Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  We ate our breakfast on the rim and then we ate our lunch too. Nothing much changed except for the color of the sky. So long as the enemy remained dismounted we knew any attack was still in planning stage. We passed the time playing cards and gambling on all manner of trivial occurrence. I lost a dollar when a raven didn’t land on the rock but instead continued past.

  * * *

  —

  Their dead now swelled in the sun and already vultures circled a mile above us, waiting. We could see them coming from a distance, a chain of them following the smell of death and the promise of more. All the battlefields they’d fed on.

  I rolled my brother’s cigarettes and checked the enemy through the scope. I was trying to make out faces among them but it was no use. I didn’t see no guardsmen’s dusters or black hats.

  “What they saying, you figure?” Noah asked me.

  “They’s talking about waiting us out. They figuring how long it’ll be before we expose ourselves for want of water.”

  “We got all we ever need on that accord.”

  “They don’t know what we got.”

  Noah smoked his cigarette down to his fingers then flicked it away right quick. “Should’ve gotten some more rollies.”

  “How long we gonna wait, Patrón?” Jeremiah dared ask. “Couldn’t we bait them close?”

  Noah exhaled through his nose. “Winter’s coming and they ain’t got no break from the wind. We’ll wait them out.”

  “You really think they’ll leave?” I muttered to my brother.

  He was fingering the cracks in the rock he was hiding behind. “I don’t know.”

  I clenched my jaw to keep from saying something I might regret. The boys was watching.

  Mason said, “I’d feel a lot better if’n we commenced killing them now.”

  Pale Jay said, “I think the injuns had it right. Following the buffalo all year. They didn’t get themselves in no siege.”

  “Men ain’t built for sitting still when there’s a fight to win.”

  “Still is bored.”

  “Bored is worse than death.”

  “I’m rotten then.”

  “Quit your whining,” I hollered.

  The boys looked off. Nobody said nothing for a long time.

  Noah climbed from the ground but stayed hunched.

  “Where you off to?” I asked.

  “You got it up here. I’m going down to tend to the folks and see if I can’t recruit some more fighters from among the men.”

  He should’ve left us with a great speech of confidence. But he only turned and walked down the path into the meadow.

  The boys watched him go. The boys spat. The boys snuck glances on me.

  “Keep an eye for sharpshooters,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  Come darkness we was in heightened alarm. We studied their shapes and saw that they ate their suppers before twig fires. We saw too that their horses was set out to graze. Their saddles was off and they was hobbled. We took that as a ruse and sure evidence that an attack was imminent.

  Not a one of us slumbered. We pulled up our coats and huddled against the wind. I checked for the thousandth time that I had a shell in the chamber.

  “Wish they’d just attack already.”

  “Somebody find some whiskey.”

  * * *

  —

  At dawn I pulled up the scope and found their horses still hobbled. A few of their men warmed their hands against fresh built-up fires. The rest was still in the tents. A full day had passed since the last action. Half our boys was laid out drooling in their sleep.

  “What they waiting on?” Carlos whispered. He was beside me now, looking over the length of his barrel as it projected from a firing port.

  I noticed then that their dead men had been removed during the cover of darkness. It was the only difference.

  * * *

  —

  Noah hollered for us around midmorning and I come to the edge and looked into the meadow. Ingrid and the other horses was at the feed troughs, their heads lost in delight. “Send three boys down.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  I called for volunteers and then joined the two that stepped forward. We found waiting on us not a hot breakfast as we’d figured but three buckets of human waste. The men, women, and children could no longer venture into the sage to relieve themselves and so had taken to sitting on buckets. “Ain’t we got enough to contend with?” I asked.

  Noah’s hat was on low and his sleeve was tucked into his pocket. He spoke to my knees. “Bang ’em out when you do it. No sense in bringing some back with you.”

  We each carried a bucket and did our best not to breathe or slosh.

  “To hell with this,” Mason said on the walk up. “I’m a gunfighter not a shit banger-outer.”

  “We’ll do it,” I said, “and we won’t complain neither. We’s the only ones who can walk up here without pissing ourselves for fear. They do stuff for us too.”

  “I ain’t complaining, I’m just saying.”

  “No, you’s complaining,” I said. “And the boys don’t need no poison.”

  But Mason hadn’t said nothing I wasn’t already thinking. My brother had put us in this bind and now he was staying warm down below.

  * * *

  —

  That night we ate and then took turns sleeping and watching their twig fires. Their men sat up late, and from the sounds of their merriment we guessed they had whiskey. In the stillness of the night air we could hear their music. A fiddle was what we heard best.

  “They about as good at playing as they is at shooting,” Pale Jay said.

  I thought on it and then said, “Let’s show ’em up.”

  The boys liked this notion. Mason and three others went down by lantern light and fetched our instruments. When they returned we sat upon the moonlit rocks and the boys tuned up. I watched through the scope for movement among the enemy.

  Jeremiah answered with Annette’s banjo. He was playing the very song we heard from their camp, only better.

  Rest of the boys joined in at once and I watched through the scope as the enemy stood from their fires and looked out at the night. They watched, and though the distance was profound I imagined them in awe. How queer it must’ve been to hear their very songs played better from the rock upon which they laid siege. Did it make them want to kill us less or more?

  * * *

  —

  The next afternoon a train of wagons appeared behind their camp. We could not see what the wagons contained but we assumed food and bedding and ammunition. We soon learned we was mistaken. Through the scope I watched as two Gatling guns was unloaded and aimed our way.

  When darkness fell we didn’t much sleep. Those was big weapons.

  * * *

  —

  We was moving rocks to bolster our firing ports when the sharpshooter scored his first hit.

  Carlos was hefting an especially big rock and doing so required he straighten his back. His head come up over the edge of the wall. The bullet hit him above the left eye at a glancing angle. He fell to the earth at once and we gasped at what we assumed was his sure death. Then as a ghost he rolled over and held his fingers to his wound and said, “Who threw that rock?”

  “You done got shot!” Mason yelled. “Holy hell and mayhem!”

  Jeremiah helped Carlos to sit. The Mexican was dizzy and sank back to the ground. I felt his skull for myself and determined it wasn’t broke. A sleeve was all that was needed to slow the bleeding.

  Carlos kept asking, “Shot in the head?”

  Mason stood and yelled from the rim, “You can’t win! Not even your bullets can kill us!”

  Just then the Gatling guns opened up and lead cut the air over us and splattered agains
t the rocks below and we dove for cover. More lead than a whole army could deliver and it come from just two guns. The distance was great enough that we could almost see the lead coming and it piled like hail at the base of our walls, tumbling rocks and ricocheting in every goddamn direction.

  By a feat of pure random madness some of those thick rounds ricocheted into the meadow.

  Horses began wailing. There was screams of children.

  I took a leave from the rim and found Ingrid shivering in the pole barn. All the animals was crowded into the corral now, as if it could offer them any protection at all from the brutalities of flying metal. A kind-faced bay struggled in the meadow, limp in the hindquarters and dragging itself about on its front legs, screaming. A bullet had broke its spine.

  Mr. Cherry fired a Spencer point-blank into that poor animal’s head, and it fell heavy on its side and quivered.

  I put my face to Ingrid’s. She threw her head to be rid of my obstruction. She was without wound and yet she was panting and wildeyed. Ingrid wasn’t built for no war, she was a horse made for quiet, wide-open spaces and I could do nothing to calm her.

  Mr. Cherry held his sobbing wife. I couldn’t hear what he said but I do wish I’d gone to him then and talked him out of what they come to do.

  The dead horse changed things for the folks below. There was no burying a horse in that hard ground and so the folks could no longer avoid the truth of what awaited outside. They took their shelter in the schoolhouse, which sat in the lee of the rock. If men emerged, they ran with their heads low to the storehouse or the woodpile and then come running back.

  For all the remaining days of the siege the Rock was filled with the stench of rot. At least up top we had good air.

  * * *

  —

  Clouds started building the next day. The wind smelled of snow.

  Jeremiah shouted, “What in hell?”

  I come to the edge to find two of ours walking across the plain of ash toward the enemy camp. I knew who it was even before I drew up my scope. Mr. and Mrs. Cherry. They was plumb wore through and wanted out. Who could blame them? Without consulting my brother they had scaled the rubble in the canyon mouth and now they aimed to give themselves to the militia. The logic was sound enough. Who would want to harm gentle farmers like the Cherrys?

  The accounts of the event have it wrong. The books will tell you that it was us on top of the Rock who shot them down. Books is writ by the victor.

  Mr. and Mrs. Cherry walked hand in hand under that thickening sky, and we stood to watch them go. They walked toward a line of men with rifles and there wasn’t a soul among us who could draw a straight breath at the sight. We believed they would be taken in by our enemy and then bound and beaten until they told all they knew. We believed they would be taken in.

  But the sharpshooter saw his chance at us there gandering without full cover and let off a round. The bullet hit Jeremiah in the left shoulder and drew blood though it was only flesh and no bone. We drug him into the cover and was ripping at his jacket and so didn’t pay much attention when we heard the enemy riflemen open up.

  The Cherrys lay writhing in the flat. Kicking and stomping and even from that distance we could hear the agony. It come across that sage and distance and hit us worse than lead. In his last moment Mr. Cherry took hold of his dead wife’s hand, and then he too bled out.

  Looking back I suspect it was the sharpshooter’s shot that sparked one of the militiamen, and as soon as one bullet had been fired, the rest of the riflemen believed there to be good cause.

  I couldn’t stop the boys then. They must’ve fired a thousand rounds at that far-off enemy. The only effect was to provoke ten thousand rounds fired in return. The Gatling guns rained lead like thunderclouds.

  Darkness brought a lull, and for the first time there was no moon or stars to light the night. There was no Noah to give us orders. He hadn’t come up all day. I had to deliver word of what happened to his people.

  He took the news with shut eyes.

  * * *

  —

  I ate from a tin of beans and watched the enemy about their fires. Too many men was standing up that evening. I fell asleep but I awoke with a terrible knowledge. I had seen the major thinking it through.

  I stood and called to the boys. “I need ten of you.”

  “You got a notion?” Mason asked.

  We rushed down the slope by the light of a single lantern and then ran across the dark meadow as the folks slept. There come only the sound of casings in our pockets and the squeak of the lantern’s hinge and the patter of boots on rock and then the ratchet of a Winchester levering in a shell.

  The boys took up positions in the canyon mouth as I directed and I blew the lantern out. I gave them strict orders to remain silent and to fire only when I had taken the first shot. “No rollies,” I said. “No sparks of light.”

  “I hope they come,” said Mason. “I hope they all come.”

  The fact that the Cherrys had climbed out meant in the mind of the major that there was indeed a way in. What better time to try it than on this dark night?

  The fact their attack come as I predicted was further evidence for the boys.

  It was in the darkest hour of night, that hour before dawn, when we heard a single slip of cobble. Then a minute later we heard the scrape of leather and the ting of a barrel on rock. I drew the hammer slow enough to dim its click.

  We let them scale the columns of rock and we let them believe the gate to be unguarded. We heard pistols cock and spittle splash and then in a bolt of lightning I dropped the lead man myself. I had aimed for the glow of his cigarette but three feet away.

  Boys was perched above and boys hunkered in the path and all at once they opened up. We saw the enemy in the flashes of our muzzles and we took aim on the shapes burned into our vision and we dropped them in the span of two breaths.

  When it was through, Youn sparked the lantern and the boys howled at the sight of the corpses upon the earth. They was strewn in unnatural postures, legs forked underneath and eyes blazed open in surprise. Two still gurgled their blood and they was dispatched at point-blank.

  The major was not among them. I did not recognize a face.

  One of the boys started pissing on a body. Then they all done it. They was laughing like we was six bottles deep.

  It had been a single unit of the militia, eighteen men. But had it been the entire force I suspect we could’ve held them.

  On top in that earliest light I put the scope on the major’s double tent and saw him out front in conference with his lieutenants. He had ordered them to try and lost. He would try again.

  They was here not to subdue us, but to erase us. What else but our complete annihilation could wrestle back the pen that wrote the Governor’s legacy?

  The Winchester would never reach but I tried anyhow. I held upon the horizon and lobbed pellets of lead. The boys took this as license and we all threw ore across that sage, over the Cherrys still sprawled where they fell, and yet the major and his lieutenants didn’t so much as turn our way.

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon the snows began in earnest and Jeremiah and me smoked with our backs to the wind. His wounded shoulder give him pain enough to grimace but he wasn’t the type to mention pain. His arm was back in its sleeve. His riding jacket was tore and the bloodstains had gone brown. He was working out the hand, trying to keep it from going stiff. “Why don’t he come up?” he asked me in a voice too quiet to be heard by the boys. Noah hadn’t even ventured up top to speak of our victory at the canyon mouth.

  “I guess we know what to do but it don’t sit right, us up here and him down there.” Jeremiah drew from his cigarette. “I ain’t never seen him like that. Scared.”

  “Losing an arm, I reckon.”

  “Don’t got to tell me. But I figured him . . . you know
, above such worries.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “I would’ve guessed we could cut his legs at the knees and he’d still be marching about barking orders and preaching hellfire. I once seen him stand and face four men with rifles and not flinch.”

  I took the last drag of my smoke and flicked what remained. The snow was pelting us now and sticking about the Rock and the day was fading fast and I was certain there was no way out of this but through pure grit. “You keep an eye on the boys,” I said. “I’ll go see about my brother.”

  * * *

  —

  Noah was in the schoolhouse with the others. He was sitting near the stove with his back to the Rock and his book open before him. Since he couldn’t read I knew he was only fending off visitation from his people.

  When I entered the room all voices fell silent including those of the children. They turned and looked upon me like I was a saint or ghost. I took off my hat and knocked free the snow and set it on a desk since all the pegs was taken.

  Charles and Constance stood together before the window. They looked to have been engaged in conversation, but now their eyes was on me.

  The people in that room must’ve known that I was one of the killers who had left those bodies in the canyon. Now I stood among them, a Winchester in one hand and two pistols on my belt. Children watching my guns. I couldn’t remember what I’d felt the first time I saw Drummond. Whatever it was had been in error.

  I leaned the Winchester against the wall and come through the room and a path opened before me. I stood before my brother. He said without looking up from his book, “Jess.”

  “The snow is thick and still falling,” I said.

  “Winter is upon us.” His eyes remained upon the page. “Build up a fire. Build up a windbreak. The boys was born tough.”