The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train
JOE R. LANSDALE
There’s people don’t believe in booger stories, as my grandma used to call them, but that don’t mean there isn’t strange stuff out there in them dark woods or, for that matter, on the streets in town, out there on a buggy ride down to the river for a picnic, or coming through the woods spitting black smoke and carrying hell and damnation with it.
Thing is, once you know the world has a sliced sky from which things leak, well, you can’t never lay down at night without your protections.
I work in a gun shop and I live there too, but it isn’t just any gun shop. Zachary, who prefers to be called Zach, repairs and even makes guns, but he’s got another kind of job that don’t always pay and sometimes does, depending. But it’s a job he will take on either way in the end. If he tries to dicker and fails to get some money out of the deal, he just sighs and goes on with it.
Zach had owed a hundred good deeds on account of a bad thing he did, and on the day the old man came in, his black skin graying, his black suit graying, as well, thinning too, a wide-brimmed black hat on his head with a white feather in it, I seen Zach perk up. Zach had done ninety-nine good deeds and still owed one more. That was the only way he could get rid of the baggage. He thought that old man might be the last deed needed for him to get shed of his little problem.
Now, when I say good deeds, I don’t mean help an old lady across the street so she don’t get run over by wild horses. A thing like that is damn sure a nice thing to do, but it don’t go on the ledger, so to speak. It’s got to be bigger than that. Something real special.
I guess Zach’s around fifty or so, though I have heard people comment on how he seems to stay at an age and not move away from it. Zach is a stout man with a gleam in his eye, and his skin is dark as the bottom of a well, and always shiny, like he just ran a race in the hot sunshine. He’s always bent forward a little, like he’s considering tying his shoe. If he wore shoes.
Zach not only makes and repairs guns, he can shoot them right smart, as well, and has a fast draw. And then, of course, there are all the magic books and talismans. He knows that stuff. That’s his side business, and all the business he does, he does well.
I was sold to him when I was young by my folks who didn’t want me. They were going through town with a traveling medicine wagon. They sold a few bottles of this and that. All of which my mama made, and nearly all of them a mixture of water and whisky and berry juice, but nothing that would do anything for you but make you slightly drunk and loosen your bowels.
Cure-all my folks called it, but it didn’t cure much. I didn’t miss them any. My pa beat me, and mama didn’t love me enough to even hit me. I don’t know it for a fact, but I heard they was hung from an oak tree for selling something that made a child get sick and die. Mama probably put the wrong berry juice in a bottle or some such when she was drunk. She could be a bad drunk. It was the parents of that child and some townsfolks that did them in. It wasn’t the law, but it was justice, no doubt.
Zach had been good to me. He was teaching me a trade, two trades, like he had. I got three meals a day, and I had a bed in the back of the shop. It was set on top of a pentagram, surrounded by all the protections Zach had made for me. Blue bottles full of dead flies and horny-toad guts, crosses, silver doodads, and a salt circle around the inner circle of chalk that made up the outside part of the pentagram.
Early on, I wondered if there was any sense to all that stuff, until I woke up and seen sitting there in the dark, all around that chalk and salt circle, a series of squatting toad-like things. It was frightening, but I knew then that it was the circle and all that other stuff that kept them out. During the day I didn’t have to worry, Zach told me, but at night, if I wanted something like water or a good book to read, a fresh candle for my night table, I needed to bring it in before the dark got deep and the clock beat twelve. Straight-up midnight was the time the demon door opened and the things came out in search of those that were involved in the hoodoo.
I told Zach I didn’t never have to do that before he took me in, and he said, “I know, but them demons want me, and now they want you, or anything to do with me and you. You want a girlfriend, have your fun, but don’t never fall in love, ’cause you can’t have it, not really. You love someone, you’re bringing them into something slimy and dangerous, and, once you’re in the life, it takes something really special and goddamn biblical to get out of it.” He said there were days when he hated having pulled me into all these dark shenanigans.
I told him I was glad to have been rescued, and that Mama and Pa were a lot worse than the demons, because wasn’t no spells and diagrams that could keep them out, and besides, he had educated me some. I could read and write and do my ciphers, and I was learning the gunsmith trade, as well as that other trade of his.
I know I’m wandering, but I think for you to understand it better, you got to know Zach’s circumstances, about them good deeds. You see, I was good deed number fourteen of the one hundred he owed. I’ve seen him do all the others up to where he is now. I helped him do quite a few.
He told me once that he had gotten as far as ninety-eight good deeds once, then messed up by doing something bad, and had to start over, and when he did, the baggage got heavier. When I say baggage, I ain’t talking about no grip, or a tow sack full of possibles.
In the back of the shop there’s a long hallway, and off the hallway are two rooms, one on the left, one on the right. I’m off to the left, and Zach is off to the right. But at the end of the hallway, hanging on the wall, is a big old mirror made of silver, and it’s shiny as a baby’s ass all greased with lotion. The mirror is framed in Hawthorn wood painted red with hogs blood and grave clay, and the painted wood is treated with hoss apple juice.
When Zach enters the hall, if even the light is bad, you can see him and me in the mirror, but you can also see the baggage, and no matter how many times I see it, even expecting it, it gets to me, makes my bones tremble inside of me like an old house rotting its lumber.
It looks a little like an old woman, and she’s got her arms around Zach’s neck, and her legs wrapped around his middle, and her head rises just above Zach’s. Her face is long and she has a possum jaw, with a lot of jagged teeth in it, and once a month she smells so bad Zach can hardly stand it. Just once a month, and on that day he doesn’t work, just rides off in the country and lives with the stink, which when the morning breaks and the sun gets warm, goes away, like a visiting in-law you don’t care for.
He can do whatever he would do without her on his back, but she’s there, in dark spirit he says, and he can feel her arms around his neck and her legs and feet around his waist, and he can always feel her hot breath on the back of his neck, and on that stink day, he says it’s the breath that nearly kills him, ’cause it reeks like a feed lot for cattle. She’s his baggage for killing a child to save his own. Both children died, his and the one he sacrificed to the dark ones. I don’t know much more than that, but let me ask you, would you kill a child to save your own? You can bet my folks wouldn’t have done a thing to save me or any other child either. They sold me for thirty dollars and was glad to get shed of me.
* * *
I was telling you about the man that came in, all dressed in fading black, and the first thing he sees is me, working on some leather, designing a holster for a pistol, using the pattern laid out for me by Zach.
I didn’t really need the pattern anymore, but I liked to keep it near, just as a way of feeling like I always had it in case I needed it. Working on the guns, well, that’s a different story, especially some of the guns Zach worked on, and certainly the ones he made to his own design. I liked him nearby to make sure I was doing that kind of business right.
“Boy,” the old man says, “maybe you ought to leave the room. I got to talk to this man here.”
“He doesn’t leave the room,” Zach said, his hands on the glass-top counter that held a number of Colts and Remington pistols. “He’s my apprentice. Name is James.”
“What is he? A high yella?”
“I suppose you could call him that. I call him James.”
The man nodded. “All right then, but I got the kind of business to talk about that you pull out of a deep dark sack.”
“I understand that kind of business, and so does the boy.”
The old man nodded again.
“I been trying to find someone for years to help me do what I got to do, ’cause there’s someone stolen and riding a kind of train that don’t never let a passenger off. They say you’re the man I need. A hoodoo man.”
“Go on,” Zach said.
“I heard rumor of you from an old man out in West Texas. Thing is, the whole thing that happened to me happened here in this very town, and now I’m back in it. I find that strange, that I didn’t know you were here all along.”
“Fate makes circles,” Zach said. “I keep a low profile on the hoodoo business, and you got to be in the hoodoo to know who I am and where I am. In the hoodoo, like you. But, I don’t work for free.”
The man came closer to the counter, opened his coat, took out a small bag and set it on the counter in front of Zach, and said, “That there is silver dust. It’s what I can pay you. It’s worth a lot.”
Zach pulled the draw string loose and pinched some of the dust and worked it with his thumb and forefinger, and let it fall back in the bag.
“All right,” Zach said. “Tell me about it.”
* * *
Zach locked the door and turned the sign to CLOSED, and we went into the back room and sat at the table where me and him eat. I got out the bottle and poured them both little glasses full of a dark whisky.
They took their sips, and I sat silent, and then the wrecked old man said, “Some years ago, right here in this town, I made a mistake. I wanted to be rich and powerful, and, well, there was a woman, and she was a fine-looking woman, dark, dark skin, with a heart like a lump of coal. Name was Consuela. Skin like black velvet, long legged and high breasted, but she had a gleam in her eye they made you weak.”
“I know who Consuela was,” Zach said. “We had what you might call a rivalry. Before her house burned down with her in it.”
“Again, I had no idea there were two hoodoo masters in town.”
“You don’t really master the hoodoo. It masters you.”
“True enough. Consuela had me do things for her, bad things. I stole and killed for her. She had spells, you see, and she needed certain things and certain events to make those spells happen. Items and sacrifice. She used them spells to help me along with money and for a long time magnificent health, ’cause that was before the hoodoo was in me. She owned my pecker, owned my soul. I dressed nice, had money in my wallet and fine clothes, of which these I’m wearing are remnants, but there were restrictions and prices to pay. One was, she kept me in her sight. Didn’t want me to let on what I knew, I suppose, but mostly she kept me like a pet. All that I was missing was a collar and a bowl on the floor.
“Got so the only time I could get away from her was when I was on one of her errands. It’s hard for me to talk about those errands, because sometimes they were bad errands. Really bad. I really don’t want to talk about that.
“Then come a day I’m on my own at night, and I’d done a thing so bad I was sick, and I couldn’t make myself go back to Consuela, not right then. I went to the café just to have some place to go where the light was bright and the voices in the room weren’t demonic whispers.
“There was this young woman worked at the café. She was petite, soft looking as a puppy, skin the color of coffee with a splash of cream. Not as wildly beautiful as Consuela, but she was certainly pretty. I went there every chance I got, just to be in the warmth and the light, to smell fresh coffee and frying eggs and bacon. But mostly, I went there for her.
“When things were slow in the café, she would pause and talk to me. I learned she lost her parents to a fever, lost everyone she ever loved in one way or another, and yet, she was cheerful, positive, and I could feel the meanness I had in me, that Consuela had encouraged, easing out of me, like a snake going away from the chicken house.
“Her name was Jenny. She liked a simple life, and I decided I could like one too. I had to get rid of Consuela. I figured the best way to break her hold on me was to kill her. I thought I was most likely able to do that when she slept. You see, at night we slept in a bed inside a circle drawn on the floor, with diagrams—”
“We know all about that,” Zach said.
“Why I come to you. You got a reputation for knowing your business. When Consuela was asleep, and I was lying in the bed next to her, I eased over to the side of the bed and pulled the hammer out from under it, where I had placed it earlier in the day, and hit her in the head. She could keep those demons out, but she couldn’t keep me out. I hit her and hit her until her skull and wicked brain were nothing but a splash on the sheets. And these demons that were all around us, they cackled.
“I waited until morning, when the cock crowed, and the demons around the bed became mist and wafted away. I got out of bed and fell to my knees, weak from fear and guilt and excitement. I’d broken the hold she had on me. I cleaned myself up and waited until Jenny was at work. I was thinking me and her could go away together. It might take some time to convince her, but I was determined. That’s how much I loved her. You seem perturbed.”
The old man had noticed that Zach’s expression had changed and that he had cupped his hands together and let them rest on his chest. He seemed to be holding something inside of himself.
“You’re blaming Consuela for the very things you wanted,” Zach said. “She didn’t make you do nothing. You did bad things on your own to get money and power, and now you want to lay it at her feet, justify what you done. You weren’t under any kind of spell, because if you were, you wouldn’t have been able to plan killing her, or even want to.”
The old man nodded slowly, the feather on his hat bobbing like a big white finger. “Yeah. I can’t disagree with that. That doesn’t change the fact that she was evil and killing her was a good thing. Shall I go on with my story?”
Zach nodded.
“When morning came, I felt weak. It wasn’t like I had slept. I ended up going into the front room to lay down on a pallet. Woke up and it was near dark, checked the big clock in the hall. It wasn’t long before midnight. That’s how much what I had done had taken out of me. I had slept the entire day and part of the night away.
“I realized, of course, that the demons would soon be out. I had to get back in that bed with Consuela’s corpse so I could be protected by the charms and the pentagram. I was in the hoodoo life, a minor hoodoo man, but minor or major, the results would have been the same. These days I make my own pentagram and lay out the protection. It’s second nature now. But right then, I didn’t have the time. Not that I slept that much with her body in the bed, and after me sleeping all day, I was wide awake. The sheets were bloodstained, her brains splattered about, all of it beginning to stink. And I swear, her dead body twitched in the bed all of the night.
“Still, next morning, I felt happy, just as free and happy as I could be. I cleaned up, fixed me some food, and then I began to feel like I was carrying something heavy on my back.”
“You’re toting the baggage,” Zach said.
The old man nodded.
“I can see its reflection in pools of clear water, and in things that are silver. It looks a little like Consuela. In one way it’s heavy, and in another it’s not.”
“Your baggage is different from mine, but it’s still baggage,” Zach said. “And it’s soul weight, not weight by the pound.”
“I know that now, but that day and that night, I was figuring it out, consulting the tomes Consuela had, the books she never let me look in, only allowing me to read the pages she chose, teaching me little spells and having me run her errands, but never teaching me the big things.
“I boarded up the room where Consuela lay, took all the protections into the front room and drew a new pentagram and set myself a fresh pallet inside of it. Next night I could hear a lot of pounding and ripping in that other room. The demons were having their way with her body. Doing whatever they do. That night I started going back to the café to see Jenny.”
“You had killed a woman with a hammer, and you went to courting?”
“Consuela was a monster. I had rid the world of her. I wanted a new life, a better one. One without murder and spells. Is that so bad?”
Zach didn’t reply, but he sighed heavily.
“After a couple weeks and a lot of sweet talk, I convinced her to walk with me down by the river. She brought a blanket, and we sat on it and looked out at the water. Soon we were kissing, and then we did what men and women do. We hadn’t no more than made love, than I felt that baggage on my back grow heavy. I had a moment of joy, and that seemed to make the baggage grow heavy.
“We hadn’t no more than gotten dressed than I heard it. A little toot at first, then a long low whistle coming from the north, heading in our direction. Jenny heard it too, said, ‘There aren’t any trains near here.’
“But there was. We could hear it, and then we could see its smoke rising up above the forest, floating into the moonlight. It was coming closer. The whistle grew louder, the smoke grew thicker, and my courage grew smaller. I didn’t know it right then, but I know it now. It was the Midnight Train.”
I saw Zach stiffen.
“Then we saw the tracks. One moment they weren’t there, then they were. Not on any bridge mind you, they lay right on the water, and ended at our feet. There was a split in the woods and the split was shiny like a polished coin, and then we could see the train. It had one big ol’ red light in front, and the smoke it was puffing had turned thick and dark. We were frozen to the spot. It looked as if that train was going to run right over us, and wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
“Jenny took my arm and squeezed it. Instinctively we knew there wasn’t any reason to run. It would catch us. The train stopped. No metal screeching, no sliding. The engine stopped right where the tracks ended. There was a hiss of stinking steam, and the cool air crackled against the hot engine.
“Then a door on the side of the train opened up, and some steps was rolled out. A little creature so white you’d have thought it was made of snow, bounced down the steps and landed on the ground and looked at me and Jenny. It looked like a huge white frog, but kind of human too. Its mouth cracked wide, and it was toothless, all pink gums, showing bright in the moonlight.
“Then another one of them toads hopped down. This one was black as a raven’s wing, and it had a mouthful of shiny teeth, pointed and long. It looked like it could have chewed its way through an angle of iron.
“Then both them things turned their heads and looked up at the open doorway, like they were scared. First there was a boot, hanging in midair. Blood red, and tipped at the toes with shadow. Then there was a leg stuck in the boot, clothed in white pants with thin black stripes. As the boot put a heel on the top step, another boot and leg appeared, and the owner of the boots and pants stepped into view, ducking its head to come out of that door on the train. He wore a big white hat with a thin black band around it. He was eight foot tall if he was an inch. I could feel that burden on my back swell and grow heavy on my soul.
“This tall man, pale of face with the corners of his mouth upturned, like he might break into smile, came to stand on the ground by the train, the toad-things on either side of him. He looked at us. His eyes were dead looking. You could barely see his moonlit pupils through the milky covering over them, but now and then in that rich moonlight, you could see red shadows move in the whites of those big, dead eyes. He had on a long, white duster and his hands were big and his fingers long and many knuckled. He lifted one hand, extended a finger and pointed right at Jenny. Then he turned his hand over and wiggled his finger for her to come to him. Jenny clutched my arm harder, and the tall man smiled. It was a smile where the edges of his lips slid up to touch his earlobes, widening so that I could see some blocky white teeth like tombstones and a thin, forked pink tongue that licked at the air like a snake.
“The train had come for Jenny, but the taking of her was to punish me for what I had done to Consuela. Her hex reached out beyond her death to make sure I stayed unhappy.
“Jenny says, ‘Pray. Pray to Jesus.’ But I knew there wasn’t any Jesus that could help us. That’s when the tall, white man pushed that duster back with his long-fingered hands, and I could see on his hips, in snow-white holsters, two big ol’ pistols. He kept that horrible smile on his face, linked his fingers, flexed, popped them so loud, both me and Jenny jumped. He pointed at Jenny again and nodded toward the train.
“Now the windows, which had been foggy, cleared, and what I saw through them windows I can’t explain. It was full of passengers and they were screaming and howling, had their faces pressed against the windows. They looked as if they had been boiled, fried, and generally shit on. I looked at the tall man, and he cocked his hands above his guns, and though I was wearing a pistol and wasn’t a bad hand with a gun, I knew right then I couldn’t beat him, and if even I could, my bullets wouldn’t do a thing to him. It was obvious to me that I either had to draw and lose, or give up Jenny.
“I can’t tell you how ashamed I am, which is why I have come to you, to repair as best I can what I did. I put my hand on Jenny’s back and pushed her toward him, said, ‘Take her.’
“Jenny stumbled forward, looked back at me. I can still see her face, the expression of betrayal. Not long before, I had held her in my arms and we had made love, and now I was passing her on to an eternity of torment. She didn’t say anything. Not a word, didn’t make a sound. Don’t think she could. The hopping men came and grabbed her arms, lifted her and carried her onto that horrible train. And then I heard her scream. It was a scream that made the short hairs on my neck stand up, made the goose bumps on my arms ripple and my stomach rumble with fear.
“That tall man, he got on the train too, and the steps went up with a snap. He leaned out from the door, and he cackled at me, and the sound of it was like having your flesh cut open with a crosscut saw. The train coughed smoke, and when it did, an open space near the engine lit up with a white light. I could see inside that gap, and the Engineer was there with his oversized engineer hat and baggy coveralls. He was little more than bones stretched over wet, dark flesh, and he and the Fireman, I suppose the other man would be called that, were feeding screaming, struggling bodies bound up in guts and skin and long weaves of hair, straight into the blazing fire box. When they went in, you could hear them scream, and then their screams became as one and turned into the sound of the train’s whistle. The train coughed, and it began to back up, and then in no way I can explain, I was no longer looking at the engine, but at the caboose. Away that train went along those tracks, and as it went the tracks disappeared behind it. The woods swallowed the train, but for a moment I could hear it toot its whistle, and I could see smoke above the tree line. Then the whistle stopped screaming, and the smoke was gone. There was only the moonlight tipping the trees with hats of silver.
“Everything outside that bubble we had been in set itself free. You could feel it in the wind and in the way the trees weaved a bit in the breeze. Where before the world was silent, you could now hear night birds sing, frogs bleat, and crickets chirp.
“The train was gone, and Jenny was gone, and there I stood, the weight on my back heavier than even moments before. A coward in moonlight and shadow.
“I ran away quick, didn’t go back down there, next day or the day after. Didn’t want the train to come back. I had Consuela’s books of magic, some she had written herself in her own crabbed handwriting. Heavy of heart, and heavier of soul, I began to read them carefully. I started thinking maybe I could get Jenny off that train, get that burden off my back. But if the answer was in those books, I didn’t find it.
“I decided I had to search out someone who could help me, not knowing the very person who could was right here in this town, near where it all happened. I packed up my goods and Consuela’s books and all her money, which was considerable, loaded it all in a wagon drawn by two strong horses. I quested for years, looking for help, and now, here I am, looking at you, asking you to help me for a bag of silver. I’m getting old now, and if I die with this thing on my back, well, no telling where I’ll end up, but I know this much, it isn’t good. Jenny’s on that train, and it’s all my fault.”
* * *
When the story was finished, we all sat there quietly.
It was the old man that broke the ice.
“Will you assist me? Help me rescue Jenny?”
Zach pooched his lips the way he does when he’s thinking hard on something. He let the old man’s question hang in the air awhile. Finally, he spoke.
“Go back to wherever you’re staying, and let me marinate on this thing. Come see me tomorrow when the sun’s dying, and I’ll tell you what I will or will not do. But let me explain to you what you’re up against. It’s not just the Midnight Train, but the Dueling Man and his minions you got to deal with. And let me tell you, the Dueling Man is made up of more bad deeds than either of us have seen. He works for the Engineer. He could go bear hunting with harsh language and wipe his ass with an angry badger, and that doesn’t even begin to explain what he is and how he is. Go away for now.”
That old man got up slow, like he had to build himself bone by bone to stand up, and then he dragged out of there like there was a ball and chain on his foot.
I looked at Zach. “Well?”
“I don’t know. He’s blaming this Consuela for everything he’s ever done, and he mentioned murder as some of the things he done. I’m thinking he did it for himself, as well. That he earned his burden more than Consuela gave it to him. Her death was just the final act that put that weight on his soul.”
“But what about Jenny?” I said.
Zach didn’t answer.
* * *
That day, I did all the work that was to be done, except some fine touch-ups on a gun being made for a gambling man. It was going to have some etchings on the hilt, and Zach had to do that. He had the talent, and he had the steady hand.
Zach sat in the hallway in a padded chair in front of the long mirror and looked at himself and that baggage on his back. He had a stand by his chair, and had a lamp on it and some hoodoo books. I looked in on him a couple times, brought him a cup of coffee and a piece of ham and bread about noon. He took it from me without comment, continued to look at himself and his baggage in the mirror. The thing in the mirror looked at me, and when it did, it made me feel cold from the top of my head all the way down to the heels of my feet. I got out of there pretty quick, left Zach to his considerations.
It was late afternoon of the next day when the bell over the door clanked, and the old man came in and walked over to me. I got up and told Zach he had arrived. Zach sighed deep, rose and followed me into the main part of the shop.
“Your decision?” said the old man.
“I’ve studied on it. I have to build you a gun, a special gun to use against the Dueling Man. I’ll have to make some special ammunition for you too. Come back in a week’s time, and I’ll have it ready.”
The old man tipped his hat and went away. Zach looked at me. “This is going to require a lot of black coffee.”
* * *
The days passed by so slow you would have thought they was crippled.
I did the work Zach asked me to do, as well as kept making coffee, because once he got started on that gun he didn’t sleep much, and with all that coffee, how could he?
Among the jobs I did for him was pack some powder and a specific shot inside the casings for the pistol’s ammunition. Those were big ol’ bullets when they were finished. Fifty calibers, and for a pistol! But here’s the odd thing, they was as light as if they was made of air and a prayer.
Zach had some metal to use for making pistols and such, but this metal he had he got out of an old trunk in the back, and the long barrel of the pistol was made of a steel so blue it made a clear spring day look dull. You could see your reflection in it. Zach looked into it with me, and I could see the baggage on his back, that horrible face. That told me there was silver in the bluing. That barrel was light in a similar way as the ammunition. The hilt was made of Hawthorne wood, painted black with a paint made of ashes and drops of frog blood and glue. When the gun was finished, it looked right smart the way it gleamed in the sunlight coming through the window.
Zach let me handle it. It was the best-balanced pistol I had ever held, single action, ’cause Zach said it was a more steady shot when cocked and aimed.
I gave Zach the holster I had been working on, made of gold-dyed leather, the dye some concoction of Zach’s. He heated an iron in the fire from the wood stove and burned designs into the leather. Those designs were swirls and little figures that Zach said were spells and such. I took his word for it.
He loaded the gun, shoved it in the holster, had me put it away. When I carried it to place inside the trunk where he kept his most important stuff, that gun seemed alive in my hand. I thought I could hear it whisper.
Zach had finished his work two days early, and when he was done, he went to bed and stayed there through dark and light without waking for two whole days.
* * *
Come the morning of the day the old man was to come, Zach got up and had me heat some water and fill a number-ten tub. He stripped down and got in it and soaked in a lot of soapy suds.
When he finished bathing, he got dressed. Put on black pants and a black shirt and a black hat with linked silver Conchos for a hat band. He wore a bolo tie with black strings and silver tips, and the clutch of the tie was silver and in the shape of a scorpion. He pulled on black boots fresh polished with silver-tip toes. He had me fetch the holster and pistol. I brought it to him, and he sat behind the counter on a stool and read a dime novel while waiting for the old man to come. He had me pull down the shades and lock the door and turn the sign to say CLOSED.
We sat there all day, Zach reading dime novels, and sometimes reading from the big hoodoo books he had, or from clutches of loose notes.
It was nearly dark when there was a tap on the door. I looked at Zach, and he nodded. I opened the door to the sound of the overhead bell clanging. It was the old man, dressed as he always was, like Zach, in black, except for that tall white feather. He was bent over more than before and walked like his feet was tied together. He was old the day he first came into the shop, but today, he was much older.
“I have the gun,” Zach said.
Zach lifted the holstered pistol up and put it on the counter. The pistol had the smell of gun oil about it, but there was something else, a tinge of something long dead; just a whiff, but it was there.
The old man spoke, sweat popping out all over his face. “I want to get Jenny off that train, but I’ve gotten old, and I’m not that good a gun hand anymore. I appreciate the gun, and I’m sure it’s worth all the dust I paid you… But can I ask you to handle it? To be my surrogate?”
Zach smiled, made a kind of gurgle that might have been a laugh, and said, “I expected just this. I can tell a man that wants to do something he’s afraid to do and wants someone else to do it for him the moment I talk to them.”
“If I were younger—”
“When you were younger you let the Dueling Man take Jenny. You killed a woman who, though she may have had it coming, you were in the deep hoodoo with before. The power, the money, the black magic. I know what kind of draw Consuela had. I was in her arms once. Does that surprise you? Her price was too high for me. But not you. Then you wanted out, and you wanted something clean and innocent to make you feel clean, so you took up with Jenny and let the doo-doo from the hoodoo rub off on her.”
“I was young then.”
“We all been young,” Zach said. “But, that’s not enough of an excuse. Not for what you said you done. You got guilt on you, and shame, and that’s at least a good thing. It’s the only reason I’m helping you. You feel remorse for what you’ve done and have thought about it for years. As for Jenny, I don’t know her, but she’s an innocent soul, and I want to get her off that train. So, let’s cut the bull and get down to brass tacks and good ammunition.”
Zach looked at me. “I going to have to depend on you for something, son. And it’s a big thing.”
“Just tell me what you want,” I said, and I sounded a lot braver than what I felt, having heard about the Dueling Man and the Midnight Train.
“When, and if, I dispatch the Dueling Man, there will be the two demons. The frog-like things he’s been talking about. I’ll try to deal with them. Meantime, you gather up all the courage you have, because it will take it, and you get on that train and you yell, ‘Miss Jenny, I’m a hoodoo man, and I’ve come for you.’”
“But I’m not a hoodoo man,” I said.
“Yes, you are. You’ve worked for me, and I’m going to put a spell in your pocket. It’s not a strong one. There ain’t much in the way of strong when it comes to the Midnight Train, ’cause you might have to face the Engineer. He gets you, all bets are off. Your ass is good and got. The good thing though is the Engineer lets the others handle the bad business most of the time, but if he should decide to handle it himself, you get off that train quick as you can.
“That little spell I’ll put in your pocket, it’ll make it so if someone on the train tries to grab you, they’ll not be able to. But it’s not a long-lasting spell. Some of those on the train will be wailing and begging for you to take them with you. You won’t have the ability to take anyone off the train except the one you call out to. When you call out for Jenny, she’ll come to you. She may not look just right. In fact, she will look terrible. You take her hand, and that will give her the protection you got. But that sucks on the protective spell, and you’ll have even less time than before.
“Get her and you run for the door, any door that’ll get you off that train. Even if it’s moving, you jump, you jump as hard and far as you can, and have Jenny jump with you. She gets off the train, she’ll be the Jenny that was put on that train all those many years ago.
“Course, if I can’t beat the Dueling Man, then you run like your ass is on fire and don’t never even think for a moment about getting on that train. I’ll be done for, me and my baggage will get on that train, and we’ll ride and ride and ride. We succeed, then I’m free of my baggage.”
“What about me,” the old man said, “will I be free?”
“That remains to be seen,” Zach said. “I don’t like you. I got nothing for you except to help Miss Jenny. Where she is, that’s on you. And just to make myself understood, if you get out there and decide to run, like you did before, I’ll shoot you. That way, with the baggage you got, I can assure you of a long train ride.”
“Should I actually go with you?” the old man said. “Maybe, being old like I am, decrepit, I ought to stay here until you get back. I might make things worse.”
Zach laughed loud enough to tremble the rafters.
“Oh no you don’t. You’re going.”
* * *
We had some ham and bread, and Zach let the old man take a shot of whisky, but Zach didn’t have none. He had coffee instead, and when he finished with it, he said, “We’ll go down early and take the lay of the land. I suggest we go to the place where you and Jenny encountered the train. Might as well make this whole thing full circle.”
We played some cards as the night grew rich, and then we packed up some folding stools and a basket with more of that damn ham and bread in it. Zach went and wrapped his mirror in a black cloth and brought it out and put it with the other stuff.
“What you need that for?” the old man asked.
“I hope it’ll give me an edge.”
We didn’t bother with horses. It wasn’t that far away, and Zach said if we all got killed, or worse, taken on the train, we didn’t want to leave the horses out there all alone.
That kind of talk made me nervous.
Zach had the old man carry the basket of ham and bread. I had the folding stools under my arm, and Zach carried the cloth-covered mirror, which is a really light tote. He, of course, wore the big gun on his hip.
It wasn’t a long walk. You were in town one moment, and then you weren’t. Before you knew it, you was traveling along a moonlit trail in the woods, on down to the river. You could hear it gurgling before you could see it.
When we got to the river, Zach said to the old man, “Where were you when the train came?”
“Almost right here. Maybe a little closer to the river.”
It was a full moon night, and it was near bright as day, and the moon’s reflection in the water made it look as if it was floating on the river. The water and the trees looked to be frosted.
Zach got out his big turnip watch and popped the cover on it and looked at the time in the silver moonlight.
“We are two hours ahead of time. Good.”
I unfolded the stools as Zach set the mirror so that it stood upright, but with the cloth still over it. The old man placed the basket on the ground and sat down heavily on one of the stools.
I won’t lie to you. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and the old man, well, I think he was starting to wish maybe all those years he shouldn’t have been planning to come back here and set Jenny free. And maybe it wasn’t so much about Jenny, as it was getting rid of the baggage before he died. I figured that was what his look out was for. Get her off that train and lose that baggage.
Zach gave me a little bag and told me to put it in my pocket, that it was my protection. I took it and did just that, but I’ll tell you, the idea that there might be anything in that little bag that would spare me from what was on that train was hard to grasp.
“What about me?” the old man said.
“You don’t get a bag,” Zach said. “You got to depend on me.”
Zach ate some more of the ham and bread, but me, I was too nervous to eat, and so was the old man. We sat there watching the river, the woods, and the big ol’ moon, waiting for the tick of midnight, which came slow. The minutes weren’t in any hurry that night, and seemed each of them was an hour long.
Finally, Zach got out his watch again, looked at it, said, “Won’t be long now.”
Short time after he said that the air turned chill, and we heard a kind of chugging, a long way off, but the sound was growing closer. There was a long high lonesome whistle and a series of toots. It sounded like a train, and at the same time it didn’t.
Black smoke appeared above the moon-tipped trees, and a rolling white mist moved between the trees and blew over the river. When the mist faded there were tracks lying right on top of the river, and running on through a gauzy silver split in the woods. Then, here come that train. You could see the cow catcher in front, black and shiny as Cain’s sin, and the one big light of the train was like a burning red eye. The whistle blew long and hard, and the air went still as an oil painting, and there was a bright cold glow around us for some distance, and outside of that glow I could see bats frozen in flight. Time had stopped out there, but we were inside the spell of the train and what it carried.
The train chugged on across the river, and the engine passed us close enough that the wind from it blew off the old man’s hat. He didn’t try to chase it down. He may not have even known he’d lost it, so intent was he on that strange, black train.
The train stopped with part of it on the tracks stretching across the river, but with a lot of it on the river bank. The engine was right next to us. You could hear the train crackle as the hot engine was being cooled by the air. We was still on our stools, but now we stood up, and I could see that the old man was trembling like a naked man in a snow storm. Zach seemed remarkably calm. He pushed his coat back so that the hilt of the hoodoo gun showed. He took a deep breath.
Then came a snapping sound, like a big bone breaking, and a door on the side of the train sprang open. Down came some steps. They just flopped right out of the train and expanded, with the bottom step lying flat out on the ground.
Something moved inside the doorway, and then it leaped out, not bothering with the steps. It was a kind of black frog, I think, and yet, it looked somewhat like a man, bent low and held up by its squatty legs. Its hands were in front of it, and the thing was rubbing them together like a fat man ready for lunch. It had a mouthful of long, sharp teeth.
Another one of those things sprang into view, pale and larger than the other, more upright. It didn’t have no teeth at all, just pink gums the way the old man had described them.
A boot stuck out of the doorway, rested heavy on the top step. A leg grew up from the boot, and then another boot came out of the train, and a leg grew up inside of that, and then above the legs the air darkened and took the shape of a man dressed all in white, except for black stripes on his pants. He wore a snow-white hat and had on a long white duster. He smiled. It was how the old man had described. The tops of his lips nearly touched his ears, and that mouth was like an open doorway to somewhere you didn’t want to go. It was filled with teeth that made you think of murder and cannibals. The man’s eyes—if it was a man—had a dead look, but in the whites of his eyes were little red shadows. They flickered and crawled. His forked tongue lashed out and whipped back inside his mouth like a snake discovering the weather was bad.
It was the Dueling Man, of course.
The Dueling Man turned his head from side to side, as if trying to figure us, and then he pushed his duster back on both sides, and you could see his guns, and they were just as the old man had described them.
Zach stepped so that he was centered with the man, and when he did he said, “Move the mirror up beside me, son. Now!”
I did just that. The mirror was so light and easy to handle I managed it in instants.
The Dueling Man’s expression hadn’t changed. He wiggled his long fingers and the whites of his eyes were no longer white with red shadows flicking around the edges. They had turned completely blood red. The frog-things squatted on either side of him.
“Take the cloth off the mirror,” Zach said.
I whipped it off, and when I did, the Dueling Man’s head pivoted slightly to take in his reflection in that silver mirror. I looked at that reflection. It was of a handsome man in the Dueling Man’s clothes, not nearly as tall, normal teeth. Fact was, he was quite handsome in that reflection. Squatting beside him was a sad-looking naked man on one side, and an even sadder-looking naked woman on the other side of him. Tears fat as rain drops began to run down their faces.
I glanced at them, back to the mirror. The handsome reflection of the Dueling Man drooped, and he rested his hands on the hilts of his pistols like he was all worn out. He sagged inside his duster and white clothes. His unique boots looked worn and scuffed, and as I watched his white suit frayed and became covered in dust that made the cloth gray. The brim of his hat lost its snap and wilted.
The wide, ear-licking smile on the Dueling Man’s face closed slowly, and he just stood there, looking at his reflection in the mirror, thinking on who he had been before he became a slave to the train and the Engineer. I felt sure that’s what the reflection was. Who he had been.
In that instant Zach drew.
It was a cheater’s way to do it, but it was still the right way to do it. The Dueling Man, distracted by who he once was, hesitated, and that’s when Zach’s pistol cracked. A hole about the size of the tip of my thumb spotted him between the eyes and you could hear what had been in his head splattering out behind him.
His long legs wiggled and then they collapsed inside his boots and all of him, clothes and flesh, went into those boots and the white hat fell down on top.
The demons came for Zach.
The old man looked as if he might run.
“Hold up,” I said.
“I got him,” Zach said, and even as those demons rushed forward, he whipped the gun over his shoulder and shot the old man right in the chest, without even looking.
The old man crumpled, ended up on his knees. He held his hand to his chest and fell forward, his face in the dirt.
“Consider that an extra good deed,” Zach said as he shot one of the demons solid in the head, and then shot the other. It was all so fast and so calm you would have thought Zach wasn’t doing nothing more than out target shooting.
The demons collapsed onto the river bank and the next instant they were gone to dust. The train fired up, and I bolted for the steps, hit them with a leap and was inside the train just as the steps clapped up behind me and the door slammed shut.
The train’s corridor ran left and right, and I was in a kind of gap between them. I could see all the way up to the open engine, and I could see the Engineer with his big engineer’s hat on and his dirty overalls, his flesh all taught, the bones in his face breaking through in spots. I swear he had an extra set of arms that lifted up out of his overalls. He and the Fireman, who was short and stout and dark from soot, sweat-licked from the fire in the engine, was loading gut-wrapped bodies into the fire.
They stared at me, but neither moved toward me. They kept loading those bodies, working to get that train to run. If it did, and I couldn’t get off before my protection went thin, then I would be trapped.
I took a deep breath and turned in the other direction, started through the cars. The seats were full and the people in them, if you can call them that, were coming out of them. They were blistered and scarred and their hair was in patches. They all reached out for me, but soon as they touched me the spell in my pocket coated them with fire.
They leapt back and the flames went away. I moved on through the box car, yelling, “Miss Jenny, I am a hoodoo man, and I’ve come for you.”
A man and a woman stood up from a seat and moved into the aisle in front of me. At first, they were just two scab-covered monsters, like all the rest, and then one of them called my name and I knew immediately who they were.
My mother and father. I won’t lie to you, hate them as I did, I was sad to think of where they ended up. Somewhere along the line, they’d gotten in the hoodoo and, when they was killed, they took the train ride. I felt my heart melt. But pretty soon, it was solid again. What they wanted wasn’t me, it was a way off that train. Zach was my family. Not them.
By then, the train was chugging and moving and rocking, and it was hot in there. It was as if the heat was lessened by that charm in my pocket, but I could feel it pushing at the air around me. I was starting to grow weak.
I kind of closed my eyes and forced myself between my mother and father, remembering how my father had beat me with a strop, and my mother had cheered him on. They reached out to touch me as I passed, and their hands flamed. They screamed and stepped back into their row.
“Miss Jenny!” I called out again and again.
Then, as I entered the next boxcar, a little figure came out of one of the seats and staggered toward me. I could see that she was female, but her boiled skin flapped off her face and her neck was broken so that her head was on her shoulder. She was naked, but it wasn’t an exciting kind of naked. It was the kind that made your stomach churn and your brain deny.
She said to me in a voice that bubbled as if she was swallowing lava, “I am Jenny.”
I hesitated, but finally stuck out my hand. She took it. No flames came off of me and jumped on her. It was Jenny all right. I turned and started pulling her after me as I ran back through the box cars.
We hadn’t gone far when I seen the old man that had hired Zach. He had been hoodooed onto the train, and his baggage was full grown now, weighting him down so much he was nearly bent double. He lifted an eye and looked up at me. The baggage, a filthy old woman that I knew was Consuela, grinned rotten teeth at me.
“Help me,” he said.
“You earned your place,” I said, and pushed by him and the thing on his back. I yanked at Jenny’s hand and glanced back at her, saw her head was straight now. The flesh on her face was flapping back into place and her skin was turning to its former coffee and cream color that the old man had described.
We came to the doorway and the steps. I opened the door with my free hand, kicked the steps out.
When I looked up the Engineer was hustling from his place up front, coming along the floor like a spider, using those extra arms to launch him forward. His engineer hat tilted to one side, but it stayed on his head.
Behind him, in the engine room the Fireman’s face turned soft, and he yelled in a voice that coughed out in smoke. “Run! Run for all you’re worth!”
There wasn’t really anyplace to run, but there was the open door now and the night outside, the moonlight.
I said to Jenny, “Jump.”
I stood Jenny in front of me and gave her a bit of a push, and she jumped. I stepped onto the top step, coiled my legs and leaped, just as the Engineer grabbed my boot, and it come off in his hand.
I went tumbling, and it was like I’d never stop. Down a grassy hill and into a wad of briars and brush. I hit something hard then and I was out.
* * *
When I awoke, my head was in Jenny’s lap. She was put back together, so to speak. Her features were smooth and beautiful, and her skin looked like chocolate there in the moonlight. She was stroking my forehead. Tears were running down her cheeks.
“You got me off that awful train, away from that awful place.”
I sat up slowly and looked around. There wasn’t no train tracks and no train, and I had no idea where we was.
After I got to my feet and looked around, placed the moon, which was beginning to slide down behind the trees, I knew the direction to go. I was all cut up from the briars and such, but Jenny had pulled me out of them, and wiped me off with the folds of her dress, staining it with my blood. I had nothing worse than a missing boot and a slight limp that was going away even as we walked. Jenny had hit ahead of the briars and wasn’t cut up at all. Her blue dress was ripped a little and there were pieces of weeds and cockleburs in her hair, but she looked fine.
We finally managed to get to where Zach was. He had covered the mirror and was sitting on one of the stools eating some ham and bread.
Except for the Dueling Man’s boots and his hat on top of them, there was nothing left of him. The body of the old man was there, but I knew his soul was on that train with his baggage, riding on and on for a bleak eternity. And I knew too, from the way Zach was smiling, his baggage was gone.
“Hello there,” Zach said.
* * *
Jenny stayed on with us, which suited me fine. She didn’t have any connection to her old life. The café she had worked at, and the people there, were long gone. I found me and her kind of suited one another.
Since I didn’t have no baggage on me, I felt I could have a life, a relationship, not like before when I was linked to Zach. You see, after that night, I was done with the hoodoo in any shape or form.
I quit working at the gun shop too. Zach insisted. He wrapped the hoodoo gun up and put it away.
Me and Jenny was hitched by the justice of the peace, got a place of our own. In our little home, no demons came out after midnight, and I could get up and have a glass of water or go to the outhouse anytime I pleased.
One day, when I went to visit Zach, just to see how he was, not to get involved in anything, he and everything in the shop was gone.
A man down at the livery told me Zach bought a wagon, hitched his horses to them, and that was the last he had seen of him. But Zach had left me something, figuring I’d come to the livery to ask about him, since a wagon would have to be rented or purchased to haul off all that was in the shop.
What Zach left me was a wooden box.
“It don’t have no key,” said the man at the livery.
I took it home and used a chisel to pry it open. Inside was the bag of silver the old man had given Zach. In the bottom of the box was a note.
SO YOU AND JENNY DON’T HAVE TO WORRY NONE.
Well, so far, me and Jenny don’t have no worries, but now and again I think about Zach and wonder where he is, and if he’s still gunsmithing, or if he might be back heavy in the hoodoo business again.