I’m only a bird in a gilded cage.
Now that he’d identified the sound, others began to collect around it like moths around a light: people talking, someone laughing, the stir of feet on a wooden floor.
What the hell?
David sat up, throwing aside his cocoon of weeds, and realized that he wasn’t dreaming it. Somewhere off to the right, not far away, there was a party going on. He kicked away the rest of the weeds with dead feet and spent the next few minutes massaging them back to agonizing life, terrified that at any moment the sounds would terminate with the suddenness of a tape-end flashing past the play-back head. Then he shook the debris out of his clothes and started toward them.
At the brow of the next hill he paused, dumbfounded, having to check his senses once again to confirm that he really was awake. In the valley below stood what looked like a segment of a Western movie set. A segment: thirty yards of street and square-front buildings, chopped off at either end as if by a giant chainsaw. Livery stables, alley with horse and wagon, saloon, hotel—half a hotel, sliced off from top to bottom at mid-room. All of it completely dark, except for a lantern hanging in the alley beside the wagon and the yellow lights streaming from the saloon.
As David stumbled down the hill, a tenor joined the pianist in Silver Threads Amongst the Gold, and a woman called out, “Drat you anyway, Jimmy Joe!” provoking a roar of masculine laughter.
When he pushed through the swinging doors, the noise stopped as if a plug had been pulled, and a dozen faces turned to him, blank with astonishment. They were all there:
The rouged tart in red velvet and net stockings.
The mustachioed piano player in bowler and sleeve-garters.
The dandified card-sharp—deck frozen in mid-shuffle under his hands.
The crooked, frock-coated banker, surrounded by his henchmen.
The cowpokes in for their booze-up from a long, dirty cattle drive.
The beefy bartender, gravely studying David for trouble, his hand on a sawed-off under the bar.
All gazing at him like switched-off clockwork figures—except for one, the only one not in period costume, a slight, elderly gentleman with the face of a benign old sheep, dressed in a cardigan sweater, shirt, and tie. Leaning casually against the bar, he was shaking his head at David with a look midway between disappointment and kindly amusement.
This old gentleman flapped an impatient hand at the others, and they resumed their roles with obvious reluctance, whispering over their drinks as the pianist groped for his place in the melody.
“I’m afraid,” he said, taking David’s arm, “that you really don’t belong here.”
“But … I’m lost.”
The old man smiled tolerantly. “Well, of course you are. And of course I know that you are. But you really must go back.”
“Back?” David stared at him open-mouthed and for the first time in many years felt a tingling behind his eyes that signaled the approach of tears. “You don’t understand. I can’t go back.”
“Of course you can, my boy,” the other said, nodding sympathetically. “It will all be arranged.”
“Arranged?”
“Certainly. Just let me think a bit.” After blinking into a space above David’s head for a few moments, he turned and said, “Ted, Hilly, will you give me a hand?”
Two of the cowpokes exchanged a glance and stood up.
“Come along then,” the old man said, steering David outside and into the alley, where the horse and wagon stood waiting. The horse, a massive old gray, turned a baleful eye to them, and David saw that the wagon was loaded with a long wooden crate.
“Ted, Hilly.” The old man nodded at the two cowpokes as if identifying them for David’s sake. “It seems we’re going to need Mike’s box.”
Ted, a neckless troll with a torso like a barrel, glared at David reproachfully, but said nothing. Hilly, a tall, rangy man with impossibly wide shoulders, muttered, “Shit.”
“Come on now, it’s no big deal.”
The two men shrugged, climbed up onto the wagon, and started to shift the box off the end, but the old man said, “No, no, leave it where it is.”
“Aw, Christ.” Hilly looked around the bed of the wagon, picked up a pry bar, and attacked the lid, which came up with nails shrieking. “Come on, Ted, Goddammit, grab it.”
Ted pulled the lid off and carefully set it aside.
Then, as David watched in horror, they wrestled a nude male body out of the box and pitched it face down into the dirt at his feet. A red neck-rag tied around one wrist made its nakedness doubly obscene.
The old man tilted his head confidentially toward David and said, “We were having a wake, you see.”
CHAPTER 27
“Jesus God,” David whispered, unable to tear his eyes away from the corpse, obscenely hairless, its backside empurpled with settled blood.
Ted and Hilly had climbed down from the wagon and were leaning against it casually, bored. The old man looked at them with disapproval and snapped, “Well, get him up.”
Ted rolled his eyes, shuffled over to the corpse, and gave it an unenthusiastic kick.
“Come on,” the old man said impatiently. “It’s cold out here.”
The barrel-shaped cowpoke growled, hunched his shoulders, and leaped into a kick that stove in the ribcage with a sickening crunch.
“Jesus,” David breathed, sagging at the knees.
“For Christ’s sake, get him up!”
Ted shrugged helplessly. Hilly shook his head in disgust and said, “Grab his arms.”
“Fuck it, you grab his arms.”
“Oh, shit.”
Together they managed to grapple the body into an upright position, with Ted holding him in a bear hug from behind.
“Come on,” Hilly said, “hold him up.”
“I am holding him up, asshole.”
“I mean higher.”
“Goddammit, I can’t go higher.”
“Oh fuck, give him to me.”
The old man sighed as the two wrestled with the body again until Hilly had taken Ted’s place, holding it from behind.
“Okay,” Ted said, massaging his fist. “Ready?”
“Hold on.” Hilly switched his grip on the body so that he was holding it on his hip. “Okay.”
Ted twitched his shoulders up and down a few times to loosen them, then reared back and delivered a blow to the corpse’s belly that would have felled a gorilla. In spite of Hilly’s grip, the body folded up over Ted’s fist, and a torrent of foul liquid erupted from its mouth to soak his shoulder.
“Oh, shit!” he screamed hysterically, trying to dance away from the drenched shoulder. “The fucker puked on me!”
Laughing, Hilly released the body, which dropped to hands and knees barking hoarsely, like a dog trying to bring up a bone.
“Go change your shirt, Ted,” the old man told him calmly and walked over to hunker down beside the still-quaking corpse. He studied it for a few moments, then said, with great intensity: “Mike.”
Hilly, leaning against the wagon, his arms folded, chuckled as Mike went on retching convulsively.
“Mike, come on.” The old man rapped him sharply on the head with his knuckles. As if electrified by this trivial blow, Mike stiffened to a catatonic rigidity.
“Mike. See!”
When he didn’t move, the old man rapped his skull again.
“See, you idiot!”
Mike raised his head, his mouth hanging completely open.
“Come on.” The old man knelt down beside him, took Mike’s head in his hands, and turned it around to point up at David.
“See!” Mike gazed up, his eyes pools of staring blackness, and David shrank back, shuddering uncontrollably.
Still holding his head, the old man leaned forward to look first into Mike’s face then up into David’s, as if checking the angle. “Did you see?”
“Ungh,” Mike groaned, his mouth still hanging open.
“Good, good,”
the old man said, releasing him to collapse into the dust. He stood up, brushed off his knees, and went over to confer with Hilly. As the two of them talked in low tones, David and Mike stared at each other. Both seemed equally horrified by what they saw.
“Well, that’s all settled then,” the old man said, taking David’s arm. “There’ll be time for a drink now.”
“Time?” David croaked.
The old man chuckled. “I dare say you can use one.”
Numbly, David allowed himself to be led inside and deposited at a table. The music and hilarity around him failed to penetrate his overloaded senses, and he gazed about in a stupor, feeling insubstantial, only superficially present, like an image projected on the wall. He wasn’t thinking about what had happened in the alley. In a sense, he couldn’t think about it; his mind simply rejected what his eyes had taken in.
When the old man arrived with glasses and a bottle of whiskey, David looked up and asked, “What is this place?”
The old man looked around doubtfully. “Why, I believe you could say that it’s the Dead Man Saloon.”
“I mean, what town?”
He smiled. “Oh, it’s not a town, of course. You can see that.”
“But where are we?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t know what to tell you. Not every place on the earth has a name. If it’s any help to you, we’re in the mountains about a hundred miles west of Denver.”
“I see.” David took a sip of the whiskey and savored its fiery tingle as a confirmation of his reality. “Can someone help me get out of here?”
“All being taken care of, my boy.”
David took another, larger sip and looked around cautiously. “Who are these people?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.”
“What are these people doing here?”
The old man frowned, puzzled. “I’d say they’re … enjoying themselves.”
His confidence returning, David poured himself another drink. “You seem to be deliberately misunderstanding me.”
“Am I?” The old man pursed his lips in an innocent smile. “Perhaps you and I simply have different perceptions of the duties of hospitality.”
“You’ll have to explain that, I’m afraid.”
“Really? How would you react to a stranger blundering into one of your own haunts and demanding to know who your companions were and what they were doing there?”
David paused. “Yes, but …”
“Yes? Go on.”
“I mean … this is the middle of nowhere.”
“Is it indeed? An amusing concept, that. And if it is?”
“Well … naturally I’m curious.”
“You mean your curiosity is aroused by all this activity taking place in what you call the middle of nowhere.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The old man’s aura of kindliness seemed to dissolve as he fixed David with a chilly stare. After sitting through two minutes of it, David asked what was wrong.
“Merely an attack of revulsion for those of your kind, I’m afraid.”
“My kind?”
The old man cocked an eyebrow at him sardonically. “Surely you know what kind you are.”
“Well, no, I guess I don’t.”
He gave him a bleak smile. “Perhaps that is the reason for my revulsion.”
David shook his head, bewildered. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand.”
The old man turned in his chair to survey the room, pausing when he spotted an enormous blanketed Indian sitting by himself in a corner.
“Horse Killer!” he called out. “Would you come here for a moment?”
The Indian glanced up without moving his broad, massive head. Then he rose, approached their table, and stood looking down at them in silence, his smallpox-ravaged face unreadable.
“Horse Killer, tell me: Do you know what kind I am?”
The Indian eyed him somberly for a moment. “I know.”
“And do you know what kind you are?”
“Yes.”
He flicked a finger in David’s direction. “This one doesn’t. He doesn’t know what kind he is.”
The Indian studied David gravely, his saturnine eyes filled with distaste, as if he were inspecting a not very promising hunting dog.
“Do you think you’d be able to enlighten him on this point?”
“Maybe. Probably not.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged heavily and pushed his lips out in disdain. “Too old. Too ignorant.”
The old man transferred his gaze to David and nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. Thank you.”
As Horse Killer lumbered back to his own table, David frowned down into his drink, feeling bitter over this unjustified attack and wondering how he could defend himself against a charge so ill-defined. Before he could find a place to begin, the old man pushed back his chair and stood up.
“I believe they’re ready for us now.”
David looked around doubtfully and turned to the swinging doors. After a moment Hilly’s knobby red face appeared above them and nodded once in their direction.
Walking out into the frigid air, David felt a tense expectancy around him, as if he were an actor making his entrance in a critical scene. The wagon had been drawn up in front of the saloon, and the steaming gray turned to look at him reproachfully. Ted watched from the driver’s station, his face shadowed by a heavily stained cowboy hat. Hilly was propped up against the back of the wagon, his arms folded, a toothpick working in his mouth, but his eyes belied the nonchalance of the pose. Although he seemed to be completely engrossed in studying the horse, the old man was obviously waiting for someone to begin the action, to deliver the anticipated line.
David, not knowing what else to do, started to climb up into the seat beside Ted but stopped when he felt the old man’s hand on his arm.
“You’ll be more comfortable in the back,” he said quietly.
David looked into the wagon and saw that the wooden crate was still in place. Then his eyes grew wide as he looked again. The crate was filled to the top with weeds. He felt the breath leave his lungs as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
“No,” he said in a choked whisper.
Hilly climbed up into the wagon, lifted off the top layer of weeds invitingly.
“No,” he said again, edging away.
“But you must go back,” the old man insisted.
“No.”
The three of them watched with intense interest as David continued to back away. When he reached the mouth of the alley, the old man spoke a single word.
“Mike.”
As David turned, Mike was already gathering his feet under him, his black gaze fixed on David as if he were an apparition of horror.
“Mike,” the old man repeated. “Bring him.”
David turned and ran.
At the crest above the town that wasn’t a town, he stopped, panting, and looked back. The resurrected corpse—almost luminescent in its paleness—was easily visible two hundred yards away, shambling toward him, lurching grotesquely with each stride to compensate for its crushed ribcage. Ted, Hilly, and the old man lounged around the wagon, watching casually, like spectators at an egg-and-spoon race.
While catching his breath, David tried to formulate a strategy. Judging from Mike’s progress, he felt he could stay ahead of him indefinitely, just by walking at a brisk pace, but the image of the two of them traversing the endless hills ahead, forever two hundred yards apart, was not an appealing one. He couldn’t risk making it into a simple test of endurance.
Coming up the hill, he’d seen the moon ahead of him, presumably setting. As long as he kept marching toward it, he was in no danger of walking in circles, and this gave him an edge. Once out of visual contact with David, Mike wouldn’t know what direction he’d taken and would soon be wandering through the hills at random, completely lost. David figured a ten minute jog would be enough to shake Mike off his t
rail.
It was also enough to do him in, and at the end of it he sank down into the dirt, panting, his throat as raw as if he’d swallowed a red-hot poker. As he waited for his heart to stop hammering and for his breath to return to normal, he wondered if it was necessary to move on at all. Checking his watch, he was astounded to see that it was only three o’clock—plenty of time to freeze to death if he didn’t keep moving. He sighed and closed his eyes, deciding a ten-minute rest would be safe enough.
When he woke up twenty minutes later, it was because a pair of icy hands had closed around his ankles. David screamed and gave a convulsive kick that sent Mike spinning into the dirt. Then, once again, he was up and running.
After five minutes he stumbled over his own leaden feet, pitched headlong down the last twenty feet of an embankment, and lay there panting helplessly.
A man can walk down a deer.
His father, not a hunter but a tireless collector of unrelated bits of information, had told him this when he was a child. In his father’s mind, it was proof of something or other—of the superiority of brains over speed, perhaps; of man’s superiority over the rest of creation.
A man can walk down a deer. Was that what the old man was thinking?
Surely you know what kind you are.
Do you know what kind I am?
Is there a kind that can walk a man down?
David pulled himself up onto an elbow and looked around. Nothing moved; the air was as still and silent as if life had never been born on this planet. As far as he could tell, he’d left his pursuer far behind. But of course that’s what the deer thinks too; spotting the hunter, it sprints ahead and imagines itself safe—until the hunter, moving at his own tireless pace, reappears and sends it into flight again—and again and again, until its energy is entirely spent.
He sank back into the dirt and gazed up at the remote, uncaring universe overhead, wondering if there was any stimulus at all that could get him back on his feet and running again. He was still wondering when he heard Mike scrabbling in the rocks above him.
He turned around so that he was on his knees, and sought out the black pits of Mike’s eyes. Do you know what kind you are? Do you know what kind I am?