Billy Tumult

Billy Tumult

By Nick Harkaway (excerpt)

Billy Tumult, walking down the street. Tips his hat to the ladies, bids the fellas good afternoon. Going to the Marshall’s office. Want to be in good with the local force. No stink-of-armipit law-keeper, this one, but a high buttoned pinstripe and waistcoat number, almost a dandy. What are the chances, Billy Tumult growls. Man might could be Billy’s brother, might could use him for shaving around that dandy moustache. Patient’s been thinking about coming to see Billy Tumult for long enough that he’s got hisself a tulpa in here, a little imaginary robot doing what the patient thinks Billy’d do. Ain’t that just the sweetest thing?”

Marshall William says hello, and Billy says hello right back and they shake hands. It’s like iceberg colliding. The Marshall’s got two shooters on his hips, of couse, just like in the brochure. What’s behind his back, Billy wonders’ maybe a third gun, maybe a humungous nature of a knife. That would figure. But when they get into the Marsall’s office and the fella takes off his coat, mother of Christ, it’s a dynamite vest, a bandolier. Thy guy so much as farts wrong and they’re all in the next county over and fuck if he doesn’t actually smoke. Laws of sanity have been suspended for Billy’s oversold publicicty-and-marketing hardassery. Thank God if the thing goes up the worst that happens to Billy is a damn reset and the whole surgery to redo from start, pain in the ass, but if this was the real world or if Billy was really part of this whole deal then he’d be pasta sauce.

Pasta sauce is authentic. Billy tweaks the filter again. He prefers the gangster aspect, can’t keep the horses-and-mud shit straight in his brain. Well, if the patient can have Eskimos, Billy can have pasta sauce, call if fair play.

A path. Photo by Elena

I’m Billy Tumult of the Pinkertons, he tells Marshall William, come lookin’ for a dangerous man. We got plenty, says the Marshall, which one you want? Or take’em all, I surely won’t miss’em. I want the new guy, Billy says, the one in the black hat living over the story. The one Missus Roth has an arrangement with. Now hold on, begins the Marshall, no not that kind of arrangement, the feedin’kind is all I mean, I got no beef with the Widow Roth.

Widow my ass, parenthiesizes Billy Tumult, if I know how this goes, but never mind that for now.

He’s an odd one, sure, says the Marshall Odd and I don’t like him and he don’t much like me. But I figure the one he’s looking out for is you, now I think on it. He offered me a whole shit-ton of gold, I saw it right there in that room, to tell him if a fella came askin’ about him. You say yes? Billy wants to know. No, Marshall replies, “Course not, he says, and rolls his shoulder.

Cutaway: a thin man naked in a room full of gold, lean like a leather-gnarled spider stretched too tight on his own bones. He tilts his head and listens to the sound of the town, and he knows someone’s coming. Slips down the gold rockface into his pants and shoes – demons evidently need no socks – and buckles on his gun. Not much of a thing, this gun. Small and dirty and badly kept. Buckles it on, long black coat around his shoulders. Tan galan on his head: bare-chested Grendel in a hat, and that’s as good a name as any. Arms and legs too long, Grendel spderabs out of the golden room and into shadow, gone a-huntin’. Too fast, he’s under the balcony across the street, flickers in the dark alley by the blacksmith, by the sawbones, by the water tower. Too fast, too quiet. All of a sudden: it’s not clear at all who’s gonna win this one.