The Marshals check their weapons, grab their hats and bags, make for the door before I finish speaking. Neither of them gives me a second look as they walk out. I follow them, watch them saddle up.
“Two Squaw ain’t home to neither of you, you hear? This here’s the last time I want to see your ugly mugs, wolfish or otherwise.”
Japeth spurs his horse onto the forest’s trail without a backward glance. Doyle stares down at me, squeezes with his knees to keep his mount in check. “Sheriff,” he says by way of farewell, spitting a gob of tobacco on the dirt between my boots. We lock eyes as he takes the reins in one hand, his rifle in the other.
I ignore the way his long paws wrap comfortably around the gun’s neck, the way his claws brush against the trigger. His nose is wet, his jaws dripping with anticipation. My voice is tight, but steady. “Either one of you bastards lay a finger on Annie, and I’ll slit your hairy throats while you sleep.”
Lola Mae believes me when I tell her Japeth is held up at the station. No reason she shouldn’t. She’s growed up next to the Sheriff her whole life, and I ain’t never gave her family no trouble they knowed about. Long as Trick kept his dealings in this county, long as Annie stayed happy, I held back. Even when our babby died, our little Retti, I let things unfold as they would, kept my deputies from the weaver’s door. All for Annie’s sake.
In the odd moments when her eyes was clear, she’d say, “No one makes me feel like you, Doolittle.” Her safety a star pinned on my chest, a tarnished steel guarantee Trick’d be kept out the clink. Now, I may be a fool when it comes to Annie, but I ain’t stupid. I know I can’t give her what he does—Trick gots more magics in his eye tooth than I gots in my whole self. I know she won’t have me while he’s around; won’t take me if I done away with him neither. So year passes year, and I work on my plan. On my timing.
Even fools can be patient.
I been waiting so long I can’t hardly remember a time when I weren’t. Waiting for them fates to turn the path my way, like they did when me and Annie was kids and she were mine for a little while. Waiting for Trick’s cock to wander. Or for his magics to burn out. For his greed to send him over county lines. For some other lawmen to catch him, like them Marshals from Portage and Plantain finally has, for them to drag him to my gaol. For arrangements to be made what leaves me blameless in Annie’s eyes.
I look at Lola Mae, see her struggling to carry the Mabel-key in her basket. I don’t offer to take it from her. It won’t hurt if she’s tuckered out by the time we reach the cells. I fall a few steps behind to hide my smile. Now that Trick’s took care of, ain’t nothing stopping me from learning him what a lifetime of hurt feels like. What it means to see his soul stolen, wasted by another man. I ain’t never forgot how much Annie loved me. Nor how she left with our babby full blown in her belly. Nor how hard, how fast, Trick ruined her. I ain’t never forgot a speck of it. Not once.
Of course, Lola Mae don’t know that.
“Nearly there, darlin’.”
“I know.” She takes my hand, looks up at me through the fan of her lashes. Good God, I think, and my mind drifts back to the first night I tumbled Annie. Laid out on a stack of hessian sacks in her Pa’s shed, she peeled her shirt off, then her skirt. Batted her eyelids. Tilted her chin up exactly the way Lola Mae’s doing now. Gooseflesh dimpled every inch of her ’til I warmed her skin smooth. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Their identical smiles leave me gasping.
I pick up the pace.
The station is dark when we arrive. I hurry Lola Mae into the front room, flapping my hat to shoo the blowflies and to distract her from noticing the horses’ absence as we pass the hitching post. “The boys must be out back,” I say, flicking a switch to fire up the bare ceiling bulbs, and another for the row of hanging lamps in the hallway. “They’s been testing the fit of them keys you brung—”
Lola Mae stops short, her face a weird mask of shadders beneath the harsh lights. “But Willie said—”
I clear my throat. “You think I ain’t aware of the goings-on in my own station, darlin’?” I smile reassuringly. “Willie and his boys filled me in—didn’t they just?—knowing I can’t stand the sight of your Pa in here anymore than you can. Letting him suffer like this; well, it ain’t neighbourly.”
She sniffs, lifts an eyebrow. Hikes her basket up, hooks it in her elbow, and watches silently as I unlock the door separating the civil folk from the felons.
“They ain’t turned them keys or nothing,” I continue. “Just made sure the two you brung slide in as easy as the one they already gots. You know: getting ready for the fourth, for the real deal. That’s all.” I hold the door open for her. “Reckon your daddy’s aching to see you.”
“I reckon,” she says. I keep smiling until the frown leaves her voice.
Most of the cells lining the long corridor is empty. Carpeted with straw and fitted only with a slop bucket and a rough mattress, the small rooms smell like piss and boredom. Back here, all the walls is damp, patched with mould. I move closer to Lola Mae to avoid rubbing against them as we walk to the far end. A stale breeze reaches me as we turn the corner—Trick’s cubicle, the largest in the joint, has two windows up near the ceiling, the only comfort I cared to give him after the Marshals dragged him in. Next to me, Lola Mae fidgets with the basket, her eyes focused on the barred door to her daddy’s cell. I squeeze her hand, my palm slick with sweat.
My mouth starts to water. I imagine what her thin cotton dress is going to look like with my palm prints smeared all over it. I picture the look on Trick’s face—the horror, the disbelief—as I bend his shiny bright over and kiss her wet places. Picture his rage as I pin her wrists and tear into her, right in front of him. Hear his strangled fury as the gag in his mouth and the metal cuffs binding his wrists prevent him from shifting hisself to her rescue. Already I can feel the hallway shake as if Trick was throwing his bulk against the bars, desperate to bust free as I leave a wicked mess dribbling down Lola Mae’s legs. As I leave him powerless to undo what I done.
I’m so excited I could whistle. Takes all my energy to walk normal the final few paces to Trick’s cell. “Put yer basket down, darlin’.”
Lola Mae ignores me, pulls against my grip soon as she sees her daddy. Gaol ain’t been good to him. Kept out the sun for so long, Trick’s tan skin is now the shade of bleached hay. His black hair, normally twisted in a single long plait, is straggled and greasy; it droops from his cheeks and chin in a bootlegger’s beard. The whites of his eyes is yellow and so is the rims of his nostrils. His arms and legs is wasted thin: elbows and knees jut from holes in his clothes as he sits, injun-style, on the bare floor. Though his fingers is free, his tattoos is scratched off and bloody. Ain’t nothing near to hand for Trick to shift apart from his bandanna gag, and even it’s tied so tight it’s bit into his skin. Wind gusts through the two recessed windows above his head: the stench wafting off him, sour cheese and unwashed crotch, turns my stomach.
“Trick,” I say. He slowly unfolds his legs, makes to rise.
Again, Lola Mae tries to wriggle from my grasp. I tense my muscles, imagine my bones is steel. She stops tugging, turns away from the cell, faces me. Twists her arms behind her. “Daddy,” she says, pressing her body to mine, so close I can feel the sharp edges of her pelvis, the warm curve of her tits. “Sheriff Doolittle’s brung me to help you. Ain’t that good of him?”
Trick huffs like a dog. Stands as though any weight on his feet pains him. Shuffles closer.
I reach around Lola Mae, run my free hand down her arm, wrench the basket away. Squeezing the bony flesh of her wrists, I trap her hands and throw her against the bars—so hard I can hear her teeth clash, hear her skull connect with iron. She winces as the cold bites into her back, but she don’t cry out.
Leaning closer, I bury my thigh between her legs, force them apart. Her face is shaded under the brim of my hat, but her eyes is bright as they meet
mine. Gaze unwavering, she asks, “Can’t we thank Doo, Daddy? For all he done?” Reaching out with her ankle, Lola Mae catches hold of my calves. Draws me even closer.
In the cell, Trick bends forward in a bow. Bends so low his features is lost in a tangle of hair. Hides behind his daughter.
“Look at me, damn you,” I say. Trick kneels, not looking. I can’t hardly breathe. My right hand fumbles at Lola Mae’s skirts, the left keeps her writhing arms pinned against the bars. She stretches up on her tiptoes, presses her soft cheek against mine. My hips is thrusting into hers, and I ain’t yet got so much as a finger in her drawers. She’s moving, arcing up, pulling. Trick grunts, but stays down. “You fucken bastard,” I growl. “Look—”
Lola Mae licks my earlobe.
“—at—”
Nibbles it.
“—me.”
Bites ’til I see fireworks.
Trick stands. His face is lit up like it’s the height of summer. A blaze of red is ripped into his scalp where a length of hair is tore out. Blood trickles down his forehead, into his eye, but he don’t blink. His gaze is fiery, reflecting two slashes of red-yellow-white light.
Stars flash across my peepers. The girl’s got me moaning and I’m near fit to burst. Lola Mae brushes her lips against my cheek, whispers: “What kind of fool you take me for, Sheriff?”
Something slippery snakes round my left forearm. It clings, tightens: breaks my concentration. I loosen my grip as Trick reaches through the bars, locks onto my hands. At the same time, Lola Mae drops to the floor like a sack of flour. On her way down, she rolls free, her bracelets glowing sunset.
“No,” I say.
The girl flicks a braided length of Trick’s hair round my other wrist, holds tight to the end. Pulling ’til my hands is crossed in front of me, she mutters under her breath, then loops the makeshift rope again ’round both of them. Trick’s grip don’t loosen a smidge: I’m as good as stuck in tar.
“Shift,” Lola Mae says, working her way behind me, pulling my beard, weaving it through the long blond strands what’s escaped my ponytail.
Everywhere the shift touches my skin—forearms, face, and now ’round waist and thighs—feels like I’ve been branded with a hot poker. My skin bubbles, stretches, then contracts. The air fills with the stank of sulphur. My nose sniffles for a hint of burnt flesh—there ain’t none. Inside my head, I hear my bones creak and snap, crunching into a smaller shape. I crumple to the floor, all the gitup gone from my arms and legs: they’s curling, shrinking, turning to iron. All of my uppers is glued together in one thin shaft; my feet jut out, press flat into crooked teeth. My jaw peels open wide in surprise, not in pain. It don’t ache too bad, this shifting. Not near so much as the hurt of failure.
A hole pierces straight through my head. Beneath my eyes, I can feel air whistle clean through my skull where my nose and mouth used to be. When it’s all said and done, I make a clank-clanking sound across the stone floor as Lola Mae tips her basket, rolls me into it.
“Good thing there ain’t five keyholes—nor even four, hey Doo? All we need is one key and now I gots meself two.” Lola Mae winks down at me. “You should oughta watch that hangdog tongue of yers, Sheriff. Slobbering ’neath Potpie’s windows, trailing it down the path after me, letting untruths slip when you gots your mind in yer trousers.” I ain’t got no expression at all on my twisted iron face, but the girl giggles like she knows I’m blushing. “You think I ain’t seen you?” She shakes her head, uses both hands to lift the Mabel-key to the lock on Trick’s cell. “I seen you plenty. Give me a hand here, Daddy.”
Lola Mae’s laughter turns to tears soon as they get the door open. She hugs Trick so tight I can hear the air whoosh from his lungs; he loops his arms over her head, squeezes back. He looks stronger with his girl tucked safe in his embrace. My tiny steel heart clenches. I wonder if Retti would ever have come for me the way Lola Mae done for Trick. If my little girl’s face’d be slick and shiny with happiness, just from being with me. If she’d work at the knot of my gag ’til her knuckles bled. If she’d kiss my bearded cheeks, knowing that beneath the lice and grime, I were still her Pa.
Probably not.
I can’t close my eyes, so I look away while Lola Mae shifts the cuffs from Trick’s wrists. From my vantage, I can’t see much: the dripping ceiling; a patch of crumbling stone ’neath the window sills; grass poking through the rusted bars; and a shadow that twitches, hops, grows into that damned fool squirrel. He pokes his head in from outside, then darts away as Trick’s shackles clang to the floor. A second later, Lola Mae is pulling Mabel out the keyhole, passing her to Trick, then running after him as he strides out the cell, snapping up my basket as he goes. Just before I get dragged down the corridor, I see the squirrel’s noggin reappear. See him scramble over the ledge, and down the cell’s rough walls.
The basket shreds and bumps over the uneven floor, taking me for a wild ride. “Slow down, Daddy,” Lola Mae says. “We gots to find Jaybird and Lilah afore we go.”
“Keep up,” Trick grunts, not slackening his pace a whit. He pulls me all the way to the station house’s front room. With assured movements, he takes a Yellowboy rifle from the wall, passes it to Lola Mae. Grabs a pair of Cimarrons, a pack of ammo and a holster from the gun cabinet, tosses them to the girl too. While she belts the weapons on, he finds himself a pack, a set of Colt revolvers and a Ruger. Pockets some shells then hangs my basket from a hook the shotgun left empty, halfway up the wall.
There’s a smash, then another. Trick’s broken the two hurricane lamps we gots for emergencies and by the sounds of it is spilling their oil on the floor. He ransacks the single small cupboard I allow myself, finds a stash of beeswax candles I ain’t never saw reason to get rid of. Crossing the room, he peels away layer after layer of wax, leaving a stub at the bottom about a finger’s width high, trailing a long tail of wick.
“Go’on outside,” he tells Lola Mae.
“But what about Jaybird and Lilah?” she asks, planting her feet firm.
“Go’on,” Trick barks. “You done a fool thing bringing them young’uns here, star. Meet me where the path splits for Portage and Plantain—then we’ll see if there’s a speck left of them worth saving.”
Sheepish, Lola Mae says, “Fine,” and leaves without shutting the door.
Trick looks down, into my basket. “You just had to team up with them fucken Marshals, didn’t you? Couldn’t leave well enough alone.” He digs into the gunpowder grout between the logs above my head, creating a hole big enough to hold a single, shortened candle stub. “Ain’t y’all never going to learn?”
Taking the frayed end of the wick, the weaver bends and knots the fibres ’til they’s shaped like a little flame. “Shift,” he says.
Nothing happens. His tattoos flicker then darken, too damaged now to make so much as a spark.
If I had a mouth, I’d hoot, Halleluiah! Ain’t no fucken limp-dick shifting going to burn me—
The sound of a match striking flint cuts my celebrations short. Cupping the flame carefully in his hand, Trick touches the match to the tip of the wick. It flares, then burns steadily toward the wall. “Ain’t everything gots to be magic,” he says as he hefts his pack. “You oughta know that by now, Doo.”
He don’t even bother to close the door as he leaves.
Watching that fire eat its way downwards, I wish I still had hands to fold in prayer. I hope the Almighty will take me, even though I can’t make no final confessions, or that them other gods might look kindly on my situation and welcome me to their halls. Whatever happens, I think, please let me find Retti when I get there.
The ceiling tilts.
“Shiny!” the squirrel shouts—and I’m tumbling to the floor, my basket sent swinging with the momentum of the critter’s leap. My head pounds harder than it does after a barrel-full of moonshine, but my vision don’t swim. I can still see the fuse
burning, flame getting closer and closer to the station house’s tinderbox walls.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” the squirrel chitters. He’s in rough shape: already short an ear and missing half his tail, his aim is off as he jumps back down to the floor. He lands in a heap beside me, dropping part of his hindquarters as he scurries my way. “Smells like peanuts!”
The instant he chomps into me, he crumples. The life snuffs from his eyes; his head caves, his body shrivels ’til he ain’t nothing but a pile of grass, straw, and dust. As I begin to stretch and shift, I thank the little begger for being such a glutton. We’s both made from the weavings of Lola Mae’s magics: just as I were his antidote, he were mine.
I reckon his long-toothed bite were just about enough to save me.
My head, my face, my limbs expand. Hair grows where a minute before there weren’t nothing but metal. Eyelids stretch over my peepers; tears well and spill down my cheeks. Every piece of me fills up with blood and guts and breath and snot and all the things what make a man—all the things except what’s most important.
Atwixt my legs, my balls is twisted ’round the grip of a cold hard key. My cock welded to its shaft.
That’s it, I think. Lola Mae’s first permanent work. Now she’s gone, and I ain’t got nothing left.
No more chances. No young’uns, not even the makings for them. I stare at the ruin atwixt my legs, then up at the candle what’s almost burnt clean through to the wall. I can smell the gunpowder, know it ain’t going to take long for the place to go up in a ball of hellfire. My eyes swim with heat and tears and visions of Annie.
I wonder if she’ll miss me, if I can’t find the gumption to snuff that flame.
Depot to Depot
Haros can’t remember the accident.
He wants to—he tries to—but he can’t hear the screech of tires across asphalt. The car’s windshield shattering. The frantic hiss of his brakes. The teeth-aching squeal of metal against metal. His left palm has rope burns from pulling the semitrailer’s horn, but he doesn’t know if it made any noise. The Allman Brothers still blare from the radio; he thinks he’d been singing along. Nineteen hours into a twenty hour drag, on a route he’s travelled hundreds of times, the hatchback appeared out of nowhere. He’s sure of that, damn sure. One minute, the road was empty; a river of black blurring into the night sky. Here and there, his headlights caught lone trees dotting the margins of endless wheat fields. At that speed they were mere flashes; emaciated, glowing people with arms outstretched, waving from a not-so-distant shore. No deer threatened to leap across the highway’s two lanes—he could spot those suicidal fuckers a hundred feet away—and at three in the morning you’d be lucky to hit a raccoon. Everything had been still. Sleepy. Cold air rushed in the open window, slapped his face. He thinks he might’ve blinked.
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