Rudolph Wurlitzer - The Drop Edge of Yonder

He paused. "Look. I'm ridin' the rump of somethin' I don't know about and I need your help."

When one of the whores banged her shot glass on the bar, Hatchet Jack signaled the bartender to give her a refill.

"That's how it goes," he said. "Ever since I poked her, she been on me like the last squirrel of winter. I'd be better off spendin' time with Ma Thumb and her four daughters."

The piano player pounded out another tune. The back of the room was full of all-or-nothing gamblers, along with three heavy-lidded vaqueros sitting on the floor against a wall, drunk or half-asleep. Four other men sat at a table, speaking in whispers as they looked Zebulon over. Out-of-work ranch hands, Zebulon figured. At the next table a large-bellied rancher was playing poker with the stagecoach driver, a busted up man with a handle-bar mustache and a soiled patch over one eye. Behind them a man sat slumped over a table; either drunk or possibly dead, his face lay across his forearms and a black cape was draped across his emaciated shoulders. A woman sat next to him wearing a dark green high-busted dance-hall dress and long silver earrings that drooped in a long bow to her neck. Her bronze high-toned face, as luminous as ancient rice paper, was framed by spills of medusa-like hair, blacker than black. Zebulon had never seen anyone like her, not even in his usual rut of Denver whorehouses known for specializing in mixed colors. She was smoking a long Mexican cheroot and appeared, as she looked over at him, more weary than curious. Or perhaps she was just bored.

"Spooky," Hatchet Jack said. "They come in on the stage, goin' south to old Mex. Looks to me like the old rooster owns her. Or maybe it's the other way around."

The woman removed a deck of cards from her purse. Cutting the cards with one hand, she spread them on the table for a game of solitaire. The first card up was the queen of hearts, which she quickly buried in the deck.

"Are you goin' to help or not?" Hatchet Jack asked.

Zebulon's eyes were on the stagecoach driver and one of the vaqueros as they sat down at the woman's table. "Right now I need to skin some cards and rest my bones"

Hatchet Jack started to object, then changed his mind. Picking up the bottle of Taos White Lightning, he headed slowly up the stairs. After a short consultation, the two whores knocked back their drinks and followed him.

Zebulon considered and then rejected what it would mean to join them, then downed another shot and walked across the room to a battered billiard table, its patched green covering stained with spilled whiskey and vomit. Sliding around the table like a two-step dancer, he maneuvered the cue ball around the table just to prove that he still could. Then he made his way over to the woman who was dealing a hand of poker to the vaquero and stagecoach driver. "Room for one more?" he asked.

She kept her eyes on the cards. "There's always room for one more: as long as one more ends up one less."

She spoke with what he took to be an English accent, along with a softer, more spaced-out inflection that Zebulon figured came from some kind of African lingo.

He placed a stack of silver dollars on the table.

"A word of advice," the stagecoach driver said. "Delilah don't take prisoners."

"But I do take prisoners," Delilah replied, looking at Zebulon with the hint of a smile. "It's what I do after I take them that causes problems."

"I second that statement."

The black-cloaked man sitting next to her raised his head, revealing a small-boned face highlighted by a thin mustache and long pointed goatee streaked with white.

"I suggest caution if you don't want to find yourself falling over a cliff," he mumbled, his head slumping back to the table.

They played seven-card stud, nothing wild. The betting remained more or less even, with no one falling very far behind except for the vaquero, who bet every hand as if it was his last. When the vaquero finally lost his stake, he bowed his respects to the woman and left the room.

"I am privileged to fill the empty space," the black-cloaked man said, looking at them as if he had no idea where he was or what space he was meant to fill.

Most likely a Rusky, Zebulon figured, having heard the accent before. Either that or a Turk or Polack.

From the moment that Ivan, as Delilah referred to him, sat down, Zebulon suspected that she was dealing off the bottom: It was the way her fingers manipulated and spread out the cards with practiced ease, cutting the deck with one hand while knuckle-rolling a stack of coins with the other.

Her precise movements cast a spell, a dreamy ritual, and no matter how much he tried to resist, he found himself unable to break or even interrupt it. As the night wore on and the hands flowed back and forth with no clear winner, he surrendered to a strange sense of relief. It was as if he had been through this before, in the same dimly lit cantina with most of the oil lamps burned out, listening to the same restless chords from a bangedup piano with cracked and missing keys, the same row of moose heads with their eyes shot out, the same low murmur of betting and raising, the same slap of shuffling cards whose numbers and faces had become so bent and rubbed that they were barely visible. He was dimly aware that he might be in trouble because winning and losing no longer seemed to matter, as if the results had already been decided.

The game was watched over by the bandy-legged man and a few drifters and ranch hands, all of them making side bets. Hatchet Jack, who had come downstairs with the two whores, was watching from the end of the bar.

When Delilah turned over three kings, beating his three jacks, Zebulon's loss emptied most of his pouch, sending him back to the billiard table, where he won three games from one of the ranch hands and then two more from the bandy-legged man, more than doubling his money.

When he returned to the table, Hatchet Jack walked over and sat down opposite Delilah.

The new arrivals caused Ivan to slam his hand on the table with such force that a glass jumped and shattered on the floor. "All the way to the end, gentlemen," he said. "No exceptions or discounts allowed. So says one who comes and has already gone and is yet ready to come again."

"You're crackin' wide open, Count," the stagecoach driver said. "I know the signs."

"Not cracking, my friend," Ivan replied. "More a glimpse from the pit of darkness into the terror of endless space. That happens at the end of a long night when one is bored and foolish enough to abandon the reins of control."

"I say you're bluffin'." Hatchet Jack pushed his money into the center of the table.

"Bluffing, you say? Well, well, well." Ivan stacked twenty gold eagles next to Hatchet Jack's raise. "What is life if not a bluff? I see your call and raise you one-hundred silver dollars."

When Delilah and Zebulon matched Ivan's raise, Hatchet Jack threw down his cards and walked over to the bar.

As Delilah dealt the last of the cards face down, Zebulon noticed a shiver run down her sleeve into the tips of her fingers.

Ivan turned over three aces.

The stagecoach driver turned over a ten of spades, adding to the two that were on the table.

Delilah produced a queen of hearts, filling out a straight flush to Zebulon's full house.

As she gathered in the biggest pot of the night, the bandylegged man staggered towards Zebulon, waving his pistol. "I remember you all right. You're that same mountain scum that stole my bay horse in Galisteo. You and that breed."

"I never been to Galisteo," Zebulon said, reaching for his pistol.

Before either of them could fire, three shots from the other side of the room blew out two gas lamps and one of the windows.

The last thing Zebulon remembered was staggering out of the cantina and trying to make it down the street before he collapsed.