His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  “No, against a man gluing pubic hair onto his chin until it looks like a beard.”

  Coffee brought life. A tiny burn in the middle of my palm smarted when I touched the hot mug. A rogue cigarette wound, I reckoned. I squinted at it with disapproval.

  Cicero closed his book of Shakespeare and thumped it down on the dusty table. “So, at least that first part’s done.”

  Then I squinted at him.

  “The explosive part. The inner riot. When something burns you up and you just can’t fathom spending a night any other way than wanting to destroy everything big and small – and yourself in the process. That’s how you let it out. How’s it feel, being glass?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I can tell something’s bothering you. It isn't the job or the lack thereof. Doesn’t take much to tell something’s going on inside a man who drinks himself stupid when stuff goes to shit.”

  “Ain’t that what everyone does?”

  Cicero refilled coffees for both of us. “It’s the boy, Faust.”

  I looked down at my hands and tried to remember where the burns and blisters had been. They hadn’t been there long; they'd mended and healed quickly enough, leaving little more than pink and scabby blotches in their wake.

  Cicero continued. “You try to push it aside and act like nothing’s wrong, but if anyone here can see through a veil of lies, you’re looking at him. Trying to get that Fulton kid out of there before it fell took a lot out of you. You didn’t succeed,” the actor admitted, slurping beige coffee he’d filled with cream, “but that doesn’t mean that you have to shoulder that blame.”

  “Ain’t letting it eat at me.”

  “Look at you. You’re a stinking, sweaty, hungover sack of dogshit, Faust. You don’t think I’ll see the correlation between an innocent boy dying on your watch and this sudden burst of binge-drinking and self-disappointment? You’re a window and I can see right through you.”

  “I'd as quickly blame it on Kallum."

  He shook his head. “I reckon you’re just about approaching the second phase of your personal reflection.”

  “Which is?”

  “Human puddle,” he said.

  Things you do as a marshal – hell, as a human – stay with you, no matter how small or big they are. But usually it’s not so much the things you do as the things you don’t do.

  I remembered how Joshua’s mother cried. I remembered how the Herald tore those men to pieces and I just stood there. I just fucking stood there.

  “Doubts are a heart’s poison,” Cicero said. “You can’t do a damned thing but bear them because you’re the only one that was there and the only one that could have done anything to prevent it. She killed those men quick as can be. They’re going to put her on trial and kill her. You and I are both painfully aware of how unfair they’ll be. You’re looking it right in the face, and you think you’re responsible for that.”

  “My prisoner,” I said. “My responsibility.”

  “There’s the human puddle I was expecting to meet.”

  “Kallum doesn’t have any right taking me off my post.”

  “Power’s what he makes it to be. When the dead bodies stacked up after Partridge, he certainly could have, but it wouldn’t have afforded him any advantage. Getting you up-in-arms about this random woman, that sways public opinion in his favor and away from you.”

  I made it my business to keep things in Blackpeak safe, wholly outside of who benefitted or who it broke down. I’d never wanted Kallum’s position, never yearned for it, and sure as hell never breathed even a word of that idea to anyone. “Couldn’t ask me just to step down?”

  “Looks bad on him. This gives him impetus. Makes you look an impulsive fool.”

  “You think he’s trying to play at something?”

  “I barely know him, but he’s big-fish,-little-pond material. He’s just the self-proclaimed mayor of a dusty little town most people would rather forget. Worst part about not mattering a damned thing is knowing that when you die, you’ll just get tossed in a grave without a name on it and nobody will remember or care. That scares a man."

  "Explains his bodyguard," I said.

  "A man threatens you or Blackpeak, Faust, you lead by example. You shoot and you kill. I think Kallum might be afraid that he could be one of your next, especially with someone as dangerous as Miss Murder at your fingertips. He's got to stifle you any way he can.”

  “So he’s afraid I’ll take his town.”

  “The minute bodies started stacking up around you, you flashed your alpha hackles. Rules of nature and all.”

  “He takes away my sway for awhile,” I considered, forgetting about the war-drums slamming between my ears, “and uses Nycendera to cement his own mercilessness.”

  “Power without needing to raise a gun or pull a trigger to do it."

  I pulled on my trousers, strapped on my suspenders, gathered my vest, and brushed the dust off of my sun-bleached hat. Washed and shaved and dressed, I felt sort of alive again. Thoughts of burning barns and scarecrow shadows faded to a whisper. If I did nothing, then that woman was going to die. “Kallum told me he was going to get Fairchild to try her tomorrow. I want to go to that trial. I’ll more likely than not need your help."

  He picked at the side of his teeth, trying to find pieces of breakfast. "Every time you want help, Faust, people go belly up. No offense.”

  “She should die to cement his authority?”

  He licked his thumb and turned a page. “You look at what she’s done and tell me if the small part of you that isn’t crammed up your own ass doesn’t think Kallum’s entirely wrong. She’s no innocent, Faust. Four men. Yeah, four real assholes, but four living, breathing bodies—” he snapped his fingers, “—just like that.”

  “She protected me. It’s only right.”

  “Some stupidity I’ll stand beside,” Cicero said, before shaking his head. “Just some.”

  Blackpeak might have been subject to Kallum’s authority, but for the past few years, it had been kept safe by my eyes, my guns, and my law. To lawyers and judges, law might have been words on pages, lines of ink to be debated and crossed out and rewritten. To me it was a hard border, something you stood beside and, come blood or fire, you upheld. A foundation to be built on and preserved. A matter etched in stone.

  I asked Cicero for his black string-tie.

  21

  They gave her clothes, at least.

  Just before nine the next morning I watched as César escorted the Herald up the dusty street. With a pair of dirty trousers cinched around her waist, a flowered tunic, and a pair of cracked U.S. Cavalry boots, she looked almost normal. Almost. Rusty chains heavied her golden wrists and ankles. They disappeared into the old hall’s tall, black doors. Place was packed. You don’t need to post signs about a trial. Dead miners do their own promotion.

  I pressed my head against the doors and listened to the commotion inside the town hall. A bunch of voices bantered back and forth. Folks packed in hot, impatient crowds gasped and awed at her.

  They’d never seen anything like her.

  They’d never known such a thing could exist.

  So they were damn happy to do what too-proud white people normally do with those who look different. I rolled Joshua’s little steel ball back and forth between my thumb and forefinger, feeling its polished surface and perfect curves. Good order in a wild world.

  “The gravity of the loss of human life is indeed hard to measure,” said someone I recognized to be Judge Fairchild. He sounded like someone’s sharp-witted grandpa, his words coming out in whistling breaths.

  “Four industrious citizens, scraped up out of the gravel like undercooked griddle-cakes.”

  “Any motivation?”

  “A woman of whatever fascinating origin can still be a creature of destruction, Your Honor. No cause here but chaos and hate.”

  “Prosecutor Bromley, does it seem plausible to believe these murders were premedit
ated?”

  “Absolutely. This was mutilation and dehumanization.”

  Judge Fairchild rejoined with, “Can men not walk the streets in Blackpeak safely anymore?”

  “Not with vagrants such as her alive and well,” said Bromley.

  Mayor Kallum’s voice rose up over the conversation between judge and prosecutor. “I will not allow this town to become a haven for the cruel and the peculiar, gentlemen.”

  “What in God’s name has she done with her flesh?” Fairchild asked.

  “An aberration of nature,” Kallum said. “Nothing more.”

  Bromley said, “Mayor Kallum, what cannot and should not be ignored is that this is an illness in your community, this violence that ever seems ingrained in it. How did she come to be here? How do any of your people thrive with the shadows of ruin hanging over their heads?”

  Kallum’s voice softened so much, I could barely hear it through the door. I closed my eyes, as if shutting out the world would make it easier to hear. “Judge Fairchild, Mister Bromley, establishing a town and ensuring its survivability on so few resources is no easy task. We often find ourselves appealing to the most...frugal type of citizen. And the most enterprising.”

  “And the most lawless,” Bromley returned. “Crown Rock thrives quite well, and without the chaos bred here. We have established ourselves as a town of some repute.”

  “You are a municipality governed by a board, protected by a willing militia, and aided by the writ of local constitution. I am but one man aided by a citizen marshal.”

  “Where is Mister Faust this morning? Was this not his responsibility to prevent?”

  Kallum wielded patience like a knife. “I have removed him from his position in dispute with his methods. In his absence, I’ve installed Corporal César Salgado, a former member of the Mexican Army and my personal friend, with the expectation that we enhance our practices from this point forward.”

  A load of horseshit had more integrity. Dispute? It had never bothered him until now, so spoke his silence and my salary. The fair-weather bastard took any chance to elevate himself.

  Judge Fairchild said, “Is Mister Faust present?”

  Kallum said, “No, he is not,” with the closest thing to speed he’d ever known.

  It was Nycendera the Herald who spoke next, because her voice seemed to hum like the teeth of a fork striking stone.

  “This man lies to you,” she said. “For the being of whom you speak stands right outside the door.”

  Maybe if I stood still long enough, she’d laugh it off like some kind of poorly-timed joke. That’d be just fine with me. I felt every single eye — the straight ones and the crossed ones — turn to the door, and about the only thing I could hear was the hissing rush of blood in my inner-ears. Did she mean me?

  Shit. She meant me.

  Don’t give Cicero the credit; I’m an avid contemplator of the the-a-tuh myself. I took the cue and threw open the doors to the town hall with both hands.

  I kept my chin down and marched up the center aisle of the town hall. There were townspeople sitting in chairs on either side, staring me stupid. Judge Fairchild was a little fellow, his head covered in wispy hair and his body almost invisible under his faded black robes. He held a shingler's mallet over the nicked-up table he sat behind.

  "Your Honor," I said, taking Cicero’s bowler off of my head and squeezing it between my hands.

  They all sat stiff as gravestones, staring at me so fiercely I wondered if they knew just how tightly-puckered my asshole was. Meanwhile, Nycendera the Herald, her glass teeth shining behind crown-gold lips doing their best imitation of a smile, seemed pleased as punch.

  The prosecutor named Bromley, a man in a bulging brown suit and glasses thicker than a bullet, leaned toward me. "You are interrupting a trial in progress. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  “Probably so,” I said. “But nobody saw fit to ask, apparently.”

  Mayor Kallum sat with the crowd in the hall, leaning against a wall and smoking a thick pipe that never seemed to run out of tobacco. His eyes were on me like flies on shit. Good he smoked, because his rage boiled like an overheated pot just under the surface.

  “Marshal,” Judge Fairchild said. “Word has it that you were present for this grotesque display.”

  “You mean the killings, or this lovely courtroom pageant of yours?”

  Bromley barked, “He ought to be held in contempt.”

  “Good to see you too, Bromley,” I said.

  I knew these fellows. Not intimately, mind you, and not at the whims of the same kind of fancy bureaucratic relationship they shared with Mayor Kallum. The Judge cleared his throat. “It wasn’t too long ago that we were all in here to see Mister Partridge get put to trial. Pageantry or not, the same process applies this time.”

  “Partridge hurt some good people,” I said.

  Bromley ground a fist into his table. “This monster tore fathers away from their families, Faust.”

  “Different trial, different situation.”

  “Are you questioning the legitimacy of this courtroom, Faust?”

  “I’m just saying that it might smell a little bit like a traveling sideshow,” I said. “Or just bullshit.”

  The crowd of townsfolk erupted into a murmur of whispers and gasps. I took a long minute to gaze at Mayor Kallum where he sat like a blister. This was the type of game he liked: he could watch on from afar as pieces moved, not because he lifted them himself, but because he slipped dollars into the pockets of folks who moved them for him. For Kallum, visibility was legitimacy.

  But I’d heard him loud and clear, and it sat wrong on that little shelf above my stomach where feelings had one hell of a time staying still. “This woman is already as good as dead in your eyes. But Partridge, a white man, he’s still alive, ready to rot away in Huntington.”

  Bromley’s throat fizzed with frustration. “Citizens of Blackpeak are dead and you expect what, exactly? Clemency for their killer? This isn’t about what she is—”

  “Hell it isn’t.”

  From the chairs, Kallum said, “Sit down, Faust.”

  “You mean to tell me you all don’t see?”

  “Sit down, Faust.”

  But I went on. “Of course you see.” I swallowed. Cicero’s string-tie bit into the skin of my neck. Maybe I’d planned to come in and start shit. I’d dressed for the occasion, after all. I lifted my sleeve and let it roll down far enough to show off the flesh of my wrist. “Something about her looking far different from this,” I gave my skin a few slaps of the forefingers, “turns your guts into soup, and most everybody in this room is just waiting to see what kind of juicy mess you plan to make with someone that couldn’t blend into the crowd.”

  “Marshal,” Judge Fairchild said. “You’re derailing the trial of someone about to be sentenced to death.”

  "Elias," I said. "Just Elias. I'm on holiday for the time being according to Mayor Kallum. But there’s words I’m meant to give, because I was right there when those four miners got some leaks put in them.”

  At that point, Kallum stood.

  “She did it on my behalf. She did it for me,” I said.

  Bromley sucked in a ribbon of air through that gap in his front teeth. “Explain this.”

  The room tightened up harder than a rawhide knot.

  “They had beef with me. They got drunk. It was a bad decision from the start. They found an opening. So they capitalized.”

  The Judge asked, “Did you ask her to intervene?”

  “I’m one man. They were four,” I said. “If anything requested her action, it was numbers alone.”

  Bromley shook his head. “Elias Faust, protected by strangers in the night. First Miss Eliza Fulton, now this. No wonder Kallum heeled you like a dog. You ask too much of others.”

  Nycendera, from her chair, jerked once, as if struck. “He did not ask this of me.”

  “From the outside,” Bromley continued, “it’s easy to see the patte
rns at work. The women do a better job at cleaning the rabble out in your name.”

  “He did not ask this deed of me.”

  Bromley’s voice trembled with severity. “Yet you turned those men inside out. Whether or not Elias Faust requested this, you performed it. You willingly murdered, and should hang by the neck for the act. Do you deny ending the lives of those four men?”

  “I do not.”

  “Did it please you?”

  Her hard lips remained closed.

  “Bloodthirsty bitch,” someone muttered in the benches.

  Which cemented it for me, really. Bromley was the mouthpiece, and Judge Fairchild the means. Around these parts, being American meant hating anything that wasn’t like you, and my God, if this woman of gold and green was anything, she wasn’t us. When white men died, not even other white men paid that price.

  Because for men like Partridge, men like us, the laws glanced right off or just melted away like ice beneath a sunbeam.

  These people would all stack their blame on whatever shoulders weren’t their own. Exactly what Kallum wanted, too. Tight ship. Ensured his little world saw him at all times for all he could offer.

  And that’s why I shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised when, standing just behind him, I noticed Lachrimé Garland giving him something wrapped in a little handkerchief square. She caught my gaze for just a little finger-snap second. Then it was gone, and I thought she flew a thousand miles away.

  Judge Fairchild, sensing loss of control, lifted his shingler’s hammer. “What has become tremendously clear, Mister Faust, is that you possess little control over yourself let alone the firebrands and vagabonds in your town.”

  “So she’ll die because you want to make an example?”

  “She’ll die,” Bromley added, “because that is the law.”

  “Partridge gets Huntsville,” I said, “and she gets the noose? Just because?”

  The judge held his hands out to his sides. “Do you expect me to change the norms of society, Faust? This creature is going to die, whether it be by the terms of my verdict—”

  “Or at the hands of men and women in Blackpeak who won’t cease to lynch her before she can skitter out of town,” Kallum barked from his corner.