Deseret (7 page)

“Midget,” Jed said gruffly.
 
“Dwarf.
 
Pygmy.
 
Runt.
 
Tom Thumb.
 
Did I miss any, professor?”

“Homunculus?” The man suggested.
 
“Lilliputian?
 
Bantam?”

“I guess that about covers it,” Jed growled.
 
His ears felt hot, and his hands
twitched involuntarily at spots about his body where, by rights, knives should
have been hanging.

“Poppa,” John Moses interrupted in a pleading tone, “this is
my
friend
.”

“Ah.”
 
The boy’s
father swung the bottom half of the door open.
 
“In that case, I am Jonathan Browning, and it is a pleasure
to meet you.
 
Will you be one of
the crewmen of the
Liahona
, then?
 
Brother Dan usually brings John Moses
home himself.”

He invited Jed into the outbuilding and onto one of the
three plush chairs, slightly frayed but comfortable, that crouched around a low
circular table in the nearest corner of the room.
 
Jed sat, but his eyes roamed the walls.
 
“Jed Coltrane,” he murmured
distractedly.
 
They were covered
with some kind of thin white board, pegged full of holes in a close grid.
 
Into the holes were poked steel hooks,
and on the steel hooks hung guns.

All kinds of guns.

All over all four walls of the building.
 
More guns were stacked, more or less neatly,
on the three large tables in the center of the room.
 
Still more lay disassembled, or pinned in vises, or had
important pieces that had been removed and inserted into obscure tooling
machines.
 
Jed didn’t consider
himself a lover of guns—knives were more his thing—but the sheer
overwhelming number of weapons on the wall made him whistle.
 
He’d come to the right place.
 
In his mind’s eye, he saw the underhanded
Irishman shot to pieces in a thousand different ways, Jed at the trigger every
time.

The two Brownings sat in the other two chairs.

“No, I ain’t one of the crew,” Jed said distractedly.
 
He wondered for a moment how he could
steal a few of these weapons, then felt guilty for having the thought, then
felt ashamed of himself for the guilt.

Coltrane, you damn crybaby, he told himself.
 
You need a gun.
 
You
came here
for a gun.

Of course, you could
buy
one.
 
But with the cash you’ve got
left, it’d be one cheap piece piece of shit.

Maybe you could
borrow
one.
 
Of course, that would mean
returning it, which would imply coming back to a place Coltrane had been
before, which wasn’t something Coltrane had done very often in his life.

“Poppa, Injuns took the
Liahona
!” John Moses peeped.

Jonathan Browning’s magnified eye popped open even wider and
Jed Coltrane flinched.
 
“Was it the
Shoshone?
 
Has anyone been
told?
 
Does Brother Brigham know?”

Aw, hell.
 
“Look, I jest… yeah, I reckon it was the Shoshone.
 
But look, the boy and I escaped, he
ain’t hurt, and he wanted to come home, that’s all.”

“Yes, well,” Browning huffed.
 
“Yes, thank you very much.
 
Has Brother Brigham been told?
 
If not, I should get down to the train station or the
sheriff’s office and get a message sent immediately.
 
Tell me how I can repay you.”

Uh oh.
 
Can’t
have that much attention, Jed thought.
 
Besides, the
Liahona
wasn’t his
problem.
 
“Yeah, I’m pretty
sure.
 
Yeah, now that I think of
it, of course he knows.
 
Look, it’s
all under control, I jest wanted to bring the boy back.”

“Yes.”
 
Blink.
 
“Thank you.”
 
Blink blink.
 
Jed really wished Jonathan Browning would take off his
eyepiece.
 
The dwarf found it
unnerving.
 
It made the man look
like a machine.
 
“Tell me how I can
thank you.
 
Please.”

Jed chased a fist into his pocket after his precious few
remaining coins.
 
Poe had always
had all the real money, and after buying the train ticket, Jed found himself
running lower than he’d like, even aside from his need to get armed.
 
Precious few coins, and all of them
Mexican.
 
He sighed.
 
“Well, Mr. Browning, as it happens, in
our escape we had to leave my guns behind.
 
I’m used to being around rough customers, as they say, so
I’ve always gone armed, and I’d hate to change that habit now that I’m on the
frontier.
 
I see you’re a
gunsmith.
 
Maybe you could sell me
something.
 
Something on the inexpensive
side.”
 
He cleared his throat.
 
“And I mean
really
inexpensive.”

Browning’s face broke into an indulgent smile.
 
“This isn’t the frontier, Mr.
Coltrane.
 
This is the
Kingdom.”
 
He turned and gestured
at the entire shop.
 
“Please, I beg
you.
 
Take any one of them, as a
gift from me.”

“
Any
one?” Jed
wondered, stunned at the man’s generosity.
 
There were guns as small as wrist-concealed derringers on
the walls, but there were cannons too, big guns that would require horses to
drag them around.

“Good heavens, you’re right, I’m ashamed of myself.
 
You’ve restored my son to me.
 
Take any
two
.
 
Take
what
you need
.
 
I’ll fill a pack with ammunition, too, and I’ll see what one
of my two Elizabeths might have in the way of a loaf of bread or a pie.”
 
Jonathan Browning stripped the eyepiece
away from his face as he launched himself to his feet and strode purposefully
from the shop.

“One’ll do very nicely, thanks,” Jed found himself mumbling
in something that resembled polite manners.
 
He saw himself holding a pistol to the Irishman’s temple and
pulling the trigger.
 
“One is all
I’ll need.”

John Moses was grinning.

“What does he mean,
one of his two
Elizabeths?” Jed asked the boy as he started to
browse through the weapons on the walls.
 
He found a nice long-barreled pistol he liked, spun the cylinder,
sighted along it experimentally and set it on the table.

“There’s Elizabeth my mamma,” John Moses explained, like it
was the most natural thing in all the world, “and Elizabeth his first wife, my
other mamma.”

That accounted for his
mammas
.
 
Jed grunted.
 
He’d seen weirder, among the Chickasaw
and the Creek and in the Ozarks.
 
“You got two mammas,” was all he said, not a question and not a
judgment.

“Yeah,” the little boy agreed.
 
“And twenty-one brothers and sisters.”

“Holy shit!” Jed spat out, then checked himself.
 
“Sorry, boy, I don’t mean nothing by
it.
 
I jest ain’t ever seen such a
big family.”

“I know,” John Moses said.
 
“Sometimes
holy shit
is what I think, too.”

Jed Coltrane laughed.
 
“You’re alright, kid,” he said, and his eye fell on another gun he
liked.
 
It was bigger than a
pistol, but shorter than a shotgun or a rifle.
 
It looked like a rifle, but built really short in the
barrel, and with a boxy round metal drum hanging underneath it.

John Moses looked.
 
“That’s a sort of rifle,” he said.
 
“Poppa calls it a
gas-powered, drum-fed, rapid-fire
repeater
to customers.”

Jed pulled the gun off the wall and hefted it.
 
The stock felt good tucked under his
arm.
 
The gun was heavy, but then
Jed Coltrane had strong carny arms.
 
“It feels good,” he said.
 
“It feels like a killer.
 
Is
it accurate?”

John Moses shook his head
no
.
 
“But it shoots a
thousand rounds a minute.”
 

Jed whistled.
 
“No kidding?”

John Moses nodded.
 
“When he’s talking to me, Poppa likes to call it his
machine-gun
.”

The dwarf looked at the weapon and its bulky drum.
 
“How does it work?” he asked.

John Moses showed him.
 
“It takes paper cartridges.
 
You have to load up a whole drum ahead of time, and that takes a good
long while.
 
When you shoot, though,
it all comes out fast.
 
You can
really chew through targets.”

Targets.
 
“You
ever shot at anybody, kid?” Jed asked.
 
“I mean, at a real live person?”

“Not yet.”
 
The
little boy chewed his lip and looked down at the machine-gun.
 
“But I guess I could do it if I had
to.
 
I could be brave.
 
But I think it’d have to be for a real
good reason.”

“Like family, kid,” Jed suggested.

“Yeah, like family,” John Moses agreed.

Jed imagined himself firing a thousand rounds into the
Irishman.
 
A thousand rounds a minute
was a whole lot of death.
 
“That’ll
do,” he said.
 

Time to get back to the Deseret Hotel.
 
Death and hell to any porkpie hat he
spotted on the way.

*
  
*
  
*

The message paper curled up at the edges as the bellboy took
his tip and retreated.
 
Sam automatically
smoothed back the paper with his thumb, and to his surprise he smudged the
ink.
 
“That’s fast,” he
muttered.
 
The message was
hand-printed in a lovely copperplate, all in capital letters like a telegram.

To: Mr. Samuel Clemens

In Care of the Deseret
Hotel

Sir:

President Young informs
me that he is presently working in the office of the Beehive House, and that
you may find him there for the next several hours.
 
He welcomes your visit at your earliest convenience.

You will find the
Beehive House adjacent to the Lion House, where you and I met.
 
I trust I will not strain your powers
of discrimination if I observe that it is the large residence with balconies
and a beehive on top, and not the adjacent Tabernacle.

Regards,

Geo. Cannon

Sam crumpled the sheet up, lit it with his smoldering
Cohiba, and tossed it into the grate.
 
Other men’s sarcasm made him feel like his territory had been trespassed
upon.
 
Well, his
earliest
convenience
was right now, he calculated,
so gripping the cigar in his teeth, he pulled his jacket off the back of a
chair and shrugged into it, heading for the door.

He’d just been sitting around, anyway, wondering.
 
He wondered where in tarnation his
criminal Irishman had gotten to.
 
He wondered if his Irishman had made off with the dwarf and the boy, or
vice versa.
 
He hoped the boy was
unharmed.
 
But most of all, because
the Irishman and his vendetta with the Appalachian midget seemed like a
sideshow in more ways than one, he wondered what was going to happen with Orson
Pratt.

As Sam pushed his way out of the big front doors of the
Deseret Hotel, he thought he saw, just for a moment, a reflection in the glass
windows across the street.
 
He
would have sworn, in that moment, that he was seeing the midget Coltrane, and
that the man must be off to Sam’s left, fifty feet or so.
 

He jerked his head around to see, though, and the dwarf
wasn’t there.

Trick of the mind, he thought.
 
Illusion, self-deception.
 
He was wondering where the dwarf was, and his brain produced
an image of the man.
 
He spun
around to his right and paced in the direction of the Beehive House.

Sam’s mission objectives were clear, though he’d expected
from the start that things on the ground would get considerably foggier.
 
His superiors had expected it too, he
thought; that’s why they’d sent a man of judgment and perception.

“Ha!” he barked a single peal of laughter at his own vanity
and spat the stub of his cigar into the sparkling clean gutter.
 
As the next headgear-doffing couple
passed, Sam twinkled empty fingers at them in a way that made him feel like a
bawdy house flirt.