A twitch of an eyelid. A too-casual picking of a very specific tooth. A curl of a lip.
They were very good, very good, as good as anyone could be.
But Charity had her good eye on them, so she saw through it right away.
Player One, the fat long one, he tossed a pair of hips.
Player Two, the sleek big round one, he pulled a set of phalanges, and made a snort of discomfort.
Player Three, the one with the smile he couldn’t quite hide, he tossed down a complete cranium with half-ribs, and he let his face fly its flag high. And why shouldn’t he? He’d won, and his friends (who were VERY good at hiding it) would split the pot with him later.
Now if Charity were ten years younger and in a forgiving mood, she would’ve smiled happily, rolled her bones, and sharked them so flawlessly they wouldn’t realize they’d lost their legs right out from under their pants until they stood up to piss the next morning.
If she were twenty years younger and in an unforgiving mood, she would’ve called them all cheats, flipped the table, and killed them with her bare hands.
But she was twenty years older now, and so instead she took the pieces, gave them a fumbling toss, and casually let an entire set’s-worth of bones slide out from her right sleeve into the middle of the table in front of everyone.
“Full cadaver and uh…. Some other pieces,” she said into an extremely loud silence. “Calling it.”
Their eyes got even louder.
“Oh. I thought this is what we were doing now. Was I wrong?”
Someone somewhere sucked on their teeth.
“Drop it and call it quits?”
There weren’t any tells at all for what they did next, which told her they were even more used to it than cheating at bones. Out came the guns; small, well-worn things that didn’t shine or glisten but sure as hell smirked with the straightforward gumption of machines that killed things.
But Charity had closed her good eye, which meant her bad eye was out. So things didn’t go their way.
Their pockets were full, at least. Even after she paid back the bar for damages she was up on expenses for a few days if she was frugal and the rest of the night if she was bored.
And she was so very, very, very, very bored.
***
When Charity woke up there was the morning sun in her eyes and there was a cold wind blowing over her face and there was a sleeping bag half-unwrapped around her thigh and there was a snake on her boot.
It was a very beautiful creature. Longer than her leg and thicker than her arm, with eyes like jewels and a rattle like a drum and probably enough venom to sock out an elephant, not that it’d ever need to.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” said the snake.
“Hope I didn’t kick you.”
“Nah, you’re a heavy sleeper.”
“You’re telling me. Time was I’d have heard you coming.”
“I’m pretty quiet.”
“I used to have pretty good ears.”
“What happened?”
“Now I snore.”
“Huh.”
Charity really wanted to stretch.
“Sun’s getting high,” commented the snake.
“You’re telling me. Shoot, can’t believe it’s already this late. I haven’t slept in this hard in years.”
“What brought it on?”
“Hangover.”
“And the time before this?”
“Oh, I was going to have to shoot someone at noon in the middle of town.”
“Stayed up all night worrying?”
“Stayed up all night wiring the street to blow.”
The snake snickered. It was not an attractive sound, but it WAS interesting.
“Dumb move, really. How was I supposed to know he’d stand on the other side of the street?”
“What’d you do?”
“Shot him on count of two and ran for it.”
“Some’d call that cowardly.”
“Waiting ‘till ‘two’ instead of ‘one’ was a damned brave thing considering how short I lit that fuse. At ‘one’ I’d be missing more than all the hair on my back.”
“Hair,” said the snake, shuddering in an eloquent and ripply sort of way.
“Not a fan?”
“It’s indigestible and execrable and generally lousy. Blech. Less of it you have the better off you are, trust you me.”
“I’d be awful cold without it.”
“Bask more.”
“Well, I’ll try. Reckon you could move off my boot so I could stretch out some?”
“No,” said the snake, and its rattle twitched somewhere uncharitable between comfort and annoyance, tickling against her knee. “I got here first.”
“Fair. Mind you, that doesn’t always work.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. A while back – a WAY while back – I found a lode out east of Sqobbish.”
“What kind?”
“Pure.”
“How pure?”
“PURE pure. You could scratch it with your little finger and your nail would glitter like a mirror for a month. And it ran deep. Good deep. Finders keepers, right?”
“Seems so.”
“Right, except the one person I trusted with it trusted it to his drink, and he wasn’t so good at whispering. So by the time I got back out there –”
“-You had company?”
“About fifty of ‘em. Lucky enough I took so long to get back they had time to start arguing without me.”
“Hah. What happened to the lode?”
“Who said anything happened to it?”
“These aren’t a rich woman’s boots.”
“You ever seen a rich woman’s boots?”
“Nah, but I heard of ‘em. These aren’t snakeskin.”
The pause was so pregnant its water almost broke.
“Right. Well, uh. I brought explosives with me. Just in case. Y’know. For mining.”
“Yes.”
“And I may have gotten carried away with cleaning up my self-defense, and well. Blew half the mountain down. Biggest landslide I ever saw; would’ve had to mine out the whole lode just to pay for the cost of digging it up again.”
“Easy come, easy go.”
“A good philosophy for an ambush predator.”
“Or a congenital fuckup.”
Charity laughed at that one. Not a fully-belly, mind you. She didn’t want to jostle her leg. “Hey. I’m not the worst, you know?”
“You’re asleep in a ditch at midday with a rattlesnake on your boot and you haven’t had a real conversation in years.”
“Well. I mean. I’ve never really been the partnering kind.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I value my independence.”
“Yep.”
“Stop making noises at me like I’m talking horseshit.”
“Wouldn’t dream it.”
The sigh hurt her ribs and made the back of her head bluster at her. “Awright, fine. Look, there was this guy. And we didn’t plan it – just a one-bar team-up, then a one-town scam, then a two-person job, then… well, then it had been five years.”
“Times fly when you’re having fun.”
“Yeah. Yeah they do. And of course, a lot of it we were drunk.”
“Well, that helps too.”
“No foolin’. But then we stayed one day too long in this town – this little dusty dried fly-bitten corpse of a fly’s taint of a town, damnit, don’t know why we even rode in – and the morning we headed out we run into a whole band of, well, bandits. Banditing, or at least extorting. And since we were still technically ‘in town’ that day, we got to be part of the protection tax.”
“He objected?”
“I don’t travel with idiots. We groveled and paid up. Then they went into town, cased everyone –”
“He objected?”
“-now WHAT did I just tell you? Anyways, we followed them out of town, waited until they finished drinking the bar’s payment, shanked the sentries, let loose the horses, and took off with their loot.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“Well, it was. But well. We were a little keyed up, and he stopped to take a piss without telling me, and when that horse came galloping up without so much as a by-your-leave, I kind of. Well.”
“You shot him?”
“Yeah, but it missed. Boy we laughed.”
“Wow. Lucky.”
“Yeah. But the guy following us heard it and well, he didn’t. Hell of a day for highs and lows.”
Someone cleared their throat.
“’Scuse you?”
“My neck doesn’t work that way.”
“Up here.”
Charity rotated her head a tenth of a degree and squinted harder. A powerful moustache blotted out the sunlight. Behind it was an unfriendly and prominent set of teeth, and behind THEM were a couple of distant twerps.
“Oh. How long you been there?”
“Long enough. My boy Tenner here says you put a shot through his friends.”
Charity turned her good eye on the distant twerps. Ah yes, one of them was about two-thirds of a twerp. That fitted the state she’d last seen Player Three in. His smile wasn’t there anymore, making him look awful drab and small. “Well, they were cheats.”
“Makes you of a kind, what else he told.”
“Yeah but I wasn’t a sneak about it.”
“Says the lady laying down with snakes.”
“Leave me out of this,” said the snake.
“First I can’t move my leg for your sake, now you don’t want to share in my troubles? You’re damned fickle, snake.”
“Says the human.”
“Fair play. You sure you won’t pick sides here?”
“No sense in it.”
Charity sagged. “Oh well.”
Well, it was just her and her gun and her good eye – which was closed – and her bad eye.
Which was wide open and ready.
Charity’s boot moved fast but her foot moved faster and they separated soon after, the snake’s fangs snapping an inch shy of her leathery toes before soaring, gloriously soaring, terribly soaring, beautifully soaring into the face of the moustache, which they attached to with violent force.
“AUGH!”
The boot, meanwhile, smashed into the arm of the distant twerp who wasn’t Player Three, throwing his aim afoul into the side of Player Three, who let out two-thirds of a scream before wholly and finally collapsing.
“AUGH!”
By then Charity had time to sit up, and things got over with pretty fast after that.
“Ungrateful jackass,” hissed the snake from atop the moustache’s hat.
“Sorry,” said Charity, halfway through a dead man’s pockets. “But I DID offer nicely the first time.”
“And after all I did for you! See if any serpent in the state shares your bed with you again.”
“Fair enough. Fair enough. I said I wasn’t the partnering kind.”
“You did. And I said not to move, and look what you went and did.”
“Exactly. I break all my promises, or didn’t you notice?”
The snake laughed at that, a little dry chut-chut-chut. “Get going before I start rattling.”
So she did, and she went, and though she never saw a snake in her sleep again she did run into the odd spider.