What woke him was the smell of coffee.

He was in a small room on a bed. In the room, beside the bed, was a window. Outside the window the world was dark. Fenimore’s rifle was in his arms but the belt and holster hung on a roughly made wooden chair next to the bed. Use had rubbed the varnish off the chair’s seat. Through his sunburned nose, Fenimore smelled the aroma of food: not good food, but edible. With the smell of food came heat, and then a door opened into a rectangle of light, a figure stood in the door, and The Starman walked in holding a dinged up metal cup. He took a seat in the chair, sliding down until he was almost lying in it, and handed the cup to Fenimore.

“Don’t you be worried,” he said. “I made sure you kept yer rifle on me at all times so I wouldn’t get away.”

The coffee tasted bitter but good.

“How long,” Fenimore gasped between hot gulps, “was I asleep?”

The Starman shrugged. “Three hours, I reckon.”

“And my burro?”

“The ass snores outside. Shouldn’t ever wake up, the beast was so tired.”

Fenimore finished the rest of the coffee, swallowing the grinds as greedily as he had the liquid, and handed the cup back to The Starman.

“Soup’s on the fire.”

“Why do they call you The Starman?”

“Who calls me that?”

“You said—”

“I know what I says, but there ain’t hardly a point in asking why if you don’t know who.”

“All right. Who calls you The Starman?”

The Starman looked into the cup. “I see yer so hungry I can’t even read your fortune from the blacks.”

“You’re a fortune teller.” Fenimore’s lips curled into a snarl. If his voice was a thing, it would have been sandpaper.

“Hoo hoo hoo! An astereologist, me? It’s not far down the road from truth, but never! I don’t give them horroscopic arts the time of night they deserve. And I mean when I get ‘em. I wouldn’t ever give ‘em. Bunch of cocksucker hogwash fuck if you ask me.”

The fire crackled from the other room.

“But you were asking,” The Starman said, more serious, “about who calls me by my name. The answer is the folks over in Hope Springs.”

Fenimore realised the man wanted to talk. Based on his rough manners and growing list of eccentricities, he wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. Based on the taste of his coffee, he didn’t have a woman in the house.

A woman.

The thought stabbed Fenimore in the temples until he sucked in air through his clenched teeth. The pain reminded him of the one whose name he refused to remember. The seventh, cleanest, coin weighed heavily in his pocket. “Why do ‘the folks over in Hope Springs’ call you The Starman?”

“It’s because of my sky glass. I’m an astereonomer, which is what the Latins called themselves when they looked through their tubes at the stars. Of course”—The Starman bit his lower lip. Fenimore couldn’t decide whether he was seeing genuine insanity or merely a very convincing act.—“my sky glass has other uses too. Like seeing men in blue ponchos ride their burros onto my property of land, goddamit.”

Fenimore had forgotten about Pedro, about killing him. He shuddered. He was still wearing the smell of the dead man on his clothes.

“The man in the blue poncho, what did he do to you?”

The Starman’s fingers tightened around the ear of the metal cup until both the fingers and the cup started to shake. “Oh, I seen him riding with the Rhodes boys. Don’t like me them Rhodes boys, cocksuckers. Especially that old Iron Rhodes…”

For a second, The Starman was violence itself.

Then he smiled real wide and tall, revealing both rows of missing teeth, and Fenimore knew why The Starman liked soup so much.

“And that gun of yours?”

The Starman rose from the chair. “Tit for tat, tit for tat, goddamn. I told you about my name, now I want to hear about that timepiece of yers.” He pointed with his crooked nose through the doorway. “We’ll eat my legume soup and you’ll tell me a story about it, and then I’ll tell you the story of my gun.”

Fenimore must not have looked convinced because The Starman added, “And an end to all these killin’ looks. I had my chance to make you dead, and I didn’t do it. You had yer chance, too, and you didn’t do it neither. So now the killin’ chances are passed and we is friends and guests and I will be treating you to feastin’ real well. Hoo hoo hoo!”

A gun went off.

Fenimore slid off the bed, landed with a thud on the floor, and was massaging the trigger of his rifle.

“Take as them my apologies,” the Starman said. He hadn’t even budged. “But I guess I got to remember to be more careful when I do my hootin’!”

Again Fenimore was treated to the sight of The Starman’s wet gums.

They lead him off the floor and into the living room, which was significantly larger than the bedroom, had all of its windows boarded up, a large fireplace in the corner, and two long handmade tables, the surfaces of which were covered with springs, gears, cogs and other mechanical doodads. In the corner opposite the fireplace stood about two dozen tall rolls of paper.

“Maps, land and sky,” The Starman said while swiping clean an area on one of the tables. Next he retrieved a sooty pot from the fire and placed it, steaming, on the place he’d cleared. He also retrieved two stone bowls from a cupboard, motioned for Fenimore to sit on a rickety bench, and poured both bowls full of thick, green sludge. There was ample soup for seconds but Fenimore’s hunger, rabid as it was, allowed him to wait for a spoon.

It never came.

“Dig in, guest, cocksucker!” The Starman roared, taking a seat on the bench on the other side of the table, and dipped his fingers into the sludge. He lifted it greedily to his mouth, closed his eyes, licked, lapped and swallowed. The swallowing made his Adam’s Apple extrude to an unnaturally hideous degree.

Fenimore dipped two fingers into his own bowl of sludge, lifted them slowly, and tasted.

The sludge was vile.

But it was food, and so he ate it.

“The timepiece,” The Starman mumbled between handfuls of soup. “Tell me its story.”

“Where is it?” Fenimore asked. The soup was starting to burn both his tongue and the underside of his mouth. “And what’s in this soup?”

The Starman stopped eating and answered with pride while licking drops off his upper lip. “Legumes, mostly. Chicken cocksucker legumes and frog goddamit legumes. Sometimes I get me a pig if I barter, so I mixtures them in too. And bones of general kind. Don’t usually use any beaks though. Don’t like the taste. And of course then I pestle it up and disinfecate it with water and moonshine so that it’s healthy in the medical way.”

Fenimore almost choked.

“As for yer timepiece,” The Starman was saying, “it’s on that table there right behind you.”

Fenimore looked. The timepiece was on the table; but, more properly, all the parts of the timepiece were on the table without themselves comprising a timepiece.

“Now don’t get yer blood veins all burst, I didn’t break it. I took it apart.”

Everything breaks.

“And everything that I take apart I can put back the way it was. I’m just good that way. Born nature, as folks say. Always have been and, goddamn, always will be. Excuse me.” He passed several toots of gas. “It’s all in the old noggin’ up here.” Tap-tap-tap he went against his head. “This timepieces of yers though, ain’t never seen a thing like it. Precise cocksucker, real good, real interesting. Lots of tiny little springs, real delicate. If you ask me, anything worth beans be made from lots of springs.”

“My father built it,” Fenimore said.

“He dead?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess them’s the words to the end of the story.”

“The end of the story.”