything. He only felt himself and the shovel, the hard earth, and the heat.

He didn’t know who or where or even what he was. Not anymore. Not in this hellish furnace of a place. Not with slow trickles of blood weeping from his hand. Hand a part of the shovel handle. Booted feet stomping shovel blade. Left, then right. Biting the earth. His boots, each one bristling with the razor teeth of a dozen midnight horrors, biting the earth and making it whimper.

No. Not the earth. That whimper came from his throat.

It wasn’t a whimper of pain. The digging man was lost. Utterly. Completely. He knew that for sure and for certain, and that was what made him whimper. He’d been somebody when he came to this place. Somebody strong. And before that, he’d been somebody else. Somebody who wasn’t strong. But the Chinaman had changed him. The Chinaman had given him a pair of boots with teeth that could bite the earth and make it whimper. And it was the hell of losing that strength that made the stranger whimper like a motherless child.

He scooped a shovelful of dirt out of the hole. The Chinaman. He seemed a real memory. White hair and coffee-colored eyes that were as pretty as a woman’s. The Chinaman didn’t seem like someone the black man would imagine. Down South, he’d never seen a Chinaman at all. Down South, there were white folks and colored folks, and he’d seen plenty of both in his time.

That was another piece of it. He punched the shovel into the earth and the crown of thorns bit his wrist.

Not a crown, a bracelet.

No matter. Down South, he’d seen a crown of thorns. Down South, there was a church, and in that church was a preacher named Stackhouse, and that preacher named Stackhouse had carved himself a black Jesus with a crown of thorns that made you ache with pure misery could bring Satan’s own bitch to her knees like a gentle lamb. And that preacher named Stackhouse had had himself a son, a boy who didn’t want to have any lamb in him at all. A good-for-nothing lay-about who would do, but not do right. A boy who’d read, but wouldn’t read the good book. He’d read books stolen from the homes of indecent white folks. He’d work his fingers, but he’d work them around a deck of cards or a bottle, not around a shovel or a hoe.

But the black man held a shovel now, so that preacher’s boy couldn’t be him. Still, the memory seemed so real. And the name was so familiar. Stack…

What was it, now? Just there on his tongue a second ago, and now it was gone.

Stack —

“Stackalee… ”

The Chinaman’s voice echoed against the walls of the hole, and the black man glanced at the four dirt walls surrounding him before he realized that the word had spilled from his own lips.