Verity Holloway
“He won’t lay a hand on us.”
Mancino could choose to be offended. The old priest had considered him for all of four seconds before telling the girl he’s as good as neutered, but Mancino could – he could lay a hand! He could lay two. Even so, the strangers have food and a tent, and Mancino has no horse, no water, no gun. The black desert night will kill him. Hear that? The coyotes are howling to chill a man’s blood. He has a story of bandits, of desperate, ruthless men, and he, poor young Mancino, in the wrong place at the wrong time, as always. Not strictly a lie, any of it.
Ned always did say he had a wretched look.
“Just a moment at your fireside, Padre. Then I’ll be on my way.”
The girl’s brow creases. She’s savvier than her companion. “There’s nothing for thirty miles. In any direction.”
Mancino ignores her. “Where are you headed, Padre?”
The priest casts his weary eyes across the distant sandy hills, fading into the twilight sky. “The sea.”
The answer surprises Mancino. He has only seen the sea once, when he crossed it. People here don’t mention it, the way people don’t mention Mars, or whatever stinking hole they came from. It’s a saltwater chasm between the old and the new, and Mancino cast off the past a long time ago.
The girl is a nice piece of meat. She’s well-muscled, glowering, and wears a gun belt over her skirts. Mancino is svelte and dark, with long legs nimble from his boyhood in the foothills. He knows his green eyes garner looks. This priest’s girl might notice his eyes if she drops the attitude.
Seated around the fire, they say grace before their canned meal. Mancino declines with a curl of his lip.
“He’s done nothing for me, the Almighty.”
The girl meets his eyes coldly. “What have you done for Him?”
They say their prayers without him, but he eats, and more than he ought. Detritus always did call him the trash can. Detritus was built like a steer and dressed like a child’s drawing of a man. Her waxed coaching coat brushed the dirt and her hair was a black halo framing her smiling face, though what anyone had to smile about out here in the dustbowl was a mystery to Mancino. Detritus had led gangs across all the country, that much he did know. She collected people, curious categories of them. It satisfied some urge in her to pack them together into a tight crew and teach them how to hold up mail trains and drain banks. Gangs of mean Spanish women with pox-pitted cheeks; of buck-toothed redheads; of men with green eyes full of guile. That was how she met Mancino, sidling up to him across the sticky floorboards of a nameless bar.
“How’s a man like you feel about the redistribution of property?”
He had opinions, as it turned out. They lived in the mountains, he and Detritus and the other four Green-Eyed Monsters, all rootless men like himself, learning to shoot straight and keep their heads. With Ned as their leader, post offices all over the frontier knew to fear them.
What are friends but guys who haven’t got around to screwing you over yet?
The priest and the girl are guarding something. They don’t tell Mancino so, of course, but he recognises the rabbity look of a bank teller with a stuffed safe and no backup. Mancino scrapes the last of the bean sauce from his can and watches as the girl goes to the little tent, pretending to fetch a shawl. She’s checking on it, the valuable thing. She sketches a cross from shoulder to shoulder and closes the tent flaps behind her.
“No bed roll?” the priest asks Mancino.
He rubs at his bruises, which are real enough. “The banditti took everything. I was lucky to escape with my life.”
The priest offers him a blanket, at least. When the pair retire, Mancino sees a box between their bedrolls, plain and black, asking – pleading – not to be noticed.
He grants them an hour of peace before quietly preparing the horses. Inside the tent, the priest sleeps open-mouthed. He’ll have money sewn into his clothes, but he’s all too sober. The girl scowls through her dreams, one hand curled around the bone handle of a knife tucked into her belt. The box rests on the sand, small and tempting between the warm bodies of his hosts. Coin, he hopes, or even jewels. Priests always have jewels.
He creeps on the toes of his boots, edging closer in the tent’s near-perfect darkness. He bends his long back, his hand a pale star against the box’s black lid.
Wait.
He flinches back before he fully registers what he sees. A snake, bright and deadly in a sliver of moonlight. His sudden motion startles it, and it reacts the only way it knows how. Mancino’s flesh is safely out of reach, but the priest’s hand lies limp on his chest. The snake gets him in the wrist, little more than a pinprick. That’s all it takes.
Mancino grabs the box and gets moving.
The girl can survive without a horse. She’s capable; call it a compliment. Besides, she’s the type to come after him, and he can’t have that. He lashes the spare behind the other horse, moving fast. With the box – heavy, he registers happily – safely in the saddlebag, he goes to mount as the girl comes falling out of the tent, wrestling with her pistol.
“Stop!” she shouts. “You don’t understand.”
The horses respond to his spurs, kicking up sand and rock. A bullet zips past his shoulder and the last he hears of the girl is a despairing cry:
“Throw it into the sea!”
* * *
Mancino is thirteen and the sun is a brand on the back of his neck. Sheep will not watch themselves, but Mancino has been awake since before dawn and their fat white shapes bob in and out of his sleepy vision like bubbles in beer. He settles his rangy body under a tree and leans his head against the warm bark. When two of the sheep wander off and a third is found dead in a wolf trap half a mile from the pasture, Mancino receives a belting for his carelessness and his younger brother is sent in his stead next time: little Damiano, always delighted to point out his mistakes. When a wolf takes him, Mancino wonders at his own luck.
* * *
He knows a hollow where he can stop before dawn. No one will see him, nor the horses pawing at the red dirt.
The box sloshes with coin. Mancino’s tongue flickers over his lips. The priest really didn’t want anyone getting inside – he can’t see a keyhole or even a hinge. It’s one of those trick boxes the Chinese silver-miners give their children, he supposes, and he gets to work with a rock, smashing it down with all his strength.
When the lid finally cracks, Mancino frowns.
He turns the box upside down and shakes it, feeling a fool for doubting his own eyes. The weight! The sounds of shifting cash.
The box is empty.
“Vaffanculo.”
The saddlebags, at least, contain a couple of handguns, a few coins, and a flask of warm water. And ammunition. Armfuls of it. Mancino holds out a bandolier jingling with shells. What was a priest doing with a private arsenal? Still, it’s something to show for his efforts. He can defend himself if the girl follows him – or worse, if his old friends show up.
He rests as the coral sun creeps over the crags, examining the box, running his fingers over the oiled wood for a hidden compartment or a false bottom. When he’s done, there’s little left but splinters, and he curses the priest and the girl for their duplicity.
Throw it into the sea.
Puttana probably got bitten. Snake venom can take some that way, trigger a sudden delirium. If she’s dead, she won’t come after him, at least. Mancino finishes the water in the priest’s canteen, letting it drip down his sun-blistered chin.
He can’t chance stopping at the nearest town. Someone will recognise the horses, or worse, Mancino. He thinks of Ned and the rest of the Green-Eyed Monsters, plotting behind his back. They probably think he’s vulture jerky by now. He brings his heel down on a rock, imagining it’s Ned’s treacherous head. The rock splits, revealing a fossil. Some butt-ugly sea creature, coiled up like a turd.
“This was all ocean,” Ned told him once, sweeping his arm across the desert vista. “A million, billion years ago.”
Mancino kicks the fossil away and takes a piss before his journey.
* * *
He is nineteen and his mother is close to death. She’s a husk of a woman, not a drop of juice left in her, and she barely fills the straw bed, sharp with sweat and wizened herbs. She presses the Saint Christopher into his palm, her cracked fingers rasping unpleasantly against his skin. “A mother will do anything to protect her children.” ‘Even you’, he hears, though only her eyes say the words. The medallion fetches a little cash from the pawnbroker. He looks fine in the new jacket it pays for. “One day,” says his father as they trudge home from the church on the hill, “the farm will be yours.” There is no time for mourning, they both understand that. The crops know no waiting.
* * *
Plethora is a grand name for a dull town, but it’s a good distance from the Green-Eyed Monsters’ stomping ground. Mancino hitches the horses and pays for a room in an inn that leans like an eavesdropping crone.
The innkeeper’s squinty eyes give him an apprehensive look, but he accepts Mancino’s false name without incident and leads him down a bare corridor to his room. “You on your way to the Lizard?” he asks, wafting away a brace of flies.
“The what?”
The innkeeper raises his voice, assuming Mancino has sand in his ears. “The shrine.”
Mancino grunts. He doesn’t know any shrine.
“You’ll have to scrounge up breakfast elsewhere,” the man goes on. “Our cook’s dead.”
“Dead?”
The innkeeper shrugs. “Life became a burden.”
The room hasn’t been cleaned since the last residents left, or perhaps the sorry souls before them. The bedsheets are coarse and grey, and the smell of stale sweat clings to them, but there is a chair for him to throw his clothes over, and the innkeeper eventually comes lumbering back with a basin of yellowish water and a sliver of soap.
Mancino frowns. He’s paid good money. “That it?”
“Hasn’t rained in a while.”
Mancino is all too eager to strip and wash and sleep for as long as his bruised body desires. As he peels off his shirt, he is reminded of the marks left by Ned’s boot as the other Monsters tied him like a hog and left him to fry.
“A good-for-nothing tick is what you are,” Ned had said. “Dead weight.”
Porco Giuda. If Mancino lays eyes on Ned again, the little bastard better have a swift horse.
There’s an old playbill down by the washbasin. Something about a harvest dance; there’s an illustration of couples arm-in-arm amongst jolly mounds of pumpkins and squash. Mancino vaguely remembers Plethora being known for its good soil, a microclimate of regular rain and kind sun. His mind darts to Italy, to his father, his cracked hands the colour of barren earth.
Enough of that.
Yes, looking at the playbill, he recalls the stories. People used to visit Plethora to taste the produce and take it to trade across the state. Pumpkin beer poured by sweet, fat women looking for husbands. Glancing out of the dusty window now, down at the listless men with the street’s dry red earth on their boots, he wonders when the town’s luck turned. A wagon draws up outside the undertaker’s shop, laden with plain coffins.
Mancino will leave first thing in the morning.
* * *
He is twenty-one and his new wife is nagging him about the top field. They could plant oranges there, Maria insists. Or figs. If Mancino would only get off his backside, she gripes, work with the other men to get an irrigation system in place, think what they could make of the place. Dig an underground aqueduct like they did in the Bible, bringing water down from the hills. She’ll do it herself if she has to.
Mancino waves away the flies. She’ll quieten down when she’s pregnant.
* * *
The night is hot and the Plethora streets are alive with breaking glass and the shrieks of squabbling harlots. Mancino’s aching body is buffeted through formless dreams. In the singing of the mosquitoes, he hears the whizz of the priest’s girl’s bullet, her desperate cry.
Throw it into the sea.
Mancino rolls onto his back, seeking the part of the sheets he hasn’t already soaked with sweat. To have paid for a bed and be unable to enjoy it—
There is something in his mouth.
His hands fly to his face, but the sizeable object is already slipping over his teeth. He wrenches his head from side to side, kicking out at his assailant with both legs. He figures it’s the innkeeper come to kill him – his own fault for being too tired to wedge a chair under the doorhandle – but the darkness of the room is so complete, he can’t make out the shape in front of him, and his flailing feet connect with nothing more substantial than his own blankets.
Panic meets pain. The thing in his mouth pins his jaw so wide he can hear the cracking of the hinges. His fingers scrabble where it protrudes from his lips, solid and thick as a man’s wrist, yet slick, briny against his tongue. He feels his face turning red, and he flips onto his stomach to try and dislodge the thing as it nudges experimentally at the fleshy opening of his throat.
He is reminded of the twisting knots of lampreys sold in buckets, waiting to be diced and fried in a broth of blood and wine. Vampire fish, born to mindlessly latch on and suck.
A fresh surge of fear. He bites down with all the savagery he can muster, but the skin – and that’s what it is, he realises then, a rubbery glove covering coils of heaving muscle – refuses to yield.
And then there are more. Oily tendrils weigh his bucking body down and make easy work of his most private defences. He is open, a passage warm and slippery. With a strangled cry, Mancino finds himself tossed onto his back once more, facing the ceiling where something dark and colossal masses above his spread legs. Through a blur of tears, there is a flash of light like a photographer’s bulb. A lightning storm blown in from the desert, perhaps, though the only thunder he can hear is the clamour of his own heart. It’s no more than half a second’s illumination, enough time for Mancino’s terrified brain to shout, nonsensically, “Woman!”
On the outside he is tough and scarred, but under the skin he’s an overripe fig. She loves him for it – She – for every sumptuous curve and pulsing cranny. All his uselessness rendered luscious, a fecund network of warm passages from his ears to his cockstand. His skin is sticky with every fluid he possesses, and there’s more for her the moment she asks, bubbling below the surface, anything she wants of him: sweat, seed, blood, every drop is for her. She’s making a map of his bowels, squeezing the sponge of his lungs with such affection that he spends, arched and whining around the roiling mass filling his throat.
At last, sing his cells as he drops into unconsciousness. At long last.
* * *
The sun is low. He has slept all night and most of the day, and he stinks worse than he’s ever stunk, which is saying something. After lying inert, listening to the rumble of the carriages outside, he gets up and pads to the grimy mirror. Each step sends a clatter of pain through a different set of muscles. Sunstroke, he tells himself, but he doesn’t look as bad as he feels. Nowhere near, in fact. His skin is clear and smooth, and the prints of Ned’s boots have faded almost to nothing. His hair – though sticky – curls around his ears in a comely fashion, with pedigree shine.
The dancehall, the butcher’s shop, and the general store all greet him with closed shutters and fading signage: Plethora is half shut up. There’s a fever burning through the population, the innkeeper tells Mancino, and it’s cutting down the youngest and the old. If it would only rain, he sighs, at least they’d die clean and cool. Mancino strikes out and asks the gravediggers if they’re in the market for a new horse, but they curse him for tramping over babies’ graves and he leaves after stating a few opinions of his own.
Last night’s fever dreams have left him randy. Down a side street he finds an agreeable woman with almost a full set of teeth, and he visits her room for a few minutes of rummaging. He is not an imaginative man, but he hopes he’s still sunstruck enough for one more hit of those fabulous, surgical sensations. All he gets is a moment’s relief and a throb behind his eyes from dehydration. Later, he tries a man. The rough-hewn farm boy treats him nicer than he treated the whore, and it’s something akin to the strange dream, if only in a mechanical sense.
What are you doing with your life? his brain asks of him at the crucial moment. Hangover philosophy. The worst.
After he extracts himself from the stable – plus a few coins from the dozing man’s wallet – he is accosted by a beggar sitting on the porch of a boarded-up house. The poor specimen is a noseless victim of Venus, and he shakes a can with a penny in it, though Mancino suspects the tremor is involuntary. Mancino likes beggars. If a town has vagrants, it means he’s not at the bottom of the pile.
“Stranger, hey,” the man calls. “You on your way to the Lizard?”
“Some shrine, right?”
The beggar nods, earnest as a drunk. “I don’t want your money. No, when you get there, will you tell them I’ve always been a devotee? In my way? I mean, I’ve never been out there, but my old man did, and he was a churchgoing man, don’t get me wrong, but he always maintained, always, ’til the day he died—”
Mancino interrupts. “They’d buy horses at this shrine, you think?”
The man wipes at the flared rim of his single nostril. “What’s it eat, your horse?”
“Oats, apples, whatever I give it.” Mancino scowls. “It’s a horse.”
At this, the beggar breaks into a dry cackle. Mancino leaves him to his delirium. He has to get rid of the spare horse. If by some miracle the priest’s girl has followed him to Plethora, she’s sure to ask around about a man with one steed too many, and he’s drawn enough attention to himself already.
Only it’s hot and dry, and the empty saloon is making eyes at him.
The beer is bad, and after the second glass he scoots into an alley to throw up. He leans against the wall, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and pauses, squinting. In the puddle of ejected ale, something stirs. At first he takes it for one of the bright little snakes that did for the priest, and he steps back. But the skin of the thing is like black glass, untouched by the red dust of Plethora. It slips through the saloon’s shadow, a pristine string of jet beads tugged by an unseen hand. Alarmed by its speed, Mancino retreats. The alcohol has barely touched his blood, but he swears the creature loses its shape as it glides away, becoming insubstantial, as if shedding its shining carapace in favour of a dirty grey vapour. Mancino remembers cold mornings in the mountains when his breath puffed from his nostrils.
He resolves to quit drinking, in this town at least.
* * *
He is twenty-five and his children number three. It is puzzling to Mancino how impatient Maria is with the little ones, how she seems to find so little joy in her life on the farm. Mater dolorosa. When she sweeps the floors, the children cling to her legs, heavy and tumescent. She never expresses pride in her handsome husband, nor their little home. She prepares the spezzatino for supper with all the delight of a prisoner picking hemp.
He spies her standing in the arid riverbed one morning, at the deepest part where the water once flowed at the level of her eyes. Standing there in the dress she’s mended a hundred times, doing nothing. Saying nothing.
There is an itching in his boots.
* * *
Garlands of dried gourds cross the main street from the rooftops, casting grimacing shadows in the deepening twilight. He’s glaring back at them, wondering what he’s still doing here, when a voice startles him.
“I figured your bones’d be picked clean by now.”
His hackles rise. Detritus is smoking her long pipe on the front porch of the drugstore, watching him with a wry smile he does not feel inclined to return.
“Were you in on it?” he demands.
She sucks on the pipe, allowing a tendril of smoke to slither from the corner of her lips. “No. But I heard. I can’t control how my babies turn out once I set ’em free.” She sniffs, jerks her chin. “Ned got his, if you want to know.”
A nudge of disappointment. Mancino wanted the pleasure of strangling Ned himself. “Who shot him?”
She snorts; it’s not a bad guess. “I dropped him off at the infirmary earlier today. It’s the fever. I found him forty miles east in a miners’ encampment. The others abandoned him. Here’s the first town with beds available.” She nods at a passing wagon, wobbling its way to the cemetery. “The wells are good as dry. Anyone with a lick of sense left long ago.”
“You should’ve left Ned to rot.”
“I care about my babies, little monsters though they may be.” Under the porch light, she considers him. “You look good.”
“I slept.”
The infirmary windows are shuttered for the night. Ned never could sleep in anything but pitch darkness. In happier times, he would wrap his neckerchief around his head and Mancino would delight in making obscene gestures at him until the other man grinned. I can hear your evil thoughts, you little dago.
“Which room is he in?”
Detritus rolls her dark eyes. “Come on now, Mancino…”
“I want to say goodbye.”
“I have a job for you. Figure I’ll need an escort, being the delicate female that I am. I’m heading out to see the Lizard.”
She tosses him a folded map. He sees Plethora, a cluster of farmsteads against the yellow vastness of the desert, fringed by distant hills. Far out into the sands, he sees it marked with a black spiral coiled up like a sleeping gecko – the Lizard. An eight-day journey if his beer-sore brain has the calculations right. How interesting could a lizard honestly be?
Detritus sucks at her pipe. “I’ll buy your spare horse, too.”
He has nothing better to do. Only one piece of business to attend to.
* * *
Mancino slinks into the infirmary, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Hanging bunches of herbs give the place an apothecary odour, but not enough to overpower the animal stink of decay. A dried pufferfish dangles from a ceiling beam, glass eyes agog, while a taxidermy crocodile, small enough to cradle, grins at the scene.
He finds Ned upstairs in a back room. It’s him, all right, laid out like a dead man. Mancino’s first instinct is to snatch the pillow and crush it into the man’s face, but Ned hears his boots on the floorboards and cracks open one green eye.
“There you are, you little dago.”
Ned’s clammy face breaks into that smile they shared so often, stealing moments in caves and bars and stables. “That’s a nice tan you got,” he adds. Mancino detects the rattle of water on his lungs.
“You left me to die.”
“Boo hoo. I was sick of you. Always was a do-nothing, take-what-you-can… barnacle.” Ned pauses, frowns. “You didn’t tell me you remarried.”
“What?”
“Her.”
Ned’s fever-bright eyes travel over Mancino’s shoulder. There is no one there.
Mancino won’t let Ned weasel out of it. “I never even got my final share.”
Ned laughs weakly. “That last post office? You hung back where you figured you’d be safe. Benny took a bullet in the thigh ’cause of you. It went green. Green!” He jabs at his eyes, the same cold jade as Mancino’s, the reason Detritus brought them together. “You spread nothing but shit wherever you go.”
He sounds like Mancino’s mother.
In a surge of rage, Mancino lunges. Only then does he notice the shape of the gun Ned is pointing at him under the sheet. As the blast deafens him, he swears he sees the bullet sail through the air like a stately bumblebee. Shock, he supposes; his brain slowing in dumb surprise at the unfairness of being murdered by his old friend twice in one week.
Mancino knows there’s something up when the bullet turns a corner mid-air. He gapes, ears ringing, as it picks up speed, ricochets off the wall and is flung back in the direction it came from, catching Ned’s jaw in a spray of blood and bone.
As Ned falls back, he’s trying to speak, his arm flailing, pointing at nothing.
* * *
Mancino is twenty-six, watching the tiny figure of his father ride the mule out over the badlands. It hasn’t rained for nine weeks. The fields are barren, but Maria is expecting for the fourth time. Mancino’s father speaks infrequently and cries when he thinks no one can hear him. It’s always been his way, but now he’s taken to riding out into the wastes to scream.
The old man’s howls echo in the impassive caves. It is Christmas Day, and on Christmas Day in Italy, everyone knows any baby born will become a werewolf. Mancino smokes on the hill, listening to his father cursing Christ for withholding the rain he needs, telling Him He is a werewolf, consuming tithes and praise, giving nothing in return.
Mancino’s youngest son stumbles over on stubby legs, intrigued by the distant noise. “Babbo cry?”
Crying won’t fix anything. In the woodshed, Mancino has stashed his saddlebags with some clothes, a couple of fennel sausages, and whatever money was under the loose floorboard in the bedroom. It’ll take Maria a week before she notices the mule is missing, let alone her husband.
* * *
He flees the infirmary like a man pursued by the devil, but no one tries to stop him. It is as though the rest of the patients are under ether. Even the physician grinding his mortar and pestle keeps his rheumy eyes on his work. When Mancino tumbles out into the street, Detritus is there in her long coat, preparing the horses for the journey.
“Satisfied?” she asks neutrally. He realises she never heard the shot. He feels eyes on him, and whips around, but it’s only the woman he tumbled earlier, leaning against the general store with her shawl loose around her shoulders. That missing front tooth is repugnant, he thinks, staring. A black hole in her sallow face. There is something behind it, billowing and fibroid.
“We’d better get going,” he mutters.
* * *
The gourd fields of Plethora are a sorry sight. Even the rats don’t bother with the crisp, colourless husks. As Mancino rides through the furrows, followed by Detritus, a shabby rabbit thumps a warning, pum-pum-pum, against the parched earth.
The journey is long, and Mancino was never one for idle chitchat. Above him only sky; below him, the sweating hide of the stolen horse. Half-dreaming, Mancino’s brain slides away to thoughts of the trick box he took from the priest’s tent. How unfair that it turned out to be empty. In his reverie he tosses it into the sea and watches it dissolve like a paper boat. Under the sun’s glare the seawater rises into clouds blowing back over the land, over the mountains where he was born. The clouds burst into the rainfall his father prayed for, rolling like sweat down the foothills and into the arteries of the rivers passing once more into the sea. He sees the whole cycle forming a great ring over the earth like a snake devouring its own tail.
He could have been a hundred miles away by now, drinking wine in a good suit. Doesn’t he deserve a little luck?
They camp for the night. A ravine has risen up around them, the same guilty red as dried blood. Detritus hitches the horses to a dead tree and starts clearing the ground for a fire.
Mancino sniffs the air. “If I were banditto, this is where I’d wait for travellers.”
Detritus snorts. “You are banditto.”
“We should move on.”
“No one’s going to bother us.”
She seems sure of it, but he keeps his gun close all the same. The sky is a vast canopy draining blue to indigo. He lies on his back to look at the stars, imagining them as diamonds he can pluck one by one and stuff into his pack. Robbing God, wouldn’t that be something?
Later, as their stew bubbles on the fire, he asks: “Why’d you care about this Lizard anyway?”
“People in these parts used to make the journey and pay their respects.” She keeps her eyes on the stew pot. “Lately I’ve been having these… thoughts.”
“Bad dreams?”
“Why, what dreams you been having?”
He stiffens, like she’s caught him with his hand in her purse. “I don’t dream.”
In the firelight, her skin shines like oil. He makes to kiss her. It would pass the time, drown the clamour in his head and guts. But her hand is on his chest, gently pushing him away.
“You’re my baby, remember?”
They eat in silence. Somewhere above, a bobcat revs and grunts, but the fire keeps it away. Detritus spits a chunk of gristle. “Back at Plethora, in the good old days, they used to make this pumpkin curry. Roasted seeds sprinkled all over like stars. I’d shoot a man for some of that curry right now.”
“No one in this country knows how to eat.”
“You’ve never been to Plethora. Not when it was worth it. People came, and never left. That good.”
Mancino picks his teeth. “Everybody leaves.”
The map is spread open by her boots. He sees the sea, the edge of it, a slice of goading green.
* * *
He wakes just in time to roll over before he throws up.
Detritus, feeding the horses in the dawn light, chuckles silently. “We ate the same shit last night. Don’t you blame my cooking.”
He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “That sickness back in Plethora – is this how it starts?”
Her smile disappears. She pats the horse’s flank. “Nah.”
He’s cold despite the sun peeking over the mountains. Their camp is in a valley where once a river carved a course through the land. He finds himself thinking of Ned and his ancient ocean again. It’s hard to reconcile that old friend with the man inhaling his own blood in that infirmary bed. Harder still to consider how it happened.
Best not to dwell. That sort of thing leads to screaming alone in the badlands.
Detritus interrupts his thoughts: “Can you ride?”
He growls at her, and they are on their way.
* * *
They’re a few days into the journey when they cross a railroad dividing the plain. The ground would usually be dotted with brittlebush and sand verbena at this time of year, flowering yellow and pink. All that’s left are last season’s tumbling brushes tossing empty seed shells to the cracked earth. Detritus suggests they follow the train tracks for a while; kinder for the horses on the cleared ground.
They ride in silence. The dancing haze of the horizon promises towering temples and fountains, but Mancino knows better than to hope for such things. Late in the day, they come to the site of a train wreck. The engine and its carriages have come off the rails. They sprawl there, rusting in the heat. A herd of wild horses gather at the metal carcass, all ribs and rolling eyes, and as Mancino slowly rides past, he swears he can hear their great yellow teeth grinding on the steel like it’s a sweet mountain of hay.
A shiver passes through him. “Che cazzo?”
“Weird, huh?”
He looks at Detritus. She’s staring ahead, as if she’s seen the strange spectacle already and would rather not repeat the experience.
“You’ve not felt it? Empty sensation,” she goes on. “Like a hole in the gut. Things haven’t been right for a long time.” She casts her dark eyes over the wild horses, working together to tear a sheet of steel from the train’s carcass. “A while back, someone stole something from the shrine.”
“Anyone we know?”
“Not our type of thief. There was… a relic, I guess you could call it. Meddling folks confiscating something they didn’t approve of, or didn’t understand. About a year ago, I caught wind of rumours the loot was buried someplace in the desert, like the thieves were planning to come back for it when the heat was off.”
“How valuable?”
“Money?” Detritus snorts. “You ever see a shark pay for something? Or a whale, for that matter? Forty feet long and seventy tonnes, old as God, worried about what something’s worth?”
Mancino thinks she’s touched by the sun. “And these thieves – they come back for their relic?”
“They sent people who’d know what to do with it. By then, the harvest had failed. The rains never came. Out-of-towners stopped coming to the fairs and the dances, so the businesses went under. People left. The ones who stayed got sick, or just sick of trying.”
He recalled the innkeeper, what he said about the cook and his burden. “That’s just life.”
“And that over there…” She nods grimly at the wild horses, fighting now over a flaking fragment of wheel and piston. “Is that just life to you?”
He always did hate it when she talked like she knew something he didn’t.
“Thou breakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.” She catches his quizzical look with seriousness. “I’m a preacher’s daughter.”
“You’re full of shit is what you are,” he says, and turns his face away from the wreckage. For another long mile, he swears he can still hear that wretched metallic crunching.
* * *
They make camp at an oasis. Boot prints decorate the sand around the mounds of tall cacti. People have been here before them, and recently.
“You should bathe,” Detritus tells him. “If you’ll pardon my honesty.”
“They particular at this shrine?”
“You’d wear a clean shirt to the Vatican.”
Mancino grins. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”
She busies herself picking rocks of the same size and colour to line their fire pit. Rocks, old socks, people: she always did feel the need to match things up. Mancino wonders what could be troubling her enough to send her eight days deep into the desert to consult some hokey oracle. He knows she was born down in the South with no idea of her own grandparents’ names or faces. She talked about it once when Ned passed a bottle around the campfire. Must be nice, having no past hanging around your neck. Mancino’s ancestors had lived and died on that pitiful farm in the foothills since the time of Caesar. Some nights he could feel them crowding into the yard to peer at him and mutter their grievances; how the fields had gone fallow and the house was a sty. Between that and Maria wordlessly haunting their dusty rooms, it’s a wonder he didn’t shoot himself.
He’s sweating an absurd amount. He replenishes his canteen and downs it, wincing as the cold spring water coats the heat of his insides, pulsing like an oncoming headache.
“They say there’s no rain in these parts?” he asks Detritus.
“Not for a long time.”
He squints up at the clear sky. “I feel it, though. I feel rain.”
* * *
A coyote is singing in the dawn. Its hitching cries wrap themselves around Mancino like a thread and tug him from his fitful sleep. His clothes cling with sweat, and his guts clench in time with his heartbeat. He thinks of the slaughtered pigs hanging in his father’s barn, their exposed bowels alive with tapeworms. He tries to push the repulsive image aside, but it’s replaced by a memory of Maria in childbed; the amniotic tang in the hot air; the amphibian kick of the baby’s slick purple legs.
His retching wakes Detritus. She stands over him with a look he can’t quite read.
“I told you I’m sick,” Mancino snarls.
“You’re not sick.” She rubs the dust from her hair and helps him stand. She points to the yellow horizon where the heat makes dancing shapes. “See that ridge? A day’s ride. Then we’re there.”
“I’m not weak.” He spits into the dirt as he wrenches free of her, tasting salt so strong he can feel his lips pucker. “Vaffanculo, woman!”
The impudent heifer has the nerve to look affronted. But with a couple of blinks of her great dark eyes, she’s in control again. She regards him, from the peeling soles of his stolen boots to the sweat rolling down his brow. She huffs. “Better hope you’re not.”
* * *
They are eight days west of Plethora when they finally see it.
There’s an encampment up ahead, two dozen weather-beaten tents pitched in a semi-circle around what looks to Mancino like a wide, deep crater. He stands in his stirrups, shielding his eyes from the spiteful midday sun. It’s not like any shrine Mancino has seen before; no statues, no priests. He thinks he spots someone emerge from one of the tents, but the figure either ducks back inside or was a trick of the heat.
“Is that—”
“The Lizard,” Detritus answers. “Almost.”
“I can’t go in.”
“Nah, you’re not flaking on me.”
“I’m going to shit myself.” He’s not exaggerating. Everything feels tender, his flesh too large for his skin. Sweat prickles down his spine, hot and cold at once. When he dismounts, his gut lurches like there’s a ball of lead inside, and he groans so loud it startles his horse. “I’ll wait here. Find a bush to squat behind.”
“The hell you will. What was it you said yesterday, about not being weak?”
He grumbles, but they hitch the horses together at the camp’s entrance. He can hear people inside, talking softly. The horses dip their long noses into the sorry drinking trough prepared for them in the shade. Some shrine. After eight days of travelling, Mancino was expecting more than two dozen tents and some whispering. He’s about to make a joke to Detritus when a wave of nausea hits him, and he jostles the horses aside to get to the brackish water, splashing his burning face.
When he’s steady enough to look up, water running down his neck, he freezes. Between the gaps in the tents, the view into the crater is clear. Mancino wipes his eyes to be sure it’s not a fever playing havoc with his brain. Lizard, they call it? It’s a skeleton. Longer than a whale, coiled up like a snake, it’s a bleached cathedral. A man could stand inside the ribs and reach up without touching them. Great spindle-fingered hands and feet spread out in the sand as if the creature is swimming through the dunes. The skull is propped open with flaming torches, the long pincer snout bristling with crocodilian teeth.
The leaden thing in his gut churns with recognition.
Mancino flinches. He forces his gaze back to the trough with its rusted edges and reflections of the horses either side of him. And of Maria. Maria at the table in their farmhouse kitchen, feeding their youngest, her cheeks wan and her eyes dull as if the baby is contentedly draining her life’s blood. No, he was right to leave. She was faulty, not put together like other women. His parched lips part to tell her so, and in the water’s surface he sees the flapping of his tongue, black and billowing. Startled, he cries out, and a flash of light from the entrance of his throat sends him scuttling back from the trough. He’s blinded, scrabbling for his gun with both hands—
Hands on his shoulders. “Hey. Steady now.”
Detritus is gently taking the gun from his shaking hands.
“When I was thirteen—” he gasps. “I was sent— to watch the sheep—”
“The wolf and your brother, yeah. Very sad.”
Something shunts inside him. He retches, bringing up nothing but a grey dribble of sputum. Detritus is unfazed.
“We do this every time you have a drink, sweetheart,” she says, rubbing his back as she steers him away from the horses. “The Saint Christopher you pawned before your mama had her last rites, and how your daddy had a fall in the badlands and froze to death in the night, and how you up and left your wife and kids without two pennies to rub together and none of it was your fault. Honestly, when I heard Ned and the Monsters strung you up and left you, I assumed they’d had enough of your whining.”
She leads him through the shrine’s canvas entrance. Mancino totters, rubbing at his smarting eyes. He’d forgotten about his father. Tossed that memory somewhere deep and lightless along with the rest.
In the crater below, the Lizard’s bones are dazzling in the sunlight. The sweat is pouring down his face now, dribbling hot into his eyes and mouth. People are emerging from the tents: men and women and a few wide-eyed children. He stumbles on the shale, kicking up a shard of white shell.
“This was the ocean once,” he mumbles, his tongue dry and thick against his salty teeth.
Detritus is half carrying him, and he tries to pull away, but when he opens his mouth to curse her, there’s a flash from inside and the assembled people cry out and surge for him, pulling him deeper into the pit.
There are too many of them. He can’t see. Someone shouts to be gentle with him, and he feels his feet leave the ground with the help of a dozen hands.
Detritus’ voice against his ear: “Those dreams I talked about. She told me to look for a girl burying a preacher in the desert.”
“Who did?” There’s another blast of light from inside his mouth, and the people carrying him moan with excitement.
“I bring people together, sweetheart, you know that. Look how happy you’ve made all these folks.”
Panic surges. “Che cazzo dici?”
“You let her out,” she tells him, shouting above the rising din of voices. “They stole the spirit from her bones. They bound her in that box and they were going to take her to the sea and throw her in, but you stopped them, didn’t you?”
“Who are these people?” His heartbeat is a roaring tide inside his ears. “They worship a… a fish?”
“I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs,” she says, “but the men of science are saying there was a race of dragons a million years ago, or somesuch. Land ones, sea ones, things that could fly. This desert was her ocean. She doesn’t want any other – she belongs here. And all the while the people here take care of her, she’ll take care of them. You get it?”
He doesn’t. But as they stumble down the beaten track to the crater’s base, someone is peeling off his jacket and sodden shirt, and the relief is almost too much. The Lizard’s incisors are stalactites bearing down on him, and his heart lurches with the same stupefying fear he felt back in the infirmary, watching that bullet take a corner mid-air like it had its own mind. Spirits in boxes, stuffed crocodiles watching over dying men’s beds, no – Mancino needs a doctor. Strange fingers struggle with the fastenings of his trousers, but when the cotton tears, he barely notices. He falls on his knees. The Lizard’s clean, dead jaws accept him as he crawls inside, curling with his knees to his chest as his guts continue to fight like a rat in a sack.
He is dimly aware of Detritus crouching outside the row of teeth. She’s packing her pipe, chatting in his general direction as if they’re enjoying a cordial evening by the fireside. “The moment I first saw you in that bar, I said to myself, ‘What a waste of skin that one is’. If it weren’t for those eyes, I’d have passed you over for useless. Which would’ve been a mistake, as it turns out.”
Mancino’s bladder gives way. He puts a hand between his legs. It comes away bright with blood, and when he finds his voice, it’s shrill with fear. “It’s killing me.”
Detritus smiles around her pipe, as if he’s simple. “Why would she kill her own bride?”
Someone shrieks and claps. Mancino tries to lever himself onto his back, but his limbs won’t take his weight. Something is forcing its way out of him, solid and smooth against the slick contours of bowel and throat. The applause gathers weight: a hard carapace clicks against his back teeth as one of the things ventures up and out. He gags, but the shape quickly dissipates, becomes insubstantial as it spreads against his tongue and past his lips like a wet, fibrous cloud of cheesecloth.
Four, five, six. As more of them wriggle free of him, the crowd keeps count. More maddening still, someone starts to play a penny whistle. The people seem to know the tune, and soon the air is hazy with sand where their dancing kicks it up. The refrain whirls and repeats until it is all Mancino can hear or even think of, replacing the thoughts inside his own head as the strange expulsions reach double digits. His world has shrunk to the size of the Lizard’s bone mouth, sheltering him, keeping him close.
They are emitting from him steadily now, unfurling from his every tender opening. They bob into the sky where they cluster together: fat black clouds, heavy with rain, flashing joyous white lightning against the hard blue sky.
With time, the blood on his thighs and chin dries and cracks like desert mud. The people gathered around the Lizard’s bones dab their tears and give thanks for the receptacle of his body. After many hours, when the sun is swaddled in cloud and the gentle rain opens his aching eyes, he can no longer see Detritus anywhere.