He was torn between the sudden desire to know more about the men and women they’d dealt with, and the simultaneous understanding that they were better at their work for not knowing. Details clogged things up and slowed you down. The more you knew about a person the more complicated it became to shut the light.
He was so horny he would have fucked a hole in the sand if it would have stayed a hole long enough. It was something that came suddenly and strongly. Just like his hunger. It dug into him and made him unreasonable and mean. He did not require much in this life, but what he did require felt to him like pure necessity. He knew he would not die out there in the desert for lack of something to fuck, but it hardly seemed like a life worth living, if he could go on forever like this. He had not given a direct thought to how well set up he was before this mess. He decided that if things were ever again as they had once been, he would appreciate it more : his freedom, his brother, their life on the road and in the woods. What he got to see and experience each day. Most people held up in a small town or on a dried-up farm and each year passed as plainly as the last until a bullet or a fire found you or time just plain ran out. That was not the life for him.
He had had one wife. They were never legally married. She had had one husband before him and it had not ended well. But they were as married as anyone could ever be in all other respects. As it turned out, he was not a good husband. After the first few months, he grew mean. He did not seem to care for her in any kind of regular way. He could feel himself being mean but could find nothing in him that would stop it. He would observe its happening and take stock. This is a cruel act and those are cruel words, he would think. And one day she left him for the man she had been married to before. It was out of nowhere that the man arrived and she joined him on his horse, without so much as a goodbye. Brooke had gone in for a bath at the time, but heard the noises of his arrival and her leaving. He pieced it together as he watched them ride away. He was in a towel on the porch as the final moments passed. That man had a quick horse and he had outrun Brooke with little effort. Brooke had chased them south through a desert for three days without ever meeting them, before finally turning back. Then he spent a year drinking and fighting with his horses. They’d shared a small house on a small plot in a small town, and he had four horses and a well to his name. He would gather the horses up and try to knock them out with his bare fists. Mostly they ran from him, but occasionally one would rear up and do him some harm. After more than enough of that, his brother Sugar returned and they started a life together. Brooke was no good keeping still. No good at doing it, and no good when doing it. So they built themselves a reputation for mobile meanness with a professional demeanor. And they’d kept at it until now. He did not know what ultimately became of his ex-wife. He would like to know but would not like to bother finding out.
He was losing his mind. He was chasing down stories and putting one boot in front of the other. There was no water in this direction, no imaginable source of food. He paused a moment then doubled back.
Mary was learning to plow. Or, more accurately, she was at her father’s side, pulling rocks and shells from the soil and nodding as he spoke to her. He was smiling a lot. He was grinning like a fool. She was running circles around him and chasing insects back into the earth. The plow was an angled wooden thing, dragged by a horse and steered by her father. It was slow work. He looked pleased and determined.
“So Bird just fell ?”
“He fainted, Mary.”
“Why ?”
“He’s still healing.”
“He’s uneven.”
“He’s unwell.”
They were startled then by a sound like thunder.
Bird and Martha were still in the house. Bird spooked at the sound and Martha tried to comfort him, but he climbed under the bed and lay there flat and unlistening. Then the windows began to break. One by one. And the voices of strange men rose up and the wall behind Martha burst into flame. They were burning them out. Bandits, marauders, rustlers, thieves. Hell was finally at their door. Martha retrieved a rifle from the trunk at the base of Bird’s bed. Bird inched away from the fire, gathering himself into a little ball. Martha stepped to the window and fired. A thud. A horse’s panic. Another shot and then the same.
“Come out, John,” a voice said. “It’s been long enough, and we are here to collect.”
The men moved from view and circled around the house. They were firing but bullets were not striking or passing through the walls. She moved from window to window, watching the front then the back of the house. She caught glimpses of the men, their horses, but they were moving fast, protecting themselves by doing so.
There was a family plot at the top of a well-wooded hill. The field Mary and John were working was a rough halfway point. John instructed Mary to hide with her grandmother, as she liked to do during family games.
“What will happen to you ?” she said.
“I will be safe,” he said. “These are just men who want money.”
“We don’t have any,” she said.
“I can reason with them,” he told her. “Now go.”
She ran, stayed low, and vanished into the woods. The sounds of gunfire and horses and voices obscured the hurried footsteps of her leaving. John found a manageable rock and worked his way toward the barn, which was only a few hundred feet from the field and a few hundred more to the house. He was going for his father’s rifle and pistol, which he kept with the animals as both a way of honoring the old man and putting him in his place. One of the men turned the corner at the far side of the house and stopped. He was remarkably nondescript. He was dirty. He had hair on his face and wore a hat that shadowed his eyes. He spotted John and John froze.
“John,” said the man. “Do you have the money ?”
John raised the manageable rock. He looked for any unique features to the man who was aiming the pistol at him. His spurs were rusty, but not remarkably so.
From the window, Martha saw John freeze, raise his arm, then fall. Then she heard the shot. She stepped into the living room and out through the front door where the man who had shot John was turning his horse back to the business at hand. She fired and he fell. She shot the horse as well. It fell upon the rider. Two other men turned back to her after the shot and she fired on them both. One fired his own shot, but it was redirected toward the sky as her bullet landed. The last of them, though she saw him only as the sixth, fired at her from a good distance. The bullet broke the wood of the banister at her left. She walked toward him steadily and he fired again, blasting a hole in the dirt just behind her. He wrangled his horse and tried to still it. She reached what seemed a reasonable distance for her trembling arms, raised the rifle, and placed a bullet in his chest. He received the bullet, hunched forward, dug his heel into the horse’s side, and moved past Martha, forcing her back a few steps but not down. She fired several more times but failed to meet the moving target.
Dust held in the air. There were no sounds from outside, only the fire cracking the walls. Bird wet himself and began to cry. He cursed himself and demanded that he get out from under the bed. He told himself again and again, get out from under the bed, but he did not move.
The gunshots that echoed throughout the valley sounded almost patient. Inexplicably, the birds in the trees lining the graveyard were still singing. Or chattering. Gossiping. There were no more horses. No more yelling. Just gunshot, gunshot, gunshot. Then nothing but birds. Mary was pacing between the headstones and pulling up dandelions not aligned to a particular plot. She’d pieced together a bouquet. She was not fully ignorant to what was happening, and there was a flood of emotion for each imagined possibility. There was joy and pride at the thought of John rescuing Martha and Bird and the farm, and of them obtaining several new horses to break and befriend. There was sadness and fear for a handful of other, darker, reasons. She kept herself busy and did not allow herself to settle on any particular thought for very long. The birds flitted from tree to tree as if
to spread the news of her bravery, her stoicism. She was like a historical person, going up against the difficulties of the world and working to change things through her survival. She had not known this grandmother. She was not a blood relation. Mary set the dandelions on the grave and asked her grandmother what she thought about the whole thing. Her grandmother said nothing, or she blew through the grass and chirped in the trees — Mary hadn’t decided how she felt about it. Mostly when she talked to her grandmother, she imagined she was speaking into a well.
Martha grabbed Bird by the wrist and pulled. He yelled stop and reached for the edge of the bed to counter her yanking. No arm rose to meet the impulse and he slid out from under the bed. When he would not stand, Martha dragged him through the doorway, into the living room, and out the front door. She paid no mind to the fire and Bird somehow made it out without a wound. She dragged him through the dirt and over a rock and out to the barn where she finally loosed her grip and released him into the dirt. She had traced an enormous S in the dirt with his back, avoiding the fallen bodies.
“Get up,” she said.
Bird turned his belly to the ground. He was crying and could not stop.
“Stand up,” said Martha.
He was in the long johns that had once belonged to Mary. He was without footwear.
“Go to the barn,” she said. “You’ll find John’s boots there and a pistol.”
The house was burning, nearly half-consumed by flame, and she had no plan or desire to stop it, it seemed.
“They won’t fit,” he said.
“They’ll cover your soles. Now get up.”
She scanned the perimeter for anything — another man, Mary. She saw nothing but bodies and a little Bird crying in the dirt.
“Up,” she said, “we’re moving.”
She headed to the barn and got the boots from beside the door. She found the pistol with the rest of the various tools near the back of the barn. She also found a rifle.
When she stepped back out from the barn, she found Bird had hoisted himself into a sitting position.
“I said up,” she said.
She gripped him by his armpits. It felt loose and awkward where the stump was, like she was hurting him.
“What are we going to do ?” he said.
“We’re going to find Mary,” she said.
“Where is she ?” he said.
“We’re going to look for her,” she said.
He was up finally. She brushed him off and handed him the boots. They were indeed far too large. They were comically large on him. She nearly grinned when he took his first few steps. He started crying again and she fired a shot into the air with John’s pistol.
“No,” she said. “Cry all you want once we’ve got Mary and we’ve set rangers on those marauders.”
“Were they marauders ?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they take anything ? What did they want ?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why ?”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Why ?”
He was crying again.
“Because we are always in the wilderness. Beneath everything is the wilderness and there is no end to it.”
“What do you mean ?”
“You know exactly what I mean, and that is why you’re scared.”
“Are they going to come back ?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why ?”
“Because we won’t be here.”
They searched for Mary near the well and did not find her. They searched for her in the fields and found only the plow. They followed tracks that led away from the house and into the woods. There were two trails. One led to the cemetery and the other led deeper into the woods and on into town.
“She’s in the cemetery,” said Martha, “or she’s gone.”
Bird was kicking stones and dragging his feet behind her. He was no longer really crying but only because he was exhausted and spent. He was dripping pathetically and running at the nose. He knew he had failed in every way you could fail in such a situation. He had been afraid and miserable and had acted as such, which only made him feel more afraid and more miserable.
Mary was kneeling on a grave and arranging dandelions into a cone shape.
Martha lifted her and held her up and examined her. Then she held the girl against her chest and shut her own eyes.
Mary asked what had happened.
Martha did not speak.
Mary asked Bird what had happened.
He was crying, and said nothing.
“We’ve got to go,” said Martha.
“Where is John ?” said Mary, because it felt like the right thing to ask.
Sugar’s delivery had to be overseen by several of the town’s deputies, partially because the doctor had spoken out so strongly against it.
The doctor was a committed drinker. He had steady hands until around 3 o’clock and then he was more than worthless.
Since Sugar’s arrival, the doctor had committed himself to enfeeblement. He would sit in the bar and drink, then he would drink in front of the bar, and then he would drink in the alley off to the side of the bar, and all the while he was calling Sugar an abomination and a creature and the devil. He said Sugar was pregnant with his own cock and if he, the doctor, were to squat before him while he was birthing that cock, it would be more or less the same thing as inviting the animal, Sugar, to fuck him.
“I will not be fucked by an animal,” insisted the doctor, on a nightly basis. He was a man of medicine. A church-going man. He had survived two wives and had two sons working to keep the peace. He deserved better.
The morning Sugar went into labor, the doctor opened up the bar. The bartender, who lived upstairs in the inn above the bar itself, and who could be blamed to some degree for answering the doctor’s insistent pounding at the door, would not take it so far as to serve the doctor at six in the morning. Instead, he suggested that the doctor take lodging upstairs and try to sleep off what was clearly still clinging to him from the night before. The doctor had simply stepped past the bartender, who was in his night cap and pajamas, and had gone around the bar to open the shutters and get the drink himself. The bartender protested but did not make a move to pry loose the doctor’s hand. In theory, the doctor was a respected man. He was educated and on the richer side of things and, above all, he was necessary to their way of life. He was not a bad doctor, though he was unreliable. He’d once cured the bartender’s ringworm without much fuss, and saved the lives of several men and women who’d come down with some kind of horrible fever just the year before. In theory, he was one of the town’s more important men. In practice, he was universally ignored whenever possible.
In the jail, Sugar demanded help but could form no specific requests other than, “Please bring a doctor,” or, “Please let me go.”
The doctor, drink in hand, held court on the porch of the bar.
“While I’ve never dealt in creature before this day, I can confidently say that to let this one out early, to open the cell any time within the next three or four hours, would be the same as letting it loose to wreak havoc on the women and children of our good town. A beast like that won’t be slowed down by something so casual as labor, at least not until it’s well enough along that it’s more or less immobilized by the pain and by the position its body will naturally assume.”
Four men, one woman, and three children were gathered before him, pausing their daily procession in order to hear more details about what was going on in the jail and why so many deputies were assigned to its security and why the doctor himself had been so put out over the last week. Rumors were spread and the doctor was always talking but something was different about this morning. Curiosities were as bright as the sun breaking over the hills. The doctor rose and swung his bottle like a young girl dancing her doll across the floor.
“We live and see the world progress into strange, dark places,” the do
ctor said. “The stench of what evil is on the horizon is beyond repute. Every morning I wake to the relief that we are still here, that there are familiar faces and friends about me, and then the horror of our situation settles in and I feel both pity and fright. At my life. At our lives. At what’s to become of them. We are witnessing the de-evolution of morals into muck. The degradation of decency.”
“You’re a doctor ?” said one of the men. He was sporting a bright white hat and a long button-down shirt tucked into a snug fit of jeans.
“I am THE doctor,” said the doctor. “I am the man who would take the bullet from your leg should the rest of the day go rotten for you.”
“I appreciate that,” said the man, “but right now you’re sounding more like a washed-up preacher or a watered-down drunk. Aren’t there some kind of preparations to be made ?”
The doctor laughed excessively and forcefully. He laughed so hard that a fine mist of spittle glazed those children perched on the steps below him. They wiped their eyes and covered their mouths and crept in closer.
“Of course I’m drunk,” said the doctor, “and this ain’t spiritual.”
“What’s the advantage ? What’s the gain from how you’re carrying on ?”
“There is none of either. I’m hoping not to gain something, but to lose something.”
“Lose what ?”
“It’s obvious and not worth taking the time to say and you’re a fool,” said the doctor. “My fear, of course.”
The doctor lost his footing for a moment, trying to settle himself back down onto one of the many rocking chairs that lined the wall-length porch of the bar.
“What’s to be scared of ?”
Haints Stay Page 9
