Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

His clothes on the floor. The shed hide of a goblin.

Her clothes in the fire, flame and ash.

And in the corner — towering over the palace of the Empress Dowager, a giant in the Empress’ own private courtyard — the pine woman stood waiting, not daring to shrink from the flames.

Waiting, pine body straining against a white dress of silk and lace. Dancing flames casting her pine shadow over the curving roof of the palace. White veil a bleached shadow over slivered lips.

In China, white was the color of mourning.

The goblin stopped his sucking. Opened his eyes. Nudged Lie’s raw, red breasts with his evil chin, licking his horrid pink lips.

Lie made the pine woman’s face her own. She traveled to a place deep inside herself, a secret place far from the white goblin’s house. A place where he could not reach her.

And from that place, for the first time, the young daughter of the Mysterious East caught the bitter scent of the white goblin’s hidden gold.

Midas knew his limit, and he’d done reached it.

Hurriedly, he rose and christened his bride-to-be. She just lay there and took it like a dream. He had to pick her up before she’d even move. He set her in front of the dresser mirror, and she stood there as still and stiff as the pine dressmaker’s dummy in the corner of the room. Midas had to pour water into the bowl for her, wet the cloth. But damned if he was going to wipe her down, and she seemed to know it. Cool cloth in her tiny hand, she got the idea and busied herself.

Midas watched her from behind, but she was perfect and demure and didn’t dare catch his eye in the mirror. Her eyes were downcast, staring into the depths of the reflection, studying the fire that burned in the fireplace behind her and the model of the Empress Dowager’s palace that dominated the floor of Midas’ bedroom.

Midas had lovingly assembled the model, recreating every detail from vivid descriptions found in one of his yellowback novels. He wanted to tell Lie about it — what the model meant to him, the dreams it held — but all that would have to wait. Right now he didn’t want to talk. He only wanted to drink in her beauty, which jerked him around like a stiff shot of tequila.

Sweat on her tight little buttocks, twin globes that were as slick and shiny as a couple of perfect pearls. From behind, she looked like an innocent little girl. And maybe she was. Haired over, but just barely. Spider-leg hairs. Hairs like undertaker’s thread.

No. Midas licked at the salty-sweet, faintly leatherish taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes and concentrated on a flavor that had no equal.

A sweet blossom’s flavor. The Chinaman’s own daughter. Or so the Chinaman said. But the Chinaman was a man who owned a gambling hall, and a man like that wasn’t exactly on intimate terms with the truth. That’s what a lawman up in San Francisco had told one of Midas’ gun-dogs.

But the Chinaman had been straight about the girl. Maybe not about the daughter part — maybe that part was supposed to make the deal more appealing in an outre oriental way, like the things described in those yellowback novels — but he’d been straight about the rest of it. He’d delivered. He’d sent the girl down from San Francisco in a wagon so there wouldn’t be any fuss or gossip at the train station, just like he’d promised.

Midas stepped past the dressmaker’s dummy, his hairy shoulder brushing the bridal gown he’d had made special for Lie. He stood next to it, tall and proud in the courtyard of the Empress Dowager’s palace, dwarfing the structure. Sunlight glinted off the sloping angles of a dozen golden roofs, warming Midas’ naked skin.

Midas was a man who could never get warm enough.

He stood in the sunlight, staring at the same scene that had greeted him every day for thirty-three years. The Gerlach family plot was a hundred feet from his window. His granddaddy’s headstone dwarfed those surrounding it, his mama’s headstone on one side and his grandma’s on the other. Only one thing was different about the scene today. There was a nigger out there on Midas’ property, about fifty feet this side of the family plot and another twenty paces or so to the west, pretty near the old outhouse where the best part of Midas’ granddaddy had been so shamefully interred lo those many years ago. This nigger had a shovel lashed to his shot-up hand with a length of barbed wire, and he was busy digging a new shit shaft in the hard, hot earth of Fiddler, California.

Midas scratched his head. Still all pixilated from his frolic with Lie, but Jesus, he needed to calm down and think this through.

The Chinaman had sent Lie, sure. But he’d also sent the nigger. Nigger had been the one driving the wagon.

But he wasn’t a wagon-driving kind of buck. Not hardly. He was a buck gunfighter. Buck bounty man, actually, to put the right name to it. A gunman with a Navy Colt secreted beneath his canvas duster. Imagine that. A wagon-driving buck with the stink of sweat and horseshit and trail dust about him trying to draw down on Midas Gerlach on the very ranch where three generations of Gerlachs had been born and bred.

That didn’t go down too good, not in this county. Midas was a wanted man, sure. Everyone knew that. But the Gerlachs ruled the town of Fiddler, the whole damn county. A network of cousins and uncles and assorted bastards kept things going the way they’d always gone. No one was going to collect the bounty on Midas Gerlach. Especially not some nigger with a Navy Colt.

The price on Midas’ head was a doozy, though. Truth be told, he was mighty proud of it. The larger the dollar sign, the larger the man. That’s what his granddaddy had always said. And Midas had earned it, too. Not in any pedestrian manner, mind you. Nothing so simple as the murder of man, woman, or child.

People up in Sacramento City still talked about it. How some rich rancher staying at a ritzy hotel by the river carved up a whore with the French chef’s best cutlery. Paiute Injun whore who had a real taste for brandy with a slice of summer peach, and the law still held him accountable, even though anyone who knew the Gerlach clan from Midas’ granddaddy on down damn well knew that the whole bunch of them couldn’t control their passions when the brandy had them by the balls. Peached or straight it did not matter.

But it wasn’t the cutting up part that had bothered the good citizens of Sacramento City. It was the simple fact that Midas (in the pixilated afterglow of a frolic similar to the one he’d just enjoyed with Lie) had sautéed the slut’s feet in the French chef’s best skillet, cooking her little toesies to a golden brown in a rich sauce of champagne and wild mushrooms and plenty of butter. When the hotel staff found him after the deed was done, sixty-two bones lay stripped clean on the hotel’s finest Staffordshire Blue china, and Midas was working his bicuspids with a toothpick. His disposition was later described as more than agreeable by the concierge, certainly polite despite a few discreet belches. In fact, everything seemed just fine and dandy until the hotel doorman peeked into the kitchen and confronted the untended remains of Midas’ gustatory extravaganza, at which point the hale and hearty Irishman promptly lost the half-pint of whiskey that had insulated him against the surprisingly intemperate June weather.

The Sacramento City papers played it up big. Said that Midas was worse than that Alferd Packer fellow out Colorado way, worse than the miserable wretches who called themselves the Donner Party. And then the gentlemen of the press got to embellishing the story, and pretty soon Midas found that he had consumed not only the whore’s feet but also the French chef’s privates — cooked up with a big mess of oysters was how the story went — and that little tale put the noblest son of the house of Gerlach off his feed for a full week. Such embellishments continued, each revelation helping to jack the bounty on Midas’ head to Tower of Babel proportions, until it got to the point where Diamond Jim Brady himself might get all wet in the mouth and strap on a gun, let alone some buck with a scarred Colt that had most-likely seen its last duty at Gettysburg.