The Widow’s Wager

POV: Hollis

The knife hung from a silk thread eighteen feet above Hollis Quade's head, and for thirty dollars a man could bet it would fall.

That was the game. That was all of it. It was called the Widow's Wager, and Hollis had invented it on a cold night in Cheyenne when he was nineteen and drunk and broke, and he had discovered something about people that he had never since been able to unlearn. A man will not pay to watch you win. A man will pay a great deal to watch you nearly die.

He stood now on a chalk circle in the middle of the Gilded Anchor's main floor, with the whole stinking, roaring, gaslit barn of a place pressed in around him, and a Colt Peacemaker held low against his thigh. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled and a bandanna that had once been red. He was twenty-four. He looked older, in the lamplight, with the hard sun-wrinkles at his eyes and the weathered set of his jaw. He did not look at the crowd. He looked at the thread.

"Gentlemen!" bawled the barker, a fat man in a checked vest, from the top of a barrel. "Place your bets! The silk is single strand! The blade is Sheffield steel, honed to a razor! The man is Mr. Hollis Quade, late of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, who will cut that thread with a single shot, in the exact second that the clock strikes eleven, or wear the consequences!"

A roar went up. Money flew. Sweating men in wet wool, longshoremen, deckhands, dandies from the Terrace in borrowed evening dress, jammed the rail and waved fistfuls of bills. Behind the bar a clock began to tick down the last minute of the hour, and a woman in a red dress shrieked with delight.

Good, thought Hollis. Give me your noise.

…

It was the noise that made it possible.

The thread was the easy part. A child could have shot it. The hard part was the pillar: a fat iron stanchion that stood eight feet to his left, a main support for the balcony, with a fat bolt-head sticking out of it exactly between him and the silk. Any honest shooter would have stepped to one side. Hollis had been standing in the one place in the room where the pillar blocked his line, in plain view of the entire crowd, since the clock began.

That was the bet. That was where the money was. A man who could see the pillar would be sure he couldn't make it.

He raised the gun.

Eleven, the clock said, with the first stroke. A thin cold sweat broke out along his spine. He felt it now, as he always felt it, in the tips of his fingers: a prickling, a buzz, like frost forming on glass. It rose in him from somewhere far down and old, and his eyes went half-lidded, and the room narrowed to the single bright line between the muzzle and the thread.

Don't think, he told himself. Don't think. Let it go where it wants.

He fired.

The shot was a flat crack under the clock's second stroke. For half of a heartbeat the room hung on the sound. Then the bullet did the impossible thing: it struck the pillar. It was clear to anyone watching. It must have struck the pillar, and ricochet. But it didn't ricochet. It curved. It bent around the iron in a long lazy arc, quick as a thought, a hair's width off the metal, and sang up into the dark and hit the silk with a sound like a plucked string.

The thread parted.

The knife fell.

It fell eighteen feet, turning, bright in the gaslight, and struck the chalk circle a foot to the right of Hollis's boot, and stood there, quivering, in the floor.

For one second, nobody breathed.

Then the Gilded Anchor lost its mind.

…

They carried him on their shoulders. That was a thing that happened, in places like this, and he had long since learned to let it. A hundred hands pounded his back. Somebody shoved a whiskey into his fist. A woman kissed him on the ear. A sweating Irishman screamed in his face, "A bloody miracle, mister!" and a dandy from the Terrace, a boy, really, with pimples under his powder, stared up at him as if he were a saint come down off a wall.

"The luck of the devil," said the boy. "Did you see that? He missed the pillar!"

"Didn't miss it," said Hollis. "Went round it."

"But how—"

"Wind," said Hollis, and grinned.

It was a good grin. He had practiced it. It was easy and cocky and crooked, with a dimple, the grin of a man who thinks God owes him a favor. It hid everything. The hands on his shoulders hurt. The whiskey was bad. And in the pit of his belly something hot and cold was rolling over, rolling over, as it always did after: a dread, like the feeling at the end of a long fall.

They saw. Somebody saw.

Nobody saw. They never see. They think it's luck.

He drank the whiskey in one swallow and slid down from the shoulders into the thick of the crowd, and made his way, grinning, laughing, shaking hands, toward the back, toward the cool dark of the passage beside the kitchens, where nobody would look at his face.

His fingers were already going numb.

…

It started at the tips, as it always did. A tingle, then a stiffness, then a dull far-off wooden feeling, as if they were somebody else's. By the time he reached the back stair the first two joints of his right hand had gone dead. He flexed them. Nothing. He put the hand against the wall and watched it, as one watches a dog that has been poisoned.

That's the price, he thought. Every time.

He stood there in the dark.

There was another price, and it was worse, and it came after. He had learned to tell it by its silence. A sort of small clean absence, like a tooth pulled. He stood very still and went looking for it, and reached back through his life, as one reaches into a dark drawer, to see what was gone.

Dad. The ranch. The red barn.

All there. The barn smelled of hay and manure and harness leather. His father stood in the door with the lantern, lanky, laughing. Hollis! Bring the mare!

The mare.

He frowned.

There was a horse. There'd been a horse. A little bay filly, white sock on the near hind, who'd come to his hand at six years old and followed him around the paddock like a dog. He remembered her breath on his neck. He remembered the weight of her head against his chest. He remembered, with a clarity that was sharper than pain, lying in the straw one night and crying into her mane because his mother had died, and the filly standing there patiently, shifting her feet, letting him.

What was her name?

He sat down on the stair.

He turned it over and over. A short name. A girl's name. It had been a joke. His father had named her. It had been something to do with...

Nothing.

He sat in the dark with his dead hand in his lap and the noise of the Gilded Anchor roaring through the wall. After a long time he said, aloud, to the empty passage, in a voice that was perfectly steady, "Well, that's one for the books, then."

Then he laughed. It was a dry little sound. It went on a bit too long.

…

"Quade."

The voice was soft and flat, with a rasp in it like a file drawn across a rail. A man had come down the passage. He was large in every direction, with a heavy square face under a gray silk hat, a gold chain across his belly, and a cigar the size of a baby's arm. He did not walk so much as arrive. Two other men, smaller, in dark coats, stood behind him with their hands in their pockets.

Delancey Pike, who owned the Gilded Anchor, had a way of saying a man's name that made it sound like a line in a debt.

"Mr. Pike," said Hollis. He got up. It took a moment. "Fine crowd tonight."

"Fine." Pike took the cigar from his mouth. "They paid me four hundred and ten dollars to see you not get cut in half. That's very fine. I like a man who draws a crowd." He examined the end of the cigar. "I like him better when he pays his notes."

"I'm working on it."

"Three thousand dollars, Quade. Three thousand, two hundred and fifteen with interest. It has been seven months." Pike smiled. It was a broad, warm smile, with a lot of teeth. "I've been very patient. A man might say, Delancey, you're getting soft. But I like you. I like your trick. I don't like to see a talent go to waste. It would be a shame to find you at the bottom of the harbor with your hands cut off."

"Why my hands?"

"It seems fitting."

One of the small men chuckled. Hollis kept his own face perfectly blank. He thought of the small, quiet pistol in the back of his belt. He thought of his right hand, which would not now close around a spoon, and of the three men between him and the stair.

"A week," he said.

"A week."

"I'll have it."

"Mm." Pike put the cigar back. "You'd better."

…

He was gone and the passage was empty, or nearly so. There was a shape at the far end, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, where the light of the gas made a square of yellow on the floor. A thin shape, dressed in black, with a cane propped across its knees.

Hollis had not noticed him come in.

That was the first thing that bothered him. He noticed people. It was a trade necessity. For ten years he had known every man in every crowd, who was armed and who was drunk, who was a cop and who was a mark. And yet this one had been standing in the lamp-shadow for God knew how long, watching, quite still, with his dark hair and ink-stained hands and a gray, patient, curious stare. A young man. Not much older than himself. A cripple, by the look of the stick.

"That bullet," said the stranger, "shouldn't have taken that road."

Hollis went absolutely still.

"I watched it all the way," said the stranger. "I was at the rail. A three-quarter-inch deviation at twelve feet, with no wind. A Colt .45 does not do that. I've shot a few, in my time, at paper. Nothing bends a ball of lead around an iron post." The gray eyes moved to Hollis's right hand, lying slack at his side. "Unless something is bending it."

Hollis drew.

He had not known he would. His left hand moved before his mind did, a dozen years of habit, quick and clean and cold, and then the muzzle of the Colt was resting against the young man's temple, with the hammer back.

The man did not flinch.

He did not even blink. He stood in the doorway with the gun at his head and his hands loose on his cane, and a bead of sweat ran down from the black hair into his collar. But his gaze did not leave Hollis's face. His breathing was slow. His pulse, in the hollow of his throat, beat like a clock.

He's terrified, Hollis thought, wonderingly. And he's decided not to be.

"Who sent you?" said Hollis.

"Nobody sent me."

"Pike? The Terrace? The Watch?"

"Nobody." The man's voice was dry as paper. "I'm quite alone. I came to buy a debt."

"A what?"

"Yours." The young man took a small folded paper from his vest, with exaggerated slowness, two fingers, and held it out. "Three thousand, two hundred and fifteen dollars, with interest. I've an offer for Mr. Pike. It's a good one. I believe he'll sell it by morning, since he cares more about the money than the man." He let the paper dangle. "In return I'd ask for a single job."

"What job?"

"A very large one. Six of us. A month's work."

"You have a gun at your head."

"I'm aware."

"And you want to hire me."

"I want to hire what you did tonight." The gray eyes did not waver. "Mr. Quade, I know what you are. I've no interest in naming it. I'd simply like it to be on my side, and I don't care in the least what you call it."

…

Hollis stood with the gun against the stranger's skull and his dead fingers aching on the grip.

He'd been called many things. Freak. Devil. Unchartered filth. He had been called a witch, once, by a woman in Dodge City who had seen a bullet turn, and he'd had to leave town by night. He'd learned to hide it. He had learned to wrap it in a joke and call it skill, to laugh at his own lucky streaks, to lie awake with the dread that one of these nights a man would look too long at the arc of a shot and say, quietly, the word.

I know what you are.

And here was a stranger, with a cane and a bad leg and a pistol at his head, saying it in a tone of perfect ease, like a man remarking on the weather.

And I don't care.

Hollis was twenty-four years old. He had not been looked at, without fear or greed, by another human being in eleven years.

He lowered the gun.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Dex Hallam."

"That your real one?"

"No." The faintest dry curl touched the corner of his mouth. "I don't have a real one. That's part of the job."

Hollis laughed. It surprised him. It came out of his chest like a cough, short and harsh, and something loosened behind his ribs. He holstered the Colt. "A million-dollar job," he said. "I'll bet."

"How did you know?"

"The way you said large." He flexed his right hand. The fingers did not respond. "One job, Hallam. Just the one. I clear the debt, I take my split, and then I'm gone. I don't do teams. I don't do families. I do one night, and I walk."

"Understood."

"And nobody asks about this." He held up the dead hand.

"Nobody," said Dex, "will ever ask you about anything you don't want to tell."

…

They stood in the passage a moment, two young men in the light of a flickering gas jet, listening to the Gilded Anchor roar on the other side of the wall.

"There's a cost," said Dex. "Isn't there?"

Hollis said nothing.

"Your fingers. I saw you try to close them, when I came up." A pause. "And something else."

"A horse."

"A horse?"

"I forgot my horse's name." He found, to his horror, that his voice had cracked on it. He cleared his throat and made it a joke. "Don't tell me. I'll lie awake and guess."

Dex did not smile. He regarded Hollis for a moment longer. Then, in a manner so quick and so slight that it might have been an accident, he reached into his coat, took out a small black book, and made a note in it with a stub of pencil.

"What's that?"

"A debt."

"Mine?"

"Mine," said Dex. "I owe you a horse." He tucked the book away. "Come to St. Cinder's tomorrow night. Ask for Ma Tilly. She'll feed you."

He turned to go. He moved slowly, with a rolling, careful step, planting the cane at each pace and dragging the left foot after. It was a kind of walk that would have looked pitiful on another man, and did not look so on him. It looked planned.

Hollis watched him to the end of the corridor. He had a hundred questions, and none of them worth asking. He found he was holding his dead right hand against his chest, cradling it, like a bird.

Then he went out into the street. The night was cold and wet, with a thin spit of rain, and the lamps along the quay made little smears of gold on the black water. He walked under them, with his collar turned up. He tried to close his fingers around the grip of the gun in his belt, and could not feel it.

Well, he thought. One more thing I won't have to remember.

"Quade."

He turned. Dex was standing at the head of the passage, a black shape against the yellow door, with the cane in one hand.

"The next one," said Dex, "is a person you're going to hate."

"I don't hate anybody," said Hollis.

"You haven't met the chemistry boy."