Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

But he was bone-tired now, like he always was after a hunt. Ready for the cool hollow of his burrow. He mopped his forehead with the coyote tail. Then he shed his furry shirt, wrapped the coyote headpiece around it, and tucked the bundle under one arm. Rifle in hand, he trudged up the road.

And though he panted, he kept his tongue in his mouth.

Late afternoon. The unrelenting sun beat through the window, warming the young woman’s nakedness like the fires of heaven.

Her tits were truly the color of alabaster. That the Chinaman had promised, though Midas Gerlach hadn’t believed him until now. Midas had bought the woman through the mail — bargaining, waiting as each offer and counter offer traveled by stage and train from Fiddler to San Francisco or vice versa. He had committed the Chinaman’s descriptive poetry to heart, but he hadn’t dared believe it. He’d read plenty of yellowback novels and he knew that, numero uno , Chinamen were given to poetic excess and, numero dos, Chi-nee women were as yellow as the first corn of the season.

But it wasn’t like that with the woman who lay on Midas’ bed. If you judged by her, the Chinamans promises were as bankable as cash on the barrelhead. Lie’s tits were the color of alabaster, and they were round and perfect and as hard as any rock God had put on His green earth. Better still, Lie went on from there, her body pure poetry that Midas hadn’t found in any letter. Her nipples were as meaty as jerky, and she complained not at all as he took each in turn between his tobacco-stained teeth, stretching those tiny mounds of Chi-nee jerky into a ten-course meal, which was an image that had never crossed the poetic Chinaman’s mind.

Quick corner-of-the-eye glances filled Midas’ mind with other images. Lie’s fingers digging into the feather bed, knuckles bleached bone white, nails chewed to the quick. Her fan lying open on the floor in a puddle of sunshine, a heavy iron thing that only an inscrutable Chi-nee would invent. His gun belt hanging from the bedpost just above her left hand, but she wasn’t the kind to go reaching for it even though she carried an iron fan that could probably bust bones as efficiently as a railroad brakeman’s club. No. She was hiding. Eyelids closed, brow straining for high cheekbones like fingers strain for palms when a desperate man makes a fist. Lips drawn back, lavender tongue clamped between her teeth with the same studied effort Midas trained on her nipples.

Thin tangle of brush between her legs like an undertaker’s dark thread, like the crimped legs of a dozen dead black widow spiders.

Nipple between his teeth, Midas grinned. Hell and damnation and dreams that come true. A woman who’d take her man without question or complaint. A woman who wasn’t capable of such nonsense. A woman who had been as mute as the day was long since she’d slipped from between her mama’s legs below decks on a ship bound for the land of gold mountains.

The beauty and voice of a flower. That was the Chinaman’s poetry, as haunting as the work of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.

A ten-course jerky meal and the music of smacking lips. That was Midas Gerlach’s poetry. A barroom limerick.

Yessiree. The Chinaman had taken the ass-end of the deal, all right. And the best waited below. Midas’ tongue traveled the length of Lie’s belly. Through the tangle of undertaker’s thread, down one firm alabaster thigh. He threw back the sheet — a clean one, catalog-bought and saved expressly for this occasion. Two teeny little stumps waited at the base of Lie’s ankles, both of them just as white as white could be, each one dotted with five little nubbins twisting this way and that, wriggling this little piggy went to market, this little piggy went to town…

Midas took one toe between his lips, then another. This little piggy had roast beef… this little piggy had none. Suckled like a contented baby. Wee wee wee… all the way home.

Home. China was a world away, but in his heart of hearts Midas knew that he belonged there. With his face buried in yellowback adventure novels he’d loved since he was just a sprout, he often dreamed of foreign shores even though his dead granddaddy’s voice still rang in his head. Those books ain’t manly things. Maybe that’s the way it was in the San Joaquin Valley shitsplat called Fiddler, California, but it wasn’t that way everywhere. Midas liked to read about Chinamen and their ways. He understood them — them with their dungeons and concubines and silk robes heavy with the perfume of opium. Even though he was a white man and a Christian, he understood the things those yellow men liked to do.

Wonderful things. Outre oriental practices that the book writers barely dared relate. Veiled descriptions which trapped Midas’ breath in his throat. Wicked scimitars that could split a man dandruff to dingleberry with one stroke. Opium dreams that taught a man the truth of his heart. Wives by the dozen, each one familiar with the taste of the whip. And best of all, feet sculpted like those at the base of Lie’s alabaster legs, tender young feet wrapped with long strips of silk. Ribbons circling tighter, tighter, tight as a Merry Christmas that never comes.

Bound feet. Saving part of a little girl for ever and ever in a grown woman’s body.

Midas closed his eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t the biggest fish in the little pond called Fiddler, California. He wasn’t a man who ate flapjacks for breakfast and broke horses with a brakeman’s club and drank cheap tequila out of a whore’s high-button shoe and shot down drummers in the local saloons if they so much as cracked a smile when he got to studying their assortments of ladies’ footwear.

For in his mind’s eye Midas was a man who eschewed denim, preferring garments fashioned from the finest oriental silk. His hair was oiled with strange perfumes instead of barber’s tonic. His bed chamber was heavy with the spicy tang of incense. Not one whiff of tequila or horseshit or lonely man’s sweat assaulted his refined olfactory senses.

But, even in the pit of his reverie, it was still Lie’s toe that was trapped between his lips. The toe of a Chi-nee princess raised expressly for his pleasure.

Because, in the pit of his reverie, Midas Gerlach was the Emperor of China, and he suckled on that toe as if it were the tit of the Empress Dowager herself.

Eyes open now.

The coyote’s words had been wise, for this was not the way it was supposed to be.

Breasts raw and red. Thin line of blood weeping from tongue.

She could not speak, but she could hear. Too well. Each little sound was amplified a hundredfold. Father said that evil spirits had stolen her voice when she was still in her mother’s belly, so the Gods had given her the hearing of a dragon in return.

White man sucking. A hungry man slurping noodles. Skin of a ghost hanging loosely from his bones like clean laundry flapping on a hot August breeze. Blue veins. Cold hands. Ghost hands. But his teeth were sharp. The teeth of the hungry goblin from her mother’s midnight stories.

The goblin with brown hair curling over his chest and shoulders.

Hair the color of the herbalist’s bitter roots.

Herbs that made her retch but didn’t give her a voice.

Father said the herbalist was a cheat.

Father took the herbalist’s tongue with a hatchet.

Father’s justice.

But Father was not here to protect her. Father was in San Francisco with the white goblin’s money. Using it to take another’s money by now. That was the way of it. Sure as she’d never touch the hard earth of Father’s homeland. Sure as the white goblin was sucking her twisted toes.