by Philip Webb
The sheriff, it seems, is waiting for us. He jumps down from the boardwalk, eyes me briefly under the brim of his hat, and strides out past us into the square, his hand hovering over his holster. I follow his gaze to four riders at the end of the street. They slow up side by side, trotting cautiously, peering up at rooftops as they advance. But as they approach the square, they turn and disperse into different side streets.
The sheriff stares at the empty road, deep in thought. “How many ’part from them four?”
“Maybe twenty,” answers Luis.
He signals for us to dismount, then lets out a sharp whistle, and a skinny Mexican boy runs down the steps of the jailhouse.
“Senor Sheriff.”
“Stand down, son.” He tosses the boy a coin. “Now listen. I want you to take this horse to the paddock by the Palace Diner. You’re to stay with it ’til this thing is over. You understand?”
“Sí.”
The boy scurries away, leading Cisco by the reins. The fact that he seems to be the sheriff’s only assistant worries me — where are the rest of his men?
Once we’re inside the jailhouse, the sheriff locks the door and leads us through empty corridors, past steel-bar gates to a windowless cell. There is not another soul in the place. He gestures for me and Luis to sit on the swing-down bed. His face shines in the buttery glow of a single oil lamp.
“Where are your deputies, Sheriff?” I ask at last.
He does not answer, just looks at us with subdued fury. I glance at Luis, wondering if we have made a mistake in coming here.
“Put your head back.”
“What?”
He puts his hand roughly on my forehead and thumbs my eyelid back so I cannot blink. Luis jumps up, but the sheriff reaches for his gun with a swiftness that takes my breath away.
“Take it easy, son. I ain’t fixin’ to see more blood spilled today.” He says it quietly, without a fuss.
He holds me like this, gazing into my eyeball ’til it starts to stream. Then he lets go and slumps back against the wall of the cell, apparently calm again. I know what he’s thinking — that I could be a Visitor, one who has stolen human form to walk on the Earth. I’ve heard you can tell by looking at the eyes, though I don’t know what the signs are.
“You think we are abductee?” Luis breathes at last. “You think they come here like this for help?”
“I ain’t taking no chances.”
It is clear, though, that he suspects only me, not Luis.
“What’s the sign?” I ask. “How do you know I am not one of them?”
“Gold in the eyes,” the sheriff mutters. “Like fire. Sometimes bright as a match flaring, sometimes just a glint. And sometimes it slips away for a while. But it always comes back you wait long enough.”
He stares at me a while longer, deep in thought, before holstering his gun at last.
“Do you intend to lock us up?” I ask shakily.
“We’re just talking. I got a manpower situation ongoing and this here’s the best place for you right now.”
“What kind of manpower situation?”
“We’ll get to that.”
He wipes the bottom of his mustache and stares at me with hard blue eyes. There’s a note of regret in his words, though they chill me all the same.
“Figure you’re the Bridgwater girl. Your aunt said if you showed up alone, meant she was dead.”
I nod. The bare fact renders me speechless. It seems impossible. Just minutes ago she was beating a rug on our front porch. She is dead.
He sighs. “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am.”
“How did you know I was coming? What’s going on?”
“Megan, your aunt came by to see me a month back. Said she figured one day a heap of trouble was gonna make its way to the town. But she wouldn’t say what.”
Why did she not say more? Didn’t she trust the sheriff? He waits for me to say something.
“I … I don’t know,” I manage at last. “I mean, I don’t think she expected trouble today, so soon.”
“But just exactly why was she expecting trouble? How come you got the meanest outlaw outfit this side of the Rio Grande riding you down?”
“You know who they are?”
“Jethro Gang,” the sheriff mutters.
My blood runs cold at the name. They are notorious outlaws, harrying the towns on the Zone border, and they kill without mercy.
I’m desperate to look at the folded-up paper from Pa. I finger the edges of it in my pocket. Should I trust the sheriff? It is clear my aunt has told him nothing.
He sighs. “Megan, you are right at the eye of this here storm. I know that much. And I’m shorthanded here, so I don’t have the patience for nothing but the truth, you hear me?”
I figure I have no choice. The sheriff will not help unless he trusts me.
“My aunt said Visitors mean to take this world from us, reckoned my pa was the only one who could save us now. This is from him.”
With shaking fingers I unfold the paper. It is a map, scrawled in a hurry by the look of it. There are mountains and something that looks like a spider and dotted lines. One line divides the map in two and has a name scrawled along it: Mavis Pilgrim. I try to recognize landmarks, but none of the mountains are named. I can make nothing of it.
The sheriff takes it from me for a better look. We all crowd around it. Perhaps the spider is a clue — if it is indeed a spider. It has eight legs, but it might be something else, like a childish drawing of the sun. There is also what looks like a cemetery — humps of ground marked with crosses.
“Mavis Pilgrim,” mutters the sheriff, tapping the name.
“Do you know her? Is she a tracker?”
“Ain’t the name of no woman. She’s a stagecoach. Runs mail between Zone towns — from Hope to Truth or Consequences ’cross the San Andres Mountains. But I don’t know about nothing else on it.” He hands back the map. “Figure it weren’t finished. Or it’s for someone who already knows them places.”
“It is meant to lead to my pa, I think. He’s somewhere in the Zone, I know he is.”
He does not reply for a long while.
“Jethro Gang — they abductees, Sheriff?” asks Luis. “They Visitors?”
“I don’t know. But they seem mighty fired up to get to Megan.”
The silence in the cell is complete. For a few moments I cannot comprehend the speed of these events, and my head just swims. It is as though unearthly forces are gathering just outside the whitewashed walls, waiting to devour me. I picture my aunt lying dead at the edge of our patch. There has been little love lost between us these years since Pa disappeared into the Zone, but she was a decent woman. I never understood why she refused to go on the trail of her missing brother. I deemed it cowardice. I see now that she stayed in Marfa to see me through childhood out of a sense of duty. A promise to Pa … How has this happened so quickly? I cannot think straight.
“You figure those outlaws know about the map?” I ask at last.
“I don’t know nothing except we got ourselves a heap of trouble. I sent deputies out to four suspected shootings already today. And they ain’t come back. I got a real bad feeling about my men being pulled every which way. If they don’t show in under an hour, I’d say we’ve got ourselves a last-stand situation.”
The sheriff leads us out of the cell back to the office at the front of the jailhouse. The street outside is empty and quiet. He just listens to the silence and fills his pipe, smoking in an unhurried way. His face is intent and grave. It is an uncharitable thought, but I am concerned that the sheriff is weighing his options and that one of them is to hand us over to save his own hide.
“You think your deputies are going to make it, Sheriff? Maybe we should make a break for it?”
I walk toward the front door for a better look outside, but the sheriff puts his hand up to halt me. He steps to a gun rack on the wall, and to avoid being seen through the windows, he keeps clear of the constant spokes of
sunlight that have bleached the floorboards all these years.
“Figure that’s what they expectin’ us to do. So we’re sittin’ put.”
He unlocks a rifle with a mounted sight and loads up a satchel with packs of ammunition.
I throw a questioning look at Luis. And he answers it with a look of his own. This does not seem a sensible tactic to either of us.
“Sir, do you think that’s a good idea? I mean, they could have us surrounded.”
“And then some.”
He edges to the frame of one of the unshuttered windows, peering into the street beyond.
“You holding anything back from me, Megan?” He says at last, without breaking his vigil.
“No, sir.”
“They take potshots at you on the way here?”
“No, but …”
“Just wondering how come them riders killed your aunt in cold blood but they ain’t loosed one bullet your way yet.”
This has not occurred to me. But he is right.
He sighs, to break the tension perhaps. “I’da knowed yesterday what I know now, I’da took you and your aunt out west myself, deep Zone. Tracker I know of up in White Sands. Old buzzard by the name of Devon Marshall. That’s what I’da done, before them sumbitches got within forty miles of Marfa Town. And if anyone knows the lands north of the Mavis Pilgrim route, it’ll be old Marshall.”
“Still not so late, Sheriff,” says Luis. “Head into wild Zone country now.”
His face creases into a weary smile. “If we got far as Betsy’s Dry Goods it’d be one of the Lord’s miracles.”
He draws back away from the windows, sweeps all the files and papers off the duty desk, and lays down the rifle and his two handguns.
“Know how to load these firearms if I need you to?”
We nod.
He sits in the chair and sets his boots on the desk, spurs scratching the surface. Then he motions us to sit by the doorjamb while he hands me the satchel of ammunition.
“I won’t lie to you, Megan. Shoulda heard from my deputies by now. Which means they ain’t comin’. Just us three. Which adds up to the worst kinda trouble.”
“What’s your plan?”
He smiles at that. “Well, right now we wait for them to make a move. They ain’t stormed us yet, which means they workin’ out what to do. If they wanted you just dead, that’d be a cinch — just come in all guns blazin’. So they want you alive, which is just about the only ace we hold.”
He waits for me to follow the logic.
“This has to be about my pa, you reckon?”
“Yep. I’d say that was a fair summin’ up. They sure wouldn’t bother with some dust-bowl farm kid, ordinarily speakin’. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Obliged.” He grins at me. “Don’t get me wrong. They’re in charge of this hand. And it’s their play. But we’re in with a chance.” He checks his rifle barrel is true. “’Cause I sure ain’t in a hurry to keep any of them alive. They be Visitors, then they got their own Visitation Day comin’.”
Visitation Day — I was not even born yet when the world stopped turning, twenty years ago. It is hard for me to imagine that moment, though I have heard the tale many times, for I have never seen the light of the moon or a sunrise.
Pa rushed out of our old cabin in Marfa, fearing the end of days. The time by his old pocket watch was a quarter before seven and the sun was a bloated, misshapen ball of orange fire, dust-streaked and snagged at the edges by the Texas sky. And so it remains today, unmoved. Waiting for a night that will never come. But he did not know that then. He was staring toward the east at the full moon. Its destruction was not violent, he told me, when I was old enough to understand. It simply parted like someone had halved a cheese with wire. The pieces twirled away from each other, spinning in the light of the sun, breaking slowly into smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing but a great drift of moon rocks, like a hanging cloud.
People ran out of their houses and threw themselves on the ground to pray. Dogs howled. Tides ceased. End-time preachers couldn’t believe their luck. Their pronouncements were at last, after many false prophecies, coming true. But the four horsemen of the Apocalypse did not ride into Marfa, or into any other town. It was, Pa said, not God’s judgment but a new reckoning. In those twenty years, the world has become a different place — from the frozen wastes of the east to the burning deserts of the west. We are still holding our breath, wondering what it means. And stranger things still have happened since.
Men and women were lost that day from a small outpost in the Sea of Tranquillity. No one knows what became of them. But most educated people agree, the moon did not come apart at the seams of its own accord. It was a sign. A warning perhaps. A visitation, though the Visitors have rarely shown themselves.
Folks say that time drags ever more slowly now that the sun holds its position in the sky. Pa used to say that the years will weigh more because people cannot just draw a line under their bad days — the unshifting angle of the sun locks them into the same black mood. But it is normal for me. Now when I think of a world that spins, I picture a place of unsettling movement, treacherous and fleeting, where shadows are no longer nailed to their masts. Where not even the earth and rocks can be relied upon to keep their solid colors and shapes.
Time is in the whisper-ticking of my watch, in the random loops of a fly.
The day ebbs away.
I think of my aunt, and slowly lay her memory to rest.
Luis whittles at a stick with his knife.
The sheriff smokes.
“I knew your father,” he says at last, so suddenly it makes me jump. “Before Visitation. Before the forever sunset. Strange fish, I made him out to be, them days.”
He doesn’t look at me, just squints at the smoldering pipe bowl in his hands. “Found an empty pickup pulled over on Route 67 one winter’s night. It was cold enough to freeze your spit on the way to the ground. I set my cruiser up so’s I could pan the desert with headlights. And out in the dirt was a man just standing there. I figured he’d froze in his boots, ’cause he never flinched when I hailed him. I got spooked when I saw the breath smoking out his mouth, so I drew on him. And still he never broke off gazing at the horizon. Told me he was watching for the Marfa Ghost Lights. We got tourists and local kids in the summer spying out for flying saucers and some such. I always figured it was bull — just reflections in the air of headlights or campfires. Just shows you how wrong you can be. Anyhow, I left him to it. No law against watching the night sky, even if it’s minus thirty.
“It was your daddy. I only knew him to be a teacher up in Alpine. Someone you’d tip your hat to in the street. No trouble, but not memorable, neither.”
He tips out the ash and scrapes the pipe bowl clean. “I sure remembered him after Visitation. One of the only clear heads in the whole county. He talked sense to whoever’d listen. Said we had to pay attention to the Zone, to study it. Else it’d be the end of us.”
I wait for him to continue, but it’s like the sheriff has exhausted his supply of words. I ask to know more, but he just busies himself with fresh tobacco. All he says further on the matter of my father is what I already know.
“First of the trackers. Figured out the craft. Listened to the Zone so hard he lost himself in it.”
I listen to the lazy buzz of the one fly left alive in that smoky haze. I listen to the sheriff draw and puff. Draw and puff. There are fitful bouts of sleep, troubled dreams that wake me too soon.
And then the shooting begins.
Gunfire punches through the windows and the door at head height. Straightaway, Luis and I scramble under the duty desk. The sheriff follows, leaning over us as glass and plaster hail into the walls like grapeshot. The door is nothing more than splinters above the handle.
“I thought they wanted me alive,” I whisper during the lull.
“Hush!” He passes Luis a handgun and nods toward my six-shooter, still in its holster. “Yo
u gonna draw that any time soon?”
I pull it out and it’s so heavy I need two hands.
Another volley of rounds rattles the air — this time, shotgun shells peppering the wall behind us.
Shouts and answering gunfire from a nearby building. An ally? Someone is screaming in the street beyond. I chance a peek around the side of the desk, though I can see very little through the dust. The sheriff edges past me toward the ruined door, keeping to the shadows. Another exchange outside, and footsteps pounding along the road. Then two rifle shots.
It is silent for the longest time. Luis crawls out and stations himself below a window. I feel isolated and redundant by the desk. When I cock my gun, the sheriff throws me a furious look as though I have tipped the balance of the battle with that telltale sound.
And from above the ceiling timbers comes a faint creaking. The sheriff swivels onto his back and lets rip with the pump action. A great clod of debris spews into the room and for a moment I can see nothing but billowing grit. A stifled cry … Then an awful thud like a flour sack splitting on the sidewalk outside. I claw the dust from my eyes with one hand. The revolver is as heavy as a branding iron — I cannot keep it still.
“Game’s up, Sheriff!” cries a voice from outside. “Yer deputy’s hit in the belly. The cavalry ain’t comin’ any time soon. Send out the girl and we’ll make it quick for you, I give my word.”
The sheriff gazes back at me with a tiny shake of the head. “She’s down, too,” he yells back. “Can’t move her.”
“Yer a lyin’ dog. Can’t hear nothing from her.”
I take a deep breath to start groaning, but the sheriff warns me off the act with a wag of his finger. “Sounds a mite like Bud Haslett,” he cries. “Except it ain’t. He disappeared last year out huntin’ buck Terlingua way and he ain’t been seen since.”
No answer.
“Bud was a Christian soul what never held company with outlaws. Well, listen, whatever-the-hell-you-are, the girl in here took one in the gut. I’m tellin’ you, she’ll be needin’ a priest if you don’t rustle up a sawbones from some place next five minutes. Leakin’ like a stuck pig in here.”
