Gunlaw

Gunlaw 18

Chapter 9 – Fifty Years Ago

The window of Jones' Pharmacy held just three panes of glass, three panes as big as doors, supported in narrow cast-iron frames, scrolling at the top and bottom. No other store in the Sweet Water owned such an acreage of uninterrupted glass. If a pane ever broke Three knew where they'd fetch a replacement from.

Sally always wondered why the long-departed Jones had reached so deep into his pockets to display pills to the passing world. The dressmaker's, or Madam Filloux's milliner store, could have used that space. Hell, even the dry goods stores could show off the range of shovels, hoes, and wire bales on offer. But pills? You had a bellyache, a headache, a toothache, you knew where to go, you didn't need to see the damn pill in the window to convince you.

Only when she stepped inside for the first time did she understand. Her mother used to tell her to turn each question on its head. Look a gift horse in the mouth, then go have a squint up its butt too. From inside, with the drug store dark against the brightness of the day, and the sunlight setting those tall-necked, fat-bellied perfume bottles alight, making emeralds and rubies and sapphires of their liquids, turning those teardrop stoppers to diamonds, Sally saw the windows earn their keep. She watched the cowhands strolling by, the mayor's wife in lace and skirts, primping over the raised wooden sidewalk, Old Silas slow and careful, a covered wagon jolting through dusty ruts. All a world away, silent, behind glass. And as she moved her head toward the nearest of those perfume flasks, and let the street slide behind the deep blue contents, let the flask warp and change the world, bringing Old Silas into a hunter's eye focus and curving the rest away, Sally knew that she had just needed to turn her question on its head. Ask any question in the right place – and there's no question left.

"Ma'am?" It didn't look as if Hile Roberts had parted his stiff and disapproving lips enough to let that thin word out, but there it was, "Ma'am?"

"Don't you Ma'am me, Hile Roberts," Sally kept her eye on the street a moment longer then straightened, patting down her skirts to face him. "You've come to my bed time enough to call me Miss Sally, or at least unbend that Ma'am of yours into something I can use."

Hile glanced around as if he didn't already know they were alone. "You can't talk like that, Sally. It's not . . . it's not proper." He hissed it though there was no-one but them to hear.

"Proper? It's not proper that I gotta piss pepper-water with nothing to fix me since Doc Cotton got his-self a stroke. You mix me up a powder, Hile Roberts, or I'll be here all day being as improper as I need to be."

Hile flushed crimson, more colour than Sally had thought would ever reach that grey face. The girls said Hile looked older than his age. One of those men who get the pinched dull look that too many years in dust will give you. They say that when the Frostral gets in off the badlands it will blow your youth away in a month. Of course Hile spent his days behind glass, so he should've been the best preserved man in town.

"You need cysteria." He reached under the counter without looking and brought out a paper wrap the length and thickness of a thumb. "A pinch in water, three times a day. And drink a lot with it. Water, not whiskey."

Sally snatched the wrapper from the counter and tucked it into the top of her blouse. She watched Hile's eyes track its progress between her breasts. "You come and see me soon, Hile Roberts, and if this sets me right I'll be good to you." She pressed her lips into a kiss and shaped her cheekbones and brow toward the face he always thought of, toward that tattered memory of a sweetheart lost in the distance of years when even Hile had been young and fierce with feelings. Rema Sensa – that had been her name.

Rema Sensa's face slid away as Sally turned for the door. She glanced once more at the glowing gems in the store window then slipped into the street. So many years in town with the clamour of men's thoughts all around her had left Sally deaf to all but the strongest images. With the menfolk that meant sex. That meant seeing herself as they did. Naked most often, bent over, tied down, garters, pantyhose, gasping, bucking, wanting, and all the variants of that passion, that lust. Women saw her driven from town with a flayed back, or reeling from their slaps, or old and sagging, begging in the street. Well most of them. For every man with too little interest for his thoughts to even reach her, there would be a woman who might want her as a plaything for the bedroom. Sometimes the most unlikely of the town ladies. Names though. Names rarely reached her through the storm. Something about Rema Sensa must have got under young Hile's skin. Something that reached bone deep.

Sally set off down the sidewalk, catching a touch of Elain Tully's scent, a whiff of her perfume, not from the gem bottles in Hile's store, something expensive that came in a tiny vial, shipped by train and caravan from the ends of the world. Maybe Mayor Tully even sent to Ansos for it. A whiff of her perfume, a trace of her sweat, and the lingering thread of her arrogance, with a hint of lust in the mix, as if she'd seen Sally at the door before she entered the shop. A glimpse of her bustle, twitching as she'd stepped across the threshold. Just enough to excite. Sally wrinkled her nose. Humans.

"Hunska bitch!" An accusation from the shadows.

Sally spared Rallon a brief look. He lay sprawled in the gap between Harding's and the moneylender's, sour drunk. When men fell to cactus liquor any gap between their thoughts and words got eaten away. Honesty Juice some called it. Others called it Ugly Sour. It didn't leave you pretty. Men tell their children, you keep making that face and it'll stick. Rallon would be better off with whatever might have stuck when he was little. Sally shrugged and picked up her pace. Too many years in town left most hunska stuck with a human face, but at least it was one of their own choosing, and with a little effort they could change it for an hour or two. Sally seldom went to bed of an evening unaccompanied or wearing the same face, but the morning always found her alone and looking like the pretty girl who died a long time back, in the days when Sally first saw the Sweet Water running through the Dry and let it lead her into town. She'd been young then, the town not much more than a camp.

While memories took her down one path, Sally's feet led her down another. She reached the end of North Lane, out past Jerrings' Stables, and stood wondering why she'd come. Nothing to see but the cripple-shack out by its lonesome, the silver thread of the Sweet Water hedged between brown and thirsty fields, and the relentless march of the Dry off to the horizon. One day it would pull her back. Out there hunska stalked in glorious isolation in whatever hills the sect had left them. Away from the stink of men. Away from each other. One day it would pull her back, or rather when her ska ended – if it ever did – her tolerance would leave her and the desire to be alone, to have space, would drive her from the town. Until that day though, while her season lasted, she was all about making coin, and experience had shown no better way of squeezing gold from humans than enduring their pallid and annoying lusts.

"Lovely morning, ma'am." A man, dust grey, leading his horse in off the trail.

"Kinda pretty." She nodded to him. She should know his name. Joe something. Came to her bed a time or two.

"Been out to The Ruins." He waved a lazy hand out at the Dry.

"Joe Hall." The name came to her and she made a smile for him. "You been out gambling the gold from those poor prospectors' pockets?"

"Have to show some initiative." He grinned and tipped his hat, passing by. Over his shoulder, "They're only going to spend it at the Horn otherwise."

"You make sure you come and spend some tonight," she called after him.

"Surely." Joe turned, walking backwards as he led his horse. "And you come out to the camps with me next time. Girl like you could earn nuggets out there."

"Might just do that." They said The Ruins were breathtaking. Sally didn't plan ever to find out. This far from the gunlaw only fools roamed. Fools, desperate men, and gamblers. It scared her sometimes, to be caught amongst so much easy meat. So far out you couldn't see even a hint of a pillar. No peace but what folks could hammer out for themselves. Nothing between a body and the sect save bullets, quick wits, and the magic of Station Rock. Hunska lived alone for a reason – you need space around you to see trouble coming.