Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The stranger cautiously mounted the stairs leading to the batwing doors of the saloon named The Necessary, according to the shingle still partially chained to the lintel overshadowing the entrance. The sign rotated in lazy circles on the remaining chain.
As the gloaming became an abstract night, a handful of lanterns cast shadows on to the boardwalk outside, dancing horned demons thrown across on the rough-hewn planks at her feet.
Stepping inside, the stranger noticed the two lanterns burning low cast a grotesquerie of shadows bent around at angles, making the interior a space twisting in on itself. The bar was intact, clean and polished. The mirror running along the length of the bar behind it had not been fared so well — a crack ran the full span of silvered glass, splitting every reflection in two pieces that refused to align across the broken divide.
A lanky man in his fifties sat at the piano placed at the far end of the saloon, his face drawn long with the lugubrious expression, the lines on his cheeks an indication that the man wore it more often now than he might have in the past. He had stopped playing and was staring at a whiskey bottle on the hardwood flooring in a lazy circle with little sign of it slowing down any time soon.
The madame stood at the bar with her back to the room, both hands flat on the surface, the posture of a woman achieving composure through architecture. The velvet of her emerald gown was a stark, defiant contrast to the rough-hewn cedar of the bar, its hem hovering just an inch above the saloon’s floor. Her hair was swept into a series of rigid, obsidian coils streaked with the first strands of silver, pinned by tortoiseshell combs that caught the amber flicker of the oil lamps.
“She started it,” said the man at the piano to no one in particular. “I only asked if she planned to drink the whole bottle before she went to bed. Then she threw it at me.”
The madame stood in silence, knowing better to ask which she.
The shadows shifted. It was not so much movement as axial twist. The stranger had seen such things. Most of old places held some variation or another. She looked to her crow. It appeared unconcerned, and that was all she need to know. Mostly harmless, then.
Harlan Creed stepped into the saloon behind her, slightly winded. “This is — it’s not representative,” he said. “Of the general atmosphere of our fair town, which is normally quite—”
“Caldwell,” the madame said from the bar without turning around.
The piano player looked at her. He had the eyes of a man who had been the most interesting person in many rooms and was waiting for the current room to acknowledge this.
“Play something,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the crow. Then back at her.
“Any special requests?”
“No.”
He played, tentatively at first. As he relaxed, the rough edges of his playing smoothed out and the song developed into something melancholic and maudlin, designed to drive up the calls for another round.
The stranger walked over and took a stool at the bar, one place removed from the madame and set down her wide-brimmed hat. The madame turned around. She was handsome in the way that certain kinds of work produce handsomeness — not softened by it but structured by it, the bones of the face doing more work than they used to.
The madame took inventory of the stranger in a way that women of her profession are able to make quick work of assessing the persons near them, eyes looking the stranger over and lingering on the tattoo on her cheek before taking in the blue of her eyes. The madame’s eyes drifted over to the crow perched on the batwing doors and then returned to the stranger’s.
“That your crow?” she asked.
The stranger nodded.
The madame turned back to the crow and gave it a nod. “You are welcome here, corbie. Make yourself at home.”
The crow continued to stay perched on the doors, watching.
“Suit yourself,” said the madame, standing up and going around to the back of the bar. As she moved, the rhythmic clink of the heavy gold chatelaine at her hip served as a metallic heartbeat, the keys to every locked door and liquor cabinet in Nod singing against her silk skirts. “But mark that you did receive an offer of hospitality from Madame Cressida.” The madame poured two shots of whiskey and downed one. When the stranger did not follow suit, she shrugged and tipped the second shot to chase the first.
“Safer than the water, I’ll have you know.”
The stranger nodded. “I know”.
“You’ll be wanting something,” Cressida said. It was not a question.
“Tell me about Nod.”
The madame glanced at Harlan, who had taken up position at the end of the bar with the posture of a man about to deliver a presentation, a forefinger raised to accentuate a statement he was about to make. Something in her eyes caused him to hesitate, then sit down, resigned.
“What would you like to know?” the madame asked.
From one of the darkened corners in the saloon came the sound of something small being set down deliberately on a wooden surface. A glass, perhaps. Maybe a coin. Caldwell’s playing did not falter but his eyes darted over to the sound and then back to the ivory keys with the practiced discipline of a man who had decided some time ago that acknowledging certain things only encouraged them.
“How long has it been like this?” the stranger asked.
Cressida considered the question as though calculating which version of the answer was worth giving to a stranger passing through.
“Like what?” she asked finally.
“Like this,” she said.
The madame was quiet for a moment. Behind them the piano continued, filling up the long spaces between sentences.
“Long enough,” the madame said, “that I can’t remember what different felt like.”
“Del took the last of it with her,” Caldwell said, from behind the piano. He hadn’t stopped playing. The words came out lyrical, yet not quite a melody to accompany the song he played. “Whatever different felt like. Del left and took the last of it with her. That was that.”
“Caldwell,” the madame said. The single word carrying the full weight of how many times she had said it before in exactly that tone. A warning to let whatever he might say go.
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re always just saying.”
The piano continued.
The stranger, for her part, said nothing. She had the particular stillness of someone filing information without indicating which parts she was keeping.
“Delphine,” the madame said, turning to Caldwell, “Was not the kind of woman you remember kindly just because she’s gone.”
“I’ll remember her however I like,” Caldwell said. “That’s the only thing left that’s mine.”
Nobody had a response to that. Even the piano seemed to acknowledge it, the phrase he’d been playing resolving into something quieter before he found his way back to the main theme.
Cressida uttered a weary sigh and looked back at the stranger.
“She have people here? Before she left?” the strange asked.
The madame looked at her steadily. The assessment running again, deeper this time.
“Her girl,” the madame said. “She’s still here.”
“Where?”
The madame considered whether to answer. Decided something.
“She’ll find you,” she said. “She always knows when someone new has come in off the road. Been that way since she was small.” A pause. “She’s good at knowing which ones are worth finding.”
From somewhere on the second floor came the sound of bare feet padding across bare boards. Unhurried. The stranger caught the ripple of movement in the shadow, but then it was gone.
The deed came out of Creed’s jacket pocket the way things come out of jacket pockets when a man has been waiting for the right moment long enough that any moment will do. He unfolded it on the bar with the particular care of someone handling a document that has been handled many times before, the creases worn soft, the paper beginning to separate at the folds.
“The spring access,” he said. “We need to resolve it before any serious party commits to Nod’s future.”
Cressida looked at the document. Then at Creed. Then back at the document, with the expression of a woman who has had this conversation enough times to know exactly where it ends.
“Transfer the deed, Harlan.”
“The timing of the transfer is contingent on—”
“Transfer the deed.”
“—on the development of the spring access corridor, which requires—”
“There is no development.” Her voice was level, her patience fraying, but held steady as if speaking to a child. “There is no corridor. There is no serious party. There is a dead town and a piece of paper you’ve been sitting on for three years that is the only thing of value I have left in the damned place. Transfer the deed, Harlan, so I can move on.”
Creed looked at her with the patient suffering of a man whose vision extends beyond the horizon of multitudes of possibilities. “What you’re not accounting for is the longer view. The spring represents—”
“The spring is tainted and you know it.”
A silence.
“The spring,” Creed said carefully, “has had some fluctuation in yield. That, I will grant you, but I expect will correct itself once—”
“I’ve been telling people not to drink from it for two years.” She pulled the document toward her across the bar. “Everyone who worked and lived in Nod is gone, Harlan. Not because business dried up. Because they left. Because staying here long enough costs something and the ones with anywhere else to go figured that out before I did.” She looked at him steadily. “Transfer the deed. Let me have something to walk away from.”
“That was not our arrangement. You’re not going anywhere,” Creed said. The certainty in it was the worst thing about it — not malicious, simply the confidence of a man who had never once considered that her staying was a choice she was still capable of making. “The town of Nod needs—”
“Nod is finished, Harlan.”
From upstairs came the sound of light footsteps moving to the railing. Neither of them looked up.
The stranger, with her cold ice eyes, did. Briefly.
A girl, twelve or so, leaned on the upper railing with her arms folded, her expression that of boredom with hearing this drama play out in the same exact manner as it had multiple times before. Perhaps even nightly.
When she found stranger looking up at her the girl did not start. She held the stranger’s look for a moment, glanced in Creed’s direction before looking back and giving a dramatic, exaggerated roll of her eyes to show the stranger what she thought of the man and the argument below her.
Somewhere along the escalation of the argument, Caldwell had stepped up to the bar between the two belligerents, carrying the whiskey bottle that had stopped spinning on the floor. He was leaning over the rail, one foot in the air, fumbling around behind the bar for a glass.
After he drew one out, he uncorked the whiskey and poured himself several fingers of rye, smacking his lips as he set the bottle down.
“I have worked,” Harlan said, with a careful and crisp dignity, “for the good of this town since before you arrived in it. I have sacrificed. I have held this town together through circumstances that would have broken a lesser—”
“Transfer the deed, Harlan.” This time, as she said it, it had the quality of something being set down permanently. “Or get the hell out of my establishment.”
Something moved behind Creed’s eyes — the specific unsteadiness of a man whose management of a situation has finally outrun his ability to manage it. His voice rose. His hand came off the bar in a gesture meant for the argument, or the document, or the accumulated weight of three years of Cressida not understanding the longer view —
Harlan took several quick steps toward the madame, fist drawn back. Caldwell, seeing what was about to occur, abandoned the shot of whiskey and injected himself between Creed and Cressida, waving the Baron off while telling the enraged man to calm down as the fist was launched towards her face.
Caldwell received the blow at the side of his jaw in a way that sat him down hard, tumbling over the stool he was just about ready to enjoy his whiskey from.
The silence in the aftermath was total, broken only when one of the keys on the piano was struck by an invisible finger to issue a lonely “plink”.
Creed stood frozen with his hand still raised, looking at Caldwell on the floor, at the overturned stool and at what the evening had become.
“I’m not a violent man,” he said. To the room. To no one. To himself, mostly.
Cressida was already moving around the bar. The stranger hadn’t moved at all.
“No,” the stranger agreed. “You’re not.”
She stood and set her hat on and looked at Creed the way she had looked at the menhir from the road — noting it, filing it, understanding its untended state.
“Come,” she ordered.
“I don’t think—”
“I wasn’t asking.”
Creed talked the entire way as they crossed the street and entered the jail, a single room with two cells. She tested the lock on one cell — it was stiff from disuse but still functional. Harlan continued to talk about the deed while she opened the cell. He went on about market conditions while she waited for him to go inside. He recapped what he had said about the spring’s yield while she locked the door.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” she told him.
“I wonder,” he said, through the bars, with the recovered composure of a man who has decided this is simply a brief recess in the negotiations, “if you’d had a chance to review the prospectus. I left a copy at the assay office if—”
She set the key on the desk and walked out as he continued to make his proposal as she walked back into the night.
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