Mr. Junction City Savings put Johnny Holler down in his book as New York’s second. Johnny said: I never asked. But it don’t matter. New York takes. New York brooks no refusing.
From just about then Johnny Holler started getting brighter. Sure, smarter—you can’t get clued in on the big game without sharpening up a bit. But he started glowin’ like a lamp turned on inside him, and all the time they walked out to Missouri to see about the Caliph of St. Louis he just kept shining brighter still. By the time I met him, you couldn’t look at him without squinting. His bandoliers screaming silver just like the moon.
Los Angeles nailed down his second up Oregon way. A minor player, Princess of the Siskyous or something, lanky tall white girl answering to Sally Rue. The Wizard of Los Angeles pricked up when she started making her name, strapped up his big snort of a horse and rode it all the way from Alamagordo where he’d fucked and then detonated the brain-stem of Abbot of New Mexico with a one lightning kiss.
Come on now. Don’t make a face. I told you it wasn’t a pretty thing, when these kids count off their paces.
Anyway, Los Angeles sniffed up the Princess just as soon as he crossed the Tahoe naphtha sink, smelled her like musk and cattle. Rode on north like an arrow. Put a blade between his teeth and hit the big empty college green where the Princess was sitting down to cards with her sad little second, boy by the name of Frank Bust. Los Angeles sat himself on the grass and played a hand or two, not winning nothing and not looking to, just taking a friendly trick when he could. When the sun got low he spat his black knife just as quiet as breathing, right between Frank Bust’s eyes. Kid didn’t see it coming to say shit, just gogged while Los Angeles brushed the hair out of the Princess’s Frank-spattered face and kissed both the her cheeks, said something in Algonquin or Greek or some such and pulled on her jaw like a trigger. Nothing came out—she was saving the bullet down in the deep of her for the end, and that made her Los Angeles’ kind of girl. He hauled her out to Junction City quick as a wedding.
She was already looking a little god around the edges. Her teeth shone like hard sunshine.
Something bad happened a long time ago. In the bubblegum daisygirl ocean days, when there were rivers where the rivers are. I’d like to know about it, much as you, much as anyone. Seems like a worthy thing to know. But I don’t make what you’d call a real effort to find out. I got my own problems. My own somethings bad. For awhile I thought it had to be a bomb. Something big and bright and final. They used to have bombs like that. That left black dust even after they’d stopped burning everybody up, and something else, something invisible, something that changed you if it touched you. Sounded right to me.
And the dust that comes down in the summer will burn you clean through.
But apart than Gilly Spur the oldest soul I know is Blue Bob who lives at the top of a grain silo sharpening scissors for bread, and he said he never saw nothing blow up but what does he know, he never lived in a city that mattered enough to bomb. He says the mail stopped one day. Then the running water and a little after that you started noticing people’d gone missing. Just gone, blinked off like a fuse. He’d taken the last of his gas and headed to Cheyenne and got drunk for weeks off of the stuff lying around with no one to guard it. Blue Bob says he’s not really sorry. He likes the quiet.
He’s the Emperor of Wyoming. Told me once, half upside-down in a bottle of mash. It’s not that he can’t fight, he just doesn’t care. Doesn’t like the world enough to care. Blue Bob kissed me all over then, and I kissed him back even though he was so old you could see through him. I like kissing. Kisses are big and bright and final. Just because I’m writ down for the Burnt Corn Ranch doesn’t mean I gotta be a virgin when I get there. Can’t see no point in virginity myself. I’m not gonna live so long I should wait on much of anything.
Here’s what I think, though, at the end of everything behind the bar with the bourbon and the dog and the commotion outside.
I think the world just broke.
Nobody’s fault. Things get old. They go funny. They get stuck like a pump or run backwards like a pocketwatch. You just try and use an old pistol that ain’t been looked after. It might click and whine and stick. It might blow you clean dead.
Gilly Spur says there didn’t used to be magic. That’s nice. I like to think the world had a childhood. A little while when it didn’t have to bother with none of this.
I saw me a picture with Los Angeles in it once. When pictures still showed down at the piano hall on Main Street. I used to like to get up in a dress and watch all those fine people flickerin’ up there. It was an old one, and Los Angeles hunkered down in the background of some bar, glowering into his two fingers of whathaveyou, up to no good. When the fighting started, he shot a lady of low morals through the heart, and looked at the camera like he knew I’d be watching in twenty years’ time. Funny thing is, I knew the shot lady, too.
She was the Pharaoh of Nevada.
New York shot her for real and true in our barn about a year before she got to Florida. Used a big birch fork and divined the Pharaoh’s path like clean water. New York took the train she got from the Savings and Loan out of her pocket and laid it down on the yellowcake flats where it swelled up like one of them old black worm firecrackers. Rode it all the way through the plains without a stop, even though the Tsar of Kansas was an easy get. She couldn’t wait.
The Pharaoh didn’t like waiting either. She turned up at my window in the middle of the night. Brought me beef and cotton lace and a real lily, so fresh the stem still seeped green. Came to me like a proper suitor, offering something precious, asking something precious. I sucked the dew out of the lily and it tasted like growing up. The Pharaoh of Nevada lay down next to me in my skinny bed and kept real quiet so as not to wake Henry Tincup and Ashen. She was a real handsome lady, with red hair and wide black eyes, heavy, soft breasts and sharp brass-tipped bullets all round her bony waist.
Come on, she whispered in the dark. Don’t you like me? You don’t want to sit around here waiting for those rotters to punch themselves sick over you. I’m here, now, and I’m ever so much nicer than the pack of them. I made that blossom myself out of the air and half a memory. I’ll cover you with lilies. Eat up that brisket and tell me it don’t taste right as a spring robin.
The Pharaoh of Nevada liked kissing almost as much as I do. Her skin was all dusty and hot and sour and good. She was right; I did like her. She was much prettier than Blue Bob, and when she got her hands inside me I saw lights dancing and lilies bursting and the sun bagged up in a sack of lace. The Pharaoh put a steel ring on my finger still slippery with her and slept like a heap of bones.
Thing is, just because you make a body shiver don’t make it yours. You have to go through the ceremony and bother and blood. I’m the end of everything. There’s no shortcut. The Pharaoh thought it was all over and won right up until the Wizard of New York steamed into town with her whistle shrieking the blues, shattering the windows and rattling the earth.