The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

by Ian Stansel

  “Sorry, man,” the voice said before Silas’s eyes could get straight. When they did focus, Silas saw two men. Both young and narrow in the way young men are, but built through the shoulders. One removed his Giants cap and replaced it backward. The other arched his back to let his oversize pack drop onto one of the bunks.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you up.” The same voice. From the mouth of the one in the ball cap.

  Silas’s throat emitted a noise, something like a grunt, and he let that be his response.

  “We’re hiking,” the other boy continued. “Obviously.”

  “Dumb shit,” Ball Cap said.

  “Fuck you,” the other one said, and he tossed a plastic water bottle at his friend in mock aggression.

  Silas rubbed a thumb into one eye, then the other. He was disoriented and his head felt heavy, as if he were in the midst of a fever.

  The boy in the ball cap said, “I’m going to take a piss.” He went through the shelter’s opening and curved out of sight, into the darkness of the woods. A moment later Silas heard him issue a childish shriek, then the word “Shit.” He came back in, said to his friend, “There’s a fucking horse out there.” Then to Silas, “Is that your fucking horse?”

  Silas sat up, nodded, grunted again.

  The other boy said, “So are you, like, a horse rider?”

  Silas ignored this. He cleared his throat and said, “Got caught a little short on rations out here. You boys got anything you can spare?”

  With an eagerness that Silas, had he been in a better humor, might have found endearing, both boys opened their packs and rattled off their inventory. Silas accepted a gnarled twist of jerky and a promise for a can of beef stew once they got a fire going in the pit out front. “I’m grateful to you,” Silas muttered. The salty jerky set his mouth watering and landed in his stomach like a lifesaver into the ocean. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.

  “So where you headed?” Ball Cap asked.

  “Coast.”

  “Well, you’re not too far now.”

  “No?” Silas said, opening his eyes. “Where are we? You got a map?”

  Ball Cap spread the map across the table and pointed to where they were. Just thirty or so miles from the coast. A deep breath filled Silas’s lungs. Too far to go tonight, but an easy jaunt for the morning. He said, “What say we gather up some wood, then, get some chow cooking.”

  The boys couldn’t build a fire for shit, but they seemed to enjoy the act of busting sticks over their knees and under the heels of their boots, and they laughed at each other when the branches refused to give and instead knocked bruises onto their flesh. Silas took over fire duty and got the blaze roaring well enough and one of the boys looked at it and said, “Damn, bro.” They popped cans of Dinty Moore and set them on the edges of the pit. Soon enough the brown tar was bubbling. Silas held his can with his sleeve and burned his mouth but kept eating until the tin was empty. One of the boys offered him another and he accepted it.

  With the worst of his hunger sated, and now that he knew he was so close to the coast, Silas sank into a deeper state of repose. Barring the unexpected, he could be there by noon. Easily. And then? Then nothing. Then who cares. Hell, he was hardly the first man to feel the magnetic pull of the water, to want to go and go until the land disappeared into the impossible vastness of the ocean. People, trees, even mountains, they all paled compared with the sea’s boundlessness. It made a man feel silly, the way someone’s tragedy eclipses the petty irritations of everyday life. The way death comes along trailing its blackness, making even birth inconsequential. And this was what he wanted: to let his existence be utterly squashed by the colossus of nature.

  The boy with the ball cap stood, went into the shelter, and returned holding a brightened phone at arm’s length. He spun slowly in place.

  The other said, “What are you doing, bro?”

  Silas flinched. What are you doing, brother?

  “I thought maybe we were high enough to get a signal.”

  “You stupid? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “There’s no middle of nowhere anymore,” Ball Cap said. A moment passed as the other one let this statement sink in. Then the one in the ball cap continued, “I said I’d call home. I’m going higher.”

  “You’ll get lost.”

  “I won’t get lost.” He stepped into the woods.

  Silas sat with the other one, the fire crackling between them. Silas’s exhaustion prevented him from feeling any awkwardness in the situation, though it was clear from his peering around and nervous snapping of twigs that the boy felt no such ease.

  “I got a cousin who rides horses,” the boy said finally. “Mandy. She’s like twelve or something?”

  Silas nodded.

  “Everything with her is horses. It was just like, when it happened, it happened a hundred and fifty percent. Boom—horses all the fucking time.”

  “It’s like that sometimes,” Silas muttered.

  “You ever wonder what it is with girls and horses? Like, what’s the thing with them? Girls in particular. Why they like them so much?”

  “No,” Silas said.

  “No what?”

  “No, I’ve never wondered about that.”

  A big pocket of sap popped in one of the fire logs.

  “A lot of jokes you could make about it, though, right?” the boy said.

  “Jokes?”

  “Big thing between their legs. All that bouncing.”

  “You saying that about your little cousin?”

  “No, I’m just saying. What people could say.”

  “Lot of stupid things people could say about a lot of things.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” the boy said after a moment.

  “Sure you did. You meant that riding horses is a womanish thing to do.”

  “No—”

  “Do I seem particularly womanish to you, son?”

  “No, sir.”

  The fire started to darken and Silas said to the boy, “Give those logs a little kick.”

  The boy stretched a leg out and weakly tapped at the fire with his boot. A log fell and the flames from the others flipped their heads upward.

  “Do you know how powerful a horse is?” Silas said.

  “Really powerful, I’d guess.”

  “Do you know what a hoof could do to that skull of yours?”

  The boy looked at him through the fire. Silas felt energized. He could sense the boy’s fear and it shot a jolt through his body.

  “I’ve had eight of my ten fingers broken, most of them a few times,” Silas said. “Got kicked in the shin when I was ten, broke my tibia clean through. Goddamn horse hardly even noticed he done it. Got thrown when I was sixteen and broke my collarbone. Dislocated my shoulder when I was nine. Fucker still pops out every now and again and I got to bang it back into place. Broke ribs on three occasions. And, see, here’s the thing I want you to know—I’m a hell of a good rider. I’m the fucking best. I can outride any man or woman in this goddamn state. So if I’m the fucking best and I’ve been slammed around and busted up that many times, how tough do you think a rider who’s just good has to be? My guess is your cousin Mandy’s ten times the man you are, little girl or no.”

  The boy stared at him, afraid to respond in any way.

  The one in the ball cap came back, turned the corner of the structure eyeing Silas. The other boy popped to his feet and whispered in his friend’s ear. Ball Cap kept his eyes on Silas and said to the other one, “No, I got this,” then they both slipped into the structure. Silas knew he should leave, but the idea of getting back on Disco was too dispiriting to even contemplate. The boys came back with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “You want a drink?” Ball Cap said.

  Still seated, Silas took the bottle and a swig, handed it back. The brown liquid stung his mouth and filled his chest with a sickening heat. The adrenaline rush of his speech to the boy was now turning into something else,
something like panic.

  “Let’s go, Wade,” the other one said.

  “Go?” Ball Cap—Wade—said playfully. “Too dark to hike now. What do you think,” he said to Silas. “You think we should go?”

  “I could give a shit what you boys do.”

  “See?” Wade said. “He wants us to stay.”

  Silas tried to see himself through this boy’s eyes. The other one, younger, was scared of Silas, that much was clear. But this one. No, he wasn’t scared of an old man sitting in the dirt, his nose busted, his clothes filthy. An old man lost and without provisions. An old man nearly crippled with exhaustion. Silas reckoned he wouldn’t be scared of himself either.

  “You get your phone working?” Silas said.

  “I did indeed.”

  “Call your mother?”

  Wade smiled. “I left a message. Got to check my e-mail too. Check the headlines. Local.”

  Silas’s mind shot back to the farmhouse, that look on Maggie’s face when she realized whose presence she was in—alarm, fear, something like grief. There was none of that on this boy’s face. God, it was enough that Silas almost admired the kid. That youthful smugness, the invincibility. Almost.

  “On second thought, it might be best if you two go ahead and move along,” he said.

  “Wade,” the other said, an appeal.

  Silas said, “You stay on the trail and you should be all right. You’ll end up somewhere.”

  “There’s bears out there, bro,” Wade said.

  “Bears just want to be left alone.”

  “No, I think we’ll stick around for a little while longer.”

  He handed Silas the bottle again. This swig went down smoother and Silas thought of all those nights at Frank and Lena’s place in San Anselmo, getting loaded, dancing.

  “What’s your name?” Wade said.

  “What do you think my name is?”

  “I think your name’s Silas,” Wade said, pronouncing it Sill-las.

  His name came almost like a shock. To hear it out here in the middle of this vast night was surreal, like a dream where things both are and aren’t what they should be. “Silas,” Silas said, correcting him. “Guess maybe I should be the one who’s going.”

  “Stick around,” Wade said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re wanted. Because you’re a fucking murderer.”

  The word stuck him like the point of a knife.

  “Sounds like you know everything,” Silas said. “And you already called the cops, didn’t you,” Silas said.

  Wade nodded once.

  “So walk away. Listen to your friend. He doesn’t want to be here. You’ll get your reward. You’ll have your picture in the paper.”

  “The paper,” Wade said with a breath of a laugh.

  “Wade,” the other one said. “The fuck?”

  Silas’s stomach was settling. That panic rising in him mutated into hardened rage.

  “Why don’t you go on now?” Silas said.

  “Because there’s two of us and one of you,” Wade said. “Because we’re young and strong, and you’re old and slow. And because your bag’s way over there.” He gestured to the shelter.

  Silas sighed, dragged his heel through the dirt to raise a knee, and reached into his boot. “But my gun is right here.” He pointed the pistol at the boys.

  “Oh Jesus,” the other one whimpered.

  “Why didn’t you just leave?” Silas said, rising to stand, his back and legs spasming with pain. “You could have left. You had every chance. You didn’t. You made that decision and now here we are. I don’t want you thinking that this is in any way my fault, what’s happening here.”

  “We’ll go,” the other one said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Colin.”

  “Colin and Wade,” Silas said. “It’s too late for leaving, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Wade said. “He’s right. We can go. We’ll walk away right now. We won’t even get our stuff.”

  “You I don’t want to hear from,” Silas said to Wade. “You’re a smug little shit. You annoy me. He’s just a little dim, but you, you’ve got no respect. You say another word and I’m going to shoot you. You got that?” He thought, I killed a man. This week, I killed a man. I could kill this boy. He took another swig from the bottle. “You want a drink, Colin?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Take it. It’ll steady you.”

  Colin held his hand out and took the bottle, spilled some into his mouth and down his chin.

  “He doesn’t get any,” Silas said, gesturing to Wade with the gun.

  “Look, mister,” Wade said, and Silas pulled the trigger and buried a bullet in the boy’s thigh. He collapsed to the dirt and cried out into the darkness of the woods. Colin held a hand to his mouth and stared down at his writhing, perforated friend, stunned.

  The boy twisted, blood blackening the leg of his pants.

  “That’s what I mean,” Silas said. “I said not another word but there you went, talking. It’s arrogant, not bothering to follow one simple direction. Thinking you always know better.”

  Silas was amazed at how easy it was. Where shooting Frank had been agony, this was nothing. The act left him feeling little other than a vague desire to do it again, to put the boy’s lights out for good. Because he could. Because he did not care for or about this person. Because, he knew then, his own life was over, and so what difference would it make.

  He turned to Colin. “He’s got to be a frustrating person to be friends with.”

  “We’re brothers,” Colin managed to say. “Fuck, please don’t kill him, he’s my brother.”

  Silas’s gleeful rage faltered and he was once again consumed by a mournful exhaustion. He breathed. “Take your belt off,” he said to Colin.

  He let the boy tourniquet his brother’s leg, an act that seemed to be appreciated on some level, and then tied both boys’ hands with the straps of their bags. The cops would find them, take care of them like they needed taking care of. Deliver them to their mother, who had made them promise to call. They’d survive.

  He tacked Disco and, taking the trail as fast as he could—which was not very fast at all, given the black around them and the twisting terrain underfoot—Silas kept a picture of Colin in his mind, the way the boy seemed to marvel at the situation, that anything like this could happen to them.

  Disco stepped carefully through the darkness. Between the trees Silas could see an opening in the woods where the moonlight shone bright enough that they would be able to pick up speed. He didn’t know where the cops would be coming from, but he figured the east. In his recollection of the boys’ map, there didn’t seem to be much of anything between him and the coast. They’d be on his tail, though. They were coming and he was running out of land. Out of time. That was fine, he told himself. He was running out of energy too. He’d never felt so old as he did then, so old and tired. Not even the good horse beneath him could make him feel like anything but a man wandering alone through the dark. The bower overhead spread and the moon appeared but didn’t make a damn bit of difference as Silas squeezed his legs into Disco’s flanks.

  Fourteen

  “This is terrible,” Rain said.

  Lena said, “What is?” They’d crested a westward ridge and were ambling along a trail just wide enough for them to move side by side.

  “I don’t know how to say it. I mean, to you. With everything you’re going through. And the reason we’re out here—which is so insane I don’t even think my brain can understand it. But I have this feeling.”

  After a pause, Lena said, “You going to tell me what it is?”

  Rain looked over sheepishly. “It’s just—I’m having fun. I know this isn’t about fun. Of course. It’s like, the opposite. But being out here, riding with you—I’m sore and hungry. And we have this horrible purpose. But it makes me think about how stupid so much of my life is. Does that make any sense?”
/>   A breath of wind came across them and angled down the collar of Lena’s fleece. She said nothing.

  “I don’t know if I’ve said this before,” Rain said, “but you’re really amazing.”

  “Am I.”

  “The way you teach and run the stable and don’t take any shit. Jesus, look what you’re doing. You’re like this badass lady.”

  Lena felt a terrible guilt overtake her. How had she let it happen, let this girl come along on this awful errand? Cowardice. Fear of doing this thing alone. Fear of being alone, full stop. This guilt wedged itself in her gut and dislodged something. She pulled back on Pepper’s reins and lunged off him. “Take him,” she commanded Rain. Lena dropped the reins to the ground and made for the cover of the woods, going until her bowels could be kept at bay no more.

  Finished, she wiped as best she could with what was within reach, stood, buttoned her pants, and looked around her. The ground rose for a hundred yards before cresting. Halfway up, a boulder emerged from the earth. Lena strode up and took two scrambling steps onto the rock. She retrieved her phone from her pocket and turned it on for the first time since charging it in Ortquist’s car. Ignoring the dozens of voicemails, she scrolled to her son’s number and called. Ellipses points appeared and disappeared on the screen, connecting. She waited and nearly gave up—she’d been half hoping it wouldn’t find a signal anyway—when the connection took and a garbled, broken ring sounded. Lena held the busted flip phone gently with two hands. Finally, the ringing stopped, but she heard no one on the other end.

  “Hello?” she said.

  Nothing.

  “Hello?” again.

  “Ell—”

  “Riley, can you hear me?”

  “Mom?” His voice was barely there, as if he were emerging from a dream.

  “Yes, can you hear me?”

  “—m. I—”

  “Riley, if you can hear me, then just listen. I’m all right. Everything is all right, but I need you to do something. Get the keys to the truck and hook up the trailer. The tan one with the brown stripe. Get it ready and drive north. I’ll call you again in a while with specifics. Can you hear me, sweetheart? I need you to do this for me.”

  “—ere you are . . . ailer but I—”