by James Wade
“They’ll be here in a week. They won’t stop hunting us. Ain’t that what you’re always telling me?”
Her smile faded.
“Give me two days,” I said. “Then we gotta get.”
She nodded.
“Three days,” she insisted.
The first two days passed with little excitement. The pain in my leg seemed worse than it had before, though my chest and shoulder were healing nicely. I tried to stand and fell and caught myself on the bed and cussed and told Sophia I didn’t need to be able to walk, just to sit a saddle.
We heard other patients coming in and out for various illnesses and medicines and the doctor seemed preoccupied with a woman down the hall. Sophia didn’t know much but said the man Finch who helped the doctor had let slip that a very rich man had paid a large sum of money for the doctor to look after her. He didn’t say whether she was young or old or sick or dying.
On the morning of the third day I was able to put enough pressure on the leg to stand, but walking was still a mighty challenge and even so I told Sophia to saddle the horses.
The doctor had thrown up his hands a second time when we told him of our lack of money but we offered a horse as payment and he accepted and when he left the room Sophia cursed him in Spanish and said that in her country doctors would help you no matter if you could pay or not and I reminded her this was not her country.
Sophia had gone to the stables where our horses were being kept. She would saddle two, trade one for food and supplies, and give the last one to the doctor. My only task while she did all of this was to put on my shirt and hat, as she had already helped me pull on my pants and boots. I was midway through the grueling process when the door opened and a man dressed like a caricature of a cowboy entered the room.
He wore brown canvas pants with black boots and silver spurs. His shirt was a striped hickory and his vest hung open over his ribs. His hat was black felt with a tall crown and a strip of brown leather hung around the crown and was studded with copper coins. A gun belt hung loose at his waist.
“You Caleb Bentley?”
“Who?” I asked, grimacing as I tried to swing my leg over the side of the bed.
“Just stay put now,” the man warned, and he touched the heel of his pistol. “I’m Hollis Hayes, and I’m taking you in.”
“Listen, bud, I’m not Caleb whoever you said. And I’m about to call the sheriff.”
The man stood. The sunlight shone through the window and the thin white curtains and cut across his lower half. His upper body was shrouded in shadow.
“My wife’s about to be back and whatever game you’re playing at, it’s gonna sure enough scare the devil right out of her.”
The man slowly pulled a folded paper from his pocket and studied it. He smiled.
“Just so you know, Bentley, it was the doctor who gave you up. Funny thing, don’t you think? A man would save a life just to turn around and give it up.”
“Sir, I honestly don’t know—”
“Save it, son. You can either let me put these chains on you, or I can kill you where you sit.”
“Would you at least let a prisoner get his shirt buttoned?”
“Well, seeing as you ain’t got nowhere, or no way, to run. You go on and take your time.”
The man pulled a pouch of tobacco from his vest and buried some in the deep pocket he’d dug over time between his teeth and the inside of his cheek.
“You’re gonna have to help me stand and walk,” I told him and as he moved toward me I readied myself for the coming fight. But there was no fight to be had.
The man tilted his head down to spit juice onto the floor and instead he grunted and the dark liquid spilled from his lips and ran down his chin. He held both hands to his heart, where the knife in his back had come out, and looked at it and looked at me and never has a face seemed more puzzled.
“Let’s go,” Sophia said and she lifted me and I moaned but we moved as one out of the room and down the hallway and my breaths were short and painful and she told me everything was going to be alright.
Outside I used my good leg to spring up toward the horse and Sophia helped push me the rest of the way into the saddle. Three other men entered the doctor’s office as Sophia mounted her horse. I leaned over and gritted my teeth and snatched the reins of the third horse.
“That is the doctor Cobb’s horse,” she said.
“Not anymore, darling.”
“There’s that sumbitch, yonder,” someone shouted from the porch.
We rode wide open down the thoroughfare as shots rang out behind us.
40
Randall paid for the body to be sent by train to Chicago, to her sister. When it was done he walked into a bar without reading the name and sat on a stool and ordered whiskey. The barkeep nodded and poured and Randall drank and ordered again. He drank and stared past the barkeep at the mirror along the back wall. He stared at himself or what, if any, was left.
“What do you see?” asked a Hispanic man who appeared to be Randall’s age.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what you see? Or you don’t know how to describe it?”
“I don’t know. Both, I guess.”
“In all things men look and see only themselves,” the man said. “It is their ego that blocks the view, but men do not know or care; and so they believe then that the world is of their own making, when of course this is not true. It is only the fool who believes the world can be made or unmade by his hand. The world is of itself and nothing else, and it will be as it is and as it always was. There is no changing for the world, only for the man. And when the man is changed in his heart so too is he changed in his eyes and, perhaps, the world appears different than before. I think, sometimes, this is a good thing. But other times a man sees only the shadows of the world, and this is a hard man to reason with because for him there is nothing worth seeking that has not already been sought and captured and corrupted. It has always been this way. So if you are looking into this mirror and do not know what it is you see, then perhaps you are a changed man.”
Randall’s laugh was short and unamused.
“I just see dark hair ready to turn gray, like my father’s.”
The man shook his head.
“When men look to their ancestors for a comparison, they have already erred,” he said. “There can be no comparison as we are one and the same with the ghosts of the earth.”
“I’m not the same as my father.”
“Of course you are. You are the same as your father and my father and all of the fathers back to the first,” the man told him. “They acted as they must act, and we act the same. Even if the actions are different.”
“If the actions are different, we’re not the same.”
“Here we must disagree. Here I must tell you the world your father grew up in was different from the one we are in. Do you agree?”
“Times have changed, sure.”
“Right. So, if our fathers were in this different world, or different time, as you call it, what then is there to compare?”
“How they handled certain things,” Randall said and motioned to the bartender.
“Things of a different time?” the man asked.
“I guess. But not everything changes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” Randall asked and emptied his glass and called again for more.
“Why does not everything change?”
“You still have to eat. You still have to drink.”
“You still have to die?” the man asked.
“Yes, death,” Randall answered, thinking of Charlotte as he assumed he always would with no ending. “Death doesn’t change.”
“Ah, but it does,” the stranger countered.
“All men die.”
“This is tru
e. But in the ancient world did they not die differently? Did they not go to their graves believing in gods who rode the sun into the sky, gods who set storms upon the sea? Did those who first lived in these lands not go to their graves believing white men to be gods reborn of iron?”
“Sure, but they still died.”
“So they did,” the man nodded. “And they lived, and we live and we will die, and all in a different time and place that is changed but the same, and so to compare is a practice in lying.”
“You say a lot of words, señor, to say nothing at all.”
The man smiled. “If your father eats an apple when he is but a boy, and then you eat an apple from the same tree at the same age, are you the same as your father?” he asked Randall.
“Well,” Randall sighed, “in that particularly narrow situation, I guess I am.”
“But you do not know why he ate the apple.”
“I imagine because he was hungry.”
“You imagine,” the man said. “And to imagine is to lie.”
“Well, if that’s the way you see it.”
“There is only one way to see it. To see it another way is to imagine, and here we find ourselves at the same ending.”
“So if you can never say for sure why somebody did something, then every action outside of yourself would be a lie,” Randall said.
Again the man nodded. “This is what I believe, yes.”
“That’s a hell of a way to see things.”
“That is not how I see things. But it is the way they are.”
“Even dying?” Randall asked.
“Yes.”
“So no man ever died?”
The man shook his head. “As you said, all men die.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Randall told him. “And I’m only getting drunker from here.”
The man shrugged and held up his fingers and the bartender came and poured two more glasses and Randall caught his wrist and asked that he leave the bottle and he did.
Randall drank and looked at the man.
“If I was to tell you every person I loved, young and old, was dead, what would you say?”
The man thought for a moment and answered, “I would say a prayer for them and also for you.”
“But would you believe they’re dead?” Randall asked.
“I would believe they are dead, yes,” the man said. “But I would still believe death is a lie. Lies exist all around us, my friend. Just because they are not true, does not mean they do not exist. Do you understand?”
Randall placed a dollar bill on the bar and turned the bottle upward. “I’m starting to,” he said.
“Salud,” the man replied, raising his glass.
* * *
Ten days later Randall sat alone at a dark wood table in a café in Alamogordo. The steam rose from his coffee and touched the cold window and left there a soft fog and he watched it fade. Outside the glass his horse was tied and blanketed and the flurries of snow were beginning to fall from the gray sky. Beyond the town, some twenty miles to the south, the Organ Mountains sat swollen on the horizon in shades of blue and black. The snow fell thicker.
He was headed home, but what that meant he could not say. No more letters had come from the ranch. He’d passed again through the valley where the old woman had sheltered them from the blizzard, and there he found the homestead emptied and abandoned. Perhaps Joanna had been able to arrange transport for the boy. Perhaps she had not.
Randall read in the newspaper of the growing violence in Mexico. He read of the rich Republicans meeting in secret in Hoboken, New Jersey, likely deciding how to become richer. More money, more land, more power. The manifest destiny of country imagined by greed and founded in blood. Forever the blood will flow, he thought. Forever.
He had once clung to the notion that it would be men like him, educated men, who would change this country. Like the philosophers of old, he would teach thought and reason and compassion. Now he was barren of such hopes. Not because he couldn’t teach these things, but because no one would listen. None would learn because none cared to.
His family had stolen this land, as had all the other families since the first men came to these shores. They had exalted things like independence and freedom but had intended it only for themselves—the freedom to take what they wanted, the independence to never answer for their crimes. Oh, but we will answer, we will answer in time, all of us. Ill-gotten spoils, he thought, sipping his coffee. We will answer with every child born to violence and every man prone to hate. We will answer with this American disease of independence. Men should not be free. All types of men—the greedy, the lazy, the privileged few—prey on the minority. The minority being those men who are both honorable and empathetic and willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
By his second cup, there was no God, no one to look after the sick and dying children—no more than there is anyone to look after a flock of birds or herd of lost sheep. If a man wants justice he need not turn to God or the law. He need not appeal to the courts or the hearts of men, rather in his own hands he holds the measure of vengeance. In his own being does he find the executioner of truth.
Randall thought all these things and more. He paid for his coffee with what little coin he had left and rode out into the snow.
“Merry Christmas!” the girl called after him, and he did not turn back.
* * *
Men returned are more often men changed, and so it went with Randall. He woke in a darkness outside the Gila Forest, having the day prior traversed the cavernous passes of the White Mountain Reservation. He rolled onto his side and lay covered in his serape atop the frozen ground. Without rising, he used a bowed branch to revive the fire. It smoldered and hissed and grew with no urgency and Randall watched it and flexed his toes. He could feel the cold around him. He poked again at the fire and drew himself up and sat cross-legged and hunched and blew on the coals through cupped hands.
On the other side of the fire, Mara snorted and her hot breath exploded into the icy atmosphere and hung there in a tuft of smoke before disappearing into some woebegone ether. She cocked her head and whinnied and looked off into the dark morning.
Randall heard the man from a great distance. He crashed through the underbrush and stumbled up the ridge toward the growing fire. Randall slowly moved his right arm behind him and felt for his gun belt.
“Friend coming in,” the man called as he approached. “Starving, freezing friend coming in. Don’t shoot.”
Randall didn’t answer.
The man brushed past Mara without taking his eyes off the fire and he didn’t slow until he was almost on top of the flame.
“Howdy,” he managed as he turned and shifted and tried to warm himself over the small fire. “You wouldn’t happen to have any food would you, friend?”
Randall let go of his pistol and tossed the stranger a sack of jerky.
The man ate savagely, stuffing handfuls of meat into his mouth. Each bite was bigger than the last and he chewed with his mouth open and Randall watched the shadows dance across his face as food fell into his tobacco-stained beard.
At last the man sat across the fire from Randall, his knees inches from the fire. Randall continued to study his face.
“Where’s your wife?” Randall asked the man.
“Say again?”
“Your wife, Geanie, where is she?”
“Who the hell are you?” the man said. “How do you know about Geanie?”
“I don’t know about Geanie. That’s why I’m asking. Where is she? Where are the girls?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t have to tell you a goddamn thing.”
The man looked to either side of him and then turned to look behind. He stared at Mara and tilted his he
ad.
“I know that horse,” he said, turning back to Randall and the fire. “You’re the old boy riding with the nigger.”
Randall didn’t answer.
“Well, where’s your woman?” the man asked, laughing. “Where’s them boys?”
He took another piece of jerky and bit off a hunk. “The way I see it,” he said, still chewing, “I just did what I had to do.”
“What’d you do?”
The man grinned. “Fella in Las Cruces made me an offer for the girls, so I took it. I don’t even know if they were mine in the first place. ’Course Geanie didn’t take too well to that, and one night I woke up with a knife to my throat, so, like I say, I did what I had to do.”
Randall nodded. “You’re the lowest kind of animal to ever breathe,” he told the man. “You know that, don’t you?”
The man stopped chewing. “To hell with you, fancy boy. How about I kill you where you sit and take that fancy horse of yours?”
“You gambled that money away, didn’t you?” Randall asked, sliding his right hand behind his back. “The money you got for selling your own daughters.”
“That ain’t none of your goddamn concern,” the man said, rising from the ground.
“Maybe,” Randall answered. “Or maybe I’m making it my concern. Maybe I’m making this whole morally hollow world my concern.”
The man opened his mouth but the words never came. Instead, Randall whipped his arm forward and fired and the bullet burrowed into the man’s chest and there it stayed as Randall kicked dirt over the coals and mounted up.
The light began to break through the trees and he sat atop the big Arabian and stared out at the rim country to the west and then down at the body before him. He pulled tight his gun belt, lowered his hat, and turned back east, riding into the rising sun.
If the world was full of monsters, he would destroy them. He would have vengeance and blood and more. He would become all the things he’d always hated and thus grow to hate himself, and in that hate he would find the only the solace left to him. He would let it fester and rot until every trace of his humanity became consumed by blackness. If the world was full of monsters, he would become one.
