All ringing after the explosion, he turns to find only sundered limbs and expired blood; he rushes past his work and bares the second stick and lights its fuse. The dynamite sends into the base of the western wall and some erratic movement can still be heard in the smokescreen. Another boom shakes the wall and a gatling with its barrel careens off its post in the tumbling slope of the walk and crashes the interior—the opening leads him into a gruff hallway with ribbed slates of thin wood and burning steel that commands sweat-on-sweat from his faithful brow. The place is dark from no moonlight and the now omnipresent smoke has the squadrons run past his insignificant figure.
Hugging the wall, he finds a chained door and swivels around for hidden footsteps. He jostles the chain and bashes it back against the door and rushes for the displaced gatling; apace bones crack from quick squat and the barrel is leaned into some perfect bricks and with the water jacket pretty on an angle had sights for the broad portal. Now cascades of clacks and runs from Spaniards flitter in his ears like persistent gnats and with the wash of them as loud as ever he traverses the handwheel into a gargantuan beating and patting of air and bullet that was like wind repeatedly breaking its own barrier with unearthly rocks.
Leaded pellets eat through air and the door shrinks into its center. The lever and handles drill back and forth as though ringing for release and sight skips from floor-to-box-to-floor and within five quick breaths all tiles front of him rupture in the breadth of the halls and the wood is all devoured. Steps become the loudest and desperado muscles into his arms and swivels his little destroyer into the posterior and a wall of soldiers gray and solid. His lever cranks as though newly oiled and a barrage bounces jacket with frame all directions so that circles of belt-fed balls plaster the clay and brick and spurts of lead punch into the infantry with retaliatory shots dwarfed in the hellfire that destroyed brain and bone. The spray of dark blood and congealed ropes mesh into smog with red pastel in holy disarray and it became more a maddening mist with dying men of guttural shouts and others fleeing with nebulized Spanish.
The gatling dumbs out smoke and a sprint for the melted door with wood splintered to pulp and brick cut to base; a black iron trunk belted with flying orbs sits defiantly in the dim underside of steps running into the remaining tower. The lock is gone. Up he reaches and the trunk exposes glittering gold plates with foreign engravings of unitary symbols and Porfiriato Spanish. A nickel-plated .44 glinted kindly with the holed light that falls in the column of void of spiraling stairs. A few more dynamite sticks with long fuses and a gold-plated lighter that he tugs out and fiddles the ignition wheel and ghostly cerulean blue burps out—the steps outside pick up again. He nestles roughly smooth red candlesticks and lights them both and plants both back with the bullion after loading four gold plates into his leather pouches and rushes into the corridor.
He takes five meters and crushes and clicks along exposed bone and gooey entrails and the smell of feces took even his seasoned nose, and he began to gag and stagger. A surreal demolition of crushing stone and blistered wood and ringing metal pinned body to floor as incendiary licks creep through widening gaps and shifts in bricks seep dawning juice. Rising with legs to kick and arms to stretch, he paces back into the new smog and retreats to the mountains.
There he drops onto knees and horns for his stead; the old man’s gold tugs into his back and with alacrity tears off bandolier and leaves into his hip on standing volcanic sediment and rests body in a vista from sloping rocks in a platform looking over Chihuahuan slopes and forestry. Horse steadies in the sloping passage and bustles down leg after leg and mechanizes into its large block of muscle square on the ground. Both souls look over into the rising sun that takes away their night and cover.
The desperado thumps into his rear and the white-gray sand takes his shape and horse nestles its long jaw and snout in its crested chest to the ground. The fort still visible from the same overlook he began his assault became his apotheosis and the twisted metal and iron echoed with the screams of the damned reaching out into the heavens that the most mindless hare and God Himself both spare a moment’s mercy. A central plateau under the Sierra Madre mountains that rough in the fleeting black smoke and odor of broiling flesh pump into whorls of devious wisps that pinhole the distant mountains into magnified floating islands. All the gravelly soil burrowed with grama and muhly flush with endless stretch of heavenly verdure shot into horizons that remind of a Parisian hunting lodge. Horse his oarsman and he the coxswain that descends all his souls into deeper and deeper madness that only Satan may relieve him of their mortal calls.
Some hypodermic needles and he bakes them slowly in the burp of the gold-plated lighter; the other lotus of man’s eternal misunderstanding shot into sky and rains down godly rays for him to see but he has no desire to look on his own wounds—he only fights his heavy eyelids and slowing heart. His crying eyes guide needles into his thigh shot with spidering veins and epicenter purple and red from puckered flesh; he V’s the needles in to clasp for shrapnel and metal, none superficially. The needles drive into his sunk fat and underskin and from winces and new energy the fingers produce only two fragments of cracked .38. The two needles he pulls out his flesh and discards them quickly for his remaining and automatically pierces his exposed shoulder with needlework gingerly managed in his nondominant hand that tugs in sounding circles for disparate shrapnel. An intact, red-glossed bullet pops from his deep skin with his guttural groan that he is relieved to have saved himself from his shoulder but despaired to have not done the same for the leg.
The glistening, morning orange gulped all smoke and mist so that all diaphanous is poled into an earthly centerpiece over the new pandemonium created from man’s hands; nature fighting for its own attention. The cumuli bump in the heavenly hang and the sky is purple and red and grows blue. Smoke melts away and only the mountains are burning in the mint horizon; peering up, very far past the clouds was a ring of dark animals that circuit each other like feathered eye staring towards space. The red-orange clay and stone bright under green tuff with the twisting face of black metal taken into the ground inch-by-inch. A conflagration must have begun earlier because there was a chain of fire from the noir rubble into underbrush; the trails leading out the fort were honeyed in melting air and soil.
Old man with eyelids fluttering looks at horse and shifts his shoulder so he can slump his head there. His needles still in his hands, his fingers freeze into claws. He pulls his shoes back under him and levers his arm round his clutched knees to curl into a ball against the rock. The injured arm hangs off his shoulder as his right holds him together, the bulleted leg outstretched makes a sandy imprint. The Mojave sees his work and throws its vultures into spins for stragglers’ corpses and calls on diamondbacks and coyotes to observe just one of the top predator’s abilities. All quiet, and the man lapped out the batting of feathered sails in smelted air and remembers some his youthful hijinks—him young and the women old. His hands grow stiff, and his thigh feels no more. He thrusts his shoulder forward quick, and his muscle turns only a weak twitch; folding his leg, the knee moves but the foot drags dead in fuzzy dark. Lids swallow his eyes, and the body leaves his control.
Cirrhosis woke him from his liver and his thigh throbbing reminds him he is still alive. It is blisteringly hot; lips are shaved to red and there is a vulture preening itself just over his head. Horse shook fat air again. The sun bakes him with noon light—the fort is a falling teepee of smoldering black and crisped gray. His foot is numb and boosts from his shoulder his balled body flat on his side. The old man curses as fever leaps from his shoulder into his arm. His throat sticky with heat still manages a nicker for horse; the beast rose quickly and trotted a quick one-two towards its call—a sharp whistle with the nod of the old man’s chin. Horse folds quickly and fixes its long face on the old man. Sinews just barely strong enough, the leg creaks into a triangle, and he ambles up with oozing wounds onto the mount. Some pus falls onto the saddle. He plops down with a hard thump on horse’s back; another knicker, and the horse rises and carries desperado through ravine and overpass. The gun belt jostles against the stead’s rump, faithfully keeping forwards with a bald welt on cocoa coat.
The unit reaches Oakland, and the sun starts to set again, a yellow wash on white sand and dark soil. Old man mumbles something about nice, little houses as horse walks trails into the main street and onto the sidewalk until the smell of chloroform stuffs desperado’s nose. He sniffles and horse kneels to an invisible prince so old man steps off and crashes through the pharmacy’s glass doors. A man with a dark rat of hair on his head furrows his brow and slams his register closed to rush his hands under the old man’s armpits and carry him like a corpse to be discarded towards an office behind the counter and shouts a woman’s name.
A lady with cream-brown hair and fair skin pivots quickly round to the man’s body slammed onto the gurney. The numbing chemicals mute all the thick odors; the aged doctor rummages in his iridescent bottles and shining scalpels to then reveal clunky pliers and foiled gauze. The man calls about restraining the patient and the lady pinches leather holds along his wrists—there the man basks under orbing sun magnified in the broad pane on the room’s center. The bloodied clothes cut away with scissors and his leg matching the gray-purple gradient of his shoulder. Some clasps click along his ankles and the lady rounds at the head of the gurney and clutches the man’s bubbling head in her delicate hands. The physician asks the old man if he happens to have a bottle of whiskey with him—a dazed shake of his head with the confirmation of the nurse ushering the man to begin.
Get him a wet cloth. Tuck it in his front.
The nurse paces quickly from counter to old man’s head and jams the poultice under his arching incisors and he clenches it weakly. Again, with her hands making an L-shape beneath the crown of his ears, she makes a smoky eye stare to the other and the pliers begin to move. Two brass buckles size of a palm scratching in his muscles for some exploded bullet—his yellow teeth chatter and the cloth fastens on his tongue and his orifices streaming all liquid possible. Repeating clicks of removed lead bullet on tin tray and his vision narrows and eyelids flutter.
The surgeon snaps his fingers. Jeanette.
The nurse rushes to the counter of medicines and procures a black, chalky jar. The nurse comes to the man and unscrews the smell before him and his eyes bulge and his chest leaps. As though he forgot his pain, he peers down at the operator and his shoveling round in his calf; back he returns to muffled shouts died down in that cloth and his straining throat.
Morning comes, and the man looks on his dressed lower body of white layered with blue stripes. Out he looks, and it turns night again. All he can remember is his grimy bed from Cherun. The counter holds some glass with white powder toothache drops and another twitches his noise with some sweet-smelling ether. His holed leg is bandaged with some seeping white dust and swiveling his head he finds the druggist; along the green tint of the door, he hears his deep breathing and intimate speak with the assistant—the transom tells that the man has no money, horse he was with kicked up and ran before anyone could approach her. The labored breathing from the man says maybe we employ him. A quick retort of employ him as what forces audible head-scratching from both. The dark oak door pumps open.
What can you do?
The old man focuses his eyes on the long snout of horse barely visible along a building. The lady steps forward.
Can you hear us?
Yeah, I hear you just fine.
You ain’t got money, so you need to work for us.
How long?
We was thinking some weeks, just about the time you’ll be all healed up.
How am I gonna work for you if my legs busted up and my arm can’t move?
Well, we were asking if you could just look mean outside.
You just want me sittin’ outside? That it?
Yeah, we saw you at least had a pistol but that ain’t no good in our hands. No one buying that either.
Sure. I’ll get to it.
The nurse undoes the straps on his wrists and ankles and the druggist wheels in some makeshift-plank-chair on buffalo-sized wheels with some cheap armrests shouldering the seat.
Hell is that?
Wheelchair. You’ll need it.
Well, shit. Ok.
Druggist parks the wheelchair aside old man and both assistant and physician come to each underarm and tug him up. They duck and throw his forearms over their shoulder widths. He comes down heavily on the ridged bottom and they drive him through the clinic door past the scintillating granite counter and desolate waiting room and out in the front of the establishment. The nurse returns with a tin of water and leaves it at the old man’s feet and leaves him there. The day passes slow; occasionally, the druggist or assistant breaks his silence serving hardtack and sweet water. In the shade of the storefront, most passersby see only a chimeric blob set near the boarded sidelight. All who prop up in the large street fashion their milk crates with varnish and paints as they peddle the same snake oil of all-cure river water and immortality elixirs.
A couple of children bustle around, and fond memories draw from deep wells of the old man’s head; one knocks around into one of those faux-charismatic, scar-eyed salesmen. A scrawny adolescent turns from his leaning post and rears up to those children. Young boy flees right, yet the girl plants there.
Old man rests in his dark station and observes. The little girl keeps her gaze to that wiry kid—the spunk on the younger one catches the eye of the salesman and requests she sit near his crate for a dollar at sunset. She readily obliges.
Each day moves all the same; salesmen leering dawn-to-dusk and cycling of tin and plate before some dark amalgam that wards off both customer and criminal. Two weeks in, the assistant chews out the druggist loud enough from the backroom and the door pops open and the doctor rushes old man just in the corner of the waiting room. Now that wooden spectacle overlooks just the customers and register. The druggist fixes himself at his register, and the nurse clatters in the back with some disorderly bottles. People rarely pour in.
In the fourth week, a man with crisp-tanned face and pale-white neck with brown splotches arrives. The pharmacist greets him, asking if he already ran out. The checker-board man only nods. Another snap, and the name Jeanette rings along walls too familiar with the name—the clinic portal produces the nurse, again, and she carries Dr. Jenning’s Color Salve that reeks of barber powder and the man requests if she show him. The tin suction pops and assistant bends down her wrist with the alabaster syrup and the man feigns a smile and hands in a dollar and a quarter and sets out.
One day remains. The druggist flicks through his bills once more and stacks his coins and the assistant is wiping down what remains of the door’s glass.
After all of nothing I’ve done for ‘ye, why out me there?
The druggist does not waver from his money, neither does the nurse from her door.
A man good with bodies usually ain’t foaming at the wounds and shot up. We had to find something for you to do.
Could’ve just stole my horse.
We tried that.
Mirthless chuckles fill the room.
The doctor slams his register with a triumphant smile.
Well, it worked out for ye’, didn’t it?
Yeah, it did.
A manly dim approaches the window and Jeanette backs away. Abraham looks ahead. One of those deputies enter, his star glinting urges Jeanette into the back.
Business going well, friend?
Yeah, it’s going.
The deputy clicks his heels together into a loud jangle of spurs and turns his head on the old man.
Old age finally get ‘ye?
No, hope it does now, though.
Hope that attitude withers away wit’ ‘ye.
Let’s hope.
Jeanette comes out with an oil-wrap of gunpaper sized into a block. The deputy slowly reaches for it and gradually wraps his fingers round it grazing her palm; Jeanette keeps on him, yet Abraham only stares at his rawhide boots.
I’ll be on my way.
Even more deliberately he backs off, a nod to Abraham and wink to Jeanette. A scowl for the old man.
He sheds that bandage roll from his leg and his shoulder, and he rotates his arm a bit as he swings his leg. Off he comes the chair, he retrieves what scraps of his clothes remain and throws his work shirt over his white gown and locks slim pants around his drawstring lower half. Jeanette and Abraham leave him to close the store; he tucks his .44 into his holster and tidies his chest a bit and tacks off some oil lanterns and makes his way to the spackled welcome sign that clatters along the glass. He turns round and hovers over the cash register, its drawer unlocked and money still in, he stamps behind the counter shutting up the money and turning the lock with Abraham’s key.
Tracing down the mouth of the street, old man cuts left to find horse. The leather pouches bedight with gold shimmer on the faithful mount—horse arches down her snout so the plates click, confirming their metal. The man of patchworked skin and cloth ambles up his stead, he thumbs the rim of his holster as horse raises. Old man nickers and horse halts. He pulls out his revolver.
Wide-brim sheriff comes around the corner of the store with two of his deputies.
Heard you did good on that fort; all we wants from you is some gold we know you got.
All three have their hands ready on their holsters.
Sure. Let me reach for it, just off here.
Throw the gun.
I ain’t throwing no gun.
Drop the gun, and you pick it up when we leave.
Wide-brim jabs his finger into the air toward the ground.
Right.
A dumb thud reaches the ground.
Old man jostles his satchels from the side of horse and curls one slinking pouch in the crook of his arm; the gold pops like glowing fish scales and three plates fall in face of the trio.
That all?
Yeah.
I see more.
‘Fraid I’ll have to shoot you.
Wide-brim sidles as his revolver drags on his hand. Jeremy takes his arm up and levels it at the face of old man; John muscles his more slowly and Dean turns to eye him away and now only Jeremy stays. Old man clicks his tongue and horse lets him down. He reaches and pads down his pistol, now hanging off his side. Wide-brim whispers something to John and both step aside in the stretch of the wall—Jeremy, solely atop the gold, has barrel heavy on old man and the desperado backs his head into the slant of his shoulders and keeps his pistol still. Sheriff holsters his arm and John follows. Horse machines into trotting form and keeps herself on the side. All men squint in the semidark, and some lunar specter finds itself on Jeremy as some radiating skeleton. The ground hums some ancient gravity with the diffusive white and ghastly does everyone appear—ghosts on forgotten lands in forgone times. Material enough to know they are flesh, but light unmoored finds them wandering spirits free from bounds celestial and human.
You want this?
Jeremy fastens his grip.
Yes.
Sheriff runs gloved knuckles about his ribs fast and John focuses on old man.
A crack as though from a tumbling tree busts the silence and Jeremy flings from his twisting spine as vessel and fiber fly in bits along the bullet—deep-brought gash ruptures his side and there he kneels with his gun unfired. Wide-brim keeps his gaze on his deputy shot down; John his finger tap, tap, tapping in his palm. Jeremy’s growing corpse paling in the moonlight and succumbing to the draws of another world. Making his way to the gold, sheriff lurches for his gold come from blood and retreats into his wall facing old man.
I trust you won’t be after me.
Can’t—now with just three it’ll be tighter.
You got your gold. Ask for some government boys—the money’ll say enough.
Onto the horse, old man muscles the fat pouches atop his shoulders.
John finds his pistol trained on old man as he trots just a meter along him, out into the street he trots still in easy view of the two lawmen. A faint bodily slump and John’s pistol follows desperado’s shrinking back. The hammer clicks, John squeezing down on that trigger. The desperado and horse pause some way off. John locks his finger just so that hammer does not clamp back down: the gun stuck as the man. A distant call booms from the street.
If you gonna shoot—shoot. If you ain’t, holster it and go on and bury your friend.
The unit roots in the dark road. Wide-brim off John’s side, John sturdies his pistol as he does his jaw. The pistol carves out its weight in folding palm-flesh and his arm falls limp. On does old man continue, and stamps of lunulas mark the fleeting of chaos and call into another world.
