id, at last.
“So take another.”
“Oh, I don’t want to deprive you.”
“What of? I can always make more.”
A near-unassailable argument, though Yancey suspected her faculties were already somewhat disordered. Above, the sun drew high and beat down bright, while wormwood’s mounting poison lent everything around her just the faintest rainbow tinge; “a lucid drunkenness,” some customer had once described the effect, when trying to sell her Pa on the idea of ordering a bottle or two. But given the difficulty of keeping its colour undecayed, not to mention the unlikelihood of cultivating a bohemian clientele in New Mexico’s wilds, he’d ultimately decided against it.
In the distance, she saw a few of Joe’s regulars come wandering out to squint in the noontime heat, while others arrived on foot or by horse, glancing their way only briefly before recognizing Chess, and finding something elsewhere to stare at. A mixture of fear and embarrassment ’cross their faces made Yancey frown; the former she understood, and sympathized with. But the latter?
“Might be they think I’m after what’s inside your pants,” Chess suggested, idly. “Or vice versa, which’d be even funnier.”
“Little do they know.”
“Ha! You got that right.”
They both had a snicker, at the very idea. Yet when he looked at her again, she saw an ever-so-slight softening in his fierce stare—almost apologetic.
“You know,” he said, “Ed might’ve misspoke somewhat, back in the Hoard. Bein’ raised up as whore-get means you don’t see nothing but women the first few years, and for all we’re made to follow after the same meat, I don’t despise your kind, as such—they just ain’t got much use for me, and I mostly return the favour.” He paused. “I did hate one woman, that’s true enough . . . but I loved her a good long time, ’fore I finally figured out she hated me.”
Yancey blinked, unsteadily. “That’d be your Ma.”
“It would.”
“Then why are you still alive?”
“’Scuse me?”
“Babies die, Mister Pargeter. Happens lamentably easily—I’ve seen it close up, twenty times or more. So . . . she’d really wanted you dead, you would be.”
“That don’t mean nothin’ but she looked to cut her losses, make a return on the investment. Money always was the only thing that bitch ever held in esteem, just like the only useful thing she taught me was how high to charge.”
The absinthe had wrapped her in cotton wool awhile, putting up a sugared screen between her and his more outrageous—effluences: half-heard thoughts, half-glimpsed memories. And now things were definitely starting to push up against that screen’s edges once more, to intrude ’emselves in at the seams, forcing Yancey to watch them pool and sharpen. That girl with hair like Chess’s, a fox-faced minx with ragged skirts and broken teeth, wavering back and forth at her mind’s keyhole between part-bloomed youth and early age . . . wreathed in smoke, doling out slaps and caresses, screaming hoarse-vowelled gutter abuse. Good lord, but she was just so present, yet and always, yammering at the corners, constantly bent on resizing Chess the outlaw back to Chess the kicked cur, the object of barter, the cold and lonely child.
What kind of a mother acts in such a way? What kind of a man has that for a mother?
“And she never loved you, ever.”
“Gal, you didn’t know her, for which you should give thanks. She stabbed me in the neck one time, hoping I’d die bleedin’, after she already sold first crack at my ass to the lowest bidder. I’d go to kiss her, she’d spit in my damn face. And then I learned better.”
She shook her head. “I can’t understand it.”
“That’s your look-out.”
Such a sleek little man, Yancey thought, to contain so large a load of high-coloured nastiness. She could all but taste his bile from where she sat, and it made her want to spit.
“You ever wish it was different?” she ventured. “That she—that you—”
“‘Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up the faster.’ That’s what English Oona used to say, savin’ the Limejuicer tang.” But when he saw she was still intent on him, he snorted. “What’s it matter? Things are like they are; we act accordingly, or don’t.”
“That sounds almost Biblical. Like something Sheriff Love might say.”
Chess laughed again, harsher. “That Bible-belting son-of-a-bitch and me ain’t got nothin’ in common, as he’d be the first to tell you.” He cast her a piercing look. “So what, he’s on your mind? See him comin’, do you, in that crystal ball you call an idea-pan?”
“I don’t have to. There’s but two names on his list, saving the occasional heretic, and we’re still between him and Hex City.”
“Which works out well for you, since I hear you’re all for giving him another go-round. So I guess you’ll be wanting this one, too—for a matched set.”