How the West Was Won . . .

[ghostgecko.livejournal.com]

Title: HOW THE WEST WAS WON, AND WHERE IT GOT US
Author: Nightspore (more at fanfiction.net/~nightspore)
Fandom: Dead Man
Pairing: William Blake (Johnny Depp) / Train Fireman (Crispin Glover)
Rating: X
Author's note: Since this is a somewhat obscure movie, I included the brief scene the two have together (the "Eerie" conversation) transcribed directly from the film. Orig. written for contrelamontre, crossposted to johnny depp fanfiction.



"Excuse me. Sir?" William Blake, accountant formerly of Cleveland en route to Machine, California, leaned on the bar and tapped hesitantly for the bartender's attention. "I was wondering if you could direct me to the facilities."

"What facilities?"

"I, er, er, I need to relieve myself," Blake said quietly.

The train was stopping for a few hours in this little town, Monongahela. He had no idea what state they were in. Some vast arid wasteland that padded out the center of the continent. Monongahela was one of those places, like the port cities of old, that had only been built because of the railroad. It boasted no natural resources, produced no goods - its existence was entirely owed to its placement, the precise distance from the last town that it took for the 29 to run out of fuel. Blake had taken this opportunity to get his first taste of authentic firewater, a brand of rotgut whiskey he'd never heard of, called Tiger's Breath. That had been an hour ago, at noon. Now the Tiger's Breath, apparently satisfied with its efforts in dissolving his guts and brain into a buzzing, queasy mess, wanted out and now.

The bartender stared at him. "Out back."

There was a single outhouse behind the bar, a little shack with the traditional half moon carved in the door. By the sounds emanating from therein it was not only occupied but likely to remain so for quite a while. Faintly disgusted, Blake staggered a decent distance away into the long grass and unbuttoned his pants. When in Rome, he supposed. The grass here, beargrass, they called it, grew almost as tall as his chest and was so stiff and sharp-edged it sliced his hands like a knife when he tried to push it aside. Out West, even the grass was ferocious. He was glad he was heading to a sizeable town. Blake knew really wasn't cut out for the cowboy life. He preferred regular baths, flinched at the firing of a starter's pistol, rode a horse only slightly better than another horse would, and liked his bread as free of weevils as humanly possible.

He saw its reflection in the duck pond before he saw the dog itself. It stood there staring at him with a wary, appraising expression, a big black dog with a shaggy coat and long legs and pale eyes, like a husky. Suddenly, unaccountably shy, Blake felt his stream dry up to a trickle.

Poor dog, the thick ruff about its shoulders made it look large, but he could clearly see the tucked-up belly and staring ribs. The tenderhearted Blake patted his thigh and whistled. He couldn't bring it with him on the train to Machine, of course, but he could beg a few scraps of meat from the dinner car for it, surely, or a nice big bone. The dog's small, cupped ears strained forward with interest, but it did not step closer. Its cold, patient gaze bored into him, and reminded him of something, although he had surely never seen such a large mutt with such pale eyes before. He glanced away from it for a moment to button himself back up, and when he looked again the dog had disappeared.

"It were a coyote," another passenger said when Blake returned to the bar and inquired after the dog's owner. The man pronounced it kie-yoat. "Or mebbe a wolf."

"Wolf!" Blake exclaimed.

"Weren't no wolf," one of the others piped up, putting down the jackrabbit he was busily skinning. "Yer a blame fool, Twill. Ain't been no wolf round here since they slaughtered the buffalo herd up at Bitterroot Pass."

"Wolf," Blake repeated faintly. Imagine that, a wolf! A big bad wolf, a grim, gaunt, man-eating monster from childhood's darkest nightmares, and he had been standing there with his man-parts in his hand, less than fifteen feet from it! It was amazing he escaped with his life. What would his parents have thought? What would his intended have thought . . . would she have considered him brave?

He suddenly wanted out of the small, smoke-filled bar and back on the train, craving the comfort of inch-thick steel plates separating him from the wilderness, the wheels turning and taking him far away from this place where even the most routine, intimate functions could be interrupted by something as shockingly savage as the unheralded appearance of a wolf.

He boarded again, noting how the other passengers seemed to consist entirely of hairy, scurvy-looking trappers. "Mountain men", he thought they were called.

Blake was pretty, almost too pretty with his wide cheekbones, full lips and melting dark eyes like the kind seen in the languid women adored by the Pre-Raphaelites, his face only saved from total effeminacy by the arch of his brows. His clothes were not new, and even when new had not been expensive, but they were clean, neatly pressed and gaily patterned in large checks. He'd wanted to appear dashing, but the effect was cheap and clownish. His fellow passengers had gotten rougher in appearance as he went further West. They were unbathed and unshaved, bundled up as comfortably in the skins of beasts they'd no doubt trapped, skinned and cured themselves as if the pelts had grown naturally on them. They filled the car with the smell of themselves, whiskey and tobacco and tanning acid and gunpowder and saddle soap and bodily processes. Such a man would be a figure of wonder and fun strolling down the streets of Cleveland with his greasy, uncut, flea-ridden hair and buckskins decorated Indian style with beads, bones and porcupine quills, as fabulously out of place as a unicorn. But here, surrounded by these half-wild men, Blake knew keenly he was the one out of place.

It was almost a relief when the 29's fireman entered the car. He strolled down the aisle, his hands clasped behind his back. Blake was impressed despite himself at how the man's stride adjusted to the roll of the train. He himself hadn't, even after all this traveling, gotten his 'sea legs'. The fireman's clothes, his skin, his entire person was blackened with an indelible layer of soot. He shoveled coal and wood into the furnace that heated the water into steam that ran the pistons that turned the wheels that were clacking, clacking, clacking endlessly, carrying Blake deeper and deeper into the wilderness.

He had seen the man once before, when he was hauling his suitcase into the train at the first station. For a moment he couldn't think of what the man resembled. Then, as he shut his eyes against the glare of the setting sun, he saw a slim white figure with dark hollows for eyes printed on the back of his eyelids: a ghost. The man was a ghost, in negative. The figure faded and he opened his eyes again, but the fireman had disappeared.

Now he sat down opposite of Blake, who clutched his suitcase on his lap. Apropos of absolutely nothing at all the fireman said, "Look out the window."

Blake obliged. He saw nothing but what had been there the past few days, an endless sea of beargrass waving in the hot wind. Suggestively shaped rock escarpments, the color of red ochre, raised from it at intervals like desert islands.

"And doesn't it remind you," the man continued in his soft, insinuating voice, "Of when you were in the boat? And then later that night you were laying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape."

Blake glanced worriedly around the car, but none of the trappers was paying attention or had noticed anything amiss. The fireman rambled on, gesturing heavenward, seemingly not bothered by Blake's unease. "And you think to yourself: why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still? And also - where is it that you're from?"

Blake had been about to protest that the man must have mistaken him for someone else, but was startled by the abrupt question. He answered reflexively, "Cleveland."

"Cleveland," the fireman echoed, canting his head to one side. There was a look of polite disbelief on his sooty face, as if he thought Blake were making up the name of the city.

"Lake Eerie," Blake elaborated.

"Eerie," the man repeated, as if agreeing to something else entirely. "Do you have any parents back in, ah, Eerie?"

"They passed on recently." The grief was still raw. Blake looked away, wishing the strange man would leave.

"And, uh, d'you have a wife? In Eerie?"

"No."

"A fiancee," he persisted, his eyes strangely downcast as he leaned further forward.

Determined to remain courteous, Blake answered stiffly, "Well, I had one of those. She changed her mind."

"She found herself somebody else," the fireman said, in a tone that was not one of a man guessing.

"No." That was another wound he didn't care to pick at. Whoever this man was, he had an absolute genius for obnoxious prying.

"Yes, she did," the fireman said with a note of grim finality. "Well, that doesn't explain why you've come all the way out here. All the way out here to hell."

A frown furrowed Blake's smooth brow. He made as if to argue, but decided it wasn't worth contradicting the fool. "I have a job. Out in the town of Machine."

"Machine?" A peculiar light flared in the man's eyes. It really was impossible to see the expression on his face underneath the layers of grime. "That's the end of the line."

"Is it." Blake tried to sound disinterested, hoping that would dissuade the man from further conversation.

"Yes," the fireman hissed, an unnatural stress in his voice.

Blake frowned again. There was some mysterious, threatening implication in the man's words. He didn't like that at all. He drew his summons letter out of his jacket pocket and handed it to the fireman, who removed his thick leather gloves and took the folded paper rather delicately between his index and middle fingers.

"Well, I received a letter from the people at Dickinson's metal works assuring me of a job there."

"Is that so," the man murmured, staring hard at the letter, turning it over and over.

"Yes, I'm an accountant."

"I wouldn't know, because I don't read. But, eh, I'll tell you one thing for sure. I wouldn't trust no words written down on no piece of paper. 'Specially from no Dickinson out in the town of Machine." He spoke in an uneducated dialect, but each syllable was precisely pronounced, the hard consonants bitten off crisply, and Blake had the odd sense that the man was playing dumb, putting on the accent for some murky reason of his own. He folded the letter neatly and handed it back. "You're just as likely to find your own grave."

He had been so intrigued by this singular conversation, Blake hadn't noticed the elderly mountainman at the front of the car looking excitedly out the open window behind the fireman, until the old man shouldered his rifle and began shooting.

Blake jumped at the sound, ducking down behind his battered suitcase as the others snapped to attention, drawing their own weapons and whooping as they hurried over to Blake's side of the car, crowding around the windows and blasting away.

"Look," the fireman said, his voice raised to carry over the volley of reports but still calm. "They're shooting buffalo."

Blake forced himself to peer out from behind his suitcase and craned his neck to see. Sure enough, there was a herd of huge, brown, furry animals galloping alongside the train. The fireman did not cover his ears, even when the mountainmen fired directly behind his head, but he twitched as if each bullet had slammed directly into his own heart. His expression revealed no fear. Nothing, he seemed to feel nothing. Outside, a buffalo calf crumpled to the ground and was trampled by its larger fellows.

"Gov'ment says we killed a million of 'em last year alone." The fireman's colorless eyes were fixed on Blake's face, but seemed to be staring right through the back of his skull into secrets beyond.

He couldn't take it anymore. Clutching his suitcase, Blake fled the car.

That night, the Tiger's Breath still fogging his brain and sloshing in his guts, Blake found himself unable to sleep. He leaned on one elbow, looking out the window. They had moved onto the alkali flats, and the desert became shockingly cold at night. Frost etched delicate patterns on the window glass. He had been forced to change into his long johns and beg another blanket from the usher.

Night transformed the landscape into an eerie fairyland painted in washes of blue and silver almost as bright as midday by the low, full moon. The bare sand was white as bleached bone. No human lived out here, not even Indians, and Blake could never imagine anyone would. This land belonged to the wild things.

Lean dark shapes were pacing the train, their tireless legs flashing as they skimmed the ground, their long-muzzled heads slung low. Wolves, a whole pack, on the hunt. Blake pressed his nose hard against the chilly glass, squinting hard through the steam of his breath at them. Despite the fact he knew he was safe, he couldn't help clutching his blanket up tight to his throat. There were no buffalo in sight, no pronghorns or mule deer or any other prey animal. He wondered what they could be hunting . . .

"What do they hunt, do you suppose, by the glimmering pools of water? By the round silver moon, the pool of heaven, in the striped grass, amid the barkless trees - "

Blake rolled over, staring in shock. It was the train fireman, the same man from earlier today. Even in the darkness, the weak lamplight casting him into silhouette, he could recognize the man's aquiline profile, the prodigious hatchet-blade nose and jutting chin. He had quietly pulled back the curtain while Blake was absorbed with the wolves, and now he leaned into the berth, one knee on the mattress, looking out past him.

"The stars scattered like the eyes of beasts above them." The man slid into the berth beside Blake, pulling the curtain closed behind him with a snap.

"What do you want," Blake asked.

"I want your clear attention," the fireman replied, his voice a sinuous, coaxing whisper. "Your eyes, your held breath, your world of glass."

In the small enclosed space of the berth, the smell of the man was sickeningly strong, a salty reek of the labored sweat he basted in all day, seasoned with the acrid coal dust drifting like black snow from his clothes and onto the clean sheets, spiced by the scent of engine oil and smoke from the wood fire. Blake's affronted nostrils pinched shut of their own accord as the man shifted closer and a thicker wave of scent rolled off him. His breath, though, was surprisingly sweet and fresh. This close, he could tell the fireman had been eating apples.

"Who are you?" Blake demanded. He wondered if he could pull the cord and stop the train. But no - it hung on the outside of the berth so that no one flailing in sleep could trigger it accidentally. He would have to fight his way past the invader to reach it, but the man's long arms and legs formed a barrier.

"I'm Nobody," the fireman laughed. He patted Blake's cheek, running his sandpapery fingertips over it, savoring the downy softness. Blake could feel the zigzag streak of greasy ash his touch left behind, smeared across his face as if marking him. It itched. "Are you Nobody, too? Don't tell. They'd banish us, you know."

He's a madman, poor soul, or a simpleton, Blake told himself. Kindly but firmly, he said, "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

The man leaned over him, forcing Blake onto his back. He draped one arm casually over Blake's chest and thrust his face close to the window. "Isn't it sad, how the sun is so warm and the stars are so cold?"

Blake could hardly draw breath. He tried to adopt a tone of gentle reason, hoping to humor the madman, persuade him to leave of his own volition. "The stars are suns too. They're just farther away."

The man inclined his head, looking at Blake with a hooded blue gaze. The only other natural color to his face were his lips, licked clean, pink and shiny as boiled sweets. "Can they get . . . closer?"

"Closer?"

"Yes . . . "

The fireman pressed his mouth down hard on Blake's, angling his head just right, his tongue prying Blake's jaws open enough to plunge inside. The wine-fragrant taste of apples filled his mouth.

He stroked Blake, sliding his hands under the wool of the long johns. The coarse callouses, the broken, stained nails flensed him, and Blake thought of the black wolf's dinner plate sized paws, the thick pads and wrought-iron curve of the dark claws. His touch drew blood. Inside his birdcage ribs, Blake's heart fluttered like a trapped creature beating itself against the ivory bars to escape. But the devilish melange of Tiger's Breath and a cold wash of disquiet held him rigid.

The man's rough hands lay tracks down on his body, cutting through the virgin wilderness, leaving a path for other hands to follow. Even in the throes of terrified ecstasy, he couldn't help thinking of his fiancee, comparing her slim, cool, dainty fingers to this man's rough, eager paws, the perfumed satin of her skin draped in the finest lace to his unashamed nakedness.

He'd peeled himself raw, and with a few impatient tugs the fireman stripped Blake, too, popping every single button off his long johns. Out of his clothes, his face and hands dark with ground-in soot, the rest of him moist and pink and ridiculously thin, the fireman resembled nothing so much as one of the skinned rabbits hanging in the bar in Monongahela.

But his lanky frame was not weak. He was all whipcord sinew under skin as delicate as that of a baby in a soap advertisement. The man was so blade-boned he threaten to flay the meat off Blake as he pushed the other man down and squirmed atop him. His strength was all in his shoulders and arms - not the bulging muscles of the circus strongman, but lean, wiry, tough as a strip of beef jerky. The only softness was in his eyes, the pale, perfect blue of Dresden china. They gave the rest of his face the look of a mask. Blake could see his own face, bleached white with fearful, longing anticipation, reflected in those eyes like a mirror.

He beat at the man with his small fists, struggling against the instinct that told him to lay down and give up. He was an accountant. His exercise consisted entirely of leaning over a desk all day, writing. After an arduous shift it sometimes hurt as if someone driven a molten steel pin into his wrist - other than that, he had never been physically taxed. The fireman deflected his ineffectual blows for a moment, then just ignored them. It felt to Blake like beating on a stone statute, hurting his knuckles more than the other man's flesh. He jabbed his fingers at those china-plate eyes, and the fireman jerked his head sideways and snapped at him, seizing Blake's wrist like a bear trap. Blake pulled back with a cry.

The man was doing something, and Blake was too choked with fear to understand what it was. It hurt, it was awful and invasive and he struggled mindlessly, clawing at the man's bare skin. And the crowning shame was that his own body, ragdoll-weak and pure as fresh cream, his treacherous body responded to the fireman's cruel caress. His own unspeakable parts reared up from behind the curve of his belly like some obscene tent pole, of such absurdly Beardsleyesque bulk that he hardly even recognized himself.

The fireman ignored Blake's tumescence with lordly disdain, grabbed him, forced his legs apart. He bent his head and slathered his tongue down the raw wound of Blake's backside, his tongue delving into places only his washcloth had ever been before. Blake cried out again, a raw primal sound. There is no one else in the sleeping car, no one to hear him, to come save him.

The man pounded him again and again, rhythmic as the pistons of the train, his bony hips grinding mercilessly against Blake's. Sweat streamed glistening down his sides, pooling in his navel, water drops of it clinging to his hair. Blake gripped the man's arms, trying to brace himself against this invasion, and felt the rawhide muscles flexing beneath his fingers. This was nothing to the fireman. He spent eight to ten hours a day standing in the full blast of the furnace, shoveling coal and wood . . . he could do this all night until there nothing was left of Blake but a few powdery shards of bone and shreds of shaved, perfumed meat in cheap woolen long johns, until he was nothing more than a thin film of oil coating this man's rasping hands. The cry of a wolf rang out.

The train whistle shrilled as they entered the tunnel.

Blake screamed, a faint, thin sound, as the man forged past his resistance, popped the ring of muscle and entered him fully, plunging into his depths, remorseless. Blake managed to open his streaming eyes and could make out only the white of the man's eyes, and the curve of his uneven teeth, shining with the faint radiance of the hidden moon.

He felt like he was being fucked by America, scoured out by the bristling saguaro cacti and rasping quartz sand of all the harsh barren lands he'd traveled through, being ploughed by the great iron shaft of the train itself, ravaged, being shaken in the fangs of the wild uncaring wolf, brother to the blue-eyed man. The landscape tried to swallow him up, whole, choking as he stuck in its dry throat. The train's wailing whistle became a wolf's mournful howl, not the eager yip-yip-yip of coyotes that he'd heard on previous nights but a full throated cry of longing and loss. He stole such authority for himself, this pinnacle of evolution. The white male of European descent, arbiter of all that was good or evil, natural or unnatural, justifying his whims with arbitrary law. Now he realized a simpler law was at work . . . and he remembered, deep down in the oldest cobwebbed, shadowed part of the brain, what it was like to be small and helpless and hunted, what it was like to be prey.

And suddenly, just like that, it was over.

The fireman drew out of him, sighing and wiping his hands on the pillow. Blake could feel his own manhood relax along his thigh, warm and soft and sticky as a roll of uncooked dough. There was conclusion, but no pleasure. Blake could only lay there, stunned. He heard the man shuffling next to him, tucking himself in and buttoning himself back up. He leaned over Blake once more, and he expected a kiss . . . but no.

The fireman took Blake's lower lip between his teeth and gently bit down, the loving caress of a wolf. But the wolves were disappearing, along with the buffalo, and the mountainmen, and, though Blake's steam-powered imagination could not conceive of it, the great trains crisscrossing the country.

The taste of the man was like ashes in his mouth.

"This is how the West was won, and where it got us," the fireman told him, but Blake only heard: this is how the West was one. And when he woke it was dawn, and the train was pulling into the town of Machine.

*end*

Comments

[theratman.livejournal.com]

Can't remember if I commented on this before... but I really liked it. Very atmospheric and strange, you know? Almost like a dream. I loved the ending.

[ghostgecko.livejournal.com]

And the back-and-forth of the mutual admirition society continues . . . *grin* thanks

[noearthlyforce.livejournal.com]

I have to say this was amazing. :) Felt like I was reading a lost scene from the movie.