The old man comes home, his shack just along the outskirts of Reno. No Comanches, no Spaniards, no Americans—only him and his wife. The dishes full of that infamous cow feed cheap to buy and cheap to taste. He tosses his wide-brim cap on that torn chair and the oil lantern slicks the room in orange tongues and like always his wife nestled in bed after housekeeping. The sheep laugh in the midnight canyons, their excited bleats knowing his dependence on them—testing his patience as a man and dedication as a provider. He mechanically sits in his same chair and mutely eats. The Mojave sand plastered on his denim bottom sieved slowly down on scratched floorboards.
“Move the table ‘round?”, he called for his wife.
“Hey, woman.”
Just some sheep still laughing outside.
“I asked you a question.”
Sandy-blonde hair motionless in patchwork sheets of gray fur tinted with red from shoddy dressing. The old man glowers at her and breaks his daze with a disapproving shake of his head and finishes up his mush of buffalo seed and cactus fruit. There he leaves his plate as he found it, he nudges open the bureau—her nightgown undisturbed. Old man swivels and glares again at his wife, still unbothered; another shake more infuriate than the last and he unlatches his tanned belt; off come his jangling boots and greased shirt and worn jeans. The beckoning of sheep kept on as he takes on his nightwear and paces towards that oil lantern turning it off and into bed he goes. He unfurled the blanket quietly that lipped cloth round her shoulder and she was curled into a ball. Her vertebrae stick through her sundress.
“What’s with you?”
He stands before her and cranes his neck just enough to see her just fine—awake. Her jaw clenched and her eyes peeled wide.
“You sick? You got fever?”
He levers his backhand across her forehead and reels back with his brow now furrowed.
“You got to explain what’s going on, ‘less I leave you here with them sheep.”
Her jaw relaxes and her lips tear their glue of sticky saliva. She opens her mouth, and a small croak winds out and finally some words.
“There was a boy.”
“Huh?”
“A boy.”
“Out here, there was a boy?”
“Yes.”
“Well,’, he plopped his fists on hips, “how old was he?”
“Head smaller than you. Don’t know.”
“’Kay, is that it? You give ‘im water? Anything like that?”
She stares ahead at the corrugated timber and eyes dial the fibers.
“He said he’d been left here, said he needed something to keep him going.”
“Well?”
“I let him in, told him he better leave that knife of his in his pocket there ‘less he wanted trouble. I gave him a cup of water and a parcel of our dinner—set him up nice.”
“’Kay, then he set out?”
“He said this ain’t enough and said he needed more, said he needed it or he’d hurt me.”
The man stares still but his brow grows deeper.
“I said well what’s stoppin’ ye, hopin’ that’d bring sense in ‘im. Then he kicked that table right in me and knocked me over the head with our lantern. He—”
“Say where he’d been?”
“Huh? No. Just said he’d been out here. A kid, out here.”
“And? When’d he leave?”
“Don’t remember. Too long ago. Hit me with that lantern ‘till I went black.”
“Jesus.”
“Can’t see too well.”
“What you mean you can’t see too well?”
“Too scared to look in the kitchen, don’t want to know my eyes are shot or not.”
“That bastard blinded you?”
Some glint in her whites started.
“Limp in my right leg, too. Thought it went dead for a while, but when I was fetching water, it was like it ain’t my own.”
The old man pinched his temples with thumb and finger and was bouncing his heel.
“He was just a kid, Micah. A damn kid. How the hell was I supposed to think he’d do that? Want to do that?” She cried.
“I’m setting out.”
“What?”
“I’m going after him, making sure he don’t come back.”
“Micah—”
“Bastard like that has no right, no right be round people.”
“Micah, please.”
She begs him, staring at the wall with the muffled calls torn for pleading Micah or seeing that light.
*
There he finds the kid, at the mouth of some gulch. The old man fidgets with the holster of his gun, slowing his fingers as he looks on the emaciated creature. He has a tattered shirt with his fleshed carcass boasting fat ribs through cloth and his legs not much better. A jaundiced child, with only his mismatched boots and withered cap and grayed coat with him. The kid kept pondering his boots and forearms, him being outstretched and pasted along red rock. Ambling slowly, the old man steps forward and gradually makes out his little skull in strapped flesh.
“Mister, you got some water?”
The old man quietly stares him down, the child’s empty gaze in the ground.
“Mister?”
The old man shot right into the kid’s sole. He leaps back and his pale flesh runs warm. The kid let out a horrible yelp, and he angled his foot in the shelter of his overhanging knee and folded arms.
“You plannin’ to kill me? I ain’t got nothin’ for you! Go on!”
The adult slammed his colt back into his holster, still staring on with his face black under his shading hat.
“I find you on that farm again, I’ll come for your head. Hear me?”
The kid, still wincing in pain, peeled his eyes and mouth went a bit agape at this demand to then understand. He nodded. Old man wheels around, gauging all that is left for any life—dried ocotillo and filling sunlight. He pauses, peers back at the cowering child, and dissolves over the rolling dunes.
*
A water tin jostles in his hand, ringing heavy the sloshes that perked up some movement in the sandy wastes. Back at that gulch, the figure now sprawled like some defeated corpse. Beaded eyes trace the old man as he stops just in front of their owner.
“What you want now?”
“Came to give you water.”
“Don’t need no water, now. Need a doctor—best, maybe some whiskey.”
“I only got water.”
“Yeah.”
The old man switches his tin to his left hand and sits crisscross facing the child.
“You shot two my toes off.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, was going for the heel.”
“That case, your aim is shit.”
“Yeah.”
The old man reaches a cupped palm into his grey tin and messily drinks some water. He cups again to rub his face.
“Why you on a sheep farm?”
“Don’t know.”
“Don’t know?”
“Yeah. Don’t know. Father mine says, ‘get you some cattle, you’ll be fine anywhere’, so I got some sheep.”
The kid made a feeble smile in his little shade, just for his face to jump back to blank.
“Why here?”, he looks round—even the sky he criticized.
“No one’s here. Least, that’s what I thought.”
“You’re here.”
“As much as you are, sure.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That shot, in your foot, could have been a wrong step or snake bite just as much as a bullet. That hat on your head is no less yours as it is mine because I shot you and I can just take it and you can’t do nothing to stop me. Any one of those things can happen to me, and you brought happening on my wife. That was something I could not stop, just a turn of the spin that meant for one night she was in a different world than you and me. That she saw a world her hate for you brought her, and your hunger split you even further from hers.”
The kid angles his healthy leg up and kicks it back down into the ground; still, he stares in the sand.
“I could kill you, you me. My wife you beat could’ve knifed me long, long back. God knows she’s been tempted. But she didn’t. I wouldn’t; I wouldn’t, because it don’t change what you did. Only changes us for keeping after it, after you—why would we? You made your choice, and we made ours.”
“You brought me water.”
“Huh?”
“Water. You brought a killer water.”
“Didn’t know I was dealing with a killer.”
“Yeah, and you brought ‘im water.”
“Yeah. You want some?”
“Yes.”
Old man muscles up his aged body and trudges the bin before the foot of the kid. The kid looks up quietly, and he palms to his mouth fast in four gulps.
“I don’t think you a killer.”
Both stare roundly at the sky—the old man the arching azure over the gulch and the kid the blue shades over the man’s head.
“Why you bring me water?”
“Don’t know.”
The kid angles his leg up and pumps it into the bucket with a flat clang and it pours what water was there on the ground fast. The old man stares on at the kid, smoky and dark eyes under his hat. The kid looks on to the glistening that snakes through the sand and the gulch let out a small howl. Some cirrus bump seamlessly, some rodents still burrowing along barrel cacti.
“Would you hand me your knife? I see you tucking it.”
“Don’t got no knife.”
“I see it there, over your foot.”
“I need it.”
“For what? For animals?”
“Yeah.”
They hear some scurrying in that darkness behind the kid.
“Why ain’t you kill me? If I’m dead, can’t go near your farm.”
“If I kill you, I think I give up something. If let you dry out, I did that. I shot you, and now it’s my charge ensuring you live to die on your own terms.”
The man lays motionless as the kid; he tosses his pistol to him, heavy imprints in the sand. The gun remains there; as the last of the water melts away, the kid leans deliberately for that army revolver and grasps it gently from its cylinder and holds it up and fastens its sight to the man. The two absorb their positions—their power to decide who walks away changed or walk not at all. Time passes quick, the arm fatigued sways its revolver across the breadth of the man’s chest.
“You could shoot me, or you can put it down. That stress of yours can just wash away, just make the choice.”
“You brought water for my knife?”
“No. I wanted you alive.”
“Then why shoot my damn foot?” The gun steadies firm on the man’s chin.
“No other way you’d listen.”
“And the gun?”
“Only way I’d really know if you’d let us be.”
No more wind. Only a dark womb of the gulch their monument.
“Bullets in here?”
“Just one.”
The kid pauses, gun still firmly on the man. The kid tugs the trigger, and the hammer pops out ineffectually. A crazed stare, and his fingers squeeze once more for the revolver to volley out that one bullet, yet none came. Frantically, the kid bats the nickel frame against his knee with handle in hand and again levels the firearm and tries to shoot the man down—nothing, a stubborn click in the stuck chamber with a lodged magnum; the kid beholds the mechanical betrayal with two beggarly hands and maneuvers his revolver into right hand and launches it into the old man—he catches it. Raising from his peacemaking seat, he paces just above the kid clutching his ankle. He ejects the blasted cartridge.
“You made your choice.”
The kid lifts his face slow, and he keeps that cold face on the man.
“Yeah.”
A shot rings round the gulch and the old man leaves the pistol with the boy.
*
The man comes home, eats what dinner he made and helps with whatever housework. He rounds his sheep, still teasing him. The house grows dusty with days into months and months into years and the man aches more each time he wakes, with his wife returning to less duties. They talk much, socialize like times once past, and conversations float in their heads; they excite themselves to be in the other’s presence.
*
“Micah, tell me a story.”
“Don’t have none good.”
“C’mon, I know you do.”
Micah ambles around with some tinware and clatters them down the kitchen top.
“Friend of mine down Austin once told me ‘bout this army general. Can’t member his name. Corporal White maybe.”
His wife leans on her elbow off the countertop spanning their shack wall, eyes of wide dilation and rare sparkle. Micah pivots with both heels and lays his two shoulders on the counter and speaks into space.
“He ran a company to chase out some Sioux—astounding he wasn’t hanged ‘till just a couple years after. Some scouts said he had scalp counts in the hundreds, some white but most Indian. Him and his men terrorized that place off Rio Grande, scared even them Spaniards back with that spirit they called of his: “white devil”. One day White came across this big pueblo village; them ones you always expect to see out here. There were brown kids, white kids, black kids—all getting along and waddling in the river with cooing wives overlooking their children. Men in the same dress and ornaments of all different color guarding overlooks of the village shoulder-to-shoulder. Some people said it was utopia. The men on their warhorses and shouldering their battle rifles looked on that place and finally felt themselves alien; they felt for the first time in their lives that they were intruding. So that corporal tells them all, ‘Men, this is what we’ve been fighting for, sacrificing for—all this time we were sustaining ourselves for this. Not God, not women, not gold, but this.’ The men that trudged through so much violence started lowering their rifles, unlatching their gun belts, and unbuttoning their uniforms. Then a shot goes off—straight through one of white men. White with his horse flicked a disturbed grin at his cavalry and galloped into his little chaos.”
Micah keeps on the timber wall.
“White filled that cove with corpses—children and all; the men trampled with their horses and burnt those that feared them and scalped those who did not. With the place destroyed, White looked on his men again and all he had was, ‘they found their peace, we found ours.’”
*
More and more years pass, and now the old man remains. He buries his wife there aside his shack and the marker their oil lantern. Some sand crunches round him. A lever click perks his ear.
“Don’t turn round.”
“Learn how to spin a chamber?”
A wry laugh comes from both.
“Yeah.”
Two shots cry about the desert wastes—the pistol drops on the land.
