Comic Artist Can Have Little A Prose Writing, as a Treat

Last year I revisited the NTO prose novelization a little, to flex my atrophied writing muscles and help keep me invested in the comic. I haven't had time for it this year, it's been worked on in disjointed segments, and I can't remember what I've posted of it here before, honestly, but as an apology for so few recent updates please have this contiguous segment of first draft from the Sun Prairie chapter. 

Hunter was of the opinion all these Midwestern towns looked alike and for the most part Sun Prairie didn’t do much to turn him from this line of thinking. Indeed, it was very like Lookback: another little huddled main street in a yellow, undulating ocean of grass, this one perched on a short bluff overlooking a valley full of its eponymous sun flowers. It had a bigger hotel than Lookback had, though, probably owing to gawpers coming to see the aforementioned blooms, and while it was midmorning, the hotel became Hunter’s singular focus. He hadn’t slept for close to three days and the prospect of doing it in an approximation of a bed was a temptation that could not be denied, even if lingering in town for any longer than it took to cross into the valley of sun flowers was beyond the scope of his plans. 

Ignoring the gnawing sense that it was a terrible idea he steered Diamonds for that corner hotel. He hadn’t even drawn up at a hitching post and the place’s whores-in-residence were after him with all the thirsty, unwanted purpose of mosquitoes. They’d caught the scent of his trailworn loneliness, the sight of his expensive horse and clothing, dusty as they all were. There were three of them: two dark ladies of Eurybais and a white girl with hair that was – Hunter didn’t want to look at her, directly, but he could see it at the edges of his vision – almost red. 

“Morning, Mister!” she sang from the hotel’s generous porch, and then politeness forced John to look at her finally, and smile, for the half second it took him to yank his hat brim down back over his eyes in acknowledgement. He swung down from Diamonds and busied himself tying the grey stallion up where he could easily reach the water trough. He’d inquire about getting the horse something decent to eat within, but first…

The almost-red-haired girl was sauntering down the hotel’s front stairs to intercept him. The other two hadn’t moved; either they could read his disinterest better than their young coworker or they’d decided to let her have him. “Fine day, ain’t it,” she said. “Lookin’ to start it off with a bang?”

Finally, he looked at her properly. Looked down at her, really, because she wasn’t even shoulder-high to him. Her almost-red hair was long and pulled up in a fetchingly untidy pile of Arteridean coils. For the briefest second he considered it, considered her. He hadn’t touched a woman since … well, that didn’t bear consideration. He was lonely, anyway, and the distraction couldn’t hurt. But the fact was he doubted the average whore had it in them to entertain him in the manner to which he was accustomed, and they made him uncomfortable, besides. Hunter decided, impulsively, to return to the favor. 

He stepped toward her, into intimate proximity such that that they were almost touching and he was looking directly down at her, his broad white hat shadowing her admittedly pretty face. “And what if I said yes?” he posed in a private purr, and he watched her eyes for any ghost of fear or glint of recognition. And he saw it: she was afraid of him. He couldn’t know, obviously, if it was because she’d seen a wanted poster or because she recognized him on a more visceral level as something she ought, wisely, to be afraid of, or because her line of work just bred caution in the wise, but she was. 

He managed a somewhat brittle smile in appreciation of her mercenary self-mastery. “Second thought, darlin’, I’m here on a spiritual pilgrimage. It wouldn’t do to have my devotions muddied with … ” He took her naked white fingers in his gloved hand and brushed them with his lips in the briefest allusion to a kiss. “Impure thoughts.” 

Something in her smile warmed; unfurled with genuine interest at the humor and the clear consideration behind it. And then, goddamnit all, he found he almost regretted his decision as he turned, quickly, and jogged up the stairs. 

* * * 

The red-haired woman trudged determinedly though the sea of yellow prairie, and eventually found what wasn’t exactly a road but was certainly a well-traveled way between scattered towns: a couple of bare, hard wagon ruts slicing through the otherwise thigh-high grass. It was a warm, early autumn day, vibrating with the codas of summer insects, and the sky was an eternity of blue you could just about feel yourself falling into, but she had eyes only for the revolver in her hand, which she was vainly twiddling with, a driver in her teeth. Hunter had ruined the action, hopelessly, until she had access to somewhere she could fabricate or at least scavenge and bodger in some new components. 

Escaping the noose had been trivial. Among other things secreted in her arsenal was a gleaming stainless steel scalpel, and she’d dug it out as soon as Hunter had left with Diamonds. Her only hurry was to somehow outpace them, but even that seemed easily achieved since Hunter had to sleep sometime. He was yet a man, after all … wasn’t he? It was difficult for her to tell. 

She’d been walking for a full day, mechanically, unhalting, lost in thoughts of slipping the scalpel between Hunter’s cervical vertebrae and how he’d fold, helpless and boneless, beneath her, when she heard the jangle of horses under harness. She turned and saw dust rising faintly over the rise she’d just come from, back up along the not-a-quite-road. She stopped, quickly screwed together what was left of the pistol receiver in her hand, and holstered it. 

The long ears of a pair of mules crested the hilltop first. A dark bay and a parti-colored paint pulled a rickety wagon with a covered load in its bed and a mess of mining hardware lashed to its sides. As it trundled down the slope toward her, she could make out the pair in the driver’s seat: two men with the look of brothers. They shared a shaggy blond hair and a general aspect, though the man driving the team for the moment looked a bit bigger and a lot more careworn than his slimmer sibling. The elder, undoubtedly, he wore an old sheepskin coat and a lot of very practical looking homespun. The younger brother wore a leather jacket with fringe so long it gave him the look of bird wings, over plaid, and his hatband was crusted with conchos, glaring in the noonday sun. The red haired woman also noticed the glint of the big metal buckle on his gun rig. He wore a pearl-gripped service pistol, a long-barreled six iron: the kind the Republican Army had handed out to soldiers of distinction after the war. 

The brother driving the team pulled them up alongside the red-haired woman, but before he could reshuffle the reins in his fingers to tip his hat the younger brother was leaning exuberantly out of the wagon, manners if indeed he possessed any forgotten. “Afternoon, stranger!” he called unselfconsciously, “Whatchu doin’ way out this way?”

Up until this point the red-haired woman’s face had been largely obscured by the wide brim of her hat; she angled her head now to look up at them, sidelong, a birdlike motion, and only then did they see the pale of her, her burning eyes, and it caused them to notice, in turn, how singed her clothing was, the marks at her throat almost like rope burns, but no—they weren’t red enough. Nothing about her was red enough; she had an eerily bloodless aspect in general. Both brothers shrunk away, the elder almost imperceptibly, his mastery over himself better, the younger in a broad and wide-eyed recoil. The older brother then elbowed the younger, and the younger appended a flustered “…Ma’am!”. 

The elder brother was gathering himself to attempt a revision of this entire meeting when the red-haired woman spoke, in a voice like rain on a campfire: “How far is the nearest town?”

Thankful for the direction, the elder answered: “Nearest? Prob’ly be Lookback, but seems you’re headin’ away from there, same as us. Good on you, too: just been some trouble there. Strange stuff.”

“Where are you bound, then?” she asked, approaching the bay mule’s near side. The mule shied, subtly and slowly, away from her, shoulder twitching as if fly-bit. 

“Wandering Gulch,” the older brother answered, eyes narrowing as he noted the mule. “’Bout a day due northwest.”

“What’s in Wandering Gulch,” the woman pressed. 

“It’s a biggish mining camp—” the older brother began to answer, but he was interrupted by the younger man, who cut in, verbally and bodily, throwing his arms wide:

“They got everythin’! Saloon, gambling hall, cathouses till breakfast—“

“Saintssakes, Markus!”

The younger brother, whose name was apparently Markus, shrunk, gloves parting his hat from his blonde hair to nervously scratch his head and look away sidelong. “S’pose you wouldn’t be interested none in any of that, ma’am, no.” 

The red hair woman just stared at him, flatly and incuriously. 

The elder brother cleared his throat. “I’m Lawrence Westcott and this here’s my kid brother Markus.” 

The woman hesitated in her response. What, after all, to say? But eventually, she said “Vane Black.”

“Can we offer you a lift, Miss Black,” Lawrence said, and while he dreaded her response he had to admit her appearance concerned him. “Respectfully, truth be told, you don’t look so good.”

 * * *  

Two coins danced over the backs of Hunter’s gloved fingers before he slapped them down. “Best room you got, I suppose, whatever that is. Possible to get a bath?”

The woman behind the counter traded the coins for a key. She was almost hilariously prim-looking considering the number of whores openly working her hotel, in her starched beige coat with her white shirt collar buttoned up to her chin. “We can draw you a bath, sure. Need to stable a horse? It’s in the back. You can take him round while we send up the water.” She slid a registry with a pen and inkpot perched on it across the countertop. 

Hunter didn’t look at the book: he put down a third coin, grabbed the key, and turned for the hotel’s broad central stairs. 

“Would you like to register please?” the clerk called after him, helplessly, but Hunter bounded up the steps without a glance over his shoulder.

“I’m gonna get out of this filthy overcoat and then see to my horse,” Hunter called back. “I ain’t fit to be seen.” 

 * * *  

They’d driven for hours, in long tracts of silence where hoofbeats on dry packed earth, jingling harness and shrilling late summer cicadas all seemed oppressively loud for the lack of conversation; tracts broken periodically and startlingly by Markus’ guileless observations and anecdotes.

He was by then explaining the history and context of their present circumstance: “So this big mining outfit moves in, puttin’ all the regular folks out of business, right, so I say to Lawrence, ‘Hell Lawrence, we got nothing here but our soldierin’ money; let’s load a cart and run a bunch of stuff they need up there!’ You know, hardware, mining stuff. Better still, let’s level the playing field some, you know?” Here he flung his arms wide, jostling Black into Lawrence, who shuddered away reflexively much as his mule had earlier. “So we’re runnin’ dynamite!” 

Lawrence tutted, wearily, his shoulders relaxing back into their previous slump. “You tryin’ to scare the lady, Markus? Sam hell, take it easy.” 

But Vane Black had put an arm over the seat’s backrest to swivel around and regard the wagon’s tarp-covered cargo with redoubled interest. Lawrence couldn’t see her face, though, and likely taking the motion for nervousness, forced his hard features into what he hoped would pass for a reassuring smile, and kept talking. “Sort of a volatile plan, ain’t it. Kind of … whatchucallit … metaphorical. Sums us up good.”

She was still looking thoughtfully backward at all that dynamite, though, unresponsive, so he continued: “What about you, ma’am. What were you doin’ way out here with no provisions to speak of? Seems like there must be some kinda story there.”

She turned forward again, finally, but she didn’t look at him: she was looking ahead down the dirt track, a flinty and faraway expression on what he could see of her white face beneath the broad black brim. “Looking for someone,” she said eventually.

“Well, good thing we come upon you!” Markus remarked. He was utterly oblivious, as far as Lawrence could tell, to the strangeness of their passenger. “Like Lawrence said, you don’t look so good. You look kinda faint. White. Like maybe you got more than a touch of the consump—”

“Markus!” Lawrence hollered, and his little brother recoiled, leaning dangerously off the driver’s seat in doing so, but still Vane Black seemed wholly unfazed. She was staring at a rough-hewn signpost up ahead: just a timber, really, with two shingles on which someone had scratched names for the upcoming forks in the path. One led slightly northward, toward hills that were doubtless formidable but at this distance were just a blue band on the horizon: that was the way to the brothers’ Wandering Gulch and its cathouses and regular folks in need of hardware. The other path ran southwest, into nearer yellow hills and holloways that largely obscured anything beyond. This way was marked “Sun Prairie.”

“What’s in Sun Prairie?” Black said, flatly, as oblivious to Lawrence’s consumption comment as he’d been. 

“Sunflowers,” Lawrence replied, with a hint of disdain which Markus evidently took great umbrage at. The younger brother leaned over across Vane’s lap to snarl a correction: 

“They ain’t just ‘sunflowers’, goddamnit Lawrence, they’re Sun Flowers.”

Black wasn’t sure she appreciated the distinction he was trying to make and apparently Lawrence didn’t either, because he rolled his eyes and said with a patronizing smile: “Folks exaggerate, Markus. I’m sure they’re just tryin’ to get people down there.” 

Markus slammed a fist into the open gloved palm of his other hand, angry. They’d evidently debated this before. “Damnit, Lawrence. Godammnit. You’re no fun and you got no imagination, I swear. Didn’t you learn nothin’ fightin’ alongside all those folks in the war. They ain’t yeller weeds like you’re thinkin’! I heard all about it. They burn in the dark, light up the night like it’s daylight ‘n’ everythin’. Like magic. Or maybe, I dunno, not like magic but just plain magic. So help me, when we’ve sold off this minin’ junk—“

This shattered Lawrence’s patient, placid smile and now he, too, turned to yell rather rudely across Black at his brother. “This was your idea, Markus!” 

“Well irregardless….” Markus said, staring huffily away toward Sun Prairie. “When we’re done with it we’ll head down there and see it ourselves. I’ll show you.”

Lawrence sighed, eyes on the mules and the oncoming crossroads. “Regardless, Ma’am,” he said, “Sun prairie’s got tourists, and some kinda flowers.”

There was a click, and both brothers looked inward at Vane Black, and found themselves staring down the barrels of both her pistols. She was banking on their unfamiliar construction confusing the point of their present usability as she said: “Time we parted ways.”

 * * *  

Hunter had taken Diamonds around the corner from the hotel’s dooryard, through a little alleyway separating it from its good-sized stable building and into a sunny paddock area of dirt packed rock-hard by countless shod hooves.  He’d shed his overcoat and indeed the body coat beneath was white enough to approach respectability but his shirt was so impossibly dusty and slack with sweat by this point he’d given up; he reached up to loosen his tie and the topmost button of his collar. The hell with it. Who was going to see? Whores? The hostler? 

His hand was still at his throat, untangling his red velvet tie the rest of way when a woman walked out of the stable and stopped, staring. 

“Well now,” she said. “There’s a handsome fellow.” 

John knew, of course, that she was talking about Diamonds: she was already crossing the yard to take him by the reins and wasn’t looking at him and his damp collar and slackened tie at all. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the presumptuousness of her touching his horse without his leave but wanted, as always, to phrase an objection in a charmingly amiable way, but she’d disarmed him, in a way that took him back to Ellen Cauley, and he knew, looking at her and making this unconscious connection to his awkward youth, that he was done for. 

She was tall, not so tall as he was but unlike the girl on the front steps he couldn’t have effortlessly rested his chin on her head, that’s for sure. She had dark, Ellen Cauleyish hair in an untidy, purely functional bun, with sweaty strands loose in her freckled face. She was well-muscled, a career wrangler for a certainty, wearing trousers that fit powerful thighs a little too tightly, a formerly white shirt cut for a slenderer woman strained taut across shoulders and biceps such that every line of her was almost indecently displayed. When she finally looked from Diamonds to John he became aware a second too late that his lips were stupidly parted. 

He rallied himself, and said, far too late: “Thank you kindly for noticin’ but I’m here about my horse.” 

She looked at him now, a quick look up and down his conformation, unabashed, just as she had Diamonds, and John liked to think she perked up slightly as she did so, pleasantly surprised with what she found. “I got room for both of you,” she said, and there was nothing at all shy or retiring about her voice, only wry amusement as now, finally, she noticed the state of his clothes, the soot and the traildust and his unshaven neck, naked in the V of his open shirt collar.

John grinned and looked down at his leather shoes, once black, blurring into the perimeter of his spats, once white; they were a near-uniform dust color now. “He could use some oats and a good currying down, but I can see to it myself.” 

 She raised an eyebrow and began to lead Diamonds off, toward the stable’s open sliding door, daring him, seemingly, to just try. “See to yourself. I’ve got this lad.”