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Cocklebur Macaluso, best wildcat on the Lode, five fat dollars just to kiss her, and not a man ever called himself cheated. Girl can cock a gun by squeezing her legs together. You know her by her green bustle and her big ruby mouth, you know her by her laugh and the shine of her knife—and you know her by the jags on her face where a broke down cattleman cut her up good because he wanted power over something.
Woman Without a Name, horse thief, run off from the Crow Nation when her family went down red under gun. Her pompadour’s slicked up high and stiff and her hand on a mare’s head’s as sure and cool as rain. She’ll ride down a deer until its heart pops and have it skinned and trussed before it knows it’s dead.
Old Epharim, bear of a woman, grey in the braid with half a beard coming in. Used to wrestle cougars for a dollar a match in some traveling show. If you can find blank skin between her scars you’re a better eye than most. Middle of town sits a big black pan as wide as a bull’s back, and the old girl fries up every night whatever she’s shot, wrestled, trampled, or scared dead. Shares it out fair-like. Smokes the whole time like a burning beast.
Witch Hex Watson, scamped out of Maine when the snow-hump knocked the cattle down and all the pretty wives called witchcraft on Missus Watson. Girl don’t care. Just as well for a one who never liked the stink of cows, never had a hanker for marrying, never had a smile for anyone but scowls enough to go round. And maybe she did know a thing or two, maybe she’d highed to the woods with her skirts up and maybe the old Puritan cold dark boocraft hopped in her pocket like a frog o’ green.
Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny. Well, she’s pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory. Astolaine lit off before the new model could hit the doorstep, skinning rabbits and scooping mushrooms like her daddy taught her until she walked out of the woods and into a town full of banshees with no love for anyone’s history.
Your past’s a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in a box where it can’t hurt anyone.
Snow White
Meets the Red Ants
Her heart’s balled up in her chest and she wants to be quit of it, just cut it out and leave it on the road. Shoulda let the dude have it. In the end she can’t hardly see no difference atwixt her and that deer she shot down. No use but meat. Charming carries her through a black oak forest and a mess of plum and peach trees and she don’t even stop to get that fruit. Snow White don’t care. Her body’s all her trouble and she won’t feed it any sweet thing. That girl’s frown sinks so black she don’t see them coming til they’re on her.
Seven of them bolt riding down a rill in a spring rainstorm, a bunch of Kates dressed afright and hollering. They’ve got on deerskins and skunk skins and spotted cat skins, pink silk and purple and blue and green, black lace and harlot’s satin, cavalry coats with gold braid and tuxedo trousers, widow’s veils and stovepipe hats and one had a whole horse skull on her head like a helmet. Another has a belt of cattle horns. The biggest toad in the puddle has a silver breastplate strapped on and lord knows where she got it, robbing a museum train or playing Hamlet on some black-bellied stage in hell. A bunch of bushwhack Titanias looking blue at her and Snow White reaches for her gun. If they’re fix to knock her down, she’ll welcome it.
That’s not what happens. Snow White fires wide. She does it on purpose. Come on. Just shoot back. Their horses skitter and the sound of seven hammers rocking back clicks up like cards shuffling. But they don’t crease her. Snow White She screams through the rain for no point but to scare them though they don’t scare and her hollering puts them in a forgiving mood, seeing as how they’re hollerers themselves. Snow White wants to cry but her but she’s dried out. She’s got ruby dust and grime and the shit of the deep earth in her and that’s about it. She looks up at the rain and noise comes out of her. Ain’t screaming or crying or talking, just noise, noise out of her blood. The rain fills up her mouth like milk.
This is what the women of Oh-Be-Joyful say to Snow White.
Ain’t you cut a swell.
Stow that nail-pounder or we’ll blow you under the earth.
Come you from the scrap of Crow Nation over the hill?
A white girl alone is trouble on everything she touches. A
sk us. Don’t we know.
Don’t you look at her like that, Bang-Up. Can’t bring her home. Can’t risk it. She’ll open the door to anyone who happens by and wonder why we ever locked it.
Hush it. What’s the place for if not half rain-drowned wildcats.
Come to town. I’ll pour you a pair of overalls myself and we’ll split up your sorrows seven ways between us.
Snow White
Puts a Saddle
On Her Back
Cocklebur sits Snow White down in a tin bathtub, peels her out: first the road comes off, then the gunfight, then the mine and then the running, the old mirror and the boardwalk, the bunched up tiredness of everything and all of her. The water’s black. Snow White frowns so deep you couldn’t dig her out with a shovel, lets the bath burn her, lets the lady brush her hair like it matters.
The water’s warm. No ice melting inside her. It just smells like river and the kettle. Cocky don’t say anything and that’s as good as love right about now.
Snow White stops doing and lets the rest do for awhile. Lets Old Ephraim feed her bunny and beans, lets Little Mab put her in some poor dead bastard’s kit. Snow White declines the mirror. Mirrors are an ugly business. She’s done seeing herself.
Is she fixing to stay? She talks less than a lump of dough I’ll tell you what.
For awhile Snow White lets Bang-Up Jackson give her a bed. It’s a little house but it’s stalwart. Snow White sleeps all the time. Lies on the bed with her eyes shut and doesn’t move. A moth lands on her nose and she don’t so much as twitch. It’s easy not to get up. Not to move. But Bang-Up won’t let that go.
We live rough but we live useful and I don’t support no pillow rancher. You ain’t no woodstove; you can’t just squat in the middle of my house and stew.
Witch Hex has been at the pine gulch with her axe. She started up the night they brought Snow White over the mountain. Without saying a word on it, the Mainer with shoulders like skin drums has stacked up pile of wood and nails north of the big frying pan in the middle of the village. Snow White will be expected to build when she’s feeling straightened. Witch Hex always says building is medicine for free.
