" . . .That he escaped that blow entirely is due to the consummate
good luck which enabled him to steer clear of that military
maelstrom . . .he never had to be post quartermaster."
Trials of a Staff Officer
Captain Charles King, 3rd U.S. Cavalry
When Pow walks into the hog ranch, everyone turns to stare at him. At the whist table, the muleskinner gurgles and lets fall his cards. The cardsharp's teeth clatter against the rim of his glass. The cowboy squeaks. At the bar, the barkeep, who had been fishing flies out of the pickle jar, drops her pickle fork. On the bar, the cat, a fantastic mouser named Queenie, narrows her moon-silver eyes into little slits. At the pianny, Lotta, who'd been banging out Drink Puppy Drink on the peeling ivory keys, crashes one last chord and no more.
Even the ice elemental, in the cage suspended over the whist table, ceases his languid fanning. He's seen a lot of boring human behavior since the barkeep bought him from a junk store in Walnuts to keep the hog ranch cool; finally a human has done something interesting. Only Fort Gehenna's scout doesn't react. He wipes his nose on a greasy buckskin sleeve, slams another shot of mescal, and takes the opportunity to peek at his opponents' cards.
The barroom is dead silent but for a distant slap and a squeal—Buck and the peg-boy in the back room exercising—and the creak of the canvas walls shifting in the ever-present Arivaipa wind.
Pow wobbles over to the bar—just a couple of boards laid across two empty whiskey barrels—leans on it—the boards creaking ominously at his weight—and croaks: "Mescal." His throat feels as though he's swallowed sixty pounds of sand. The barkeep stares at him, her mouth hanging slightly ajar. Against her garish blue lip rouge her teeth look as yellow as corn.
Pow licks his lips with a cat-coarse tongue and whispers: "Come on, Petty, give me a mescal. I'm powerfully dry."
"You're dripping wet," The barkeep answers. Pow looks down, and yes indeed he is dripping, brown water seeping from his dirty uniform, turning the ground he stands upon to mud.
"Sorry," he says. "Is it raining outside?" He looks back towards the door, which is a blazing rectangle of sunlight, bright enough to blind—it's not raining outside. Arivaipa is a goddess-forsaken wilderness of a desert, where it only rains occasionally, and then usually in the dead of night. And anyway, if it were raining outside, it would be raining inside too, for the hog ranch's roof is made of brush and it is not water tight. The last good downpour was two weeks ago, and it had almost swamped the hog-ranch out.
"Lotta—get the lieutenant a towel," the barkeep says, but Lotta does not spring to the order. She shrinks back behind the wall of the pianny and wishes she were invisible.
"Lotta!" The barkeep repeats, "Get Lieutenant Rucker a towel or I'll kick ya in yer hinder."
While Lotta reluctantly follows the barkeep's order, Pow wipes his face on the mustachio towel nailed to the bar; the towel, none to white to begin with, comes away black with dirt. The barkeep hands him a sloshily poured glass; he drinks it in one draught, and bangs his glass down for more. The mescal is bitter and burning but it washes away the taste of mud in his mouth. He feels very clammy, and from the itch, there is sand in his drawers. The barkeep pours him another.
"Thanks, darling," Pow says, and bolts his second drink. The whist game has not resumed; the players are still staring at him, and he returns their glance, saying, "Ain't you people never seen a man drink before?"
No one responds to this quip, and then the canvas curtains over the doorway to the back room part. Out staggers Buck, laughing, struggling to get her sack coat back on. She's got her right arm in the left sleeve and that's not going to work no matter how much she pulls. The peg-boy follows her, grinning, and snapping his galluses up over red-checkered shoulders. An air of satisfaction hovers over them both.
Buck outranks him, so Pow wafts a salute at her, and she waves at him drunkenly, collapsing in a chair at the other rickety table. The peg-boy sticks a cigarillo in her mouth, another in his, and lights them both.
"Where the hell you been, Pow?" Buck says. The barkeep has already anticipated her desire, and plunks a bottle of whiskey before her.
Pow licks the dirt from his lips and realizes that he has no idea.
Arivaipa Territory, where the sun is so hot that it will, after dissolving your flesh into grease, melt your bones as well. A territory of bronco natives and bunco artists, wild religiosos and wild horses, poison toads and rattling snakes. A hard dry place, an endless expanse of Nowhere. Why the Warlord wants to keep a thread of authority in such a goddess-forsaken place is a mystery, but the Army doesn't question orders, just follows them. Thus Fort Gehenna, and a scattering of other army posts, sown like seeds across the prickly rocky dusty landscape of the remote territory.
The hog ranch sits on Fort Gehenna's reservation line, just beyond the reach of military authority, and technically off-limits to army personnel. There are no hogs at this ranch, just cheap bugjuice, cheap food and cheap love, but these three attractions make the hog ranch a pretty attractive place to Gehenna's lonely bored hungry soldiers. So a well-worn track starts at the hog ranch's front door and wends its way through the desert scrub, up and down arroyos, by saguaro and paloverde, across the sandy expanse of the Sandy River to terminate behind Officers' Row.
Down this track, known as The Oh Be Joyful Road, Pow zigzags. His feet kick up dust, and the sun hits his shoulders, his bare head, with hammer-like intensity. The heat has sucked the wet right out of his uniform, which now feels gritty and coarse against his skin. His sinuses tingle and burn. He feels in his sack coat pocket for his bandana, but the pockets are full of sand. So he blows his nose into his sleeve, but only a thin gust of dust comes out.
His boots are full of sand too; near the cactus priest's wikiyup he sits on a rock and pours them out. Were his toes always that black? They look like little shriveled coffee beans. His brain feels thick, as though his skull is full of mud. Pow marches on, his eyes slits of grittiness, his eyelids scrape at his eyeballs like broken glass. He can hardly see where he is going, but the urge to go is strong, and he can't help but follow it.
Pow reaches the Single Officers' Quarters, and staggers up the steps into the blessed shade of the porch—a few degrees cooler and the air slightly moist from the water olla hanging from the porch eaves. He pulls down the olla, hearing his muscles crackle like dried cornstalks. The olla is fat and round, beaded with moisture, but almost empty. He licks the droplets off the clay, oh delicious wetness, and then throws the pot on the ground, where it shatters.
As a first lieutenant, Pow's only entitled to one room, and this room is now empty of his gear, its only furniture a steamer trunk and an iron cot. Pow collapses on the iron cot, unable to take another step. His thirst is sharp and pointed, it's overwhelming and all encompassing, it leaves little room inside him for anything else. All around him he can sense moisture, but he himself is parched.
He shakes his head, feeling the tendons in his neck wheeze and burn. There's a rattling sound inside of his skull—his brain perhaps, now shrunken to a desiccated nubbin. That would account for the thickness of his thoughts. Something falls into his lap; at first he thinks it's a piece of jerky, then he realizes it's his ear. He tries to stick his ear back onto his head, but it won't stay, so he puts it in his pocket for safe keeping.
A shadow slinks in the corner of the room; two silver eyes glitter. Freddie, Pow's pet Gila monster, which he raised from an egg, is peeking out of its den, a hole in the adobe wall. The lizard waddles across the floor and nips at the toe of Pow's boot, its usual method for requesting a treat. Lacking anything else, Pow gives the Gila monster his ear—his hearing seems fine without it—and Freddie nibbles daintily. Pow reaches for the lizard; Freddie spits a shiny squirt of silvery poison at him. Pow licks the slippery venom off his fingers—it's lovely wet.
The lizard is fat with moisture; underneath that scaly skin, it's heavy with wetness, its meat saturated with blood, bile, venom, juice. Pow makes a dry clucking noise with his splintery tongue, and reaches for Freddie again. As if sensing his intent, the Gila monster scuttles away, but desperation makes Pow quick. He snatches.
III. Dry
Pow's retreat from the hog ranch to his quarters did not go without notice; indeed, when he had staggered onto Fort Gehenna's parade ground, a long file had straggled behind him. In addition to the habitués of the hog ranch, who gave him a respectable head start before following, the brigade included the herd guard, a couple of privates who were loitering in the shade of the sinks watching an ant fight, the tame broncos (as the soldiers call Arivaipa's natives) who live behind the remuda corral, and the dog pack, tempted out of the arroyo by Pow's smell, which, now that his clothes have dried, is quite strong: a meaty kind of decay.
This crowd now stands outside the SOQ, and it has attracted the attention of Lieutenant Brakespeare, Gehenna's adjutant and current acting quartermaster, and Sergeant Candy, Gehenna's ranking noncom. When they arrive to investigate, a multitude of voices in several languages all begin to babble at once. Lieutenant Brakespeare ignores the shouting and enters the SOQ only to find Pow's room empty. The contents of his trunk are strewn about the room and every item packed therein that once contained anything moist—boot polish tin, a bottle of Madama Twanky's Sel-Ray-Psalt Medicine, fly ointment—lies wrecked upon the floor.
The destruction continues across the hallway and into Lieutenant Brakespeare's quarters—the lieutenant swears horribly when she sees the mess—and on into the kitchen beyond. There Berman, the lieutenant's striker, stands surveying a battlefield of crumpled tin cans, smashed sauerkraut crocks, broken wine bottles, and the splintered remains of a water barrel.
"He went that way," Berman says, that way being into the back yard. There Lieutenant Brakespeare and Sergeant Candy find Pow face down in a laundry tub, sucking up soapy water, while the laundress stands over him, whacking at his shoulders with her washboard. They heave Pow out of the almost empty tub. He burps a giant soap bubble, which pops into an appalling stench of sweet-sour decay, and shakes the soldiers off. He feels deliciously waterlogged, heavy and solid. He feels much much better.
The crowd has rushed around the back, and now a rotund figure—Captain de Poligniac, Gehenna's commanding officer—pushes through, almost invisible underneath a huge black umbrella, an item that officers in uniform are strictly forbidden to carry. When he reaches the SOQ back porch, and lets drop the shade, Polecat (as the good captain is called even to his face) reveals that he's not in uniform anyway, just a pair of dirty red drawers and a white guayabera. He'd been in his quarters, riding out the furnace of the afternoon on an herbal haze, and he is annoyed at being disturbed.
"What's all that infernal racket, Lieutenant Brakespeare?" Polecat complains. He catches sight of Pow, and his voice trails off. His lips pucker in puzzlement, and he stares at the rapidly dehydrating lieutenant.
"Pow!" Polecat says. "I thought you were dead!"
Of course, First Lieutenant Powhatan Rucker is dead. Not just dead, but drowned. How can you drown in a desert? In an Arivaipa thunderstorm, all too quickly. One minute the sky is as blank as a sheet of paper; the next minute it roils with quicksilver clouds, from which lunge enormous purple-silver prongs of lightning. And then rain bullets down, water floods into the arroyos and anything not on the high ground is swept away. Ten minutes later the desert is dry as a bone again, and the sky empty.
He died a hero's death, Lieutenant Rucker did, trying to save, not another comrade, but rather the hog ranch's entire supply of beer. The story is short and tragic: the freight train dropped fifteen cases of beer at the hog ranch, before proceeding on to Rancho Kuchamonga; an inexperienced drover off-loaded the beer in the arroyo below the hog ranch; when the storm came up, Pow organized his fellow whist players into a bottle brigade, and supervised the shifting of fourteen cases to higher ground; the water was already foaming when Pow went back for the last case—refusing to allow the others to join him in harm's way; Pow heroically managed to shove that case up the bank, just as a wall of water twenty feet high came roaring down the ravine.
After Pow's battered and soggy body was found tangled in an uprooted paloverde tree, he was borne off to Gehenna's sandy cemetery, where he was given a full military funeral, and toasted by the entire garrison with bottles from the fateful case that killed him. But now that sandy cemetery has spit Pow back up, a circumstance that no one in Gehenna can ever remember occurring before.
"If Pow is dead, how can he be alive?" Polecat says, in bewilderment. They've retired to his office, for privacy, although the crowd still loiters outside, hoping that voices will be raised enough to facilitate eavesdropping. Considering that the walls of the office are mud-covered brush, and the ceiling more brush, under which hangs a piece of canvas which keeps centipedes from falling on your head, the voices do not have to be very loud. Polecat plops behind his desk, trying to look official, while the Lieutenants Brakespeare and Rucker stand before him, in semi-respectful stances. Lieutenant Fyrdraaca, retrieved from the privy, isn't quite as drunk as she was before, but she's not sober enough to stand at attention, so she has sprawled upon Polecat's well-used daybed.
Polecat puts his spectacles on to examine Pow more closely; the lieutenant is still crusted with a fine silt, but the few bits of skin visible look downright shriveled. He is twenty-two years old, but now he looks a hundred.
"I think alive is stretching it a bit, Polecat," Buck says. "I mean, Pow is animated, but he looks a bit rough to actually be alive. I would say he's definitely dead."
"Then what am I doing here?" Pow asks, bewildered.
"I called you back." Lieutenant Brakespeare says. She sounds rather smug.
"You brought him back from the dead?" Polecat moans. "Why in Califa's name did you do that, Azota?"
"His quartermaster accounts were a mess—and short, too." Lieutenant Brakespeare purses her mouth into a small knot. "I'm not going to be responsible for his shortages, or pay for his mistakes."
At the time of his death, Pow had been Gehenna's quartermaster, and thus responsible for all of Gehenna's rations, uniforms, equipment, ordnance and equipage, for the previous three months. During that time he'd not done a lick of paperwork, preferring instead to while away the days playing mumblety-peg with the QM clerks. To say that Pow's QM accounts were a mess, was being charitable. Actually, they were a catastrophe.
When Lieutenant Brakespeare (only shortly graduated from Benica Barracks Military Academy but already well on her way to being a properly stuck-up yaller dog, as staff officers are called) assumed the QM duties upon Pow's death, it had taken her fourteen days of non-stop paper pushing to complete the QM returns properly, and even then she couldn't account for all the shortages in the QM inventories. Since officers in the Army of Califa are personally responsible for items on their inventory returns, someone is to going to have to pay for these shortages. Lieutenant Brakespeare has no intention of being that someone.
Polecat complains: "But you shouldn't summon someone back from the dead just to make up a shortage."
"I didn't," Lieutenant Brakespeare says primly. "Officers are forbidden by The Articles of War to attempt or achieve any magickal acts. Article 3, Section I, Subsection 2."
Buck, from the settee, observes: "Maybe forbidden themselves, but there's nothing in The Articles of War about paying someone else to attempt or achieve magickal acts for you, eh? Who'd you get to do it?"
"The curandero," Lieutenant Brakespeare admits. The curandero is an elderly bronco who, having decided he was too old and wise to fight, made peace with the Califians and moved into a wikiyup near the river, from which he dispenses charms, foul smelling ointments, and philosophical advice, in return for rations. "Anyway, Lieutenant Rucker can go back where he came from as soon as he either produces the inkwell, or pays for it. I don't care which."
"Inkwell?" says Polecat.
"Ayah, so. Pow signed a receipt for fifteen glass inkwells, shipped from Fort Ludwig to here—" Lieutenant Brakespeare fishes a sheet of paper out of her sack coat and consults it. "On Martes 12. One arrived broken and was dropped from the inventory. One was issued to Corporal Candy on Martes 15; one was issued to the AG, and one to the CO. Leaving eleven on the return. But there were only ten in the QM store. Where's the missing inkwell?" She looks accusingly at Pow.
"I don't know." Pow says. He has no idea where the missing inkwell is, but there's a burning feeling in his throat, a scratchy roar that is extremely distracting. The dry Arivaipa air has sucked his moisture away and his thirst has returned, with a vengeance. Something wiggles on his neck; despite the canvas a centipede has fallen from the brush. Pow pops the flailing bug into his mouth and it squishes wetly between his teeth. The others don't notice.
"How much is the inkwell valued at?" Polecat asks.
Lieutenant Brakespeare consults the receipt again. "Fifteen lisbys."
"Fifteen lisbys!" Polecat reaches for the cigarillo box on his blotter, which does not contain cigarillos. "Fifteen lisbys! That's pocket change!"
"You always gotta do things the hard way, Tiny Doom," Buck chortles, and Lieutenant Brakespeare gives her a poisonous look.
"Have you got fifteen lisbys, Pow?" Polecat asks.
Pow feels in his pockets, but if he ever had fifteen lisbys, the Arivaipa desert has them now. He tries to answer; his jaw creaks like dry wood, and no words come out, only a puff of dust.
"I'll take that as a no. Here, I'll give you fifteen lisbys, Pow, and you can pay Lieutenant Brakespeare, and that will be that," Polecat says, his head now wreathed in soothing herbal smoke. He fishes around in his top desk drawer. "Buck, do you have two lisbys?"
There's an ink bottle sitting on Polecat's desk, half-full of ink. Pow can smell the dark delicious wetness—
"I don't want your money, Captain," Lieutenant Brakespeare complains. "It's Lieutenant Rucker's responsibility and he should either find that inkwell or pay up—"
Pow's entire focus is now pointed at that ink bottle and the promise of liquidity within. His thirst burns; his blood has long evaporated, and his veins feel like rawhide thongs, taut and stretched. He reaches a clawlike hand towards the bottle. The ink tastes thick and dark, but most deliciously, it tastes wet.
The others have stopped their squabbling, and are staring at him. Pow licks his now black lips and sets the empty bottle back on Polecat's desk.
"Anyway, it's not just the inkwell." Lieutenant Brakespeare says triumphantly. "There's also a small matter of the paymaster funds, which are also missing, and which Pow, as QM, is responsible for."
Polecat blanches. "How much?"
"Five thousand divas."
"Paper or gold?" Polecat asks faintly.
"Gold."
Suddenly Lieutenant Brakespeare's actions no longer seem quite so drastic. Fifteen lisbys is nothing; even a private can probably scrounge up fifteen lisbys, the price of a beer. But five thousand divas in gold—Fort Gehenna's entire payroll for the entire year! If the troopers find out their pay is gone, they'll riot, they'll mutiny, they'll desert. They'll raise a howl that will be heard in the War Department back in Califa, a howl that, since Pow is dead, will thunder down upon the shoulders of his superiors: Polecat and Lieutenant Brakespeare. They'll be court-martialed for sure, and lucky to escape cashiering. And they'll still have to pay back the cash. Five thousand divas in gold is a pretty good reason for raising the dead.
Polecat and Lieutenant Brakespeare pounce on Pow, but their berating questions get nowhere. He can hardly hear them; they are distant mirages in his parchedness. The ink has only whetted his thirst—not quenched it—and now his only interest is in moisture. He can smell the wetness; not in the air, which is as dry as dust, but in the living bodies around him—wet blood, wet bile, wet sweat, wet saliva. They are soggy with wetness, fair dripping, and he can feel himself shriveling for the lack of it.
Pow stares at Polecat, upon whose white brow stand little drops of sweat, whose rosy cheeks are flushed and bedewed. Polecat's lips are moving, opening to display the moist cavern of his mouth—the desire to lunge towards that wetness—tear Polecat's tongue out by the roots, suck out all its moisture—is rising like a dust devil inside of Pow, twisting and turning and—
"Hey," says Buck. She's now standing next to him, a bottle in her hand. "Have a drink, Pow. You look like you could use it."
His hands are too gnarled now to grasp the bottle; creakily he leans back, and Buck pours the coarse whiskey into his mouth; as it flows down his throat he feels his flesh expanding, reconstituting itself, plumping out. Delicious delicious wetness.
Lieutenant Brakespeare turns on Buck: "You could be helping. You signed the receipt for the paymaster. This will hit you, too."
Buck protests: "I am helping. While the two of you shriek like owls, I've been thinking. You know, the night Pow died, I was at the hog ranch, too."
"Where else?" says Lieutenant Brakespeare bitterly. She's never set foot in the place.
"Cállate, Azota, I wasn't feeling so well so I left early—cállate, Azota!—and thus missed Pow's heroism, but I do recall now that when I left, Pow was playing cards with the scout, Lotta, Pecos and some other guy. Pow was losing, and losing in gold, too."
"Who was winning?" Lieutenant Brakespeare asks.
"The scout," says Buck triumphantly.
So Polecat puts his sack coat on and orders Lieutenant Brakespeare to arrest Pow, which she does. Then, they all march, under colors, down to the hog ranch to demand the return of the payroll. They find the scout eating pickles and playing mumblty-peg with the ice elemental. He freely admits that he won the divas off Lieutenant Rucker, but he refuses to return them. A bet lost is a bet won by someone else, fair and square.
While Polecat dithers, and Buck and Pow have themselves another drink (or two), Lieutenant Brakespeare puts the screws on the scout. She starts out politely persuasive, then turns to choleric threats, but neither attitude makes the slightest dent. The scout is part-bronco, part-coyote, rumor has it, and a shavetail lieutenant don't scare him at all. Lieutenant Brakespeare sends a detail to search the scout's miserable shebang. No gold. Another detail holds the scout down and searches his greasy buckskin-clad person. No gold. She's urging Polecat to allow her to tie the scout to a wagon wheel and set his hair on fire—I'll wager he'll cough up the gold then!—when Buck offers a lazy solution.
"A wager." Buck says. "Let's make a wager."
Arivaipa Territory is arid and dull; the soldiers must make their own fun and what's more fun than a wager? At Gehenna, they'll bet on anything. I'll stand you four divas, five lisbys, six glories that you can't: leap a prickly pear cactus; eat six jars of jalapeño pickles; stand on your head for six hours; ride that strawberry roan; stay in bed two weeks; walk from the hog ranch to the flagpole blindfolded. The inhabitants of Gehenna have bet on ant wars; mule races; tennis matches; foot races; marksmanship; whose bed sheets are whiter; whose corporal is fatter; and whether or not lightning is attracted to a picket pin dangling from the flagpole. (Yes.)
The scout's eyes, deep in red-painted sockets, gleam. "A wager?"
"Ayah," Buck answers. "A bet. You won the divas off Pow, now give him a chance to turn about fair play. A contest of skill."
"What skill?"
"Who can hold their breath longest?" Buck suggests.
The scout shakes his head. "He's dead. He don't breathe. A foot race?"
Even in life, Pow was pokey; in death, he's moving at a snail's pace. Buck quickly counters: "Who can stay on Evil Murdoch the longest?" Evil Murdoch being the most notoriously un-rideable bite-y mule ever seen in Arivaipa.
The scout shakes his head. "Evil Murdoch kicks me in the head, I'm dead. The lieutenant, he's already dead, why should he care? Not good odds."
Lieutenant Brakespeare suggests: "How about a penmanship contest?" This suggestion is so boring that she is ignored.
"A drinking contest, then," says Buck, grinning. She knows that the scout takes particular pride in his ability to consume large quantities of bugjuice, with no outward effect. Only last year he drank the barkeep under the table, and she's a professional.
"Done!" says the scout quickly, "I got five thousand divas in gold. What is he going to put up?" This question is a legitimate stumper. The cumulative value of everything at Fort Gehenna, from Polecat's silver cigarette case to the hay in the hay yard, probably isn't worth five thousand divas in gold. What can Pow wager that even remotely begins to match the value of the gold?
"How about his soul?" the scout says.
"Done!" says Buck.
By now, night is falling. To the northeast, in a cliché suitable for a yellowback thriller, a storm is forming up over Mount Abraxas, garish purple and pink lightning splitting the iron-blue twilight sky. A dust devil spirals across the parade ground; the howling dog pack chases after it. Fort Gehenna is now mostly deserted; every soldier not currently on duty is at the hog ranch, along with every one else for miles. A drinking contest between the scout and a dead man is probably the most exciting thing ever to happen at Fort Gehenna. The hog ranch is standing room only; slits soon appear in the canvas walls, each rent accommodating an avid pair of eyes. No one wants to miss the show.
The officers have had a whispered conversation regarding Pow's stake, which Pow has objected to. With his body liable to crumble to dust any minute, Pow's soul is all he's got left—he doesn't want to chance losing it. And besides, he doesn't care about the five thousand divas, why should he? He's dead. They can't court-martial him or cashier him. No, Polecat agrees, they can't. But they can confine him to the guardhouse, which is a dry place, where the water dipper is offered only twice a day. Here, they are offering Pow an opportunity to drink all he can, set me up another round, keep 'em coming. Suffer thirst or quench it. When it's put like that, Pow agrees that getting the money back is his responsibility after all.
As for the value of Pow's soul, how can it match the value of five thousand divas? Strictly speaking, it does not. Pow, in life, was an affable fellow, always good for a laugh and a loan, but he wasn't a famous magician, or a holy man, or anyone else who might have accumulated great animus, a weighty powerful soul. No matter to the scout. He has a little collection of souls; he keeps them in a leather pouch he wears on a cord around his neck. He's got the soul of a baby who died at birth; a dog that could read; a woman who lived to be one hundred and four; a coyote with two heads; a man who was hung for horse-stealing; and a woman who changed into a flamingo during the dark moon. The soul of a man who drowned in the desert would be a nice addition to this collection.
The rumble of thunder is growling nearer, like the distant approach of cannon fire, when Pow and the scout sit down across from each other at the whist table. The peanut gallery—no peanuts, no gallery—crowds around.
The rules, as Buck explains them loudly, are simple: whoever quits drinking first loses.
They start with the rest of the beer that Pow rescued from the flood—the last case, the one that Pow died for. After the funeral, the barkeep had put this case away for a special occasion and Pow's return is certainly a special occasion. It's very poor beer (the good stuff has no hope of surviving the long journey via steamer and mule train to Arivaipa) but the people who drink at the hog ranch aren't picky. As long as the beer is cheap and wet, they are satisfied.
Pow, of course, only cares that the booze is wet. He and the scout chug down the beers as quickly as Lotta places them on the table. Six bottles each. With each swig, Pow feels his flesh expanding, fattening. The alcohol doesn't affect him at all, only the moisture. His muscles and sinews flex, his jaw relaxes. His brain swells back to its normal size, and he is beginning to think clearly again. The scout starts out strong, matching Pow sip for sip, but Gehenna's officers are not yet worried. The beer is weak stuff; even Lieutenant Brakespeare can drink several bottles of the stuff to no ill effect.
The scout finishes sucking the last few drops of beer out of the last bottle and tosses it over his shoulder. A yelp indicates that his aimless aim still found a mark.
"I gotta piss," he announces.
Pow needs no piss break; so he waits at the table, while the scout saunters out back to the saguaro that became the default urinal after the big storm washed the privy away. He returns a few minutes later and the contest resumes.
Now the beer is gone, and at Buck's bidding, the barkeep brings out the hog ranch's supply of mescal: six large ollas. This mescal is rough and strong; Buck doubts if the scout will make it through the second olla. She winks at Pow. Now that he is better hydrated, his eyes don't feel quite so much like glass marbles, so he winks back.
"Ut!" Pow says, raising his glass. The mescal looks exactly like urine, and it tastes, Pow realizes, almost exactly like soap. By the end of the first olla, a thin glaze is starting to creep across the scout's face. He puts his glass down and burrows into his buckskin jacket. The room stiffens and other hands stray towards hips, shirt fronts, waists, and boot-tops—any place a weapon could be stashed.
But when the scout's hand reappears, it's with a leather cigarillo case. He aims the cigarillo for his mouth, and makes the target on the second try. The scout accepts the trigger that the drover, leaning in, offers.
"Cigarillo?" The scout asks Pow.
Pow shakes his head. He's ready for another drink. And anyway, even when alive he never smoked. The scout gets the cigarillo lit on the third try; his hands are definitely shaking now. He probably won't even make it through the next glass. Gehenna's officers exchange triumphant glances.
But the scout makes it through the next glass, and the next one too. They are into their fourth glass when the scout finishes his cigarillo and casually flicks the butt away. But his aim is impaired, and the flick sends the butt flying, not towards the floor, but directly at Pow. It lands in his hair, which, now well saturated with flammable liquid, immediately ignites into a halo of fire.
The crowd recedes in a squawk of horror. The barkeep has had patrons burst into flames before, and experience has taught her to keep a blanket handy. While Buck and Polecat slap Pow with their hats, she elbows through the crowd and tosses the blanket over Pow, pushes him on the floor, and sits on him.
When they unwrap the blanket, they find Pow a bit charred around the temples, but otherwise no worse for wear. They haul him to his feet and sit him back down at the table. The fire has quenched his deliciously moist feeling, and he's ready for another drink.
"No more smoking," Buck warns the scout. She doesn't believe for a minute that the scout's flick was unintentional, but since she can't prove this belief, she's going to watch him like a hawk. Pow's thirst is the insatiable thirst of a desiccated dead man. The scout is neither dead nor desiccated and he should have long succumbed. Buck is getting suspicious. The scout grins at her, pointy blue-stained teeth gleaming, and raises his glass.
But by the time they've killed the mescal, the scout is looking a bit done. His eyes are tarnished silver coins, and, in between chugs, he's clawed his hair into jagged clumps. The canvas walls are now sucking in and out, as though the hog ranch itself is trying to gasp for breath, stifled by the interior tension and the stench of hair pomade, tallow, dog and bugjuice. A guttural rumble overhead reminds them the storm is coming in.
But the scout doesn't drop. They finish the mescal, and pause so that the barkeep can send Lotta out to the back to dig up the whiskey that's been mellowing in a grave near the corral. The scout staggers off to relieve himself of some of his liquid burden and Gehenna's officers worriedly confer.
"He's cheating. He's got to be," Buck says. "No one can drink that much and live. Even Pow's starting to look waterlogged."
Pow is looking rough. As he has absorbed the liquid, he's puffed up, ballooning like a sponge. Where he had been stringy and dry, he's now round and plump, but it's a strained kind of plumpness. His skin, burned black with decay, looks shiny and stretched, like the skin of a balloon. The bony claws of his fingers have swollen into fat sausages.
In short, Pow looks about to burst. The scout has an outlet for his excess liquid. Pow is drinking faster than he can absorb. Something is gonna give.
"I know he's cheating," Buck repeats.
"How can he be cheating?" Polecat whispers. "What are we going to do?"
Pow is no longer paying attention to the whispered accusations flying between the officers. Something cold and hard has just bopped him on the beezer: an ice cube. He looks up to see the ice elemental, suspended in its silver cage above the table, waving a small blue hand at him. Pow sloshily waves back.
The elemental grabs at its scrawny neck and pulls, making an agonized face. Then it points to the scout's empty seat. Pow is mystified. The elemental grabs at its neck again—no, it's not grabbing at its neck, it's pretending to pull on a pretend something that is not actually hanging around its neck. The elemental points at the scout's empty seat again, and then mimes chugging a bottle. Pow glances around. The scout has not returned; the spectators have thinned out, some ducking outside for the same reason the scout did, others for a smoke. Buck has also disappeared, but Lieutenant Brakespeare and Polecat are still whispering worriedly. No, Polecat is whispering worriedly. Lieutenant Brakespeare is also staring at the ice elemental, who seeing her gaze, opens his little blue beak. A few teeny tiny sparkles fly out: Gramatica, the language of magick.
Pow may be dead, and also alive, and therefore somewhat magickal, but he still can't understand Gramatica. But Lieutenant Brakespeare, who is not magickal in the slightest, cannot be magickal at all per The Articles of War, upon pain of death (except at remove, of course)—a tiny little flicker of comprehension flits across her face, a flicker that almost instantly is reabsorbed back into her normal mulish scowl. The elemental tugs on the imaginary thing again. Pow and Lieutenant Brakespeare make eye contact, and the lieutenant raises her eyebrow oh-so-very-slightly. Pow is still clueless but Lieutenant Brakespeare seems to have understood.
A bright blue light briefly electrifies the hog ranch interior, its whiplike crack provoking shrieks. The roar of thunder drowns out the shrieks. The storm is almost upon them.
The scout returns and takes his place across the table. Buck returns and she and Polecat resume their positions of support behind Pow. But Lieutenant Brakespeare has realigned herself until she stands directly behind the scout. Buck gives her a glare, which is ignored. The barkeep pours from a dirt-encrusted bottle.
"Ut!" The scout says, raising his glass.
"Ut!" says Pow. The brief hiatus has left him thirsty. He raises the glass and drinks; the liquid flows like oil down his throat.
The scout sputters and puts his glass down. "This is not whiskey!"
The barkeep holds the bottle up so that the label reading Madama Twanky's Amber Apple Schnapps is visible. "The whiskey bottles broke," she explains. "This is all I could salvage. Don't you like apple schnapps?"
The scout sniffs the glass again, suspiciously. "It don't smell like apples."
"If you ain't thirsty anymore, we can stop right now," Buck says "Call an end, and Pow the winner. Get home before the flood."
Pow swallows; death has ruined his palate pretty good, but even in death he knows the aftertaste of apple schnapps, his mamma's favorite digestif. He also now knows the aftertaste of gun oil. And he knows the difference between the two.
"Finish now and we can be out of here before the storm blows us away," Buck suggests. Her smile is very smug.
In response, the scout raises his glass and bolts its contents. Then he chokes. Coughs and wheezes. His eyes roll upward, and the snake tattoo on his forehead ripples. Tears spring to his eyes, snot dribbles from his nose. He swallows hard, and slumps forward.
The hog ranch is silent. The wind has stopped, but the roof brush rustles, and a few drops of rain slip through, an advance guard. Another bolt of electric blue scorches the night. This time the crack sets ears a-ringing, and the accompanying thunder has almost no delay. Lieutenant Brakespeare leans over and jiggles the scout's shoulders, but he doesn't respond.
"I hereby declare—" Buck starts to say, and then the scout lifts his head. His eyes glitter green and gold, and he says: "Set us up again."
The barkeep pours them each another round of gun oil and this time the scout doesn't hesitate. Smiling, he drains the glass and slams it so hard upon the tabletop that it shatters. He grins, a rill of amber fluid dribbling down his chin.
"Set me—" The scout's voice turns thick and then trails away. His head flings back and his eyeballs roll up and then roll down. A bubble of foam appears on his lips and as he gurgles this bubble forms a beard, dripping down his chin to cover his chest. The scout begins to vibrate, his arms and legs twitching like he's been hit by lightning. The foam turns reddish brown, as the scout paws at his neck, moaning creakily.
"Looking for this?" Lieutenant Brakespeare dangles a small buckskin bag for all to see. In her other hand, the knife she used to snip the buckskin cord while pretending to be solicitous gleams sharply. She smiles, and that smile, in combination with her jagged scars, one on each cheek, is extremely malevolent.
The scout croaks as she opens the bag, waving his hands weakly. Six wisps of light—the souls the scout has collected—fly up and out, floating through the brush roof to disappear into lightning-spattered darkness. Lieutenant Brakespeare shakes the bag over the table, and something small and glittery falls out: a scorpion.
"What is that?" Buck asks. The scorpion curls its tail up, stinger gleaming. Arivaipa scorpions are dull brown and white, bland. The carapace of this scorpion is milky green, like translucent jade, and its stinger is a small barb of bright fuchsia.
"Ha!" says Lieutenant Brakespeare. "That scorpion is a Potable Sigil. It makes any liquid drinkable. Pretty useful in the desert, no?"
"I told you he was cheating!" Buck crows.
"You cheated too," the scout says thickly. "That weren't no apple likker."
"Evening the odds," Buck retorts. "And anyway, your cheat cancelled out mine—so that makes your cheat bigger!"
The scout is gagging and retching; Candy thrusts a spittoon towards him just in time. The scout vomits up a copious amount of bad booze and gun oil and then keels over backwards. Lieutenant Brakespeare winches his head up via a fistful of greasy hair and says: "Where's the gold?"
The scout burbles and Lieutenant Brakespeare nods, satisfied. Candy and the drover carry him off, to recover (if he can) in the guardhouse. Lieutenant Brakespeare and Polecat follow, to plan the excavation of the payroll gold as soon as the storm blows through. Outside, the rain is starting to come down, which means inside it is starting to come down, as well. The spectacle over, the spectators scatter for cover from the storm.
"Can I have another drink?" Pow asks, but no one refills his glass—they've all disappeared. He's killed the bottle of gun oil (Buck had switched the liquids when everyone thought she was pissing), but, of course, he's still thirsty, and so he's rather sorry the contest is over.
The scorpion-sigil skitters, tail waving frantically, trying to find shelter from the raindrops. Pow's interior is starting to feel rather odd. There's a ticklish feeling in his tummy, a funny rustling that makes him want to giggle. Pow unbuttons his sack coat, and something hard butts his hand. He looks down, and sees a scaly nose poking out from a tear in his shirt.
Freddie. The Gila monster erupts from Pow's chest, and darts forward to snap up the insect sigil, then scuttles back to safety. A gust of wind has almost taken down one of the canvas walls; another gust blows off half the roof and Pow's hat. A falling viga narrowly misses Pow's head; it lands instead on the table, smashing it. Then something large drops into Pow's lap: the ice elemental's cage. Inside, the elemental has a death-grip on the bars, tiny sanguine-colored sparks flashing from its mouth. Pow doesn't need to speak Gramatica to understand the elemental's shrieks for help. As the rest of the roof blows away, Pow fumbles at the cage's door. The door springs open and the elemental springs out, disappearing into the howling electrified night.
Pow lets drop the cage, and raising his face, opens his mouth to the wet wet rain.