“He drank so much out of fear and disappointment with himself, that he locked himself in his room until he drank so much his stomach sloshed out of his body, and all he could feel was the paining explosion of once-repressed grief and misery and he called out for his wife and children that he knows to love, but he knows even more to fear. He cries with all the world watching him, all the pressures, all the money, and all the fears running into his brain that have been sedated with alcohol all this time, and all this dread that he let himself accumulate could have gone away if he put down that bottle. But he wanted to live in the life he created, his own version of reality where he was his own master when it was the bottle that careened him into even further self-delusion.”
A soapbox orator booms on temperance and drunkenhood—he files out greased pamphlets of cautionary tales and mortal sin.
“He loved his appearance; he loved his drinks and his cigarettes. He grew inwards from his filthy mother and abusive, prideful father. He is a good man, but good in that he only knows to simply not do things that he knows are bad, not that he is seamlessly good. I see him take out the trash occasionally; he likes to take out the trash and produce a cigarette from his coat that his wife bought him and smoke hoping that the buzz numbs his brain enough to shut out the suffocating weight of duty and responsibility. He peered into the dark asphalt and let his eyes sink into the orbiting shadow of the streetlight and he remembered when he was young when he still trusted himself with his own body—now, his body was just a bag of cheap impulses and recurrent kicks, and he hates everything so much.”
There he solicits in the face of a drugstore and carpentry, his milk box bending underneath his great feet and ponderous voice. Sniffling prepubescents and adolescent parents grovel in front of a large crowd, carrying some oil lanterns and listen as supplicants.
“That man is temporary, that much is true—what is ever so much truer is that sin shall tack on to you forever; what is now, is that man can repent. Repent shall he, and so shall he save himself and those he loves. The love of a Christian God is all the love a man needs, and will he find his path.”
A man with a wide-brimmed cap shoots one into the wilting box and the preacher jumps and yelps and two more into his hill and leaps off.
Hot hell mister—yous tryin’ to shoot ‘im?
Wide-brim saunters over to speaker, posted appositely to face him patting down his coat for sneaking holes and imaginary bullets.
Yous aimin’ to get shot.
You nearly shot me!
Did not, and I ain’t plannin’ to—less you give me reason.
All I wanted was for Holy Temperance Movement gospel to—
Another shot before the toe of his foot. He jumped into the wall behind him—a big clack with his bald dome clattered against the glass storefront.
Anymore ‘em words ye’ head’ll be out on ‘em windows.
The crowd amasses before the sheriff as momentous wings growing from a slighted angel. Rapture of man and his lesser dealings—towing a small band and conserving ancient catechism: an old world to stave off the new.
Wide-brim motions his .44 to the right, the preacher blinks in this mercy and flees.
Huddle of miscreants, sinners, and beggars still trail the sheriff and now to him they look. Same children grubbing at their young caretakers’ hands that needlessly cradle and hopelessly hush. The sparse candlelight and some canistered oil light on their streaked faces and yellow teeth and blistered lips and orange eyes and disgusting skin.
Y’alls stay ‘ere and deputies come for ‘ye. I get’s my wife for some spare crop and roughage. Best’ll do.
Terrible dark on a pinned run of tarmac swallowed in tottering steel and clay; anti-penumbras wrapping celestial children in honeyed manlight with their cosmic patriarch the sheriff.
Gunslinger lingers in the dark, watching the sheriff. Wide-brim moves as though trying to step the cement back into the ground—quick tacks in the dark with names in shouts at each train’s end.
Josiah!
Another trail of steps.
Jeremey!
Another.
John!
Opacity knits the people in its folds, so the old man stumbles after wide-brim. A fast walker, he cares not for the bounty hunter tailing him; chewing hard on his cheeks, sheriff paces with knowing clacks to his home.
He wheels around the finish off the long sidewalk. Some houses like the one with the slain mule deer out in front, more coiling crabgrass, some bushy wolves. Shabby clusters lit orangery—slope pocked with black domes and wide-brim ant-like along rising paths; he rushes into his home, and old man stays at the low valley. He breaks the sand around him in a circle and sits flatly—staring and anticipating the sheriff to reappear and gun him down. The sounds of deputies herding the beggars tick with the flat noise of bare feet and hard clicks of broken boots.
Out come the deputies into the dust, the moon taking kindly to their hats. The grey pike has them all in a line, facing towards the sheriff’s mountain. Deputies stay and the lead one fronts a group of thirty and shouts for Dean.
The sheriff bursts the door open with one hand and in the other bundled tarps. His wife was barely seen in the crook of his living room and the deputes and their crowd only peered blankly at mountainous providence.
‘Ere, take ‘em blankets and parce’ out food and water. Josiah and John stay, Jeremey comes with me for stragglers.
Jeremey left his flock to the other shepherds, and he went on with wide-brim; the people stay and their knees look to have gone slack and eyes tumescent with glee.
Mister.
The old man kept his back to the disembodied voice.
Hey, mister. He poked into his hard wing.
I hears ‘ye.
Take some.
What?
Mesquite and agave.
‘Shore hand ‘em over.
Ain’t you gon’ turn ‘round?
Nah, I’m good.
If ye’ ain’t turnin’, I’ll give ‘em to someone who will.
Well, I guess you gotta give ‘em to someone else.
Right then.
The deputy steps away from the huddled man that paints images of the world behind him from the fine cracking of mesquite pods and mouthily agave; some fathers emptying the anxious chest-knot with a deep breath, the mothers caressing kids feet taller as they croon for her. The steps kick up again and the deputy draws beside the old man.
I ain’t recognize ‘ye—come out from Reno?
Nah.
Sacremento?
Nah.
San Francisco?
Nah.
Well, hell you came from then?
South.
Where’s south, then?
With ‘em Mexicans and old soldiers.
So you a vet?
Nope.
The munches come from the hungry herd—the noise loosens the old man’s shoulders. The deputy steers front the desperado who hides his face in the slant of his black hat.
I’ll grab ‘yer pistol there if ‘ye keep ‘yer mouth tight.
Bounty hunter.
Say again?
Traveling sheriff.
Ha! Now yous a funny one. Ain’t another sheriff round here fo’ shoot 30.
Can I call my horse?
Horse?
Ye, my horse.
Sho’, but you gotta teach me how to whistle down a damn horse.
Old man gets himself up and sizes up the deputy.
Name?
Sorry?
‘Yer name? Ain’t gonna make me guess, are ‘ye? Come on, don’t blank me out. Head ain’t what it used to be.
John.
John.
Yeah, like the prophet.
Ye, ye I know.
You gon’ call him, or are ‘ye—
Quiet now.
The old man unbuckles a bison horn from the underside of his left bandolier strap and brought it deliberately to his lips. A hellish trumpet that brought the hungry spirits up from their saving repasts and to the antediluvian boom.
John drops his cupped hands.
What’s wrong wit ‘ye? Yous tryin’ to crush mine ears? Hell you’ll call down bandits. Now—what’s that gallopin’?
Only some munching to be heard.
Ah you dumb, old crone.
Listen—hey, old man what’s ‘yer name?
Don’t got one.
Well, alright—‘yer job?
Bounty hunter: state of Nevada.
There ‘ye go.
Well, why didn’t ‘ye say so?
Hard to say anything with a gun at my chest.
Josiah turns back to the crowd and waves his hands in the air to soothe disgruntled Elysians; the level-headed deputy whispers something to hot-head and he procs off to announce rations are out and offers John to motion the crowd into their homes. Josiah resumes to old man.
Explain that body.
Steffens– $150; homicide on three counts, horse stealing, property damage, wagon burning, and railroad obstruction.
Got a license?
Since when’d you need a license?
Last summer—had to make it harder for people who’d just cut off heads and mangle the faces and claim the reward. Sometimes even bounty themselves’ll do it if they mess their face up enough.
Well I’ll be—I ain’t never heard that.
Yeah, yeah. So what brings ‘ye here?
Your sheriff—I need to cash in.
Hate to tell ‘ye, but we short on everythin’ government made—food, alcohol, and money.
I ain’t gone down to Oakland from Texas jus’ to be told to go to D.C.—that jus’ ain’t happenin’.
Alright, alright.
He took a pause and paces up to a sudden stop.
Listen, those compradores we mentioned—them’s been sackin’ government envoys down near the estuary. Took a little military installment from couple decades back— the whole get-up: bullet waves and huge explosives.
‘Kay.
If you want that money that bad, you can go on and take ‘yer share from that depot and hopefully everyone runs well. Don’t go getting’ yerself killed, though. You can prolly make a better livin’ out of the new fields up in Northern California.
Nah. Where’s they at again?
Take the road into the mountains and it levels flat out and you’ll see a big black block—probably be missin’ yer head ‘fore you can reach it, though. Reckon ‘ye head out mornin’—actually, naw, best head out now. Doubt you’ll find it ‘fore yer body’s worth.
Where can I leave off that body?
Put it down there, not much where else. Probably not where rest ‘em are eatin’, maybe offload it around the carpentry.
Old man and horse broke into an overpass with hard waters rushing into crushing smoothness. Horse navigates cheerily and closely—the desert life keeps in their burrows and nests and pause to stare at the two and then return to their quotidian animalism. The eggy moon is flat with nimbostratus shells and the path boxes old man into a corridor of growing rock and boulders.
Star light makes horse’s brown-black coat a stained gray; old man hides his face in his hat. A curve in the corridor breaks—a nice vista. The old man rears horse and clutches a hard hand on his arch and horse folds into rest. Buttes in the far east full of more low-grown brush and down south bluffs with stamped-out fires fresh with smoke. Kitty-corner down 50 meters from the old man’s post lies a black speck—the fort. A mishmash of water, rock, and dirt; the installment is four flat walls maybe 20 meters high and two towers clasped with thin buttresses and ramparts like those castles near the Rio Grande. Covered parapets and one masterly high watchtower that oversees a duet of gatling guns posted at corners and riflemen in towers. The hang of the old man’s view barely obscures him, so he has time to consider if fire or speech is best, maybe both.
Stained ruffian caps patrol roughly the walkways and some small blotches on left breasts discernible from even blocks length away; black canid skull with hand wrist-out in the jaw. The moonlight makes the fort black and white and gray with patrols striping in and out of sight. Old man rustles in his bandolier—anthracite, matches, and .45. He discharges some paper in his eight pockets and makes it a bleached flower. He drops on his knees and plops the paper and firms the coal into the paper: the horse expels a huff of air.
Horse cranes its fat neck and black marbles stuck to snout and looks while the old man clambers back onto his feet and trains its eyes to his movement around its bottom. Something squished around its rear, and the man returns with horse patty and back onto his knees rubs intensely palm-through-palm with charcoal and feces. Desperado fingers the charcoal and breaks it eagerly like a kid picking apart chocolate, he then unholsters the magnum and slams handle down again and paste and dust puffs out. He smooths the brittle minerals together and it turns out crunched gel; again, on his feet, he pads off the coal and excrement under his denim pockets and unbuckles his pants. Belt falls and urine follows a minute after. All that yellow stream douses into the coal-feces and mends it neatly and makes a muddy clump of dark. The flower turns into a bomb as old man clenches his device into a ball, and he runs a match cross his bandolier and lets the flame tickle the edge of the crepe paper’s crumple. Two brusque steps, and the hardest lob his body could produce shoots the ball in the air overhead of the northern gatling pair. Before the explosion sets, old man nickers at horse and the stead belts up almost immediately and old man mounts in such energy reminiscent of his old glory.
A terrible boom erupts out from behind, and they gallop ready and fast. Another explosion bringing wall down with it from the sounds hitting the canyon: complete breach. The other gatlings too large to be reoriented in return of this assault, and in the long corridor old man teeths his bison horn and ruptures a great auditory divide that threatened Apache warriors. The narrow corridor let little room for horse—a man of lesser call or horse of lesser patience would never traverse this canyon crack. Out comes a one-man army from a rocky womb and horse leaps in preternatural bound and strength and another explosion claims the master tower. The reinforced steel eaten through and wood naked white from damage; conflagrations start, and incendiary intervention demands flesh and metal. Desperado spurs horse subtly and brusquely and comes to quick halt with desperado offloading in front of wall wedged from its pillars and he forces body with arm and leg through splintered and gaping wood with fiery garnish vining down.
The courtyard already circuits hard smoke and figures invisible—a deluge of flame burps from the hard din and rush from the tower and another muted quake from deeper within the western walls. There the old man crouches in piling smoke and the grey becomes black, and in that chaos the man creeps step-step-step into some supply shed.
There he finds a roughed bolt-action rifle and a crate of dynamite right under; the dynamite would maybe give him means of escape, and the bullion was ideally in that western wall. He latches a belt in the underside of the firearm and throws it over his shoulder and pockets two dynamite sticks.
