Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  “I ain’t here to complain, brother. I believe the lack of visibility may provide us an opportunity.”

  His eyes glanced upon me and then back to his pages. “Is that so?”

  “They can’t see us.”

  “You want to make a run for it? Where will you go? There ain’t no way out of this valley.”

  “Brother.”

  Now he looked up and I saw the weary in his face. “What, Jess? What? You always pester me. Since you was a girl, always pestering for answers.”

  I looked about the room. The people was whispering among themselves, their eyes glancing on us, on me.

  “You never trust the answers I give anyhow. Look, I know it ain’t easy. But you all is doing good. There ain’t nothing for us to do right now but wait. You’ll get killed or worse if you leave this Rock. This is the only place we got left. Trust me.”

  “I’m trying to trust, brother. I am. But the boys up there, freezing and ducking lead, they need you. They keep turning to check the trail to see if you’ve come up. And when they look around and don’t see you, they know you is here sitting in the warmth, your back to the Rock. You got any sense what it’s like to watch you ride off and leave us behind?”

  His eyes narrowed. “What you really talking about here, Jess?”

  Jane stepped near. “Jess, you don’t understand what he’s suffering. This wound. It keeps him up at night. He has dreams. . . . He is a man who is healing. He can’t be out in the cold for long hours, not now. You must understand that.”

  My voice shook. “These boys put their trust in you.”

  “Damn it, Jess!” His curse sent a shock through the room. I don’t think he noticed. His eyes was wet. “It wasn’t me who got her killed. You didn’t listen. You didn’t trust. You went to town.”

  At this truth my knees wobbled. All those days I wondered if my brother blamed me. Now I knew. Yet nothing he could say about the matter was more cruel than what I said to myself in every lonely moment.

  He said, “Just go up top and do as I say.”

  “Do you trust yourself anymore, brother? I don’t think you do. I think you running on fear, not belief.”

  He parked his gaze in the Bible.

  I took his book and snapped it shut. When he looked up, there wasn’t certainty in his eyes. Unsure like that, he looked old. He looked broken and familiar. He looked something like our pa.

  “Brother, you asked me if you hit him too hard. I lied to you. His head cracked upon the ground and he wasn’t never the same after. You knew you broke him. That’s why you never come back. Walking the path the Lord laid for you, shit. Walking a length of yarn, more like it. All these years you knew the truth. Didn’t you?”

  He took hold of Jane’s arm.

  “Not now, Jess,” she said. “Not here.”

  But my heart was pounding and there wasn’t nothing off-limits. I turned toward his followers. “You stayed because you trust this man to lead you. You trust he has a straight line to the Lord and that he hears what you cannot.” I opened my brother’s Bible to the book of Kings and bellowed, “Read it to us, Noah Harney. Come now. Show us you know these big words. Impress us with your God-given skill.”

  Noah didn’t move. Jane took the book from my hands and said, “You stop this right now.”

  “See?” I called to the room. “He don’t read. He ain’t never read a true word of this book to you. Ain’t that right, Noah Harney? Come on now. Be clean with them just this once. Be clean with us.” I turned to them. “See, Jane teaches him to memorize the words. Then he holds the book before you on Sundays and pretends. Fools, don’t you see? All of us, fools. We’ve been whiskeyed by this man.”

  At once their voices rose with objection. Their eyes leapt with light and men waded across the room to confront me. They begged my brother to contradict these crazy indictments. They waved fingers at me as if they was knives. They implored him to read a passage, to right his ship, to put this ugly woman in her place.

  When I turned, Constance was in the window’s light. Our eyes met. She nodded.

  I took up my rifle and put on my hat and stepped into the storm. I felt the snow upon my skin and knew.

  Live or die, what come next was on me.

  * * *

  —

  On the rim, I racked the Winchester and Jeremiah passed me a smoke. I waved it away. My eyes was on the distance.

  The snows had ebbed and I could see over the plateau. Their fires was smothered and their men hid in snowbound tents. Three guards leaned against their rifles.

  Between here and there lie the bodies of the Cherrys, two mounds in the white, left out.

  My boys shivered against the rocks. My boys had their collars up against the cold and their hands buried in pockets. Carlos wiped snot from his nose. Mason coughed.

  The wind grew to a howl and the snow pelted us and the enemy camp was again lost to sight but not to knowing. It loomed within, always, a cardinal point.

  “Tonight,” I called and the boys turned. “Out of the darkness. Knives. Teams of four. We move among them like the wind and leave them to bleed with no voice to call out. We slay them as they so deserve.”

  The boys looked about one another. They stood from their rocks. Snow hung on the brims of their hats.

  “The winter is young and we wither in the cold and we do not have any resupply. There is no escape fast enough and surrender means a fate worse than death. And so what choice do we have but to seize the first advantage offered to us? That advantage is now.”

  Carlos said, “Knives?”

  Pale Jay frowned. “I ain’t never killed with a blade before.”

  “It’s good,” Mason said. “You’ll like it.”

  I drew my own knife and held it to the light. “We enter their ranks. We embrace them as the snows embrace them. We become them, and we kill them son by son, father by father, brother by brother. We kill them and in so doing we set these people free.”

  Pale Jay said, “But I guess I don’t get why we don’t just shoot them dead?”

  Jeremiah answered for me. “Gunfire will alert them and they will rise against us in sheer number.” He nodded to me. “Right?”

  “Tonight we attack as they could never expect. We own our murdering and resolve ourselves to it. For if we fail, they will blot us from this earth forever and write our stories in their name.”

  “This is what Patrón wants?” Mason asked.

  I did not hide my eyes. “If you’re moved by what Noah Harney orders, you should remain here. He may even let you inside with him.”

  Mason spat.

  Carlos shrugged. “Some of us won’t come through.”

  “I for one plan to die tonight,” I said. “I plan to take a hundred of those bastards with me. Ask yourself, is it death you fear or being the last man alive?”

  Youn’s eyes narrowed on me.

  Mason put a thumb to his blade. He shrugged. “You know I’m in.”

  Jeremiah tested his stiff arm. “I’m going.”

  All at once, the boys was checking their knives.

  Youn was the last.

  Jeremiah said, “When do we go, Boss?”

  “Hone those edges,” I said. “Eat some grub and make your peace. We wait for them to sleep. We wait no longer.”

  * * *

  —

  The folks was asleep in their warm stone houses and the fires in their stoves smoldered and filled the wet snow with smoke. It fell so fast we couldn’t see nothing in the lantern light but flakes. The night hummed with ashen landings.

  We turned our lanterns on the snowbound bodies blocking the canyon and picked our way through the rocks and helped up the man behind and steadied the one in front and we starved the lanterns and set them in the dry lee of the rock and passed through the mouth and into the sage toward our deaths. W
e knew the direction by heart.

  We didn’t see their encampment coming, we smelled it. Wet horse, wet wool, wet smoke. The snows fell so hard we could not see their tents until our fingertips found them. We dispersed into the heart of their village. We broke into our fours and I led mine straight for the double tent that held the major.

  We took the guard where he dozed. We drove him into the snow without a grunt and four blades worked him until his muscles quit taunting us.

  We felt our way around the edge of the tent until our pushing revealed a release in the canvas.

  We stepped into the heavy air of men dreaming. The enemy grumbled and rolled over.

  We loomed as shadows within a veil of shadow, towering over flesh and blood bound by the same ties to kin and land, governed by the same codes of order and soul, and yet our fingers searched quilt and fur for the tender opening of neck. When we might’ve noticed the same textures upon them as upon us, when we might’ve known the lack of division between their breath and ours, we felt nothing but our lust to finish what we had begun.

  The major swatted as if at a mosquito. I drew the blade across his bare throat and in the next motion drove it into his chest and he arched in gasping violence and I bore my forearm into his open mouth to silence him and when he quit trying I pummeled his nose with my elbow and reburied my knife in his guts and stirred.

  Tent to tent, geyser to geyser, we sank blades into eyes, slashed at cheeks and bellies, hacked and stabbed. Tendons cut loose and muscles balled, joints unhinged, intestines held in open hands. We found each other by click and whisper and moved as one into that next place from which we could not return.

  In the space between killings we grew cold. Yet in each new tent waited a rush of pulsing heat, and we relished that warmth like serpents turning toward the birth of spring.

  Gunshots as red bursts muffled by snow.

  They rose and leapt upon us from every direction. Only they didn’t know who to kill.

  I hacked with the major’s sword. I sliced a man through his collar. I swung at a shape and felt the gravel of spine. I drove the sword through another and left it and drew my pistols and bucked off rounds.

  We put our backs to one another and fired at the sounds of men rushing and shouting and gasping. We fired with our eyes open and yet we saw nothing but the dragon’s breath of our barrels and the purples and reds of vision lost to light. We fired through tents and at gasps and we understood our hits by the sounds lead makes against flesh, fabric, air. We, the arms and legs of the same insatiable beast.

  It went on in increments not tallied by any earthly measure. For centuries we wander that snow with their blood running from our elbows.

  * * *

  —

  Dawn brought only white but no order. The sky as white as the earth and between was white without distance, gravity the only cardinal point.

  In the absence of their agony the silence grew to a roar. We turned our war upon silence. We hollered. We fired only to hear the report. We stumbled over bodies and turned to dig them out and check if they was ours.

  We heard nothing but for the falling snow and the hooves of our own hearts.

  * * *

  —

  A tuft of red hair among the white. I dug it out with insane terror.

  The hair did not belong to my Greenie.

  * * *

  —

  “How could you kill as you have?”

  For as long as we’ve been the Good, we’ve invented histories to so convince our children. We heed preachers upon tilted altars. We let them spin this world.

  So long as we remain at its center.

  V

  I do not recall our return. I do not recall if Noah greeted us or what Jane said or if Constance stared in horror at the blood that turned our jackets to armors of crimson ice.

  I have no memory of so much that happens after. For decades now I walk in one place and dwell in another.

  Before, I was aware of every turn in the breeze, the fibrous flutter of wind through feather, the heat every blister makes upon a heel. Before, I could wake at night and tell how many hours till the dawn, I could work all morning and know how many minutes until the noon.

  Pa’s voice across years, Your ma never lost the time.

  * * *

  —

  What I remember next is Ingrid keeping her distance. Her nose lifted toward my scent.

  Despite the snows and risks of winter travel, families began packing at once. The men found the dynamite and took it upon themselves to blast and then blast again the rubble blocking their wagons. They fought that rubble and the frozen bodies below it, heaving until their heat give off clouds. Jane lifted a panel from her wall and dragged from a cave chests built of hardwood. She handed the families sagging bags of gold.

  They rolled out into the white without a call back to the man who had brought them there, or to the killers who had traded life for their freedom. The orphans, the homesteaders and their babies, they rolled out into the sun-blind white.

  Before they left, Ingrid stood downwind. She stomped a foot. She blew the scent of blood from her nose.

  I tried to shirk my frozen jacket. I struggled against the ice until the jacket fell free with a clatter. She was already backing away. She was looking to the wagon.

  Susie clung to the wagon’s rear. Pots dangled from the bows and a water jug hung from the panel. The children of the mother sat up front. Susie the orphan held to the only space that remained, the flat top of a trunk.

  I had to put a rope about Ingrid’s neck and tie her to a post in order to tack her up. She did not trust me about her flank. When I was done I drew the rope from her and let her trot home.

  Her Susie swung up into the saddle and old Mr. James adjusted the stirrups to her short legs. I followed them through the mouth and then I remained inside.

  I must’ve run to the top of the rim, for I remember watching Ingrid cross that plateau.

  Susie was so light upon her back. Ingrid always was a little girl’s horse.

  * * *

  —

  We too rolled on from the Rock and past the bulge of corpses. Ours with theirs, under piled snow.

  Constance, Charles, Jane, and Noah sharing a wagon. The five of us Wild Bunch who lived rode behind, Youn, Mason, Carlos, Jeremiah. I remember rubbing ice upon my flesh. It ran from me in pink tendrils.

  * * *

  —

  In time we again entered green forests and the snows melted into the needles and left only a road burdened with mud and trees dragged down by the weight of snow now melted to water.

  We rolled through the mud and wore it as we had snow only days before, sawing logs from our path as we went.

  Noah sat upon his seat and held the reins in his hand, and when the next log was cleared, he flicked those reins and the wagon rolled on.

  * * *

  —

  I remember my brother in the fire’s light, his hand upon my shoulder and his eyes holding mine. His sleeve dangled at his side and his lips drove for the same resolution our knives had sought those nights before.

  “The Lord’s chosen survivors. He sent us a miracle.”

  In my sleep they drove their forearms into my throat and I gagged as their knives cut fire across my belly and blood rose up and rained back and I sank away into the flood, gasping.

  * * *

  —

  We traveled for days and I was never sure of sleeping or waking, only of distance.

  I remember their first laugh, the sin of it, the highest crime.

  I remember them speaking of Old Mexico.

  I remember watching my brother point his finger toward the stars.

  * * *

  —

  We saw posters tacked to trees as we neared the first town. We stood before one. Noah said, “I’d turn me in
for that kind of money.”

  In this town the road split, and they pointed the wagon toward the south without conversation. I spoke for the first time in days and all heads turned toward me in mute surprise.

  Annette was in my hand. She was always in my hand now.

  Noah said, “The snows are too deep to the north. We’d never make it.”

  I remember Charles saying, “Sitting Bull has survived in Canada all this time. If that land can hide a whole tribe maybe it can conceal us.”

  Jane said, “No one would ever expect us to turn north in winter.”

  * * *

  —

  On a muddy street Mason, Jeremiah, and Carlos stood before me and asked if I’d given any thought to leaving with them. “We could take up hitting coaches. There’s always fun in that,” Mason said. He punched me in that way of his, and then he put his arm about me. “You know they’ll drive you mad with all their baby chatter.”

  “Creeks made of tequila in Old Mexico,” Jeremiah said.

  “Come on, hermano.” Carlos handed me a brass casing poured full with moonshine. Each of us now held one. He raised his.

  “To the boys,” Mason called.

  “And to Annette,” Jeremiah said.

  We took them down. Then Carlos offered me the bottle but I waved it away.

  “Catch up later then,” Jeremiah said, his hand on my shoulder. He drew me in and slapped my back in that manner of hard men who’ve bled together. “Read the papers and you’ll see our names.”

  In fact he was correct. I would see his and Carlos’s names in the papers a month on. Ambushed in an alley for the bounties on their heads. I don’t know what became of Mason.

  Youn left the same day. He did so without a word. We was walking together along the wagon as it rolled the muddy street. When I looked next he was missing.

  I found him headed up a side street. He turned back to me when I called. He tipped his hat, and was gone.