Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,25

just like the country which is not the Crow Nation. Trees, river, rocks, clouds hunkering down low like they’re just as fugitive as she is. It is spring in both Crow Nation and not-Crow Nation. Puff blossoms on the bough and big tulip buds coming up like candles. Deer have velvet on their antlers in both Crow Nation and not-Crow Nation.

Charming drinks from the swollen freshets. He finds the grass here choice. He is happy to be with Snow White again, happy to be running fast again, happy to prowl it over again with his favorite girl.

Snow White comes over a country possessing many cliffs and high stones. A lot of blackberries here, and sap flowing from the trees like whiskey. She does not apprehend the geography, being dog-tired and shot up in the heart even if her skin’s still holding together. Snow White don’t know it but on the lee side of those blue rocks there’s a soft valley full of people. If she turned east a bit she’d clap eye on a village, buckskin huts, fires and a mess of horses. The people there look like her, but not like her. They wear two braids and high pompadours dyed and stiffened. It’s not her mother’s village—the Crow Nation is still something to see, and it so happens only one old fella with a black scar right through both his lips remembers a cousin’s sister’s bad-luck daughter by the name of Gun That Sings. But that’s one more than Snow White’s got in the way of folk fit to speak to who know her mama lived or died.

If she rides down into the valley, this is what will happen: a little girl will see Snow White and start up crying. Snow White will not mean to fear. She’ll get off her horse but the girl only cries harder and runs for her father. Other folk will know her now. They’ll look at her and they won’t smile. They won’t see her mother’s face on her and welcome her home. Snow White will try to speak but they do not have English nor want the burden of her handling. Her appearance will not comfort. They will not know her for one of them just by looking. Anyway, Snow White presents a figure like a barrow-tramp and she’s still wearing blood, some from the dude and some from the deer.

She won’t know it, but the little girl whose name is Cold All the Time will say to her father:

I don’t want to go with the white lady, Papa. Make her go away. I want to stay here. Why can’t we stay here?

A tall man called Busy Horse will sing up with English in his pockets. He’ll turn her back.

Go on your way. A white girl alone will only cause us grief. Someone will come looking for you and the price of you will be sky high. One white person is like one steelhead. Once you see the first one, the others are already coming. Go back to Brother John the American Man and eat a lot of good things. Do not speak to him about us. We keep to ourselves. We do not want white problems. White girls are bad luck.

And that will just about be the end of Snow White. Once you take away the end in sight, not much left to do but pull up the ground over your head. Sometimes the next no is the last one you can take.

If she turns west, Snow White will find something else, half again as strange. There’s a town out there, in the un-land between the dirt America’s bought and spat on and the territory they haven’t got around to snatching yet. Town goes by the appellation of Oh-Be-Joyful. Fitted out with run-off catalogue women, whores, cattle Kates, bandits, desert rats, and gunslingers. All women; all sour on the whole idea of going back where they came from. No law there, but no mercy neither. Do for outsiders all you please, but never for Joyfolk.

Somebody there remembers Gun That Sings, too. She’s about as old as the ocean, but she’ll talk you dead for free.

Come on, girl. Pick one. Ain’t no guarantee of peace either way, but turn that ’loosa’s nose toward something other than nothing at all or this time next year you’ll be freezing to death on the Arctic Circle with the ghosts of those boys who thought there was a passage straight through this country top to bottom.