What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes. They both get told so often they become pantomime. And then worse.
Oh-Be-Joyful don’t last much past Montana Territory unterritorying and stating up. But you never leave a girl behind. They join up with a wild west show and tour flat-dead towns on scrub-dust rivers. Not the big show, Bill’s show, but one nearly as good. They earn their dinners. The trick shots Little Mab and Bang-Up pull off look just like magic. What Woman Without a Name does with a horse would shame anyone who dared call himself a cowboy which truth be told is not too many people anymore.
And they have a pair of aces. A curiosity unequaled. It goes in the freak show because no one knows what else to do with it, and Boss Jake says it gives him the crawling creeps.
A little while back someone else showed up asking after work, though everybody but the lions knew he was just looking for their funny little curiosity. That kid was a much better get than the old box anyway, with those deer legs that could outrun a horse. Spends most of his nights in the freak tent with the box, talking to it like it can talk back. Talking funny. Maybe it’s French or something. Boss Jake knows he’s got a genuine cryptozoo on his hands, so he lets Deer Boy do whatever he wants. Only he says it cripplezoo because Boss Jake ain’t too bright and learned his words off his daddy’s bad mouth.
If you pay your nickel you can see it easy enough. Read the nice red sign up there: The Glass Gunslinger. And there she is: a glass box wrapped up in some old mangy coyote pelts and inside it there’s a girl. Sort of pretty, or she would have been if she hadn’t run herself so hard when she could run. Jake reckons she’s Choctaw or Cree or something and he don’t care when Woman Without a Name tells him she’s half-Crow and half-son-of-a-bitch.
Don’t look Snow White to me nohow.
Bang-Up Jackson makes sure the gunslinger’s hair looks nice before shows, crosses her arms over her chest with a big crazy pistol all pigged up in jewels in one hand and a long hog-sticker rifle in the other. Keeps her face clean. Keeps the flies off.
The gunslinger isn’t dead, but she don’t move and she barely breathes, so in summer she don’t smell too nice and the flies come singing. That’s when the Joyful girls—the furies, Jake calls them—take her out of her box and wash her in whatever’s handy. They let the Deer Boy help and the way he holds her head you’d think he’d married her before she got put in that box.
Old Epharim catches Deer Boy kissing the gunslinger once. Standing there with the box open and crying while he kissed her red, red lips. Nothing and no one troubles the old bear. She let them alone, though she didn’t feel right on it considering he was a stranger and Bang-Up would have both those pretty deer legs bust out if she knew. But what does it matter? Been twenty years now and Snow White don’t look a day older, don’t ever sit up and ask for whiskey in her coffee, don’t do nothing but beat her heart and work her breath.
Deer Boy kisses Snow White again.
She doesn’t wake up.
Snow White
and Red Deer
Contend for a
Piece of Meat
Deer Boy stands over the glass gunslinger one night in autumn. Everything smells like woodsmoke.
He puts his hands on the glass of her box. Leans in. Deer Boy can see himself in the glass. He can see her through him.
Deer Boy’s heard his mother’s sick back home. The lunger, maybe. But she’s old, so it doesn’t matter what it is. When she coughs it comes up red as apples. It has occurred to him that he should go to her. If he brought her what she wanted, she might heal up. Might look at him and say: what a good boy.
Deer Boy brought a knife with him. He holds it between himself and Snow White.
I need your heart.
He opens the glass. Snow White is warm. He ran so far and now he runs alongside her. Keeping pace. Keeping time. He doesn’t try to understand things anymore. Deer Boy just loves like a light bulb and he never goes off.
“It looks like a choice,” he says to her soft as falling, “between you and me. But it isn’t.”
When the words come out they run backwards.
Deer Boy drags the knife over his chest. He is giving her his heart. He is exchanging a deer’s heart for a girl’s heart. If hers would fix him, his will fix her. He knows it. She isn’t his sister. She is his sister.
Deer Boy sees her eyelids move. He thinks he sees it. He’s sure he sees it.
Boss Jake hauls him back yelling for help. Hauls him off of her and Deer Boy is crying, he is begging her to wake up. She’s dead, she’s dead, you can come back now.
The furies clean him up. He didn’t cut deep enough. Never could. No damage done. Snow White don’t move a whisper.
Deer Boy’s blood seeps into her white calfskins like snow.
Snow White
and the Story