Chariot - [Millennium Quartet 03] Read online

  And even if she did have it, did that mean those who cared for her had to desert her when she needed them most?

  Damn.

  And people wondered why he kept to himself.

  Then a new, white cotton shirt, still in its package, dropped onto the table in front of him. He jumped, and looked over his shoulder just as a voice said, “My dear fellow, you look absolutely frigid. Do put it on before you catch your, death.”

  * * * *

  5

  He was as Jude and Dodger had described him.

  With an apologetic smile, he slipped into the booth and set his white straw hat down on the table by the window. An immaculate white handkerchief mopped his dry brow. A long-fingered hand pushed back over his mostly white hair, while the other hand waggled to speed Trey into the shirt.

  It fit perfectly.

  “Much better,” the old man said with a nod. “Can’t have you getting ill, now can we?”

  Trey buttoned the shirt, rolled the cuffs up twice, and leaned back, more man a little bemused as Rhonda suddenly appeared at the table, order pad at the ready, all but simpering as she took the man’s order—cheese and lettuce sandwich, coffee, and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, my dear, would it be possible to have a small plate of honey and biscuits.

  Trey waited.

  Rhonda said, “No problem at all, sir, believe me, no problem at all.”

  He stared at the waitress in disbelief, his mouth working soundlessly as Madame Song burst through the swinging kitchen doors, apron gone, and fussed behind the counter. Not saying a word. But smiling.

  Trey looked from her to the old man and said, “She never smiles, you know. In all the years I’ve been coming here, she’s never smiled once.”

  “Yes, well. ..” He extended his hand. “Harp, Mr. Falkirk. John Harp.”

  Trey accepted the greeting without speaking, mildly surprised at the strong, dry grip.

  Harp shook out his napkin, and placed it on his lap, glanced around the table before fussing with his silverware. “It was a wonderful thing you did out there. That poor woman. A mild concussion, no more, I should think.”

  “Who are you?”

  A small constant smile: “It’s quite amazing, and a little sad, don’t you think? How people in a perfectly neutral location can’t seem to let go of their fears, even though there’s nothing at all to fear.”

  Trey leaned back, wondering why all the nuts and losers in the world were so attracted to him.

  A curse.

  It was probably a curse.

  “Nevertheless,” Harp continued, “you didn’t think twice about assisting that poor child. Remarkable. Quite remarkable.”

  “Who,” Trey repeated carefully, “are you?”

  The old man leaned back as well and folded his hands on the edge of the table. A glance out the window, a glance toward the counter, and he inhaled slowly. “Mr. Falkirk, I believe there are four far more important questions you ought to be asking.” He lifted one finger. “Why, for example, do you suppose you are able to do the things you do? Why are you able to tell which slot machines will pay off for you, and which will not?”

  Trey opened his mouth to demand an explanation, closed it when he decided it would do him no good. This man, this John Harp whoever the hell he was, was not accustomed to being pushed, or to being bullied by demands.

  “Why is that, do you suppose?” Harp repeated mildly.

  And Trey answered, without thinking, “I met a man.”

  * * * *

  I met a man once. It was about seven, eight years ago. I was in Reno, having no damn luck at all, down to my last couple of dollars, again,, trying to get down here. I was walking, looking to find a ride, when I saw this guy with his head stuck under the hood of a pickup that should have been put out of its misery twenty years ago. I don’t know anything about engines, but I figured maybe I could help anyway, so I walked over.

  When I got close enough I could see he was pretty old, long white hair braided to beat the band. An Indian. I can’t tell the difference, so I didn’t know whether he was Navajo or Apache or what, but he was fiddling with some wires.

  And he was either talking to the engine or to himself.

  A couple of seconds later, he stood up and saw me.

  You need a ride? he said.

  Yeah. But I don’t think I’m going to get it here.

  He laughed as he slammed the hood down. Once in a while, he said, it gets stubborn. Like a horse that decides it doesn’t want to work today. You have to work around it sometimes. Sometimes you have to trick him. Get in, get in.

  My legs were sore, my feet were sore, my head was sore, I was pretty much at the end of my rope, so I figured I didn’t have anything to lose. I got in. He asked , me where I was headed, I told him, and he gave me the kind of look that made me want to apologize for everything I’d ever done wrong in my life.

  Not a way to live, young fella, he said.

  The only way I know how, I told him.

  He shrugged, put the key in the ignition, and damned if he didn’t ask the truck if it was okay to ride all the way to Las Vegas with a half-cracked white man inside who wanted to piss his life away at the gambling tables.

  When the engine started, he shrugged again. I guess it’s okay. You got money for gas?

  I had three bucks.

  Always me, he said to the dashboard. I always get the dumb ones.

  I didn’t say anything for a long time, just watched the mountains. After a while he started talking, not really saying anything in particular, but with a lot of hours ahead of us, I suppose he figured it was better than nothing since the radio wouldn’t work.

  We talked about the usual stuff—his family, what was left of my family—and I eventually asked him why he talked to the truck like he did. At first he didn’t say anything, and I figured I’d put my foot in it. Not an unusual thing.

  Then he said, I always ask permission to drive. It’s the right thing to do. I get big trouble otherwise.

  I guess I looked as if I was the one riding with the nut, because he kind of laughed and said, you know Indian stuff, right? You must have read about it, or seen it in the movies or on TV. Some Indian prays to the gods to help him fight the enemy, or show him where the food is, things like that? You must have. Well, it’s like this—everything has a spirit. Trees, animals, rocks, rivers, they all have spirits, and if you’re a good Indian, you talk to the spirits, ask them if it’s okay to do whatever it is you have to do.

  But this is a truck, I said.

  The old guy said, So? If a rock can have a spirit, why can’t a pickup? Once you figure out it’s true . . . And he shrugged, laughed, and offered me a drink from a bottle he kept under the front seat.

  We talked about all kinds of stuff after that, complaining, you know, about politicians and the weather and women and stuff like that, and it turns out he was a doctor. It was night by then, and I couldn’t see his face very well, but just about when we could see Vegas in the distance, I asked him why he didn’t ask the spirits to help his family with a hellish couple of years of fatal illnesses which, he had told me, had taken quite a few before it was over.

  Because, he said, sometimes they just get pissed off, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  He dropped me off a little after that, and I hitched another ride into town. Found a shelter and stayed the night. Went to a small casino the next afternoon, lost two of my three bucks, and figured what the hell, why not, I’m going to starve anyway, and asked the slot machine if it was okay to win a little so I could get a sandwich.

  Didn’t happen.

  I couldn’t find a job, ended up panhandling, made about five bucks, and tried the asking thing again.

  Didn’t happen.

  A cop busted me for vagrancy when I hit the streets, but I guess he figured I wasn’t into dope or robbing convenience stores, so he gave me ten bucks and a couple of hours to get out of town before he locked me up.

  I took the mone
y, got out of town in a hurry on the back of a truck hauling grain to Four Corners, and three months later I was back.

  It took me six hotels and I couldn’t begin to count the number of slots before one of them gave me the feeling it would be all right to play.

  I won.

  * * * *

  John Harp nodded as though he understood perfectly. Which was more than Trey did. Even now, talking about it with a stranger who knew too damn much about him, the whole thing seemed, if not improbable, then downright impossible.

  But it worked.

  Asking how or why wasn’t going to change it.

  Madame Song and Rhonda delivered the meals. They fussed, they waited until Harp had tasted his sandwich, sipped his coffee, and exclaimed over the size and light weight of the biscuits, before backing away.

  Trey couldn’t believe it.

  They actually backed away.

  Harp interrupted him: “What if I told you that your success has nothing to do with spirits in a machine?”

  “You’ll jinx me,” he answered immediately, reaching for the catsup.

  Harp laughed heartily, deeply, and shook his head. “My dear fellow, that’s the perfect answer for now. I salute you.” Which he did with his cup of coffee.

  This, Trey thought, is nuts.

  He couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t angry, why he didn’t push a confrontation, why he simply didn’t get up and leave. The answer to each was the same: He was curious. The man didn’t seem to be a threat, certainly not physically, and there was something oddly engaging about him. As if he knew full well what a ridiculous figure he cut, with the hat and the suit and the boots all coupled with the aristocratic accent and bearing. As if he knew and didn’t really give a damn.

  Besides, he had bought the shirt, and he had somehow managed to tame Madame Song. That in itself was worth the price of waiting a while longer—at least until he’d finished the largest burger he’d ever seen.

  Customers filled the booths and tables, the noise level rose, and a second waitress made the rounds with Rhonda. Madame Song retreated to her usual position in the kitchen, and each time one of the swinging doors opened, he could hear her scolding the cooks. Everyone could, and only those who weren’t regulars paid any attention.

  Business as usual, he thought as he watched Harp touch the corners of his mouth with his napkin each time he finished a bite; business as usual. .. sort of. . . and I think I’ve fallen into the rabbit hole here.

  The initial surprise and curiosity began to give way slowly to a niggling apprehension. The room seemed unreal, the diners characters in a play. Not quite real. Not quite there. As if, if he looked hard enough, he would be able to see right through them.

  The idea was unsettling, made him look outside, but the street, the sidewalk, was no more real. Cars and cabs, buses and the occasional limousine drifted by silently; pedestrians held conversations in mime.

  Harp checked his watch and made an impatient clucking sound. His eyes narrowed, and he stared blindly at the sun, his lips pursed.

  “Problem?” Trey asked.

  Harp didn’t answer. He reached for his hat, changed his mind with a nearly inaudible grunt, and slowly, very slowly, turned his head.

  “Mr. Falkirk,” he said softly, “second question: Have you ever wondered why you don’t seem to be able to get hurt in Las Vegas?”

  * * * *

  2

  1

  E

  merald City was empty. Jude could feel it.

  For an hour after Trey left, she had fussed around the house, cleaning what didn’t need to be cleaned, making a spare lunch of salad and tea, cleaning again, wandering always. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she went to the porch and hunted for a sign that would tell her she wasn’t the last person on Earth.

  But Emerald City was empty.

  She knew that Muriel had taken Lil for her therapy, that Roger was in his office at the university; she suspected the others had taken off on errands which would keep them away for a while.

  Safe, then; for the moment she was safe.

  Nevertheless her hand trembled as it peeled off the veil, to allow her face to feel the air again.

  There was no need for her fingers to probe the pink-and-flat white scar tissue that took the place of her cheeks, no need to trace what remained of her nose and lips, all in the hope that night had somehow rendered her whole.

  Too many years had passed.

  All she had left were her children, and the veil.

  There weren’t even any tears.

  She drifted into the yard, the veil in her left hand, just, in case. Just in case.

  A dry wind slow-danced with her hair, rippled her formless dress around her hips and breasts. If she could have smiled, she would have at the sight of a flock of birds too distant to identify, darting and wheeling over the desert.

  She wandered up the street, kicking at loose pebbles, softly humming a song she had heard at Eula’s last week. She didn’t know the words, didn’t know the title, but it had infected her to the point that she couldn’t get it out of her head. And didn’t want to.

  When she reached the end of the street she hesitated before moving on, wishing there had been a shower at least so the cacti would be in brief stunning bloom. Still, the spare beauty of the landscape caught her as it always did, making her wonder, as she always did, how anyone could think this place was harsh and barren.

  One hundred yards later she reached the boulder Trey claimed marked the city limits out here. On it he had etched with the edge of a small sharp rock, the words now worn to grey and fading, the chariot stops here, and she grinned. Like all gamblers he was superstitious, and since he had moved back, evidently to stay, he had never ventured beyond this point. When she had asked why one night, all he’d said was, “The snakes kill out there,” and wouldn’t tell her what he meant.

  You’re a dope, she thought fondly; you’re a dope, and I wish I could love you.

  The wind stopped.

  The flock was gone.

  She was alone, and feeling small, and after brushing a thumb over the boulder for a vague kind of luck, she hurried back to the street, every so often kicking out a sandal to get rid of the sand.

  I wish I could love you.

  She paused in front of Eula’s house, and didn’t realize she’d held her breath until her chest began to ache. When she shuddered in air, too fast, too abruptly, she swayed with brief dizziness and stumbled back a pace.

  “You know,” Eula had told her not so long ago, when they met while Jude had been night-wandering the street, “that a pretty veil thing you got there, child, but you don’t got to wear it.”

  “You don’t know,” Jude had answered stiffly.

  “Oh, child, yes I do, I surely do.”

  A shooting star had streaked over the desert. Her eyes closed briefly, and Eula had laughed softly, without scorn.

  “You making a wish?”

  Jude nodded.

  “It got something to do with that pretty veil?”

  Jude hesitated before nodding again.

  Eula lowered her voice then, and took light hold of her arm. “Listen to me, child—the song got it wrong, wishin’ don’t make it so, no, it don’t.” A step closer, so close Jude could smell the warmth of the woman, and something else, something familiar that she couldn’t put a name to. “It don’t have to be, Miss Judith Levin. It don’t have to be.”

  Then she had walked away, humming, snapping her fingers, every few steps laughing aloud, filled with joy.

  Jude hadn’t moved until the old woman was gone, then she had looked up at the sky, saw another shooting star, and this time she didn’t wish. That had frightened her without reason, so much so that she’d barely said two words to the woman since.

  Now, staring at the house, wondering where Eula was today, where, she was singing, making others dance and clap, eyes raised to the rafters, she put the veil on, frowning a dare at the woman to come out and talk again.
>
  When nothing happened, she blinked once, hard, and remembered the kiss she had blown to Trey that morning.

  I wish I could love you.

  She whispered, “Oh, God,” and felt a chill centered around her heart.

  Emerald City was empty, and it was suddenly too big, and she ran all the way home because she wasn’t safe anymore.