And then he remembered other words. Words heard out the backside of that church Down South, linked up so that they made stories. Stories about an eternal bad man who wore an oxblood Stetson, a man who made church-going women slick between the legs with a sharp glance, a man who shook up the earth with his feet, a man who scared a preacher’s youngest son but scared him with a fear that made his blood surge with all the power of a river come springtime.
“Stackalee.” The name was on the digging man’s lips, and it seemed to fit there, just the way a man fits a woman.
He sucked a deep breath. His blood surged. Suddenly, he knew why he was here in this hole with a shovel wired to his hand. He’d made a little mistake, and now he was paying for it with his sweat and blood. The men who’d put him here figured that he could never do what they’d asked of him.
The men? No, that wasn’t right. The man. That fiery Southern preacher, him so high and mighty, speachifyin’ and preachifyin’. “Dig your hole deep, sonny boy. Gonna take a deep deep hole to hold all your shameless sins.”
Oh, he could dig a hole deep, all right. Man name of Stackalee, he once dug a hole straight down to hell just so he could kick the devil’s brimstone ass. A man with fanged boots stitched by a Chinaman, he could put the bite to a shovel with those boots, make that shovel work a damn sight harder. Especially if his name was Stackalee.
“That’s my name,” the man said, no whimper left in him. “Yes, that’s who I am.”
He punched the shovel into the ground, again and again, and each time he brought it away he expected to see the white face of Satan beaming up at him from below.
Things didn’t work out that way, though.
Because, the first time he looked up, expecting to see the unforgiving sun wearing its implacable mask of indifference, there was old Satan, above him, waiting.
Staring into the pit.
Smiling.
The white goblin was gone now.
Lie was alone.
She wasn’t supposed to be alone. But neither should she have lain naked in the white goblin’s bed, nor bear the marks of his teeth and lips upon her body. Father’s dark man was to have protected her from all of that. Him, with his six-gun and his magic boots.
But Father’s dark man was outside, digging in the earth like a mole.
Father had made the magic boots. Stitched them from the bodies of living bats that jerked and screamed when the dark man pulled the boots onto his feet for the first time. Father had promised that the boots would give the man the strength he had long wanted, and the man saw soon enough that Father’s words were true, because soon enough the dark man’s six-gun thundered and his enemies fell.
With his fist the dark man crushed a deputy’s skull — not surprised to find that he could do such a thing, but certainly astonished to find that the simpering idiot actually had a brain inside his head. With nothing more than a sharp glance he severed a hangman’s rope, and the thunder in his boots turned the stone walls of a jail to powder and pebble.
Father took the dark man’s money. Not only for the boots — there was the high price of a fugitive’s room and board, the higher price of silence. But Father told the man how he could get his money back. The man agreed with nothing more than a nod, and in that moment Lie had felt the power of the stranger’s razor-edged glance cut straight to the secret depths of her heart. She had felt, just for an instant, that a man who looked into her soul with such eyes could deal with a goblin who wrote letters that stank of lust and misery. Maybe Father could outsmart that monster, after all. Lie hoped so. For that monster, Father said, dined on human flesh, calculating the riches of a hundred men on an abacus of human bone. That monster, Father said, would fall before no ordinary man.
But what would Father say now? His terror in fanged boots was digging in the ground like a railroad coolie. What would Father do if he saw that? Cut off the dark man’s feet with his ceremonial axe, the way he had taken the herbalist’s tongue?
Would Father leave her here with the goblin who ate the flesh of humans?
No. That could not happen. The very idea of being trapped in this furnace of a place chilled her, like a hot breeze sliced cold as it gusted through a forest of stone cemetery monuments.
Lie had no faith in her father, a man who had used her as a poker chip. But her faith, somehow, swelled with the power of a razor-edged glance that could never be held.
Until she looked through the window.
And saw the pale goblin holding a gun in each hand.
And her dark man.
And his blood.
The men had split the buck’s face into a dozen pieces — at least, that was the way it looked to Midas — but damned if the hardcase couldn’t still manage an uppity little grin.
“That’s enough, boys.” Something about the buck had suddenly made Midas all twitchy, and he wanted to conclude this matter and get on with the business at hand. “Now, do like I told you.”
“Damn thing’s gonna fall apart if’n we try to move it,” said one of the men.
“Bullshit,” said another. “Didn’t fall apart last week when you pushed it over. And that was with me in it.”
“You mebbe got a point there.”
Everyone laughed. Even the buck. But when Midas’ men stopped laughing, the buck didn’t. His belly heaved until his eyes filled with tears. Midas waved his men to work with his six-guns, but that only made the buck laugh harder.
The deadliest gunmen within a hundred miles heaved and struggled like a bunch of field hands, easing the old outhouse from above its horrid well. Midas planned to relocate the communal privy nearer the men’s quarters, and it looked like it was going to be rough going. One of the pistoleros slipped and nearly fell into the brimming shit shaft, grabbing the teetering structure for dear life, his gun-hand suddenly the home of a half-dozen splinters. Rivulets of blood wept from the buck’s split lip but still he smiled full and wide, tittering like a schoolgirl as Midas’ gun-dogs pulled their compadre from danger. “Smells like the gate of hell itself,” one of the men said, and the buck whispered, “Oh, you don’t know, you just don’t know.” And then the buck glanced at Midas, who stood in front of a brand new outdoor privy with a quarter moon cut in the door and
MRS. MIDAS GERLACH
PRIVATE
inscribed just below it, and he looked at the hole he’d dug in the hard earth of Fiddler and he laughed and laughed.
The gunmen moved the pristine outhouse over the freshly excavated hole. The buck was nearly busting a gut now, tears spilling from his brown eyes. The entire display was an affront to Midas’ sensibilities. He had to make the buck understand, because he didn’t want this kind of thing happening in front of his men. “Death isn’t a laughing matter,” he intoned. “You should go to your grave with dignity. Your last action, digging this hole, has been a noble one. After all, the poets of the Mysterious East tell us that there is no nobler effort then the shielding of true beauty from the undeniable vulgarity which thrives within this vale of — ”
The buck howled and hooted.
Midas’ guts were as tight as fiddle strings. He knew his men had noticed his distress, and that wasn’t good. But there was something about the stranger’s roaring laughter that burrowed under his skin like a
