Felt & the Lone Gunman

A Jew in the old West

1.Some Personal History and a Letter

Felt weighed his future in the cloud formation overhead. “I stand between my memory of her and her simple grave.” Only last night he had seen her in a dream, the first since her death. She sat wrapped in the quilt they once had shared when abed. Her bright brown eyes flush with a meaning he could not quite fathom, and her blond hair played beautifully against her ivory skin. So surprised was he at seeing her he simply stared. Suddenly she said, “I will meet you later. I will wait for you.” “Where?” Awakening in a start expecting her to be sleeping by his side.

He checked his gun belt as was his custom when first opening his eyes, then he pulled from his jeans thrown on the floor a letter from his brother. They corresponded now and again concerning sexuality and personal identity. In the west bogeymen waylaid strangers at the narrow passes between outposts. Some wags said ghosts traversing the narrows and flats came from never having a proper burial place. He read:

Homosexuality is due to the Peter Pan Principle. People fear responsibility most. It is a return to infantile behavior. Emasculation and to defeminize womanhood are the places of safety homosexuals and lesbians go back to. As an infant boy sees the tit. When the homosexual cross dresses he becomes the woman. Her tits are his. He wears a bra and a skirt and stockings and high heels. He is a mockery of a woman and a lesser expression of manhood. In fact, he does not want to be a man nor does the lesbian want to be a woman. She does not want to have sexual intercourse and become pregnant. It is repulsive to her because she fears the full expression of her femininity, her nubile nature, her child producing nature. As an infant she saw her father’s clothes, his trousers, his shirt, and these become hers. She is neither a boy nor a man but neither a woman nor a girl. Rather something mixed up and ugly. For a woman wants to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and to deny this is for her to become not the ugly stepsister, but the non-woman. To be in the never-never existing world is to go to Peter Pan’s world where any sexual expression is possible and is indeed correct. To surrender to the draw, to give into this desire to be there, is to fail. Manhood and womanhood are the birthright to being born into this world with a body. There are those who would give these gifts away for nothing in return. Furthermore, the legitimization of homosexuality and lesbianism on a societal level is extremely dangerous. It opens up a pathway to non-adulthood permanently. The law of unintended consequences will take root and all Hell will break loose.

He carefully refolded the letter.

2. Hank Bottles

His horse Vanity galloped on God’s pleasant and bountiful world. He cocked his ear. Certainly, she was running before the wind. She neighed, a signal for him to fetch his spurs. “To town.” They rode the well-worn trail, passing untended fields abandoned by farmers to go even farther west. Tumbleweed and ruin remained. It weighed sullenly on his heart. “Where is thy green pasture, O Earth!” His voice rang out into the silent wilderness. He spurred Vanity to hasten past death. It was all too foreboding. The sunlight flooded the earth with streaks of white fire.

He tied his horse to a post despite the heat. Then he strode into the General Store.

Hank Bottles, proprietor, polished his counter. He looked up to see Felt. “You’re looking mighty fine today.”

Felt complimented the glow of his wares, his countertop and the wonderful clock. “These are the best of times since Man emerged victorious over Lizards.”

Bottles agreed, reminded of some news. “Oh, by the way, did you hear? A new lady arrives in town this afternoon.”

Felt struck his fist down on the wood counter. “Another one?'”

Hank stopped polishing. “She’s fair I’ve heard, and what’s more, Felt, she’s rumored a minor prophetess.”

Felt rubbed his jaw. “You’re a fibber. A Jew hasn’t wandered into this town for a whale of time.”

Bottles smiled. “Still, Felt, she’s due on the afternoon stage.

“Where can we bury her? I don’t know. Jews and Gentiles may marry, but not find rest in the same cemetery, and may become ghosts.”

Bottle had stopped polishing upon the mention of ghosts. “An apocalyptic ecstatic Protestant fringe has petitioned the Lord for a prophet. The drought is longstanding. Many are certain God has turned his face away.”

Felt disliked talking about the drought.

“And then,” continued Bottles, “Parson Strange has increased his rants against the Jews. He cries, the Jew is unholy, the murderer of Christ. Since the Jews came before the Advent, are they not Satanic?”

“The Parson will have to deal with her on the level. By the way, isn’t this place something like Hell?”

“Maybe the Parson will calm his fury, Felt. The depth of a man is hard to plumb.”

Together they contemplated the sad ship of state. Even something trivial like the arrival of a minor prophet during a drought foreshadowed doom.

Bottles suddenly recalled, “Some flinty souls came to the store yesterday looking for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“They showed a broadsheet from up North boasting of your skill with those pistols you wear. They wanted to challenge you to a duel. I told them to get lost.

“What did they say?”

“They laughed uproariously. Then they left.”

Felt shook his head. “My reputation lives. Where are these men?”

“I don’t know. I told them you weren’t ever to return.”

Felt cracked a grin. He checked his pistols and stepped out into the brilliant sunlight. He crossed the street of dirt packed dry as a bone and headed toward the Hotel. Its façade reminded him of a skull. Two plate glass windows cast an evil eye over all who approached. He pressed forward. Death’s odor only quickened his pace. The innkeeper, Phil Chalmers, hastily turned the pages of the guest register. Felt noted the unusually quick movement of the even mannered Chalmers. “Fussy today?” asked Felt.

“Not particularly. Is there something I can do for you?”‘

“Just tell me, have men been asking for Felt?”

“Do you mean your self?’

“Chalmers, in literature we can find men with double identities. Often people say it is the ‘I’ who is at command. One ought to doubt this. By early childhood most men have assumed several personalities, some of which are locked in perpetual conflict.”

“Then,” said Chalmers, “I will restate my question.”

Felt waited. He disliked Chalmers. Was it his too easy smile?

Chalmers smiled. “I come into contact with many faces. How can I remember every question? I can’t bring to mind questions regarding a Felt or Mr. Felt.”

Was there a difference? He winced and began to turn away.

Chalmers reminded him, “Every Monday a poker match at noon at the saloon.”

An unusual set of coincidences: the prophetess, his past as Gunman Felt, and the poker match beginning this very hour. He stepped out of the Hotel.

He smoothed his hair and straightened his hat. He passed Vanity. Bottles was rearranging the merchandise in his store. The saloon doors yawned at him. His destiny, he believed, was at a crossroads.

3. The Bar Room

No one walked into that bar room a babe. Everyone carried a history. This was no baptism. Eyes raked him. The pungent mixture of beer and urine filled his nostrils. Men sprawled in their chairs drinking, talking, clinking glasses, spitting, or idly gazing into the putrid air.

He went to the bar. An hombre next to him hovered over his drink in silent meditation.

Simpson turned to Felt, “Did you ever have a wish?”

He knew Simpson but didn’t talk too much. “What do you mean?’

“I mean,” in a quiet voice, “did you ever hope to win big?”

Felt acknowledged that he did on occasion.

Simpson stared back into his drink, “Then you’re an ape.”

Simpson was always morose. Felt pushed away from the bar and saw tables being set up in the back of the room.

The poker tournament had garnered considerable interest. Men gathered like birds of prey. They checked decks of playing cards for flaws. Poker players cheat; it is a maxim. Only fools gambled.

A commotion arose. The pot quickly boils. A man punched a man holding a notched card. That man cracked his fist into the other man’s gut. The man doubled over. While his assailant laughed, someone threw a chair at this laughing man that smote him on the back. In a rage, he mangled this new antagonist and threw him into the wall. In a flash thirty men fought strangling one another.

Felt ducked under a flying bottle. Fighting men blocked the doors. Outside he found an alley with stairs going to an upper floor. “Some poker match.”

A few drunks snoozed on the stairs happily oblivious to all. Felt ran up the stairs considering the various levels of consciousness each man cultivates. He opened a door into the great upper hall.

4. The Prophetess.

A lady sat on the stage at the far end of the room. Though there was a haze of tobacco smoke in the room, he could see her clearly. Had he met her before? He couldn’t decide. Chance encounters, long past assignations, flophouses, strolls by the dry riverbeds, women sauntering by the fields on their way to pick buttercups, and other quarter-drawn images briefly flooded his mind’s eye.

A group of people clustered around the proscenium. The speaker addressed them with a merry treble. He couldn’t quite distinguish her words. He stepped closer all the while considering the idea of beauty.

He looked on with amusement at the spindly legged stool upon which she sat.

She said, “I awoke this morning after slumbering through the night, and I looked over to my side where usually my lover H. did lay. He was not there. I looked in the closets, on the porch, in the other rooms, even outside the door on the stoop. Suddenly a most wicked thought entered my bosom.” She brought her pretty hands to that sacred place. “True, I was suffering a rather strong dose of intestinal discomfort. Perforce I thought I had eaten him during the night. My horror!”

Some faces in the audience visibly paled.

He was curious. He strained to hear more.

“I rushed to the mirror. Surely there I could find proof. I examined myself from every angle to see if the snakelike shape of H. I could discern under my flesh. I didn’t find him. I resumed my search with greater vigor. I ran into the front apartments, and I was so out of breath and at the end of hope, I was frantic. I saw H. sleeping on the divan. He opened his eyes at that very moment and said, “My beauty.”

Felt raised his hand.

She paused and grew slightly pink at the applause afforded by her listeners.

“Join me on stage. Come, Mr. Nimble. Be quick!”

Felt hesitated. “Mr. Nimble?”

She pouted.

He climbed up on stage and the sea of faces in the crowd eyed him suspiciously. Who was this interloper?

“Did you have a question?” she asked him.

“Yes, madam, I am wondering if this is the fruit of an overzealous unconscious or a true account of that which happened to you.”

She did not take affront. Her serenity impressed him.

After a pause while she surveyed the audience for snicklers, curled lips, pinched cheeks, curled toes, lame smiles, or hoarse laughter. She turned her gaze back to Felt. “Why do you ask? Do you know H?”

“‘No, we never crossed paths.” It was something else entirely. Her remark about ‘beauty’ intrigues me. It was unexpected.

“Ah,” she said. “You are a follower of poetry?

“Nothing of the sort.” He was certain a connection existed between H’s remark and his own thought about womanly creation. Beauty, he felt a pang of sorrow, is ephemeral.

“Who are you?” he asked, as if identity was any more permanent.

‘I’, she announced, “am The Prophetess, the Bird of Poetry.”

“I understood you would be arriving on the afternoon stage.”

She pulled Felt onto her soft lap. The stool collapsed under the added weight. The audience erupted in laughter and shouts of bravo.

The Prophetess grew scarlet. Felt in haste scrambled away.

She rearranged her dress and her hair.

The audience renewed their paroxysms of laughter.

“Why are you so gay?” she asked them when they had at last settled down.

The crowd gave her a warm applause and she took her leave.

A comedian. Bottles had miscast this Prophetess.

Some men followed her out of the hall.

Felt wondered, weren’t they alarmed by her remarks about H?

5. The Lone Gunman.

The lone gunman imagined he knew where Felt hung his hat. The ride stretched out in front of him like yesterday’s newsprint. The last miles of the parched trail would end in turmoil, if the predictions of the ghost machines he had consulted prior to the journey proved true.

His confidence in machinery was well founded. He relied on the gun, a deadly machine. But is there a machine that gives life? There was little to spend on such impractical questions. Every moment was more precious than a child.

He was fast on the draw, and justly considered himself peerless. He boasted, “I could shoot Felt in the eye right now if these mountains didn’t stand between us.” The memory of him swaying in the haze of the terrible heat haunted him still. The sun did bear down on the street with such strength the heat rose out of the dust and burnt his toes through his soles. It distorted the landscape.

He rode onward. Felt waited for him to show his face. Felt had, he admitted reluctantly, won the bet. Felt’s ace had beaten his jack. Felt relaxed his face momentarily, but that was enough for the lone gunman to judge him easy prey. He challenged him to a duel unto death that noon. Felt accepted and went off to his rooms over the saloon to prepare for certain victory.

The lone gunman sat alone at his table polishing his gun ’til it shone in the heat with a ferocious tongue of fire. Noon calmly approached. The lone gunman picked up his holster. The leather slapping against his thigh gave him reassurance. He strode out of the saloon certain that Felt waited.

Felt wiped dust from his jaw and noted the passage of birds overhead seeking water. Perhaps a shot into heaven might reward the living with a deluge, he thought, yet he never did like to waste ammunition. He grimly stood his ground knowing that noon floated high above like a creature.

As the lone gunman walked toward him a drop of vitriol penetrated the chambers of the lone gunman’s heart. “Felt!” he screeched in the terrible language of hatred, “Die!’ Both men stood very still. They waited.

The lone gunman drew first and fired. Somehow the bullet flew awry. “Was it the dust? The dust?” the lone gunman repeated over and over.

As the lone gunman rode, he still could not fathom it.

And in only the farthest reaches of Felt’s consciousness was he aware of the peril approaching him.

The lone gunman repeated, “I never miss.” And this was true. Yet on that strange day Felt lived and didn’t even shoot back. He laughed. He tipped his hat, sauntered to his horse, and rode south.

The lone gunman had been deeply shamed, and for some that kind of shame is akin to death. Not only had he lost in cards. So good was he at estimating his rivals’ dreams, he never lost. Yet even his shot had been waylaid. “Felt must have a secret to be that strong.”

He searched in the dust for his spent bullet, thinking to find it would provide a clue, only to stop when the sun began to dip below the horizon. Then he walked slowly back to the saloon to drink and curse the afternoon’s events.

Years had passed since that duel. For Felt it was one episode among many. “The lone gunman is a fierce enemy to be sure, but I thwarted him.” As he had ridden south, he shoved the lone gunman from his mind. “Better pleasant pretty faces of cowgirls ahead.”

During the years up to the present moment the lone gunman had sought vengeance. He trained a cadre of hardened individualities; cutthroats, pirates, scum, those who had surrendered deliverance this round of life. So habituated to death they felt little remorse when dealing it out. He sent them scouring the land for whispers, rumors, stories, gossip, word or news concerning Felt. He drove them out of his shack shaking a stick of dynamite. “Out! Out!”

He drove himself relentlessly. He did not tire until he perfected striking a hand off a wristwatch at 500 paces. The locals allowed him wide berth. In the saloons they lifted a cup to his good health and prosperity. They elected him sheriff for seven consecutive terms. He swelled with pride, yet he preserved a thin head due to his lust to find his foe.

At long last a hint of Felt arrived. One of his cadres had returned. He told the lone gunman how they had Felt squarely in their gun sites and had shot him several times. A pool of blood spread out under his belly. Then they went over to exult in their victory. Yet the murdered Felt had come alive. He shot all of us in the throats. “Only I am still living.” Then he collapsed and died of internal hemorrhage.

“The fools!” the lone gunman muttered as he rode south after Felt. He goaded his horse faster. “They should have left Felt for me.”

6. At the Riverbed

The trail died out. He stared into a dried riverbed. Suddenly he began to rave with such vehemence it seemed as if his temples would explode.

His lips bled. He arched his back and clapped his hands in some African rhythm. He ranted and raved as if possessed. Spent and doubled over, he watched the riverbed turn bright crimson and out of the earth sprang pools and streamlets of blood erupting with such force and profusion that soon the river flowed with blood boiling and surging southward.

He set up camp for the night at the riverbank. He took out from his pack a crystal globe and scryed for information while humming Hindu chants and bits of mantra stolen from passing monks and gypsies in perennial search for work on the railroad.

The windswept surface of the moon looked down on him and wondered. He despaired of using the crystal globe to his advantage. Putting it aside and he took out the ghost machine bought from the panderers of the latest technologies from out east.

He pressed in the wheezer and worked the soundless bells hoping to catch a ghost. He considered the likelihood of snaring one here difficult and wheezed and worked almost three hours until the desire had almost dried up and become a ghost of itself. Then he caught one.

The machine dinged and donged mindlessly so much the lone gunman fretted he had goofed and wished he had left the machine back home. Then suddenly it stopped. A ghost pint-sized but manifest appeared and said imperiously, “You!”

The lone gunman drew his gun straight at the ghost’s throat.

“You must be joking, Joseph,” the ghost admonished him. “I am only an illusion casting about for an entrance to the world, and you want to shoot me? Go ahead!”

The lone gunman grimaced, “This must be a real ghost since he knows my Christian name, and the Lord knows a name is a powerful means of control.” He wiped a tear from his eye. The panderers hadn’t cheated him.

The ghost waited for Joseph to ask a question or to send him on a mission procuring women, booze, news, jewels, the grail, stolen objects from the Jews locked in the Vatican catacombs or other ill-gotten loot. The lone gunman stared at the ghost. “My magic is deep.”

The ghost yawned and wiped dust from its brow. “This world is cheaply made if it is so unclean.”

The lone gunman re-holstered his gun. “What’s that you jabbered?”

The ghost buttoned his lips.

Joseph thought the ghost resembled someone he knew.

“Entirely possible,” answering the lone gunman’s thought. “I am shaped partially by you, and I could assume that of anyone you desire.”

Joseph pondered this. He picked up the ghost and held it in his palm, examining it from all sides. “You are sexless.”

It smiled. “I could fix that. Has it been that long you’ve smelt a woman?”

He nodded.

It kicked the machine and it rattled. This triggered a rumination that delved deep under the folds of the lone gunman’s brain into his tortured libido. It brought forth from the fiery depths of his memory the image of a girl he once loved. And behold! There she stood sparkling in beauty, though if he looked too hard, he could see right through her. The pleasure of gazing at her was so intense.

She stepped from her filmy dress. They fell to the ground.

“Joseph,” she purred.

He followed her into the dream world where they lay together, mated, mingling their essences. The sun dappled the earth with its morning light, and he awoke with shock. The ghost had vanished.

“Back into the machine?”

He packed the machine into his bedclothes and quit the camp. The riverbed was stained a crusty red, deep scarlet as blood. He forced his horse down into the dry riverbed and followed the trail.

“The bastard is mine!”

7. The Lone Gunman in Town

The lone gunman blew into town, a frigid wind.

Bottles peeked out of his door. What a strange, twisted mien! None too pretty any girl would warrant. He hurriedly closed his shade lest the apparition think the store open and come knocking.

The lone gunman registered the shopkeeper’s odd movement. He slightly turned his horse toward Bottles’ shop, then shook away the impulse to paddle Bottles’ belly like a drum the cavalry men drum when on a rampage through the wigwams.

Instead, he shouted at the top of his lungs while lifting himself in his saddle and grinning.

The townswomen caught their skirts in their delicate hands and ran indoors. The lone gunman caught every detail. He likened the bare flesh of their legs to the dancing of the whores in the firelight.

The saloon was dead ahead. He rode straight down the center of town. He had the strongest urge to shoot out the plate glass windows but quelled it just barely. Once calming the quivering musculature of his shooting hand and generally smoothing his appearance so as to approximate generally accepted decorum, he reigned in his horse and tied her to the post. He failed to take note that the post’s head was cunningly carved into the shape of a man’s head. Perhaps he was too intent on entering the bar and slaking his thirst.

He strode into the bar.

“Just come new into town”‘ the barkeep asked.

The lone gunman leaned heavily against the bar. Dumb questions brought him to the brink of apoplexy. “You’re a guesser, aren’t you?'”

The barkeep rolled his eyes. Sometimes he was a poor judge of character. “Another loon is all this town needs,” he thought. “Pulla beer on the house and then ride pronto out of town to any place you fancy.”

The lone gunman massaged his jaw. The glint in his eyes darkened to steely gray. “After the beer,” he swore to himself, “we’ll see who vacates this place.”

A foaming V shaped glass cold to the touch slid down the bar top into the lone gunman’s hand. He tipped his hat to the barkeep’s finesse. The beer calmed the volcano in his gut so completely he forgot his promise to shoot the barkeep for his flippancy.

“You’re an intelligent man,” he said to the fellow standing next to him nodding into his glass. “I can tell by the receding hairline, large forehead and prominent eyes. Are you a scholar?”

Simpson shot the lone gunman a look of dreary resignation contemplating the stupidity of human small talk and responded, “What makes you think so?”

The lone gunman caught a memory of a gleam in this cowboy’s eye. “I’ll buy the next round.”

Simpson swung his newfound companion a look of appreciation. “I’m Simpson.”

“Ever so glad to make the acquaintance, Simpson. Bartender! Render this man any spirit he might ask for. I’ll pay.”

The barkeep shot the newcomer a glance of distrust and then shrugged it off. “What mind is it of mine what strange folk come into town for a spell. It’s a free country since the War of Slavery was won by the Union.”

The lone gunman led Simpson to an empty table away from the bar. “So, we can talk privately. I have an offer that will bring you benefits in this life and the next.”

Simpson followed the shrewd back of his friend. “A gunman?” he surmised from the cocky gait.

They sat. A small period of silence ensued.

Simpson weighed his options, and finding none, stayed seated.

“Family?’ the lone gunman asked.

“I never met the right woman, mister. There aren’t many unattached sweethearts in these parts.”

“Is that so?” looking at Simpson. He was puzzled. He had seen many women on his ride through town.

“I’ve slept with a few,” Simpson added asserting his manliness.

The lone gunman stroked his fine guns. “On the flats outside of town, Simpson, at the small of dawn some women gather, whether real or ghost I cannot tell, but they hunger beauteous in the moonlight.”

Simpson’s eyes glittered. “What do you make of it?”

The lone gunman cracked a smile. “A woman is life.”

“How do you tell if a man speaks the truth or smokes a crooked pipe?’ Simpson asked.

The lone gunman extended his grin and put one of his guns on the table. He spun it around.

Simpson watched as it slowed and slowed and finally stopped with its snout pointing at his chest.

“You’ve been a winner all your life, haven’t you?’

“I once imagined I was. Now look at me.”

The lone gunman’s eyes penetrated Simpson to the core. “I say you’re as good as dead.”

“Why?” He was slightly shocked. “What is your name?”

The lone gunman paused. “I’m from the north. My name would mean nothing to you. Call me Johnson.” He chose the first name that occurred to him.

The name triggered a memory in Simpson. Before he knew what he was saying he asked, “Have you heard about the murderers who crucified a man named Johnson a few years ago? You related?”

“No,” narrowing his eyes to slits, by nature sensitive to the slightest nuance. “Were you one of those murderers yourself?”

“No!” blurted Simpson surprised at the implication of his guilt in such a ghastly crime. “I was standing by the bar where you met me when it happened.”

The lone gunman had sized up Simpson to the tiniest increment. He reholstered his gun. “Up north I represent the law.”

Simpson stared with dread. The nearness of the law unnerved him. “Are you accusing me with a hand in that outrageous death?”

“What you said simply fingers you as a suspect in the crime, Simpson. You cannot run.”

“It’s all only gossip, Johnson.”

“You’re not the type to gossip, Simpson. You are more likely to nibble at the cheese of braggadocio like a farting mouse.”

Simpson laughed. He had an infectious laugh that could lighten any mood. “I don’t believe a man of your looks could ever be elected sheriff. You are too ugly and forbidding.”

The lone gunman weighed the taunt. “You insult me?”

Simpson gently touched the lone gunman’s sleeve. “It was a joke. You misconstrue me.’

“So you have a sense of humor, Simpson?”

His eyes spread wide in awe. A woman, nay, a goddess, sensuality steaming from her pores, was born out of the blue, a picture of pure sexuality. She just appeared out of a haze of smoke and snuggled close to the lone gunman who angled his head to see her face.

She was demure.

“Where have you been?” He ejaculated.

“Out,” she purred, “wandering the flats.”

Simpson’s jaw dropped in amazement. “If women such as she wandered the flats, what else did the world hold in store?”

“Do you like me, Simpson?”

The lone gunman slammed his fist on the table. “Your mine!”

“Now, Joseph,” she winked. “You’re too jealous. I can be for everyone.”

The lone gunman shook with rage.

Simpson knew he courted danger yet he found himself transfixed.

She brought her lips to the lone gunman’s and kissed him full on the mouth. Like a screw turning looser the lone gunman’s rage stepped down until it became a cipher and then disappeared. So did the urge to choke Simpson slowly diminish.

The lone gunman sweated. “Did you look, Simpson? Is your dick broken? You can only dream of women like this one,” snickering as he felt for her nipple.

When they kissed she pressed her full bodice against his chest.

“Because if you did look I’ll snuff you out as quick as I snuffed out my mother.”

She pushed the lone gunman’s hand away. “You are vulgar sometimes, Joe.”

Simpson was mesmerized. He had never seen a woman so lovely. He scarcely responded to the lone gunman’s threats except to dumbly nod.

“I’d wager a thousand you were the instigator of that crucifying group, Simpson. I can see you blessing the men, sanctifying their grim intent, laying out the plan, choosing the victim, and mocking the true event. Did you even light the pyre of faggots?”

Simpson snapped out of his reverie at that last word. “What?’

“You knew this man Johnson, Simpson. What did he die for?”

“He was a Greek or maybe one of the lost tribes of Israel that had migrated to Scotland. None could determine the facts. He traced his lineage back to the Merovingians from France. This Johnson sermonized passionately against the evils of the flesh, madam, if you’ll excuse the meaning. Then the vigilantes found him in flagrante with the wife of the redoubtable Parson Strange. He had bedded all of the nubile young ladies.”

“But, Simpson,” she softly objected, “I am not made from the rib of Adam.”

“I believe you, Dolly,” he gushed. “Do you mind if I call you that?”

Dolly shook her head. She rather liked the name.

The lone gunman meanwhile had gathered the threads of Simpson’s story, “Some vigilantes gathered?”

“They were more vicious than a pack of starving dogs. They wrapped him in a heavy cloth and dragged him to the graveyard where they nailed him to the cross.”

“You were never married?” the lone gunman inquired.

“No,” furrowing his brow. “Why the same question? My girl shut up her pajamas and never let me have a look after that incident. In fact she moved clear out of the county somewhere further south. I think she went along with an injun.”

“So you still hold that you were involved only on the periphery of events?” the lone gunman asked.

“The hysteria reached a feverish pitch. In the end I lost my ambition.”

The lone gunman curtailed the conversation. “You’re rich, Simpson,” snarling.

“I’m practically penniless for all that matters.”

“I mean, you jackass, you’re rich in lies!”

“I sold my last gold claim out in yonder hills. I have nothing.'”

The lone gunman lunged across the table and took Simpson by the collar trying to strangle him.

Simpson managed to break the hold and slipped away with half his shirt. “Are you berserk?”

The lone gunman stamped his feet in frustration. He reached for his guns.

Simpson snatched a look at Dolly before hightailing it out of the saloon just a nick ahead of the lone gunman bullets.

Dolly was smoking. The volcano in the lone gunman’s heart roared with flame. “I need to kill.”

Dolly pulled him by the rawhides back into the seat and enveloped him with her scent. “Hush, my sweet savage prince. You’re too loud. Use subtlety.”

He sipped at his beer. “But that is my strength.”

“Once you were strong, Joe. Examine the roads you have followed to this present moment. Are you not merely a-strut the world like a cock unloosed amidst weak demoralized humans?”

The lone gunman looked at her askance. “Didn’t I create you?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “What is true love and who loves truly? I am magic, Joe.”

The lone gunman liked her looks so much he could forget everything else for a year. “But,” he thought, “a woman’s looks eventually fail.”

“Is my dress tawdry?’ as if she was hurt by his thought.

The lone gunman shook his head. “You are too beautiful for words, my lovely. To describe you the words die and become ghosts.”

“A fanatic like you could end up on the cross, Joe.”

The lone gunman had never considered the possibility of crucifixion as his end. “Dolly, many other malefactors besides me run amuck in the world. Every popinjay has his own inviolate end.”

“I agree. Are not men tiny candles in the great flame of Hell?”

“‘Simpson was a liar, Dolly, no two ways about it.”

“And I think you are a stout swine and a Cassanova.”

“I’m what?” he blustered.

“An artist, Joe,” stroking his hair and calming him.

“I grew up in an artistic household. My father and mother painted each other until my Dad panicked and my Mom slept with every milkman who loitered on the porch.”

“You shot her in the stomach?”

“I cleaned out her womb, Dolly. The wags say I came out of it and entered babyhood.”

“‘And then you grew up to become the dreaded gunman from up north.”

“Ah that,”with some measure of satisfaction, “is the story of my life.”

8. Felt Fired Upon

The nature of the world bewilders the strong, overwhelms the weak, and laughs at the dead.

Felt read the statement twice wondering what the author meant. “Was this a pessimistic outlook or a realistic appraisal of the odds?”

Someone had written this message on a wooden cross that looked like a cemetery marker. The burial field was on the other side of town. He had never seen a sign like this before either in the north or the south.

He stood at a crossroads at the edge of the populated area and wondered who in the future would venture down these roads after all now living were dead. He liked to walk at the edge of the polis where lurked banditry and other evils. He felt alone. He kicked at the world and raised a cloud of dust.

“Symbolic.”

The gunmen notched their sites on Felt and fired.

At just that instant Felt bent low to the ground to marvel at a brightly sequined seashell his boot had uncovered. The volley of the guns pounded his ears as the bullets whistled overhead. He instinctively hit the ground and lay perfectly still.

The gunmen gave a hoot of triumph. Dishonor weighed on them like a feather. They slowly ambled over to inspect their prey.

Felt had cut himself with his knife so that blood oozed out from beneath his body.

The gunmen gloated as they fit the toes of their boots under him to flip the body over to see if any life clung to him still. Felt drew his gun and shot two of his assailants in the throat before they could blink, and kicked the third so savagely in the groin he doubled over and rattled for death.

Felt grinned at the inner panorama of past battles he had fought that now flooded his consciousness. He crushed the bones of the firing hand of the one still alive and then hoisted him up to a sitting position.

“Comfortable?”

The gunman shook his head. “I am dreaming, aren’t I?’

Felt stripped him of his gun and then crushed his shinbone with his boot. “You are naked, mister, remember that when you meet your Maker.” Then he walked off down the road toward town.

The gunman gnashed his teeth in pain and bitter recognition at his predicament. “Will I ever find vengeance?” His personal demon anxiously hovered over him. He crawled over to his companions who had traversed beyond the pale. Their condition pushed his mind over into insanity and delirium. The tether snapped and he fainted.

To staunch the blood Felt held his hand over his self inflicted wound. Blood caked his shirt. “I ought to go see the Parson.”

The church was not far. He could see its steeple. He stumbled into the Parson’s office.

Parson Strange eyed him dubiously. “Snake bit you?”

Felt laughed. The snake that had tricked Eve. “I need a bandage and a chair. In a short time I will be as good as new.”

“You do look a bit piqued.” He shook a drawer loose from his medical cabinet and fished out a coil of bandages. He lifted Felt’s shirt and saw the knife slash. “Nice butcher job.”

“You’re a real hoot,” a glint of appreciation for the Parson’s humor cracked a smile. “I’ll recover soon enough.”

Strange nodded his head. Felt was an unusual man. Impenetrable really. As he wrapped the bandages around Felt he prayed to the Lord Christ for his sake. Then he lit a cigar and blew the smoke into the afternoon breeze that came in through the open windows of the church. “I might as well confess it to you, Felt. I feel as if something remarkable has overcome you. Do you know what it is?”

“Why, Parson,” surprised by the remark. “I haven’t changed a bit.”

The Parson cast a knowing glance toward Felt. “I am better acquainted with you than that. Let’s start with your blood soaked shirt. What in the world happened to you?”

Felt drew in his breath. “Well, Strange, nothing really. Gunmen from an old enemy tried to armbush me out there and a seashell saved me.”

Strange bit his tongue. “An old enemy? You have no enemies here that would go that far to kill you, Felt. Your story confuses me.”

“I’ll try to make myself clear.”

The Parson settled into a chair.

“Have you considered the problem of murder?” Felt asked.

“The problem does not exist. It is prohibited in the Bible.”

“You are familiar with Cain and Abel. The first murder had no cause,” said Felt.

“No murder is justified,” added the Parson.

“Yet Cain did not suffer death in return. His retribution for spilling his brother’s blood was a mark on his forehead and exile,” Felt continued.

“The relevance to the present situation is rather thin. Are you suggesting that the blood caked on your shirt is part of the blood that soaked the earth as a result of Abel’s murder?” Strange asked in disbelief. “How,” he thought, “could anything that occurred countless years ago, if at all, have a connection to the present?” It eluded his understanding.

“You are wondering why I hearken back to the Old Testament. Is the blood of Christ more real to you?”

“Of course. The sacrament is holy.”

“The veneration of the cross disturbs me.”

“Whatever do you mean? Are you a Puritan?”

“Strange, three men ambushed me.”

“Why did they attack you?”

“Curiosity about a seashell saved me.”

Strange opened his eyes wide. “A seashell? In these parts?”

“Exactly, Parson. These gunmen climbed out of my past and rode after me, maybe for years wandering the earth, until they found me.”

The Parson buttoned his top button. “I think we ought to walk on the church paths and talk of this further.’

They crunched the dirt beneath their heels as they walked.

Strange posed the question, “Only since Christ has there been history. How could there exist anything older?”

Felt considered the query. “I admit I have never heard of the year zero, so perhaps history did start when you say. However, to explain. I would have to reveal certain matters about my past.’

The Parson held up his hand, “Is not the past like a dream?”

“Is memory accurate?’ he said softly.

“Better that you forget it and command the present,” counseled Strange.

Felt held his silence. Better to not tell the Parson in any event.

“Will you be worshipping with us this Easter?” he asked Felt.

Felt demurred. “I have never joined you in worship, Parson. You know that.”

The Parson took a hymnal from his pocket and opened it randomly. He thought he would impress upon Felt the unique joy of deep faith in Christianity. “Odd. There is a snatch of newsprint pressed between these pages.’

Felt’s heart pounded. What does it say, Parson?”

The Parson read, “What the living seek in vain, the dead are joined in its adoration.” He looked at the paper in puzzlement.

Felt knew it was an unmistakable portent that danger was very near.

“It’s a message like I said before, Strange, that the past has come upon me unawares.”

The Parson replaced the hymnal into his pocket. “Do you really assign that meaning to this obscure line? It might carry a message about the need while we stay above the earth to follow after the cross.”

“Strange, how else to explain its similarity to the message on the cemetery marker before the attack. My shell of anonymity has been pierced.”

The Parson grunted. “I remember when you came into this town some years ago. No one had ever heard of you or what to make of you.”

Felt agreed. “I came to town on a long shot that all would be forgotten, but I will have to leave, Parson. Nothing happens by coincidence.”

They both fell into thoughtful silence for a moment.

Then Felt asked, “Have you met the prophetess newly arrived in town?”

“I have heard rumors of her remorseless journey to our parsonage, but I chose to ignore all mention of her until my hand was forced.”

9. An Itinerant Rabbi

Felt went home. Early next morning he let loose from his manse a bird he used occasionally to reconnoiter. He could scry the location of his enemies. However, this was not always reliable.

He watched as the bird glided upward to a high vantage point. Then the bird swept in a long lazy arc. Long minutes passed, longer than usual, and Felt began to despair that he would succeed. Sometimes miser destiny too closely holds his hand to his vest. Though the bird could see all, it was clear to Felt that not all could be accurately assessed.

The Lone Gunman that morning had woken early on the flats. Dolly was gone though he couldn’t tell where. He was certain he held her in his arms after a night of torrid sex. She was inexhaustible. He had kissed her madly, fondled her nipples until he rasped his fingertips, licked her cunt until his tongue was coarse to the touch, her aroma filled his nostrils still, and then pumped her until his dick ran dry.

He had never encountered a woman so hungry. He sighed.

A bird flew at an odd angle overhead. He sensed a long fingernail pointing at him and found this discomfiting. He pulled out his gun. He shot slightly wide of his mark. He swore a torrent of epithets.

The bird instantly soared to a higher altitude. The bullet meanwhile went awry. It plummeted earthward grazing the scalp of a gravedigger who had just finished his work at the cemetery. The gravedigger blessed himself, “Mother Mary,” and wiped the sweat and blood from his brow. He let his eye wander the empyreal blue sky. “Strange and immutable are the ways of fate,” thought he. Men in such employ could at a trice wax philosophically.

The bird did not return. Felt considered this a sign. Events had turned malevolent. Still he chose as he had for all the mornings since his awakening to pray.

An itinerant rabbi he had encountered years ago revealed secrets about many matters of concern to Jews. At first Felt hid the fact that he was a Jew. The rabbi said he knew Felt was Jewish because of his odor. “Your forefathers stood at Sinai and the sweetness lingers still.”

“That you have not prayed is of small worry compared to the glory of return, teshuva, to the path to the seat of the Lord.” He sold him a pair of tefillin, the leather straps bound around the left arm and around the head with two leather boxes affixed to these straps.

Felt carefully wrapped the tefillin on his arm and head and said the blessings as he had been shown. Instantly he experienced a heightened sensibility unlike his normal waking state. He stood facing the rising sun and from memory said the prayers the old rabbi had taught him.

During the ‘Eighteen Blessings’ he saw in his mind’s eye the presence of God descend onto the shoulders of Abraham, who fashioned it into a brightly hammered brilliantly lit shield. He beheld the miracle that death was no more. Abraham placed the shield over that immense expanse between life and death and made a bridge over which all could pass. Then the name of God, the letters of which were etched onto the shield as letters of fire, blazed a bright orange. It engraved in him the expanse of knowledge and depth of mind to appreciate what his eyes beheld.

Felt yearned to join ever closer with this fire. Yet it kept him apart lest he be consumed, for he had not yet the purity to pass through. He carried grievances and sadness unending. He harbored a body corruptible. The thousands of years in exile and the destruction of the Temple had proven almost beyond endurance

Then Felt heard a sound unlike any earthly sound. A trumpet resounded from all four corners of the earth. He heard the joyous return of the judges of old who once ruled in perfect righteousness. He saw two stout beams that upheld the world and upon this world a city of unbridled light rose up and upon its central dome a flower of untold beauty grew. He heard the voice of all the ingathered people praying and then saw the fulfillment when the Presence of God reunited with its feminine half, the Shechinna, ending the pain of exile. He took three steps back, closed his eyes, and returned to normal consciousness.

He carefully exited from this sacred space while removing the tefillin and placing them into his saddle bag. He walked onto his porch and called for Vanity. She hurried over the dry grass to her master’s manse. As she ran, there broke the bubbles of roads and half formed nightmares torn, creased and beheaded by the changing tides of the night. Of the tumult and turmoil lightly sown into the fields by death she uprooted, and charged to Felt’s side. He stroked her snout, saddled her, and then trotted to town.

10. The Parson and the Prophetess

Felt laughed inwardly at the tragic nature of humankind. Mummified candidates for the cemetery, stragglers, rattlers of chains, salesmen, borrowers of time, the childishly innocent, the impaled, junks dealers, women with bejeweled sleeves, all wait breathlessly for the hangman’s noose.

He loosed his collar because of the heat and the sweat dripping down his neck. Vanity slowly advanced down Main St. He could see the Parson and the Prophetess gesticulating madly at each other. He tied Vanity to a post and walked to within easy earshot.

“You’re the devil inhabiting men’s dreams, you sot!’ cried Strange at the top of his voice. His face grew so red it resembled a ripe orange, a fruit rare in these parts.

The Prophetess clapped the Parson about the ears. “You sniveler, cheapskate, bag of vomit gas, you’ve stolen the wealth of this town for years. I know your game. You’ll carry your own nailed coffin to the grave for no one will want to give you a decent burial were your corpse found in the nave of your church. I’ll truly bring these men salvation!”

The sides of the Parson’s head smarted. “You hide behind your supposed knowledge of the divine. Prophetess indeed! You are a whore who eats men inside her own bosom!”

The Prophetess grew madder. “You liar! You don’t know the secret places of a woman. Come to my boudoir at nine o’clock tonight. My lingerie is European.”

A sudden calm settled onto the two combatants.

“At nine tonight?” the Parson asked her.

The Prophetess bent over and revealed more of her cleavage. “Yes, at nine.”

The Parson’s features grew reflective. The tide has turned. Is it truly love?

She touched Strange’s cheek with motherly care. “Tata,” as she turned and slowly walked into a petticoat store.

A cloud of men followed her offering advice and their services. She led them by the noses not unlike a beacon that in the foggy night leads ships to harbor.

Felt pushed through the now dispersing crowd. He slapped Strange across the back. Strange nodded.

“In the old West passions swiftly overturn and become their opposite.”

“Is that some kind of poetry?”

“No poetry adequately describes this scenery, let alone the cooing of two lovebirds, Parson.”

“Only God Himself could paint such a picture, Felt.”

“Of course. But can you explain the mystery of love?”

Strange shook his head. “No. It’s as if a thunderclap hit me.”

“Why, it’s a wonderful morning!” exclaimed Felt. “Let’s amble over to Bottles’ shop for a bottle of medicine, a licorice, and an amorous titledaddy.”

Strange mopped his brow. “I do need a shot of strength, Felt, of that I am certain.’

Felt led him to Bottles’, leading merchandiser of ointments and injun medicine.

11. Bottles Helps the Parson

Bottles’ shop rested in shadow, something peculiar in these parts where the sun always seemed to be directly overhead and not a cloud to be seen for miles. Bottles hummed incessantly. Today he hummed a childhood song the words to which he had forgotten except that he remembered the song spoke poignantly about a princess, ‘Mary, and a Hundred Soldiers of God’.

He felt contentment like no other when he was alone amid the fine articles in his shop. He had arranged everything just so. Felt and the Parson hollered Bottles from the street. Bottles saw them approach. “Soon,” thought he, “we will sip at the noisesome font of conversation.”

They swung open the door and entered.

“Parson, I’ve never seen you so happy. Is that a smile that dances at your lips?” asked Bottles.

“Yes, he has undergone a change as wide, deep and unpredictable as the sea. The Prophetess charmed him, Bottles, and not insignificantly. She tickled his balls so deftly they fell into the folds of her skirt like two billiard balls.”

Bottles chuckled while the Parson turned his attention to the rows of cunningly shaped vials containing stuff, smoke, ash, and perfume drawn, stuffed and tinctured from exotic plants not native to the west.

Bottles noted the twinkle in the Parson’s eyes. “Does some trifle interest you, Parson?”

Strange took out of his vest pocket the half smoked cigar he had snuffed out at the onset of his meeting with the Prophetess. He lit it with fanfare. “I hesitate to commit myself, I must admit that at the outset.”

“Is this an ordeal for you? Do you love her? Is it lust?” Bottles asked. “I can put you at ease. I have on my shelves lotions, soaps, pastes and other embodiments that will enhance the delights to be found in the flesh.”

Strange gave no answer. Truly he didn’t know how to respond.

Felt chided him, “No words from one such as you, Strange?”

“It is like the first time I climbed into the pulpit. I shook. I trembled. Would my soul be equal to the task that lay ahead? There stood The Adversary; I could feel his presence crouching at the door of the church. Then The Lord came to my rescue. A torrent of words poured out of me and pushed The Enemy far away. I knelt in awe. It was deeper and more profound than I had even dreamed. And heretofore, I thought myself to be stoic.”

“In the west,” opined Felt, “stoicism is oft the key to victory.”

Bottles could not contain his impatience with this blather. He chose a handful of potions and aromatic liquids from his shelves. He put them on the counter in front of Strange. “Though the bottles are oddly shaped, Parson, their effects are most direct and unmistakable.”

The Parson gingerly touched the shaved glass jars. “You are a marvel.”

“And you are a sweet morsel,” responded Bottles.

Felt interceded. This was all too sticky for him. “Pretty wares, Bottles, that certainly, but I propose you bring out from your cabinets stronger weaponry upon which our friend might rely and become a prince among lovers. Have you alchemical mixtures?”

Bottles snorted in impatience and hurt at being so rudely interrupted. “Manhood is not a commodity that can be bought and sold, Felt. The organ grinder plays his song, however delightful the melody the monkeys cavorting will never be men.”

Strange awoke out his reverie. “The church fathers concluded at the Epicene Synod shortly after the death and resurrection of our savior that monkeys will never evolve into men and neither will men ever devolve into monkeys. Regarding my situation, gentlemen, I prefer to affix her like a horsed knight pieces the armor of his opponent on the field of glory.”

“You stir the emotions, Parson. Is she the fair maiden awaiting your return from the field as you carry the champion’s pennant flying at your staff’s end?” asked Felt.

“Such fine talk dampens virility,” cautioned Bottles. “Knighthood is dead.”

“The church vibrantly lives, is that not so?’ asked Felt. “And has not the congregation profited with Strange in the pulpit, Bottles?”

“Have you worked out in your mind the Easter message?” asked Bottles.

“At the moment my thoughts are in turmoil.”

“No better muse than the Lord,” agreed Felt. “But do you believe that this sudden affection for the Prophetess is well formed? Will it not roil the congregants?”

The Parson coughed with unease in his belly. “Perhaps it will not be so widely known.”

“A vain hope, Strange.” muttered Felt. “The gossips already have you taking suck at her nipples.”

“Like an infant,” whispered Bottles. “Do you suppose, Strange,” he asked in a louder voice, “that she loves you?”

“I hope that she does, Bottles. I admit that I am unworthy.”

Felt grew alarmed at the Parson’s demeanor whose brow was drawn with lips drooping. “What a fantastic change from the proud, prancing Parson,” he thought. “Bring, Bottles, a cloak for the Parson.”

Bottles hurried off into a back room where he kept haberdashery and other masculine articles. He returned moments later with a handsome black cloak draped over his arms.

“Try it on, Strange,” Felt urged.

The Parson put the cloak around his shoulders. A new being seemed to fill its interior.

“You look mysterious and other worldly,” gushed Bottles.

“I feel absolutely royal. Thank you, gentlemen.” He winked and then vanished out a side door with a flourish of the cloak’s skirt.

Felt also bade Bottles goodbye after paying the bill.

12. The Paron and the Prophetess Remove Their Clothes

The Parson hugged the shadows in the lengthening dusk now bringing the daily hoped for surcease from the sun. Evening descended miraculously from the sky to settle over a town awash in uncertainty and self doubt. How long would the drought last? Was it the fault of the Jews? The killers of Christ had set the table for Satan to sup at his ease and what more like Hell than hell on earth.

No one out west at this period of time had ever seen a Jew. Some elders of the Church, the Parson knew, suspected the Jews hid themselves well by blending in with society at large hoping to escape their collective doom. The truth does not long consort with liars though they be the best of chameleons and she will kick them like pricks out of the marriage bed.

The great ocean of sand that was the world shifted ceaselessly under the lunar influences. The Parson struggled for sure footing lest he fall victim to the undertow. For are we not all puppets manipulated by one master puppeteer?

He wrapped himself tighter in his cloak. He thought he might disappear into the blackness of the night. “Am I man enough?” he asked though he heard no definitive answer.

Who could define manhood? The Lone Gunman? He who surrendered his manhood to a ghost of his own devising? Perish the thought.

At last Strange summoned his courage, hitched his trousers and stepped out from the shadows toward the center of town where the Prophetess waited impatiently for his approach. He knocked on her door. Two young men ushered him to her private chamber behind two French doors. Perhaps, thought Strange eagerly, “the rumor of her European lingerie is no fabrication.”

“So, Strange,” she slyly asked him in greeting, “You have come?”

Her nudity took him aback. He had imagined wooing her, undressing her, easing her out of her garments if any got in the way, her stockings, corset, negligee, silks, and turban. But this? So soon! He shook from consternation.

“Are you shivering, Parson?” she asked.

He could not speak. He stood as one erect staring at her bosom. After a fierce struggle he found his tongue. “I thought we would talk first.”

The Prophetess cupped her ear. “Did you say something, Strange?’

“Talk. I suggest we talk before dessert.”

“Let us put off our repast.” She lit another taper by her bed and sitting on it cross legged motioned for the Parson to sit in a chair opposite her. “We’ll converse like two Hindu sages who have overcome the slavery to sex and every other bond that holds all mortals to this coil.”

She pointed to the chair and Strange followed her command. Strange sat and viewed her overall as a sailor might view the ship on which he is about to embark.

“At first flush, there is a certain beauty about her.'”

“You may call me Majesty,” she told him without the slightest trace of humor.

“I am puzzled,” he confided to her, “I had imagined you would appear as ethereal as an angel in my dreams. I don’t doubt that you are real. I doubt my dreams.”

“Sush, Parson,” she scolded him.

He noted her skin was creme colored, like milk. “Do you pass unknown through the world and does this hurt you?” he asked.

“Your eyes penetrate me, Strange. It is as if you are an old lover caressing me after a long absence.”

The Parson nodded. “Am I right to understand that your beauty in this realm is but a token of the greater femininity found in paradise?”

She melted just a little. “I am the Majesty and you are the Flame,” she pronounced as if ordaining royalty upon two worthies.

He sensed other presences in the room fluttering about, perhaps elves, who gathered garlands, flowers, and a crown from the lush gardens of Babylon for her brow. “How wondrous!”

‘Majesty,” he uttered, “Am I drawn nigh before the Bride?”

She answered, “These bedclothes are my marriage gown”‘

“Ah.” he spurted. “You are so perfect.”

“What is time?” she asked, “For in perfection there is no time since there is no change. I call it a prison.”

“And I am the key to unlock the secrets of Time herself,” asked the Parson.

“The blind man cannot apprehend that before which he stands. Do you see?” she asked.

“Majesty,” he whispered, “I will lower my flame and bow my head with your sweet inspiration as my beacon.”

“I am a mirror, Strange, reflecting the glory of supernal womanhood in the warm glow of my motherly graces.” She held her hands before her bosom and a feeling of maternal love bathed him.

He began to sweat. “I am uncomfortable because of the heat, Majesty.” He unclasped his cloak.

She coaxed him with her gaze. He unbuttoned his shirt and loosened his trousers.

“Naked you entered the world, Strange, and naked should you be in the temple.”

The Parson felt dizzy and he almost fell into her arms. She clutched him like a babe in swaddling clothes. He felt as if he was drowning.

She buried him in her belly and her breasts.

He swam with all his might against the tide that pulled him toward a yawning sinkhole. “Save me, Majesty, save me!” he tried to mouth, but all that were audible were moans of pleasure. Like a beached fish he came aground on her nipples and began to suck.

She allowed him to lap the milk of sleep at her breast. After a while he slept and so did she, lulled to sleep by the gentle swaying of the bed under the lunar influences.

In dream they met as lovers and made love over and over again endlessly. Finally sated, their cups overflowing, they awoke in intimate knowledge of the other.

“Shall I not tell you my first name?’ asked Strange.

The Prophetess smiled. “Are you not H.S.?”

The Parson Hiram Strange shook his head, “Yes, I am Hiram.”

13. The Parson Comes Upon A Surprise

The Parson fell back on the pillow into a shallow doze, as if he were a swimmer and the bed a shallow pool. After an indeterminate time he awoke in a blaze of terror. He tore the bed sheets from his sweaty chest. He was conscious of a void he had never felt until now. The Prophetess had vanished. She had dressed, applied lipstick and other feminine blandishments, combed her hair, and she had winked at him as she quietly closed the bedroom door. The Parson took sudden fright as only a child does that he was head only, that the Prophetess had consumed his body entire. How serene! To no longer have a body over which to worry. He wiggled his toes, slapped his thighs and examined his manhood. The bedclothes were crumpled on the floor. He didn’t care. He pulled on his trousers, and thanking the Lord, departed in haste.

A single gull flew over town. “O, Parson!” the Prophetess cried out. “O, Parson!” she repeated. “Over here.”

The Parson squinted in the bright morning sunlight. He coldly acknowledged her lest anyone suspect them of amorous ties. He waved and slowly approached her.

“Hiram,” she said when he was close, “Are you feeling well? Strange took her hand and said, “Quiet, Dear, let us retire out of the public eye.”

“Nonsense,” she retorted, stung by the remark. She resented being hidden by men. “Was last night a lie?”

The Parson bit his lip in consternation. “Was I adequate?”

“Need you doubt yourself? We can discuss those details later.”

“Details?” he wondered aloud. “You were markedly eager last night.”

“You noticed?”

“I have never lain by a woman so desirous of me.”

“That itself is a curiosity. Hiram,” she pouted, “I bled last night.”

“You’re a virgin?” he asked incredulously.

“No. I have my period. Last night you entered me while I was bloody inside.”

Strange felt repelled by the notion. He didn’t remember any blood. “Are you more primitive when you have your blood?”

“I am, Parson. At those times I can barely hold back from the most orgasmic urges.”

“You mean, Prophetess, the mixture of seed and menstrual fluid is a rite?”

“You’re correct, Parson.”

He couldn’t imagine. “Pray, tell. I wasted my seed.”

“No, Strange, not at all.

He grew a bit fearful. “What did you do with it?”

“I husbanded it, of course. Is that not what every wife does with the little extra her husband leaves her?”

“For what purpose?” he asked.

“To create a manikin, Parson.”

“Is such an act possible? To wantonly create life?”

“There are secrets, Strange, that women speak of only amongst themselves. Every woman desires a manikin. It is just that I know how.”

“Are you versed in arcane knowledge?” his jaw ajar.

“I have fashioned the shape of my manikin out of the caked blood I collected over many moons, Strange. I required the seed of a man to provide the intellect, and I had to collect it in the appropriate way.”

“So you will not be heavy with child?”

“No. My manikin will conquer the world!”

The Parson was shocked at her naked ambition.

She stroked Strange’s jaw. “Why so sad? Am I not pretty?”

He thought he would tell her of his wild fear when awakening but he was ashamed. “You are a mystery,” he managed to say.

She hugged him and the Parson collapsed into her bosom. He went limp like a washrag. He stared at her bugeyed.

“Hiram, she breathed, “Am I your bride?”

Strange nodded, transfixed by her beauty.

14. A Short Meditation on Infinity

Felt was uneasy. At long last the stalemate had eroded. He sensed a patch of seething hatred growing nearby. A menace. Criminals hurt not only themselves and their victims, but also the community at large. No manner of sacrifice will bring succor. That time has long since passed. Criminality when painted with large strokes chokes the angel of prosperity hovering over a town until it faints from exhaustion. Destitution follows, if not rapidly, then in due course, slowly and inexorably. Iniquities’ repercussions endure sadly for generations.

Then why not wipe the miscreants off the earth. Would not the face of the earth laugh in merriment? In these dusty climes the townspeople avoided starvation by dint of great struggle. The sun glared in its dive toward the horizon many miles west to burn the people there to black.

Felt doubted another day would come. He listened carefully and he heard the pounding of waves. Has God wrought another flood? This he could not discount. He wondered at the passage between reality and illusion and where on that path he stood.

The notion of infinity came to mind. Evil, he posited, was the simpler infinity, that of all the integers starting from 1. Good was the still greater infinity of all the points between 0 and 1 on the number line. The number line though severely restricted to such a small space held more diversity and hence had more potentiality and therefore humor. All the integers drove itself and everyone mad by the unending terror of similarity.

He saw the carved head on the post just outside the saloon. He had never noticed it before. Had it just come into existence, an unintended consequence of his thought? The head slowly turned its eyes to and fro in a slow arc as if a warder. The eyes froze when they apprehended Felt’s proximity. He was overwhelmed by repugnance for this bodiless creature whose very grimace bespoke inner torment. For what cause? Had he martyred himself? Did an unjust god hold sway over him? Was he simply born into this plight? Worthy of pity? At whose bosom did he suck?

The head regarded Felt and then expelled a great breath. “Do you know me?’ it asked.

“Why do you ask?” said Felt, “Are you certain you have an identity?”

“I know you,” it said, “and that provides a sufficient floor on which to erect an identity.”

“Have you invoked the goddess of love who will bestow on any of her choosing the mask of desire?” Felt asked.

“She visited me only last night. I saw her dancing in front of me nude,” said the head.

“Ah,” concluded Felt, “then the gift of speech is decided. You are the font of poetry.”

“I will say this much, as you have guessed that I am an oracle. I wonder how you pierced my mask?” it said.

Felt brushed aside the question. He meant to ask the head a thousand questions.

“You should pray how this night divides,” it uttered.

“What?’ asked Felt, afraid he didn’t understand this device.

The head resumed a lifeless pose; its eyes no longer wandering. Where there had been life a moment before now all was still, a death mask.

Felt touched the head with his palm to feel for a pulse. “Not a trace of life.” He adjusted his guns for instant draw. He recognized in this phenomenon of the talking head the immanence of an unspeakable danger. His fingers danced over his guns.

He surmised plots had been drawn against him in a hive of mendacity. However, try as he might he could not locate its source. Wait. He heard noise from the saloon. Shot glasses banged on the bar, charges and countercharges by the patrons, endless circular arguments, the clanging of the spittoon, foots stamping, hee hawing, bellows from foul whiskey consumed, dares, dreams spent, the hours pissed away.

Felt considered entering the saloon to individually challenge every talker as to the source of the trouble brewing. What would he say to the spirits locked in the bottles consigned to dreary end in some rotten cowboy’s belly? He withdrew.

He walked away from the saloon’s swinging doors and a shadow of anxiety melted into his heels. The shade of Bottle’s shop was drawn shut and the lights extinguished. Had all hope dwindled? Vanity had trotted off to a watering hole. The town had transformed itself into a vaguely unfriendly place. Felt was mystified by a sudden depression. A very soft wind had brought it along. It clung to him like a fog that hugs the beach during a silken rain.

A man wildly scrambled out of the saloon just before the crack of a pistol shot. Felt whirled to see the man somersault on the ground only to gather himself up in a cloud of dust to run off. Felt watched expectantly for the pursuers to come murderously through the saloon doors for their prey. But the iron tongue of the saloon fell silent. Just like the iron bowl of the sky that threatened rain but never brought a drop down onto the parched earth. “That man could have been Simpson, but I didn’t know he could move so fast.”

15. The Penitent

Parson Strange ran to his church. Fear smote his heart. It beat like the tom toms when the injuns pranced around the campfire. Wild ideas thumped in his brain. Godsoothl What had he done? An ill-advised night with a devil woman who kept the drops of his semen to make a cake. Had life risen out of yeast? He dismissed the idea, and yet, it held for him a peculiar fascination. The Bible hinted at the beginnings of life. Adam was made of dust, and Eve from his side was made, with the admixture of yeast. The biblical account did not go into that level of detail. Had the Biblical author a dislike for detail? Did Adam resemble Jesse James? An idle speculation, the Parson knew. But then, who would have guessed women still practiced the black arts. Perhaps Moloch still lived into whose mouth they tossed children to burn. Jesus died to blot out those sins. He gathered them inside himself, like a womb, impregnated by the great serpent. No other creature, only Jesus could have borne the terrible weight of the world’s sin in His belly.

The smile of relief that snake felt after releasing that sin into Jesus, what a coming! Semen did resemble yeast, sticky, white, moist. The prophetess had pricked the bubble of his manhood. Masculinity is really quite fragile. Her vagina smiled thinly at him. It had a will of its own. It overcame him so weak was he, like a babe in her arms at her breast. The embarrassment scorched his soul. He sought solace from the sad and despairing Jesus.

His savior looked up at the sky oblivious to the Parson’s dilemma. The gospel narrative had it all wrong. They’d crucified Jesus in the nuts. “Jesus knows my pain,” Strange knew.

He ran faster to his church to ask him forgiveness. A penitent knelt before the nave of eternal life in silent prayer. Her narrow shoulders shook beneath her wrap. Tears streamed down her face. “Would Jesus answer?” She wondered.

For aeons he had remained silent. From the perspective of her short life the silence might be an aberration, a result of her sin, her father’s sin, of her own dim awareness, hardly because of his absence from history. She wore a blue ribbon to tie her hair.

Strange didn’t recognize her but found her back comely. He stole forward in fear of interrupting her prayer.

She sensed his presence and turned to face him.

At first glance he looked right through her and saw the nave’s face dripping with tears. Then his normal vision returned, and he saw rightly a young woman of dainty figure pouting. He hadn’t heard of any new arrivals into town. Her plight touched him.

“You’ve been crying?” he asked.

“Yes,” she tried to smile, and her eyes sparkled with her not dry tears.

“You’re sad?”‘ Strange asked. “Why would one be sad, so young, so pretty?”

Since the prophetess he had become oddly reawakened to pleasures of the opposite sex. “I was thinking I’d never known my father,” she confessed.

“Your father?” Strange gasped. What kind of brute would have abandoned such a fine child? “What happened to him?”

She felt she had found refuge for her sorrow in this man. “He ran off with the carnival when it crossed town shortly after my birth.”

Strange was genuinely moved by the swell of her innocent bosom. “Pagans?” he blurted. “The church had long ago banned carnivals.”

“It was worse than that,” she told him softly.

“More ill?’ Strange asked. “What possibly could be more miserable than consorting with pagans and partaking in their ruinous rituals?”

She laughed joylessly, “Some jokers in the carnival tried to crucify him in a graveyard when their wagon broke an axle in a ditch.”

“Crucify? Wasn’t that a Jewish method of torture?” he asked.

She winced at the mention of any Jew. “They nailed him to the cross for expiation of their sins. They wrote ‘King of the Jokers’ on his forehead.”

“His corpse?” Strange asked. “They chose him as sacrifice plainly in imitation of Cavalry.”

“His death is uncertain,” she said.

“Then he survived?” Doubt grew in his mind. Such a method of execution was cruel and quite effective. “Why did they choose your father as victim? Was he scarred?”

“His ego was larger than proportion should allow. Perhaps they found him mad,” she admitted.

“Then you shall never know the truth of the matter.”

“Of that I cannot say, yet I fear the same. The townspeople say he was left to die, but some pilgrims pulled him down and nursed his bruises. Mostly it was his pride that was damaged.”

“Some men die of shame,” said Strange. He felt a distinct kinship with this man. “Do they say why?”

“Why?” she asked. “There is no explanation for the fact that he left in the first place.”

“Wanderlust often propels the plainest of individuals in quest for the unknown,” he said.

“Ta.” she dismissed this poppycock.

“He tired of sex with his wife I suppose,” he offered. “And of you the product,” he added.

“The rejection still stings like an asp,” she murmured.

Strange felt a swelling in his phallus. Had she noticed? “What was your father’s surname?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “Johnson.”

16. Rabbi Elisha Ben Aliyahoo

Felt lifted his eyes to look into the far distance of a parched field. The heat waves rising from the cracked and fragmented clay blurred his vision. An immensity of evil lurked in the limned shadows. Yet he was still naive, and he pressed into the field against his better judgment.

That rabbi who taught him to pray told him that he was too impetuous, too willing to rush without thinking through all the ramifications.

“Come what may,” the rabbi told him, “There is no shrinking from responsibility. The past sets the future, even the tiniest act is a thousand yards tall. Why had Rabbi Elisha Ben Aliyahoo become an apostate? He accompanied legendary Rabbi Akiva into Paradise, an achievement few of all men had ever grasped. The level of attainment to which this man had risen is almost unimaginable, yet he erred, for he mistook Metatron, an angel, for God. So august is Metatron he resembles God. When back on earth Rabbi Elisha Ben Aliyahoo visited a prostitute who named him ‘Acher’, in Hebrew the ‘Other’, for he plucked a flower for her on Shabbos, forbidden by the precept that one should do no work on the Shabbos, and he a man of immense evolution through understanding of the Law broke its supreme commandment. He probably thought, as some who have come after him, that once at the top of the mountain, it matters not how one descends. His misjudgment had numberless consequences. This name of the ‘Other’ stuck, and so he is known even today in the Talmud, causing him unending misery, which even death could not expunge.”

That part about the after death bothered Felt. Jews didn’t believe in the Christian Hell, but what exactly was the belief? Were the dead somehow conscious or only Rabbi Elisha Ben Aliyahoo?

The floating head of a bug blew past Felt’s brim and then dropped onto his boot. It laid there softly floating on the fine petrified dust his footsteps had stirred. Felt accurately pointed to this as a meaningful accident. He bent down to examine this prehistoric relic of a time when mankind worshipped insects and other repellent creatures. Woe betides those who fall into that shallow grave of atavism. He who would awaken dead things ought to think again. To his horror the lips of the bug moved.

“I need gin, Cowboy.”

Felt instinctively went to his hip flask. Thirst is a terrible way to expire. He uncapped it and doused the bug. He waited but the bug said nothing. He kicked it off his shoe as so much filth. He rearranged his holster and pulled down his brim to darken the sun’s harsh glare. He frowned; such monstrosities often portend doom. Felt knew the Lone Gunman waited for him at the far end of this dry field like some monster waiting at the edge of dreaming when the sleeper has no peg attached to wakeful reality. Mayhem might ensue yonder. He grimly set forth to meet it some miles distant yet in the desert flat and ghostlike. Perspective was difficult. He began the descent into the flats under the sun’s unrelenting fury. At the world’s end would the sun cease.

17. Immortal Life

The Prophetess was madder than fire. That damned Parson!” she muttered. “He knows my flesh. I gave it to him. What has he given me? That liar!” Lovingly she smoothed the cake of semen she had collected over many assignations. She required a last hidden ingredient the magical books never mentioned to bring forth a live manikin.

The alchemical practitioners yearned for physical immortality. In Genesis many Christian scholars discovered the first magicians in the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be of primordial rank. Unfortunately for them the Torah is an extremely terse text. Much detail and explanation had been removed. Moses broke the first tablets and brought back a heavily edited second version. The details are in the fine print that no one can read, unless he is trained from childhood. It is an oral tradition and written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, if indeed he ever existed. Christian kabbalah is an obscene joke, though there are many thoughtful followers. What Christian can read the Talmudical tracts? To hide their ignorance, they wrote authoritative books with so many details, allusions, dead ends, alluring wisps, and dull impenetrable sentences without the slightest regard to breath or truth.

Over the many centuries the encrustations on the tracts had become so monstrous they fool even the shrewdest mage whose deepest wish is to fool death. How could any scholar in the western tradition know anything about the Talmudical writings? The church fathers burned them in scorching fire. So much pustulence, they thought in their beetle brains.

The western tradition lists the great books, but they ignore one of the greatest books ever put on page, and yet they write about the Jewish scholia as if they were authorities on the subject. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Can one imagine that the rabbinical tradition would have revealed recipes for creating a live manikin, as if they wrote cookbooks with recipes showing lists of ingredients, times for heating, times for cooling, times for distillation, for the red, for the white?

The Prophetess believed she possessed the secrets to immortal life as described in the pages of the musty books she had collected over a lifetime of reading. She would settle for nothing less than physical immortality. Death is a sad subject. She had sought out teachers, attended secret meetings, watched experiments with corpses of the newly dead, had drunk liquids prescribed by mages who boasted of amazing virility, had delved into cellars with covens of witches boiling huge vats of bug juice, and had even watched yogis from afar bend themselves into fantastical shapes for the purpose of contacting Shiva, Vishnu or Brahma and other sundry gods. She had felt the effects. She swore by them.

Is there a devil that plays with people nudging them a little here then a little there to no good end? Twain’s Mysterious Stranger looked at the small beings at his feet busily going to and fro in the hubbub of daily life oblivious to the mean presence hovering smugly above their heads. Like the demiurge blotting out the true providence hidden very far overhead somewhere in the starry heavens, too far to notice, because the demiurge stole all the attention. He is a shooting star in the firmament dazzling all who look up. The nose points down. Is the snake that fooled Eve this notorious demiurge, the grand usurper who wiped clean the seat of the Lord and took it all as his own?

The Prophetess had long ago discarded the Bible. She sought the truth in the primordial tradition underlying all the major religions. Jesus traveled to India in the years between his bar mitzvah and his crucifixion. He had to learn the art of resurrection or the reversal of the crucifix. Yogis since the dim ages after the splitting of the root races had mastered the trick of cheating death. They could even hang twenty-five-pound weights from their scrotum. Does death carry scrotum in a sack underneath his enormous belly? He eats the dead at lunch.

Often the Prophetess pondered the mystery of immortality. “I’ve watched the penis most carefully. It is like and unlike a worm.” She squirmed unconsciously. “When it stands up erect it is as if it is resurrected.” The blood in her veins ran rather more warmly. “If only I could locate the juice that allows it to quicken, coagulate, and form its hardness. It pulses with life. It brings great pleasure to the erotically charged presences.”

A tear formed in her eye. She thought to collect it in her palm and then to rub it into the ball of semen. The ball was little more in size than a finger cake. So dainty, like a pearl, it shone in the light of the sun. She massaged the tear into the matter and hovering over it blew into it with her breath. It is said that a pregnant woman can feel her unborn child move in her womb. Rivkah felt Yaakov and Esau fight in her womb. When she walked by a house of Torah study Yaakov stirred inside of her, and when she walked by a place of idol worship Esau stirred. The dainty cake of semen moved just a smidgen in her palm in response to the tear. ‘Has life begun?” she wondered, a twinkle in her eye. There were many questions following this realization. She sought Bottles.

18. The Prophetess Appeals to Bottles

“Of course,” said Bottles, “You have reversed the usual method.”

“Do you mean that this is immaculate?” The Prophetess asked somewhat startled by the comparison to Mary, mother of God.

Bottles shook his head though a smile crept onto his lips, “Such effrontery!” he thought. “No, dear woman,” gently, for carrying a pregnancy is a fragile process. He dared not upset its progress especially at this incipient stage. “Are you truly happy?”

She hadn’t considered it. “I can’t define happiness, Bottles.” She looked at him askance. She hadn’t come into his shop for a psychological battle of wits. “I love chess, if that is what you mean. The queen is so stern.”

“Have the pawns snuggled next to the queen while the king was locked in battle?’ Bottles asked. He wondered as to the fathering of this child.

The Prophetess laughed merrily for she felt she was near a milestone in her quest for immortal life. “I have dipped my cup into many fountains, Bottles.”

“Have you come then for a secret ingredient?” he asked. “Pregnancy does cause cravings for the most unusual substances.”

“Perhaps.”

Bottles removed the cover to a small coffin in which a child might be buried. He selected three perfumes that rarely had permeated the air of any mortal’s nostril. “Here, he pointed, “are alchemical compounds manufactured by tortuous manipulations of the essences of metals, flowers and blood.”

Her eyes lit with joy at the cunningly shaped bottles. Each lip of a spout reminded her of a penis she yearned to touch with her lips. However, she did not reveal this to Bottles.

He took note of her happiness and thought he had found an answer to her predicament. “Shall I instruct you on the proper use of these perfumes?”.

She dared not refuse. “Proceed.”

“Because you have entered the vale of pregnancy by a little used path, extreme measures must be exacted. This ball of semen, ill-gotten, gained its potency by your tear, dear lady. Your tear acted as the life-giving antidote to the restful mass of semen in your hand. You became the male actor and in your hand that ponderous ball was the feminine receptor. You have come upon this state backwards.”

“What must I do?”

Bottles grinned broadly. “Insert that vile ball into your vagina while inhaling the aroma of these perfumes in this order: blood, metals and flowers. Dare not depart from this instruction. And pray, act soon.”

She blushed at mention of her pubis. However, in light of the situation, she could not expect less. She retired to a back room of the shop and did as Bottles recommended. She felt a very faint kick in her womb. Bottles expected payment. She removed her earrings as the cost was dear. She practically floated back to her apartments so free and happy was she. It is the fruition of a woman’s dream to give birth, however crookedly it might occur.

19. Simpson and the Parson

Simpson denied the existence of God. He had pored over too many texts supporting, revealing, skirting the issue, invalidated by erroneous assumptions, too logical to a fault, or too plain ridiculous to believe. He offered his own life as proof that no higher benevolent power existed. After his encounter with the Lone Gunman, however, he took pause from his usual cast of ruminations lowered by alcohol into depths unseemly for a man, and hied himself to the church. The image of the risen Jesus tempted him. As it approached Easter, he felt a shift in the heavens even though no rain had fallen.

He came into the church and saw the Parson holding a young woman in his arms, her bustier fallen from her shoulders. It was an agreeable scene to Simpson, passion had many forms, some physical and some spiritual, and who could find the middle?

“Is this not all too common?” he asked in way of greeting.

The woman hurriedly covered her breasts with her hands and then fled behind a pew.

Simpson compared her to a frightened hart.

“She is a penitent,” explained Strange. “I was helping her to undress.”

“What if I came to you for help, Parson?”

“When did your neuroses start, Simpson?”

“There are multiple problems, intertwined, some blending into others, indistinct boundaries, hazes, halos, the between and the undivided middle, Strange. I have spent many hours gazing directly at truth and finding a table set, napkins, plates, crystal, cloth, and steaming pheasant and other delicacies, vintage wine, whisky and other potables, but no guests besides myself.”

“No guests?” Strange asked. “That itself is intangible”.

“Yes.” admitted Simpson glad for an ear. “Eating alone soon became tippling alone.”

“The bottle?” asked Strange.

“I craved company and then I craved attention rather than nothing,” said Simpson.

“Nothing, you say? What kind of attention?”

“I expected reward.”

“Is not expectation nearer to the Fall? When Eve gave her husband the apple, were not her motivations disingenuous? She appeared to be pure but had other matters in mind of a sexual nature. The stumbling are the wicked,” he quoted from the book of Psalms.

“I am not so orthodox, a mixed soul. Yet the idea of falling conjures a memory of bliss.”

“How so?” asked Strange, extremely curious as he had felt utter happiness cupping the woman’s breasts.

“Can two minds have similar experiences?” asked Simpson.

“A woman?” asked Strange.

“Is it ever not a woman, Strange, that pours out her heart to the wrong man?”

The Parson felt alarm. Did he refer to his recent play with the penitent? “Whom do you mean?”

“Dolly has fallen for the wrong man, Strange. A weaker man would cry.”

“She is not called Dolly, Simpson. From what pit did you fetch such a name, in a drunken stupor? Is her surname not Johnson?”

Simpson felt cross at the derisive comment hurled at Dolly. “Such beauty. Such erotic charge! He never before had so near approached a female so overtly sexual.” A tear started at his eye. “Could her name be Johnson, Dolly Johnson?” He didn’t know.

The Parson noted the tear in his eye. “Are you not overly romantic?”

Simpson cursed his tears. To reveal himself to the Parson felt like poison. “How could any man adulterate his remembrance of Dolly? How to describe it to an ass?” He said, “She sat by the Lone Gunman. I am the one who fell in love with her.”

“And with you?” The Parson asked. “Does she play patsy with your heart?”

“Were those two little hearts you played with, Parson?’ asked Simpson.

The Parson grew visibly scarlet beneath the stubble on this chin. “You question my fondling the penitent? She needed comfort and I, a man of cloth, fulfilled her need, though I was stopped from completing the act.”

“You are a hypocrite and probably unable to finish the act.”

The Parson feared the tale of his rendezvous with the Prophetess had surfaced so even the scoundrels at the bar had gotten wind of it. “Are you drunk now, Simpson, sorry excuse for a man. Is the last time you had sex with a ghost?”

“I do not consort with ghosts, Parson.” He looked up at the martyred Jesus hanging from the wall. “You worship a pagan god and that is worse than death.”

At the mention of the crucifixion the Penitent appeared. No longer sorrowful, she was perplexed. She addressed Simpson.

“If you question the crucifix, you will rot in Hell.”

“Did you invoke me?” asked Dolly, freshly arrived at the church by no apparent means.

“Lady,” said the Parson, “this church is inviolate from provocation from below.”

“So above is so below, Strange, neither is the other,” she said. She found the Parson an odd fish, cold-fleshed, his heart an unusual mixture of jejune emotion and thwarted passion. In imitation of the lifeless Jesus hanging above their heads? He had died young. She thought it likely.

“Have you two supped together?” she asked the Parson.

Strange could not find his tongue. “With Simpson?”

Dolly laughed. It was a delicious laughter that hinted at untold forbidden delights. “No, you fool, with that scrawny Jesus hanging dead on the cross.”

The Parson, the penitent and Simpson all looked at the figurine hanging on the wall. Did the eyes really blink?

Simpson looked at her with new eyes. The thrill of seeing her had ratcheted a notch higher. He did not know why.

“It’s because of the heat that man generates, Simpson.”

“You mean the Lone Gunman?”

“He is your superior in every way,” with real warmth, “And it is my guess he will triumph over Felt when they meet for their final duel.”

“Duel?” asked the penitent, finding her voice.

“Yes, child,” she said. “Do you know that the Parson’s seed is now the foundation for the building of a manikin?’

The Parson froze in horror.

The Penitent looked anew with repugnance at the Parson. “Has a witch collected your droppings? Did you foul my breasts with the same hands that touched hers?”

“I will leave now,” Dolly told Simpson. “I go to find the Lone Gunman.”

Simpson, jilted, watched helplessly as she swayed from the church her short hem barely covering her ass.

20. Felt in Gehenna

Felt’s hat sank down below the crusty rock bed of the town. He had walked beyond the boundary separating men from the vale of death where almost all lose sanity. While not the underworld it was its near precinct and a place to avoid. Yet Felt walked freely into its domain some say sixty times as large as the earth. Was it this free act that saved him? No one can say. Heroes before him stretched thousands of years into the past and not all had lived to tell the tale. How one enters a quest is how one finishes the trials in pursuit of the prize, yet not always. God knows the quarters of a man’s heart and his purity. He sees and knows all, including the very private acts done in secret. Then who would dare? Few are pure as driven snow. The Mishna says snow is the highest level of whiteness in the world. In those parts of the world in drought, snow had not fallen. It is the mass of sins weighed on a cosmic scale that determine a drought’s length and severity.

Jonah spent 3 days in the belly of a great fish, and then was he bound to prophecy Nineveh’s doom. Pharaoh, whose first born died along with all the other first born of both man and beast in the 10th and last plague that smote Egypt, alone did not himself die at the crossing of the Red Sea. It swallowed up all of his men and chariots. All except him. He survived and became afterwards the King of Nineveh. Unnerved by the plagues, justifiably so, he hearkened to Jonah’s cry, and Nineveh was saved.

Noah, an earlier prophet than Jonah, did not utter prophecy. For five hundred years he isolated his family from the world around him, rather than to scold it. The world sank so low in depravity that God forsook it and let it rain until it flooded all and everything.

A layer of fear lay on Felt’s heat. It is disputable whether Pharaoh whose heart is hardened by God against hearing Moses, held in his head a conscience separate from what God forced him to have. That fear, that nothing is by choice, spurred Felt onward into an uncertain path. He followed the tides of his heart. There was neither north, south, east or west. In the middle sat God.

“A man ahead?” He’d heard report that none but ghosts ventured onto this exhausted landscape.

The lands had been milked to death by the injuns who moved to fairer climes, somewhere to the south, after the breast that provided the milk that rendered the earth an arcadia ran dry. Myths uphold the injuns as holders of an idyllic culture. They treated their women as cows, their teats as dugs, their bellies as mortar, slaves to their coveted patriarchy.

The pundits have written in their dusty tomes that men do not till the earth with joy. For is not farm labor a curse? Eve, in league with the snake and in rebellion against God, ate the forbidden fruit thinking that God would not see. He cursed the snake lowering him from upright stature to one that slinks on the ground eating dust and is stepped on by women, but the farmer would forever sweat and curse his brow. All for a piece of fruit?

Felt grew weary with symbols. The man, or so he had thought, turned out to be a cactus swaying though there was no appreciable wind. He stepped carefully watching for cracks in the earth. Some opened without warning and would have doomed to Gehenna a less ginger man.

Felt, however, thought Hell was above the ground on the flats, and into the flats he walked unheralded. That was a vain imagining.

Over a crest of land to his left over the softly undulating hills of broken earth did he not hear a circus? Even in a place so unadorned a circus brought to mind happier times. Horns blaring, hoops flaming, tents striped, the trapeze, the human cannon, pirouetting ballerinas, and the benches shoulder to shoulder all straining to see the face inside the totem. Long ago before the white man came to these shores the injun had perfected the circus though the white man had usurped the injuns rightful place as the barker. The injuns never forgot that grievance. More bitter than long marches, massacres, diseased blankets, Mexico, the vanishing buffalo, the barker loomed in the distance. The totem outside the barbershop is the last vestige of the injun in the east. Beware the razor.

21. The Circus

Felt turned to take a look. “A gaily colored tent?”

Its pennants hung limply in the heat. The desert flats could swallow this tent entire. What evil lurks inside the earth was content to let bygones be bygones. Why struggle anew? It was a passing thought.

Felt welcomed the sight of the tent. “Maybe I will find shade within?”

He walked to the flaps of canvas serving as the entrance. “Rather like entering a womb,” he thought. Finding no ticket-bailiff, he entered.

A clown appeared from the shadows and showed Felt to his seat. Felt looked around. “Will the show begin soon, though I am the only patron?”

The clown didn’t answer. It is unwise to believe a clown. He unbuckled his belt and his stiff shirt front rolled up to his chin like an accordion.

An artist came out from the eaves to paint a face on the clown’s stomach. She was deft and quick with her hand and painted a striking image with black ink as if she heard music, though there was none to be heard in this realm.

The clown looked down at the drawing and very pleased was he.

The ancients had confused the delineation between the mind and the stomach as the seat of thought. They didn’t know from where thoughts arose.

Accordingly, Felt was drawn to the painted face though it troubled him. Artistic effort ought to evoke a visceral response. Felt shook his head, “I do not recognize it.” Then he understood. A smile of recognition spread evenly across his features. The face was his.

She had looked at his soul and depicted its form. It was a magical effort the like of which Felt had never seen, and on such a medium as a clown.

Before he could ask, the clown had flipped, rolled, and catapulted to the center of the ring. He clapped his hands. There were some titters in response but Felt could not see who had tittered in the gloom or at what. Then he saw.

A nude pranced out wiggling her breasts. She was delightfully mischievous and comely, “The tales of women dancing on the flats doing unspeakable sex acts is true,” he pondered.

As if she could read his thoughts she whispered and then winked, “I am very shy.” She momentarily covered her breasts with her hands.

The clown reemerged pulling down his trousers. He took her to couch to lay her down on its ample cushions. He kept slipping off her mons pubis though his desire was ardent. She quickly grew weary of his less than heroic ministrations.

“I tire of you,” she said and pushed him off her. She propped herself up on one elbow, “I am still a virgin. All of my other lovers were clowns.” What a surprise. She once had a hymen? She implored Felt to relinquish his sense of honor and to mount her like a stag.

There are those men who will shrink from befouling their flesh by having intercourse with a woman still wet after a previous encounter. If she is insatiable, he cannot stay hard forever, and inescapably she will bitterly denounce him as useless.

He briefly considered the sordid invitation and politely demurred.

The clown cajoled him. “Would you be a cuckold? Is there not a man in the house?”

Felt did not move. To frolic? Not here with her on the flats. She slinked off the ring rejected; her head held low as if she was a captive woman going off to slavery in Babylon following the destruction of the first Temple. Tears fell from her eyes onto her breasts.

Might she one day be a mother with milk flowing from her bosom?

The clown rubbed Felt’s face from his tummy using the tears fallen to the floor in a puddle.

“You call yourself a man? You are a murderer!'”

Felt weighed the truth of the remark. A near bullseye. He had killed her ardor. Is this not like the slaying in the heat of passion the one who betrayed you? He quit the circus tent and continued his walk.

22. A Baptismal Pool

At the end of the world there is nothing else. If one looks down the cliff’s edge, for that is the definition of the end, there is nothing to see, except maybe to hear, if one’s ear is extraordinarily sensitive. Poets write of such subjects, alert to the wisps of the wind they are. They hear words in the raindrops falling on the roofs, in the leafless trees, from an empty bench and from headstones in a long-forgotten cemetery. Poets often write about God. There is space for everything, and everything has its space. There is neither poverty nor wealth, old age nor youth, senescence nor beauty, neither death nor birth. The first Psalm says, “Happy is the man who does not walk with the counsel of the wicked, nor does he stand with those who are sinning, and nor will he sit with the scoffers. The Torah is his desire, and he will mediate in his heart on his Torah day and night. That person is like a tree planted in pools of water, that gives fruit in its appointed time, that rises up and does not wither, and he succeeds in all that he endeavors. The wicked are like the dried mud that scatters in the wind.”

To stand at the end of everything and to hear the roaring of the great Oceanus that encircles the earth, is to stand at the very edge, so close to annihilation, and beyond the wanderings of all but the most stalwart of ghosts. For even they fear total rejection by God.

Felt came upon a stand of trees with high branches and white bark. As he approached, he saw a man standing to one side. The slant of the late afternoon sun and the shadow of the trees darkened his visage. As he continued over the slight rise in the land, he saw group of women sitting quietly by a spring fed pool. It was an oasis. Women sat talking in soft voices. All eyes were on the woman standing in the pool wet and naked as the day she was born. Felt wondered that here of all places gathered a sect of Ecstatics practicing baptism. A woman stood to confront the stranger breaking uninvited upon their ritual. “Are you mad?’ she asked him.

Mad?’ he asked. “To have come here?’

“You stagger like a drunken fool.”

“I hadn’t realized any church evangelized here on the flats.”

“So have you come for a cleansing of your sins and a rebirth? It is almost Easter.”

“I was looking for someone, that much is true,” he said.

“Who might that be? Jesus?”

“I don’t want to hear that name. There is no salvation through Jesus.”

She spat. “You are a Jew.”

The man who had been watching from the shadows moved toward Felt. His long filthy rawhide coat touched the tops of his boots.

Felt warily watched him.

“The arrogance of your race infuriates everyone.” His eyes flashed with hatred.

“Who are you? Felt asked.

“I have eloped with Jesus. I search these flats for to bring ghosts, whores, clowns, cowboys, ice cream men, fishmongers, haberdashers, millers, sailors, masons, Mormons, murderers, and blood spillers to the true path in Jesus. The past signifies nothing except judged by God.”

“A name is the measure of the man,” said Felt.

“You Jews suffer in eternal exile. The Romans cut down your Temple because of the fornication your oral law requires. What right have you to charge us with crimes when you are the criminally insane judged by God.”

“Just tell me,” said Felt, “I look for a man who may have passed here shortly before I did.”

“Was he as ugly as a Jew face?” the woman asked.

“What did this woman see?” Felt wondered. “How did that woman in the pool come to be reborn?” he pointed.

“A broken heart, some say. A gunman shot her.”

“Did you see this gunman?” he asked.

“I see you wear guns, mister. Every Jew is horned.”

“Then tell me, which way is the end?”

“The end is Jesus, O Ye of little faith.”

“Is the shortest route in that direction?” He pointed to the West.

The churchman brought his hands to his sunburnt brow to scan the horizon. “There is nothing that way.”

“Then that is the way I will go.”

“Peace be with you, Jew. You wander the world like Cain.”

23. Oceanus

The Lone Gunman sat at the end of the world facing toward the desert. He sat at the lip of the cliff overhanging oblivion, his back ramrod straight like a yogi of old cross legged, eyes closed, chin resting lightly on his chest, and his hands folded one on the other. He was in perfect stillness. His mind raced to review his past incarnations. So far, he had not found a consistent thematic thread connecting them. All of the leaves had fallen from the tree, and he couldn’t find where to put them back on the tree. It was against nature. He strove to overcome nature including his own, but to no avail. No matter how still he sat and for long or short he returned the same as he was at the outset. At the end of all things, he hoped to find oblivion, and so here he sat waiting for Felt. When he came to this point on the cliff, he looked down its side and an updraft welled up and almost lifted him off his feet. He maintained his tie to this world just barely, but confident he could withstand the challenge of oblivion. He removed the ghost machine from his pack and rubbed it chanting mysterious Hindu strings of words. He fiercely worked the gongs for he wanted to invoke a strong entity, something vast. He coaxed the fire underneath the machine to grow hotter plotting the heat would force the entity to find surcease in the desert. The flaming sun overhead defeated him not purposely for the sun has no will of its own nor does it take it into account any mortal. He prayed to the fire red like his tongue. In past encounters with fire, he had been able to bend it to his will. Here, however, the fire maintained its changeable shape, always seeking the sky. “Damn you, fire.” He coaxed it, he rolled on the desert floor, and he raged. The heat of his anger was terrible to behold. At last, he was spent. He cursed the sun, but the sun paid no heed. He sat facing the fire silently pleading for a response. Somehow, he had closed his eyes! He couldn’t understand how he had missed it. A shapeless form of ectoplasm had seeped out of the ghost machine and now floated overhead. It hung in the still air beyond his reach and then drifted up into the sky never to return. In fury he kicked the machine and extinguished the fire. Then he assumed the position of a high yogi sitting on the mountain top and plunged deeply into his self. In front was the endless desert and to his rear was oblivion. A perfect place to wait.

There is no telling when one meets one’s foe. Will it end in murder? Esau came out of his mother Rivka’s womb first, hairy like a man, a hunter, and his twin brother Jacob, a man who would spend his time in the tents of study, came out afterwards holding his brother’s heel. As the first-born Esau deserved the blessing of the father Isaac, but through trickery Jacob won it. Esau swore that he would kill his brother after their father’s death. But over the course of the next 20 years when they finally met Esau though physically mightier did not kill his brother. He demurred. There is no telling why.

All men are brothers, it is said. Felt did not hold by that fiction. In the end a man shows his true colors. Felt considered the root of this grim conflict with the Lone Gunman as he walked slowly due west. The Lone Gunman believes I cheated him at cards that day and he must have felt great anguish at losing, and then when his bullets went awry, he lost face. The accounts of our duel endlessly repeated by the gossip mongers probably wore away his confidence like rain striking an old tin roof. It twisted his heart until it became so cunningly knotted it could not be undone. For all these years he has nursed an awful wound that would not heal, like a need to slake an unquenchable thirst. A molten volcano burns in his gut and there is not enough water in the world to extinguish it. So, thinking he came to the end of the world and heard the ceaseless roaring of the Oceanus into which the ruined souls fall. Souls are naturally lighter than air and would fly up into the sky. Yet the prodigious amount of water flowing creates a strong downdraft though it is far, far below. No one will ever measure the distance.

Twilight had fallen. Felt walked along the lip of the land uneasy at the nearness of the end. Then he saw a figure sitting looking neither right nor left. Felt threw a stone at the figure to awaken it from its slumber as he suspected he had come upon his enemy but wanted to know for certain.

The Lone Gunman had succeeded after intense concentration in replacing some hundreds of leaves on the tree but countless more sat on the floor, when he heard a stone fall near him. He cursed the interruption after so much painstaking effort. He opened his eyes hopeful he would remember and looked. “It is Felt! He saw that peculiar bow-legged stance stamped forever upon his brain.

Felt heard the outburst and recognized the Lone Gunman.

“Felt, you are mad to have come this far.” The Lone Gunman screeched.

“I am tired of hiding from you.”

“On the flats there are many ghosts, Felt. You will join them.”

“I have met one at least. A heavy eroticism accompanies her.”

The Lone Gunman was startled. “You saw Dolly?”

“She didn’t tell me her name.”

“Where is she?” the Lone Gunman asked.

Felt kept his eyes locked on the Lone Gunman’s hands. He pointed away from the cliff. “With some evangelists undergoing the rite of baptism last I saw.”

The Lone Gunman wondered at that. He doubted she had a conscience or a shred of sincerity. “Maybe she wanted to bathe.”

“I think she wanted to cleanse herself of the filth smeared on her from your dick.”

The remark burned the Lone Gunman, scorching the fires inside of him. He couldn’t hide his increasing rage. “You dare to insult my manhood?” he yelled. Fire exploded out of his mouth.

“They say your dick droops like a dead mouse and smells worse,” Felt smiled.

The Lone Gunman’s hands quivered. The lever had fallen in his brain. He snarled, “Die Felt!”

They both fired.

Felt was a hair quicker, and the Lone Gunman’ shot went a shade wide.

Felt walked to the Lone Gunman’s corpse lying so near to the lip of the earth. He pushed the body over the edge and heard nothing, not even a rasp. He looked up at the sky and saw clouds marching this way from over the horizon. In due course, there would be rain.

A song goes, “And in the end he will tend every flower blooming.”

Felt hummed it as he walked back to the town.