But he’s got bad business to tend to.
Snow White
Shoots Antelope
By Means of
a Magic Arrow
Snow White’s pony bears up just fine. She never could abide the trussed-up old world high-steppers Mrs. H favored. Pintos, paints, and appies, accept no substitutes. Snow White helped the birth of this horse in particular. Shoveling horse shit and afterbirth beat laundering a household full of button trousers seven ways. Hell is a soapcake on Monday morning. She’d cleaned the blood out of his eyes and the muck out of his tail. Old boy has a pedigree name in a ledger somewhere, but Snow White’s called him Charming ever since he mashed her foot flat half a minute after he came into the world trying to tottle up to standing.
Snow White rides him hard, no mistaking. She needs distance, the generosity of miles. Maybe there’s no gone that’s far enough, but if there is, she aims to find it. She lets Charming snatch up sea-grass and when the sea’s so far behind them she can’t smell salt, she directs him to alfalfa and meadowsweet. Snow White portions out a bag of apples she absconded with between herself and her horse. She still does not care for apples but food is food. Sugar is sugar. She has to make them last. All the smarts in the world don’t tell you where the next town lies when you’ve never seen the big open but in pictures. Don’t matter much. She’s never been happy a day in her life until she lit out hell for Hades, and if she never sees another human face it’s just as well by her. Snow White puts her gun on her arm and takes down a beaver for a week’s su
ppers. She’s not too sure how to dry it perfect, but she does her best, and the fur sits better on her shoulders than any dress she ever wore to please her daddy. She’s careful with her bullets. Gotta miser them good. Her life is weighted out in apples and bullets.
Snow White follows the sun.
This is her father’s country. Every town Snow White lights on is a camp with H stamped on the gold pans. She keeps her hat down. Waters Charming and rubs him down good. They’re muddy, chawed-up shanties with more drink than nuggets. The camps recall to her some mixed-up bootblack funhouse mirror of her boardwalk back home and she understands for the first time what it means to be a rich man’s daughter. Even a secret one. Even one worked like a furnace. Snow White drinks whiskey now and it tastes like dirt on fire but it makes her feel strong. She eats son of a bitch stew and before too long she gets to like it: boiled up baby cow brains, liver, tongue, heart, kidneys and on good days a carrot. It stinks powerfully, but her body wants it awful, the blood and the iron and the fat.
Snow White does not know much about men and she does not like what she sees. Their eyes dog her something dreadful. They are for the most part a miserable sight at cards. When Snow White plays, the Queen of Spades always turns up in her hand. She don’t like it. Don’t like being watched. Oftener than not, some poor overworked girl does all the work of entertaining—tinkles the piano if they got one, serves table, changes the day’s chiseling for currency, and there’s a menu behind the bar if you got a hunger dinner don’t touch. The miners use that girl awful in every place Snow White slows down long enough to scowl. It sticks in her jaw every time. That lady put on a purple skirt and shined herself up and damn but she can play those cowboy songs like she was born on a drive, but they don’t see it. Don’t see the mighty pains she took on their sorry behalf. Don’t see what it costs to get so fair.
Snow White can’t quite call whether it’s her tits or her gun that grief her most. Sure, the grimy boys grab her even when she bands her chest down tight, but once she punches one of them plum down, she gets to like that, too. Turns out her shit-shoveling arm can clean a man’s plow no problem. But no matter how she pulls her slicker over Rose Red, some ganted grubstake whose claim don’t love him sees the grip and thinks he can take it easy.
Probably it was always going to turn out like it did. Human nature only got a few tales to tell.
In a silver camp name of Haul-Off, Snow White shot a man.
It was raining fierce and the fella hadn’t eaten in three days. Any color he struck went eighty percent to the company and how can a man get ahead on those numbers? How can a man think straight with a gun like that in his sight, all those pearls and that opal glinting like a good life?
There’s a heap of world Snow White doesn’t understand. She can ride and she can shoot and she can hold her rye, she don’t fare well in high company and she don’t know a thing about cattle. But getting beat down by a body twice your size who just wants to take the one thing you’ve got in this world from you—yeah. Snow White knows something about that. And she’s about the fastest draw til you hit the Dakotas. She did it out in the street out of respect to the piano girl. It feared her less than she thought. No different than a tin goose in a gallery, only she got no prize for firing true. Snow White felt a damn sight worse over the seagull she brought down way back. Funny how a gun can speak your pain so clear.
When she sheaths her barrel, she sees it: one of the red pearls fell off somewhere in the mud. Nobody’s daddy is pleased.
Ten miles out of town Snow White broke up sobbing into her pony’s mane. Charming stood bold, took all her tears so she could keep on going.
Snow White follows the moon.
Snow White
In the Underworld
Round about Nevada the grass gets scarce and the critters get shy. All those apples are long gone and the bullet situation is not promising. Snow White hitches up her need and goes looking for work. She suffers some worry over whether her femaleness will trouble her, but the truth is after riding those back countries down, most everyone looks the same.
She finds what she’s looking for in a gemstone mine south of Blue Coffin. You could ride right over it and never know it’s there: the men live below snakes in the hollows left after the axes and drills have stripped the shine out of the rock. Coupla the boys even throw down rugs, perch a picture of the missus back home up on a spit of stone. One hollow’s set up for a saloon, a tilted splintery bar, whiskey so cheap and stiff the boys call it Who-Shot-John, a card table and seven stools nobody stops fighting over. Snow White stows Charming with the camp horses in a corral run by a woman just about as old as the wheel and heads underground. It don’t escape her this is her father’s mine. Nevada is his mother’s teat; where he made his fortune. Well, why shouldn’t Snow White have a fortune, too? Not that she expects one. She’s no fool and a night in a gold camp will straighten you right out on the odds of making your dimes on the lode. If you want to get straight, which most nobody does once they’ve seen the good blue and the hard yellow.
It’s neither of the two down here. It’s the true red: rubies. Bloody knuckles; apple rinds. Snow White gets a skinnier cut on account of her being a girl and a half-breed heathen if ever the foreman did see one, but it’s something. It keeps Charming in hay and her in beans-on-griddlebread and on Sunday they get tinned peaches if the take’s been good. Way Snow White figures it, in a month she’ll have enough socked away to head back north, up to Montana which she has not forgotten, into the Territory. In a month she’ll have enough to quit worrying if she hasn’t seen so much as a badger stumble past her sights. The company man smiles and rolls his cigarette. It’s what they all say. Just a month and I’ll bring my people out. Just a month and I’ll move up top to Blue Coffin where they got proper houses. Just a month and I’ll be shitting rubies, that’s how rich I’ll strike. Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today.
Snow White does not complain. She swings her ax and learns to see in the dark. She forgets what it’s like to smell nice. She gets so that her heart beats faster whenever she sees a glitter of red in the gloom. Just about every week some idiot tries to get her to wash their clothes or scrub them down or show that cook how to make a proper tuck-in. Just about every week some bruiser gets tied and bellows at her to show them her Injun witchcraft or tries to get their hands under her shirt. Give us a smile, Snowy. Give us a taste. We all share down here.
Snow White has broken a fair number of fingers. Fingers count in this line of work. Fingers are a penny-bid on your future. All that separates a man from a dog is fingers.
Folk stop galling her so hard. Snow White is aware that if she loses one fight it’s over for her. So she does not lose. She cuts her hair off after a short, burly mister starts touching it and allowing as how he’s heard heathen’s pussy’s got feathers instead of hair. I know y’all are just like a blackbird down there. She doesn’t miss it. No mirrors underground, and she’s grateful for that. She swings her ax and does not see the sun. It is like being inside the heart of her father. Close and dark and hungry, pumping wealth like blood.
A month is not enough. Never is and she knows that now. Hell is a company town. Snow White owes the store for the food in her belly, the tools on her back, Who-Shot-John whizzing around her head every night when the all-stop blows. And she might have stayed, told herself the big lie, that tomorrow she’d find a bloody knuckle so big it’d pay her way to the moon with cash to spare. There’s an apple in that mountain with her name on it.
But somebody’s looking for her. Someone’s knocking on the grass up there, and he wants to come in.
Snow White