+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Riding on the Range | | | | by D!99y Dud3 | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ This is a series of disconnected episodes I posted on a Web forum today about an alternate Wild West universe. The persons named herein are the usernames of posters on said forum. No attempt has been made to format the text into 80 columns. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just me and my horse. Nobody else around. Just me and my horse. And some buzzards circling overhead in the dusty midday sun. Other than that, just me and my horse. Just then, a large crowd of tourists, most of them obese and clad in loudly-colored, mismatched shorts and T-shirts, came pouring out of the Bell teleport station set in the rock face of a canyon to the west. I spotted Trix in the crowd and waved at her. She looked as lovely as ever. She didn't see me. I sighed. "Giddy up!" I said to my horse. He looked at me indolently for a second and went back to grazing. ----- Later that week, I caught up with Genba in a mining town west of Albuquerque. I had ridden across the desert. He had splurged and blown a gold dollar on the teleport, and had amassed considerable earnings at poker by the time I arrived. I ordered three fingers of rot gut. My horse ordered a beer. "What kept ye?" Genba asked. "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K Ranch," I replied. He nodded knowingly. I sipped at my whiskey and didn't say much for a good while. My horse went outside to take a leak. ----- The acrylic domes of Jackson Hole glistened in the sun away across the grassy plain to the west. I wondered how they kept them so clean, way out here in the middle of nowhere. A rusty cargo shuttle hung motionless in the sky, awaiting permission to land. My horse was telling me about a theory of his concerning why the grass in Wyoming was sweeter than the grass in Kansas. I feigned interest, but I wished I had an apple to shove in his mouth to shut him up. As we drew nearer to Jackson Hole, we came across a snake oil peddler's wagon painted in bold letters touting the wonders of Cream of Caulk's wondrous cure-all. I looked at my horse, and he at me. We both shrugged. "Giddy up," he said. ----- In the spring of '73, some enterprising Comanche warriors hacked the Bell security codes for the teleport system and managed to send a sizeable raiding party to Washington, D.C., where they wrought considerable havoc before the Union army squelched the uprising. I was down in the newly formed state of West Mississippi fighting on the side of the Confederacy at the time. My horse was working in Wild Bill's travelling show. I envied his turn in the limelight somewhat, but I had to do my patriotic duty. While on furlough, I bumped into Trix in New Orleans, where she was performing in a burlesque show. There was one dance she did where you could almost swear you could see her knickers. Inspirational, to say the least. After the show, Trix sat at my table for a spell. I bought her a drink - champagne imported all the way from the country of France in Europe. She didn't drink, so she watered a potted cactus with it when I wasn't looking. She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then asked, "Who do you think will win tomorrow, the Cowboys or the Indians?" "I think it's game over for the Indians at this point," I said. ----- I was in Cheyenne with my horse back in '61 when President Barron Trump hammered the golden spike that connected the continental atomic monorail tracks from east coast to west. Bell's teleport would render the trains obsolete a few years later. Genba invented faster-than-light space travel later that year, but it would be another quarter century before he developed a practical working apparatus. My horse had just dropped out of college to live in a commune. I took to hanging around an old Indian wizard to try and take my mind off of Trix. It wasn't working. I sprang my horse from the commune and took him to a quack in Minneapolis for deprogramming, then we headed west to find Trix. The doctor told me to take a sack of apples along, but all I had was peyote. My horse regaled me with all manner of occult stuff and nonsense as we mosied across the lower fifty-three states. In Boulder, I got word that Trix was dead. ----- Me and my horse rode on a cattle drive from the Texas panhandle up to Dodge in the autumn of '63. After my horse collected our wages and divvied them up fair and square -- he got sixty percent and I got forty -- we rented a shotgun shack outside of town and took up hog farming for a spell. One night, I heard a scratching sound at the window. I thought it was a tree limb at first, but then I remembered there were no trees in Kansas. I got up and went to the window to investigate. Lo and behold, there was Trix looking me straight in the eye, not six inches from my face. ----- In Monterrey, GG had started a mariache band and was churning out the hits hand over fist. My horse bought a few of her wax cylinders to play on his Edison gramophone, but they melted in the desert heat after a few plays. The ghost of Trix was hanging around fairly regularly then. Some nights I'd wake up in a cold sweat to find her floating above me, grinning in my face like a Cheshire cat. I'd gotten used to it, but it's the kind of thing that always startles a feller no matter how many times he sees it. Since me and my horse were the only ones who could see her, she had ditched the petticoats and bustles in favor of something a little more comfortable. Well, a lot more comfortable, really. We would occasionally put her up to playing practical jokes on unsuspecting yokels. One day, we spotted a couple of men panning for gold in a creek west of Salt Lake City. Trix snuck up behind one of them and knocked his hat off his head. He spun around and didn't see anybody but his friend in the creek up to his ankles, some twenty yards away. My horse snickered. I nudged him in the ribs to make him keep quiet. The man fetched his soggy hat from the creek, put it back on his head, and went back to panning. Then she drifted up behind the other man and knocked his hat off. My horse was braying like a jackass with laughter at this point, and so was I. This went on a few more times until the two men came to blows. We tired of the festivities after awhile and headed back to camp. ----- The last time I saw Dark Dick, me and my horse were receiving honorary awards at a rodeo clown convention in Abilene, summer of 1901. Abilene was a bustling metropolis of 28 million by then. I tied my horse to a hitching post in front of a saloon in the Arab Quarter and mosied inside. The Arabs were peculiar folk. They didn't let horses drink inside like a normal saloon. Genba had found a way to reincarnate Trix the previous year, and there she was with Dark Dick and Cream of Caulk. The women folk were helping to rope the yokels into a shell game Dark Dick was running near the back of the establishment. I took off my hat and approached the trio. "Evenin', ladies, Dick." Who are you callin' a lady?" said Creamy, true to form. I heard my horse snicker outside. Dick said the locals were becoming disgruntled at being relieved of their hard-earned money. There were murmurs about getting up a lynch mob. I shuddered at the thought of poor Trix having to suffer through death a second time. We hastily packed up the shell game and Dick's winnings, and prepared to vacate the town. We were met at the door by men with guns. A lot of men with a lot of guns. ----- My horse bought a new hover car with the money we made from our last cattle drive in 1905. By then, the teleports were cheap enough that beeves could be beamed directly from the Bell stations out west to the big station near the slaughterhouses in Chicago. Our rustic way of life was quickly coming to an end. He took me for a spin on the red dirt backroads of East Texas. We saw Trix hitchhiking there and picked her up. She was wearing booty shorts, which were all the rage back then. "Nice ride," she said. "Thanks," the horse replied. "Nice booty." Trix giggled. I strapped myself in as he floored it. The car ascended above the treeline and headed toward the blue stratosphere. ----- When General Washington repelled the first reptilian invasion in 1776, we thought we'd seen the last of them. But, alas, it wasn't so. Lewis and Clark found the Louisiana Purchase teeming with reptilians and reptilian-human hybrids. The Sioux had had minor success at slowing their encroachment, but their bows and flint arrowheads were no match for directed energy weapons. Something had to be done. Trix and my horse set about working up a binding spell while I went down to Mexico to rustle up reinforcements. The banditos shrugged and said they didn't have a dog in the fight. Next, I appealed to the Negro free states down South, but they were still nursing a grudge against the white man despite having won their freedom in that famous landmark Supreme Court case in 1806. As I mosied back to St. Louis to see how Trix and my horse were coming along, they came galloping up. Trix was covered in mud from head to toe. "What happened to you?" I asked her. "Well," she said, "the spell worked -- sort of -- but it had an unexpected side-effect." "What kind of side-effect?" I tried not to snicker at her soiled condition. Trix mopped a dab of mud from her brow and slung it at me. I ducked. "We conjured the river gods to rise up and drown the lizard people as they crossed the Mississippi, which they did. But after the river swelled up, it plopped back down again and splattered mud all over the countryside." "At least the cornfields will be fertile this year," I replied with a shrug. Trix feigned flinging more mud, but waited for me to duck before she flung it. Hit me right in the face that time. My horse snickered. "Meh, shuddup," I said. ----- One day, shortly before the War Between the States broke out, me and my horse booked passage on a riverboat up to Cincinatti to see the World Exposition. Dark Dick was on the boat, running his shell game as usual. Cream of Caulk had disembarked at Vicksburg to visit relatives. While we were strolling about the Texas deck to pass the time, we spotted a beautiful young woman. My horse whistled. I told him to mind his manners. "Oh, it's all right," he said. "Me and her are old friends." He introduced the woman to me as Trix Malone. She said she was bound for Cincinatti too, where she would take a ferry across the river, then a stagecoach down to Lexington and points beyond. I asked her how she had met my horse. "Oh, didn't you know? My folks were his original owners. He won the Kentucky Derby when I was a wee lass." I looked at my horse incredulously. He was beaming proudly. "No, ma'am, I reckon that news got right past me." ----- When she turned sixteen, Trix discovered she had amazing powers: clairvoyance, telepathy, astral projection, you name it. She was afraid to tell people about her newfound gifts, lest they accuse her of being a witch. In those days, witchcraft was considered by devout Christians to be synonymous with devil worship. At age nineteen, Trix befriended a sickly colt who was born on the family farm and cast a spell on him, turning him into champion racehorse. That was the same horse who would later become the central figure in this here yarn. Trix was working as a laboratory assistant for Genba, the renowned inventor, when she met Dark Dick. They tried to elope, but her father, a man of considerable influence, was having none of it. He hired the Pinkerton agency to track her down and fetch her back home. She was inconsolable for a time, but she eventually got over it. At age twenty-five, Trix was killed in a stampede at an exhibition of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Knoxville, and reanimated by Genba in his laboratory a little over a year later. ----- I bought my horse from a man in Arkansas in 1855. The man was a judge and horse trader who had just been elected to Congress, and he was selling off his property and livestock to move his wife and eight young'uns to Washington, D.C. I was astonished to learn the horse could not only talk, but had a wicked sense of humor to boot. The novelty of a talking horse wore off after awhile, and I was thankful to have someone to converse with on those long, lonely rides across the wild frontier. Years later, on a steamboat journey up the Mississippi, I would meet the person responsible for the horse's unique abilities. Me and my horse struck out for the wide open West from Arkansas to seek our fortune. We dabbled in a little bit of everything, with modest success. My horse was an Indian agent and fur trapper at various points, while I worked mostly as a guard on Wells-Fargo coaches hauling gold and silver from the mines in the West to the relative safety of the big banks further east. We were both deputy sheriffs for a few months down in Arizona. One day as I was transferring a shipment of gold from the coach to a monorail bound for Fort Knox, a voice from behind me said, "Put your hands in the air and don't move." I did as the voice instructed. I had heard that command many a time in my line of work, but this time something was different. It was a woman's voice. I caught a glimpse of her face reflected in the window of the depot. A bandana covered the lower part of her face, but I recognized her, all right. I had seen that face on "wanted" posters all over the territory. It was the face of Cream of Caulk. ----- Before Trix and Creamy came out west, they worked at the perfume counter in a department store in St Louis. To get by on their meager wages, they shared a room in a run-down tenement. Sensing that the struggling young girls faced starvation, the owner of a seedy riverfront dive recruited them for a stage show with promises of stardom and wealth. They accepted the job and a generous cash advance without first finding out what he had in mind for them. Trix was taken aback when she saw the costume he wanted her to wear. She tried to refuse, but the manager said, "A deal is a deal." Creamy, who was a little more daring, wasn't as mortified as Trix -- until she learned what he wanted them to do while they were wearing the costumes. Then she, too, wanted to back out of the deal. No dice. They tried to flee, but the manager barred the way out. They were trapped. Resigned to their fate, they took the costumes into the squallid dressing room and put them on, emerging a few minutes later with a dejected look on their faces. "Excellent," said the manager. "Very nice indeed. Now go out there and work it." ----- Me and my horse were camping out under a giant redwood tree in California and eating peyote buttons one balmy summer evening, pondering the mysteries of life and what-not, when he turned to me and said, " I wonder how Trix is doing." I didn't know who Trix was at the time. This was a few years before we met. "Trix who?" "Never mind. Forget about it," he said sullenly and went back to contemplating his navel. A lone cargo shuttle rattled overhead. On its way to San Francisco to deliver a load of hashish, no doubt. A few minutes passed. The horse stood up abruptly and sauntered off. "Where are you going?" I inquired. "I have to take a leak. Do you mind?" ----- One of Trix's more compelling stage shows, and the one that propelled her to instant stardom, was the one where she pulled flaming fireballs from under her petticoats, to the delight and astonishment of the audience. Nobody knew she was a witch at the time, so how she kept them under there without setting her clothes and herself ablaze was a complete mystery to all, even the great scientist and inventor, Genba. It was also at that juncture in her career that any of us saw Trix completely naked from head to toe for the first and only time ever. And, although the episode was quite possibly the first wardrobe malfunction in cinema history, it wasn't because her clothes had caught on fire. The silent movie industry was starting to take off in a major way in 1888. Trix was riding high on the success of her fireball show and wanted to get in on the ground floor. She took a teleport to Los Angeles and met a big shot producer who had seen her show and hired her right away. She was to play Lady Godiva. A very long wig was supposed to cover all of her lady bits, exposing only her limbs and midriff. Supposed to. There was a hook hanging over the stage, and one thing led to another, and... well, you figure it out. Me and my horse saw the whole ordeal from backstage. "Poor Trix!" I gasped. The horse snickered. I elbowed him in the ribs. Hard. He stomped on my foot. I poked him in the eye. A comedy trio who witnessed that backstage exchange between me and my horse would later make it the basis of their entire decades-long film career. ----- Trix was well into the fifth decade of her film career before anyone noticed that she hadn't aged a day since Genba resurrected her, over sixty years before. I was an old geezer. Genba was an old geezer. Dark Dick was an old geezer. So was my horse. Creamy, as lovely as she still was, was showing her age. But not Trix. She still looked twenty-five. She had to be eighty-five by now. She had told us all she was a witch back in 1926 or thereabouts, but still.... I asked my horse about it while we were sitting at the card table in the game room of our Pebble Beach bungalow playing gin rummy one day. "What do you think?" He looked at me over the rims of his bifocals. "About what?" "You know. Is it her magic, or something Genba did in the lab that day?" The horse shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe neither. Maybe both." Cream of Caulk stopped by in her custom hover car that a Mexican chop shop had tricked out to look like a old timey hearse, with flames painted on the front quarter panels. "What's shakin', Creamy? Rob any stagecoaches today?" "You know I gave all of that up decades ago, you old buzzard." And so she had. The long arm of the law had finally caught up with Creamy and her band of outlaws. She had done hard time. She had gotten religion. She still dressed slutty though, so it ain't all bad. "What do you think Trix's secret is?" I asked her. "I know exactly what it is, but I swore I'd never tell." "Oh, you'll tell," I replied. "Come over here and sit on my lap." ----- When Trix was a young woman, sometime before she started training racehorses and riding them to victory in national horse races, she liked to make mud pies in interesting shapes that offended the sensibilities of the straight-laced womenfolk of her sleepy little town. Many a distraught lady would come calling to tell Trix's parents what they had seen, and demand that they do something to curb their child's creative impulses. But Trix would not be curbed. Her artistic creations became ever more realistic and lifelike, until even her own mother could no longer deny what they uniquely resembled. Her sculptures became larger and larger too, reaching such immense proprtions that they could no longer be kept hidden from travellers passing on the road in front of the house. Indeed, they eventually became so large that they towered over the countryside and could be seen from miles away. The flabbergasted townsfolk had finally had enough, and insisted that the judge order Trix's parents to send her away to a convent. Wishing to keep peace in the community, they reluctantly agreed. That didn't solve anything, however. No sooner had she settled in at the convent than Trix proceeded to invoke the outrage of the denizens thereof with her works. The Mother Superior called in an exorcist to cast demons out of the child. She was required to spend every waking hour either kneeling in prayer or performing work in the nunnery's vast gardens. Nevertheless, the sculptures kept coming and coming. They got bigger and bigger until the base of each one covered an entire homestead plot. Then, on her sixteenth birthday, it suddenly stopped. Trix had sublimated all of the immense energy of the massive symbols and concentrated it deep within her soul. And that's when the real magic started happening. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If this phile gripped you more than a muddy old river or reclining Buddha, please re-upload it to as many BBSes as you can. Danke schoen! Oh, and tell them you stole it from one of these fine boreds: Agency BBS Borderline BBS Sysop: Avon Sysop: Balzabaar telnet://agency.bbs.nz telnet://borderlinebbs.dyndns.org:6400 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------