When Dutch van der Linde resumes his habit of picking up waifs, Micah realizes he’s become entangled in a violent tragicomedy with no end nor reward, and he begins to doubt he can stick it out for the long con.
In other words, a loose-ish retelling of the game’s events if a fresh batch of foundlings and the tragic Tilly Jackson bring the gang’s sincerest evil to its own vague approximation of redemption. Set over a longer time span in a bigger country. Really not a fix-it, in some ways a make-it-worse.
Rating: Mature
Featuring:
Micah & "Where's my coffee, boy!"
Hosea & the light of his life
Dutch & the Dutch defense
Hosea & Dutch
Molly / Dutch (toxic)
Micah / Tilly (some other kind of toxic)
Arthur & trying his best but not succeeding
Uneasy alliances, unlikely trauma bonds
Warnings: Micah POV; graphic violence; death and abuse of children, animals, major characters; unplanned pregnancy; rape (not described); Micah being a dickhead; the gang being dickheads; Dutch being Dutch; period-typical attitudes; slurs
He was so damned drunk he was jumbling his words, drunker than he’d gotten for Sean’s party—oh, he had moved as steady as ever and cast just the same drowning shadow but you could tell he was fathoms deep, slapping his knee at awful jokes, sweeping his girl into frantic dances, ranting and raving in the mad-making mask of moonlight and fire and drawing eyes and fear and love—but where he’d been pleased as Punch then I couldn’t tell what mood he was in now. He oversaw the revelry with a piggy little look, except when he turned a thin smile to some passing remark. Each time his eyes fell on Hosea, as they seemed to do by instinct, there was no mirth in them. It was the same squint he wore when planting bullets and making orphans: covetous, spiteful, hate, hate, hate.
Rating: Mature
Characters: Micah, Hosea, Dutch, the Van der Linde gang
Warnings: Check masterlist, we got a dark one
Wordcount: 10,900
| AO3 | Masterlist | Map |
| Theme: Micah Bell |
Hosea was colorless and sunken against his pillows, almost as pale as his spider-silk hair. He’d startle awake every few minutes just to shake out his lungs, then somewhere between the space of his heavy blinks and quiet moans he would slip back under. His coughing brought up thick phlegm shot with blooms of jellied blood. Toy Ann took one look at him and declared it pneumonia.
He’d been warning them all for weeks, but now everyone was starting to suspect it might be true: this old wind-broke horse had reached his last ride. I guess that’s why they’d put him right where Karen had died.
Little Bo, woken by the commotion, crept across the post-office in her new dress and quilted leggings and sat down quietly by Hosea’s head. As Toy Ann fed him some kind of tisane with a bitter woody smell, Bo took it upon herself to soothe him like one might a suffering animal, humming softly a broken tune, rhythmically smoothing back his hair, her sad, thin face solemn with focus. He coughed like Hell for fifteen minutes and then regained a bit of brightness—enough to clear his eyes and his lungs for gentle talk.
“Thank you, dear. Well, don’t you look lovely in that dress? You must be a proper little princess, is that right? No? I don’t believe it.”
Another cold night stole over our ruins as Hosea began to receive a rotation of death-bed well-wishers. The women was all tearful again. Grimshaw swept through like a whirlwind for a few minutes at a time, near scornful in her fussing, and he endured it with benevolent restraint. Mary-Beth with her girlish simpleness held his hand and asked him what it was like to be dying. But he didn’t get far in answering before Tilly jumped to her feet and scolded her—scolded them both, him for dying at all—and fled, sobbing, into the snow.
Abigail sat with him longer than anyone, big-eyed Jack bemused and uncertain at her side, and yet she said the least. The torn shirt in her lap spared her having to meet his eye.
“I gotta finish this,” she said bluntly.
“Don’t let me stop you.” Hosea gave a wet cough. “How are you, Jack?”
Jack glanced between them. “Fine,” he said, clipped.
“How’s that sore throat?”
“Better,” said Jack.
“Uh-huh. Good.”
In the silence that stretched tight across the post-office, Hosea’s rustling breaths was as loud as the fire snapping in the pot-bellied stove. Jack sniffled, watching his mother uneasily as she stabbed the needle in and yanked it out, stabbed and yanked, stabbed and yanked, mending with a violence made for shredding, with the same futile urgency she’d put to stitching Davey Callander.
Hosea coughed again into his hand and wiped it on the edge of his blanket. Abigail’s eyes followed the movement. The small dark spot his fingers left behind spread into a black bloom in the lantern-light. Her jaw tensed. She dropped the needle and the shirt and pressed her fists against her thighs. She stared at the blood like it had wronged her, those sharp angular brows cutting mean lines of revulsion into her face.
“You’re gunna git better,” she bit out.
“I’m trying, my dear,” murmured Hosea.
“No, Hosea,” she snapped back. “If tryin ain’t good enough, I don’t wonna hear it. You’re gittin better.”
“Abigail . . .”
“You’re a bastard.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away furiously. “Do you see where we are? D’you see the mess we’re in? You can’t leave us like this. You can’t, and you ain’t gunna.”
There was little he could do to console her; Abigail was too perceptive for that. In the end, he did nothing at all.
When she whisked out the door with her child in her wake, Reverend Swanson shuffled in after them, Bible in arm. His walk was one of the first in this outfit I’d learned to find by ear for its strange, careful, dragging arrhythmia. He stopped by Hosea’s feet and wiped a sweaty palm on his coat. Beneath the far-away reverie he’d stuck into his veins, he had the presence of mind to look vaguely ashamed.
“Mr. Matthews.” Every word sounded scraped out of him, like he had to reach in and pull them out hand over hand, lettered tape-worms as long as rivers. “What with your . . . condition . . . Well, I thought I ought to ask if you’d like to . . . get your affairs in order, as it were.”
“No eulogies, no coffin, and certainly no epitaph,” said Hosea. His tongue flicked out to lick dry lips. “Will that do?”
“I am trying to be courteous,” said Swanson tightly.
Hosea smiled at him, a long-suffering gesture. “You’re always courteous, Reverend,” he said indulgently. “The Lord’s not waitin on me, let’s not pretend. I’ve lived my life the way I’d live it a thousand times over. Met all the people I wanted to meet. Robbed who needed robbin. Had some fun along the way. Good enough for me.”
Swanson swallowed. “You’ve been kind to me. More than I deserve. I have no other way to repay you. So . . .” He slid shaky fingers down the spine of his Bible, his eyes shining with moisture. “I will pray for you, my friend. I hope the Lord will hear my sincerity.”
“Thank you,” said Hosea. “Bury me beside Karen.”
“Of course.”
Soon it was Morgan alone who shouldered the burden of watching him wither, turning up again and again to check that he was still breathing and make a new joke of it each time to lure out some wry response. They was really quite fond of each other, in their way. Rare was the moments they disagreed, rarer still that they fought. They was as close to love as it gets between men who eat, drink and fuck in the company of their worst selves—I do believe that, even if it ended so poorly. Morgan just wasn’t loyal to him the way he was Dutch. Hosea had never asked it of him. Hosea had only asked it of Dutch, and only now.
Dutch didn’t come in once.
As the night waned, the post-office emptied but for the drowsy children and the bloodied men. Them four kids lay together by the stove, whispering like breeze-blown leaves on a crowded bough, Bo burrowed into Sampson’s side. Lenny dozed in his corner, slumped against the wall like a corpse; he had some bizarre aversion to lying down I never could understand. Blood was seeping through the bandage around his head.
At the ungodly hour of one o’clock in the morning, Toy Ann puttered into the post-office to deliver Hosea another dose of expectorant and stirred everyone out of their slumber. It truly seemed that no plight, however dire, could bear to touch her; she remained an all-weather brightness, immortally loud and tirelessly blithe.
I winced and turned my head away like the sight of her stung me.
“Braithe in that steam, Isaiah,” she damned near hollered in Hosea’s face. “Lookitchew, y’got some red in them apples agin. Whad I tell ye.” She pinched his pale cheek until he rattled with laughter.
“Indeed, Miss Baker,” he rasped, “I feel a changed man, born anew! I must thank you for lettin me borrow some of your youth.”
Toy Ann cackled. This flirting had become Hosea’s favorite game in the two weeks we’d had her, mostly for the sound it elicited—like beating a crow to death with a big stick.
“Yewth?” she cawed. “What yewth?”
“Oh, don’t be so modest”—cough—“you’ve got the wisdom of five lifetimes and the age of a girl.”
She ruffled his hair, grinning with all the holes where teeth should be. Her eyes disappeared under a lacework of wrinkles. “Ain’t nothin gonna keel you, son, yer much too quick!”
“Lord!” barked Maurice by the stove, and buried his face in blankets.
Toy Ann nagged Hosea past his sweet talk until he dutifully quaffed his bitter tea, then she turned her attention to Lenny and his dinged head, then to my leg and its angry stitches. And when at last she left, and the post-office went quiet once more, Hosea’s breaths began to crackle and crackle into those shot-buck moans.
The next coughing fit that took him over had him coughing for a very long time.
“Need I remind you that you were wrong!”
I jerked awake as if a gun had gone off.
Dutch and Morgan was outside the post-office, fighting through the window in the door by the light of a muted morning. I looked at Hosea, propped against his pillows, and for an instant I thought he was dead. His head was canted back, mouth fallen open, eyes gazing dully at the ceiling. Then I heard the slow, creaky breaths leaking out of him. Still clinging on.
“And you were right to have us all leave camp?” snapped Morgan. “That went real well, didn’t make you look a damn fool—”
“What was that?” Dutch smiled derisively. “Oh, Arthur Morgan is full of opinions these days! But does he have any ideas? Cause I-I ain’t heard a one!” He raised his hands, going poison-pleasant. “You gonna tell me what I shoulda done, friend? You gonna tell these fine folks what our next move is?”
“Why you gotta read into everything I say? You know I ain’t—”
“The last thing I need right now is a whining child in my ear.” Dutch must have worn his voice ragged yesterday evening, calling for Toy Ann; it was serried to a rusty snarl, and getting only rougher. “If you ain’t doubtin me, then stop askin stupid questions. You think I haven’t considered the consequences? I ain’t as short sighted as you are, Arthur, I know what I am doing! I have planned—for—contingencies! I have got this—under—control!”
“Yeah well have you planned for what happens when Hosea dies here?” Arthur spat back. “Have you planned for women and children dyin? For Colm O’Driscoll t’be huntin our heads now? Have you planned for that?”
“Gettin away from here is my plan!” Dutch was beginning to pace. “And there—there ain’t nothin I can do about that stupid old man throwin himself over the God-damn Jordan. We all knew it was comin!”
Arthur’s glare went slack. “You—You w—What is wrong wit you?” He breathed out a cloud of disbelief. “You ain’t right in the head.”
“I am right as rain,” sneered Dutch, “it’s you who ain’t right.”
“Colm being here done somethin to you.”
Dutch stopped. The vein in his forehead was almost purple. “Colm being here just got five children killed. Murdered. Ain’t it done somethin to you? Or d’you think—” He laughed suddenly. “D’you think I’m as bad as he is? Is that what you think?”
“No,” said Arthur. “No, Dutch. I know it . . . It ain’t like that. But can you . . .”
There it was: that look of bleak helplessness. The train was heading for a wall, and the driver was laughing.
“Dutch,” he said weakly. “Hosea’s real sick.”
Dutch gripped Arthur’s shoulder under one firm palm. “This is Colm’s last-ditch effort to get us,” he growled. “Once we’re over the border, he’ll have lost us. If we turn around now, we’re playin right into his hands.”
“It ain’t the time for God-damn feudin!”
“He’s made time. And we pay for it. I have had enough payin.”
Just as his fist began to tighten, Dutch let go. He whirled around and vanished from the square of the window.
“Hosea’s gonna die, Dutch!” yelled Arthur.
“So be it!”
Arthur hung his head. He rubbed his eyes with gloved fingers, hooked his thumbs in his belt. For a moment, he only stood there. The stove ticked and tapped an idle rhythm. Thaw dripped from a gap in the ceiling, steady as a clock. Arthur heaved a heavy sigh, and pushed inside.
Hosea raised his head and smiled.
Arthur looked away, his face carefully blank.
“I assume you heard all that,” he said as he shut the door.
“Oh, yes,” said Hosea, breathy and slow. “Dutch doesn’t talk about me like that behind my back.”
“How would you know?”
Hosea thought for a moment. Then he said, “I see your point.”
If the joke was meant to coax Arthur away from his worry, it was a waste of breath. He shook his head stoically and moved to the stove. As he opened the hatch, his eyes twitched reflexively against the gust of shimmering hot air that rushed him. He threw in a fresh log. It sputtered and hissed with damp, smoke curling off of it like swirls of black oil.
“You sound a little better,” he allowed, watching the flames lick up the log’s rotten flanks.
Hosea hummed. “The wonders of medicine—modern, or otherwise.”
“Blood still comin up?”
“Bit.”
“Feverish at all?”
“I’m fine.”
“‘Fine’? Whatchu mean ‘fine’?”
“Arthur,” said Hosea severely.
Arthur scowled into the fire. “What?”
“You’re startin to sound like Susan.” Hosea croaked a laugh, but it wasn’t for humor. There was a testy glint in his eye. “One is quite enough.”
Arthur slammed the hatch shut. He dusted his hands on his coat.
“Molly,” he said. “Y’all right?”
It was then that I noticed her sitting silent on the bench in the corner of the room, her face white against the slash of red lips and the frame of a dark scarf. She was so pale the veins crawling under her eyes stood out like cracks in a porcelain vase, blue as ink. Her arms was wrapped tight around her middle.
“Oh, I dunno,” she said miserably. “D’yeh think I put him in this mood?”
“Dutch? Naw.” Arthur turned back to the stove as he said it, hiding that guilty look from her glassy gaze. “He’s just . . .” He scratched behind an ear. “Well, we’ve lost some folks—we’re all a little rattled.”
Molly dabbed her wet eyelashes with her finger-tips and sniffed. “He shouted at me. Really shouted at me, in front of e-everyone.”
“Miss O’Shea,” cut in Hosea, “forgive me for being brusque, but we are in a Hell of a lot of trouble, a Hell of a lot, and Dutch has just about lost his mind over it—”
“I know! Jesus, I know! You sound just bloody like him!” Molly stood up sharply, then quavered—she seemed to go a shade whiter, near translucent, like the belly of a fish. She laid a hand against the wall to steady herself. “What if I’m sick?” she cried. “What if I just drop dead? Doesn’t he care? Doesn’t he?”
“Molly, dear,” said Hosea, gently now. He reached out to her with a trembling arm. “Come here. You’re not gonna drop dead. You’re—”
“How do you know? You don’t know! He’s left me alone, Hosea!” The whites of her eyes and her spit-wet teeth and the glaze of tears gathered on her lashes glittered madly in the shaft of pale light spilling over her. “I-I’m all alone here, and I am sick of snow, and I’m hungry, and I nearly got shot two days ago, and, oh, I just”—her voice was going thinner and thinner, the shrinking whimper of a child in the cobweb of a dark room—“I can’t shake the feelin anymore that I’m gonna die like this, I’m gonna die like an animal, a-all of us, how can he not see that we’re walkin to our deaths!”
Hosea pressed the side of his fist against his forehead, shutting his eyes to her misery. By the stove, Arthur shuffled his feet and hands, unsure what to say.
I cleared my throat loudly.
All three heads in the room twisted quick to mine.
How curious it was to wield such empty power: little old Micah Bell, barely there at all, nothing more than a fly on the wall until the slit of my cold blue leer went round and my lumpy body dragged itself into a splay-legged sit. I came into existence like a headache or a bad smell, and the way they looked at me, I might well have been either. I savored it. Not the attention, but the potency of it. I didn’t own much—no one did in this line of work—but when I was in a room, it was mine.
I turned my smirk on Molly O’Shea. Low as a purr, I said, “We never made no claim of goin someplace easy to be, Miss Molly.”
I took out my watch and began to wind it. I had to be careful what I said to her. The crown to which I pledged my soul with promises of human feeling was the sump of all her woes.
“There’s a price to be paid for the dreams of men with ambition. I wouldn’t expect a girl like you to understand—but you, and others like you, are very often the price.” I held up my watch, dangled it by its chain. Molly’s wide eyes darted to it. “No shame in a healthy dram o’fear, sweetheart; no shame in quittin while you still can. After all, if you really love Dutch, wouldn’t you want him free, and . . . unhindered?”
I laughed to myself, ugly and grunting, the noise of my fullest disdain.
Arthur took a thunderous step toward me, his brow darkening. “Why’s this son of a bitch still alive?”
Hosea’s glare was just as dark. “The poison ain’t set in yet.”
I swung my watch into my palm and tapped it with a finger. Tick. Tick. Tick.
“One o’these days,” I said through the trickle of my grin, “you’ll see I want what’s best for this family. You’ll all see.”
Arthur’s shadow fell over me. “Only thing I wanna see is you at the bottom of a hole.”
“Ain’t he charming, Miss Molly?” I jeered. “Ain’t he just?”
Molly’s red mouth quivered. Unbreathingly she stared at me, her face splotched with mottled pink like blood in milk.
Then she shook herself. “Excuse me, Arthur.” She pushed past him stiffly as she hastened to the door.
When the panes had quit rattling from the violence of her exit, Arthur turned back to me. His nostrils flared with bull-rage. “Where do you get off scarin girls already scared outta their minds?”
“I have faith, Morgan,” I said. “Maybe I’m the last one who does. How are we supposed to get anywhere with this cloud of despair and disloyalty hangin over us, stifling our every move!” I tossed my arm, teeth bared. “Twenty—six—mouths—to—feed, half of them moanin, ‘I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!’ It’s no wonder Dutch can’t think straight!”
“He’s tryna get a rise outta you,” said Hosea.
Arthur didn’t take his eyes off me. “I’ve half a mind to let him.”
“It’s just talk, Arthur.” Hosea sat forward, sharp and serious. “Just talk.”
Arthur was disappearing somewhere behind that predator in him. Oh, we always waltzed around it, but after so long he might as well have come out and said it: How I wish I could kill you. Could, could, could. I admit it was becoming intoxicating. Morgan could hit me until my face was twice its size and my teeth was scattered across the floor like bone-flowers, but he could not kill me. I held that empty power over him, like I held it over them all. If I was bound to them by my broken leg, they was bound to me by their own code, bound to feed me and nurse me and swallow their pride for me. Tussling brothers. Defanged Cain.
Arthur swirled his tongue in his mouth like he was licking at the teeth Dutch had pulled from him. The predator slid reluctantly out of his eyes. Poor beaten dog. I laughed angrily and leaned into the corner made between the wall and the counter, as comfortable as if I lived there, as if he didn’t make my hands shake.
Hosea lay back. He knocked his boot against Arthur’s leg. Arthur looked down at him, suddenly weary. His knees clicked as he lowered himself to Hosea’s side. All I could see of him was the sinking curve of his spine.
“Ah, old friend,” he said, “twenty-six mouths.”
“First time we’ve cracked twenty-five, huh?” murmured Hosea. “Remember when it was just the three of us?”
“Long time ago now.”
“Someone’s watchin our Tower of Babel.” Hosea coughed. “Gettin too big for our britches.”
“Well,” said Arthur, then stopped. He just nodded.
Hosea clapped a gnarled hand on Arthur’s knee, patted it twice hard. “Arthur, listen.”
Arthur nodded again.
“I’ve decided . . .” Hosea’s throat worked against the flutter in his voice. He averted his eyes. “Arthur, you can tell old Dutch I won’t bite his head off if he comes to visit”—he raked in a crackling breath—“he won’t get no quarrel from me anymore.”
Arthur stilled.
“What you mean?” he asked.
“It’s time I face the music,” said Hosea. “We’re goin nowhere fast, and we ain’t comin back. Nothin I can do about it now. Used to be my life was a pretty good bargaining chip, but I guess that’s over with. Outlived my usefulness after all.”
“Why you talkin like this? You said you was feelin fine.”
Hosea blinked dimly at the window with such gray-faced exhaustion it seemed at first he had no strength to answer. Dutch was right; he had gotten thin. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his cheeks and the notches in his nose. His eyes was melting deep into his head, deeper by the day. Soon he would be peering out at us from the bottom of a well, sockets black like the crows had pecked them clean.
When he finally spoke, I could hardly hear him. “Just stay calm. You can do that, can’t you?”
“You ain’t been so calm,” said Arthur. “You been more worked up than I’ve seen in years.”
“I knew I was running out of time. Thought I could change his mind. Turns out I was wrong about a lot of things. Maybe everything important.”
His breaths needled weak and creaky through the silence that settled, like rust on a hinge, old floor-boards under phantom feet. All his long life and this was how he chose to go—giving up the ghost, giving up the fight, giving us up for lost. I ground my teeth beside them, crushing my head against the side of the clerk’s counter, thinking, thinking, thinking.
Hosea shook Arthur’s knee. “Look at me, Arthur, look at me.” That hard-edged intensity had come to him, put a wick in his eye. “It’s not over for you. It’s not over for any of these fools.”
“Past few months you been sayin the opposite,” said Arthur.
“And now I’m sayin it’s time to start makin plans.”
“For what?”
In a whip-quick flash of contempt, the drawstrings on the old man’s thin little mouth pulled even tighter. He withdrew his hand.
“When I’m gone, Arthur, there won’t be a soul alive who’ll bother to see through this act of yours,” he said darkly. “Do me a favor, for God’s sake, don’t die playin the part of the dumb brute—”
He barked out a rough cough, his body jolting with the effort, and rapped a fist against his breast-bone.
Arthur said nothing. He got up to leave.
“We only get so many chances,” snapped Hosea. “I ain’t askin you to be a great man, only a better one.”
Arthur threw the door open. The cold coursed in.
“Too damn late,” he said, and then he was gone.
Hosea pressed his hand to his forehead again, breathing harshly in his anger.
I watched him with a mirthless smile. “Poor—old—feller,” I drawled. “And you was tryin so hard.”
He glowered at me from the side of his oil-black eye. Hoarse as sandpaper, he grunted, “Go to Hell.”
My smile spread thinner. By habit I smoothed my cool palm over the grip of a gun, touching my finger-tips to the embossment. Arthur had set aside Hosea’s Peacemakers, left them in the belt discarded over a broken-legged stool on the other side of the post-office, far beyond his reach. I guessed the old man had no fear of me, and that was reassuring in its way. He couldn’t beat me like Arthur could; couldn’t kill me with his bare hands. Unarmed, he too was just talk.
I hummed to myself, skinning my thoughts, one at a time, taking them apart, hm-hm-hm. I took out my knife to busy my fingers and began to slice fine kerfs through the hem of my cotton blanket.
“You and I,” said I at last, “we ain’t so different, you know.”
“How depressing,” returned Hosea, stolid.
“Sticks and stones, old feller. You’ve learned to hate me, and”—I put a hand on my chest—“I surely sympathize, as I don’t like you much neither. But, at the end o’the day, we want the same thing: to stop draggin dogies into dog-fights.”
Slowly, Hosea lowered his arm and turned his head to me, inscrutable now. I stared back at him, hoping silently. His mind was quiet on his face, not like any other mind in Van der Linde company save our second greatest confidence man—the usurer. The world’s game to them was not cunning but cheating. No big speeches, no big conviction: desire and deceit, a trap and not a tower. It was my game when guns was off the cards, but it was theirs even when bullets would do.
“I think,” said Hosea, deliberate in every word, “we’ve got a very different idea of what that means.”
“Why we want it, maybe,” I conceded, “but not what it means.”
His look flattened, feigning disinterest. “Your point?”
“We are wedded in this chaos, for better or for worse. But for better . . .” I raised my knife between us, flipped it in the air. “For better, we can help each other. Way I see it, we are, as you say, goin nowhere fast. I’m all outta plans, and you’re damn near outta pulse.”
“If you were outta plans, you wouldn’t be sweet-talkin me.”
“True enough.” With a crooked grin, I tapped the flat of the blade to my nose. “Sharp feller, even if you is gettin long in the tooth. See, that’s why we’re better off puttin our talents together.”
Hosea coughed into his fist, then leaned over and spat onto the floor-boards. “Thought your talent was listenin,” he rasped, wiping his mouth. “Said I ain’t in the business of quarrelin anymore.”
“And yet you was all too keen to have at Morgan just now.”
He regarded me coolly.
“All full o’piss and vinegar to-day, isn’t you,” I laughed. “Don’t you worry that pretty little head, old girl. I’ll put in the hard labor all by my lonesome, cause unlike you, I ain’t the type to lie down and die when I want somethin.”
He did not react to any part of my insult. “So what do you want? My blessing?”
I picked at my grinning teeth with the point of my knife. “I’ll settle for a good word.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Devil’s advocate,” he said calmly.
“I ain’t no Devil, old man, and you ain’t no Angel.”
Hosea dropped his mask. All the thinking he’d tucked into his sleeve came tumbling out in the kind of madman’s malice I’d thought was Dutch’s alone. It was painted over his sunken skull and the black fire of his eyes, a glittering life born only of hating a man so intensely his very living spurs you on.
“I never claimed to be an Angel, far from it.” He spoke now with his teeth out and spitting, a rictus nearly glee. “I’m somethin worse than all the robbers and rapists and murderers of Hell: a man with nothin to lose. Every word outta your mouth has steered us wrong, and you think there’s a chance in Hell I’d trust you?” He wheezed a saw-blade laugh. “Think over your plans again, Micah Bell. You ain’t the only forked tongue in his ear.”
I studied him and every inch of his self-satisfaction. It never was hard to pry out a bad man’s manifesto. Confession for confession, a crook won’t be outdone. This old fool was just as easy as his god—in his petulant rage, he had given me my triumph.
I chuckled darkly, saluting him with my knife.
I did it. I’d breathed life into him.
But now, of course, he wanted me dead.
He didn’t show it—not to Grimshaw when she turned up clucking and fretting over his warmth, nor Charles creeping in for the heat of the stove, nor Mary-Beth meting out a breakfast of chewy bear stew—but he made no secret of his sudden good mood. A spark had come back to him, that boyish mischief that gave him his humor. He was joking, and laughing, and spinning his yarns; he charmed Mary-Beth into a conversation about cutthroat trout and entertained her inanely for half an hour. Something was feeding a new-found power in him, and I knew what it was, and he knew I knew.
He was waiting for my move. Watching me. Testing me. He lived for the time he was biding, and he lived for toying with me.
When Mary-Beth left us to the last of our stew, I stared at him without shame. The hot meal had brightened him yet more, brought blood to his skin and sprung his eyes from the shadows a little. He seemed quite calmed down, relaxed under his tight lungs, no coil of wire-spring readiness despite his lingering threat. Still he had no fear of me. But I no longer found it reassuring.
“You know,” he said into the silence, so abrupt I nearly jumped, “bear was one o’the first things I ever ate.”
“Is that right,” I said.
“Mm. Black bear is good.” Hosea tapped his spoon against the bowl. “This was a small one, though. Spring bears usually are—otherwise you get twice as much fat as meat. I bagged a thousand-pound grizzly once with an old huntin friend. Oh, to be young and stupid again.” Shaking his head, he chuckled to himself. “He’s long dead now. Might as well’ve been the bear that got him: totally riddled with worms. We was sick for two weeks. Gotta cook’m right through, learned that the hard way.”
I pushed a slimy wad of shank around my bowl. I’m sure he felt real smart with his Aesopian intimidation, very amusingly underhanded. Anger was starting to tense me, my fingers stiff and itching for a gun, but I soothed myself with thoughts of my power—indeed, it was not so empty a power when I was growing mad enough to catch a hundred bullets just for a taste of it.
This old man would get me what I wanted, or I’d shoot him in the fucking head and reckon with my death however I saw fit. How I chafed under his thumb, how I chafed.
The morning wore on, and I chafed, and I chafed. People came in and out to see him and send me dirty looks. They asked after his health. He asked after the kids. Tilly Jackson brought in that cross-eyed little Bo, and her cold-pinched face lit up with joy when she spotted him. She reached out and touched his cheek, and she giggled in her tiny voice. It was all so saccharine I felt ill.
But then, I just felt quite ill. My head was beginning to spin and my stomach roll, so I lay down. The swollen skin around my ankle had gone tighter, hotter, tugging at its stitches, like something inside me was trying to get out. That unborn creature of blood poisoning was pushing at my seams—I could already tell. I’d been bled enough times to know what it feels like.
I closed my eyes for a while.
“What’s your name, little lady? Is it a secret? Come on now, you can tell me. I can keep a secret.”
“Micah.”
I flinched hard. Squinting through a fevered smear of black and white contorting under morning sun I found Dutch bent over me, his hand out like he would have touched me. I groaned in the back of my throat, sore all over. Crumpled in a dead slump with the wall at my spine and my neck at an angle, I’d fallen asleep like Lenny Summers.
I grasped for Dutch’s hand. He pulled me into a sit. The snow beneath me had become slush, and my clothes was wet. Hot and cold rolled over my skin in prickling waves. My head nodded forward.
Dutch was kneeling now, his hand on my shoulder, thumb and forefinger at the junction of my neck. Instinct tensed me, but in my shuddering he did not notice.
“You don’t look well, son,” he said. His voice was a ruin, husky and deep.
I could hardly steady myself to see him. “I don’t f-feel well, Dutch,” I said haltingly. “Fucking horse got me g-good.”
A knife of pain spiked through my leg, quick as a bullet. I clutched my knee and beat it with my fist, harder harder harder. Dutch’s grip tightened.
“Micah.”
“What,” I forced out.
“Why are you out here?”
Well, brainless moron, I thought I ought to be murdered where everyone could see me.
I hid behind my hat. My best friend spite was clearing my head. I hoped Dutch was afraid. I hoped it was all falling apart inside him. It was falling apart inside me, and I hated to waste my misery.
“I’m burni-ing,” I said, shivering. “I’m on fire.”
Dutch swore under his breath. “Toy Ann ain’t given you somethin?”
“Old hag’s been at me three times now. She’s g-given me plenty.”
“I’ll make sure she gives you somethin a little stronger.”
His touch vanished as he stood, and I sagged in relief. I leaned my weight onto one numbed hand and looked up at him shakily. He was moving away.
“Dutch,” I said.
He stopped. Against the blue sky he was taller than the mountains, dark as the ghost of the sun.
“Gonna lose old H-Hosea if we’re up here much longer.”
His face shuttered. “Not you too.”
“No, don’t worry”—I raised my off-hand to placate him—“I know you’re only doing what’s bes-st for your people. You always do. A visionary, but a provider when it matters.”
His look turned hunted. He nodded stiffly.
“That’s all I want,” he gritted out. “To make sure we all get outta this alive.”
“And you will.” I made a wide gesture, pleading with my faith. “We kn-know . . . we know we’d be lost without you. Them kids, well—they’d be mincemeat.”
Dutch stilled in his scowl. His throat bobbed. He flickered somewhere else. I hoped he was seeing that child again. Hoped it was all falling apart.
“Go inside, Micah,” he said. He turned around, and the long, dark line of him swayed slowly toward the log cabin where twenty frightened faces waited for the mantle of his conviction to fall over their eyes.
Tell us again we’re gonna be free. Tell us again we ain’t never gonna die. Tell us again. Tell us again.
When I dragged myself back inside, Hosea was watching me. I returned him a glower that was weakened by my trembling, the rats’ tails of my hair rattling a greasy dance.
“I-I need c-clothes,” I snapped through chattering teeth.
Under the bandage my leg was red and hot as a coal. But it was the smell that worried me. Yellow with pus all in the seam, the wound was going sour, curdling like old milk. Toy Ann pulled up my stitches and washed it out and stuffed it with a paste of knit-bone and bistort. Then she started winding my bandage again.
I grabbed her wrist. “Sew me back up.”
Toy Ann shook her head. “Thread is puttin that blood-cheese in you,” she hollered.
I stared at her dizzily, hazed in a pulsing pain. “Blood-cheese?” I repeated. “Listen, you old witch, I’m tellin you—sew me back up!”
Beatific as ever, Toy Ann spun her wrist and twisted out of my grasp. “Drink this and go t’sleep.”
She pressed a rusty tin mug, boiling to the touch, into my hands. The tea was black and stank of bile. My stomach writhed.
“Drink it right up,” she insisted, “then go right t’sleep. Poison’s goin through ye, needa sleep it out. Git it? Sleep it out, son. Ye’ll wake up fever-broke, sweated all out in yer dreams. Trust this old witch now.”
I was already sweating like a pig, soaking through old stains in the O’Driscoll shirt Hosea had foisted upon me. But Toy Ann, for all her dirty charlatanries, knew one thing quite well: how to shock the body into living a little longer. And I will tell you this. I was beginning to fear dying myself. I’d seen a dozen strong men outdone by blood poisoning—Hell, it only took one night to claim Davey—and it is a long fate, a fading-away fate, the kind that robs you of sudden-death dignity. This was not how I planned to go. No man who deals in bullets wants to die in a bed.
“Well,” I said bitterly, “I guess I will just sweat it out in my God-damn dreams then.”
Hosea raised his own mug at me. “That’s it, Micah,” he chirped. “Better than the sweetest liquor!”
“Look at you, all cheerful,” I sneered. “Till death do us part, old feller, and by the state o’you I’ll put my money on sooner rather than later.”
The gleam in the old bastard’s eye was wicked as a dagger. “Hear that, Toy Ann, the man’s got no faith in medicine.”
“Keep talkin, dead man,” I said. “I’ve always liked your shoes.”
He might have flung some retort—had opened his mouth to do so—but for the cough that came out instead. He grabbed his chest, put down his tea, bent his head forward as it rocked through him, tore through him, clawed out of him raw and wet with blood. His brows was screwed tight, face twisted up. Toy Ann looked on studiously, tapping the wrinkled slash of her lips.
It was torture to keep this thing alive. He put on his big show of meeting death with open arms, but it terrified him. I could tell. All those regrets, he’d never be content to lay down the burden of his failure. When it was looming over him, when it became the only thing he could see before him, I wondered if he would beg like Karen for one more moment of torture, two more, three more, anything but ending, anything but losing his chance.
No I don’t wanna die. Don’t let him kill me, I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die.
My shaking hands sent scalding tea over the rim of my mug. I sucked it desperately off my skin.
With blood in his teeth, Hosea smiled knowingly. He knew damned near everything.
Dutch burst in like a bat out of Hell, striking his hands together like they might light a spark. Hazily, I blinked. Honey gold in hard light, his gaze was ablaze with a terrible excitement and ringed with sleepless black. For a moment I thought he was on fire, but it was the flare of high noon making candles of his fur. I let my eyelids lower again on the anvil of my headache.
“You’re smilin,” said Dutch. “Feelin better?”
“Gettin there,” said Hosea. The smile was in his voice, warm and lax.
“I told you that old woman could work miracles.” Dutch’s boots charted a slow, stalking path across the room. “I’m gonna hold this over you.”
“Well, don’t jinx it.”
I peered at them between my lashes. With a blown-out sigh, Dutch settled himself by Hosea’s left side where I could see the red heat in his eye. He pulled off his gloves and set a hand on Hosea’s chest. He pressed down searchingly. His fingers crept beneath Hosea’s coat. It was clear when he’d found what he was looking for: a long exhale left him, steady and rolling, his weight seeping out as air.
“There’s your heart,” he muttered. “Still goin strong.”
“Hallelujah,” said Hosea dryly.
Dutch’s hand jumped with every hot pulse of Hosea’s heart, rose and fell with the tide of gravelly breath, some strange hypnotic war of rhythms. I touched the spot where my heart would be, but it wasn’t there—melted already, it was freed from its cage, running all through my burning blood, all through the swelling drum that was my body. My head was killing me. My leg was killing me.
“I’m thinkin what we need to do,” said Dutch, “is put you and the women and the rest o’the old fogies on a train to Montana.”
“With our secret fortune?” scoffed Hosea. “That’s eleven people—sixteen if we’re bringin those abandons with us. Seventeen if you wanna add this useless crip. It’ll be two hunnerd dollars for tickets alone.”
Stupid old man was counting sheep like I was. One two three four five little sheep all in a row.
“I know.” Dutch’s voice went low. “We need . . . one good take. To set us up again.”
“Dutch.”
“Hosea. We need money.”
“We need to keep our heads down, or we’ll all be dead before we make it to the border. You think throwin a blind dart at the nearest bank’s the right move?”
“Not a bank, for Christ’s sake.”
“Excuse me for figuring we was done with logic and reason.”
Angry now, Dutch began to seethe. I heard him shuffle, then strike a match, light a cigarette, draw deep to bring the fire through.
“You said you were done with the doubting,” he said, gone dark and heavy with smoke.
“Nothin to doubt when you ain’t even got a plan,” shot back Hosea. “What’s the plan? Who’s your mark? How’re you gonna keep the heat off us when it comes down?”
“Don’t get superior with me,” growled Dutch. “I’ve been stuck up here, same as you. I need to get the lay o’the land.”
“Well that’s just it, Dutch. There’s your solution.”
“What is?”
“The land. Work with the land. Be resourceful. Look at what’s right in front of you steada what’s locked up in that head o’yours.”
“There’s nothing here, you crazy old bastard. What, you fancy takin up trapping? You fancy sellin off what little resources we got left?”
“Round up those sheep on the ranch and sell those.”
Dutch paused. He grumbled through a pull, but he was thoughtful as the smoke poured out.
“How much is a damn sheep worth these days?”
“I reckon two dollars a head. No less than that. And after this cold snap, well, there’ll be hunnerds of local ranchers with gaps in their flocks need fillin. Ask that Mrs. Adler, she’ll know.”
He was thinking. Thinking.
“And what if she don’t wanna give em up? They’re her sheep.”
Hosea wheezed, the cat that got the cream. “Aha. Look.”
“What?”
“The stupid’s comin out. You know I’m right.”
Oh, Dutch hated that. His spiteful glint was thinly veiled. “We’ll try it your way, old man, but I got my dart set on somethin bigger than mutton-punchin.”
Hosea plucked the cigarette from his fingers and sucked on it. Apology by way of annoying him further. He smiled lazily, and offered it back.
“How about we do the mutton-punchin first,” he said, “and then we’ll see which way the cat jumps?”
Dutch took the cigarette, took the bait. “First reasonable thing you’ve said.”
“Is it? Here I was thinkin, between the two of us, I’m the one with all the reason.”
“Oh, is that so.”
“Ain’t that why you keep me around?”
His eyes sparking with amusement, Dutch blew out a plume of smoke through a smile. “Not at all, Hosea.”
He handed back his cigarette. Hosea coughed a little as he took it.
Dutch leaned closer, conspiratory. “Never mind what I said,” he murmured. “Let’s go rob a bank.”
Hosea chuckled behind his smoking hand. “Let’s revive this mining town operation, maybe they were onto something.”
“Mm, a mountain full o’gold.”
“Packed with it, all the way to the top of Dead Head Crown.”
“A crown’s gotta be made of gold, right?”
“Gotta be, or you ain’t a real king.”
We was going to die and them two was in each other’s ears like lovers. It would have been so fucking funny if it didn’t make me so fucking mad, scorching mad, trembling mad.
“Maybe I can convince Mr. Bell to cough up his teeth,” said Dutch.
I curled my hidden hands into fists.
“He’s awake, you know,” said Hosea.
“He is? How can you tell?”
“He’s too still. He dreams like a dog.”
I opened my eyes full and fixed them in my cold blue stare. The light made them pale as caught specters, dark-eyed demons. Hosea was mocking me, laughing at me with his smug look, his damned smug look.
“Didn’t mean nothin by it, son,” said Dutch soothingly. “We ain’t at pullin teeth just yet.”
“I know, boss.” I smiled, flashing gold to the blinding sun. “But what’s mine is yours.”
I was just drifting off again when Morgan and Javier came barging into the post-office with a red slab of meat that might once have been John Marston. They laid him down by the pot-bellied stove in a spill of mangled limbs and cold, clotted blood, his head lolling on a limp neck, puffing shallow cloudless breaths. His face was alien in its disfigurement, black and ballooned, eyes sealed behind the bloat of his bruises. Every part of him was dripping. I could not tell what was blood and what was snow-melt.
“Think he’s out now,” said Morgan, squatted down beside him.
“¡Oye, pendejo!” Javier gripped John’s chin roughly between his fingers and shook him hard. “¡Ya levántate, eh!”
John remained silent.
“Yeah, he’s real gone,” said Javier.
“Dumb bastard.” Morgan chewed at his thumb-nail. His eyes was stuck fast on John, transfixed by the damage. “Get Abigail and Susan. Toy Ann, if you can find her. Hell, get the reverend.”
Javier put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up. “And Dutch?” he asked.
“I guess,” said Morgan.
“He won’t be happy.”
Morgan met his eye grimly. “Well, at least you ain’t died, that’s all I’ll say.”
Javier gave him a pointed look. “If I died of the grippe, I’d ask God to send me back and kill me with wolves.”
In Javier’s absence, Hosea staggered to his feet and moved to crouch by Morgan. Awoken from an uneasy sleep, he was creased in the face and wet with drool and shivering now in the cold. He brushed his knuckles over John’s forehead, nose, cheek, frowning to himself. He rolled John onto his side and began to peel him out of his soaked and shredded coat.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
“Found him like this in the forest, couple o’miles out from that basin. Only he was talkin then, and now he’s just about crow bait.”
“How’d he get like this? Where’s his horse?”
Morgan grunted. “Well, the damn fool got lost in that snowstorm and found himself some real hungry wolves. They was comin at him for hours, he said. He’d done dug himself into a hole. At some point they got tired of reckoning with his bullets and went after Benny. He got up and followed them, killed the rest, I think. Rode Benny to death on the way down. Crawled the rest of the way.” Morgan helped Hosea lift John out of his shirt and vest. “I’ll go find his saddle to-morrow. We can sell it if John doesn’t make it.”
Hosea made a vague noise. His fingers picked carefully over the swaths of flesh torn from John’s arms.
“Nothin like a dead man to get old Hosea out of bed,” said Morgan.
Without looking up, Hosea flicked a hand to dismiss him. “Stop being useless and go find Toy Ann.”
It wasn’t long before half the camp was crammed into the post-office and gathered round their piecemeal brother-in-arms. Toy Ann and Abigail got to work sewing him up at once and packing him with the same foul, oily poultice I was filled with, and Swanson put some morphine in him. There was little talk.
The old guard stood above them, blank-faced observers. Folded over in pain, Hosea had a shoulder against the wall, his lungs rumbling.
Dutch tilted his head to Arthur. His gaze was somewhere far beyond the space where John was lying.
“Whad d’you think?” he asked vacantly.
“He’d be real lucky,” said Arthur.
“Then he will be.” Dutch nodded, deep in thought. “He will be.”
Arthur sighed. “Might be we’ve about used up all our luck.”
Dutch’s eyes cut across his collar to Hosea. The old man stared back at him, struggling to breathe.
I could no longer track the passing of time, where the pain was coming from, what happened before or behind my fever-bludgeoned eyes. The room smelled of blood and rot. My agony was complete. There was no reason for living except that they wanted me dead.
They wanted me dead.
They wanted me dead.
Shit, he said softly. Quite the miserable wretch, ain’t you?
I hiccuped, shivering like a dog. The sun was so bright so burning it scraped upon the backs of my eyeballs, jagged as a splinter. I would have squeezed them shut but I could not do that with Hosea wiping my face, my shirt, my blanket, close enough to kill me and maybe even strong enough, weak as I was. I knew I was bug eyed with fear, probably reeked of it to a snake like him.
You cccan’t kkill me, I stuttered. Hhe’ll knnoww.
Think I’d waste my time cleanin up your vomit if I was gonna kill you?
Youu been wwwastin your time lllonng as I knownn yyou.
Well he looked at me with black in him then, he did not like that, no, he knew I was right. Knew I was right and how stupid was that, all these God damned liars looking like fools in front of me, Hell I knew them now better than they knew themselves, better than they knew each other, I under no illusions, under no hocus pocus preacher with his hand to some pagan lord. I laughed at that stupid Hosea. I felt such life in me, such floating life. I could kill him easily I realized. What was I so afraid of? He was a dead man walking and I was as living as the vulture that sweeps its shadow over all the world and all the little animals scurrying to their holes and all the pilgrims thirsting for mirages in the desert.
Why so glum old maaan why so glum! You could be dead but cher alive! Now that is somethin, that’s a real somethin!
She gave you somethin strong all right.
The door opened behind him. As he twisted round to see, my heart froze in my chest with fresh fear at the sight of the dark figure walking in like a shadow that lost its head.
Not right now son, said Hosea.
Lamb smiled his terrible smile. I think Mr. Bell needs more medcin.
The last dose seems to be doin its job well enough.
Lamb moved slowly to the stove, one long step after the other, young and sure, surer than most boys his age, sure for having nothing worth anything in all the world, nothing but wanting. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He threw it onto the pile of stinking spoiled flesh lying at his feet.
Beginner’s luck, he said cheerfully. Next game’s mine.
Hosea pushed me back down, sharp hand to my shoulder, unfolding me from my stare. Beneath the blanket I held my guns tight by the grips and swiveled my wild eyes.
Why ain’t he dead, I rasped.
From what I hear you saved his life, said Hosea.
I shivered, shivered, shivered.
Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time for more.
I slipped out.
And I slipped in.
And I slipped out
and I slipped in
and I slipped out and I
slipped in and
I slipped
out wake up now come on
his hands was on me grasping bony hands he was holding some abyssal black oil to me Micah drink up he said but I did not want to drink what came from his hands cruel hands cruel mouth all violence all deceit but I would drink him if I had to I would drink what he did not offer and if I
could chop his head open and all the snakes come out like worms like maggots white and writhing white as bone with red running long lines down their twisted spines how he nursed those snakes his wicked children birthed them from the semen of his lies and there I was sticking my fingers into the liquid mass of them and putting them in my mouth and they tasted of
poison but a poison I could eat because I was of their flesh and ilk I was Beelzebub and they was my cousins and I
showed him my teeth he looked
at me with hate in him hate as black as the empty space where the crows had eaten their jelly and he said to me drink up Micah drink up your poison and my
hot heart
surged with a rage of blood that was mine and not his mine and not anyones I
reached out grabbed him threw him pinned him beat him beat him beat him he was grabbing at my belt I twisted his arm slithered down sank my fangs into him sank my venom into him seeded my snakes louder
and more violent than his
louder and bloodier
crying out in horror like I was Death but my friend I was far more benevolent than Death by far more benevolent even if this
snake beneath me was trying to get free thrashing against my solid hands I got out my knife to make this easier tried to plunge it into his maggoty brain but his hand was free he grabbed me grabbed my knife sprung it from my sweatslick palm tossed it somewhere clatter I put my knee on his hand put my fingers round his pulse crushing squeezing pressing all my weight down his face was swelling like a grape his eyes popping out of his head and rolling he jerked he jerked my knee slipped his
hand hit my belt again and he had my gun
bang
my ears
singing
fell back he rolled me weight on my back my leg I screamed
screamed
the weight came off I gasped and trembled looked up wildly to a boot meeting my face blood burst from my nose like hot iron running down my chin my leg was such Hell I could hardly
feel it but I felt the knee that pinned the back of my neck and held me down and the hands that twisted my wrists into knots the hands that twisted my shins into knots I yelled you go and fuck yourself you gutless coward you go and fuck
yourself untie me put a gun in my hands and we will shoot each other like men gutless maggot gutless fuckin maggot cracked
against my head I saw white and I saw red and then I twisted and saw Arthur Morgan above me with murder in his eye and Dutch standing by the door black as an omen and Hosea sitting at his side sweet little snake wrapped around his neck fuck yourself you damn snake fuck yourself
now tell me said Dutch stalking a slow circle around me watching me with tiny predatory eyes where was he where was he
tell me why I shouldnt rip you into so many pieces there will be nothin left for the Goddamn rats
cause it would take some gutless maggot to kill a man when hes tied up God damn you all you make me sick
Arthur will you please escort this savage out of here I will join you shortly
Dutch the old mans voice was just a whisper he was touching his throat his breath coming hard and thin forced through too small a hole Dutch look at his eyes
so Dutch came to me knelt down before me pressed his thumb to my eyebrow dragged it up to widen my eye
what the Hell is wrong with him is he kiting out on somethin
Toy Ann gave him somethin
whad she give him cocaine is he coked up how much fuckin coke does it take to turn a man into a monster
he was always a fuckin monster Dutch you just seen it proper now hes gone after one of us
dont talk about me God fuck you all you try to poison me and you call me a monster untie me so I can shoot you in your shiteatin cocksuckin mouths
Micah do you know who I am
I tried to say Dutch but what came out was the Devil. And that
oh yes
that was of great interest to him.
Do you know who you attacked just now
a snake a snake a snake a snake—
Somethins. Fairly. Wrong with him.
Thats clear.
Dutch unfurled like some great bird Lucifer on sinstained wings glowered down at me violent malevolent. It is by this old snakes infinite grace that you are still breathin mister Bell. I suggest you consider this a debt that binds you to him body and soul because the very moment his last breath leaves his lungs I will kill you with my bare hands do you hear me my bare hands.
What we gonna do with him Dutch.
Throw him in the Goddamn stable.
He will kick up such a damn fuss make the horses all agitated you know he will and I have no doubt he will try to get away on that Hellhorse of his.
Then throw him in the fuckin snow so help me God I want him out of my sight or I will do somethin to him.
Dutch.
What. What Hosea.
Just. Toss him. Over the counter there.
I am not leavin him in here with you. Not no damn way
body and soul. Hes mine.
Dutch regarded him with burning eyes red as heartsblood. In the end this was not his power. Hosea had pried it gently from his whiteknuckled fists.
Hes yours then. Do it Arthur.
And so I was lifted up and tossed over the clerks counter in the corner of the postoffice to lie in Lambs nest of broken shelves and empty bottles sweating and shaking bereft of my guns nearly crying for my pain my wild rage my helplessness my cage
and in those hours
trussed up like a hog
I felt the cold weight of a corpse against my back.
I still cannot fathom exactly what happened that day.
The memories are of a different color, a different shape, like they was made in a different mind than mine. I met a creature in me that I had never met before, and by its actions one thing was certain: I had finally done my prospects irreparable harm. There was no spit-shined boot that would hear my plea this time. I’d breathed life into Hosea, and then I had squeezed it out again.
From my dark corner I heard only his sharp, sandy gasps, scrabbling for life, the body’s last desperate spasms. His breaths was coming weaker than ever, weaker by the hour, weak enough that he had fallen asleep and could not be awoken. There was no peace in it; he struggled even in unconsciousness. His farce of a family lingered by his death throes, waiting for him to die.
I was lucky they could not see me. If they’d remembered I was there, they would have lynched me where I lay, tied up and crippled, and they would scatter me across that mountain, my eternal Hell.
So I was silent through their mourning, lingering, murmuring. The night grew deep; my corner was the blackest shadow. Two small children choked on cries of fear. Some folks was sniffling. The talk was bleak, circling the whorls of this strange apocalypse, though little of it now was about Hosea. He was never going to survive—he’d been warning them, after all. But he would be there to haunt them, join them round the fire, sing with them in chorus, meet them as a passing bird, a passing beast, press against their backs at night. That’s what dead men do.
Tilly Jackson’s voice, a shaky hum, curled through the smoke of low commotion, so soft it was nearly a song, nearly a lullaby. Green fields. Open country as far as the eye can see. We’ll be free, Hosea, free. Remember when we took the train from Altonville to Lamy and I was afraid of the whistle? You held my hand and told me I was making the train feel self-conscious for her poor singing. Cold crowd like this, she’ll never make it to Broadway. Remember, Hosea? I need you for the train to Montana. Please.
“All is lost,” muttered Pearson to himself. “Damn it all. All is lost.”
I did not hear Dutch. He wasn’t there.
I closed my fevered eyes. I tasted metal on my tongue. Hosea’s blood. I tried to spit, but my mouth was dry. He tasted sick. Like the ichor of a drowned man. Like the cruor of a snake bite.
“No! No!”
Like all the breath had left the room, a candle snuffing out.
“Dutch!” cried Tilly Jackson. With a crash of feet the door flew open and she ran into the frozen night, screaming, screaming.
“Dutch! He’s dead! Hosea is dead!”
The hair on my neck rose. I shivered, shivered, shivered.
When Dutch stormed in, the candleless room went dark. I know it was him because he was chanting no, no, no as though he could command the world to admit its lie. His presence spurred the gang into sudden frenzy. All weight shifted toward him in steps of one and two, pulled like moths to a flame. He was their strength, and now he was their desperation. I heard his boots cross the room, his knees strike the floor-boards.
“Hosea. Hosea. Don’t do this to me. You ain’t dead.”
Women began to cry.
“Wait,” said Dutch, “his heart’s still goin!”
“Oh my God,” said Grimshaw. Her boot heels clattered forward. “We gotta get him to cough. Dutch—”
Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack. It sounded like he was bludgeoning a carcass with a mallet, pounding the fragile cocoon of empty lungs.
“You ain’t gonna die,” he snarled, wild as an animal. “I forbid it. I forbid it.”
“Dutch, listen,” said Abigail pleadingly, “he’s got no air. Somebody’s gotta git air into him. Here, put im down, let me—”
The babies was wailing now, I couldn’t hear a thing. Voices rose in a riot of shouting, praying, cursing. Dutch beat that withered corpse hard enough to knock its soul out, then Abigail breathed it back in. Push, pull, push, pull. It seemed to go on for hours, hours of torture, hours.
Then, a weak, bubbled noise. More a gurgle than a cough.
“He’s back,” cried Abigail through a muffle of tears.
He coughed again, bubbled again. He coughed until he retched. Dutch was murmuring—into his ear, I am sure. Stealing him back from that brink.
Hosea was alive. My body and soul was still under his thumb. A hot tear slipped out of my eye as I shook in fury and fear and relief. I thought about death. My daddy dying in a rage of stripped flesh, torn apart. Freddy Ogle, screaming in his coffin. Annemarie drowning with hands around her neck.
I thought about Jenny. Dead, lovely Jenny. What a beautiful way to die.
After that night in Ogallala, I never saw Ruddy Bainton again.
Two years later my daddy saw in the newspaper that he’d been hung in Kansas for snatching a post-master’s six-year-old son. The boy was three days dead when they found him curled up like a baby in the sea of Flint Hills bluestem with his knees tucked against his unbeating heart and his hands pillowing his cheek. Like he’d fallen asleep there. Just fallen asleep.
Daddy smacked the paper with the back of his hand and tipped back his head and with razor-blade rhapsody he laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.
I couldn’t help but feel that I’d missed my chance.
Would you be alright with readers making fanart for your fic and if so would you have any interest in seeing it? The reason I ask is I did a little digital painting of a scene from Ch. 2 awhile back, but have kept it private as i painted it initially for my own practice and personal entertainment. But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe you’d like to see art inspired by your fic, so I decided I’d just reach out and ask. If not that’s totally fine and I can just continue to hold on to it privately!
Also if it helps you decide, the art is my own interpretation of the scene just seconds before Lamb shoots the dynamite. It is safe-for-work and does not depict the brutality of the scene about to occur. I just thought it would be fun to try and capture that strange slow second in time right before something terrible happens.
Have adored every chapter of TATII so far and I hope you’ve been having fun writing it!
It would blow my mind to see any sort of anything inspired by my work, be it a masterpiece or incomprehensible scribbling or, hell, interpretive dance. The fact that you thought about my fic long enough to make art of it makes me all giddy inside, and what a scene to capture. If you're comfortable sharing, I'd give my right arm to see it!
Edited to add that I am very touched by your sensitivity toward the subject matter of that scene, I deeply respect that. It was a difficult scene to write!
Sorry it took me so long to see your reply! Heres my little painting of that scene! I just loved the vision of harsh lantern light climbing up a dark tree in an otherwise dark landscape (and revealing something darker with it)
Again, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed TATII !
Holy hell, this is amazing. Your art style is gorgeous--I'm getting vibes of a classic children's literature illustrator (maybe Eileen Soper?) from the foreground, which is so grim with the context. I'm obsessed with that mesmerizing blue underpainting coming through the shadows of the foreground. And your brushes man. I don't know how you achieved that crunch but it's good.
Never in a thousand years would I have expected this fic to inspire art, let alone such beautiful and cinematic pieces. I can't stop looking at it. Thank you so much for sharing.
I’m glad you liked it! I wasn’t familiar with Eileen Soper so I looked her up and gosh, what a compliment!
Ive also decided to add the second version of the same drawing here. This version is a lot darker, to the point I thought it may be too difficult to actually see what’s going on in it. But I do think it does a better job of presenting the scene as occurring at night. I figured why not just show both
Also: “We’re one letter away from an anagram of Tahiti”
Wow, that one's beautiful too! The snowflakes and lighting really stand out, and so does the foreboding... They're both very accurate to the scene tbh, the "deep-water blue" of the snow and sky and the featureless black of the rest. I think it even adds to the piece that the gang is hard to make out here. The poor child wouldn't have been able to see their faces (much less their intentions) at all.
Would you be alright with readers making fanart for your fic and if so would you have any interest in seeing it? The reason I ask is I did a little digital painting of a scene from Ch. 2 awhile back, but have kept it private as i painted it initially for my own practice and personal entertainment. But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe you’d like to see art inspired by your fic, so I decided I’d just reach out and ask. If not that’s totally fine and I can just continue to hold on to it privately!
Also if it helps you decide, the art is my own interpretation of the scene just seconds before Lamb shoots the dynamite. It is safe-for-work and does not depict the brutality of the scene about to occur. I just thought it would be fun to try and capture that strange slow second in time right before something terrible happens.
Have adored every chapter of TATII so far and I hope you’ve been having fun writing it!
It would blow my mind to see any sort of anything inspired by my work, be it a masterpiece or incomprehensible scribbling or, hell, interpretive dance. The fact that you thought about my fic long enough to make art of it makes me all giddy inside, and what a scene to capture. If you're comfortable sharing, I'd give my right arm to see it!
Edited to add that I am very touched by your sensitivity toward the subject matter of that scene, I deeply respect that. It was a difficult scene to write!
Sorry it took me so long to see your reply! Heres my little painting of that scene! I just loved the vision of harsh lantern light climbing up a dark tree in an otherwise dark landscape (and revealing something darker with it)
Again, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed TATII !
Holy hell, this is amazing. Your art style is gorgeous--I'm getting vibes of a classic children's literature illustrator (maybe Eileen Soper?) from the foreground, which is so grim with the context. I'm obsessed with that mesmerizing blue underpainting coming through the shadows of the foreground. And your brushes man. I don't know how you achieved that crunch but it's good.
Never in a thousand years would I have expected this fic to inspire art, let alone such beautiful and cinematic pieces. I can't stop looking at it. Thank you so much for sharing.
Would you be alright with readers making fanart for your fic and if so would you have any interest in seeing it? The reason I ask is I did a little digital painting of a scene from Ch. 2 awhile back, but have kept it private as i painted it initially for my own practice and personal entertainment. But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe you’d like to see art inspired by your fic, so I decided I’d just reach out and ask. If not that’s totally fine and I can just continue to hold on to it privately!
Also if it helps you decide, the art is my own interpretation of the scene just seconds before Lamb shoots the dynamite. It is safe-for-work and does not depict the brutality of the scene about to occur. I just thought it would be fun to try and capture that strange slow second in time right before something terrible happens.
Have adored every chapter of TATII so far and I hope you’ve been having fun writing it!
It would blow my mind to see any sort of anything inspired by my work, be it a masterpiece or incomprehensible scribbling or, hell, interpretive dance. The fact that you thought about my fic long enough to make art of it makes me all giddy inside, and what a scene to capture. If you're comfortable sharing, I'd give my right arm to see it!
Edited to add that I am very touched by your sensitivity toward the subject matter of that scene, I deeply respect that. It was a difficult scene to write!
hello fellow anonymous 🤝 i wish you weren’t anon on ao3 I really was interested in seeing if you have any other fav fics/stories. Great writers have great taste
Greetings anonymous flatterer. Your flattery will get you somewhere. But my answer may be disappointing for being one of the most popular fics in the fandom: "what wastes and deserts of the soul." It kinda lost me toward the end, no spoilers, but I enjoyed most of the characterizations and just got really invested in the mundanity. Really great OCs, loved them all. And that writing style 👌👌👌
I'm not horny enough for most fics with dark themes, so I end up reading light stuff. I'm interested in platonic relationships, non-sexual power struggles, ideological conflict. The unexpected. I'm always up for recommendations myself, so if anyone has any, send them my way!
Rating: Mature
Characters: Micah, Dutch, Arthur, Hosea, original child characters, the Van der Linde gang
Warnings: Character death, casual racism
Wordcount: 7,600
| AO3 | Masterlist | Map |
It was Pearson who found me on the threshold of the post-office, scratching at the door like a dog waiting to be let in. I was shivering and soaked. I’d lost my hat somewhere in the snow, and numbed as I was to such trifling concepts, I hadn’t even noticed. Pearson brought me inside and sat me by the pot-bellied stove, his thick hands and thin words all pitying and mournful as ever, and he put a blanket over me despite the nasty things I said to him.
Then he left me there. No one was much fussed with me.
The musty smell of that small room was overwhelmed completely by iron blood-stink, hot and heady. Karen had been ripped almost to pieces. They couldn’t help her, and they knew it themselves; it wasn’t long before they stopped trying. Still, it took her two hours to die. She cried and moaned for all of it. Toy Ann let Sean back in, and he sat by Karen’s side and talked and talked and talked over the din of her convulsive terror and Swanson’s wispy prayers. I asked for someone to please fucking shoot her, but she told them she didn’t want to die, so they wouldn’t do it.
If they don’t go quiet and get that strange lost look, there’s this cry you hear from bodies that know they’re dying—it’s always the same. Not the same sound, but the same flayed edge, an urgency you’ll never feel until your heart’s blood is draining through the sand of your existence and Death’s wings are over your eyes and you know, you know, these are the last sounds you’re ever going to make from the last breaths you’ll ever draw. You supplicate your masters as an animal brays for powerless kin. Where’s my mama? Where’s my husband? Where’s my God? They cannot help you. Death has gotten inside you, drowned your feathery lungs. He is going to take your hand and push you through the surface of yourself.
I’ve heard that cry a thousand times—a thousand people, lands and years apart, all struck with the same realization: Going to die now. All my years are gone. Ate up all my air. Used up all my words. No one told me. I didn’t know.
When Karen went silent, so did the room. There was no more murmured reassurances, no more Bible for blank eyes and deaf ears. They rolled her into a sheet and carried her out into the night.
“You folks is crueler than I thought,” I laughed, “lettin a girl go on sufferin that long when she’s only got one end left in her.”
Morgan, his eyes as blank as that dead whore’s, fisted a hand in my shirt and beat me until I was unconscious.
I woke again as the reverend was removing my boot. Now I was screaming. Pearson and Bill had to hold me down and stuff my mouth with the end of my scarf. They’d taken my guns, or I would have shot them in my animal panic. My foot nearly came off with the boot, white-pink bones broken through the skin like boughs of limestone. Pearson spoke to me and petted me gently on the forehead as Toy Ann folded my bones back into their cradle of flesh, and stitched up my leg, and splinted it firmly, and propped it on the bench.
All our whiskey and moonshine was destroyed, just about. I lay there in agony and unable to thrash. My body started to warm, and as it did, the pulsing shriek of pain became my only sense. My skin grew clammy, my eyes rolled back, my breath stoppered and shuddery. I clawed at the floor, at the wall. When I started begging them to throw me out in the snow, Swanson finally gave me some morphine.
Air came back to me like water to a parched tongue. Awareness crept in. My tired eyes traced the faces around me cast severe in firelight and synclines of shadow. Tilly Jackson and Mary-Beth Gaskill was cryingly scrubbing Karen’s blood out of the floor-boards. Lenny and Uncle was patched up beside me, Lenny about the head and Uncle around the foot. Hosea sat without a shirt and his union suit pulled down while Toy Ann dug trunnel-deep splinters out of his waist. There was a vague look in his eyes. His breath was rattling.
They brought the kids in after a while. Six little things, sitting in a pool of blankets and clothes they didn’t fit. Three of them was quite small: a wan, freckly girl, maybe eight years old; Sean’s blond boy, just a bit bigger than Jack Marston, drifting in and out of sleep; and a girl of about the same age with downy hair so dandelion-pale her eyelashes was white like mine. One of her round blue eyes was crossed toward her nose.
The other three boys was older, and well enough to mutter amongst themselves. The Indian was the tallest by way of lankiness, gawky and ungraceful, with pointy rat-like features and bulbous eyes. He had his arm around a dark-haired kid of ten or eleven, patting the side of his shoulder as he trembled and gasped. Beside them was a negro black as coal, large mouthed, stern browed, leaning forward to speak with low gravity.
My Indian boy kept turning to glance at me over his shoulder, the whites of his eyes gleaming behind a curtain of limp hair. He was still wearing my coat.
“He ain’t gittin up,” hissed the negro.
“I-I know,” said the Indian shakily. His voice was dry and cracked—older than I’d expected.
The negro put a hand on the Indian’s knee. “F’he git up, I kill im.”
“Oh, please no.” The Indian sniffled wetly. “Please don’t do that.”
“Don worry. I got some idea how to do it.”
Grimshaw cut in, forbidding and shrill. “Nobody’s killing innybody, you hear me? You settle down.”
“I’ll sit with them now, Susan,” said Hosea, rising slowly from his chair. Bandaged and clothed again, he had regained some presence. “Get out of here, get some rest.”
I waved a bleary hand as he stepped past me. “Don’t send me no half-pint hoodlums, old man. I also got some idea how to kill one.”
Hosea clipped my ear with his boot. “Sleep off that attitude please, Mr. Bell.”
“With any luck, you’ll wake up dead,” said Lenny flatly.
I showed my teeth in a sneer. My split face burned and broke. “I’ll be damned if I go before you do.”
“You’re damned already.”
All night, my shallow breaths subsumed in the steady murmurs of children and old men, I lay in the post-office thinking about death. I thought about Ruddy Bainton and the hollow-eyed boys that occupied the only gentle space in his black and violent heart. I thought about Lamb and his sweet smile, and the way he killed the ewe that he died beside. I thought about Karen’s howling and the last little cry of that child on the tree. I thought about Jenny. I turned that thought over and over.
It was poetical to me. A crude and lovely end for a crude and lovely girl. When I closed my eyes, I saw her head open on the rocks and pour out all her beautiful secrets.
How quiet is death. How quiet, and how still, and how final.
By morning, two of the children was shrouded outside with Karen. They had passed almost unnoticed, asleep and then dead, so quick to stiffen that it seemed Hosea was lifting little marble statues. The four that remained were subdued. Everyone was subdued.
In the early dawn, the two dark boys got up and pulled on some dirty O’Driscoll clothes piled in the corner. The Indian laid my coat carefully over me while I feigned sleep. Then together they left the post-office without a word. Surrounded by sleepers, they too passed almost unnoticed—but for my noticing them.
I did not care what they did. If they was going back to Colm, it made no difference. He knew what state he left us in. Besides, I was growing restless myself.
At around six o’clock I grabbed my guns and crawled outside to sit by the fire on the threshold of the post-office. There I watched the light crack upon a film of cloud as pale and strewn as whipped egg-white. Fog had wet the wreck of the cook-house and the charred ruin of the shack. Frozen blood glinted like crystals in the streets. The bodies had been dragged away, but the snow still cupped their phantom weight. A dead horse remained where it fell. In the way that it always does, the sun was carving in stone what the night had whispered in secret.
The cold was quite good for my ankle, as I’d hoped. The drum of hot blood ebbed to a twitch and then to a near numbness. I thought I might finally fall asleep, at least for an hour or two, but just as my thoughts were swirling down the dream-drain I jolted up with a racing heart like my legs had been yanked out from under me. My ears was ringing. The smell of wood-smoke made my skin rise.
I wasn’t tired no more.
There was no breakfast, so I sipped hot water in lieu of coffee as the camp came slowly to some semblance of life. Folks trickled steadily out of the log cabin. Slop-pail in hand, Sean burst out with an almighty slam and stormed up the street. Pearson and the girls began salvaging what they could from the cook-house and moving it to another drafty shotgun-house next door, snapping at each other between measures of tense silence. Javier emerged with a long gun across his shoulder and went to relieve Bill of his patrol. I’d heard that the boy’s fever had broken while we was out hunting for Irish flesh, but it was nevertheless a shock to see him standing; he hadn’t been upright in nearly a week. Drawn and pale, he sure didn’t look well enough for it. The long black duster he wore under his poncho was unfamiliar to me—another souvenir from our dearly departed O’Driscolls, I guessed.
We’d killed six of them. That was six coats, six guns, six belts, six pairs of boots, six sets of rags for binding, tying, wrapping, patching. A nickel watch or two, maybe. Meat enough for weeks if we got really desperate.
I’m only half joking.
When Hosea awoke in the post-office, everyone knew at once. He turned the camp upside-down looking for those missing boys. Accosted me soon as he saw me; sent Arthur out on horseback to track them down. Seemed like their prints led him all the way back to the woods we’d found them in. Hosea stood in the middle of the thoroughfare, a hand on his hat and the other on his hip, watching the Morrigan shrink to a speck of black on a white canvas.
Then he marched breathily to the log cabin.
I was heating myself some more water when Dutch all but ran out into the street, pursued by an argument with his counsel. Hosea was throwing his arms and hounding him so viciously he was going blue in the face. Looked like Grimshaw was mediating, or trying to. Now it’s O’Driscolls—senseless brutality—still Pinkertons—who’s next on the chopping block?—Mr. Matthews!—soon be over!—it’s already over, Dutch, it’s already over!—the desperation in their voices carried like the ice of a westerly wind. Dutch stopped where he stood and said some surely venomous things, things that made Hosea’s anger crest and then shutter to an eerie stillness. With Grimshaw at his shoulder, Dutch resumed his scowling retreat, and Hosea did not follow.
As they drew closer to my ears, Grimshaw’s squawking began to take coherent shape. She was talking about something else.
“I ain’t sayin it’s the same thing—”
“It ain’t the same at all. At all. You think you got any idea what really goes on? Tittering around the fire with your merry band of gossipmongers while we’re out there, riskin our lives? This—this moralizing is a bit above your station—”
The old whore bristled. “Don’t give me that tripe like I’m some stranger to you. This camp is as somber as a damn funeral, Dutch, and it’s no wonder, cause we ain’t even got to burying yet. There’s no talk about innything, around the fire or otherwise. Especially not about that boy.”
They stopped again, almost right before me. Dutch had his back turned and his face hidden; he spread his arms by his sides, demanding more.
“So?” he snapped.
Grimshaw leveled him a steely glare. “I would have done just what he did,” she said coldly. “He was one of ours, and you killed him for savin your life. Now you think on that.”
She spun on her heel and went back the way she’d come, where Hosea still waited like a pensive shadow, scanning the hem of the far-off forest. Grimshaw patted his arm, said a few sharp words to the side of his head and coerced him briskly inside.
Dutch stood there and breathed. His breaths came slow and deep, burning off the last of his fury in billowing clouds. He looked around dimly, turning to the post-office—and then he saw me sitting there, two pale gleaming eyes. I saluted with a finger. Some purpose seemed to come back to him suddenly, pulled on like a clean gown over a rumpled night-shirt, and he moved to stand by my fire, rubbing his hands together.
“Got everyone questioning my judgment,” he muttered, as if to himself. He rummaged through his pockets for makings.
Vulnerable had always been the best time to work him.
“They don’t understand the position you’re in,” I said soothingly. “Ain’t been no time for thinkin. From where I sit, shedding my blood for you”—I gestured with a chuckle to my splinted leg—“you’re doing right by us, and to them that have it out for us. I’m proud to be here by your side.”
But I couldn’t tell if he was listening; he was already drawn into the mesmerism of the fire, his gaze dark and detached as he tamped and rolled a cigarette thoughtlessly. With his hair hanging in knots over his shoulders and a shadowy beard growing in, he’d lost his timelessness. Past that cracked mask I could see an old man trapped in a young man’s dreams, blinking bloodshot eyes, looking vaguely like he was asleep and had been for some time yet had gotten up to loom over me and roll a cigarette, still dreaming.
“This country,” he began slowly, “this country is built on a backbone of lies, Micah. Men in power have no scruples that ain’t bought by the highest bidder.” He licked at the edge of the paper. “Put your hand in the right pocket, peddle just the right honey, and the big bugs’ll let you do whatever you want. Kill . . . indiscriminately.” He held his cigarette over the flames. “For sport. For fun. For nothin.” The cherry caught and flared. Dutch pulled in a long, steady puff. When he spoke again, his words spilled out as smoke. “These fools, well, they don’t see things clearly, never have, no matter how simple it is. But I know if there’s one thing you unnerstand, son, it’s necessity. Chining this beast won’t be clean. I got no mercy in my heart for child-killers.”
I searched him carefully for signs of a lie. He had an obvious tell, this amused wolfishness that prowled behind his eyes, like the world was so stupid it’d eat anything off the palm of his hand, but I didn’t see it now. I never saw it when he talked like this.
And yet that pleading little lady who was heavy with child, he shot her in the face. And that boy, only a boy, who protected him with ruthless efficiency and the flesh of his own body, he shot him in the face.
His mind just astonished me sometimes.
That was Dutch van der Linde: a visionary, an idealist, the serpent of his own Eden. I despise hypocrites, but the ones like him, that don’t even know what they’re doing, the vast chasm of their delusion was made just for me.
“They don’t deserve your mercy,” I said lowly. “A child’s life is worth any sacrifice.”
Dutch turned to look at me with a flicker of interest. Then his eyes twitched, narrowed, seeing me properly for the first time—he was startled out of his daze.
He waved his cigarette around his face. “I heard you got stomped by a horse, but did you fist-fight it too?”
I forced a laugh to reward his joke, but my nasty smile was real. “Different horse,” I sneered. “Old Morgan named Arthur, I’m sure you’ve met him.”
Anger prickled along the lines of his brow. I was about to begin an impassioned lament about the injustice done to me when the rumble of galloping hoofs broke the quiet. Our heads snapped to it. A rider was approaching fast from the woods, cut from the snow with straight, exacting lines—a black hat on a black coat on a black mount. It was not Arthur Morgan, but it was his horse, no question.
Dutch’s eyes went still. A sharp cold spiked in my chest. He didn’t need to say it, I knew what he saw: for a long, impossible moment, Lamb was riding the Morrigan into camp.
But then the moment passed. The figure assembled itself and split in two. A little colored rider was wearing Lamb’s coat, and behind him, taller, was the Indian boy in Lamb’s hat. They thundered toward us and shot up the thoroughfare, and came to a halt outside the post-office.
The Morrigan stamped, grinding at the bit, uneasy. The negro boy lifted his chin and glowered down at us imperiously. His matted hair was big around his head, a dark halo. In heavy leather boots and Lamb’s trim coat, he looked nearly like a man.
“You,” he said to Dutch. “I guess you the boss.”
Dutch stepped out. “That ain’t your horse, son,” he said guardedly.
The boy snorted. “Hairy galoot was ridin it annoyed me.”
“Well where is he?”
With two fingers, the boy mimed a running man. “Runnin on up here wid hees two damn feet, I spose.” He laid a palm on the saddle horn and swung out of the saddle. He landed in the snow as light as a cat. “Why you send him after us?”
“I—Well. We were concerned about you.” Dutch waved vaguely. “This ain’t no place for kids to be wanderin alone.”
The boy’s gaze flared with a quick and terrible fire. He stepped toward Dutch, half his height and none of his danger, looking somehow like he might try to hurt him.
“Mister, you listen to me,” he said, and his husky voice was rough with threat. “You got no idea about us. No idea. You ain’t keepin us nowhere. You unnastand me? We ain’t to be kep.”
Dutch’s shoulders went tight. He smiled a thin, wolfish smile. “Oh, I understand you. Loud and clear. But I beg you not to think of us so ungenerously when our intentions are nothin but generous.” He raised his hands in a show of innocence. “We ain’t captors by any means; we are but a brief sanctuary in this sadistically inclined world. If you wanna leave, now or at any time, nobody here is gonna stop you.”
The boy regarded him from the hollows of a deep frown. Even with some feet of space between us, I saw in the dark glass of his pupils a gleaming intelligence. He was getting the measure of Dutch in nothing but a look and a lie, just as I did, and he seemed dissatisfied with what he saw.
“How you fit to keep a kid anyhow?” he asked sharply. He flung his arm toward the woods. “You let Little Tom get blowed up. He’s in about twelve pieces back dere.”
That shocked the charm right out of Dutch. At once his mouth went slack and his eyes went tense, a battlefield of baffled furies warring on his face. He was seeing that child, I could tell. Whatever look had frozen on that tiny disembodied head was now frozen in Dutch’s mind.
Dutch cleared his throat, blinked hard. “I am real—sorry—about that,” he ground out. “We tried.”
The boy’s lip curled in disgust. He was dissatisfied with that too. “Them sheep-fuckers treated heem monstrous rough, you know. Then you come along and git him blowed up.”
“I did not get him . . . blown up. That was not my doing.”
“If you was tryna help, you fail. So you useless.”
“Useless?”
“Well what use was you to Little Tom? He dead, a thousand time over dead.”
Dutch gazed down at him distantly, a storm considering a sinner. The atmosphere fizzled with anger, palpable, from both of them—but more than that, I realized they was enthralled by each other, like two birds before a mirror, seeing themselves and an enemy in the same reflection. That, too, was Dutch: an addict to himself, and his own self-righteous rage.
I nearly said something then to distract him from this shining infatuation, this thing that was bound to become a spectacular breast-beating, heart-carving production, but then it occurred to me: Colm sent him this child. He sent him all of these children. It was so strange an idea to me, so strange to glimpse this warped angle of Dutch that caught the light of a wild child’s eyes and surged with hunger. I couldn’t fathom what plot I had fallen into and shattered my body upon; I could only wonder if the Pied Piper would reappear one day and make a new surprise of them.
Dutch was the one to break their egg-shell silence—dangerously, unnaturally quiet in his next words.
“Shall we introduce ourselves like civilized men before we throw around any more accusations?”
The boy laughed suddenly, one short sound. His teeth was jagged and yellow. He was still growing one, a snaggled little canine stuck out like a gator tooth. “You civilized, Mister?” he asked. “You look like suthin a cat cuff up.”
“It depends who’s asking,” said Dutch, calm.
“I guess you right.” The boy held out his hand. He wasn’t quite smiling, but his eyes was, even beneath his heavy, suspicious brows. “Maurice.”
“That’s all?” said Dutch. “You ain’t got another?”
“You ain’t earned it.”
Now Dutch returned his eye-smile. Somehow, it looked more dangerous than his cold fury.
“I can respect a man who knows his family’s worth.” He enveloped Maurice’s dark hand in two huge palms and held it like he owned it. “Dutch van der Linde.”
“That’cho name?” Maurice wrinkled his nose. “Lord, why so damn long? Ain’t no good wid names.”
“Well son,” said Dutch pleasantly, “as you’ve so neatly proven, the good thing about names is that you only have to use one of’m.”
“Say it ageen?”
“Dutch—van—der—Linde.”
“I’m callin you Mr. Dutch, how’s that suit’chu?”
Dutch patted his hand once, then released it. “Suits me just fine.”
Maurice gestured to the Indian boy watching them from the Morrigan’s back. “There’s Sampson,” he said.
Tipping his hat, Dutch began moving toward him. “It’s a pleasure, Sampson.”
At arm’s reach, he faltered. The boy’s eyes was following him vacantly, bulging from a pallid face. He may not have been Lamb’s revenant corpse, but there was a ghostly air to him, a delicate transience that suggested he might disappear like a wisp of smoke if not looked at. He didn’t seem altogether conscious despite his animal terror—or perhaps because of it.
“Oh,” breathed Dutch, “poor thing. You don’t look well at all.”
He touched the boy’s shoulder, murmuring softly. He cast a glance up the street, looking for Hosea or Grimshaw or someone, I’m sure, but there was nobody. Sluggishly, as though pushing through honey, the boy snaked an arm around Dutch’s neck, and Dutch dragged his gangling body off of the horse and set him down carefully.
When Sampson was standing on his own, Dutch turned the Morrigan round, looped the reins over the saddle horn and swatted her on the ass. She lurched for the woods at a lope.
Dutch shook his head. “The horse don’t know when she’s being stolen and the rider don’t know when he’s being robbed.” He laid a hand between Sampson’s shoulder-blades, gave him a clap that made his hollow chest ring. “Go inside, get yourself warm. I’ll see if we can’t rustle you kids up somethin to eat, all right? You ever eaten a saddle?”
He laughed a profoundly awkward laugh. His hand slid from the boy’s back as he made his escape to the cook-house. He was all flustered by that Maurice, so flustered it seemed he’d forgotten I was there. Quite a talent on that boy, to tie the tongue of a man who was all tongue.
Without Dutch’s lowering presence, Sampson began to sink at the shoulders and the curve of his spine, unwinding like a spool of thread. He shuffled forward a few steps, trying to reach Maurice. Then he doubled over and retched hard. Nothing came up but a string of saliva. He retched again, and again, and again, between horrible quivering whimpers, his body shaking with the effort of wringing out a dry stomach.
Maurice went to him when he was done, and with a stern grip on his arm and a steady stream of instruction, he helped Sampson unbend himself.
“Hey. Calm down. Look at me. Calm down. No more cryin. No more a’dat. Be strong now.”
Sampson blinked his watery red eyes, wiped his watery red nose. “O.K., Maurice,” he said weakly.
“Now come on.”
They turned to the post-office. Maurice set his suspicious glare on me as they circled the fire on the threshold. Dressed in patchwork pieces of Lamb and O’Driscoll, they looked an even rougher crowd than we did.
I grinned, toasting them with my mug. “Regular little buzzards, ain’tcha?”
“What you care?” snapped Maurice. “You fellas is buncha owl-hoots. You think I don’t know?”
“Well now,” I said, and held up my palm peaceably, “you got some sand in you all right. Little boys oughta be careful where they go tossin their sand.”
Swatting the air dismissively, Maurice made to move past me. But Sampson seemed rooted to the spot. His big wet stare was fixed on me.
“Um—um,” he said.
I snorted. “Your Injun’s quite a speaker.”
Maurice paused at the door and glanced between us. “He just throwed up several times, let him catch hees breath.” There was a reproachful twist to his mouth; his patience was reluctant, performative. “He soft, you know. He ain’t seen so many dead folks. I think he was wunna dem cowboys before, or suthin. Or, I dunno. So I guess he know cows, but not much else. He look good in that dead Indian’s hat, though.”
It was a very nice hat, clean and firm. Not even a year old, hardly broken in. It was so dark it made the boy’s pallor stand out on his face like blood-shock.
“Maybe we wanted to keep that,” I said.
“Then you shoulda picked it up,” said Maurice. “Is ours now.”
“What if I take it from you?”
He patted his hip. “I picked up that Indian’s gun, too,” he said, “so you better hope you faster.”
My body tensed, all instinct. Of course Lamb’s pocket advantage was still in there, perfectly sized for a boy’s hand.
“You ain’t used it,” I said. “You don’t know how fast you’re gonna be.”
“Sure, tough guy.” I punched the air. My smile was mean.
“Maurice please,” whispered Sampson.
Sneering, Maurice rounded on him. “Why don’tchu thank me for the hat stead of gittin in my damn way? This old white man’s talkin smoke.”
A tight look came over Sampson’s face. “He helped me.” His voice, just as tight, and thin as ice, sounded like it would break under a feather’s touch. “When I wis . . . on that . . .”
“And now he wanna take your hat.”
“Don’t get excited,” I cut in sharply, “I was just testin you. Wanted to know what kinds of little owl-hoots we was dealin with here.”
Maurice squinted. “I ain’t like you, Mister.”
“You don’t save kids tied to trees?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, good, and he a clown, too.”
I laughed at him with my lip between my teeth. “It don’t bother you, then?” I drawled, leaning back. “Dead folks?”
Suddenly he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He thumbed at a button on Lamb’s coat. “Sure it bother me,” he said. The passion in him had gone muted. “I knowed that kid.”
“Uh-huh. What about the dead Indian?”
Maurice didn’t answer. He opened the door and went into the post-office. There was a puzzled submission in that, the bearing of a child scolded for something he knew was bad conduct but which hid so far inside him he wasn’t sure how to correct it. Whoever brought him up had scooped out the boy before a man could take his place. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen dead folks—even dead kids, for that matter—and if he shot me just to spite me, it surely wouldn’t be his first time killing a man either.
I made a note of this. I made many notes.
Them kids had barely been inside five minutes before Hosea and Grimshaw came rushing down the street to dandle and lambast them by turns. As I expected, Maurice took that treatment poorly. Snarling like a little beast he dragged Sampson outside as if to run away again, but it was a short-lived chase; Grimshaw moved fast when she wanted to, and she soon had his arm locked in a vise of bony talons. The look that crossed Maurice’s face could only be described as divine wrath. In the middle of the road, he cursed up a storm that left Hosea speechless and Grimshaw lashing him with screeches that could shatter glass. I sipped at my water. Hell, kids did amuse me, but this one was going to start some kind of war and crown himself king.
Then Hosea was laughing, long and startled and raspy as a slack-stringed fiddle. The war, it seemed, had already begun.
The kids lit the fire of life under the gang again, if only because the council of elders went round getting everyone worried about feeding and clothing and warming them. Folks began crawling out of the woodwork to make sure they were receiving the very best of their hospitality. In ten minutes, Pearson and the girls was delivering a thin feast of canned-corn-and-bean succotash to the post-office. Toy Ann showed up and then vanished. The widow Sadie Adler came out to see them too, to-day looking weak and shocked and like a hurricane had blown through her, with Abigail escorting as a crutch for her shaking limbs. Probably relieved to have some real children to present him, Abigail brought her snot-nosed brat along, an eagerness she was quick to regret; that little cross-eyed girl soon woke under the attention and screamed like they was taking a knife to her. She was a mighty inconsolable thing. Her screaming drew a bigger crowd that made her scream all the louder. Lenny went running off in search of Hosea, who’d lulled her to sleep in the first place, but it turned out he had gone hunting with Charles before anyone could try to detain him. Dutch laughed icily at this news. He was incensed. He tried to hold the child, but she fainted in his arms for sheer terror.
Annoyed with this display of ineptitude, Maurice announced to the room that the girl was some form of born idiot. The kids hadn’t been able to dissect even her name from the nonsense she spoke; they’d taken to calling her “Bo.” She did have a vaguely wilted look about her—a low mouth and drooping eyes—that a doctor might have traced to a withering blood-line. But I’d say her unbusy mind did no detriment to her instinct, which was sharper than most. She was right to be afraid. Beyond the wool of Dutch’s painted words, this was not much of an improvement from the last bad circumstance she’d found herself in.
Mary-Beth ended up walking her up and down the street until she’d calmed to a shivery blubber, and Abigail left the post-office with her boy wailing into her skirts. I made some glib comment about her failure, to which she said, “Some nerve to go tormentin folks while you got that bum leg stuck out like a beggar’s trick.”
Scowling, I inched my foot away from her.
There was a stark divide between the old guard, who fell quickly in step with this “lost waif” song and dance, and the youngsters who seemed terrified by their new burden. It was all Grimshaw could do to keep Tilly Jackson in the post-office for child-minding; that girl was desperate to slip away and do anything else at all. Bill and Javier turned up just to stand there uncomfortably, exchanging glances, and Lenny had started to pace the street in worry, chewing at his knuckles.
I think many had feared or hoped the kids would all be dead by morning. Now that some had survived the night, their presence boded a worse ill than all the ills that came before. Things was about to change. None had seen this coming, and none knew quite where it was going. Dutch insisted this was our silver lining. To Swanson, they was a blessing for our wicked souls, some divinely appointed chance at charity. But the truth of the matter was that we had four more mouths to feed—five, with Sadie Adler, for twenty-six in all—and no food left. No money, neither.
I ran my tongue over my gold teeth. I tested the weight of my leg in the air and winced at the spike of throbbing pain. This was Hell. I’d landed myself in a moron’s Hell.
Near midday, Pearson handed me a ration of pemmican and a draft of whiskey and slammed my hat onto my head.
“Found that up the road,” he said. “A little frozen, but it’ll thaw just fine.”
I took it off and whacked him with it.
For hours I mulled my meal and cleaned my guns and watched the millstone of movement grind pathways into the snow. I was all the world’s witness from my little spot. I caught the cool white hand of the sun, the smell of weak broth in the cook-house; I taunted Lenny as he built up my fire, and I snarled at Swanson as he passed me, and they answered with a bite to their words. Oh, there was a monster in them to-day, a red-blooded rage made of hunger and loss. For each fresh death, the ghosts of all the last we lost seemed to rise and haunt again. It was enough to make a man feel crazy.
Restless without the privacy of his own space, Dutch had claimed the end of the thoroughfare as his demesne, and there he stood smoking, facing the forest, a strange dark animal waiting in the wings. He looked thin somehow. Insubstantial. They say grief is heavy, but it seemed each loss made him lighter.
In time, the kids began to wander grimly through the camp. I saw that deft hands had hemmed their clothes and taken in the waists. Bo, small but not quite small enough for Jack’s spares, needed a new outfit made by hand, and until that was done, she had to be carried around in her nest of dangling blankets and men’s shirts. Somehow this task fell to Javier. For all his earlier unease, holding the girl against his shoulder seemed to content him. He crooned his mournful Spanish lullabies, and she listened in mournful silence.
The dark-haired white boy—Theodore James Wallis, I heard—emerged at last as the sky began to yellow. Sullen, swollen in the face, he had given up crying now for a bitter disinterest. I tried to get his attention, but he gave me a wide berth. When he returned, it was with Sean. They was two of a kind in sullenness, and parted ways at the door without saying a word.
Ghosts had their hands down every throat. What a wretched thing, that vice of despair. It kills you before you’ve died.
A misty dusk was sinking over the snow when the hunting party rode into camp. They had found Morgan, it seemed; he was between them, astride his dark horse. Looked like they’d bagged a whole damned bear and diced it up.
Dutch’s reception was ominously terse, and Hosea bore it with ominous lackadaisy. He wobbled heavily in the saddle like a man made of too much water and not enough air. He nearly fell on his ass dismounting. Charles ducked away with the horses, keeping wisely quiet, while the happy family hauled three hundred pounds of bear up the road and fought with violent composure.
“Shall I honor your death wish and shootchu myself?” said Dutch mildly.
“Sure,” wheezed Hosea, “seems you’ve got a penchant for shootin folks these days.”
“Why don’t you just ride off again? I’d forgotten how peaceful it is without you here.”
“You won’t have to wait much longer, my friend”—wheeze—“I’ll be well beyond the reach of this wandering circus soon enough, and thank God for that.”
“Don’t—say—that,” said Arthur tiredly.
“No, no, Arthur,” said Dutch, “don’t be so selfish. If Hosea wants to go West so badly and leave us fools here fightin to survive, well, who are we to deny him? It’ll be a weight off my back, won’t have to waste my time worryin over him no more.”
“You? Worry over me? That’s the best joke I’ve heard in a while.”
“Arthur, I am glad you didn’t turn out like this ungrateful bastard . . .”
Their squabbling dwindled to distant mutters as they pushed into the cook-house. I took a thoughtful draw of my cigarette. Hosea was looking deathly gray in the face, half corpse already but too stubborn to lie down and die. Two days ago I’d figured the old man would get through to Dutch eventually. By words or by death, he’d do it. This weather, this wilderness, its wildness was beyond us. Well, what I hadn’t figured was Dutch getting his back up about an injustice that had a man’s name and a body of flesh—an injustice he could hunt down and run from. Hate gave him an inferno of blinkered power.
There would be no end to this great cross-country death march now. It was too late. I was trapped in my moron’s Hell, deprived, in the damned snow, with the starved sheep and the death-cries and the delusions, just as I’d thought.
If I could stand, I would have shot him. Watching him through the window, I turned that thought over.
Shoot first.
I turned it over and over.
Shoot first.
Shoot first.
Go down shootin.
Arthur left the cook-house. He was making his way toward me as if he could smell Dutch’s blood dripping from the stage in the theater of my mind. The evening redness was behind him; his face was bleak with shadow.
“There he is,” I said smilingly, “my good friend, Arthur Morgan. I missed you and your sunshine.”
He stopped in front of me, looming like a headsman. He was angled away from the fire, nothing but silhouette.
“You ain’t moved a muscle all the damn day,” he said. “Usually you can’t sit still for five minutes.”
“Well, you know, I was just thinkin of goin for a walk.”
Arthur grunted. “One day I’ll turn round and you’ll have really turned into a snake.”
I raised a hand and shook it like a tambourine. “Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch,” I spat through my teeth.
“Oh, I knew it,” said Arthur. “Rattler. Damn bastards.”
“At least I’ll face you like a man,” I hissed.
“Like a snake, you mean.” He gestured to me. “This whatchu been doin this whole time? Runnin your mouth?”
“Just makin conversation. That allowed, Big Dog?”
His sharp exhale verged on murderous intent. “Thinkin of cuttin out yer tongue, but somehow I doubt that’d stop you.”
“Funny,” I said darkly, “cause you’re still here, barkin back.”
He fell silent. He didn’t like that one, which meant I won. But winning with Morgan could quickly become losing if he decided to change the game. I waited tensely, staring up at the blank slate of his shadow.
Finally, he asked, “Where’s Marston?”
I snorted a laugh, even as a stone of dread dropped into my stomach. “Hell, some brotherly bond you got,” I jeered. “I was startin to think you’d forgotten about him.”
“Answer the question.”
“Well,” I said, then cleared my throat. “I already told Dutch. We split up just as we got to the basin—he went up into the mountains, and I went down the river.”
“Why ain’t he back?”
I spread an arm impatiently. “The last snowstorm hit a few hours after we split. I assume he froze to death up there like the damn fool he is. Or was.”
Morgan took a step toward me. I flinched back, growling. My bruised face was pulsing.
“You best be glad I don’t make you go up there and find him,” said Morgan, deadly low.
“Then we’d both be dead,” I snapped.
His teeth glinted in the firelight.
I shut my mouth. That was a game I couldn’t win.
Because the game ain’t fair, said dead little Lamb. You look stupid.
A burst of violent hacking from the cook-house distracted Morgan from whatever he would have said next. Hosea’s voice threaded the coughs and gasps, wrenched out of him like viscera from a gut wound, but these weren’t no dry whistles like we was used to hearing. These was wet, gluey, stuck in him. I caught a glimpse of him through the window, bent over Dutch’s arm, his lungs hitching as Dutch struck him hard on the back.
Then he went limp. His limbs pooled beneath him and his body slithered out of Dutch’s grasp.
“Arthur!” came a cracked cry.
Dutch didn’t sound like that. Come Hell or Blackwater, he wore fear as wrath and stress as calm. This was a Dutch I didn’t know.
And Arthur was off running as fast as the snow would let him.
Moments later he and Pearson clattered out of the cook-house with Hosea lolling between them like a wrung-out towel and Dutch marching alongside—sturdy now, steel in his brow. They brought the old man straight past me and into the post-office. Pearson nearly tripped on my foot, but he didn’t so much as glance my way. I heard a snatch of Hosea’s laborious breaths. It was a familiar noise, the kind a buck made with a bullet in its throat: a moaning inhale, rattling deep in the barrel of the chest; an exhale that trickled out like sand.
He was dying now, properly. I guessed he would be dead by morning.
Dimmed by the walls, Dutch said, “Wake up, old man.”
“Whatchu think?” asked Arthur.
“Whaddo I think?” The wrath was setting in, clipping his words to knives. “I haven’t had time to think. I-I didn’t realize he’d got so thin—”
“Well what we gonna do? He won’t last long like this.”
“God damn it, Arthur, will you—?” Boots thunked across the floor-boards. “I need to find Toy Ann.”
He shoved out the door and left it hanging open as he hurtled into the darkling dusk. The murky shape of him was soon swallowed up by the fog, but his voice lingered, bloody and raw. The way he screamed her name made my hair stand on end. If he called for me like that, I’d figure I was about to get shot.
“He’ll be all right, Arthur,” said Pearson. “Hardy as a humpback, I always say. Don’t give up on him just yet.”
“Course not,” said Arthur. He sounded resigned.
Arthur got up to close the door. With his hand on the handle he stuck his head out and looked at me. Now the fire caught the side of his face: a weary eye, a frowning mouth, all the lines of age set deep like claws had raked him over. His beard was getting big. He looked older than Dutch, leagues older, in the manner of a man who had begun to meet Death on every road, see his great eclipse crest every horizon, as sure and as punctual as the sun, and had grown out of averting his eyes.
“You gotta be carried inside, or what?” he asked.
I scooped my sodden blankets into my lap and slowly dragged myself backward on my palms. “I ever tell you what a decent feller you are, Arthur?” When I was beneath his outstretched arm, I glanced up at him and grinned. “Way you look out for me, for that dyin old man—well, it just warms my heart, brother.”
“Oh, if somethin happened t’you, it would devastate me,” he said, and swung the door shut.
I just read thru chapter 3 without realizing it was chapter 3 but when I tell you I was HOOKED. I think this is gonna be my favorite rd fic of all time, the flow of the writing, the pacing, the dialogue!!!!! I love the whole thing being from Micah’s povn(and the background you gave him,) and all the internal monologing snd interactions just feel so real to me— I’m over her throwing down the phone and putting a hand over my mouth at some of these plot twists. and I am so curious as how you got such a wide vocabulary and etc because this is A—MAZE—ING. 💙💙
I’m going back to get the full story now, what fun awaits meee!
Well heck, thank you very much! Chapter 3 is a hilarious jumping-off point, but not a bad one for getting a sense of the tone lmao. Might end up being your favorite RDR fic of all time? That's unbelievably high praise with the quality of fics this fandom has. I don't even know what to say. I'm glad you're enjoying it so far (and so much!), thanks for brightening my whole month!
The Angel That Is Icarus — Chapter 3. Obsession III.
Chapter Summary:
Micah leads the gang to a suspicious hideout in the basin south of Colter. Little do they know, Colm has something special planned for them.
Rating: Mature
Characters: Micah, Dutch, Arthur, Sean, Sadie, original characters
Warnings: Racism, character death, evidence of rape, please check masterlist warnings, this one is rough
Wordcount: 13,800
The next morning, as the pale sun scattered itself across the plains of an empty sky, we rode.
Seven men on seven horses carved a warpath out of Colter, me and Dutch at the crest of the charge. Lenny Summers and Karen Jones stood in the white street, long guns in hand, watching us leave. Karen sent off a sloppy salute. Beside them, clutching Lenny’s shoulder, Hosea was red with fury.
Ours was a troupe of many masks, but on this day there was no mystery as to our intent; we wore the face of a killer. With all soldiers on the march, Hell-bent on destruction, we left the camp as bare as the cloudless mountains.
I had learned something interesting the evening before: Colm O’Driscoll was Dutch’s favorite sport. The idea of being stalked by him kindled the same glee as a hundred-grand score. He needn’t run from an old friend, no; this was a foe he could fight tooth and nail. No moral high ground, no theater of philosophy on a battlefield of shit. He had received an invitation for pure animal warfare, and he let out a sigh of relief.
I understood his desire well enough, though I had never developed the conceit to squirrel it inside contrived ideals. Man is like wolves; he that has it in him to lead has it in him to conquer, and he that don’t have neither has got it in him to kill nonetheless. Ain’t no thought behind it. Ain’t no such thing as love or hate, like or dislike. There’s only have and don’t have. A man who don’t have will do just about anything to have.
But old Dutch thought himself above a beast, and so put a thought behind every square inch of his nature. It was a good trick. If I’d had half as many words as he did, I’d have been able to convince these folks I was Moses.
As it was, I could convince nobody but Dutch of anything at all, and him only of what appealed to his temptation. And the scent of a petty rival thirty small miles away—that struck his temptation.
In fact, it had put him in a very good mood.
“South, right Micah?” he asked me over the churn of hoofs in the snow.
My face was full of bees that morning, prickling with yesterday’s cold, so I had my scarf tucked over my nose. I pulled it down when Dutch turned to me. There was a wild, wide-eyed look to him, sleepless and untethered, like he might lose his footing and float away, or tear at the seams and wring my neck. I had come to recognize it. I called it his war-face. His breath spilled from his lips into a veil of pale mist.
Whatever trap Colm had set for him, it’d have to be as crazy as he was.
“Sure,” I said. “South till we meet the river—then we follow. Takes us all the way there.”
Dutch nodded once, and raised an arm above his head. “Hear that? Gentlemen! Let’s go rob these bastards before they rob us!”
Somewhere behind us, Sean MacGuire whooped. “Them O’Driscolls won’t know what hit em!”
“That’s right!” yelled Bill.
“Chain-lightning!” sang Lamb.
Sean let out his gawky, stuttering laugh. “He’s a killer and a hater!
He’s the great annihilator!
He’s the terror of the boundless prairie!”
The boys was in a singing mood to-day. I saw Dutch smile to himself. He knew they was singing about him, for him, because of him. He lifted his eyes to the east. The altar of Dead Head Crown stood tall and immortal, its hoary head haloed by the sun. The evergreens speckling the slopes dripped with melting snow. Song-birds alighted in their branches, chirruping and chattering, and swung through the air as if pulled on strings. High above us, each as small as the head of a pin, nine white geese in a long neat wedge journeyed tirelessly across the sky.
“There,” I said, “I hear it.”
The murmur of the river was rising to a rumble.
“I hear it too,” said Dutch.
The Count surged forward in pursuit.
I shifted in the saddle and tested my spurs against Bulrush’s sorrel flanks. My body had no memory of this creature, no trust. He was a cross-grained beast, thick as a buffalo, with a clunky gait and a mean little side-eye, but I could already tell he was a strong one, sure footed. At any rate, I needed to learn him; I’d worked Baylock to the bone in that blizzard and wore him out thoroughly. He wouldn’t even accept a beet from me when I went out to see him, his head hanging listlessly over the stall door.
Well, he liked to kick up a fuss, my horse. I knew it’d only be a matter of cooing and cosseting before he was back on his feet again.
I gave Bulrush a pat on the neck. He snorted cordially. Neither of us was particularly pleased with this arrangement, but we could be civilized. I chirked at him, squeezing my legs around his belly, and he pushed harder through the snow to keep pace with the Count.
We had barely met with the sinuous spine of Spider Gorge when Morgan—ever the mama’s boy—decided to make up for Hosea’s absence by bleating in Dutch’s ear.
“You sure this is a good idea? They might not be—”
Dutch cut him off with a scoff. This argument had been attacking him on all fronts for hours; it was clearly beginning to annoy him.
“Pray tell, what else would they be!” he snapped. “God-damn reptiles—”
“It just don’t make no damn sense, Dutch, and you know it!” insisted Morgan. “O’Driscolls, in Ambarino? Why would they be here?”
“Shut up, Morgan!” yelled Bill.
“I don’t pretend to know the mind of a man like Colm, son,” said Dutch tightly, “and I resent that you expect me to.”
Morgan growled in frustration. “That ain’t what I’m—I’m sayin there’s no reason!”
“Colm doesn’t need a reason. He never does.”
“That ain’t the way I see it.”
Dutch turned sharply in the saddle, and fixed him with a look. “Arthur, do you have anything important to say? I am all ears.”
Morgan fell silent. Idiot though he was, the warning note in Dutch’s tone was not lost on him. A moment later I saw the Morrigan glide into my periphery and draw up to the Count’s left shoulder, raven black to angel white.
“I just think,” said Morgan, lowly now, his eyes hidden beneath the brim of his hat, “might be we’re gettin het up over some damn cattle-rustlers who like wearin green, and we’re about to make a scene when we should be keepin to ourselves.”
“Do you think so little of me, Arthur?” Dutch laughed as he said it—a clipped, mocking sound that stung like a brisk slap. There was no amusement in it at all. “D’you think I’m gonna march up there and make a scene?”
“Dutch—”
“You don’t trust me like you used to,” he said airily.
Arthur’s jaw tensed. “I trust you more’n I trust anyone, Dutch. I just think—”
“You ain’t thinkin hard enough, my friend.” Dutch waved a dismissive hand. “Micah said—” He turned to me suddenly. “How many did you say, Micah?”
“At least twenty,” I said, “side-arms on all of em.”
“Twenty armed men,” drawled Dutch, dissecting every syllable with deliberation. He looked at Arthur, and held out his gloved palm demonstratively. “Does that sound like rustlers to you? Put some sense into that barren head o’yours, it’s gatherin dust.”
“I’m tryin,” said Arthur tiredly.
“Surrounded by small-minded fools these days, Micah,” said Dutch. He laughed again, that same sharp little barb that stuck under the skin, and he raised his voice to a hoarse shout full of showman theatricality and dramatized spite. “Who else thinks these strangers festooned in shamrock green—who just so happen to be sharin a mountain with us—are but good old-fashioned cow-punchers?”
A chorus of noway and not me and Morgan’s an idiot went up like a war-cry. Dutch sent Arthur a smug look, and across the Count’s head so did I, flashing my teeth.
“And if it ain’t them,” wheedled Dutch, “I’m more’n happy to cozy up to a few crooked cowboys—or put some copy-cat butchers in the ground.”
“If I didn’t know any better,” I said loudly, before Arthur could open his mouth, “I’d suspect he was being petty. Why else would he ignore such an obvious threat to our people? You don’t—you don’t much like me, do you, Arthur!”
“I ain’t ignorin nothin!” snapped Arthur.
“Oh, I’m afraid he’s being perfectly earnest, Micah,” said Dutch. “You’ll know when Arthur’s feeling petty cause he turns into a damn vaudeville comedian. I don’t know where he got that sarcastic streak from, but it’s very unattractive.”
“I ain’t being petty!”
With a wry smile, Dutch leaned toward me. “There you have it. He ain’t being petty.”
I conceded defeat with an obliging chuckle. Even when doubted openly, interrogated in front of all his loyal guns, Dutch was still in the mood to defend Arthur from me. And here I was, the biggest damned fool of the bunch, trying to lead a blind shepherd from a maddening whirlwind of blind sheep. I’d have to keep whittling him down.
Arthur furrowed his brow; a long sigh escaped his nose. “I’m just worried about us all leavin camp when we got Pinkertons on our tail. They are our biggest problem right now, we can’t afford to lose sight o’that. Look what happened the minute we let our guard down.”
“They won’t chance these mountains just yet,” said Dutch firmly, “not after the weather we’ve been having. They don’t even know we’re here.”
“But O’Driscolls do?”
Dutch scowled, spreading an arm helplessly. “Well, I intend to find that out!”
“I don’t like this. I got a bad feelin. They’ll be on us like a pack o’coyotes if they get so much as a whiff of how weak we are.”
“Oh, Arthur, please stop worrying. Pinkertons won’t attack a camp of starving women and doddering old fools—”
“But they’d have no qualms using them as leverage.”
“And if it comes to that, I will give myself over gladly. What they want is me, you know that.”
Arthur startled. “That ain’t—”
“It’s not comin to that! All right?” As if banishing the thought, Dutch swept a hand back over his shoulder. “Put that bad feelin to bed. We’re in a good spot now; I grant you, it may not look that way on the face of it, but we are a mere step away from what you and I and that cranky bastard have been dreamin of for years! Few more weeks and we’ll be outta their reach for good!”
He watched Arthur intently. War gleamed in his eyes, molten and dark as a smoking gun. “What a precious gift it is,” he said quietly, “to be free. Can you remember what that feels like?”
Dutch made a fist, and brought it to his chest. His gaze didn’t waver, not for a heart-beat—he held Arthur in the black frenzy of his focus like a fly in a web. The vein in his forehead bulged, thick and spidery.
“Faith, Arthur. I need you with me.”
There wasn’t much faith in Arthur Morgan, not while I knew him. He went through life on the wings of a muted despair, a leaf in the wind, unmoored and unmanned, going where the tide took him. I doubt he had ever reached out to grasp even a poor man’s power; I doubt he believed he was capable of it.
But sometimes, in scattered moments like this one, I saw the sparks of a desperate hope shine in him: hope, against all reason, and against all evidence, that Dutch was more powerful than Death.
“I’m with you, Dutch,” he said.
“I know you are, my boy,” said Dutch, “I know you are. That’s the difference between you and me—I never doubt you.”
Now that was markedly untrue, and the shadow that passed over Arthur’s face showed he was thinking the same, but Dutch was satisfied with his conclusion and considered the matter settled. He put a hand on the cantle of his saddle and turned around, and at the sight of his men following reverently on his heels he grinned wide.
“Sean!” he shouted. “Sing us a song!”
Sean’s green eyes sparkled at being singled out. “All righ!” he cried, spurring Ennis into the middle of the throng. Then he saw me looking at him, and his beaming joy became a glint of mischief. “Oi, Micah! Whistle for me, why don’tcha?”
Anger poured over me. I bared my teeth in a snarl. “What am I, a damn parakeet? No.”
“Come on, ya sour son of a bitch,” goaded Sean. “Tink yer too good fer us, do yeh? I know you can keep a tune well enough, I’ve heard yeh.”
Dutch’s laugh boomed beside me. “Well, he ain’t lettin you get outta this one, Micah.”
I smiled aggressively. “I wouldn’t wanna steal his thunder.”
“Not possible, son,” declared Sean, puffing out his chest. “I’m a regular old siren—the girls can’t resist my lyrical soul, and as for the men, well, nottin gets the blood pumpin quite like an Irish jig. You know—”
“Just whistle, Micah,” groaned Dutch, “anything to get him singing instead of talking.”
I choked the saddle horn in my fist. It was one thing to humiliate myself for Dutch’s entertainment; it was a unique talent of mine, to whore myself so unashamedly as to slip past a man’s defenses, to make myself a currency that could buy me whatever I wanted from men who had everything except a lapdog. But to be humiliated in a manner not of my choosing, reduced to a laughingstock time and time again by bitches too stupid to realize they’d sold their damned minds first, I couldn’t stand it. I could never stand it.
Through clenched teeth, I ground out, “What—am—I—whistling?”
Sean laughed his awful stuttering laugh.
“Is it true that the women are worse than the men?” he sang. Then, circling the air with a finger:
“Call the Devil to settle it, then!”
I hung my head and hissed out a breath, and I dutifully repeated the refrain in a whistle. Twee tiddly-diddly dee!
And with a rousing “hey!” Sean slapped his palm against his thigh, nearly as fast as the beat of horses kicking snow, and with the vigor of a marching band all the rest of them—even Sniffy Smith—did the same, one, two, one, two—
“Is it true that the women are worse than the men?”
And I, the piper, whistled my tune.
“That they went down to Hell an were trown out again?
Wit me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!
Now there was an old man lived at Kellyburn braes.”
And again I whistled my twiddly tune.
“And he had a wife was the plague of his days!
Wit me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!
The Devil, he came to the man at the plow.”
And I whistled my tune—and then I kept going.
“Sayin, ‘One of yer family I must take now.’
Wit me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!
‘An which of me family do ye like best?’”
And Arthur and Sean and Bill and Lamb whistled. Twee tiddly-diddly dee!
“‘I’ll take your good wife an I’ll leave you the rest!’
Wit me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!
‘Take her away, an wit all o’me heart—’”
And we whistled.
“‘I pray you and her will forever depart!’”
And they sang:
“With me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!”
And I whistled and whistled to Sean’s half-yelled song, weaving in and out of step in a subtle duet, a silk ribbon dancing round a ragged rope, embellishing his lyrical soul. Where he steadied I warbled, and where he dived I soared. Though the boy could hold his notes just fine, his instrument was blunt, no more an art than a hammer to a nail. But I could thread him through a needle and spin a tapestry out of him.
In the corner of my eye I saw Arthur watching me, brows raised in surprise.
Aside from Davey Callander, I’ve never met a better whistler than myself. I can be a bird, and I can be a flute, and I can be the nauseating chanteuses that wailed and wailed and wailed in Dutch’s graphophone.
And now, on his command, I was the music to summon the Devil.
“There were two little Devils a-playin wit chains.”
Twee tiddly-diddly dee!
“She upped wit her stick an knocked out deir brains!”
“With me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!”
“There were two oder Devils looked over the wall.”
Twee tiddly-diddly dee!
“They said, ‘Take her away or she’ll murder us all!’”
“With me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!”
So we loped and we twirled through the mountain hall of snow-laced spruces and sang with the song-birds and the twittering river, and I whistled like a good boy to amuse them.
Soon enough, the humiliation would be theirs. Then Colm’s. Then whoever else wanted me in their lap, droplets upon droplets to the trail of blood I strung round my neck and played with when I was bored, like little glinting rubies, like human ears, my trophies, all mine in the end, all mine.
“So it’s true that the women are worse than the men—”
Twee tiddly-diddly dee!
“For they went down to Hell an were trew out again!”
“With me whack, fol-dee, fol-iggiddy-fol-the-dol-ee!”
It was hours of singing and more of talk as the river dipped down into the basin and led us on like a long white-water thread through a labyrinth of trees. Now and then I was startled out of my riding-trance by the crackle of insect wings zipping past. Looked like spring had finally arrived at this old, reluctant country. In the bowl of the basin the snow was beginning to thin where the sunlight touched it, yielding a firmer crunch and a better foothold. It was faster travel than yesterday’s snowstorm, though not by much; Arthur’s concerns had clearly made some impression on Dutch, for he soon seemed to be pacing the horses for a return journey this afternoon.
Through a stretch of slow walking, Arthur drew up beside me and insisted on a plan of attack. Seven against twenty was no small change, and Sean was only worth half a man or less, bad as his shooting was. Morgan was right to fret, this time. I knew it would amount to nothing—well, I hoped it would, anyway—but I cheerily sketched the layout of the ranch in his journal and showed him a few good spots for bushwhacking. Morgan wasn’t much of a strategist, and neither was I, so we put a few ideas to Dutch.
I had fanciful notions of trapping them inside the ranch-house somehow and setting it on fire. Add a bit of fun to our lately miserable lives. See, I didn’t mind who survived this—just that one side turned out fully exterminated, and the other still had a king left to pay me back.
But when I suggested it to him, Dutch laughed away my idea for a joke. He thought I was parodying myself. These folks, they truly did not know how to have a good time.
I think they was mulling over a way to lure them into the open—by settin the house on fire! I offered, this time a parody in earnest—when our Irish talking-machine broke through the stream of his own chatter to beg for a break. A lazier bastard there never was, nor a hungrier one as determined to lay out a picnic spread not five miles from a den of bloodthirsty killers. But Dutch had a soft spot for him—or, as I suspected, had grown a sixth sense for the perilously fine line between his merrymaking and his rabble-rousing.
He stopped us at a bend in the river where the water ran under a tall, flat shelf. As Charles took the horses to a likely grazing spot on the sunlit side of a knoll, Lamb spread his oilcloth over the snow on the shelf. No one was optimistic enough to think Dutch would allow a fire, so Lamb, Sean and Bill sat on their saddles and busied themselves with a meal of unwatered hardtack and the shoe-leather pemmican Pearson had tortured out of the hunters’ meager haul yesterday. Between pauses for gnashing and gnawing, it didn’t take long for argument to erupt between them; Sean and Lamb could rile Bill up like no one else, and he was sore at being halfway to sober these days.
“Shut’cher God-damn mouth!” he yelled, his thin voice rising above the rush of the river. “He ain’t gon die! Never has I heard of a man dyin o’the shakes! Never! How stupid is you fools!”
And, I suppose, he was sore that his catamite was trickling slowly into Hell.
I was more interested in the quiet conversation Morgan and Dutch was having by the edge of the woods, heads bent together, cigarettes already half ash. With furrowed brows, Dutch was scribbling frantically in his little note-book.
Weaving down wind between the trees, I crept round them as if looking for a spot to water the nag until their backs was turned to me and I could pick apart their murmurs.
“. . . these long—long leaves,” said Dutch, “zigzagging up the stem, like . . .”
His pencil made several expansive sweeps.
Arthur hummed around his cigarette and tapped the page. “I think I know this one,” he said. “But it’s too dry up here for those.”
“O-O.K., well what about . . .” Frowning deeper, Dutch began drawing again.
“That’s gumweed,” said Arthur. “Ain’t dry enough.”
Dutch drew another.
“Jimson weed, no . . .”
Dutch drew another.
“I don’t know what that one’s called but I saw it last year.” Arthur waved his cigarette over the pages. “These is all weeds o’the wastes.”
Dutch snapped his book shut. “So what is up here, Arthur?”
“I ain’t a damn herbalist—Why didn’t she tell you what we can find up here?”
“I don’t know!” Dutch massaged his temple with the pad of his thumb. Ash scattered onto his coat. “Damn it, she could hardly unnerstand what I was askin. And she won’t part with that tome of hers for nothin . . . Believe me, I tried.”
“What we need is real medcin, Dutch, from a real doctor.”
At that, Dutch cast him a sharp look. “This—is—real—medicine—son.” He punctuated each word with a stab of his cigarette. “Indians know their medicine better’n any o’those school-bred doctors ain’t never made a cure with their own hands before.”
“You believe that story? Bout her and the Wapiti?”
“You saw how that panacea o’hers works, you know it does. I never took you for such a skeptic.”
“Well, listen, I ain’t usually, but she has a lotta stories—”
“We’ve got a lot of stories. And we ain’t half as old as she is. She’s lived this long, she’s gotta be doin somethin right. Don’tchu think?”
“Well, I guess. Sure.”
“If she’s runnin a scam, it ain’t a very good one—all the way out there, in backwoods Grizzlies East? Now that’s a waste of stories, if they ain’t true.”
When Arthur turned his head to meet Dutch’s eye, I could see the crooked grin creeping across his face. “Been a while since you was so taken in.”
Dutch huffed, feigning offense. “Don’t pretend you don’t like her too.”
Arthur pretended to think about it. Then he chuckled, and ducked his head. “Yer right, I do like her.”
“See?”
For a single bare moment, a rare and honest mirth twinkled in Dutch’s dark gaze, a spark of knowing without saying. I was aware, distantly, that he and Morgan had known each other a long time—at least a decade, I assumed—but I hadn’t learned how long exactly, or how well. Sometimes their eyes said they was brothers-in-arms; sometimes, blood-brothers; sometimes, wild animals scrapping for a bone. For that moment, though, Dutch knew him like a father knows a son, with the fondness of an old man for a little child: a fondness that is a tower casting a fathomless shadow.
But as he pulled in another lungful of smoke, his look blackened into the same pensive frown it had crawled out of. Only the shadow remained. The shadow of a storm, and a cold desperation.
“‘Real medicine from a real doctor,’” he muttered in quiet mockery. “With what money? We have”—he drew closer, nearly a whisper—“we have thirty-three dollars and a dime, Arthur.”
“I know, I know . . . Sorry.” The smile was still in Arthur’s eyes; he hadn’t caught on.
“Bring me some money and I’ll buy him a damn hospital.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Dutch clapped his palm over Arthur’s shoulder and steered him away from the edge of the woods. Slowly, solemnly, the pair of them moved toward the boys by the riverside, tossing their cigarette stubs and pulling on their gloves.
I rested my head against the bark of the tree at my back and shut my eyes to the world. A terrible sigh seeped out of me, abyssally deep and hollow as a husk. Thirty-three dollars and a God-damned dime between twenty-three useless nomads on a trip to fucking Canada was not what I had in mind when I set my sights on Dutch van der Linde. Sure, I had sunk time and labor into many a failed gang and many a hanged man, but I tended to have some sense for when a sinking ship would bring me down with it. I thought of myself as persistent, undaunted by minor setbacks. But this time didn’t feel like no minor setback. I felt I had been set back farther than I had any fall-back for.
Well, I had one little fall-back. I pressed my tongue against my gold teeth. If I was going to run now, I’d have a gap in my smile for a long while.
“You know,” came Arthur’s voice from afar, almost out of earshot, “when we’re ranchers on Canada’s virgin pastures, you should make the switch from terror of the prairie to botanical artist.”
Dutch grunted. “There it is.”
“I’m serious.” His tone was anything but serious. “I ain’t seen you draw plants b’fore. You’re pretty good. Almost as good as you are at w—”
“Shut up, Arthur.”
Arthur let out a wheeze of laughter. “I can’t help it.”
“Go on”—Dutch shoved him with his shoulder—“away with you.”
I was starting to change my mind. If Colm didn’t kill them, I’d do it myself. I wanted them dead and their heads on pikes. I wanted them to dream about Canada from the depths of Hell.
Hissing out a heavy breath, I emerged from behind my tree and trudged over to the shelf. Ahead of me, Dutch had almost reached them; Morgan was veering off to a low edge of the river-bank, rocky and slick with ice. Even from yards away, I could hear that Sean was still talking, and from the smear of blood on his puffy grinning lip he seemed to have settled his dispute with Bill. He flung out an arm with dramatic flair and began to holler another song.
“Oh Colom, dear, an did yeh hear
The news that’s goin round?
The shamrock is by law forbid
To grow on Dead Head ground!
Saint Patrick’s Day no more we’ll keep,
His colors can’t be seen;
Fer der hangin men an women for
The wearin of the green!”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Sean,” said Dutch. He came to a stop beside their oilcloth, looking down at them amusedly. “These degenerate rapists and murderers are a disgrace to the air they breathe, let alone the colors they wear.”
“They’re a downright embarrassment,” agreed Sean. “Why’re dey goin round dressed like the bloody Clan na Gael for? Oh, yes, quintessential Irish specimens, they are. Can’t even pronounce der own names right. Colm? Colllm? Can you imagine if I went round callin myself ‘Seen’? Seen MacGuire? No, sorry, haven’t seen im. Jesus!”
Lamb muffled his hiccoughing laugh in the palm of his hand.
“If we find Colom at the end o’this rainbow,” said Dutch indulgently, “you go ahead and teach him a little Irish. I’m sure he doesn’t know a lick of it.”
“Better I just put a bullet in his troat and spare us all the sound of Irish butchery, eh?” Sean snorted at his own joke. His mouth hung open as he probed his back molars with his tongue. “Did I ever tell yous I had a neighbor back in Donegal called O’Driscoll? Nasty bloke, even in the homeland. Must be a rotten name. My da always said you could tell the wort of a man by his name an how he said it. An Englishman can have an Irish name, but if he doesn’t say it properly, it widders like a blighted crop an don’t mean nottin. Same goes fer dis country. I hope for all your sakes you know your names.”
Bill pointedly ignored this sermon in favor of chewing hardtack, but Lamb’s look turned strange beneath his smile.
“You talk too much, Sean,” he laughed. “So much talk for all nonsense.” He reached into his coat pocket. “You wanna game o’chuck-a-luck?”
While Lamb amused himself by cheating Sean and Bill out of all their worldly possessions, Dutch wandered to the shelf’s overhang and gazed down at the rushing water, plunging into a brown study. He took off his gloves again and lit another cigarette. The roar of the tide in his ears must have drowned out the universe and its noise entirely; I guess that’s what he wanted.
We passed near a half-hour like this—Dutch doing his thinking, the boys playing dice, Morgan reclining against a rock upstream and Charles fucking the horses or something. I smoked for a bit, then set to cleaning my guns with an oily rag. I listened to Sean’s stories and Bill’s bellowing, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I returned to the trees for a walk. A little pink bird was whistling alone; I whistled back. Tuee-tu-tuee-tuee-tee! I thought about shooting it for something to do, but that didn’t seem particularly wise, so I threw a bullet at it instead. I missed by at least two feet. It flitted off like a blossom on the breeze.
By the time Dutch stepped away from the riverside, it was about a quarter to twelve, and his good mood had resurfaced. He marched over to snoozing Morgan, scooped up a handful of snow and lobbed a dead-shot straight to the neck. Morgan jolted violently. His hand went to his gun. His hat toppled off of his face.
Dutch was bent over in front of him, palms braced on his knees. “Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty!” he yelled.
“God damn it,” grumbled Morgan, getting heavily to his feet.
Dutch had already spun around to rally the rest of the troops. “Come on, you lazy bastards, we need to get a move on if we’re gonna be there and back before nightfall! Where is Mr. Bell?”
I hurried out of the trees. “Here, boss!”
His glanced at me out of the corner of his eye—a split second of acknowledgment. It was long enough that I could see the gleam of his war-face.
You know, I have heard recently that sharks will die if they stop moving for even a moment. I don’t know if that’s true, as I have never met a shark myself, but I have met Dutch van der Linde, and it was certainly true of him.
Ain’t nothin more stupid than believin in a man. Believe in life, believe in death, believe in money. Them three things is all that’s true.
My daddy gave me these words of wisdom two days before a man he’d made a widower followed him into a seedy gaming-room tucked round the side of a livery yard in Ogallala and shot him in the face. This wasn’t where he died, I’m sure you know—he died a bloody pulp in Texas. As luck would have it, the bullet went clean through one cheek and out the other, shattering three teeth into so many shards he’d be finding them in his food for years; one by one they wriggled out of his gums and his tongue and the roof of his mouth like cicadas from the soil. The widower left that gaming-room in just as many pieces, though they stayed, I hope, right where they was buried.
My natural conclusion was that my daddy was a self-styled stupid. You don’t leave loose ends, only dead ends, and that was why. What hubris had him believe that man wouldn’t come after him? Wasn’t it the same to believe in a man’s meekness as it was to believe in his lies?
These was questions Dutch would never learn to ask.
He had truly believed he could pull ahead of Colm, regain the lead in this little sport of theirs. But there was a fatal flaw to Dutch that few recognize now, one that caused him far more harm than his crimes or his conceit or the unquenchable fire of his hatred: he was as naïve as a child. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that men would cheat at chess. A kinder soul would have been embarrassed to beguile a man so easily gulled, but the hunter bests his prey by knowing its weakness; it is a game of skill, of intelligence, of choosing the right mark, and the right moment to strike, and there is no need to apologize for striking true—none at all.
Why am I telling you this now?
Because when we arrived at the ranch, there was no one there.
I could tell as soon as we’d reached the edge of the lake. In the fair-weather stillness its black glass surface was frozen to a mirror, the inverted echo of a silent scene. I stared at the dark windows across the water, at the tracks in the snow gouging furrows between the buildings. The ranch was abandoned—the O’Driscolls had left.
“Looks empty,” said Dutch.
“Looks like they’ve all gone somewhere,” said Charles.
Dutch lowered his binoculars and turned to him. “What d’you reckon?” he asked.
“Big group of people left that cabin and went to that barn back there.” Charles drew steady lines through the air with an outstretched arm. “They came out on horseback and rode into the forest.”
“Were they in a hurry?”
The wrinkles deepened between his brows. “Don’t think so.” He gestured to the ranch. “We should move closer. Can’t see much from here.”
As we snaked round the lake, we found the riders’ tracks. They fanned out through the trees in thick, scattered tracts, split into groups of threes, fours, fives. All was heading north—back the way we had come.
“How many, Mr. Smith?” asked Dutch.
“I counted nineteen,” murmured Charles. “Could be a couple more.”
“How fresh?”
“Few hours. Unless they circled round, we passed them on our way down here.” Charles pointed. “That one’s different. Goes to the house, dismounts, then gets back on and follows the others. I’d say that was the trigger. Maybe he let them know we were comin.”
The quiet became at once too quiet; every scrape of hoof in snow was sharp as crunching bones; the shiver that wracked the branches with every low hiss of wind went under my skin like a needle.
No one spoke again. We was all listening.
I led us slowly to the edge of the woods where I’d watched the O’Driscolls through the window, and I pulled out my binoculars. Beside me, Morgan did the same. Inside, the lights was doused and the room was dim, but embers still glowed in the hearth. It was so quiet I could hear the creaking of wooden walls twenty paces away; the buildings rocked gently to the same cradle-rhythm of the trees. There was no living movement anywhere—not inside, not in the sheds, not hidden on the outskirts.
It was Dutch who broke the spell. He urged the Count carefully out of the trees until he was exposed, a black shape painted stark against the snow. Then he drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air. The sharp crack cascaded off of the mountainsides like a clap of thunder and seemed to swoop around us in a carrion-bird kettle. Bulrush flinched beneath me. A few birds flew off. Every finger in the company twitched for a gun, an interminable reflex. Nothing else moved.
Dutch returned his gun to its holster. With a flick of the wrist, he beckoned us forward. We obeyed wordlessly, emerging from the forest to stand beside him. He didn’t take his eyes off the cabin.
“Listen to me, all o’you,” he said grimly. “Stay—alert. They could be comin back. They could be anywhere. Watchin us right now, even. If you ain’t dealt with O’Driscolls before, I have no doubt they will make a mighty educational impression to-day, one way or another. There is no trick too dirty for them, no perversion too low. And God forbid, if they catch you alive, just shoot yourself.”
He dug in his spurs. The Count broke into a trot. The rest of us, with crawling skin and hackles raised, trailed tentatively behind him. Even Arthur seemed unsure, now; his jaw was tight, and his eyes clung to the shadows.
We crossed the agony of white space between the trees and the cabin, printing ourselves onto a blank page. A few feet from the stoop, Dutch slowed to a halt. The company followed suit. From here I could see something—a piece of paper, it looked like—nailed to the front door with the point of a knife. Dutch sat tall in the saddle, rising on his stirrups to peer into the front-facing window.
“There appears to be a corpse inside,” he said calmly, “layin spread out on the floor. In the nude, of course, because this is Colm we’re talkin about. I’d bet my bottom dollar his balls are in his mouth.”
“Christ Almighty,” said Sean. There wasn’t much else to say about it.
Dutch swung his leg over the Count and dismounted. Morgan was moving to do the same before Dutch had even hit the snow. Gripping his hat he hastened to Dutch’s side, and together they ascended the steps. At the top, Dutch plucked the note from the door. The two of them stared at it in silence.
Finally, Arthur spoke. “Well, they definitely know we’re here.”
“Of course they know we’re here, Arthur,” snapped Dutch, “they followed us here! Even you can see this ain’t a chance meeting!”
“So far, it’s no meetin at all.”
Dutch leveled him a black scowl. “Enough. I’m not doin this with you right now. We have got some poor dead bastard in there”—he knocked his fist against the door—“and a horde of O’Driscoll Boys ridin helter-skelter through these mountains. They are taunting us.”
“And you know what that means,” pressed Arthur.
“Yes—I—do.”
Dutch rounded on us, meeting our gazes where we sat waiting on our horses.
“You wanna know what this says?” He waved the note in the air. “He hopes we enjoy the surprise. He even signed it—ain’t that sweet?” Smiling, he began to fold it into a neat square. His smile was pleasant, but there was violence in every cutting crease. “How enigmatic! How coy for old Colm! Oh, it must be some surprise!”
“I can think of several surprises we’ve had already,” said Morgan dryly.
“So can I,” said Dutch, “and yet I imagine this one will be some exquisite, as-yet-undiscovered atrocity, if he’s so fuckin pleased with himself.”
Whatever fleck of amusement Arthur had allowed himself evaporated in an instant. I think it sunk in at last that Dutch’s fury had hit its apoplectic ceiling.
“We are gonna strip this place of everything it’s got,” shouted Dutch, his voice shearing like torn paper, “and then we are riding back, and we are gonna be quick, you hear me! Charles, Bill, Sean”—Bill straightened, Sean leaned forward, Charles nodded—“you search these sheds. Micah, Lamb, to the barn.” I looked at Lamb; he grinned at me. “You and me, Arthur, we’ve got the cabin. We want food, clothes, blankets—anything we can use. Don’t think too hard, just grab whatever God-damn ditty you can fit on your horse. Hop to it!”
I must confess: when I began to understand why Colm had me lure them out here, my apprehension gave way so entirely to relief that I could hardly keep up the act of concern. From the other side of the feud, Dutch’s impassioned performance went from tragedy to comedy. That poor, hapless clown. This was what happened when he was struck against a plan grounded in sensible realism and cold, hard cash; he erupted into a shower of stars, a brief and powerless rain, worshipped with wishes but an illusion just the same. He would burn for now, seethe a little, but Colm would soon snuff him out like a candle.
I was safe. Colm O’Driscoll held all the cards, and I was one of them. All I had to do was wait. And so I sent Bulrush up the pasture with the appearance of urgency but not the spirit as the others scrambled to obey a leader with teeth around his jugular.
Though, not every gull in company was created equal. Racing me on Across the Water, his weedy twelve-hand pony, Lamb was still grinning when we reached the barn.
“That Colm O’Driscoll,” he said cheerfully as he dismounted. “Mean bastard. He got Comanche blood in him?”
I chuckled, dropping into the snow. “Micks got just as much violence in em as any savage, boy. You watch Sean and you’ll see.”
“Heard them Comanches eat babies. Irish eat babies?”
“They got witches, same as you.” I shuffled to the barn doors, rubbing my gloved hands together. “Witches eat babies.”
“We don’t got witches. Mexicans got witches. And they eat babies.”
“You got witches, y’damn idiot.”
Propounding the exact nature of a witch, we hefted open the doors and led the horses in. A hail of bleating kicked up at once. Penned on either side of us was dozens of sheep, ratty and grayed and starting to thin, huddled together on a bed of old straw. Dead ones was strewn across the floor, legs stuck straight out like wooden dolls—evidence of the die-up, I supposed. It was dark and humid in there, and it reeked terrible; the warm, caustic stench of stale piss was so thick it felt almost alive as it writhed up my nostrils.
I gestured broadly. “Reunited with your family, at long last,” I said, and laughed.
Lamb leaned over the fence and extended his arm to a little white lamb. With a shrill bleat it staggered to him past the thicket of stubby legs, wiggling the stump of its tail, and he scooped it up and held it to his chest. It was near luminous against his black overcoat and dark hands.
“Ain’t that touching,” I said. “Too bad little Isaac ain’t aware how you bond with kin.”
His giggle was high and effervescent, like a woman’s ersatz affectation, but that was the way he always giggled. “I like some mutton,” he said shyly, as if it embarrassed him. “How many woolies you think we can fit on our horses?”
“On yours? Not even that one.”
“You underestimate her. She’s strong. Small but mighty. Like a ant.”
I glanced at him askance. “Why’d you kill your tribe?” The question had been burning me since I met him.
He returned my look with one of amusement. “You think a tribe is one little family?”
“And you think you’re real funny.”
Lamb shrugged. “It’s a new world, Micah Bell. In fifty years, there’ll be no more tribes. You play the American game, or you die. Little families, all fightin for whatchu don’t have. That’s yer game. You look stupid. And now we gotta look stupid, or we die.”
“So you was done lookin stupid.”
He hummed to himself. He ran his thumb along the lamb’s curly head. It was starting to get restless in his hold.
“D’you like the rules o’this game, Micah?” he asked.
“I like it when it serves me, just like anyone.”
“Well that’s the trick—that’s how they reel you in. They make you think it’s a game you can win. But you can’t, because the game ain’t fair. Now this Dutch o’yours, he’s fair. That’s what I want, a fair game.”
“A fair game,” I drawled.
Lamb smiled angelically, his nose scrunched. “I dream his dreams.”
This boy was a fierce confidence artist. He could hardly string ten words together, but he knew exactly which ones to use. That slip of mischief in the corners of his lips was for my eyes only—he knew I knew, of course. A liar knows a liar. What a strange creature he was, all alone on his island of one, singing, giggling, stringing up bodies.
“How old are you, boy?” I asked.
His smile flickered. “Seventeen.”
“Hm,” I said. “Thought you was older.”
“Why?”
“You look older.” I hitched Bulrush to the fence and raked my eyes over the barn, scanning for a way up to the hay-loft. “Then again, all you redskins look like old leather boots baked too long in the sun.”
“And you vé’hó’e look like a cat’s pink ass-hole,” said Lamb, “but I feel it’s impolite to say so.”
He had hardly finished speaking before I had his hair in my fist and his back shoved against a post. The air left him in a punched-out grunt. The lamb slithered to the floor and ran crying through the gap between my legs. When the boy’s left hand went for the gun in his pocket I grabbed his wrist and wrenched it behind the post. I closed in on him, crowded him with my body—he couldn’t squeeze his right hand past the firm rock of my gut. He gave up struggling. His dark eyes was wide, his pupils ballooned like black moons. I could feel his pulse in my navel, quick as a rabbit.
“You’re gonna catch a bullet with that attitude,” I growled, “so you’d better watch yourself now.”
“They gonna getchu for this,” he breathed. “Dutch gonna hurtchu.”
I laughed coldly. “You think they care if you live or die?” I tightened my fingers around the base of a braid. He winced, choking out a noise of pain. “Whose side d’you think Dutch would take—the murderin savage, or the man helpin him catch Colm O’Driscoll? Little thing, you don’t even know who that is.”
Lamb’s brow hardened. A muscle in his cheek twitched, and he said nothing.
I lowered my mouth to his ear and whispered slowly. “You can sing all their songs and cozy up to whoever you like, but you will never be anything more to them than a rabid dog. Not with that—that death-smell on you. You hear me?”
I felt his nod more than I saw it.
“Now you say, ‘Sorry, sir,’” I murmured, “and watch your damn mouth.”
“Sorry, sir.”
When I drew back, his gaze was wet with malice. I smiled at him with all my teeth. A tremble of delight ran through me, from the roots of my hair to my unsteady legs. It was the best I’d felt in months. I let him go and stepped away in one motion, showing my palms, laughing like I’d told him a very good joke. He lowered himself to a squat and picked up his hat. There was a tremble in his hands, too.
“You still look pretty stupid to me,” I said.
He said nothing.
I sent the boy up into the hay-loft to stew on that while I headed deeper into the barn for a look-see. But there wasn’t much of substance to be found anywhere—assorted tools and domestic possibles, a low-bellied wagon, a tub for water storage. I tossed a coil of rope up to Lamb and had him truss us some good hay, and I filled my saddle-bags with bottles of coal oil. For myself, I crammed all the packs of matches I could find into my pockets.
I came out of the back room to see Lamb loading two bundles of hay onto my horse. But before I could open my mouth to object, he grabbed a fat ewe by the neck, pulled his Thunderer from his coat and pressed the two-inch barrel against its head. Then he blew its brains out. The percussive blast and spray of blood sent the flock into a frenzy. In their scramble to escape, the sheep trampled their dead, their children, each other. They rocked against the fences like great foamy waves. Bulrush tugged desperately at the knot in his reins; Across the Water merely flicked her ears.
Blinded by fury, little Lamb hadn’t quite anticipated the debasement that would follow his display of power: that it would be a struggle to drag a corpse about as big as he was out from under the fence and haul it over his mare’s skinny rump. And what a struggle it was. I just stood there watching, thumbs in my belt. I lit a cigarette and smoked languidly. The cacophony of panic was deafening; I couldn’t have said anything if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t. That would have interrupted the show.
All men is one animal, you know. Even a lamb is a wolf.
At some point I took out my watch to glance at intermittently, hoping to wear him down a little more. I measured eight torturous minutes of grunting, panting, fumbling with four limp limbs and a wobbling barrel-belly. It was the wildest I’d ever seen him, blood bloated and white eyed and nearly crying, but it seemed to curl off of him like steam with every labored breath. Behind the strain was a kind of deranged focus. When he was done he straightened up and wiped his nose along his palm. The lividity of rage had drained from his face; now he wore a serene, dangerous composure. He didn’t even acknowledge me. He got on his horse and rode out the doors.
I did the same.
I emerged from the barn into the pouring daylight and blinked my sun-struck eyes. I shifted awkwardly against the hay digging into me.
Suddenly I could hear shouting. The smell of a wood-fire burned the air.
Down in the ranch-house men was screaming—three spooked horses was making for the hills. Smoke billowed from the chimney and blasted from the front door and at the windows bright tongues of flame licked at lace curtains.
I kicked Bulrush into a gallop and flew down the hill after Lamb.
We arrived to meet chaos. Near the stoop Bill was rolling in the snow, hatless, his leather coat smoldering. Sean and Charles came sailing in on their horses from halfway across the property. Inside the cabin, over the roar of the fire, Dutch’s voice was serrated with wheezing coughs.
Then Morgan burst out of the smoke and clattered down the stairs, grim faced and jaw ticking—in his arms lay a woman entirely naked, bound hand and foot, gagged with a rag. Dutch was close behind them, hacking into his fist.
As he hustled past me Morgan said, “Seems like you and the O’Driscolls had the same idea.”
I don’t know why it surprised me that he was right. Fire does always make things more entertaining.
Dutch flung his arm, gesturing to all of us. “Get in there, now! Especially you, Bill!” He sounded like he’d swallowed glass, like the fire had gotten inside him. He dragged in ragged breaths. “Food! Clothes! Blankets! Go round the left, through the side door!”
Charles leaped from his horse and sprinted round the side of the house. It was the fastest I’d ever seen him move. Tugging his scarf over his nose, Sean darted after him. Bill staggered to his feet. Snow sloughed off of him in wet clumps.
“Bill, get that body outta there!” screamed Dutch. “Micah, get the horses! Lamb, inside!”
“Never a dull moment with you fellers, is there!” I yelled, and I whirled Bulrush around.
While I rounded up the scattered horses, them six just about turned the cabin inside out. The snow was soon peppered with cans, knives, bottles, boots. Bill and Lamb came out with a charred corpse stiff and spread-eagle between them. Stripped down to his shirt-sleeves, Morgan went charging in like a bull. Pillows joined the pile, and an armful of clothes, and then a singed flock-bed. I don’t know what the Hell they was thinking. It took two men to drag it out. We couldn’t put that on a horse.
Morgan was about to run back inside when an ear-splitting crack ripped through the cabin—like the snapping of a giant’s skull—and with a gasp of sparks the blackened roof came crashing down. The men tossed themselves into the snow as walls buckled and fire flared out. The horses startled violently. They tried to scatter again. Reflex took me over and I spun them into a cat’s cradle.
By the time I’d managed to settle them down, I was lit up like a spire in a lightning storm. My heart was so much thunder I itched to put a bullet in something. Shoot first. Shoot first. Well, there was nothing to shoot.
I swung off of Bulrush and ran a hand along his lathered neck. He grunted unpleasantly, pushing my hat askew with his nose. I pushed his nose the other way. He had impressed me, the lumbering brute. Baylock would’ve bucked me before I took him within ten yards of a fire that big. Seemed Bulrush was either foolhardy or deeply trustful—either way a fool.
Wreathed in smoke at the knees of the burning cabin, Dutch was checking hurriedly over his men and picking through the supplies they’d rescued. He threw a thin cotton sheet over the rancher’s body. It was hardly recognizable as a human being now, more jerky than flesh, the face twisted in a mangled lipless grimace. The stench was enough to flip my stomach: a thick rot smell, knotted with burnt pork. Dutch straightened as I approached. I nudged a can of peaches with the toe of my boot.
“Awful nice o’them to leave us this bountiful haul,” I said.
He snorted. “Arthur said much the same thing—shortly before Bill set the house on fire.”
“Of course it was Bill,” I sneered. “Some men come out of a dented tin, don’t they.”
Bill shot me a dirty look.
“Exactly that,” agreed Dutch.
Arthur came over to us unsteadily, wiping his brow. “They’d rigged the front door to drop a lantern into enough kerosene to light up New York City. Anyone with half a lick o’sense would figure they’d try somethin like that, so Dutch and I took the side door. Then that woman went off her head screamin when we found her, and Bill came running through just the door you’d think he would.”
“I didn’t know!” cried Bill. “I-I’m sorry, O.K.?”
Arthur threw out his arm to shut him up. Then to Dutch he said, “Reckon that was the surprise?”
Dutch scowled. “Since they ain’t here to point and laugh, no. That was the appetizer.” He brushed the snow from his hands and looked around darkly. “Where did you put that poor young woman?”
It was an easy mistake to make for a man so accustomed to the mantle of the savior. But when I saw her sitting there in that empty stable, wrapped in Arthur’s coat, I knew there was nothing poor about her.
This was a cast-iron woman, that was clear—face and hands baked brown and spotty by the sun, littered with deep, old scars, palms and finger-tips calloused to pebbles. Even her feet, corned and cracked, wore signs of a life hard lived. But the O’Driscolls had worked her hard in ways a body ain’t made to learn, spoiling that lovely white skin with a marbled crust of semen and wine-stain bruises from her slender neck to the meat of her firm calves.
She wasn’t shaking, not under the gathered shadows of seven rough-looking men, not even from the cold. Morgan would hardly look at her, and Charles didn’t at all. Sean and Bill feigned a fuss with the horses. Lamb stared unflinchingly, with blood smeared across every bare inch of skin. But the young woman scarcely seemed to notice any of us. She had eyes only for Dutch. Big, dark eyes, deadly as an oil well.
He got down on one knee before her, laying his hands flat. “Miss, is this your ranch?”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Did you know the men who captured you?”
“N-no. I’d n-never met’m b’fore.” It seemed a struggle to bring words out of a mouth that had shaped itself around a gag. “But they was called . . . well . . .”
“O’Driscolls?” prompted Dutch.
“Y-yeah. Somethin like that. They was wearin green, all of’m. Buncha m-mick barbarians.”
“It’s an unspeakable thing what they done to you, Miss.”
“They took the kids.”
Dutch faltered. “They took your kids?”
“Not mine.” For the first time, a tremor rippled through her, as though plucking at the thread of that thought set the whole web to quivering. “They had kids here. Nine, nine kids. They took em out, somewhere—they’re gone. K-kids is gone. You gotta—gotta find them.” A flash of life. A knobbled hand shot out to grasp Dutch’s, clamping over his knee; her knuckles went white. She said, very slowly, “You—gotta—find—them. Please.”
Dutch enfolded her hand in both of his and held it tight. “We’ll find them, Miss.”
And there was no lie in that. This was a rage I had never seen on him. It went beyond war and hate and straight to cataclysm.
He raised his eyes to Arthur. “What are those sick bastards doin with kids?”
The young woman quivered. “They was doin horble things to them kids.”
In the silence, I heard Arthur’s gloves let out a choked squeak as he ground his fingers into fists.
“We’ll bring em back safe and sound, Miss,” said Dutch. “You have my word.”
Let me return to that gaming-room in Ogallala.
The game hadn’t started yet. The dealer had just cut the cards. I’d finished pouring Half-Cock Grindle his first glass of whiskey and was about to pour one for that foul-mouthed, soggy-eyed Englishman Ruddy Bainton. And then I was going to leave the room. My daddy only wanted them to get a look at me, you see—Bainton, particularly. He had this habit, well known in our circles, of taking pretty photographs of dead little boys in calm repose, or gazing blankly out of windows, or sitting at the dinner-table. Strangely artful for so disgusting a creature. It was the gentlest depravity I’d ever heard of. If he liked the look of me, maybe he’d play a big game to get me.
Bainton said he very much liked the look of me, and the smell of me too.
The doorknob turned just as I reached it. Somehow I think I knew what was about to happen, because instead of standing there and waiting for the door to open, I flinched into the corner of the room that the door would swing to.
When the widower came in, the first thing he saw was the back of my daddy’s head. That was what he would have shot, if Daddy hadn’t spun round at the cock of the hammer. But if I’d been standing in front of that head—the round-faced image of the man who raped his wife to death—it might have been my blood sprayed across the poker table instead.
Life is a gamble, my daddy always said, and you’re playin a dirty cheater. Death, with his chin on your shoulder and your cards at his feet, is waiting for his moment. Your luck will run out eventually.
Yes, I saw the chink in Micah Bell’s armor. It was as obvious to me as a stain on a starched shirt. How foolish of him to believe that a man could be harmless, how foolish to offer Death a better hand. I thought I was so clever.
But damn me, I am the very spit of him. I believe in one man, just as he did: my fool self. And sometimes, when I feel sure of my intellect or instinct, the die of fate is cast square at my face like a widower’s bullet and my luck comes up snake-eyes. I thought I knew O’Driscoll’s game the way I knew Dutch’s. Turns out there will always be a madness you’ve never met before.
Colm O’Driscoll held all the cards, and he had already played me.
So let me return to that gaming-room in Ogallala.
Let me shake Colm’s hand again.
Let me press my kicked-dog power against little Lamb Chop.
Luck, God-damned luck, and hubris—those are the only things you should believe in.
The sun’s last blood had trickled away and a thin fog had rolled in. A dark blanket was falling upon the trees and dousing us all a featureless black, but the snow was the same deep-water blue of the evening sky.
We had turned from the river some time ago; Colter was less than a quarter-mile north. We rode without lanterns. Dutch was ahead of us, quiet as the grave. He hadn’t said a word in six hours.
Sitting side-saddle behind him, the widow Sadie Adler was dressed in what we’d found in the cabin—her clothes, she’d said, though I’d only seen a handful of women in pants before now, and none was of a decent crowd. She was wearing her husband’s coat. The O’Driscolls had cock-soiled it like they’d done everything else, and tore the seams all to bits, but Sadie wouldn’t be parted from it. I suppose their defilement meant nothing to her anymore. In her hand she clutched one of Dutch’s Schofields. By now I’m sure her fingers had frozen around it.
One by one, we crested a hillock. And that was when we saw it.
In the distance, at the foot of a black fir, a lantern cast a yellow spill across the snow. The Count fetched up suddenly. I yanked hard on the reins.
“Arthur,” said Dutch, splaying his hand by his side.
Arthur brought the Morrigan slowly to the Count’s shoulder. He was already taking out his binoculars.
“What is that?” asked Dutch.
“Gonna guess you ain’t talkin bout the lantern.”
“Don’t play with me, Arthur.”
“I can’t tell. Can’t see nothin.”
“Cause it’s dark or cause there’s nothin there?”
“Dark. I-I kinda—” Arthur lowered the binoculars and squinted into the darkness. “There might be someone standin in fronna the tree. But it’s strange. There ain’t no feet.”
Dutch looked at him. “No feet?”
“There’d be feet on the ground, but there ain’t.”
I moved Bulrush to stand with them.
“So we got a hangin,” I offered.
“Or a crucifixion,” said Arthur. “They like doin them lately.”
Sean piped up from the rear. “Is this the surprise?”
Sadie Adler made a strangled noise. Her fist tightened in the fur of Dutch’s coat. I imagine Dutch mistook her reaction for fear, but he couldn’t see the look on her face.
No one answered Sean. It was a stupid question to ask.
We crept forward by inches. The lantern grew from a firefly to a yellow moon. I started to see something pale in murky patches against the dark bark. And when we was just close enough to see the burning spot of the flame, a sound drifted to us across the deathly still air—hushed, fragile, and very like a voice.
The Count fetched up again.
“Did you hear that?” asked Dutch.
This time he didn’t wait for a response. He slid off his horse and left the widow there alone. Morgan dismounted too, drawing his Cavalry Buck, and began to follow.
Dutch held an arm out to him. “Stay there.”
Morgan stopped.
“Just—watch my back,” said Dutch.
“I am,” said Morgan.
“Stay there,” said Dutch again, and he kept walking.
Without the welter of grinding snow, and with Dutch slowly approaching, the voice became clearer, more insistent. It was crying. Sniveling. High and quavering, hitching with desperate gasps. I lifted my binoculars and brought the figure into focus, and I saw exactly what I thought I’d see.
There was a tiny child tied to the trunk of the tree. At least three feet off the ground, it seemed—and barely three feet of child, at that. Younger than Abigail’s bastard. The ropes were a violent black crisscrossing naked white skin. A pinched, slack-jawed face watched Dutch, almost a hundred feet from the tree now, with rabbit-eyed terror.
“Dutch,” called Lamb.
I lowered my binoculars.
Across the Water lunged forward in my periphery and leaped in front of Dutch.
That was all the warning I had before Lamb’s Thunderer went off with an explosive bang. The little cry became a sharp, spasmodic scream. All guns left holsters faster than a blink, but so did the next bullet Lamb fired.
What I hadn’t seen was the stick of dynamite tucked against the kid’s side.
The blast shook the ground. I flinched to cover my ears. Dutch threw himself into the snow. Splinters and bits of meat tore through the air like buckshot. Bulrush reared, and I clung on with my knees, and horses everywhere was lurching to run. The ringing in my head became whinnied shrieks and a litany of curses. The tree cracked, groaned, and hurtled down into its neighbor where it settled its dead-weight against a tangle of branches.
With the lantern snuffed out, I could hardly see a thing—the snow and sky was a near-black blue. But I saw the silhouette of Lamb and Across the Water standing there still, one calm being in the middle of it all.
Dutch staggered to his feet.
“Why did you . . . do that?”
“It was a trap,” said Lamb.
For a moment of stunned silence, Dutch simply stared up at him. Then he raised his pistol and shot him in the head. Like a puppet cut from its strings, Lamb fell back against the dead sheep. His body slid sideways, first with the arm, then with the head, then it toppled from the saddle and dropped into the snow, one foot caught in the stirrup. Across the Water flicked her ear and that was all.
Dutch turned to us. A featureless black.
“Anyone else”—dark as water trickling over ice—“feel like blowing up children?”
I swallowed. No one spoke. My pulse pounded in my ears. Behind me, Sean’s breathing came out in whimpers. The widow slumped over the saddle horn and began to heave out wordless, blood-curdling wails.
Dutch walked toward a misshapen lump that had landed in the snow, about the size of a man’s boot. I think it was the child’s head, still attached to the shoulders. He looked down at it with a fist pressed to his mouth.
“J-Jesus,” he said thickly.
Arthur started forward, mechanical, as if hypnotized.
Dutch’s head snapped up. “No!” He rushed to close the space between them, nearly at a run. “Don’t—don’t. You don’t have to—” Arthur was trying to get past him. Dutch planted his palms firmly on his shoulders. “Arthur, it’s O.K., we will clean this up to-morrow. We will put the child to rest. But right now, we—we gotta go back. Listen to me. We’re goin back.”
“I told you Lamb was no good.” Arthur’s voice was quiet, hazy. “I told you.”
“You did. I’m sorry, my boy, you were . . . What is that?”
A bright spark was skimming along the forest floor to my right, distant as a star, quick as a snake. Arthur sprinted to it like a madman after a ghost-light, disappearing into the darkness. The Morrigan scrambled to follow him.
“Arthur!”
Cursing, Dutch caught the Count by the reins and forced Sadie back as he swung into the saddle. Then he vanished too. I didn’t need to spur Bulrush on—he was already moving.
The air whipped past me as we hurtled through the trees. The night was near complete; I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see a thing, except for the spark. I peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pocket. I fumbled to find the lantern hanging from my saddle string, and then I fumbled to find the match in the band of my hat. I struck the match with my thumb-nail. I lit the lantern. A swarm of tall black ghosts flitted suddenly around me, darting in and out of a narrow pool of light, and the men on their horses was everywhere.
The Count’s pale shape veered left, then slowed. The spark had gone out.
“Kid here!” came Arthur’s shout, somewhere ahead.
“Get it down!” said Dutch. “Where the Hell are you! Shit!”
Another spark was traveling across the black snow, far, far away.
“Go! Come on!” yelled Dutch.
He took off, and we with him as a thunder of hoofs on his heels.
Another spark appeared. Then another.
“I got ten o’clock!” Charles melted out of the light.
Dutch gestured. “Bill, that way!”
And Bill was gone.
“Behind us!” said Sean. “There’s one more!”
“Go, Sean!”
Ennis swung round. It was just me and Dutch and Sadie Adler.
“Colm’s a damn madman!” I yelled.
“Didn’t I tell you, Micah? This is all a game to him, a fuckin game, and we’re losing!”
It came to me, finally, right then. It wasn’t the first time a man had used me to dangle his cock in another man’s face, but it was the first I’d dangled a cock of dismembered babies. They was all insane. I’d ensnared myself in a tribal blood-bath. This had been a huge mistake, the biggest mistake of my life, the most pathetic, the most worthless, for no money no power no pleasure.
Damn my smile. Damn everything. This was gonna get me killed. This was gonna get me killed to-night. If I’d had Baylock, I would’ve gone back down to the basin and out the other side.
When we reached our spark we jumped to the ground and Dutch smashed it under his hand.
“Find the child!” he snarled at me. “You stay there, Mrs. Adler, we’ll handle this!”
I picked up the fuse and pulled myself along it, and I kept going with Dutch breathing over my shoulder until the slack drew taut and the line rose to a tree.
A dark boy was slumped against his ropes, his thin bird-like bones protruding and angular in the lantern-light. Indian, I realized, but short haired, civilized. Twelve or thirteen, maybe. His eyes was closed, his head lolling on a limp neck. No clouds of breath left him. I thought he might be dead, until a strange, slow shudder ran down his body like a heavy wind was rocking him.
“Hey.” Dutch had his knife out and began sawing through the ropes. “You alive? You alive? Micah, will you do something?”
I joined him, hacking frantically where the loops was pulled tight against the bark. Fear pricked every pore in my skin, fear that we might chafe the dynamite and spatter the snow with a hundred pieces of ourselves. I cursed Colm O’Driscoll with all my capacity for thought.
The boy sagged as the ropes started to droop; I held my lantern in my teeth and wrapped an arm around him, letting him sink onto my shoulder. He was cold as ice, but still pliable—his blood wasn’t freezing in him yet.
“Five, six,” breathed Dutch. “You got him?”
I made a vague noise of assent.
“Wrap him up. They just lit another fuse. I’m gonna go get it. You find the others.”
Dutch whistled, stepping back. The Count came and whisked him away. I stripped out of my coat and folded the boy into it. His eyes twitched under his eyelids. I scooped him up and slung him over my shoulder again like a sack of grain.
As I ran to Bulrush I heard a whisper behind me.
“Thank you, Mister. Thank you, Mister.”
I slashed the ropes holding down the hay bundles and hoisted the boy up in their stead, and when I mounted I reached back and yanked his arms forward and tied the ends of my coat-sleeves around my chest. I took the lantern handle out of my mouth. The whole thing was slippery with cold saliva.
“Hope you can’t feel your balls no more, boy,” I said, and dug in my spurs.
It didn’t take long for the others to find me; Bulrush and I were a beacon in the dark. Sean was the first to answer my call, but Charles loomed into the light before him.
His child had frozen to death at least an hour ago, but he’d brought the stiff little thing with him, shrouded in a blanket.
“It didn’t seem right to leave her there. Poor girl.” He said it with about as much emotion as he said anything.
Sean’s was alive, but only just: a small fair-haired boy of about four or five, buttoned into the front of his coat. Sean was holding his own lantern aloft, and his face was white.
“Fockin fools the lot of us,” he hissed. “Whoever’s settin these off . . . I mean, look at us. Beggin teh be picked off from the shadows.”
“There’s nine kids,” said Charles steadily.
“I’m not sayin we give up, you daft bastard, I just hate this, you know, runnin round, not knowin—I mean—so—so let’s—”
A flurry of shots rang out in the distance and echoed off of the mountainsides. Our heads swiveled. Sean snuffed his lantern.
More shots. Pop-pop-pop-pop. Erratic, staccato, like rocks tumbling down a cliff. The makings of an avalanche—a massacre.
Behind us came the rumbling of hoofs. Dutch, Bill and Arthur was galloping to us in a halo of light.
“BACK TO CAMP!” bellowed Dutch. “NOW!”
“But the kids, Dutch!” yelled Bill.
“You stay here’n get the rest of em! Rest o’you, with me!”
We tore through pace after pace of snow under the moonless black sky as gun-fire thickened and clapped through the valley. The dense wood opened out and became the expanse that ran to Colter. Lights appeared, pin-prick specks swinging wildly, flashes from muzzles. A building was engulfed in a pillar of flame. The shotgun-house.
Whooping. Screaming. Bulrush was grunting with exertion. I shivered in my shirt-sleeves.
I drew my gun.
Now I could see the monstrous shadows of horses circling like wolves. I could see the men running through the street. Women in their fluttering skirts. Dutch fired a shot. Even at two hundred yards his bullet found its mark in a horse’s skull. Knees buckling, it plunged and rolled.
“Kill every last one o’those sons of bitches!” screamed Dutch.
We fanned out as we swooped in and squeezed them in a whirling noose. Arthur and Charles and Sean ducked behind the buildings left and right. Dutch and I cut a straight line down the thoroughfare, hailing bullets on every rider in sight. There was one, two, three, four—fourteen horses for fourteen O’Driscolls. All mine now. I pulled the knot in my coat-sleeves loose and tossed the boy into the snow and dropped my lantern after him. I drew my other gun.
Finally, finally, I had something to shoot.
I broke into a cackle. “I hear Hell is good this time o’year, boys!”
Diving past the burning shack I saw two women and a little man staggering toward the cook-house. Standing in the door was Hosea Matthews, fire-lit, the shadow of his hat cast over his face, his pistol cracking against his grip. A horse flew by me and cut off one of the women, and the rider reached down to fist a hand in her scarf. Her screech jerked in her throat as the scarf tightened and she started to drag behind him. I emptied what was left of both cylinders into him, one-two-three-four-five. He toppled off his horse and his chest fell onto the woman’s head.
I made a twirl and reloaded and shot another O’Driscoll in the mouth as I leaped past. I passed the Count again. Sadie Adler was missing every one of her shots. When she ran out of bullets she shrieked in ungodly rage and reeled back her arm and hurled Dutch’s gun. It struck an O’Driscoll in the neck and knocked him to the ground. Then Sadie was on the ground too, crumpled on hands and knees—I think she’d flung herself down. Dutch didn’t go back for her. He didn’t even look. But it wouldn’t have mattered because within a second she was scrambling forward like some kind of animal and attacking the O’Driscoll with her body.
“Kid-fucker!” she screamed.
In a haze of fire and smoke she grappled him before he could get up. Devilish strong, all wiry power. I knew she would be. She had his arm pinned. She found a knife in his belt. She stabbed it through his wrist. And when his grip loosened and she had his gun, she unloaded it directly into his face.
“Kid-fucker! Kid-fucker!”
Wild thing she was. Wild indeed.
Back up the thoroughfare the women had made it to the cook-house and Hosea had shut the door. We hadn’t boarded those windows, to let the wood-smoke vent—I could see now the barrel of a rifle resting on the sill. As I galloped up the street again I met Karen’s eye on the other end of the rifle. She winked. She must have been running on quite a thrill to think of doing that to me.
Then I heard a snap and a hiss. I looked round. An O’Driscoll had lit something in his hand—a fuse—and he tossed it through the window over Karen’s head.
The O’Driscoll slumped suddenly. Morgan had shot him from across the street.
Hosea burst out of the door.
“Out! Out! Get out!”
Everyone inside ran into the street.
The cook-house exploded into shards. Pain flashed through my head.
Bulrush lurched forward, then took off bucking with a violence that jarred my back. Unseated, I swung over his neck into the snow. I was struggling to get my knees under me when something heavy fell on my leg and I felt a wet snap.
A shock went through my whole body, a thick warm-water pressure, like all my blood was turning to foam. I made a noise that was shaky and pained but I didn’t quite feel pain. I seemed to be beyond myself, as if the blast had knocked me out of my skull and into the air.
I levered myself onto my elbows, panting. I pushed onto one knee. Folks was swarming around like flies on carrion. Or maybe that was the dark spots that had filled the water of my eyes. Sounds had gone murky, muzzy. I couldn’t tell what to shoot, so I tried to stand. My knee buckled beneath me and sent me down again. I sat up and blinked and shook my head. My clothes was soaked through, I noticed. A thin wisp of cold was sinking into my burning skin. There was a child in the snow somewhere wearing my fucking coat.
And that hot pulse of anger swept the feeling back into me. My senses cleared. The O’Driscolls was streaming out of camp like a deluge of black flood-water. As they went by I heard them cheering. I shot at them until my guns ran dry.
And then I hung my head and fell forward onto my elbows and I screamed.
Bulrush had stomped my ankle. The realization was dawning on me. It felt like my bones had grown teeth and were chewing out of my leg, the flesh swelling to swallow my boot.
“What happened to you?”
Arthur’s voice. I reached out blindly, grabbing at his foot.
“Fucking—horse,” I groaned. “When I find that thing I’m gonna melt him for soap.”
Arthur kicked my hand away and squatted by my head. “We might melt you first. What use is a lame Micah? You was hardly useful before.”
I looked up coldly, squeezing my hands into fists. “Devil fuck your eyes out.”
His jaw stiffened. I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew suddenly that he had that glint in his eye. He was thinking about killing me.
He stood up, and walked away.
“Wait, A-Arthur,” I gasped. “Please, Arthur, please help me . . .”
He didn’t stop.
I ended up crawling down the thoroughfare on my hands and knees. I think I went into a kind of trance. Smoke and fire choked the night air. The sheep were moving aimlessly, bleating, crying, holding each other. Dutch was calling for Hosea. Grimshaw had gathered a huddle of women. Someone was dying, I heard. I kept crawling.
A crowd shuffled past me, going where I was going: the post-office. They was talking in hushed voices. Dragging someone, or carrying. When they’d all filed inside, Grimshaw stopped in the doorway and shoved someone out.
“Take a walk, Mr. MacGuire.”
The door shut in his face. He turned the knob desperately. He scrabbled at the boards in the windows.
“Karen!” he cried. “Can y’hear me? It’s gonna be all right! It’s gonna be all right, my darlin!”
Before the sun had risen upon our fourth day in Colter, Karen Jones was dead.
The Angel That Is Icarus — Chapter 2. Obsession II.
Chapter Summary:
Dead Head Hills isn’t exactly a hub of civilization, but supplies are running low, and Micah and John are itching to get out of Colter. There must be someone in these mountains willing to lend a hand.
It was during those six days in the derelict town of Colter that I realized what would destroy the Van der Linde gang.
It wasn’t the bitter cold, nor the brittle wind, nor the vicious fights. By then, it was already too late. The fractures had long since become chasms, the devotion insanity. Dutch was going to die believing he was Christ on the cross, that was clear from the moment I met him. His people would abandon him to his madness, or if they was as mad as he was, they would be hunted down and shot in the street like dogs.
No, we was long past the glory days, long past the crescendo. This was the end, orchestrated by none other than the mad god who started it all.
Obsession, my friend, is an infectious disease. And old Dutch—he was a leper.
“It’s not a waste-land,” said Dutch, “it’s an enterprise. People live in Canada.”
“People not like us. We—” Hosea’s cough was muffled behind the cabin’s walls. Over night it had become more of a breathy whistle than a burst; he just didn’t have enough air to pump the bellows. “We fringe folk endure a harder winter. We barely made it through this winter, you saw.”
“This winter was the worst one of our damn lives, Hosea!”
“And you think Canada’s gonna be any different?”
“Well, to start, we won’t be fringe folk for long.”
“Sure, sure, we’ll have a thousand-head remuda and a city in your name. They hand over the deed when you cross the border. Lovely people, Canadians, generous like you wouldn’t believe!”
This was usually the part where Hosea would jeer or cajole to signal the joke. These days, he didn’t bother.
Dutch’s response was tight enough to snap a bowstring. “I don’t appreciate your sarcasm.”
Hosea’s response was immediate. “I don’t appreciate your hot air.” Then, before Dutch could fire another shot, he said, “Go away. I need a nap.”
For a frail old man in failing health, Hosea had a whipcrack wit and tenacity to match, his beady eyes bright as a boy’s. I’d never once seen him lose an argument—only win it, or end it. He was relentless. After being so curtly dismissed, Dutch had no choice but to storm off with the last of his dignity, his thunderous footfalls diminishing as he retreated deeper into the cabin.
“Eavesdroppin?”
Arthur was plodding up the stairs to the porch, heavy as an ox and nearly as big. This time I didn’t jump.
“Those in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones,” I said, spreading my hands.
He moved to lean against the wall beside the front door and crossed his arms over his chest. “I never did read the Bible.”
Charitably, I decided not to correct him. “Never seen you do much readin at all,” I said.
“Never seen you do any.”
“Then you ain’t been payin attention.”
“Neither have you.”
With his shoulders set and that frown on his face, Morgan looked as though he was trying to guard the cabin from my ears. Sometimes he was as grim and monstrous as a Horseman of the Apocalypse—Death at the shoulder of Conquest. Other times he was so amusing, so strangely harmless, I couldn’t help but tilt my head and laugh at him.
I’ve been told I laugh like a baby. The sound always made Morgan’s hackles rise.
“‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,’” I said through my smile, “‘for they shall be satisfied.’ That’s Matthew, for the unenlightened.”
“Sure,” said Arthur flatly. “Does righteousness cover vengeance?”
“Hm?”
“I’ve seen your gun. ‘Vengeance is hereby mine.’”
“A man who reads guns, not Bibles. Funny feller, you is.” I cradled the grips of my revolvers, running my tongue along my teeth. “But a wise one, no mistake. Guns are honest; a book only lies. Ain’t no gods out there watchin over us, Arthur. No such thing as righteousness or satisfaction. There’s only us, and the people that want us dead. Maybe not now, but soon.”
Arthur shook his head and huffed. “Well that explains you.”
“It explains nothing,” I said slowly. “It’s just the way things are. Kill or be killed.” I stopped then with a chuckle, and held up my hands disarmingly. “You, uh, you have to do it, you know—to protect the people you love.”
“Oh, you believe in love, do you.”
I grinned an eyeless grin. “It hurts me how little you know me, Arthur, after all this time ridin together. It truly does.”
With a low hum I traced out a long line in the snow with my boot. The wood beneath was wet and rotten, abandoned for at least a decade. By the end of the next century, this would all be eaten away. There would be no sign that anyone was ever here.
“Whatchu really think about this . . . all this?” asked Arthur. “This plan?”
He was testing me, always testing me, this feller. Looking for a tell, I suppose, or a vulnerability. Maybe he was emboldened by the glimmer of an honest thought that he’d lured out of me. But I was happy to disappoint him. I chose the most ridiculous lie that came to me, just to toy with him a little.
“Always wanted to go to Canada,” I sighed wistfully.
He set his jaw. “That so.”
“Sure.”
“The scenery?” he asked. “The weather? The ‘crystalline lakes’?”
“Heard they speak French up there. Beauuutiful language.”
“Oh, I’m sure it really calls to you.”
I laughed again. I could almost see Arthur’s skin crawl.
The cabin door swung open. Dutch leaned out with his forearms against the door-frame, ensnaring us in a dark, scrutinizing stare. My face fell at once. Arthur stayed where he was, planted at his master’s side.
“You boys havin fun here, chewin the rag on my porch?” asked Dutch, a cold edge to his tone. “Do you have nothin better to do?”
“Actually,” I said, stepping closer, “I was hopin to speak to you, boss. We need supplies, rather urgently.”
Dutch met my eyes. “I’m inclined to agree.”
“There’s a crick down thataway”—I gestured to the south—“so says Arthur. Thinkin along there’s the likeliest place to find some . . . generous neighbors.”
“So go and look.” Dutch flicked out his fingers. “You want an engraved invitation?”
A coal of anger flickered in my chest. I bowed my head and looked up at him past the brim of my hat. “I assume you don’t want no robbery.”
That made him pause. His eyes dug trenches into me, but they was busy with a hive of errant thoughts. Days of interruption from his usual meticulous grooming had left his beard rugged and his hair bedraggled—he didn’t cut a particularly charming figure, this mountain man more fur than man. But I had enough sense to know this weren’t the time for causing trouble we couldn’t run away from, and Dutch was never too proud to look desperate.
“You assume correctly,” he said at last. “We’re in dire straits. What we need are friends, Mr. Bell.”
“Right you are, Dutch, as always,” I said.
Morgan’s brow twitched. Dutch didn’t see it.
“Go and have a look,” he said, “but don’t do more’n that. Don’t make yourself known. Stay out of sight, if you can. I want to know who’s around: their trade, their means, their numbers. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll find some hospitality in these parts.”
“You know,” I said, glancing up at the clear blue sky, “I think our luck is on the turn.”
The smile he donned was as performative as a whore’s. Two actors, we was, warring like cockerels behind a script and a simper.
“Take John with you,” he said. “He needs somethin to do.”
As I turned to make my way down the rickety wooden steps, I caught a glimpse of Dutch bending toward Arthur. My ears pricked up.
“Arthur, I need you to get a hunting party together. Charles and Lamb. We need meat, as soon as possible. Mr. Pearson’s just informed me that the grain’s gone to rot.”
“Sure. But Lamb’s no good for that.”
“He’s not?”
“Wouldn’t find a deer if he was standin on it. Can’t use a bow neither, he’ll scare off everything for miles with that blunderbuss he calls a gun.”
“Well, my mistake.”
“I can have him set up some snares, catch us some rabbits. He’s handy with traps, if we tell him where to put’m.”
“Better’n nothin, I guess. We need to get this old coot eatin good. The boy, too.”
“And Javier.”
“Oh, poor Javier. How is he?”
“He’ll be fine. At least half . . .”
Soon the crunch of my boots in the fresh snow was louder than the elegy drifting behind me. I waded ponderously toward the post-office, spinning my hope like a dime on the tip of my finger.
After the blizzard had died down in the early breaths of the dawn and the sky had cast off that terrible white weight, an atmosphere of calm resignation had fallen upon the camp. This was their future—they could see it now. A never-ending battle against the kind of cold that gets in your marrow. A lean hunger that devours you alive until there’s nothing left for the vultures. A life of fear, of being hunted, of living like prey.
There’s no one to blame when you die the death of beasts. It’s pathetic, apathetic. A bullet fired without thought or forethought. You can’t fight back; you can’t run. I was waiting for its next victim. Whether it was Hosea or Javier or delicate little Jack, it made no difference now—Dutch was the spirit of vindication when he was bested by a man, but when bested by Mother Nature, he was just like any other fool. Powerless. He wouldn’t be able to stand it.
I pushed into the post-office and wrinkled my nose. The heat from the pot-bellied stove had lifted the damp from the waterlogged wood and thickened the air with the clinging stink of mold. Sean startled, hiding a beer bottle behind his leg. Lenny was dozing in the corner, wedged upright between the wall and a bench, chin to chest and arms tucked around his middle. Lamb had climbed over the clerk’s counter to sleep in a nest of buckskin blankets and broken shelves. No one else was in there.
I checked my watch: twenty to two o’clock. I grunted impatiently. I thought about bringing Sean along instead, but then he said, “What’chew sniffin around in here for, y’greasy old hound?” and I barked at him so loud it shook the walls. Everyone in the room flinched. Lamb was on his feet like a shot with his gun in his hand. Cackling, I slammed the door shut before he could shoot me.
Here’s my advice to you: if you must be a dog, be the Big Bad Wolf.
I ended up slogging all the way to the shotgun-house further up the thoroughfare to fetch John. Inside, the place was as somber as a dirge and reeked even worse than the post-office, sour with sweat amid the bitter of wet smoke. The child’s phlegmy cough rang out from the bedroom at the back, and a murmur of women’s voices followed. In the corner there seemed to be a funereal game of five-card stud happening at the dinner-table. When the old money-lender won the hand, he tipped back a shot of whiskey. My throat went dry with envy.
John and Swanson was sitting by the fire beside Javier. Swaddled in blankets like a body in a shroud, the boy lay supine, his face pale and drawn, his brows tight with pain. He was shivering violently. In his hand he clutched the reverend’s cross; his lips moved in silent prayer. Above him, Swanson’s thready voice read from the Book of Psalms.
“‘You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me’—”
“Marston,” I broke in, “you and me, c’mon.”
Marston looked up at me, squinted a little. “Where we goin?”
“Meetin the neighbors.”
“We got neighbors?”
“Better hope so, or your greaser buddy will be our next meal.”
He considered it for a moment. He glanced in the direction of the bedroom—thinking, no doubt, about the woman who had trapped him in here. Weighing whether he preferred me or her.
“Fine,” he decided, and stood up. “Ain’t much left of my greaser buddy to eat, anyway.”
“Chinga tu madre,” said Javier weakly.
“Yeah, chingy ching.”
“You’re lucky I don’t have my gun on me.”
“Real frightening. You can’t even open your eyes.”
Javier lifted an eyelid by a fraction, but the light made him wince.
“Stop disturbing him,” scolded Swanson.
Marston nudged Javier’s foot with his own. “Don’t die while I’m gone.”
“Sure, brother.”
Toy Ann nearly hit me in the face with the front door as she came bustling in, a canteen held against her chest. I staggered back with a hand on my hat. She was a tiny, shriveled old thing, but she moved fast and had the stiff strength of a dry bone. The bearskin coat that dwarfed her frame was warning enough of that: a hunting trophy, she claimed. I believed her.
She paid me neither apology nor acknowledgment as she marched to Javier’s side.
“Reverend!” she shouted. Javier’s eyes snapped open, glazed and bewildered. The old bat was half deaf and half drunk. “Ga’blessy, Reverend, but get outta my way, he ain’t yet dead.”
“W-well,” stammered Swanson, raising his hands, “Miss—”
“Shew! Away now!” She shook the canteen as if trying to spook a pigeon. Crackerjack Cure-All sloshed menacingly against the metal. “Horble ginger fiend. I’ll hurt ye good, I swear I will!”
“Miss Baker!”
Marston hurried out the door before he got caught in the cross-fire of Grimshaw’s wrath. I dragged my feet after him, hoping for a glimpse of the carnage. More amusing than Toy Ann herself was seeing Grimshaw, so used to soft little girls broken in by a lifetime of violence, discombobulated by a senile liquor-loving witch.
The two of them was wrestling like a pair of polecats for the canteen when I finally tore myself away.
There was precious few supplies to go around in the cook-house, so Marston and I had to make do with a handful of rations and a top-up of the cheap swill Karen had bought in the tiny foothill town of Cathedral as we fled into Dead Head. I wasn’t overly concerned; Baylock was resourceful enough, and I could go a few days without a meal. The swill, I admit, was a sore point. I wished I still had a bottle or two of bourbon, but I never was good at pacing myself. I could want it now or I could want it later, but I’d never want it any more or less—that was my philosophy.
It’s just borrowin from the future, my daddy once said to me.
If he keeps it up, my brother whispered in my ear, his grin as sharp as a wire, maybe he’ll run outta future to borrow.
Patient in all things, that boy was.
Sometimes, when I thought about it too hard, I found it quite a feat of nature that every part of me, from my lumbering ape-like body to my singular man-hating habits, had crawled from the black yolk of my daddy’s blood. See, the Devil’s children have no mother. I may have been held in a womb for a time, but I was a cowbird in a sparrow’s nest, as alien to that flesh as another’s child. All glimpses of a stranger in my brother were invariably the woman’s touch I did not get; he was a graphophone spinning the last echoes of her existence in a waning web of wax. I don’t remember her, but I remember the finger-prints she left in his mold. What a different man I would have been, if I got my share.
Before I’d even left the cook-house I’d already swigged a mouthful of whiskey. Quite a feat of nature.
In the cavernous livery stable, Morgan and the Indians were already saddling their horses. Dark eyes glittering, Lamb looked up from the spool of fishing-line he was winding around his hand.
“Afternoon, gents,” he said cheerfully.
John picked through the stalls in search of Benjamin. “You still owe me a pack of cigarettes,” he said.
“Do I?”
“Don’t play dumb. I won it fair and square.”
Lamb stuffed the line into his saddle-bag and hoisted himself onto his horse, holding the crown of his gambler. He ran a finger neatly along its pencil-curl brim. His nap—and its rude interruption—seemingly hadn’t put a dent in his careful poise. He looked as well rested and high spirited as ever, not a hair loose from his braids.
“Remind me when I get back,” he said.
“Well d’you have one on you now?” asked John. “I’m headin out.”
Lamb leaned forward with his hands folded over the pommel, beaming like a cherub. “You run outta cigarettes?”
“Would you just gimme the damn pack you owe me?”
“When I get back,” Lamb assured him.
“He’s a damn liar,” I said. “He doesn’t even smoke.”
John squinted. “Whad’you mean he don’t smoke?”
“Have you ever seen him smoke? No? Cause he don’t.”
Lamb set his clinging smile upon me. “This one must have been raised with wolves. Scared me half to death before you came in, Arthur.”
Arthur heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Whad he do, bite you?”
“Barked at me. Woof woof.” Lamb smothered a chortle against the back of his hand.
“Yeah, well,” said Arthur, climbing onto the Morrigan, “I wouldn’t worry. His bark’s worse than his bite.”
They was laughing at me, to my face. My blood boiled in my veins, motherless and sinful as the blood of a demon. I abided many things, but I could not abide this. Every muscle in my body coiled tight.
The hunting party rode for the doors. Quietly, I leered. Then as Lamb passed me I lunged forward and snapped my teeth at him with near-manic rage. His hand darted to his gun. The look on his face was no longer angelic. An image came to my mind of women and children strung in a cloud of flies from a Christmas tree. I stepped back.
He continued to watch me until he was a silhouette in the light at the mouth of the stable. Then he turned his horse to follow Arthur’s, and disappeared from view.
“You two’re just as strange as each other,” said John.
For hours, Spider Gorge led us on a twisting chase down Dead Head’s spine. Our wretched town of sticks and stones had long since faded away, and before us rolled a river of dark trees pooling in the saddle between the mountain-tops. White dripped from granite flanks like semen, daubed thick as grave dirt in the wish-bone of forked thighs. We rode until my lips were bitten numb and my fingers and toes were cadaver stiff and the sun had dipped behind the range on our right.
That was when we came upon a drop in the slope. The river galloped down into a vast basin that stretched out like a lake below us, awash with blue shadow against the rim of fire-lit peaks, dense with spruces and firs as old as the earth.
I found it hard to believe none of this was on Arthur’s county map. But I wasn’t going to question him. Typically, Arthur was our navigator. He could figure out where we was faster than anyone else, and that was quite the asset for a gang that lived on blank spaces and unmarked roads. Hosea called him “goose brained” for the way that a goose in the air is never lost. It was a trait the two of them shared, and Charles as well, but they couldn’t commune with a map like Arthur could.
Meanwhile, I’d unfolded my map and could’ve believed we was in Montana.
“Other side just over that way, then?” asked John, drawing Benjamin up beside me.
“One would assume,” I said ambiguously. Dead Head Hills was nothing but an awkward smear on this map, anyway, drawn by a cartographer who surely ain’t seen the place; no surprise I couldn’t understand it. I folded it back up and slipped it into my saddle-bag. Less ambiguously, I said, “There’ll be someone in among all these trees, I have no doubt.”
“You think?”
“I said, ‘I have no doubt,’ didn’t I?” I snapped my fingers at him. His eyes narrowed. “Pay attention. See that gap there?” I pointed to a spot in the basin where the tops of the trees seemed to bow and give way. “Must be a lake.”
Lake and trees meant grass, when there wasn’t two feet of snow, and the ramparts of the range would shield this basin from the brunt of the wind. It made for better living than our town, that was certain.
“Good enough,” said Marston. “Let’s find somewhere to make camp.”
I unfastened the shovel wrapped in my sugan from behind my saddle and tossed it to him. “You set up camp,” I said. “I’ll find us a rabbit.”
Marston’s nose wrinkled incredulously. “You ain’t no kind of hunter.”
“What do you know about me, boy?” I sneered. “I been huntin since your mama was wipin drool offa your chin.”
He juggled with that for a moment. He damned near thought out loud, this kid—I could see the scales tipping in his head, wavering between the boyish poles of obstinacy and disinterest.
This time, disinterest won.
“Whatever you say,” he said with a shrug. “Watch out for grizzlies, I guess.”
As the blue of the sky deepened from a lake shore to an ocean, and Venus appeared as a spark on the horizon, I rode Baylock into the woods. He was beginning to droop under me, I could feel it; three days of meager feed, a heavy burden and enough plowing to drain a work-horse had taken its toll. He tossed his head in half-hearted protest, loath to wade through this sinking snow. So I offered him a beet—one of only four Pearson had spared me—and chatted to him for a while about this and that. The trees closed in around us, a suspicious crowd of dark-clad strangers listening intently to the chuff of his hoofs and my aimless muttering.
I dismounted when the fire on the range was a smoldering red. The snow came nearly up to my knees, powdery as dandelion seed. Before me, the tell-tale track of a rabbit tunnel traced an endless snake round the trees. I flipped a coin, and it landed heads. I forged ahead, swinging my gun out like a dowser.
The air dropped into a bone-chill as I shuffled through a deepening dark on the rabbit’s trail. I beat at bushes and knocked on trees, my eyes swiveling for movement, and now and then I paused to listen, head tilted. It was a quiet world up here, quiet and still, with only the long exhale of the atmosphere for company, and the occasional stippled patter of snow falling from the boughs when a breeze shouldered through.
I had been walking for at least a quarter of an hour before I caught wind of another warm body. A bush to my left broke into a shudder, unprompted by the air. I looked over at it; the rabbit tunnel crept right over its feet. Leaning low, I skulked toward it, tucking my hair behind an ear.
Close enough to touch, the bush twitched. I shifted my weight and kicked it hard. A jack-rabbit exploded out of the snow like a fish from water. My gun hand shot out, almost without thought. Cocked the hammer, pulled the trigger. The crack of the bullet sent birds bursting from the evergreens. The rabbit dropped down in a heap.
As I lifted it up, its legs jerked feebly.
“Bet you feel reeeal stupid now, don’t you?” I said, and wrenched its neck until the spine crunched in my fist.
It was a lean little snowshoe rabbit of three pounds or less; not much of a meal for one man let alone two, especially with a bullet mangling its shoulder and breast. But the sun was low enough now that the snow was darker than the sky. So I slung the rabbit over my shoulder and trudged back to Baylock.
Wasn’t hard to find Marston’s camp; the smoke from his fire was thick and white with damp, curling high above the treetops. The flickering flames was stark from a mile away.
When I could see John’s face in the firelight, watching my approach, I flaunted my kill and declared, “Never let it be said I don’t do my part for you folks!”
“Barely a mouthful on that thing,” said Marston. “Forgive me if I’m not impressed.”
“That’s some talk comin from you, Marston, some talk indeed. Now it’s your turn to be useful.” I threw him the rabbit—he let it land ungracefully in the snow beside him. “Skin it.”
“How bout a ‘please’?”
“C’mon, wifey, don’t make this difficult. I caught the food, you skin the food.”
Without further protest, Marston pulled a knife from his belt and resigned himself to the task. Times like these it surprised me that, for all he played at surliness, he was quite a well-trained boy. Waspish and stubborn by the handful, sure, but lazy he was not. He’d dug out a wide pit to make this camp-site and packed the snow down nice and tight, and set up the tent on his own to boot. He’d already laid the ground beneath his ground-cloth with fresh spruce boughs. His fire was built to last. He knew how to survive; he just did what he was told.
Despite the back-talk, Marston rarely acted on any meaningful thought. One might get the impression his thoughts ran no deeper than what he could piss out in one stream. But I’d seen flashes of intelligence in his eyes that rarely made it to his mouth: creeping doubts, unasked questions, silent disapproval—he was more of a cynic than he let on.
Which is why, when I asked him “So how’s Javier lookin?” around a mouthful of gristle, I knew he’d tell me exactly what he thought.
“Don’t know,” he said. “He might die.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Fever ain’t let up once.” John peeled a thin ribbon of flesh from a tiny bone. Picked at it distractedly. “He’s all burned up inside. Says he feels like he’s on fire, and his head’s killin him. In a few days, bullet might be a mercy.”
“Toy Ann ain’t makin no difference?”
He scoffed. “That old hag’s more likely to poison him than fix him.”
“Real shame.”
And it was. Ironic for a revolucionario, but Javier was a good soldier. A man of Bibles, that one. I guessed that was why he’d fallen in with this crowd to begin with: Dutch sure knew his way around a pen and a passion.
“Never know what’ll get you in the end,” I said. “Some of us go down fightin—others, they just go to waste.”
John scraped at his teeth with the needle-point of his rabbit bone. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a damn lizard?”
“Just being honest with you. It’s a big, scary world out there, son.”
“Don’t call me that. In fact, don’t talk to me.”
I laughed lowly. He was fun. Of them all, he was my favorite. I tapped out a cigarette and passed it to him. He didn’t thank me.
After another half-hour of smoking and sipping at our whiskey, we crept into the tent to get our frozen asses off the snow. John stretched out across his bed, lanky as a fawn, then turned on his side and curled into a ball, resting his head on his saddle and his hat on his ear.
I leaned over him, grinning. “Cold there? Wanna cuddle, sweetheart?”
“Rather die,” he said, his sandpaper voice muffled. “Ain’tchu gonna sleep?”
“Already had one.”
“Jesus, you really ain’t human, whatever you are.”
The long night waned in whispers: sharp breaths of wind pushed past the trees; animals shuffled in their holes to get at hidden grasses and strips of bark; the horses bickered in quiet whickers as they searched for a spot to graze. I heard a lone wolf inspire a choir of scattered howls. I heard a fox catch some kind of varmint and carry it away. The little thing screamed like a murder in a distant alley before its head was smothered in the grip of slavering jaws. I went off to fetch some firewood, and came back to find another fox nosing at my knapsack. Its brown eyes caught on mine; it bolted into the darkness.
I tended the fire. I cleaned my guns. I smoked a few more cigarettes. My breath was a cloud of mist and fume. This was my last personal pack—I’d have to take from the communal stores soon. The thought was repellent. Tallied in Pearson’s note-book like a beggar in a bread line.
I was starting to shiver badly, so I burrowed into my sugan and pressed myself against Marston’s back anyway. He wasn’t faring much better.
“Said I’d rather d-die,” he muttered, but didn’t move to shake me off.
“Ain’tchu e-ever built a lean-to?” I hissed, cupping my nose in my gloves. “This is path-thetic, Marston.”
“Shut up. I’m sleeping.”
All angles and edges, he was. Why Abigail would want this man warming her bed, I had no idea.
Long before the first ember of dawn touched the sky, I was shaken from my spidery half-dreams by a fragment of bird-song.
My joints were locked. My fingers and toes were numb. Every movement was like scraping at rusty hinges with a fork. Marston was so deeply asleep he didn’t stir as my frozen agony wrenched a low, wounded noise from me. When had I gotten too old for this life? Maybe I’d just grown too used to the balmy Rolling Plains and shed all my years of roughing it in the Rockies.
It took me at least a half-hour to peel myself away from John and get out of the tent. I was hobbling like Uncle, the soles of my feet cramping something awful. As I rekindled the fire and put some water on to boil, I thought again about Abigail and that sour little face of hers, scowling at me like I was a lemon she could taste from three yards away. What a fight it’d be if I told her to rub my feet. A good fight. A worthy fight. I wondered how long it would take to wear her down—or how much it would cost me.
The moment I began drip-brewing coffee with an old cheese-cloth, John sprang to life. He turned onto his back and yawned. He rolled his ankles, then sat up and rolled his shoulders.
“Why the Hell’re you doin that?” he demanded, squinting up at me. “What the Hell time s’it? Ain’t even morning yet.”
I checked my watch. “Four o’clock,” I said in a sing-song, just to irritate him.
“Four o’clock?” John put his head on his knees and groaned. “Why in . . . Ugh. It’s damn freezing.”
“Whine, whine, whine. That all you people can do?” I prodded at the fire with a stick, turning over an ash-bellied branch. “You’re gonna need thicker skin if you plan on survivin Canada.”
John groaned again. “Give me some coffee, right now.”
“Since you’re awake, you can finish makin it.” I stood up on creaky knees. I couldn’t feel my feet.
While I looked them over to make sure I wasn’t about to lose any toes, John poured us some coffee and heated up a can of beans. He settled down next to me beneath the eaves of the tent, and we wolfed the beans like it was our last meal, both battling for the bigger share. It went down so fast I burned my mouth and couldn’t taste a thing, but it was one of the best breakfasts of my whole hick life. Right up there with Domino Crake’s hoe-cakes that got all us Ogle–York Boys through that terrible March in Dakota. The heat bloomed inside me like a new life. I took my gloves off and cradled my mug of coffee in frigid palms, and I closed my eyes as I drank, breathing the warm steam into my lungs. If I had someone rubbing my sore feet too, all this would even be worth the trouble.
“Say,” I said, sliding a cold knife into my peace, “that A-Abigail of yours . . .”
Marston didn’t hesitate. “She ain’t mine.”
“So you wouldn’t mind if I”—I cleared my throat, pointedly—“had a slice?”
“You can sure try, but after whatchu did to Jenny, I don’t think any o’the women’ll give you a slice.”
All the warmth drained from my veins in the wake of a wash of ice.
“I—did—not—kill—Jenny.”
“Sure,” said John breezily, “I don’t think you did. I think she just saw you comin and reckoned Hell was the better deal. Can’t say I blame her.”
My fingers tightened around the mug. “Very funny. That’s very funny, Marston.”
“Struck a nerve, did I?”
“Not at all. My nerves ain’t so easily struck.”
“F’you say so.”
“I do.”
I knew what they all thought of me. To say they wasn’t fond of me would be putting it mildly. Sure, that hadn’t mattered when I thought I’d have the Blackwater money halfway to Nevada by now. But things had spiraled far, far beyond my control, and these folks had known me long enough that they didn’t believe any other façade. They wasn’t convinced by amiability, nor by threats, nor even by unfailing competence. I was the beast who put their god in my pocket, who killed young women and scattered their brains for my morbid pleasure. This weren’t no church offering penance to sinners, no matter what Dutch said. They would make it my Hell. They would test my patience.
Our silence spanned hours as anger stoked a new heat inside me. The sun began to rise somewhere behind the mountains, bringing a slow blue out of the sky. It was then that we could see the coal-smoke demon of unlit clouds looming in the north, heavy with another storm. We continued to say nothing. I suppose there wasn’t much to say about it.
We pulled down our camp and saddled our horses. It looked like they’d dug out a few shallow grazing patches, so they wasn’t starving, but I gave Baylock a beet to calm his nerves. The encroaching storm was unsettling him.
When John and I finally mounted up, he wheeled Benjamin toward me with black in his eye.
“I’m sicka lookin at you,” he said. “You head on down to the lake and I’ll go up the ridge there, look for a vantage point.”
I followed his gesture to the low, snowy border of crests in the west. From here, they wasn’t much farther than three or four miles.
“Running away, is you?” I said nastily. “Fraid I’ll shoot you for mouthin off?”
“You still on about that? Jesus.” John huffed. Would have been a laugh, if he were smiling. He weren’t. “Can’t even remember what we was talkin about. Give it a rest.”
This dirty game, then. Warring with my nerves this morning, then. I dropped it like a live wire.
“What d’you expect you’ll see in that situation?” I asked, jabbing my thumb at the clouds.
“Anything but your damn face,” he said. “Meet you back in town. Adios.”
That was all. He spun Benjamin around and urged him into a brisk chop, carving a long gash in the snow as he rode away.
I sneered at his retreating back. “Keep that up, Marston, and I’ll start gettin the impression you don’t like me!”
If the stubborn ass wanted to be in the worst place possible during a blizzard just for a sulk, that was his right. He had the tent, but it wouldn’t be of use to either of us if we was caught outside to-night. I, on the other hand, had the coffee. To the victor go the spoils.
Baylock and I soon met with Spider Gorge once more, wending a slow march to its gurgling dirge. The dark Hell-smoke became a high gray fog. The morning sun lit white candles on the ripples and rocks. I tried whistling a lively tune to raise my mood, but now I was thinking about Jenny.
Red-lipped Jenny, balanced on a knife’s edge.
That girl was a fine piece, with gossamer hair and a storm in her eyes, and wide hips that swung when she walked. Young, too—very young. She had that sweet and sad look about her, but it was only a look.
I liked her. She was the only one of those tight cunts who’d actually fuck me. And what a dirty little thing she was. Anything that could fit in her mouth went there. I was glad she didn’t care much for kissing because I wouldn’t have kissed her with a barge-pole.
And then I guess I killed her. Just like I guess I killed that girl on the ferry. It was a very simple equation with these people, you see; they liked each other well enough, but they didn’t like me, so I did it all, and I was everywhere. I was the gun in Dutch’s hand, and the bottle in Jenny’s. The bullet, and the rock.
Hell, did it irk me to be blamed for what others did.
Whether it was my black mood or the white storm, Baylock really began to chafe after we’d put in the first twisting mile. His ears was pinned back, his teeth working hard at the bit. He was prone to fits of temper, this boy, and they was nothing pretty for the man on his back.
I leaned forward and met his eye. “What is your problem? Knock it off.” I laid my hand on the hard muscle of his neck. He shook me off, grumbling under his breath. My anger writhed behind my ribs. I dug in my spurs for a pinch sharp enough to make him twitch, and he jerked his head up and quirked his ears, cowed like a child at the crack of the switch.
“That’s better,” I said. “You fight me, you always lose. Your memory ain’t so good, kid.”
He was listening to me now, bashfully, waiting for reassurance that I wouldn’t do it again. But I didn’t much feel like reassuring him this time.
We rode on in silence.
As the downward slope gave way to the flat at the bottom of the basin, the storm swept the sun into its palm and dusted us with puffs of fresh snow, soft and fragile as down-feathers. But the gentleness, as ever, was not long to last. The flakes became heavy and flew like locusts against my back. Struck me hard as hail-stones, clung to my coat. The wind rose into a biting one, a burrowing one, chewing through me and spreading an icy seed. I turned up my collar. I tucked my hair into it. A sudden gust lashed over the river and lathered the water and whipped my hat clean off. My hand sprang out and caught it before my head noticed the loss.
Any man who has weathered a blizzard knows this feeling. The mind becomes startlingly clear. The senses narrow to the orchestra. Crunching hoofs—a howling roar—a thousand voices—a river of white snakes—now a bludgeon—now a scythe. No gaps. No lull. I shivered as if trying to rattle out of my skin. Baylock’s heat was buried too deep beneath his winter coat to warm my locked legs.
I thought briefly and vindictively of Marston, up there on the ridge that was nothing more than a white line on a white sky, thrashed senseless, I knew, for his struck nerves. He got what fools got. I hoped it killed him.
The forest of spruce and fir thickened as I rode, barely-there ghosts in a white-breath mist, and they pressed harder against the banks of the river until we was weaving winding loops around their skirts. The wind shook the snow from their dark arms, and the rush of locusts made new sleeves of their own wings, thin and silken as evening-gloves. A raven snapped past, capsized, fluttering like a widow’s dress, and disappeared in the black tangle ahead. Baylock flinched and lurched to the right. I could hardly move my fingers to tug the reins; I could only trust his sleight-of-limb.
It was like I was riding the sky. We leaped on clouds in a cavalry choreography. We knew none of the steps and couldn’t catch the rhythm—at any moment we might slip straight through and fall, fall, fall to the far-away plains below. I was grinning like a madman, feeling perhaps as the wind does: spread over everything until scarcely there at all. No one was watching me, no one was there—except, now, you.
I filled my lungs and began to sing.
For three hours we rode hard in a near-blind haze. The wind settled once or twice, as if the sky had run out of air, before picking up again to flog the trees with a vengeance. I was beginning to doubt that anyone would actually live here, a stone’s throw from a mine that didn’t turn out and little else. Even the hardiest mountain man would find himself under six feet of snow on this late spring day, to say nothing of the scornful winters that must try their damnedest to rid this place of life.
But as misgivings circled my head, the river opened out and the white curtain parted to unveil a wind-whipped lake. It was not as vast as I had expected, but the clearing was twice as vast, stripped bare of trees to make at least ten hectares of unbroken snow. A rough-hewn cabin leered at me across the water, and a smatter of sheds trembled here and there, exposed to the prowling storm. In the distance I thought I saw a stable or a barn—a big, two-story structure, of a size to house about fifty head of cattle and a hay-loft as might just feed a herd over the snow months.
I could hardly believe my eyes. I brought out my binoculars and swept them slowly over the collection of buildings laid out in this middle-of-nowhere tableau, checking for a pulse, or the ghostly shimmer of a mirage. There was yellow light dancing in the cabin windows. Long black shadows flitted in and out. Long enough for men. Many. No children.
Some strange mountain men they was, or no mountain men at all. Rustlers was my first guess, bootleggers my second. Whatever it was, it weren’t no honest outfit. Not this secluded, this hard to get to. They was hiding. Same as us.
The wind hastened and the snow curtain snapped shut. The ranch disappeared in the flurry. I hissed in frustration and put my binoculars away. Turning Baylock around, I folded us back into the weave of the firs and crept us quietly round the lake. Laced with cobweb cracks and delicate as glass, ice skirted its serrated edges like the marble skin that comes before the black char of frost-bite.
When we had moved as close to the buildings as the timber-line allowed, I drew us to a stop and peered once again through my binoculars. The cabin was twenty paces to the south or more, and the blizzard gushed around my back to wash the noise away, but it looked as though the men inside was having quite the party. Fifteen, maybe twenty of them, guzzling drink, flapping their gums, dancing round the dinner-table. There was a feller with a fiddle and another with a flute, and another on the floor was beating at a drum. They was rough men, unwashed, dressed all in thief black but for the garish pop of grass-green: vests, neckties, bandanna handkerchiefs, whatever they had fit beneath their weather-worn overcoats. Six-shooters hung at their hips. Something twitched at the back of my mind, some dull, half-formed suspicion.
If there had been generous neighbors here, they was here no longer.
I had no time to consider this. The man with the fiddle lowered his bow and looked straight at me. Everyone in the room turned to peer through the window—twenty sets of eyes met mine, twenty palms met the grip of a gun, twenty paces from where I sat at the edge of the trees holding a pair of damned binoculars. My blood ran cold. Baylock’s ears swiveled; he shuffled his feet.
The cabin door opened, splashing a hot glow onto blue snow. A figure stepped out, bathed in firelight and wind, and beckoned with one hand. The other lazily stroked his holster.
At twenty paces, he would probably have missed me. Hell, at twenty paces, I would probably have missed him. I could have spun round and galloped into the woods right then. But it wouldn’t have made no difference, in the end. And it ain’t what I did.
I kept my binoculars trained on the figure outside as I urged Baylock toward him. Sallow against the flames, his face was sculpted of ragged angles and deep furrows, stamped with a hawk nose violently crooked in the bone. Stringy hair brushed the lavish fur collar of his coat, smearing grease on the back of a timber wolf. A snakeskin band circled the crown of his black hat. Gold buttons lined his black vest, a gold fob dangling from his pocket. Around his neck, a green neckerchief, neat and knotted. A predator with expensive tastes: a mirror image of another man I knew.
This was their leader, there was no question of that.
I dismounted. I walked until I could see the whites of his eyes. I stopped. The man did not move.
“Hey, uh . . .” I raised a hand slowly. “Nice—nice to meet you. This your ranch?”
“It is now.”
His voice rasped and crackled like dry leaves. He was nearly whispering. The wind howled between us.
“I-I can’t quite hear you,” I said.
The snake-hat stranger smiled a thin-lipped smile. Looked a little like a snake himself, skin stretched taut over his skull and sunk into his eye sockets like a mask.
“Then you’d better come a little closer,” he said. His fingers flexed around his gun. Peacemaker, by the look of it. Maybe a Cattleman. Clean grain, polished varnish, well cared for and well used.
Now I was starting to realize my mistake. But it was too late to make my escape; I stepped forward until the heat of the fire caressed my snow-pinched cheeks. Until he was close enough to touch me.
“You buy this property?” I asked carefully.
“Yes, few days ago. Oh, it was a steal, I’ll tell you.” His smile broadened, and I saw that his eye-teeth was sharp as a cat’s. “Well, seemed like it at the time, anyway. Maybe shoulda seen the writin on the wall. Ranch in the middle o’nowheres, and on a year like this, huh?” He whistled lowly, rocking on his heels. “Unseasonal, this. You bin up here much, boy? Up in the Grizzlies?”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“Derned unseasonal, ain’t it?” The snake-hat stranger spoke with a lilt of knowing humor, as if talking around a secret I was supposed to know. That twitch in the back of my head was growing. “Had quite the die-up just now. Just a few days past. Went from eighty head to roundabout sixty, I bet.”
“Eighty head? Whatcha got in there?”
“Sheep. Sixty now.”
“My condolences.”
He hummed with his tongue between his teeth, half agreeing, half amused. “Where’s my manners?” he said, and stepped aside with a flourish. Twenty pink-faced swine let up a raucous cheer at the sight of me. “Y’wonna come in, my young friend? Lookin so cold and forlorn out there. S’warm inside. We got drink. Women.”
“Women?” I couldn’t see any women.
“My boys, they get bored. Plumb borin up here. Don’tcha think?”
This dance was really something. He was toying with me and I was letting him. There surely had to be a tactful way to finagle his intentions without stepping on his toes. There always was.
“Certainly not much of a livin round these parts,” I agreed. “Why set up here?”
His laugh whistled voicelessly in the base of his throat, thin and lung rotted. “Why do anythang?” he said. “There’s money in it.”
“Ranchin money?”
“Bit o’ranchin. Bit o’huntin. Trappin. Rockies game, you know. Fetch us a pretty penny.”
“You look like a man who likes to hunt.”
He laughed again, longer, tossing back his head and its snake-band hat. In a motion so quick I nearly flinched, his hand flicked out and slapped his thigh.
“Do I?” he wheezed. “Well I guess I do, don’t I!”
His boys was likewise entertained, an audience of drunken hoots and crows. I laughed with them a little, inviting myself into the joke.
“Hell,” I said, “long stay if you brung some girls.”
His smile didn’t falter. “S’a short stay for the girls.”
The crowd didn’t laugh at that. A raw-boned boy with a waxy face lifted his bottle and poured out a glug, nodding solemnly to himself. It puddled like piss and sunk into the floor-boards.
“How much did it cost you?” I asked.
The snake-hat stranger cocked his head. “The girls?” he countered innocently.
“The ranch.”
“Oh, really, not much.” He stuck his thumbs in his gun belt. “Couple a’bullets.”
I shifted on my feet. My hands was starting to shake.
“Some trouble for a ranch in the middle o’nowhere,” I said.
“Naw,” he said, drawling it out. “I tolt ya, friend, there’s money in it. Ranchin money. Huntin money.”
“Sure. I hear the grizzlies is wakin up from the long nap.”
His mouth twisted suddenly into a bare-toothed snarl, and he bent forward at the waist, breathing a puff of sour whiskey over my face.
“That’s just it,” he hissed with a wild glint in his eye, “I’m lookin for one in particular. Quite the beast, or so they say. Think I may have found him, you know. He ain’t far, ain’t far at all.”
The twitch surged to the front of my head, plain as day. I tried to swallow, but my throat had grown a lump. He’d gave up the jig. He’d gave it up, so I was dead.
“It just occurred to me that you ain’t introduced yourself,” I said thinly.
“Well,” said the stranger, “neither has you, and you come to my door.”
I gave him my brother’s name. I always did, when I felt I was speaking to the last man who would see me alive.
“Missster Belll.” He sounded it out like he was appraising the flavor. He extended his hand, and his smile slithered back. “Colm O’Driscoll.”
It rang a hollow knell. Of course I knew that name. You might think of him now as Dutch van der Linde’s legendary rival, the creature who left America’s last dreamer broken hearted and filled the cracks with black hate. But he was much more than that. A ruthless savage. A bogeyman with a hundred faces. Bandit-lord of a sprawling empire, the largest and slipperiest of its kind—robbers, killers, rapists, head-hunters. He was known then as the Irish Butcher: a forcemeat epithet perched atop a mountain of unprintable brutality. He and Dutch, they cracked each other.
Shoot first. That was my daddy’s remedy for fear. Shoot first, and go down shootin.
I did not shoot Colm O’Driscoll; I took his hand and I shook it.
“Colm O’Driscoll,” I laughed. My voice was remarkably steady over the rabbit-beat of my heart. “Colm O’Driscoll, the O’Driscoll, in the flesh. Well, I have heard a great deal about you, old feller. Now you’re a man who knows how to run a tough crew and make some real money. Not like all these molly-coddles as carry wives and spawn on their backs.”
“A man after my own heart!” said Colm O’Driscoll. “You feed the fleas, you get the mange. I’ve always said that.”
“I like that,” I said. “Very wise.”
“You got experience with such molly-coddlin outfits, then?”
I cleared my throat. “Sure.”
“Is that right, is that right. Oh, I know the type, I do.” He ran a hand down his timber wolf collar, all the way from his breast to his navel. His hand stopped there, just above his gun, and stayed. “Whatchu think o’that? My God, ain’t it so tragic?”
My gaze flicked to the twenty cutthroats over his shoulder watching me with yellow teeth and anticipation, fingers twitching at their sides. The fiddler was sitting with an ankle crossed over his knee, plucking the high string to the metrical rhythm of dripping water. The raw-boned boy dumped out another glug. Colm O’Driscoll just smiled and smiled that snake-like smile, colder than the snow, like it was all so damned amusing.
“I’ve tried to help,” I said lowly, “too many times, I surely have, but you can’t get it through to that kinda people. They’re too—too soft, they just can’t do—what—needs—to—be—done. They go on like this until they get themselves killed: them and their fleas.”
Colm’s eyes twinkled with delight. “You sly dog,” he said. “You sly little dog. He don’t work on you, do he? Oh, you gon break his poor little heart.”
He reached out and grasped me by the shoulder. Chin raised, he looked down his nose to reassess me.
“Mr. Bell,” he said, “I think we could be friends.”
I shuddered under the leper’s touch.
“I am not a man who hides, Hosea.”
“Let’s be honest, you’re not a man who has much sense at all. What do you think we’re doing right now, huh, you think we ain’t hiding? You think this is freedom?”
“This is—”
“We’re running and hiding, that’s what we’re doing. We’re running and hiding just like we’ve always done until you get it in your head to do somethin reckless and then we’ll be runnin and hidin again, and don’t you—”
“Hosea—”
“—say you’re not—”
“Be quiet, be qu—Which is it, Hosea? What do you want? You don’t wanna run, you don’t wanna fight, you—”
“Yes I want neither! Oh, shocking, I know. I’ve had enough—”
“Let me—”
“—turn around, and—”
“Let me—”
“—a real—”
“Hosea, let me ask you something. When did you start thinkin so small?”
“Thinkin small? I’m thinkin long term. I’m thinkin where this sorry bunch is gonna end up by the turn of the century. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m not fond of this pretense anymore, Dutch. I’m gonna die up here. You’ll be sorry when it comes to that. Or maybe you won’t, I don’t even know what you want anymore. Maybe I’m just holding you back and you can’t wait till I’m gone, I can’t tell.”
“How can you say that? After all we’ve been through together, after all I’ve done for you.”
“You’ve saved my life a thousand times, old friend, but now you’re going to kill me.”
A pause. The only sound inside was Hosea’s whistling lungs; outside, the wailing wind.
“We’re gonna get you down from these mountains, head back down to Cathedral. All we need is some more supplies and Toy Ann’ll be able to fix you somethin up for that cough.”
“Toy Ann? You’re gonna stake my life on Toy Ann? Just yesterday she sank straight to the bottom of a snowdrift and it took three men and a rope to get her out.”
“She was drunk.”
“Exactly, you buffoon, she was drunk.”
“Hosea, will you calm down?”
“We got a little boy with us, Dutch. Remember? He’s been coughing himself the past week. We’re not built for this no more. This is what family is like—you make concessions. You change your way of life. It’s time.”
“We are. I mean, we will.”
“You know what I mean!”
“You want us to succumb to civilization, settle down in the suburbs of some rinky-dink town and grow old and fat together? This ain’t that kinda family. We don’t back down from livin just because they tell us we oughta be dyin.”
“It’s our responsibility to keep these people safe.”
“I offer these people liberation, and I give them what I promise. That is why they follow me. I ain’t backin down.”
A pause.
Then, firmly: “Fine, Dutch. Fine.”
“Do you have my back?”
“You know I’ll follow you to Hell if I must.”
“Well we ain’t goin there. Where we’re goin, we’ll be the richest men in the world.”
Oh, you see, vain men ain’t hard to please. Not at all.
The Angel That Is Icarus — Chapter 1. Obsession I.
Chapter Summary:
It’s a long way to Canada’s crystalline lakes from the southern plains of West Elizabeth, but Dutch has a plan like a dog has a bone, and he’s determined to get his people there alive or dead—that is, until they’re thwarted by Pinkertons and a blizzard in the Grizzlies West.
Rating: Mature
Characters: Micah, Arthur, Dutch, Hosea, the Van der Linde gang, new gang members
Warnings: Character death, slurs, casual racism
Wordcount: 5,100
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My old man lived by maxims. Nothing fancy, not like the navel bore-hole of Dutch’s proselytizing—nothing much longer than a few choice words. But it was a book of principles, nonetheless.
If you’ve heard anything of that famed and fierce animal, this may strike you as peculiar. What compass drives a man to cut a bloody swath across four states and end as a bloody smear dragged a mile behind a Mexican bandito’s horse? These was random acts, surely. Nothing so vicious could be done through the faculty of reason. But then, people have that instinct to deny any suggestion of regular, mundane humanity in cold-blooded killers for fear that it may bring us closer to them.
The truth is, we are all the same. We all want the same things, we all share the same blood, we all think the same thoughts. All creatures is creatures of habit; what makes us human is that we justify our habits with beliefs. Even old Micah Bell.
I made it a point to despise everything my daddy left me after his demise, but I must admit, some of those maxims of his have stuck with me and guided my hand all these years.
My favorite was just this: obsession is vanity. I always thought it a fine irony for a man so obsessed with himself he must’ve canceled out the sentiment. But that somehow made it all the truer. He put that weapon in my hands when my flesh was still soft and never noticed how well I understood it because I used it first on him.
That’s the thing with beliefs: they’re stronger than the man who believes them. This one was strong enough to raise me, clothe me, put food in me, spare me the rod and point it at my brother’s yellow belly.
It came to the forefront of my mind the very moment I heard Dutch van der Linde spinning a yarn at that bar in Crenshaw Hills—stinking of horse and wood-smoke and tobacco, rings glinting on his hand, eyes shining with love of his own voice—and it followed me all the way to the bullet in his head.
Obsession is vanity, boy. And vain men ain’t hard to please.
Out of the frigid night that had fallen over Dead Head Hills, heavy with buffeting wind and foreboding, Arthur’s lantern bobbing in the blizzard was the light-house that saved us that May. We’d been pushing the horses hard for three straight days and nights through a thickening snow, at first to throw off our scent and then because stopping would be suicide.
What on God’s green earth was we doing up there, you may wonder. Well, fleeing God’s green earth.
Our blood was sweeter than we’d realized, you see. We had arrived at Seyoten, Ambarino’s humble cradle of civilization, and resolved to test the waters; after over a month of travel, a bit of civilization didn’t seem quite so repulsive. Of course, Dutch had set one toe on the city streets when the Pinkertons began circling. It seemed there wasn’t a place in this free country he could go where the trappings of justice wouldn’t be waiting for him with a cage and a whip.
It was far from the first mistake we’d made that year, though I tended not to call them mistakes—it was just the business we was in. Sometimes a job don’t pan out. Ain’t nobody’s fault, except if it is. This time, we was just unlucky. I was pragmatic about these kinds of things.
That don’t mean I thought these folks was worth the trouble. In fact, this was when I started to have my doubts.
I’d come close to cutting loose a month before, when the Blackwater incident sent Dutch into a panic. As soon as we’d struck the border to Oklahoma he decided, spur of the moment, on two days of no sleep and a gallon of coffee: Canada. We was going to Canada, British Columbia or some such, an “unspoiled paradise of opportunity.”
That was never going to happen, even a fool could see that. These people had lost everything they had. They’d lost me everything I had. We’d be fresh out of money and living on charity and penny robbery by the time we hit Coll County.
But I wasn’t quite ready to review my prospects just yet, and I’ve often found it easier to put my lips to the ear of a desperate man than a satisfied one.
And so we pushed on north through the West Elizabeth prairie, weaving on and off of the highway and steering clear of civilization proper, never making camp more than two days at a stretch. And as expected, the money dried up within the week. Soon all us that could rob was robbing, even the dead-weight women. It was a risky operation: ten or eleven of us would split into groups and fan out into the vast expanses of farm-land in search of homesteads to shake down or wipe clean under cover of a ruse. Yes—penny robbery. Just enough to buy us the essentials. Then we’d scatter from our groups, meander from a climbing sun to a dying one, and find the caravan several miles ahead of where we left it. Anything to keep the smoke away from the hive. We left quite the trail behind us, one our fretful Arthur Morgan fast became paranoid would overtake us, slow as we was traveling. But there was God-damned twenty-two of us, wild and starved. We was one missed meal away from holding out our hats by the roadside. Our Indian spent half his time riding out into the rolling steppe and catching up to us by nightfall with a ropy doe slung over his horse’s rump and wild turkeys dangling from the saddle. Until he fried his hand on a hot pan and needed Morgan to be his bow arm. That was a lean week.
Davey Callander passed on the seventh day. Bullet to the gut, a parting gift from Blackwater. We’d thought the poor bastard was going to pull through for a moment—he was chatting, joking, even eating. Drinking like a fish, though that was no surprise. I was driving his wagon for a couple of days; still remember whistling merry duets with him as we trundled through rain and mud. Good whistler, that boy. Then he caught a fever and was dead by morning.
The mood plummeted. Fighting broke out over cigarettes and canned corn. Dutch yelled himself so hoarse he couldn’t speak for two days. Little Jenny took to drink, hard, and all them boys that fluttered in her orbit was quick to fall back. In fact, most of the men began to drift away from the caravan for days and nights at a time; I resumed my habit of bedding down elsewhere, far beyond the outskirts of their camp, under the pretense of keeping watch on the south.
But in my mind I was happy as a sand-boy. This was right where I wanted them: miserable, hateful, frayed. I threw myself harder than ever at Dutch, waxed long about the folly of letting injustice become oppression or something equally trite. I wheedled and I crooned and I debased myself like a dog. The Blackwater money was right there. Leaving it behind for this fairy-tale Promised Land made no damned sense. Dutch was thinking about it—I knew.
Then, at some point while we was still in West Elizabeth, Dutch sent a few of us—myself, Javier Escuella and John Marston—back down to Flat Iron County to retrieve Sean MacGuire and Davey’s brother Mac. No sign of Mac, but we did find our little Irish pup in Ike Skelding’s hands. I tried to convince the boys to write him off. And when that failed, I thought about “accidentally” putting a bullet in him when the shooting started. Didn’t find an opening for that either.
Now, I really couldn’t stand that mouthy cocker spaniel, but this weren’t about that. He was keen, and keen counted for something, even if he was such an awful shot he’d hit the sky if he was aiming at the ground. Give him a couple of years and he could’ve been a good earner.
No, the problem was that the gang put on a whole party to celebrate his safe return. They danced, they caroused, they listened fondly as he unhinged two weeks’ worth of jaw all damned night. He even wrangled a hug out of old Cross-Patch Marston.
The problem was that he was good for morale, and it only took a small victory to make Dutch feel invincible again.
Some of those who is truly obsessed, truly passion crazed, end up losing the line between fantasy and reality. I maintain that Dutch was one such a man—more an idea than a man. Whether or not they believed in him or even liked him particularly, folks was inspired by him to reach out and touch the impossible. He was a messiah, and the world was his stage. And these people of his, these strange ruffians who loved him more than air, Dutch had plucked them off the street and put them in the clouds around his head.
There was nothing I could have said then to make him change his mind. But I was a patient Judas; always had been. So, my mood as foul and fickle as the wind, I followed him and his flock like a homeless mutt up into Ambarino.
That was where we lost Jenny. We’d stopped for a piss break on a mountain road. She was blind drunk.
“Where you off to, sweetheart?” I asked, half laughing as I reached out for her arm.
Prickly thing swerved to avoid me—swerved straight off the side of the mountain, took a fifty-foot tumble, and split her head open like a melon on the rocks. The rapids at the bottom of the gorge stole her body away before we could conceive of how to get it back; only thing left behind was a little glob of brain against a halo of blood. When we fashioned her a grave the next day, we didn’t even have to dig a hole.
Didn’t seem entirely my fault—and yes, you maniac, of course I tried to catch her—but the way this damned gang acted, you’d have thought I pushed her off myself. Old Hosea had Dutch locked in furtive conversations about me. The women screamed at me; the greaser punched me. Morgan was starting to wonder if he should dispense with me. I could see it in his eyes, all flint and steel. He was a nosy bastard at the best of times, but now he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. Out here, it wouldn’t take much to kill a man: it’d be as easy as pushing him off a mountain.
I stopped sleeping.
In late April, the cold snap set in hard and fast. We was deep in the Grizzlies East, nestled in valleys and pines, when a tide of snow descended upon us and forced us onto the exposed all-weather road. For hours every morning and night there was a brisk snowfall; the rambling mountain roads that saw no sunlight became slippery with ice, and those in the sun was more mud than dirt. We was stuck on the highway with our heads on a swivel. Dutch sent out scouts in all directions to check the roads for Pinks and the towns for talk. But all we found on the highway was harried travelers and surly locals, and all the towns assumed we was prospectors heading west to try our luck in the Spine like so many others.
The old guard took to mingling again: fraternizing with the powerful, preaching to the destitute. We replenished our numbers with two new stragglers. My life was flashing before my eyes, visions of dying deprived in the damned snow surrounded by delusions and sheep that multiplied even as they starved.
By the time we’d reached Seyoten it was the start of a very cold May, and Dutch was the king of the world. Rode right into the city with Hosea and Arthur at his shoulders. He might as well have spread his arms and declared, “I am Dutch van der Linde, have you folks heard of me yet?”
The Pinkertons had. And they were already there.
“Did you get a good look at it, son?” Dutch lifted his lantern higher, straining to see the Morrigan’s rump past the snowflakes whisked into a flurry around us.
“Sure . . .” Arthur’s voice was barely a whisper. “It’ll do us . . . somewhere for the horses . . . old . . .”
“Louder, Arthur, I can’t hear you!”
“It’ll do us!”
Dutch shoved the reins at me, set down the lantern and made to stand. As I struggled to unclench my frozen fingers he leaned over the side of the bed-wagon and whistled sharply, reaching out an arm. White as the Count was, Dutch seemed to step out onto thin air and ride ahead on a cloud. I leaned forward in my seat, squinting. The dark riders on their vaporous horses and the sputtery glow of Arthur’s lantern was strange phantoms to my sleepless eyes, dancing between phosphorous sears of brain-lightning. If I lost track of them, the gang really would kill me.
“Hey,” came a muffled rasp behind me.
I glanced back. Hosea was awake and dragging himself to his feet, a painstaking effort that had him clutching his chest for breath and my back-rest for balance. His nose and mouth were hidden behind the loose drape of a scarf, his eyes black as pitch in the thin yellow light.
“Micah. Is that”—he paused for a wheeze—“Arthur?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Whad’d he find?”
“Old mining town, abandoned. Seems it’s got the facilities for us.” I hummed to myself, and I drawled, “How lucky we are.”
“Lucky indeed,” said Hosea sourly. “I’m sure we all feel”—wheeze—“very lucky.”
I truly hated Hosea. I hated him more than I hated Arthur Morgan. He did far too much talking, and thinking, and web-spinning—he made an obstacle out of himself at every turn. Just when I’d start making progress with Dutch, Hosea would say something to redirect him. And as much as he played at infallibility, Dutch looked to Hosea as the pulse of his little “family.” When the wife complained, Dutch ruminated, he demurred, he temporized. Sheer miracle I’d gotten the ferry job through to him, but if there was one thing I knew I could count on, it was that the boss did not let opportunities slip through his fingers. Even Hosea’s nay-saying was no cure for a man of action.
The old boy was a nuisance, generally, but up here in these God-forsaken mountains, he was my unwitting ally. I was staking my bets on him. See, he was very unwell. More unwell than I’d ever seen him. He rested with his head tipped back and his mouth hanging open. His breath came short and grated, as if forced through too small a hole, and his coughing fits was beginning to sound desperate. With each passing day, with increasing urgency, Hosea wanted to turn us around—and if anyone was going to make that happen, it was him.
Looking at him then, watching him sit back down laboriously and curl up in unfurled sugans, I thought he may well die trying.
It was at least an hour before we arrived at Arthur’s town. Sure wasn’t much to look at: ramshackle buildings up to their knees in snow, with gap-toothed roofs and shattered windows, floors littered with thin ice and refuse. But Arthur was right—it’d do us. I’d certainly survived worse.
We knew that parking the wagons meant we wasn’t moving again until the thaw, so Dutch had all the men who could still stand mount up and do a proper inspection. Arthur scribbled out a rough map of what he’d seen as he rode through and sent the eight of us off in pairs. There was around three dozen houses, most of them reduced to splinters; a saloon with no roof; the remains of an assay office, a general store and a “Spider Gorge Mining Company” building; a small post-office near a livery stable; and the snowed-in shell of a stone chapel. Bill and I took the south end of the town, where the post-office and stable stood.
I hated Bill, too. “Not sure about this one” was his announcement every time we stepped through a door. Broken windows and icy floors was enough to deter him. Where did they find this princess? I had him check which rooms had the fewest gaps and drafts while I stuck my arm up chimney flues. Most of them was slippery with ice, and the tops of the stacks was clogged with snow. There would be no warm hearths until they was cleared—especially since there wasn’t a dry branch as far as the eye could see.
When we returned to the caravan, the rest of the scouts was already back.
“North side’s a bust,” said Lenny.
“Except there’s a cabinet of white mule in this funny old shack.” Lamb tapped a square on Arthur’s map and smiled. “It’s still good. Smells like floor polish.”
Lamb was our latest recruit, a scrawny full-blooded Indian—Arapaho, I think, or maybe Cheyenne—with broad shoulders and a stumpy neck. He closed his eyes and scrunched his nose like a child when he smiled. As the story went, he murdered all seven members of his family, ripped out their intestines to make nooses and hung their corpses from the pines like Christmas baubles. Dutch’s talk of the virgin plains of Canada lit stars in his dark eyes. He was with us for the kingdom, not the king. I knew a sycophant when I saw one, and he knew I knew.
“We didn’t find nottin,” said Sean. He’d been stamping his feet since he got out of the wagon. “Match-sticks, all it.”
Arthur thwacked him on the back of the head, nearly knocked his hat off. “Two or three are salvageable. Some small gaps, but we can do something about that.”
“We can’t stay in doze, we’ll fockin freeze to det!” snapped Sean.
“Sean won’t survive, but we can chop him into bits and patch the holes with him.”
“You’re a real piece o’work, Morgan.”
“I think you’ll find you’re the piece o’work. Several pieces, actually. I’m sure some of us will miss you. What else?”
John took Arthur’s pencil and crossed out half the map. “Central’s a wreck. Roofs are done in.”
“Saw a couple round here”—Charles swept a finger along the outskirts—“that was mostly intact, but they’re pretty far from things.”
“Hm, don’t like that, need the horses closer. Bill?”
“Post-office is good,” said Bill, glancing at me, “stables is good, and these, these four houses is good.”
Arthur rubbed his forehead. “Why don’tchu define ‘good’ for me, Bill?”
“Well—Well—”
I took over before Bill tried to think too hard and sprained something.
We quickly made up our minds to move the gang to the south side where there was the least damage and the closest escape route. The women, the ill and the old was to share a shotgun-house; another next door was for storage and chuck; the seven working men would get the cramped little post-office; and Dutch would get his palace, a big, sturdy log cabin, to do with as he wished.
Naturally, Morgan would be staying with him. He wasn’t even apologetic about it. The privilege of the first-born. I was starting to really seethe, but I held my tongue.
As soon as the domestics disembarked from the wagons and entered our new camp, the work began. Susan Grimshaw pounced upon her brood, flapping and squawking: we needed beds and blankets laid out, we needed drink and air-tights brought in, we needed fire, we needed to board up these windows, we needed to pull ourselves up by our God-damned bootstraps. The men began unloading the wagons. The women carried supplies into their shotgun-house, and Charles and Arthur lugged Javier in after them like a limp corpse. He’d had the grippe something awful for three or four days now, delirious and trembling, whimpering and whining. If he didn’t gracefully pass away soon, I was happy to help speed things along.
“Hey, hey.” Out by the bed-wagon, Dutch raised his lantern to illuminate Hosea’s face where his scarf had fallen askew. “Your lips are lookin a little blue.”
Hosea waved him off stubbornly. “I’ll be fine.”
Ignoring him, Dutch forced Hosea’s arm over his shoulders and shuffled him forward. “Gonna get you inside, warm you up.”
“I’ll be fine, for God’s sake.”
“Of course you will. We didn’t come all this way for you to keel over in Ambarino, damn you.” Dutch pointed at Pearson, who had a cook-pot in his arms. “Mr. Pearson, we need some coffee immediately! Meantime”—he rummaged frantically in the pockets of his coat until he found a small silver flask, which he shoved into Hosea’s heaving chest—“I-I got summa this stuff, you can have that. Where is Toy Ann? Somebody get me Toy Ann!”
Victoria Ann Baker was a creature of mischief to rival the Devil: there when you least wanted to see her, disappeared the moment you called her name. At least a hundred years old, by the look of her. We’d picked her up purely by happenstance after Morgan and Javier found her cottage in the secluded valleys of Deerwood County and robbed her blind.
That was the plan, anyway. She ambushed them from behind a door brandishing a meat cleaver and a bottle of something that made them vomit when she cracked it over their heads, and like the soft touch they was, the boys couldn’t bring themselves to shoot her.
Apparently the addled crone fancied herself some sort of herb-wife—I still don’t know what the Hell that is, but Morgan took a liking to her eccentricity, as was his habit. He bought from her some suspicious black liquid for Hosea, a tincture she called “Toy Ann’s Crackerjack Cure-All,” and to our astonishment, it didn’t kill the old man outright. In fact, Dutch was convinced it was working. He would not rest until he added the little miracle worker to his collection. I never learned how exactly he encouraged her to leave that cottage in the woods for the company of hopeless crooks—maybe he sold her on the Canadian dream, or the promise of a fairer society, or any number of his delusions of grandeur—but next thing I knew, she had stolen one of Pearson’s cauldrons to brew unknowable horrors in the middle of our camp.
And of course, because Dutch wanted her now, she was not there. Lenny took off into the snow, hollering her name.
“You gonna do any work, or you just gonna stand there?”
That was Arthur coming up behind me. I jumped out of my skin.
“I’m smoking,” I said testily. Then, remembering I didn’t like the idea of being pushed off a mountain, I tapped out another cigarette and offered it to him. “Want one?”
He wrinkled his nose. “From you?”
I blinked innocently. “From a man who happens to be offering, sure.” I chuckled, turning snide. “Are you that prideful? You’d rather sulk than take a smoke that don’t cost you nothin? Nothin but your pride, I suppose.”
Unmoved, Arthur folded his arms, his face a mask of stone. “You’re slime, you know that? Yer like the scum that grows on rocks in the water.”
“And you’re like a little star”—I swept my cigarette across the sky—“breakin through the clouds of a midnight storm.”
“Don’t talk like that, it makes me nauseous. But that—Stop it.” He batted at the hand that was still holding out the pack. “I ain’t takin yer damn smoke.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, and stuffed it into my coat.
Despite his rejection, Arthur was hesitant to leave me in peace. He loomed over me, tall and dark as a ponderosa pine, staring me down as though waiting for me to do something. There was a hard glint of suspicion in his eyes; my antics seemed to have drawn out the busybody in him that needed to know exactly what my business was.
And it seemed he was going to get there obliquely.
“There’s a”—he raised his arm to the south—“a crick runs down thataway, ‘Spider Gorge,’ I guess, from that sign on the company building—”
“Not on your county map?” I asked.
“None of this immaculate wonderland is on my county map.” He leveled me a meaningful look. “And let’s keep it that way.”
So that was his angle. “Don’t gotta tell me twice.”
“Think I gotta tell you in particular at least four times, to be safe.”
“Now, now, let’s not squabble,” I said, raising my hands. “It ain’t the time. There’s work to be done.”
“Well you’re damn right about that, and yet here you are, smoking.”
That about did it.
“And here you are,” I sneered, “loitering beside me with both hands unoccupied. So why don’t you worry about your own damn self?”
His jaw hardened. Our talk collapsed into a tense silence, broken only by the bustle of men crunching through snow and yelling over the wind. I watched him carefully, and he watched me back. Snowflakes drifted under the eaves and gathered in his beard. He didn’t look like he was planning my untimely demise; he looked irritated, mildly. I may as well have accused him of failing to darn my socks. My anger flared from a smolder to a roar. Imagine that: Dutch’s pet scum trying to rile Arthur Morgan. The creature women screamed at and darkies punched.
So I just chuckled as if I’d won—a black sound that bubbled like tar in my throat—and tried another tack.
“How’s old Hosea, then?” I asked. “And the Mex?”
“Freezin to death,” said Arthur, impassive.
I nodded sagely. “Sure. But we’ve had plenny a snowy days lately. They’ll be fine.”
“Nothin like this. We shouldn’t be up here in these mountains. We—”
He clammed up suddenly, his mouth clicking shut. I smiled at him with all my teeth, and he turned away to glare at the ground. How embarrassing for him—admitting those dirty doubtful thoughts in front of me.
“Keep the faith, brother.” I spread my arms, gesturing to the black blizzard rolling around us. “Canada, a land of untamed prosperity.”
“It won’t be like this,” he said firmly.
“Of course not,” I soothed. “Forests and meadows. Crystalline lakes. And no Pinkertons. All that country, ripe—for—the—taking.”
“You may fool Dutch with that talk, but you don’t fool me.”
“Always the cynic, ain’tchu.” Flicking away the butt of my cigarette, I said off-handedly, “Gotta clear those chimneys, Morgan.”
“Sure,” he said. But his brow furrowed the way it did when he was swirling too many thoughts around in that worrisome brain of his.
“Salt and hot water,” I offered.
He lifted his head then and looked at me directly. A new glint came into his eyes, like a fat doe had crossed his path, or a strange bird had landed on his hat.
Like I had pleasantly surprised him.
He nodded. “Get Pearson on it. You take Lamb up the roofs with a shovel and some axes.”
If I was the type to cry, I would have cried. Fool me for thinking I could rest—I’d been standing still for so long the exhaustion was finally settling into my cold-brittled bones. I had the wild thought of flopping over and playing possum.
Instead I said, with some indignation, “Lamb?”
“He won’t fall off.”
Unfortunately, that was true. The redskin was light on his feet, his body sculpted for the crude efficiency of a mountain goat.
“Axes won’t cut it,” I said.
“Just the shovel, then. I don’t know, you’re the expert, take whatever you think will work.”
“Well who’s got the damn shovel?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
“What was you gonna tell me about that crick down south?”
“Not important. You ain’t weaseling outta this.”
The glint was gone; the enforcer was back.
“I ain’t weaseling outta anything, boss,” I growled. I sucked in a long, sharp breath. “I’ll get it done.”
“Do the shack first, we need to get Jack and Hosea warmed up fast.”
I dipped into a mocking bow. “As you wish, my liege.”
While Morgan trudged off to sip cocktails with Dutch on the log cabin porch or whatever other “work” he planned on doing, I found myself stuck helping Pearson light a fire for the next hour. By the time he’d put water on the boil, Lamb had been sent back to that shed full of moonshine, so I was saddled with Lenny. Boy took another half-hour just to find me a damned shovel and some bags of salt. I threatened him with a bullet for every headache he’d cause me, but he still gave me lip the whole time and slipped off the roof twice. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Abigail kept sticking her head in the flue to remind us that her damned brat was cold, until someone at last had the bright idea to move the deadwood into the post-office where there was an old pot-bellied stove. Presumably to burn them in.
Melting and salting both chimneys was such an operation that we finished just as the last whispers of snow was drifting down and the sun was cresting Dead Head Crown. I was dog tired, bone tired. I felt twice my age. I forgot I hadn’t eaten in two days and went straight to the post-office and fell asleep to the sound of Tilly Jackson singing the child a lullaby.
Six hours later, the pale midday sun met my eyes through the cracks in the boards. I woke with a start.
“Wouldja look at that,” said Uncle from his seat by the stove, saluting me with a bottle of whiskey. “Thought you’d gone an died, boy. Don’tchu know there’s work needs doin?”
The apple never falls far from the tree, and Micah Bell III is proof of that.
Rating: Mature
Characters: The Bell family
Warnings: Mention of rape and murder
Wordcount: 600
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They called us the Rattlesnake Twins on account of my brother’s nervous tic.
He was an antsy thing back then, with darting eyes so electric blue they nearly glowed, and a stutter that meant I did all the talking. Stress would make him itchy. Whenever we was robbing, looting, sticking up or shooting off, he’d get that itch in him, that jolt of nerves, and he’d start shaking like a dog. Arms out by his sides, legs hopping on hot coals, head until his hat was askew, body lit up with forked lightning. Problem was that old revolver of his—Daddy’s meekest Buck, one he stole off the corpse of a baker too meek for the back-water he came from—it had such a sloppy cylinder it’d turn any dead silence to sand. Like shaking up a damned maraca.
Imagine awakening at midnight not to the croak of a floor-board but to an ungodly rattle from the dark—ch-ch-ch-ch—and four blue eyes flashing cold and predatory in the corner of the bedroom.
I could’ve killed that boy for the headache his habits caused me. And I admit, though a futile complaint for the third of his name, it always did irk me to be named for acts which I did not commit. From the tender age of seventeen I was wanted dead or alive in three counties for the nomadic depravity of my family. You might think I’d begrudge them the Hell they made my life and the Devil they made me, but meaning’s a funny thing. This was my trade, my legacy. It soured my pride when it was their depravity in the papers and not mine. Though I suppose that is man’s ultimate progenitive drive—to make more of himself, to live on in their deeds, to become immortal in the blood-lines of the earth.
Well, we had a lot of stories, the three of us: me, that brother of mine and our no-good daddy. Our daddy’s daddy, too—already three years hung by the time I arrived. But out of respect for my brother, I won’t be sharing his stories this time. Nor will I spell out the name I knew him by. For though we Rattlesnakes fought long and hard, we too fell in with the flock. Dug our blood-line some fresh trenches, made new names for ourselves (fuck you, Daddy, ha ha ha). Civilized living, if not well mannered. It is not my business to take that from him, as I hope he would not take it from me.
I ain’t a good man; I’ll never be one, and that’s a fact, because I just can’t bring myself to care about such things as taxes and peace-keeping and jay-walking. Life ain’t trifles, it ain’t some divine wig’s decree of rights and wrongs. Nevertheless, stranger, consider yourself duly warned that I am by societal reckoning a much better man than the one I will be writing about. I did steal, I did rape, I did kill, and I did not feel remorse, and I did not show mercy, and I did not love. It took many wounds to seed those knotted scars in me. This story is about those wounds—every bloody, sordid inch of them.
Come sit by the fire and play us a song as I return to the head of a long-dead man named Micah Bell.
