What they don't know
All she had to do was ask him, and it surprised her how easy it was. There was that one chance where their paths crossed, the two off duty ships they seemed to be when not on the job together, that she grabbed. Madison turned sharp on her heel and grasped at the opportunity. When he said yes, he surprised her.
Anxiously she waited at Zeals that night, pacing the floor along her usual routes, but with a nervous stride and glance cast to the door every other minute. Charlie kept to the taps and watched her with pursed lips and a furrow in his brow. She told him he'd be coming, but neither of them really knew what to expect.
When he came in through those doors all eyes were on him in a second, then gone again in the next. Here was a man of little interest to the black and blue of the crowd. They gave his black jacket, blue jeans, boots, brown hair and odd eyes only a fleeting moment of interest, then went back to their conversations. Madison's heart swelled for reasons she tried to ignore and crossed the room to greet him.
Charlie watched while they clasped hands, while he kissed her chastely on the corner of her mouth, and he frowned.
All the questions she'd been thinking the other night before were answered in a single moment. When she introduced him she could see it in his eyes, when their eyes met, rust and clouded blue.They locked gazes and in that little instance Charlie knew. When he looked at her, she knew; he disapproved.
Salvador showed no opinion of the liver-spotted man she knew and loved. His face remained a mystery, a stoic mask of calm and an apathetic air. When Charlie offered his hand, he looked down at the gnarled fingers in pause, hesitated for a second too long, but when their hands clasped for that one brief moment in time and their eyes met again, the rust-eyed Spaniard said only, "Mucho gusto."
Later Charlie would tell her just what he thought of the man for sure, but now was not the time.
Later, when the crowd trickled out through the eaves and the cracks of Zeals, Madison had him to herself. Charlie left them together with a warding glance and shuffled off to his own private sanctuary in the bowels of the bar. When they were alone she appealed to him, desperation in her eyes.
With her back to Salvador she rolled up the back of her t-shirt, and waited for him to see it. The nice, neat little brand that for so long was hidden, just another secret.
13
"Lucky is thirteen."
She turned around, lifted her eyes to his, pulling back down her shirt.
"Tell me you know. Tell me?"
She walked over in the dark bar to Charlie's back room and pulled from beneath some covers on a couch an old book of superstitions, myths, forgotten lore.
"This is all your territory, Sal. Make me make sense."
The rain poured outside. Battered across the roof above them as though it were just tin.
Her eyes on the book, the book held up to him, as though he was an altar, a place of awful but Real benedictions.
Salvador looked her in the eyes and for a moment she swore she saw a sad ounce of sympathy deep in rusty depths. There was a trace of melancholy in his face when he turned his eyes down to regard the book in her hands. Slowly he lifted both of his own, one to the underside of this ancient fairy tale mystery and one to the top. He clasped the book between them like that and gently lifted it away.
"You'll find no answers here, hermosa," he told her gently, setting the book aside. All this time she thought it was some profoundly important relic, and he set it aside as if it were nothing more than paper glued tight in wood and leather.
"Even if you did," he added, "you wouldn't like them anyway."
Fingertips touched behind her to the bartop as she slid herself up onto it, legs dangling, eyes on that book that was put aside. Had she expected him to me a Man of the Book? When he was graveyard dirt, bad moon risings; men like him bartered in sweat, traded in blood, divined secrets from tears. Not books. Not words pressed to empty pages.
"Have you seen me before?"
Her voice was small. Silence wrapped around her like a thin papoose. He said nothing.
"I trust you, Salvador. And I don't have a lot of that for anyone."
The book was given a glance, and the rainsoaked window nearby. She wondered to herself what he tasted like in the rain. Did his copper skin give up moist tales, did his kiss share souvenirs of who he was, might have been, and lengths gone to?
"I'm not afraid to know what you know." She stared at him with all the courage instilled in her. There was so much risk here, with this man little more than a stranger, always on the edge of her world, who she wanted to know more of. More, more.
That one statement may have touched a nerve, shot a spark in his eye that glinted when he turned. Salvador put his profile to her, not his back, and crossed his arms. For one small fraction in time there was a smirk tucked quietly in the corner of his lips, but the longer he looked out the window the more it faded away, replaced by a pensive frown.
"I hope you will find me when you need helping."
And her lids near covered her eyes, as she clenched the edge of the bartop, eager to hear where her Fate was, if not in the tome that was now as meaningless to her as a wet bullet.
"All you have to do is ask."
There he stood in silhouette, for a time still saying nothing, soaking in her words like they were the rain pattering against the windowpane. When too much of no time at all had passed, he repeated her statement. His words were hollow and empty. "All you have to do is ask," he said, as if reciting scripture. Those words were a memory, and he knew. He had been the one to say them to her first after all.
Letting that echoed statement linger, Salvador pulled down a chair from the nearest table, turned it over and sat himself down. He remained facing the window, watching rainwater turn itself to little rivers that poured down the glass. "Ask me your questions, hermosa, and I'll answer what I can, but be plain." He didn't much like crypticism, she was starting to learn.
The nocturnal colours swarmed around the man. It left her stomach wriggling and her throat dark and dry. So when she spoke, it was in rustles, a sheer sound that the rain almost stole.
"Charlie refers to me as Miss Lune Bleu. I was born on the Crest of a Blue Moon, so my coming into this world was always a celebrated thing. Custom was that I was luck, good and bad. To tell you the truth I didn't think of it much until I got here. Until Charlie looked at me like..."
She let go the counter to bring her hands up together and bunch them close, fists falling to the tops of her knees as she leant forward, staring into rememberance. "When I was fifteen they scarred my back and there was a small party to celebrate the age and my being the Thirteenth Daughter of the Blue Moon." Cornflowers did not yet move to Salvador, who sat there staring away, listening, they too lingered on the patterns of droplets cast by the storm.
"I thought it all hokeypock for years. But sometimes things feel different. Sometimes I think maybe I could be more than I am." She paused a moment, recalling.
"I knew a Shaman in the town I regularly worked for. The Sheriff introduced us. I assisted him with some of the local tribes, helping to keep the younger men out of trouble. I taught them how to shoot, how to braid leather, some gunsmithery, some cooking. And one day, while we were shooting, a ricochet lodged in the side of one the youngest, Richard. And I walked over and I took out his bullet and I sewed him back up. And next morning... he was fine. Not a sign of a stitch."
Madison stayed put, a shy look over to Salvador.
"There is a magician in town. Karras." A pause, a hand back through tendrils, holding back strands from her face, concentration woven through her expression, from behind the Lion.
"He sawed right through me. Righted my rib. It's like I'm this... freak of nature, and I don't know how and why."
Hand fell from night-damp hair to that brand on her back, and she touched there, potently.
"It is partly why I told you I was afraid, the other night." She waited a moment. "What do you think?"
Her head tilted as she stared at him, in angst. Here he was, the only dependable friend she had next to Charlie. Here he was listening to her. There he was willing to paint the town in blood. There he had been unwilling to accept her payment.
She slipped from the counter and silently moved around to stand before him, now she the thoughtful silhouette. And there he sat with his eyes closed. Fingers soothed back through his hair, nails raking across his crown.
He was her Knight in shining armour.
"Do you know this story?"
Salvador moved sluggishly, like a man stirring from a dream. Maybe her tale had lulled him into some state of sleep, rolling through his mind as memories from long ago. He slid his hands up her thighs, catching her by the belt loops and bringing his knees together, pulled her down onto his lap with weighted sigh.
"Cari?a," he said quietly, "you're just a girl. A beautiful, talented, strong-spirited girl. I don't know this story, but I think--" The glow in rust colored eyes was dim when he opened them, when he looked up into cornflower blue. "I think it doesn't matter. I think you're strong enough to look death in the eye and spit in her face." Here his grin was sharp and knowing, like he was sharing some crude little secret with her but failed to fill her in on the details.
"What you are isn't in that book, hermosa. It's not in any book. What you are--" He unhooked one set of fingers from her belt loop and lifted his hand to press down on her chest, right over her heart. "--is in here. Nothing else matters."
(Composed with the player of Delahada; with much thanks)
