“It’s soup,” she cackled, her eyes bunting evilly. “Just plain red pepper soup, seasoned with brimstone and jellied kerosene and a few other personal spices. A delicate consommé sure to please as rugged and discerning a palate as yours, man. My own recipe… hee-hee-hee.”
Malone nodded once, his face aglow with the light rising not just from the boiling kettle but from the liquid frothing on the ladle, and downed the contents in a single gulp. He smacked his lips and put the ladle back in the pot.
Water started to stream from the corners of his black eyes, to cascade down his cheeks and into his beard. The tears were so hot that the hairs of his beard curled aside to give them free passage and the hair on his head began to writhe desperately as if trying to flee his skull. Smoke began to rise from the region of his belly, and the leather there darkened ominously. The veins in his eyes swelled until there wasn’t any white for all the red. A fingernail fell intact and smoking from the fourth finger of his right hand, leaving a steaming scar in its wake.
Malone opened his mouth, and a gust of fire issued forth that put to shame the roaring of the falls of the Yosemite—a great, intemperate blast of flame that turned the iron pump on the edge of the sink into a tired lump of slag. A sharp explosion shook the house as the heat of that exhalation blew out every one of the house’s twelve imported windows, and Mary Makepeace held her head and screamed and screamed. Outside the kitchen, where the blast had struck, twenty-five feet of grass and brush was vaporized in a swath five feet wide.
The force of his reaction had propelled Malone into the far wall of the kitchen, cracking a support log and threatening to bring down the whole upper story along with the roof. The log creaked, but it held.
Slowly, Malone picked himself up from the floor, his eyes still watering, and rubbed at his throat as he nodded admiringly toward the aghast witchen. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” The lining of his mouth had gone numb, and his tongue felt like what a match is like after it’s been used. “Now,” he said softly, “it’s your turn.”
“Hmph! Waste of time this now, waste of time.” She flew over to float above the steaming kettle at which Malone had labored. Some of the bravado had fled from her cackle. Malone ought not to have been alive, much less offering comments on the quality of her most incendiary dish. She stuck her bulbous nose downward and sniffed contemptuously, then dropped lower and studied the simmering surface. “Maybe you survived the tasting,” she said dangerously, “but you won’t survive the contesting, hee-hee-hee.” Using the end of an unlit match for a spoon, she dipped out a sample of the concoction and popped it into her mouth.
For a moment she chewed reflectively. Then it hit her. Her eyes bulged enormously, and her mouth dropped open, for what Malone had wrought was as feral and fey as it was flamboyantly effective. “Ohhh myyyyy!” she exclaimed sharply. Her skin turned from brown to pink to cherry red, and her tiny body ballooned up like a pig bladder. Bigger and bigger she swelled, until at last she burst in a cloud of red heat that filled the whole kitchen.
When the cloud had gone, so had the witchen. A corner of the mountain man’s mouth turned up, and he gave a loud snort of satisfaction. “Hee-hee, hee,” he growled at nothing in particular.
“Mary?” a querulous, uncertain voice murmured. “Mary?”
Malone watched enviously as Mrs. Makepeace rushed to embrace her newly restored husband and children, vowing as long as she was granted life to live in understanding and harmony with him again, to love and honor and all those other words so many people take so casually the first time around. Her only problem was that she didn’t have enough arms to hug him and the children as tightly as she wished.
When the tearful reunion had settled down somewhat and the thankful Hart Makepeace had learned what had transpired during his cellulose sojourn, Mary was able to inspect a gleaming, completely restored kitchen. Even the ruined jams and preserves had been returned to their respective jars. Only the melted sink pump remained to remind all of what had gone before.
Unexpected side benefits arose from the confrontation. For the remainder of his life Hart Makepeace would smoke neither cigar nor pipe. The two Hart children, who spent the rest of the afternoon vomiting up cookies, chocolate, oatmeal, raisins, nuts, and other baker’s ingredients, were able to resist permanently the most tempting blandishments Sacramento’s millers could proffer.
That night, as Amos Malone was preparing to take his leave of the farm, Mary Makepeace asked him, “What was it you prepared that affected her so, Mr. Mal… Amos?”
“A little something I learned from Tullie Kanotay, ma’am.” He cinched the saddle a little tighter, and a warning groan issued from Worthless’s throat. “Tullie Kanotay’s part Apache, part Irish, part somethin’ not entirely human, and all Texan… which latter often amounts to the same thing as the former. Bit o’ the witch in her own right. That dish can only be made up once a year by any one individual, and then only by one who knows the proper proportions, has the touch of a master French chef and the heart of a Hindoo raj, or else the emissions might unbalance the ice which caps the head and backside of our world. Why, I can hardly eat more than a bowl or two of it myself.
“It’s chimera chili, ma’am, and its effects can’t be countered by any spell or magic known, because the taste changes every couple o’ seconds. It had to be that dish and that one only, or your nasty visitor could’ve spelled her way around it. But the flavor kept shiftin’ too fast for her taste buds, not t’ mention her counterspells, and so the moment she sipped it she was done for.” He patted the Sharps buffalo rifle slung next to the saddlebags on Worthless’s back.
“The recipe itself ain’t too hard to work up. Hardest part’s findin’ chimera meat.” He gestured toward the distant, moonlit, serrated crest of the High Sierra off to the east. “Ain’t too many chimeras hereabouts, but you can track one down if you know how they work their meanderings.”
Mary Makepeace listened to this quietly, then glanced back toward the farmhouse, which once more smelled of cleanliness and home. Inside, her husband and sons were reveling in being once more themselves instead of sterile objects of china and wood. She looked back up at the mountain man through eyes made of lime-green glass. “Dear, kind Amos Malone, whom I shall never call Mad, I don’t know how to thank you, but I… I would offer you one last favor in return for your aid.”
Malone eyed her uncertainly. “Now, ma’am, I’m not sure that I ought…”
“Would you… would you… stay for dinner?”
Malone wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. He rubbed gingerly at his stomach. The heat lingered… though it hadn’t really been a bad soup at all. No, not bad at all.
“I’d be pleased to, ma’am. I don’t get the chance to eat much in the way o’ home cookin’. I’ll stay… so long as there’s plenty of plain meat and unsalted potatoes.”
“I’ll lock up the pepper,” she assured him, smiling delightedly, and led him back toward the house.
Worthless watched them go, then ambled off toward the nearby barn. The forehead horn that Malone kept constantly trimmed back was itching again. That meant for sure there had to be a mare nearby who, like himself, would care nothing for the antics of silly humans but only for the things that really mattered….
Jackalope
A good story usually comes about when two or more elements fuse together. Sometimes these may relate to one another, sometimes not. Beloved of inventive tellers of tales and maniacal taxidermists alike, the jackalope is to be found stuffed and mounted in innumerable western bars and honky-tonks, patient recipient of whiskey stains, crude jokes, and the occasional criminally misplaced dart. Yet rumors of its actual existence continue to surface, even if largely due not to scientific reports but to the rumor-mongering persistence of elderly bewhiskered gentlemen comfortably ensconced in wooden rocking chairs on creaky porches.