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How the West West Was Won, and Where It Got Us	By : Nightspore Category: 1 through F > Dead Man Views: 1708 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Dead Man, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-How the West West Was Won, and Where It Got Us
- 1
HOW
THE WEST WAS WON, AND WHERE IT GOT US

"Excuse me. Sir?"
William Blake, accountant formerly of Cleveland en route to Machine,
California, leaned on the bar and tapped hesitantly for the bartender's
attention. "I was wondering if you could direct me to the
facilities."

'> "What facilities?"

"I, er, er, I need to
relieve myself," Blake said quietly.

The train was stopping for a few
hours in this little town, Monongahela. He had no idea what state they were in.
Some vast arid wasteland that padded out the center of the continent.
Monongahela was one of those places, like the port cities of old, that had only
been built because of the railroad. It boasted no natural resources, produced
no goods - its existence was entirely owed to its placement, the precise
distance from the last town that it took for the 29 to run out of fuel. Blake
had taken this opportunity to get his first taste of authentic firewater, a
brand of rotgut whiskey he'd never heard of, called Tiger's Breath. That had
been an hour ago, at noon. Now the Tiger's Breath, apparently satisfied with
its efforts in dissolving his guts and brain into a buzzing, queasy mess,
wanted out and now.

The bartender stared at him.
"Out back."

There was a single outhouse
behind the bar, a little shack with the traditional half moon carved in the
door. By the sounds emanating from therein it was not only occupied but likely
to remain so for quite a while. Faintly disgusted, Blake staggered a decent
distance away into the long grass and unbuttoned his pants. When in Rome, he supposed. The grass
here, beargrass, they called it, grew almost as tall as his chest and was so
stiff and sharp-edged it sliced his hands like a knife when he tried to push it
aside. Out West, even the grass was ferocious. He was glad he was heading to a
sizeable town. Blake knew really wasn't cut out for the cowboy life. He
preferred regular baths, flinched at the firing of a starter's pistol, rode a
horse only slightly better than another horse would, and liked his bread as
free of weevils as humanly possible.

He saw its reflection in the
duck pond before he saw the dog itself. It stood there staring at him with a
wary, appraising expression, a big black dog with a shaggy coat and long legs
and pale eyes, like a husky. Suddenly, unaccountably shy, Blake felt his stream
dry up to a trickle.

Poor dog, the thick ruff about
its shoulders made it look large, but he could clearly see the tucked-up belly
and staring ribs. The tenderhearted Blake patted his thigh and whistled. He
couldn't bring it with him on the train to Machine, of course, but he could beg
a few scraps of meat from the dinner car for it, surely, or a nice big bone.
The dog's small, cupped ears strained forward with interest, but it did not
step closer. Its cold, patient gaze bored into him, and reminded him of
something, although he had surely never seen such a large mutt with such pale
eyes before. He glanced away from it for a moment to button himself back up,
and when he looked again the dog had disappeared.

"It were a coyote,"
another passenger said when Blake returned to the bar and inquired after the
dog's owner. The man pronounced it kie-yoat.
"Or mebbe a wolf."

"Wolf!" Blake
exclaimed.

"Weren't no wolf," one
of the others piped up, putting down the jackrabbit he was busily skinning.
"Yer a blame fool, Twill. Ain't been no wolf round here since they
slaughtered the buffalo herd up at Bitterroot Pass."

&qn>"Wolf," Blake repeated
faintly. Imagine that, a wolf! A big bad wolf, a grim, gaunt, man-eating
monster from childhood's darkest nightmares, and he had been standing there
with his man-parts in his hand, less than fifteen feet from it! It was amazing
he escaped with his life. What would his parents have thought? What would his
intended have thought . . . would she have considered him brave?

He suddenly wanted out of the
small, smoke-filled bar and back on the train, craving the comfort of
inch-thick steel plates separating him from the wilderness, the wheels turning
and taking him far away from this place where even the most routine, intimate
functions could be interrupted by something as shockingly savage as the
unheralded appearance of a wolf.

He boarded again, noting how the
other passengers seemed to consist entirely of hairy, scurvy-looking trappers.
"Mountain men", he thought they were called.

Blake was pretty, almost too
pretty with his wide cheekbones, full lips and melting dark eyes like the kind
seen in the languid women adored by the Pre-Raphaelites, his face only saved
from total effeminacy by the arch of his brows. His clothes were not new, and
even when new had not been expensive, but they were clean, neatly pressed and
gaily patterned in large checks. He'd wanted to appear dashing, but the effect
was cheap and clownish. His fellow passengers had gotten rougher in appearance
as he went further West. They were unbathed and unshaved, bundled up as
comfortably in the skins of beasts they'd no doubt trapped, skinned and cured
themselves as if the pelts had grown naturally on them. They filled the car
with the smell of themselves, whiskey and tobacco and tanning acid and
gunpowder and saddle soap and bodily processes. Such a man would be a figure of
wonder and fun strolling down the streets of Cleveland with his greasy, uncut,
flea-ridden hair and buckskins decorated Indian style with beads, bones and
porcupine quills, as fabulously out of place as a unicorn. But here, surrounded
by these half-wild men, Blake knew keenly he was the one out of place.

It was almost a relief when the
29's fireman entered the car. He strolled down the aisle, his hands clasped
behind his back. Blake was impressed despite himself at how the man's stride
adjusted to the roll of the train. He himself hadn't, even after all this
traveling, gotten his 'sea legs'. The fireman's clothes, his skin, his entire
person was blackened with an indelible layer of soot. He shoveled coal and wood
into the furnace that heated the water into steam that ran the pistons that
turned the wheels that were clacking, clacking, clacking endlessly, carrying
Blake deeper and deeper into the wilderness.

He had seen the man once before,
when he was hauling his suitcase into the train at the first station. For a
moment he couldn't think of what the man resembled. Then, as he shut his eyes
against the glare of the setting sun, he saw a slim white figure with dark
hollows for eyes printed on the back of his eyelids: a ghost. The man was a
ghost, in negative. The figure faded and he opened his eyes again, but the
fireman had disappeared.

Now he sat down opposite of
Blake, who clutched his suitcase on his lap. Apropos of absolutely nothing at
all the fireman said, "Look out the window."

Blake obliged. He saw nothing
but what had been there the past few days, an endless sea of beargrass waving
in the hot wind. Suggestively shaped rock escarpments, the color of red ochre,
raised from it at intervals like desert islands.

"And doesn't it remind
you," the man continued in his soft, insinuating voice, "Of when you
were in the boat? And then later that night you were laying, looking up at the
ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape."

Blake glanced worriedly around
the car, but none of the trappers was paying attention or had noticed anything
amiss. The fireman rambled on, gesturing heavenward, seemingly not bothered by
Blake's unease. "And you think to yourself: why is it that the landscape
is moving, but the boat is still? And also - where is it that you're
from?"

Blake had been about to protest
that the man must have mistaken him for someone else, but was startled by the
abrupt question. He answered reflexively, "Cleveland."

"Cleveland," the
fireman echoed, canting his head to one side. There was a look of polite
disbelief on his sooty face, as if he thought Blake were making up the name of
the city.

"Lake Eerie," Blake
elaborated.

"Eerie," the man
repeated, as if agreeing to something else entirely. "Do you have any
parents back in, ah, Eerie?"

"They passed on
recently." The grief was still raw. Blake looked away, wishing the strange
man would leave.

"And, uh, d'you have a
wife? In Eerie?"

"No."

"A fiancee," he
persisted, his eyes strangely downcast as he leaned further forward.

Determined to remain courteous,
Blake answered stiffly, "Well, I had one of those. She changed her
mind."

"She found herself somebody
else," the fireman said, in a tone that was not one of a man guessing.

"No." That was another
wound he didn't care to pick at. Whoever this man was, he had an absolute
genius for obnoxious prying.

"Yes, she did," the
fireman said with a note of grim finality. "Well, that doesn't explain why
you've come all the way out here. All the way out here to hell."

A frown furrowed Blake's smooth
brow. He made as if to argue, but decided it wasn't worth contradicting the
fool. "I have a job. Out in the town of Machine."

"Machine?" A peculiar
light flared in the man's eyes. It really was impossible to see the expression
on his face underneath theers ers of grime. "That's the end of the
line."

"Is it." Blake tried
to sound disinterested, hoping that would dissuade the man from further
conversation.

"Yes," the fireman
hissed, an unnatural stress in his voice.

Blake frowned again. There was
some mysterious, threatening implication in the man's words. He didn't like
that at all. He drew his summonster ter out of his jacket pocket and handed it
to the fireman, who removed his thick leather gloves and took the folded paper
rather delicately between his index and middle fingers.

"Well, I received a letter
from the people at Dickinson's metal works assuring me of a job there.&;
"Is that so," the man
murmured, staring hard at the letter, turning it over and over.

"Yes, I'm an
accountant."

"I wouldn't know, because I
don't read. But, eh, I'll tell you one thing for sure. I wouldn't trust no
words written down on no piece of paper. 'Specially from no Dickinson out in
the town of Machine." He spoke in an uneducated dialect, but each syllable
was precisely pronounced, the hard consonants bitten off crisply, and Blake had
the odd sense that the man was playing dumb, putting on the accent for some
murky reason of his own. He folded the letter neatly and handed it back.
"You're just as likely to find your own grave."

He had been so intrigued by this
singular conversation, Blake hadn't noticed the elderlyntaintainman at the
front of the car looking excitedly out the open window behind the fireman,
until the old man shouldered his rifle and began shooting.

Blake jumped at the sound,
ducking down behind his battered suitcase as the others snapped to attention,
drawing their own weapons and whooping as they hurried over to Blake's side of
the car, crowding around the windows and blasting away.

"Look," the fireman
said, his voice raised to carry over the volley of reports but still calm.
"They're shooting buffalo."

Blake forced himself to peer out
from behind his suitcase and craned his neck to see. Sure enough, there was a
herd of huge, brown, furry animals galloping alongside the train. The fireman
did not cover his ears, even when the mountainmen fired directly behind his
head, but he twitched as if each bullet had slammed directly into his own
heart. His expression revealed no fear. Nothing, he seemed to feel nothing.
Outside, a buffalo calf crumpled to the ground and was trampled by its larger
fellows.

"Gov'ment says we killed a
million of 'em last year alone." The fireman's colorless eyes were fixed
on Blake's face, but seemed to be staring right through the back of his skull
into secrets beyond.

He couldn't take it anymore.
Clutching his suitcase, Blake fled the car.

That night, the Tiger's Breath
still fogging his brain and sloshing in his guts, Blake found himself unable to
sleep. He leaned on one elbow, looking out the window. They had moved onto the
alkali flats, and the desert became shockingly cold at night. Frost etched
delicate patterns on the window glass. He had been forced to change into his
long johns and beg another blanket from the usher.

Night transformed the landscape
into an eerie fairyland painted in washes of blue and silver almost as bright
as midday by the low, full moon. The bare sand was white as bleached bone. No
human lived out here, not even Indians, and Blake could never imagine anyone
would. This land belonged to the wild things.

Lean dark shapes were pacing the
train, their tireless legs flashing as they skimmed the ground, their
long-muzzled heads slung low. Wolves, a whole pack, on the hunt. Blake pressed
his nose hard against the chilly glass, squinting hard through the steam of his
breath at them. Despite the fact he knew he was safe, he couldn't help
clutching his blanket up tight to his throat. There were no buffalo in sight,
no pronghorns or mule deer or any other prey animal. He wondered what they
could be hunting . . .

"What do they hunt, do you
suppose, by the glimmering pools of water? By the round silver moon, the pool
of heaven, in the striped grass, amid the barkless trees - "
He had quietly pulled back the curtain while Blake was absorbed with the
wolves, and now he leaned into the berth, one knee on the mattress, looking out
past him.

"The stars scattered like
the eyes of beasts above them." The man slid into the berth beside Blake,
pulling the curtain closed behind him with a snap.

"What do you want,"
Blake asked.

"I want your clear
attention," the fireman replied, his voice a sinuous, coaxing whisper.
"Your eyes, your held breath, your world of glass."

In the small enclosed space of
the berth, the smell of the man was sickeningly strong, a salty reek of the
labored sweat he basted in all day, seasoned with the acrid coal dust drifting
like black snow from his clothes and onto the clean sheets, spiced by the scent
of engine oil and smoke from the wood fire. Blake's affronted nostrils pinched
shut of their own accord as the man shifted closer and a thicker wave of scent
rolled off him. His breath, though, was surprisingly sweet and fresh. This
close, he could tell the fireman had been eating apples.

"Who are you?" Blake
demanded. He wondered if he could pull the cord and stop the train. But no - it
hung on the outside of the berth so that no one flailing in sleep could trigger
it accidentally. He would have to fight his way past the invader to reach it,
but the man's long arms and legs formed a barrier.

"I'm Nobody," the
fireman laughed. He pattedke'ke's cheek, running his sandpapery fingertips
over it, savoring the downy softness. Blake could feel the zigzag streak of
greasy ash his touch left behind, smeared across his face as if marking him. It
itched. "Are you Nobody, too? Don't tell. They'd banish us, you
know."

He's a madman, poor soul, or a simpleton, Blake told himself.
Kindly but firmly, he said, "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to
leave."

The man leaned over him, forcing
Blake onto his back. He draped one arm casually over Blake's chest and thrust
his face close to the window. "Isn't it sad, how the sun is so warm and
the stars are so cold?"

Blake could hardly draw breath.
He tried to adopt a tone of gentle reason, hoping to humor the madman, persuade
him to leave of his own volition. "The stars are suns too. They're just
farther away."

The man inclined his head,
looking at Blake with a hooded blue gaze. The only other natural color to his
face were his lips, licked clean, pink and shiny as boiled sweets. "Can
they get . . . closer?"

"Closer?"

"Yes . . . "

The fireman pressed his mouth
down hard on Blake's, angling his head just right, his tongue prying Blake's
jaws open enough to plunge de. de. The wine-fragrant taste of apples filled his
mouth.

He stroked Blake, sliding his
hands under the wool of the long johns. The coarse callouses, the broken,
stained nails flensed him, and Blake thought of the black wolf's dinner plate
sized paws, the thick pads and wrought-iron curve of the dark claws. His touch
drew blood. Inside his birdcage ribs,ke'ke's heart fluttered like a trapped
creature beating itself against the ivory bars to escape. But the devilish
melange of Tiger's Breath and a cold wash of disquiet held him rigid.

The man's rough hands lay tracks
down on his body, cutting through the virgin wilderness, leaving a path for
other hands to follow. Even in the throes of terrified ecstasy, he couldn't
help thinking of his fiancee, comparing her slim, cool, dainty fingers to this
man's rough, eager paws, the perfumed satin of her skin draped in the finest
lace to his unashamed nakedness.

He'd peeled himself raw, and
with a few impatient tugs the fireman stripped Blake, too, popping every single
button off his long johns. Out of his clothes, his face and hands dark with
ground-in soot, the rest of him moist and pink and ridiculously thin, the
fireman resembled nothing so much as one of the skinned rabbits hanging in the
bar in Monongahela.

But his lanky frame was not
weak. He was all whipcord sinew under skin as delicate as that of a baby in a
soap advertisement. The man was so blade-boned he threaten to flay the meat off
Blake as he pushed the other man down and squirmed atop him. His strength was
all in his shoulders and arms - not the bulging muscles of the circus
strongman, but lean, wiry, tough as a strip of beef jerky. The only softness
was in his eyes, the pale, perfect blue of Dresden china. They gave the rest of
his face the look of a mask. Blake could see his own face, bleached white with
fearful, longing anticipation, reflected in those eyes like a mirror.

The man was doing something, and
Blake was too choked with fear to understand what it was. It hurt, it was awful
and invasive and he struggled mindlessly, clawing at the man's bare skin. And
the crowning shame was that his own body, ragdoll-weak and pure as fresh cream,
his treacherous body responded to the fireman's cruel caress. His own
unspeakable parts reared up from behind the curve of his belly like some
obscene tent pole, of such absurdly Beardsleyesque bulk that he hardly even
recognized himself.

The fireman ignored Blake's
tumescence with lordly disdain, grabbed him, forced his legs apart. He bent his
head and slathered his tongue down the raw wound of Blake's backside, his
tongue delving into places only his washcloth had ever been before. Blake cried
out again, a raw primal sound. There is no one else in the sleeping car, no one
to hear him, to come save him.

The man pounded him again and
again, rhythmic as the pistons of the train, his bony hips grinding mercilessly
against Blake's. Sweat streamed
glistening down his sides, pooling in his navel, water drops of it clinging to
his hair. Blake gripped the man's arms, trying to brace himself against this
invasion, and felt the rawhide muscles flexing beneath his fingers. This was
nothing to the fireman. He spent eight to ten hours a day standing in the full
blast of the furnace, shoveling coal and wood . . . he could do this all night
until there nothing was left of Blake but a few powdery shards of bone and
shreds of shaved, perfumed meat in cheap woolen long johns, until he was
nothing more than a thin film of oil coating this man's rasping hands. The cry
of a wolf rang out.

The train whistle shrilled as
they entered the tunnel.

Blake screamed, a faint, thin
sound, as the man forged past his resistance, popped the ring of muscle and
entered him fully, plunging into his depths, reeleseless. Blake managed to open
his streaming eyes and could make out only the white of the man's eyes, and the
curve of his uneven teeth, shining with the faint radiance of the hidden moon.

He felt like he was being fucked
by America, scoured out by the bristling saguaro cacti and rasping quartz sand
of all harsharsh barren lands he'd traveled through, being ploughed by the
great iron shaft of the train itself, ravaged, being shaken in the fangs
of the wild uncaring wolf, brother to
the blue-eyed man. The landscape tried to swallow him up, whole, choking as he
stuck in its dry throat. The train's wailing whistle became a wolf's mournful
howl, not the eager yip-yip-yip of coyotes that he'd heard on previous ni
bu
but a full throated cry of longing and loss. He stole such authority for
himself, this pinnacle of evolution. The white male of European descent,
arbiter of all that was good or evil, natural or unnatural, justifying his
whims with arbitrary law. Now he realized a simpler law was at work . . . and
he remembered, deep down in the oldest cobwebbed, shadowed part of the brain,
what it was like to be small and helpless and hunted, what it was like to be
prey.
cla class=MsoNormal>
And suddenly, just like that, it
was over.

The fireman drew out of him,
sighing and wiping his hands on the pillow. Blake could feel his own manhood
relax along his thigh, warm and soft and sticky as a roll of uncooked dough.
There was conclusion, but no pleasure. Blake could only lay there, stunned. He
heard the man shuffling next to him, tucking himself in and buttoning himself
back up. He leaned over Blake once more, and he expected a kiss . . . but no.

The fireman took Blake's lower
lip between his teeth and gently bit down, the loving caress of a wolf. But the
wolves were disappearing, along with the buffalo, and the mountainmen, and,
though Blake's steam-powered imagination could not conceive of it, the great
trains crisscrossing the country.

The taste of the man was like
ashes in his mouth.

"This is how the West was
won, and where it got us," the fireman told him, but Blake only heard: this is how the West was one. And when
he woke it was dawn, and the train was pulling into the town of Machine.
- 1
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How the West West Was Won, and Where It Got Us