by Dyer Wilk
He felt sympathy trickle and then flow within him, washing away the voice of reason that told him he should go himself, to climb out tonight on his own and leave this blighted place far behind. The voice that replaced it whispered something else, a lie that would bring temporary comfort at best.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. You’re right. It’s better if we go tomorrow. Sam’ll get us a fat, juicy rabbit. Maybe even a couple of them. We’ll have a big dinner before we make the climb.”
If sleep had come , Gordon wasn’t aware of it.
He spent the night in a middling place within his own mind, trapped between memory and tired oblivion. When he rose from the hard ground at first light, Bill was stooped before the fire with a handful of sticks, tending it.
Gordon didn’t ask if he had slept.
He already knew the answer.
Without a word, he walked out into the grove and found his place among the trees, climbing to the bow some seven feet off the ground, now worn-free of bark by the friction of denim and fingernails. He sat and stared through the field glasses, watching the man in his own tree on the other side of the river.
The hours past, the heat of the day growing along with the thirst in his belly. But still he watched, never looking away, ignoring every ache and instinct to sustain himself. The man was toying with him, testing his patience by proving he could sit longer, denying his own need for food and drink, refusing to even move one hand to unfasten his pants and relieve himself. He was a statue, swayed only by the breeze and the weight of his weapon, tugging at him just enough to catch the sun and cause a flash.
Gordon watched and understood that this was madness.
This was the end of all reason.
To sit and wait and see oneself fade away without a care or regret, dedicated to the task and nothing more.
As the sun set, he returned to the cave, stopping at the shore to kneel and drink until his guts were seized by a cramp. The others had built a fire, but only Frank sat close. Bill was tucked into the rocky alcove that had belonged to Jimmy, sleeping or pretending to sleep. Sam sat propped against the opposite wall, staring intently at a box wrapped in twine and brown paper sitting at his feet. A few seconds passed before Gordon realized it was the parcel they’d taken from the coach three days ago.
Gordon sat, wiping the drops from his chin. “What’s with him?”
“He’s been like that all day,” Frank said. “Except for about ten minutes when he went to check the traps.”
“He catch anything?”
“You smell food cooking on this fire?”
Gordon thought of his hunger, distant and well-buried. Weakness hadn’t yet afflicted him, but it waited just as the man waited in his tree. Patient and prepared to bring an end to him.
He pushed the thought away and forced himself to smile, feigning good humor. “I must have lost my sense of smell in the fall.”
“You must have lost your sense, too,” Frank said. “Staying out in the heat all day. Thought you might have died out there.”
“If you’d have really thought that, you’d have gone looking.”
Frank lifted a heavy chunk of dry wood and dropped it on the fire, sending a swarm of embers flying. “Only because you still owe me five dollars. I can’t rightly leave a debt unpaid. Even if a man is on the verge of the great beyond.”
Gordon reached into his pocket and fished out a handful of coins. He tossed them at Frank’s feet.
“You’re paid in full.”
Frank reached down and scooped them up, holding them in his palm reflecting the firelight for a moment before closing his callused fingers around them.
“Much obliged, Gordon. You decide to wander off again, I’ll let you die in peace without rummaging through your britches for legal tender. Speaking of which, where did you wander off to?”
“You know where.”
“Don’t see why you waste the time.”
“There’s a lot of time around here to waste. And besides, someone should be watching.”
“Anything new to watch?”
Gordon shook his head. “Same as it was before.”
Frank slipped his hand into his pocket to deposit the coins. When he pulled it out again, he was holding the bottle of Laudanum. He set it on his knee, letting it slosh. It was mostly empty now – two inches of bitter liquid sitting at the bottom. He pulled the stopper and tilted his head back, gulping until there was only an inch left.
He sucked his lips dry, savoring every last drop, and set down the bottle. He pulled off his boots and slid his stocking feet close to the fire.
“Bill says you and him are climbing out tonight.”
“Me and him and anyone else who wants to try.”
“I might. Ribs hardly hurt at all.”
“Medicine will do that. Might loosen your grip, too, if you have too much.”
Frank wrinkled his chin in a non-expression that was too displeased to be a smile and too amused to be a frown. He raised the bottle, holding it lightly by the neck between his thumb and forefinger, twirling it around for a moment before taking another gulp.
He exhaled in exaggerated satisfaction. “My apologies for imbibing. Sometimes I need a bit of loosening.”
Gordon saw the dull intoxication in Frank’s eyes, disguised by years of practice. Soon he would be nearly useless, a man walking through thick mud, sinking deeper and deeper with every step.
He wouldn’t bother to argue.
Instead, he turned and looked at Sam. His eyes were still fixed on the parcel, the way a predator looks at its prey.
“Sam, are you all right?”
Sam didn’t answer.
“Sam?”
“No point in trying to rouse him,” a voice said.
Gordon turned and looked at Bill. His eyes were half-open now.
“Wouldn’t speak to me or Frank either,” he said. “I called him a yellow-bellied turncoat and he didn’t even twitch. Think he’s lost his mind.”
Gordon walked over and sat beside Sam. He reached out to touch him and then thought better of it.
“Sam, is there a reason why you’re so interested in that thing?”
Sam nodded, continuing to stare, unblinking.
“Can you tell me what that reason is?”
“It’s so plain,” he said.
Gordon glanced at the parcel. It didn’t look particularly special. Just a box like any other, the sort of thing that was shipped across the country and delivered every day. When they’d held up the coach, it had taken a couple minutes to find the right one because they all looked so similar, the only distinguishing feature being a New York City address.
“Are you worried Charvet won’t pay us?” he asked.
“He’ll pay. He always pays.”
“What is it then? Besides the way it looks, I mean.”
Sam was quiet for a long time. He still didn’t blink.
Then he came to life again, leaning back slightly and flaring his nostrils.
“I never thought such a thing could be so much trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
Sam allowed his eyes to leave the parcel, shifting them to Gordon to acknowledge him. Gordon saw the solemn determination there, the look of a man who knows something the rest of the world refuses to believe.
“It’s the reason we’re here, isn’t it? If we hadn’t been hired to steal that thing, none of this would have happened. Tom would be alive. Jimmy would be, too. It would be the same as it always was.”
Gordon leaned over to touch the parcel, meaning to turn it to look at the address again. Sam reached out fast and grabbed his wrist, starling him.
“I have an idea,” he said. “It’s been in my mind all day. Tried to convince myself to forget it, but I can’t. I think we should open it and see what’s inside.”
“Are you off your rocker? What’s in there is no business of ours. We don’t get paid to go nosing around what we take.”
“Charv
et never said we couldn’t.”
“But he expects us not to. If we open it, chances are he won’t pay.”
Sam smiled. “I don’t much care anymore. I need to know.”
Gordon looked to Frank for support, and then Bill. Neither of them protested. They were all too tired to make an issue of it.
“Fine,” Gordon said, throwing his hands up. “If you want to explain to Charvet why it was opened, you go right ahead.”
He turned away, putting his back to him as if it would convince him to leave the parcel be. He listened as Sam lifted it, unknotting the twine, and tearing away the paper, removing a lid and lifting the contents within.
“Son of a bitch…”
Gordon looked over his shoulder. Sam was holding something flat and rectangular. It flexed and warped in his hands, reflecting the light of the fire, projecting a yellow spot onto Sam’s face.
“Goddamn…carpetbagging…son of a bitch!”
Gordon leaned closer and saw that it was a photographic print, a sharp image of a naked man and woman in the middle of a very private act. If he had only bothered to look for a second, it would have meant nothing to him. He would have mistaken it for the sort of illicit art one could find in shops that catered to a very curious variety of customer. But he gave it enough time to know better, to allow his eyes to study the faces and recognize them.
The name didn’t immediately come to mind, but he knew the man’s reputation. He knew how much money the man had and that his fortune was growing by the day, built on steel and coal and railroads and land he’d snatched up cheap in the days after the war when business-minded Northerners had swept into the South looking for new financial opportunities. He knew the woman in the image wasn’t his wife, though much like his wife, this woman was young and beautiful. He knew the man got whatever he wanted because men like him always did, and even though he had much to lose, he was smart enough to avert a scandal and the inevitable divorce it would bring by hiring an unscrupulous sort of man like Charvet to hire more unscrupulous men to steal the damning evidence before it could fall into the wrong hands.
Sam pulled himself up from the ground, bracing his arm against the wall to compensate for his ankle. He walked over to the fire and dropped in the photograph.
Gordon shouted: “Wait!”
He crawled toward the fire, trying to reach it in time.
Frank was closer, but he did nothing. He stared at the flames in a Laudanum daze as the photograph caught fire. Bill was on his feet, trying to do something, reaching down to grab it and pulling his hand back in pain. It was too late. He could only stand and watch as the paper browned and curled, the man and woman in their lustful act turning into a fine sheet of glowing ash before crumbling.
“Why in God’s name did you do that?” Bill asked.
Sam shrugged, his eyes still focused on the fire. “All Carpetbaggers should burn.”
Bill clasped his hands together tightly, rubbing the singed fingers. “Oh, here we go again. Let’s hear all about how your daddy couldn’t pay the bank and a big bad Northerner swooped in and bought the farm out from under him.”
Sam stepped back from the fire, the anger on his face becoming more direct, focused solely on Bill. “You have no cause to talk about my kin like that.”
“Which way is that, Sam? I’m only repeating the story you’ve told a hundred goddamn times. But how about you include the part where your daddy drank half his money away, and lost the other half playing cards? Or better yet, how about you tell us where you were when all this happened? Oh wait. We’ve heard that one, too. We’ve heard it a hundred damn times because you never shut up about it. You were all broke up when the war ended and didn’t have two pennies to rub together, so you went to West Virginia and took to stealing coal wagons. And how about this? How about you tell us what any of that has to do with that damn picture? Is that hen-pecker the same fella who bought your daddy’s farm?”
Sam opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, and then started again. “Well, no. He’s not the same one. But I know the type.”
“Oh, you know the type. You know a thieving Northerner when you see one.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And you hate them more than you hate anything.”
“Yes!”
“So, since you hate them so damn much, why don’t you tell me why you burned the damn picture? You probably just did the man a favor.”
Sam’s hands clenched into fists. “I wasn’t doing him any favors.”
“Oh, how is that? I mean, objectively speaking, how does destroying it hurt him in any way? You know who he is. You’ve read the papers. You’ve seen what he’s caught up in. Doesn’t take much to figure out that we were stealing the damn picture for him. And why do think he’d want it? So he could put it on the front page of one his publications? So he can announce to the whole world that he’s pecking a hen that isn’t bound to him in holy and legal matrimony?”
The fists waved, shoulders squaring as Sam’s voice rose in volume: “I don’t care what he wants. I don’t work for thieving Northerners.”
Bill’s voice was calm: “You don’t? You just burned the picture. You saved him the trouble of having to do it himself. Hell, he doesn’t even have to pay Charvet now. Which means Charvet doesn’t pay us. Which means he’s such an astute thieving Northerner that he figured out a way to get a proud Tennessean who hates his guts to work for him for free.”
Sam limped forward, the fists aiming in a new direction. “I told you, I don’t work for him! If I’d have known who hired Charvet, I wouldn’t have touched it. And I’ll tell you something else, when I get out of here, I’ll go to New York and cut his goddamn Yankee throat myself.”
“Oh, now we’re on to the Yankee talk again. Let’s hear all about the war and the things you saw and the things you did, all those Yankees you killed in battle, and how after twenty-five years you haven’t moved on like the rest of us.”
“Are you telling me what I can or can’t feel about it?”
“No. I wouldn’t presume to tell you anything. The wax in your ears is so thick, you wouldn’t be able to hear it if I was screaming it in your face. But since it seems like I have your attention, I’d like to remind you that the war is over and your side lost.”
The anger burned brighter than the fire, but Sam moved slowly, limping closer to Bill, his raised fists prepared to strike.
His voice wavered, unsteady. “I killed men like you in battle. If I’d seen standing there on that field, weapon in hand or no weapon, I’d have spilled your blood and washed myself in it.”
“Big talk,” Bill said. “Sometimes I think you weren’t even in battle. You probably tried to enlist and they figured you were too slow in the head. Probably had you running a stretcher and carrying the corpses of more capable men.”
Sam swung, but it was Bill who landed the first blow. The punch grazed Sam’s jaw and ricocheted over his shoulder, the force of it pulling Bill against him. They grappled each other, their legs moving together in a tangle as their weight teetered back and forth. Bill pushed at him, trying to break his grasp, growling and cursing.
After a moment, he was free, standing there, out of breath, looking at Sam as Sam looked back at him.
Gordon could see it on their faces, what they both intended to do.
He ran toward them, shouting: “Stop!”
Sam lunged fast, reaching for Bill’s throat.
He wasn’t fast enough.
Bill drew his pistol and fired.
The shot thundered off the walls of the cave, torturing their ears and leaving behind a sharp ringing.
Sam stumbled back, grabbing his stomach. The blood seeped between his fingers, staining his white knuckles. He fell to his knees, letting out a pained groan.
Bill lowered the gun, breathing hard. He looked satisfied and disappointed at the same time.
Sam’s mouth hung open, showing a twisted row of yellowed teeth. He clenched them, shaking his head, and reached for hi
s holster.
The second shot was quieter, almost dull. Bill turned his head and looked down at Sam and then at the hole in the middle of himself. He leaned back against the wall of the cave, trying to keep on his feet, and then slid into the alcove where Jimmy had made his last confession.
Sam laughed, but there was no humor in it. It quickly turned into a cough and then a pained moan. He flopped forward, reaching out to break his fall, and crumbling under his own weight. He lied there, his head turned to look at the fire.
“Goddamn Carpetbagger,” he muttered.
Gordon saw the life leave his eyes, his lips moving wordlessly and then becoming still as a thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Bill tried to sit up and slumped down again. His legs sliding across the ground until they were splayed in front of him. He looked at the palms of his upturned hands lying useless in his lap, and then cried in silence, as if he felt a deep shame more than he felt the pain of the bullet.
And then he was gone.
Frank got to his feet, stepped back, and bumped into the wall next to Gordon, trying to put distance between himself and the horror he saw before him. He lifted the bottle with a trembling hand and took a gulp, losing half of it down his chin.
“This goddamn place is cursed,” he whispered. “He’s killing us and he hasn’t even lifted a finger.”
Gordon placed a hand on his shoulder. “Frank…somehow we have to…”
Frank reeled, his eyes half-deranged. “I’m gonna kill that bastard if it’s the last thing I do!”
Gordon searched his mind for the right words, for a way to bring him calm and comfort. But there were none. Frank was driven now, a whipped bull charging at its enemy.
He dropped the bottle onto the ground with a hollow plunk, and took up his rifle from its resting place against a timber beam.
The only word that came to Gordon’s lips was “wait.” He repeated it, again and again, nearly shouting it as Frank stormed out of the cave and ran into the grove. Gordon gave chase, but Frank was faster, driven by an unseen force that no man had a right to harness.
