He shoots down a tin can behind the saloon and the bartender tells him he did well. He lumbers atop dog whelks and broken shells back to the hitching post and feeding troughs where he propped up the ancient containers of spirits and liqueurs. Aching and stretching his back, the man returns the shot metal back to the perch and tracks sluggishly to his starting position. The lustrous oil from the gun slicks his index and thumb along the frame and he huffs in a liter of dry air and lets loose with his lungs emptying. The corrugated metals and wrinkled glasses flew up into sparkling shards with fast afterimages of dust and splinters. The bartender praises the sharpshooter’s deadeye, and he asks for his gun back. The man sluggishly grinds his hips along his pelvis in his five paces to the bartender, and he runs his thumb along the hammer for a moment and feels the oil rub into the pad of his finger. Controlling the toss of his revolver, the man hands the pistol handle first to the bartender and leaves a faded dollar in his palm. He wishes him thanks and the man nods with his chin and with the brim of his hat and he winds back into the city street to unhitch his horse.
The wind fluffs the sand, and the weight of each click of his heel plastered his bones with the geriatric reminder of pistoning and arthritis. The leather grab from his boots acted as an undesired accent—his feet weigh down as though he were walking on top of molasses; a frail communication left between the faculties of his body that was as much an eternal reminder of man’s oldness as it is man’s eternal companion.
He tosses his foot from one imprint to another, throwing his body step after step so that he could get out of the scorching sun. He slams his heel into the step of the inn and clutches his hips so they would not pop out. He draws up to a portico, gunpowder stains rubbed into the imported cherry wood of the hotel, and clumps of wood dyed dark green from stumps of horse nestle and dyed yucca feed. The owner of the inn saw his daughter scalped, and his son doused in pitch and oil and set afire like a leper—his business and mind were diseased from the attack. His mind is split, talking to him is playing into a cracked drum, beat it whatever way, it will never sound the same—never hear what a man would expect.
Some shop owners tossed buffalo gourds, torn garments, and charcoal into watering holes and feeding troughs, hoping they rally whatever spirit was left in the town to wage a dead man’s war on the Comanche, a war that was bound to get all of them killed, maybe that is what some of them wanted; a termination of their listless, daily survivals that only left them effigies of the great pioneers early America had raked their spirits to be.
The bell chimed tentatively and hushed after three swings, clipping off the rings of its own nickel dross as it bangs across the dense cherry-wood portal. The manager darts his eyes to the man’s soiled attire: blasted cartridges riddle the old sharpshooter’s gun belt, flotsam and jetsam of animal carcasses and furs recessed in his hanging pockets, and a wide-brimmed cap of wiry plant sinew that fitted onto his own dilapidated cranium. His eyes buried into his head and peering back at the innkeeper with two black dots stenciled onto a face either war-torn or work worn.
The keeper muscles into his elbows that were on the counter when the man had walked in, and now he clutches hand over fist, reaching not for underneath the pine countertop for some firearm, leaving his hands in the open, at both men’s disposals if they so wanted. He dons a white collared Slater filled in with a greased undershirt that barely seeps through his front rucks. Kempt suspenders latch and glue from front shoulder to back and run along the blunt crests of his overweight frame. A frazzled combover lays on his scalp, some ecchymosis shades his head a muted purple that popped along his liver spots.
Rum?
Sho. 2 dollars yer night.
Mm.
The old men fill their share of pressure in the room so that the other cannot, the innkeeper stays stable in his elbows, and the desperado his hand knuckling along the ridge of his back-holstered knife while he pays the man. The old sharpshooter flattens greasy bills on his counter for the keeper to then lug his knuckle out of his palm and pin the dollars along his half-index-finger and ring finger. The melanterite color shows it was recently printed, the old man digs his grey teeth and licks his lips, and peers up towards a sharpshooter posted in a ready stance.
You’s a bounty hunter?
Nah. Left that lung ago, I’s a traveling sheruf.
Travelling sheruf. That’d be the dey.
So whas’bout it? Can’s I stey her?
Yea.
The keeper stumbles as he pivots on his left foot to lurch for a room safe and quarters key posted on a corkboard beside him. His seasoned hands fiddle with the flimsy iron of the key ring and produce a blue-cobalt fit that absorbs light more than anything else in the room—than the whole town, rather. Old sharpshooter stacks his weight into each small pace in a show of either ceaseless anticipation or wishful provocation; he clasps his spurs and heels a foot from the face of the counter and peers darkly into the old man.
The old man has a bite in the corona of his right ear, and the fluff from the desiccated cherrywood beams plaster his whole face with this faint, asbestos tan. His washed opal eyes plainly gaze back, locking eyes but garnering no presence or fight behind his black-dot globes. They both look on into each other, then they let off as the room keeps still with the sound of cracking floorboards washing the lobby.
The innkeeper still pans his gaze toward the old man’s broad back as he carefully ambles up the stairwell recessed in the wall facing the door. The old sharpshooter could no longer distinguish the crack of the stair boards from his failing legs, the clicks of infuriate bones furrow into his ears, and the sheer frustration it brings him distracts him from his balance, so he shambles into the left of his hip up the rest of the stairs. He trails a monotonous string of metallic plucks of his silver spurs up to his room at the end of the upper floor; the cherrywood and cedar of the inn grew cracked in the plasterwork near his room. Shutting the door, the old man sits in a pine parlor chair from the carpentry out behind the trade store. He unclasps his boots about his ankles and rustles them off with dusted loam and limestone falling from them; then, he stores the boots on the side of the bedframe hidden from the door. His desperado gun belt and weathered coat fall to the floor and all left is his brackish denim pants toughened with hard grime. The bed croaks and groans as he roughs his palm into the bedsheets to check for loose cash or teeth; a rosewood comb and a bent paddle brush clatter on the floor next to his belt, and he ruffles his motley pillow and throws up his wrinkled sheets to lay on his side.
He nestles his chin into the fat of his creased arm, and the languor of the town breaks him into a hypnotic lull as he stares doll-eyed out the window of his room. The draft humming under his shut door whipped up and down his back, and his sore feet grew into reddish inflammation. He itched his midback, atop his liver, and he feels his fingers into his gooey flesh hoping to crush that pain. As a few hours pass, the chronic pain drives him from his bed to his strewn gun belt. Uncrooking his arm, he levers himself upright, cups his hand around his ankles, and bangs with the other on his back to mollify his ceaseless pain. The gun belt was a cheap gift from his time in Mexico, an old vaquero left him it on his bedstead the morning after the two had wrangled the man’s cattle for a two-mile stretch.
Work was the only thing on his mind back then, he would trek from town to post office to railroad in hopes of having enough money to oil up his pistols and tobacco to chew. He was on his way south toward Arizona—the station from Abbott was his only way of travel and home. As he was boarding, he cut his attention from the train car to the corkboard busy with a yellow flyer that boasted thick, inked numbers. The paper read off a bounty listing on the head of a woman who shot her husband and bludgeoned his horse. Her face was wrinkled with deep-running crow feet and her eyes were sunken as her mouth sagged with her excess flesh—a woman whose body and mind had acquiesced to the sweltering heat of the Chihuahuan desert. Instead of making his way into Jerome, he traversed down to Rio Grande City. He joined a circus show that was already making its tour around the Texan border—they had horses, food, and fire; all they needed was his protection.
It took them one, long week to drop off at Austin. The ringleader pinned a gold nugget to the countertop of the hotel to house his posse and him. He was a whole head and shoulders larger than the smartly dressed showman; his arms and legs were stubby with fat and short bones. His meandering mustache and furled sideburns also accented him as a draconian fiend, here to swindle the populace of their money in the show of the horrors of the world, all gathered in his traveling menagerie.
