The Six-Gun Tarot Read Free Page B

be any singing or playing. Jim could hear Ma and Pa fussing, inside the house, their voices gaining in speed and volume.
    “Hush up now, William; the children will hear,” Momma said.
    “Hell with ’em!” Pa bellowed. “Maybe they’d like to hear what a man’s gotta put up with just to have something to soothe his burning head.”
    “You’re drunk,” she hissed. “Please, William, if it’s the headaches, we can go see Doc Winslow—”
    “Doc Winslow can go straight to Hell, too!” Pa roared. “He ain’t got nothing in his little bag that’s gonna stop a Johnnyman’s curse. This damn eye … like ants made outta ice crawling in my skull.”
    “Let me help you, darling, please.”
    There were loud crashing sounds—pots and chairs knocked about, Momma crying out in terror. Pa threw open the door and staggered out into the warm, sticky night. He froze when he saw Jim standing there wide-eyed and silent.
    “Pa,” Jim said. “Momma all right in there?”
    Billy Negrey nodded slowly. Inside, Lottie was crying and Momma was calling out to her.
    “Jim, you know I love your mother, don’t you?”
    “Yes, sir,” Jim said.
    “Sometimes this, this thing … in my head. I say things, I drink, ’cause it hurts so damn bad.”
    “I know, Pa. Ma knows too. She knows.”
    Billy staggered off the porch and toward the barn. He turned to regard his son. Billy’s skin was dream-spun silver in the bright moonlight. The eye patch was hidden in shadow. Jim was taken by how old he looked—not the years but the awful toll this life had exacted on him. His God-given eye fixed on Jim’s own.
    “Take care of your mother and Lottie, Jim,” he said. “I’m going into town.”
    A few minutes later he rode out of the barn on his horse and disappeared down the dirt road toward Albright. After a time, Lottie stopped crying. A little while after that, Jim heard the porch door close behind him and felt Momma’s small, strong hands rest on his shoulders.
    “It’s all right, Jim,” she said softly. “Your poor father just needs to find himself some peace, that’s all.”
    She wrapped her arms around him and began to sing “Barb’ra Allen,” her favorite song, low and sweet. It was old, like the mountains it came from, another place, another time. It was sad, but there was a beauty in the sadness that Jim didn’t fully understand but that soothed him nevertheless; it was Momma’s song. He picked up the fiddle and played it the way Pa had taught him.
    The stars blazed and the lightning bugs drifted. The moon painted the world in smoky silver and endless ink. He felt her love, for him, for Pa, and all was right in the world then. It was all going to be just fine.
    He never saw his father alive again.
    Jim opened his eyes to a vast canopy of black velvet, sprinkled with silvery sand. He was on his back looking up. It was cold—a deep desert night. He struggled to sit up and blinked. He was under the warm horse blanket beside a crackling cook fire. About twenty yards to his left was the wagon he had been in earlier. To his right he could see Promise tethered to an emaciated excuse for a tree beside a pair of short paint horses. The mare seemed stronger, more alive than he had seen her since they had entered the arid hell of the 40-Mile Desert.
    “She’s a good horse,” a man’s voice said from across the fire. “Strong heart, strong spirit.”
    The man leaned closer toward the flames and Jim could make out his features in the frantic, shuddering firelight.
    He was Indian, the first real one Jim had ever seen. His hair fell down to his shoulders in black, oily strands. His nose was crooked and seemed too thin and too pointy. His eyes reflected the firelight like spit on slate. His face was a grizzled topography of pockmarks and scars that made it hard to figure his age. His eyebrows grew together, colliding over the crook of his nose. He smirked when he saw the reaction his appearance created in the boy. The