Six-Gun Snow White

Compares

Herself to An Unmovable Rock

I heard a lot of talk sp

eculating on whether myself or Mrs. H was the more handsome. It’s plain foolishness.

Everybody knows no half-breed cowgirl can be as beautiful as a rich white lady. Where’s your head at?

Part III

Snow White and Porcupine Chase

Each Other

Around the World

Snow White

Stops Speaking

This is where Snow White gets off. Where she stops telling a story about other folk and starts being in a story other folk tell. It’s like crossing a cold stream. You don’t even think much about it—water’s not that deep, and only a few miles further on there’s a meal and a bed. But you’ve left one country and hoofed it on into someplace else.

Girl deserves a rest, anyhow. You can tell a true story about your parents if you’re a damn sight good at sorting lies like laundry, but no one can tell a true story about themselves.

Snow White

Steals the

Sun’s Tobacco

Snow White knows when it’s time to blow the scene. Saddle her whole life and get on the road. It’s a sense like smell or seeing, when she looks around at a pretty little zoo and realizes it doesn’t belong to her, she belongs to it. Ain’t never going to be the hero in this story, kid, way things are headed. Just meat for the table. Best be on your way. Kiss the bear and the fox and don’t look back. Spin those slots one last time. Don’t they come up all winter, white as death. Don’t they always. Don’t they just.

So this is what happens: girl gets her gun, puts on a man’s clothes, steals a horse, and lights out for Indian Territory.

Snow White’s heard her daddy’s men talk about Indian Territory. They’re skeered and scarred and when they say those words it sounds like their whole world is surrounded by a jungle of cannibal Oberons and night-blooming thunderbirds. Eat you alive and wear your skin, won’t they? What roads they got are lined with white men’s skulls. If a body gets lost in there he’ll never unsee what goes on, painted men dancing and songs like your mother dying and witches boiling bones and girls what turn into wolves. God don’t open His eye there. It’s Hell or fairyland or both.

Snow White says: sounds good to me.

You’ve read the papers. That girl run off because she got prettier than her mama and oh ho the old lady don’t like that! You know how mothers and daughters are. As if a body don’t just get fed up. As if a kid don’t have a limit on hardship.

So Snow White throws her dress in the furnace to burn like it ought to. She doesn’t even wait for sundown. Just hoofs it while Mrs. H gets herself gorgeous. Snow White straps Rose Red to her hip and rides out on a big apron-faced Appaloosa with spots on his rump like eyes. So what if it’s stealing? She took her daddy’s hat, too. Snow White can ride so sweet you’d think there’s no horse under her, just a girl with four legs pounding the ground. Fuck that mirror and fuck that house. What’s she owe them? Her back, that’s what. The girl is gone. She is plum finished. She walks out through the front door. It’s night and everything smells like the sea.

Snow White points her situation north, toward the queen hanging upside down in the sky, punished forever for using her daughter poorly. That’s the road for her, yes sir, toward Montana, toward the future, out of the world and into the black.

Snow White

Dances With Porcupine

Not too long before somebody picks up her trail. He has a name but it doesn’t matter. He has a job. That’s who he is. He’s a Pinkerton, but that doesn’t matter either. Who isn’t, these days? If you’ve got a gun arm on you, that is. If you’ve got a proclivity for hitting people until they do as they’re told. This dude, he come out from Chicago with a job in his holster. Don’t care who hired him; don’t care how long it takes. He gets his money every week by wire and that’s as good as being on the right side of virtue in his book.

It’s not the hardest job he’s ever done. Girl don’t really know where she’s going, see. It’s a long way to Montana. What she knows about long-haul travel she read in books and the man’s read those books, too. These runaways, they’re easy money. Wastrel trigger-punks with less sense than Dog gave a gopher. (This is how the dude appellates the good Lord for he does not abide blasphemy. The Great Good Dog in Heaven watch over your humble servant.) Those abandons are nothing but walking sacks of coin to him. They shin out like the world’s got room for them but it just ain’t so. Boys end up shot in some Babylon of a gold town. Girls go to ruin. This gives the dude a grand ticket to visit any brothel he passes, and the dude do like roostering himself up a spell. Once he’s got a bead on her. Once he smells her good and full. He got a late start, is all. Train from out east don’t make the trip in a blink. Pretty soon she’ll bake that crowbait horse into the ground and he’ll have her. Once she’s riding shank’s mare she’ll be easy as nickels.

The conditions of the job don’t bother him none. He’s done worse. Most runaway jobs don’t necessitate his gun or his knife, but it’s a bad old country out there these days. Folk want all sorts of loot for their trouble. The dude’s had to bring back ears, hair, fingers, even an union-man’s eyeball once. The eye was bright blue. Easier than hauling the whole body over three states, he’ll tell you that much for free. Sometimes he thinks the rich are so different from usual folk they’re more like wild beasts or fairies than men. If this fellow had a gentle stomach he’d have taken up some other business. He does everything a Marshal does but twice as hard, twice as dirty, and without the soft and cushioning arms of the government to wipe his tears.

The dude don’t see himself as a bad man. Way he sees it, he’s an angel for hire. He can gather in lost lambs from the four corners and kiss away their tears or he can shake a flaming sword. Up to his employers. St. Michael don’t question why when the Big Dog says git. Ole Mike, he just ties up his war-bag, thumps his golden road, eats his beans out the tin and when he sees his mark he gets to it no fuss. That’s the dude in a nut. There’s nights he don’t feel so fine on it, sure enough. But nobody likes their job sun out and sun in. Reckon there’s bankers back east right sick of the smell of money. Reckon they might like a change. But there comes a time when a man is who he is and not even a railroad spike through the chin can change it. That banker will be counting coin in his grave and come the great good day when righteous folk put on their white robes, the dude will still be a Pinkerton with an eye on his chest, minding Heaven don’t go apples up.

No, the dude don’t call himself a bad man.