Beside still waters.
He felt what seemed to be the slimy surface of a tree, leading upwards. An underwater root? He caught hold of the root. He steadied himself for a moment. He swallowed water, gritting his teeth against the impulse to cough out. He kicked upwards and began to swim. His hands slid from the rotted surface.
Let go, let go, let go.
In a moment of panic Lucas almost surrendered.
Tamsen nearly slipped away.
Lucas swam steadily, paddling with one hand while clinging to Tamsen’s still form with the other. When he weakened he reached for the root’s dead wooden meat. He drew vigor from somewhere within the wood’s murky heart, working his way upwards, humping along like some bizarre form of water bug.
He’d been holding his breath for a while.
How long?
Seconds? Minutes? Hours?
Days?
He watched the glimmering daylight filtered through God only knew how many fathoms, taunting and laughing at him, wishing him dead.
Yea though I walk through the valley…
Goddamn, goddamn, God-be-damned I want to live!
At that last thought he emerged from the depths, laughing and gasping and choking, his left hand firmly entwined within a clot of rotted tree root.
“Praise God,” he croaked.
It was only then he remembered Tamsen, still hanging limply from his right hand. Her head bobbed serenely – face down in the dirty silent water.
Lucas released his grip on the root, turned to grab for her and slid inexorably backwards into the river’s eager grasp. He stretched his hand outwards and upwards.
“I have you,” a deep timbered voice said.
2
Wet dreams, dreams of drowning, dreams of death.
Tamsen’s dying mind was awash with the raucous laughter of the river gurgling within her ears. Whispering lurid suggestions as she floated and felt herself lifted upwards, heaven bound, a darkling vision of godhood hanging over her mouthing words she dared not hear.
Up, down, up, down.
Her head bobbed helplessly, choking and swallowing. The log reared over her like the great dripping member of some dark forgotten sea god. Poseidon, Neptune, Triton – names dredged from the pages of a childhood classical primer and other names she hadn’t read. Names she couldn’t speak. Names she dared not utter.
Jacob? Are you there Jacob?
The raft shattered like a broken vow beneath the log’s blind implacable thrust. She saw another river, another woman and another time. In the storybook of memory she felt the ropes, tough and twisted, cutting livid tattoos into her flesh. She felt her body bound to the unforgiving dunking stool. She felt herself moving within another woman, feet dancing in midair, old Delta.
Up, down, confess, confess.
A hand like chilled iron clenched around her wrist while the raft and her belongings and her life drifted past, moving down to something cold and hungry that waited far below.
She heard a voice, loud and distorted in the echo-echo of the water, (Lucas, is that you?), a woman’s voice, loud like thunder, shrieking LET-HER-GO.
Up, down.
She saw Lucas’s ship, the ship she had never seen and yet she knew it. She knew the creak and groan of each ice-locked member, threatening to give way. She knew there was death all about, pushing at each bulkhead, seeking some means of entry, of relief.
She knew that as dark as death outside of the ship was, darker still was the darkness of the belly, hidden deep below. She felt cold bitter hands and cold bitter flesh, cold upon each other, weeping cold bitter tears.
Up, down, up.
She felt herself being lifted and carried through the valley with his voice dark above her. His words dripped like sweet thick molasses, filling her up, drowning her and leaving her for dead by the warmth of a slow crackling fire that whispered ashy secrets and spoke of smoke and release.
3
Through the drown of darkness Lucas remembered a conversation, long ago and a lifetime away.
“We must go,” he’d said to Tamsen.
“But why?” she’d asked.
“My father….”
“Your father is dead.”
“The townsfolk?”
“People will talk but their memories are short. Give them time. They’ll forget the shame that has passed.”
She sounded so confident.
So sure.
Had he ever listened?
“We carry the cross of shame,” he told her. “Some memories will never die.”
“Are you so certain?” she’d asked.
“We must go,” he’d replied. “There can be no alternative.”
And so they left.
4
“Are you going to sleep forever?” a voice graveled close as death to Lucas’s ear.
Lucas raised himself up. He opened his eyes, attempting to clear his vision with several great sandy blinks. He shook his head and groaned aloud.
The other man kept talking, far too loudly. “Alive, by God, alive. I yanked two fish from Lady River’s arms today.”
Lucas remembered a strong hand grasping his. The hand of the Lord, he’d thought, raising him up onto Jordan’s rocky shore. Then a voice, strong and deep, I have you. From there he began a blissful descent into oblivion, blacking out while barely halfway on to the shore.
“Can you sit? Can you speak?” the voice again, loud but farther away as if the speaker had straightened up. “Holy Christ man, are you helpless?”
Lucas winced as much at the blasphemy as his discomfort. He felt cargo shifting within the hold of his skull. He touched his cheek, found a sticky wetness and reflexively touched his fingers to his lips. He tasted blood and spat it out as if it were a poison.
“Tastes good, don’t it? I had to drag you out and you cut your cheek upon the wood. You and that woman were too damned heavy to lift but there was no way in Hell I could make you let go of her hand.”
Lucas’s right hand squeezed reflexively upon thin air, cramping slightly with the effort. “Tamsen! Is she…?”
“The woman? Sure, she is fine. She’s just taken on a little river water. I guess she swallowed when she should have spat. How the hell did that rope get around her anyway? She’s up with Jezebel now, in the cabin, drying off.”
Lucas’s eyes focused upon a large blackened pair of boots – the left solidly planted, the right cocked upon its heel. A large cross was carved into the boot’s wooden sole. Lucas coughed violently, both to clear his lungs and to conceal his shock. His efforts at diplomacy sadly failed.
“I am no godsman, if that’s what you think,” The strange man said. “I put the cross down there to walk upon, grinding it into the dirt wherever I go.”
Lucas raised his eyes. From his perspective the stranger seemed huge, a barrel of a man as tall as a tree, coarsely featured and roughly hewn. His heavy arms crossed about his trunk in a manner that spoke of a hunter’s patience. A scraggly beard played about his cheeks like a forgotten smile and a savage scar furrowed a path down and across his left cheek.
The stranger grinned fiercely, exposing a set of huge yellow teeth that contrasted sharply with his darkling features. He bore a strong hint of mulatto. One of Cain’s own, Lucas’s father would have said.
The stranger wouldn’t stop talking.
“A couple of sheep came ashore. One was dead. I saw a couple of crates as well. I’ll send the boy to look but the rest is gone for sure. Lady River don’t give back much, once she’s took.”
“You got my thanks, sir. And my hand as well,” Lucas said.
He raised his arm, surprised at the effort it took. The dark man’s grasp swallowed Lucas’s – a working man’s palm; thickened and horny with calluses and as dry as a piece of sun-bleached driftwood.
“Call me Duvall, Jonah Duvall, for I am no man’s sir.” He gave Lucas a snaggle-toothed grin. “Maybe I ought to call you Jonah or Lazarus, the way you rose up from the deep.”
“Moses would be
just as apt, for he too was raised from the river but Lucas Sawyer is my given name.”
Duvall nodded and tightened his grip. When Lucas realized the man meant to raise him to his feet he put as much effort into the act as he could manage. A wave of blackness washed over him. His knees turned to water but Duvall held him easily.
“I think, Lucas Sawyer, we had best take this easy and slow.”
Lucas nodded weakly and stood, leaning against Duvall like a man against a mast. Duvall wasn’t as tall as Lucas had thought. The man was a good hand and a half shorter than Lucas but built as sturdy as an oaken stump. Hesitantly, like two drunkards tottering home, they made their way along a twisted trail, back-tracking the ramble of a tributary creek branching down into the Greensnake below.
Lucas saw the cabin from the top of a small ridge.
The smoke caught his eye, a thin trail slithering from the gullet of a blackened mud-stick chimney. The building, like its owner, was a low, squatty thing. The only aperture was a door, hanging halfway open like the jaw of an old man, fallen asleep over evening conversation.
“Come on,” Duvall said. “It’s cold outside today. Not summer yet, not yet at all. I’ve got a fire inside, nice and hot, hey?”
A small goat pen sprouted from the cabin’s left side and within the pen’s confines Lucas spotted one of his sheep standing stock still while a largish billy goat mounted from behind. He hoped she was enjoying herself.
“Is that my sheep?”
“One of them,” Duvall replied.
“Thank God the goat’s seed will not take hold,” Lucas noted.
“God has nothing to do with the making of the two-back beast,” Duvall said. “Seed will root in the damndest of fields.”
In the far corner of the pen Lucas noticed a second sheep trembling noticeably from the cold or the wet. Beyond the pen, close enough for the easy transport of dung, a shapeless patch of garden sprawled.
To the right of the doorway a young man squatted in the dirt, working industriously at some task Lucas couldn’t see. A black dog of undeterminable pedigree sat beside the boy, its long red tongue lolling patiently.
“I saved two of the sheep,” Duvall said. “They washed up, or maybe swam. Can sheep swim? The third one sure couldn’t. He floated in wrong side up. At least there’s mutton.”
“Yes, there’s mutton,” Lucas answered dully, not quite grasping what the man was talking about.
Then he realized the boy was stringing up one of his sheep; the younger one with the blackish spot about its right eye. He moved closer. The boy hauled on a line hung over a convenient peg jutted high up the wall.
Lucas stared at the young man’s back, bent with effort, his shirttail loosened several inches above the belt line to expose a grimy patch of bare skin, slicked with sweat. He thought of Peter and he tried hard to keep his eyes from resting upon that patch.
“Up boy,” Duvall commanded. “Get it up there.”
In a half a heartbeat the sheep dangled several feet above the ground. The boy tied the line off and straightened upright. Lucas leaned against the roughened logs of the wall, sudden weakness swimming over him. The boy continued to work.
Lucas feared to break the silence that hung about the three of them, as chill and as heavy as the gunpowder clouds hanging overhead. A bit of sun broke through, warming Lucas in the winter-like chill. Sunlight glinted on the blade of a clasp knife the boy pulled from his trousers. The reflected light danced across the bits of reluctant down-sprouted upon the man-child’s face.
The boy was a savage, an Indian. This puzzled Lucas. As far as he knew, most red men lacked the capacity for growing facial hair.
The blade was keen, sliding with a wet hiss through the belly of the hanging sheep. Entrails sprung free like a bundle of wet red snakes. The young boy neatly snared them, dropping them into a waiting wooden tub. The bright red blood flew unheeded, spattering upon the heavily stained wooden wall, spilling to the dirt. The hound lapped up what it could.
Lucas’s legs buckled. He began a second slow tumble into the darkness. The last thing he remembered was barking his shin upon the door frame as he fell, tearing the trouser fabric and leaving the memory of his flesh imbedded in the hungry fibers of wood.
A Preview of Long Horn, Big Shaggy
Bone Bits, Boogers and Walking Bastard Haunts
The bullet chewed into the meat of Jonah Walker’s dust gray horse long before he heard the shot. Jonah kicked free of the stirrups as the horse dropped. He tried his hardest to land on his feet, but didn’t quite manage the trick. He hit the ground like a sack full of busted bricks, smack dab in front of parched out buffalo skull. His ankle twisted and his knee sang out like a freshly skinned Siamese cat.
He stared down at the buffalo skull.
Big ugly thing.
He could have sworn the dead hump bones were laughing at him.
“Shut up skull. You’re dead and I ain’t.”
If they were laughing, he was outnumbered. There was nothing out here but dead humps, as far as he could see.
Dead buffalo, blown down to nothing but shiny white bones.
Skulls and rib cages.
Whole damn skeletons.
Yes sir, the buffalo hunters had picked this range clean a long time ago. They had ridden through this country like a herd of gun toting locusts. They took the skins, and some of the bones that were close enough to the railroad tracks to sell for fertilizer. But way out here, this far from nowhere, in the shadow of the distant mountain that men call the Devil’s Anvil, they just shot the big humps dead and left them right where they fell. Which was probably what the booger that had just shot Jonah’s horse had in mind for him.
At least he was still alive.
The way he figured it, that put him way ahead of the hump skull.
At least for now.
He touched his knee, ginger-like. It felt spongy and warm. It was already swelling up, soft under his fingers, like the bone was wet and rotting. He didn’t think anything was broken. At least he sure hoped not. That horse wasn’t going anywhere too fast, and civilization was one hell of a long hobble-hop-walk away from where he was to.
The horse kicked at the air and snorted red foamy snot.
It wasn’t pretty.
Jonah touched it with a fingertip - a thick pink gumbo of tissue and blood and half breathed air.
Damn.
It was a lung shot. That meant slow death and no coming back. He ought to finish the dang thing off, but he didn’t have that many bullets left.
“I may need these last couple of bullets,” Jonah told the horse.
The horse snorted.
Kicked again.
More horse snot.
Maybe he could use his knife to open its throat. I could save on bullets. I wonder how long it’d take a horse to bleed out dry? Damn thing would probably kick him to death, halfway through dying.
The horse stared up at him with eyes as black and flat as Apache tears.
The damn thing was begging to die.
Shit fire and save on matches.
The beast had been a damn good horse. He’d stolen it three towns back. Horse stealing was pretty bad trouble, but need makes want when the devil rides for home, and at that time he’d needed a horse real bad.
This was all that fat old sheriff’s fault, damn it.
If that old badge holder hadn’t caught that bullet in his gullet in the middle of that bank hold up, Jonah wouldn’t have needed that horse so bad. Then that fool kid got himself shot, too bad to ride and fell off in the street with the money bags in hand, hanging head down from his horse, his ankle hooked like grim death into the stirrup socket. The kid’s damn horse had panicked. It took off, riding hard for hell’s far gate, bouncing the kid behind him, scattering nuggets of skull bone and brain gunk and all that Jesus dying money from one end of the street to the other, until Jonah had turned and plugged three quick shots into the thick of the horse’s screams. The townsfolk rose up like cat bit m
ad dogs, rooting in the street for the brain stained chunks of dirty gold and folding cash.
Jonah tried hard not to think about any of those bullets pissing through horsemeat and into the boy. He tried not to think about what he might have been aiming for. Some things just weren’t worth the ponder.
To hell with that raggedy rat shit.
A man does what he has to. He takes what he needs, and eats what he can get, and tries not to ask too many damn questions in the doing of it.
It was truth in spades.
It was better to be the jaws than the meat, every time.
“Feed and need,” Jonah said aloud, damn near scaring himself to death with the sound of his own voice. “Need and feed.”
The horse snorted again.
Damn it.
This was no time for poetry.
A decision needed to be made.
He looked at the dying beast.
It had been a damn good horse. It had only threw him the once. It didn’t eat much and the owner never came looking for it. Jonah guessed that whoever the owner was - he was too busy sifting through the brain bits and pocketing messy gold.
What was the dead boy’s name anyway?
Billy?
Jesse?
Jonah couldn’t remember. He was too busy trying to remember how many bullets he had left in his pistol. He never was much good at counting. He lost track at somewhere about four. And wasn’t that the sorry truth. It was the reason why he’d robbed the bank in the first place. He’d needed money. If he’d had some cash in his pockets before, he might have been able to afford the little luxuries that made life feel easy.
Things like a fresh horse.
Or extra ammo.
Maybe arithmetic lessons.
The horse whinnied, soft and wet, like its lungs were blowing through a thick red mud.
It was in pain. Real bad pain.
Hell.
Jonah sympathized. His own knee was burning like fresh caught sin.
The horse kept staring. The buffalo skull stared. Even the dirt stared.
To hell with it.
He drew the pistol and put it up against the horse’s skull. Just about three inches left of the ear. One shot ought to do it. He held the pistol there for a long silent minute. He tried to think of something holy to say, before putting the horse down. Then he let his breath slide out in a whistling sigh. He wondered who the hell had fired the shot that had crippled his horse.
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