Fiction Revival

Heat Lightening

2009-06-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

Liquid light from an oil lamp. Greasy light. A light that stained everything it touched and it was all over Eddie Fast Elk as he leaned over the table in the saloon, his gun still warm. Blake was leaning back in his chair and choking on his blood. The cards were all over. Some hidden in the darkness, others glistening in the light, the staining light. Eddie looked over at the bartender and nodded and then turned back toward Blake. “Call me a cheatin’ son-of-a-bitch, again.” He grinned as Blake tried to breathe.

The bartender came over with a bottle of whiskey. “You want a glass?”

Eddie stood up and then grabbed his pistol. “He ain’t gonna need one.”

The bartender shrugged and put the bottle on the table. Eddie holstered his pistol and started for the door. The bartender went back behind the bar.

Outside, the sun had gone down and what was left of the light was smeared across the jagged rocky peaks of the mountains to the west. Eddie untethered Blake’s horse and then slipped onto his own slowly, and then quietly left town.

2009-05-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

What if the sky were like this always, everywhere? Crisscrossed, penitentiary, and so close to your head?

The fact is that the molecular strata of the sky are like this, but you can't see it--or you are convinced that the air is not a net that holds you...

Mad Love

2008-11-12T20:49:00.000-08:00

Jimmy had her tied up by the time Kyle came back with a case of Lucky Lager and his pistol, the metal dull and brutal in the light of the cabin. Jimmy was standing in front of the girl and looking at her intently. “What’re you doin’ Jimmy?”

Jimmy wiped his mouth. “Well, I was thinkin’ about rapin’ her.”

Kyle looked at the girl, her legs bound up tight, no way for Jimmy to get his thing in her and do whatever it was Jimmy thought he was supposed to do with a woman. Her blond hair was wet and pasted about her neck, and her mouth was gagged with a filthy red bandana. Her eyes were closed and she made a low moaning sound that was coupled with a high pitched whine each time she breathed out, like a dog waiting to die. Kyle smacked her across the head. “Stop makin’ that sound.”

Jimmy approached the girl and touched the side of her head that Kyle had smacked. “It’s okay, sweet thing. It’s all right. He didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Kyle cracked open a Lucky and swilled it, and then wipe his mouth with a loud satisfying sound. “You all fucked up in love, Jimmy.” He was lean and hard, and had teeth like a gator. Light brown hair shot out of his head in patches here and there like bunches of dried grass.

Jimmy shook his head. “Ain’t so. I just wanna, you know, she’s a perdy thing, ain’t she? Like some angel or somthin’? I mean, can’t we keep her ‘round a bit?” Jimmy was a little bigger than Kyle, his lean muscle covered with beer fat, teeth gray from lack of care. His blond hair wet with grease, his receding hairline concealed by a baseball cap with a filthy Valvoline patch stuck to it. He looked over at Kyle with a sad puppy expression on his face.

“So’s you can rape her?”

Jimmy’s mouth curled up in the left corner of his face and his grey teeth were exposed. It looked more like he was in pain than smiling. “Well, you know. Maybe one day it won’t be like that no more. Maybe.”

“Maybe? You ever hear of love born outta rape, Jimmy? Huh? You ever?”

Jimmy reached for a Lucky and Kyle smacked his hand away. Jimmy held his hand and whined over it like a child smacked for going after something he wasn’t allowed to touch. “Well, I don’t know. But just ‘cause I ain’t never heard such a thing don’t make it so.”

Kyle shook his head. “You don’t make any goddamn sense, Jimbo. Make what so? That love ‘n’ rape ain’t kin?”

Jimmy quickly snatched a beer and stepped back before Kyle could connect with a back hand. He grinned and pulled the tab and the can schiltzed and beer foam ejaculated out of it. Jimmy laughed.

“You blowin’ your wad.” Kyle sucked at his teeth and then swirled the remainder of the beer in the can and downed it, then crushed the can between his hands and grabbed another one. He looked out the door of the cabin, at the light moving along the tree line, the flow of green pine needles like water, calm, and restful. “Soon as we get the money for the bitch, I’m gonna plug her. Just like the last one.”

The girl whimpered and Kyle shot out a foot against her shin and she cried out a muffled, slobbering sound and then snuffed up through her nose and was quiet. “Why you gotta be so mean all the time?”

Kyle spat on the ground and pulled out a pack of Old Golds and lit one. He sucked on it, violently, and then made a big O with his lips and puffed out smoke rings. “I ain’t mean. I’m just the way I am.”

Jimmy tipped his beer to his lips. “Well, I don’t see why we gotta kill her after we get the money. I don’t see that at all.” He looked at the girl. “We don’t gotta waste all that perdy stuff, do we?”

The girl looked down at him, bound and gagged, her blue eyes sparkling with pleas. Jimmy looked up at her and smiled his painful smile. “Just the way we gotta do things Jimbo. Just the way things are supposed to be done.”

“But she didn’t do anything.”

Kyle scoffed. “Anything, yet. I’m sure she’s got all kinds of horror bound up in her guts. All kinds of terribleness she’s yet even thunk about.”

“Then she could join us. She could be one of us?” Jimmy looked at the girl and nodded at her and smiled.

The girl tried to nod back, but she was tired--getting more tired as she struggled against the rope tied around her hands and feet, and her legs. Her back raw against the wood support beam that kept the roof of the cabin from crashing down. “Ain’t a girl’s thing we do, Jimmy. This is for men and only men. What we do is a man thing.”

“But I like her, Kyle. I do like her more’an I ever did like any of that other cooz we trapped up here.”

Kyle snorted smoke out of his nose and flicked the burning cigarette at the girl. It exploded against her jeans and she let out a muffled yelp. Kyle stood up and raised his fist. “Do it again, bitch. Just make another noise like that one and it’ll be the last time you do that.”

Jimmy finished his beer and burped. “Jesus Christ, Kyle.” He leaned over and snatched another can.

Kyle looked back at the light in the trees. He didn’t carry a watch and it was the only way he knew how to tell time, like some animal or other savage beast that followed the day light and then crawled in somewhere to sleep through the night. “I gotta go. Gonna meet the man.”

“Okay.”

“When I come back with the money, you’re gonna slit her throat.” Kyle jammed the gun into the back of his pants and grabbed two more Luckys and left the cabin.

Jimmy stood up and brushed himself off. “Slit your throat, he says.” He looked into the girls eyes. They were past terror, and even past surrender. He knew that look. He’d seen it in the eyes of every girl he had ever raped, or killed, and even the ones that were still warm though the life that had kept them that way had long passed. “But I don’t know,” he said and reached out and touched the girl’s cheek and ran his hand soft and sweet as could be along it. “I don’t wanna do that to you.”

The girl nodded and tried to make words through the gag. She didn’t seem so tired now. There was an urgency to her, a thing that Jimmy didn’t know much about. Most of the time, they just sat like lumps of overworked clay. Jimmy took the gag off and stepped back from her. “You don’t have to,” the girl said. Her lips were full and beautiful, even with the lower one split and bleeding from when Jimmy had smashed her mouth with his fist to get her to stop crying.

“Kyle says it. I gotta do what Kyle says.”

The girl sucked at her lip and then said, “Do you want me?”

Jimmy shook his head as if he’d been asleep and an alarm had gone off and now he was wide awake. “Want you?”

“Jimmy, right? You’re name is Jimmy.”

“It is.”

“Trina.”

“Huh?”

“My name is Trina.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said and sipped his beer. “Trina. Even got a perdy name.”

“Do you want me?”

Jimmy looked down at the floor of the cabin, at the cracks in the old wood boards and the dust and the dirt that been ground into wood by the bodies of all of those who had come before her. “Yeah.”

“Untie me.”

Jimmy laughed. “That’s funny. If I untie you, you’ll just run away like them others.”

“Just my feet, Jimmy. My legs. Take my pants off.”

Jimmy flushed with heat when he heard her say that. He’d never had a girl say that to him before and he liked it. Girls didn’t talk much to Jimmy unless they were telling him to leave, or pleading for their lives. “I just untie your legs, right?”

She nodded. “Yes, my legs. Take my pants off. Hurry Jimmy. You have to hurry or he won’t let you have me.”

Jimmy scowled and looked out the cabin door. “He never lets me have anything. I never get to have it. I gotta wait.” His mouth overflowed with spit and we wiped it along his bare arm. “They’s still warm, mostly.”

The girl shivered in disgust. But, she was committed now. She had to do what she had to do. Jimmy untied her feet and unbound her legs and then slid her pants down and stepped back and looked at her. “Is it ready?”

“Oh yeah, Jimmy. Baby. It’s ready. Come on,” the girl said, hot and heavy as anything Jimmy had ever known.

Jimmy unbuckled his pants and pulled out his cock already stiff from the girl’s words and the sight of her bound up and bleeding. He slowly approached her as if she was the one who was dangerous, but right before he could touch her, slide inside, Kyle appeared at the door of the cabin, empty handed. “Fuckers didn’t show!” He didn’t even look at Jimmy, his dick out and throbbing close to the girl as he came into the cabin and grabbed a beer. He opened it, downed half of it and then looked at Jimmy, his pants down around his ankles. “Ah, what the fuck you doin’ now?”

Jimmy scrambled to pull his pants up as Kyle came toward him, flinging feet and fists. “Don’t, Kyle. Just stop. I was just gonna have some fun.” Jimmy stumbled and fell down and Kyle kicked him twice, hard, in his ass.

“Fun? You fuckin’ retard!” Kyle slapped Jimmy’s head. “I’ll show you fun. I’ll show a good time, you fuckin’ shit ball.” Kyle stopped pummeling Jimmy and went over to the girl and stood in front of her and grinned.

“No, Kyle. Don’t.” Jimmy struggled to his feet and pulled out a Buck knife and fumbled with the blade as he tried to pulled it out and set it to lock.

Kyle grabbed the girl by the throat with one hand and with his free hand he slid down between her thighs and was surprised to find them warm and wet and inviting. “Well, now,” he whispered, husky and boozy into her ear. “You just a whore, aren’t you? All this got you hot and wet and ready, don’t it?”

The girl ground her pelvis as Kyle moved his fingers inside of her. She let out a soft moan.

“Yeah, just like that, huh? You like that?” Kyle ran his tongue along her cheek. “I’ll give you somethin’ sweet thing. I’ll give you somethin’ to take with you.” Kyle reached down between his legs just as Jimmy stuck him with the knife in the back, in the right kidney. The blade went in all the way as if Kyle was never such a hard thing at all, but soft as butter left out on the table in the summer heat. Kyle turned to Jimmy, his face confused and shocked as he reached around to touch the handle of the knife. He staggered backward and fell, and writhed on the floor like a fish that had been run through with a spear.

“Oh Jimmy, I want you so bad,” the girl said, the words stuttering out of her as she watched Kyle go slack and still, the brown handle of the gun poking from the back of his jeans.

“I want you, first. You’re mine, first.” Jimmy started to work off his pants.

“My hands, Jimmy. Can you untie my hands?” the girl said with a breathy sweetness that made Jimmy shiver.

“But you’ll run away.”

“I won’t run, Jimmy. I want you. I want all of you.”

Jimmy grinned his stupid drooling grin and tried to untie the knots by reaching around the girl. He didn’t want to give up the warmth of her body against his, the skin wet and electric, but he couldn’t get the knots loose and so he went behind her and worked them free. The girl fell forward, on top of Kyle and she reached down and pulled out the gun. “All right, sweet thing,” Jimmy said as he stretched his arms out and walked toward her.

She squeezed the trigger and Jimmy’s left shoulder jerked back. His face was still dreaming of getting inside of her--still unaware that he’d been shot, and he kept coming toward her. She squeezed the trigger again and this time it went into his gut and his face contorted suddenly, confused, amazed at what was happening. He reached down and touched the wound and held the blood up to his face and then he looked at the girl. “You killed me?” he said, and the only thing that came out of his mouth after that was the blood when she shot him again and opened his chest toward the dimming light of the world.

She gathered her clothes, put herself together as best she could. Jimmy’s dead eyes stared at the flood of crimson flowing across the floor. Kyle moaned and coughed. She went over to him and rolled him on his back, forcing the blade in even deeper, his back arching over the handle. “Look at me,” she said.

Kyle gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. “Just go on, you bitch. Just go on and do it.”

“Open your eyes, or things are going to get worse.”

Kyle blinked. He knew what that meant. He’d said it so many times, and now it was his turn and it sounded all too familiar and strange at the same time. “There,” he said as he looked at her.

She straddled him and slid the barrel of the gun into his mouth. “Do you love me?” she said.

Kyle’s face looked surprised and confused, like the girl was suddenly speaking a foreign language to him. He tried to speak around the gun, but his tongue was pushed flat and the words couldn’t form around the metal.

She leaned in close and whispered into his ear. “I can’t hear you Kyle, you’ll have to try harder.”

Kyle tried, but the words kept getting forced apart by the gun. There was so much he wanted to tell her now, seeing her for what she really was. Not a thing for ransom at all, but a wildness about her that he wanted to keep, to hold against the wildness inside of him, but he couldn’t find the words to fit it all together, to unlock her fingers from the gun, to pull out the knife and mend his wounds, his damaged heart. And even if he could string the words together, weave them as perfect as a Navajo blanket, the gun wouldn’t let them get out.

“I need to hear it, Kyle,” she said. “Do you?”

And it continued this way, with the gun in Kyle’s mouth and the metal taste of his broken words, and the sweat smell of her straddling him, working the knife deeper into his back until there was no more light on the trees, and the world outside was tossed into darkness, and the stars passed on.

Something Along The Lines of the Aimless and the Damned

2008-10-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t like I’d never been high. But a weed high is different, and the stuff that Randy was putting in the pipe didn’t look like it had ever come from a plant. It looked like something that had been mined. It was just different stuff. “This is the shit, man,” said Randy. He put the pipe to his lips and torched the end with a Bic and sucked, his eyes turning into slits as the smoke went into his mouth.

It was late afternoon in August, a week before school started, and the Anaconda High School Copperheads were running football drills down on the field below the old Catholic cemetery where me and Randy were sitting near some high tombstones. It’s a good view from up there. You can see the whole wasted town. Trace the lines of where everything went wrong. The hills across the narrow valley like baked and cracked skin where the old smelting towers used to be. The broken water channels that once fed the smelting stacks. The big stack east of town like some forgotten tower of Babylon. The town itself just spillover from the graveyard on the hill.

Used to be a busy place. All first generation Europeans, mostly Irish, who had heard about the big mines in Butte, and all the work that was going on. They built houses, the schools, the churches, the bars. Settled the valley like an invasion of ants and busied themselves making a few men some of the richest people in the world.

My dad said the sky was always a yellowish haze when he was growing up. All the smoke from the smelters filled the sky and blotted out the sun. The trees died, and all the plant life that held the soil in place vanished. The hills would wash into town whenever it rained, and the water would sometimes carve out someone’s coffin and there would be bones there, spread out through the streets. Sometimes bodies with flesh hanging off like torn rags. Random meat for hungry dogs. That was when Anaconda was something on the map that people knew about. When there was a grip of good paying jobs that would kill a man. My father met my mother in high school and settled in down by the tracks and thought about building a family on the wealth from the mine in Butte. But that all left. The only jobs around killed men slowly. Picked at them for years until they finally crumbled. Dad took a job working produce at Safeway on the west end when Butte folded. Worked his way up to assistant manager. Mom did hair on Commercial street. Not much to do. Like scraping a meal out of a bowl that’s been licked clean. The house on the east end that we lived in still haunted by the ghosts of people from other countries. The trees on the hills eventually started to grow back. Grass returned. All types of plant life that had disappeared in the poison were coming back. The hills stayed out of the streets. The smelters crumbled and fell apart. Houses burned down or were closed up. The dead stayed buried.

Randy coughed out smoke and pointed down at the football players, at the sophomore running back who cut through the defense like the entire line was made of paper and he the sharpest scissors ever made. “That kid, that Collins kid? He’s fuckin’ awesome, man.”

I scoffed. “But our football teams sucks ass.”

Randy laughed out his nose. “Yeah. But he’s still good. He’s got something.”

I watched the Collins kid hit the corner of the line and slice between two defenders, Carmickle and Shaunessy, A couple of meat heads in my math class. Bonehead math. Math for people who’ll never go anywhere past managing the local Pump and Suck. I hated it. It was math that made you feel even more stupid because it was all the shit you were supposed to learn in middle school, but didn’t. Because middle school sucked, and made you feel even more stupid because it was all the shit you learned in elementary, which was okay. But kindergarten was the whole show. After that, it all went down hill.

The Collins kid ran down the sideline and scored. Touchdown. “See?” said Randy.

I nodded, hit the pipe. Felt the dry heat of the smoke singe my throat and burn down into my lungs. I held my breath. Counted to ten. Let the smoke out slowly and then started coughing, and then the buzz. My head floated up and out over the field, rolled up in the sky and I was no longer there. And then Randy said something about it all being good. Everything. And I came back and listened to him. He went on about how good everything was. How good the shit we were smoking was. How good the running back was. The football team. The wasteland of our hometown. The empty lots. The big black pile of slag that sat at the edge of town like the corpse of a giant animal that refused to rot finally into the ground. The town itself, a ghost town where the ghosts kept acting like they were alive. Having parades. Painting houses. Having funerals and weddings. Practicing football or getting high in the cemetery.

I handed him the pipe. I thought that I handed him the pipe. I thought that I thought it and then didn’t do it, but then the pipe was in his hand and he was sparking the lighter and everything was sharp and focused, and then fuzzy and I leaned back against a tombstone and thought I was dead. In the distance, the melancholy whine of an ambulance floated up in to the air.

“I’m hungry,” Randy said. “Let’s get some fried chicken.” We stopped at the Safeway, eyes thin and bleary, sniffling and rubbing our noses.

“Why do you do this to me?” I said.

“Do what?”

“My dad works here. You know that. We walk in and he sees us all fucked up, he’s gonna know somethin’ ain’t right.”

“You worry to fuckin’ much.”

Inside the store I looked around for my father, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t want to see him right then--still too high to figure anything out if he were to say anything to me. Give me orders to mow the lawn, clean my room, feed the dog, take the dog for a walk and clean up the shit if it crapped it out on the sidewalk. He’d say that people knew us and that he had to keep things controlled, keep things in their place. He didn’t want anyone thinking that his son would let the dog shit on the sidewalk, and he certainly didn’t want anyone to know that his son was a pot head, even though he didn’t know anything about it. I’m sure he wouldn’t hear it if I told him that I was high. That I was stoned and ground and felt like a baked tortilla as I walked toward the deli and the thick smell of fried chicken.

“Help you?” the old lady behind the counter said, her face a molten mask of make-up with eyes set deep in her flesh as if they’d been pressed into it. They sparkled black and strange.

“Fried chicken,” said Randy.

I coughed and looked around. I was sure everyone in the store knew me. Knew my father. They would tell him that they saw me acting strange in the store and then he’d sit me down with his glass of bourbon on the rocks and start telling me how a man should behave--the measure of things. “How many pieces?” the old lady said.

I looked over at her, at the name tag that read Barbie and tried not to laugh. Wondered what Ken was doing. Maybe he was the half melted man with the fucked-up lower lip who walked like a broken marionette and cleaned the toilets. Malibu Stacy locked up in a wheelchair at home and tube fed. Chain smoking in front of the black and white television that only could get one good channel, and all that was ever on was stuff about God. How He was going to come back and end all the suffering. All the suffering that people chose to endure. “Eight,” said Randy. “Dark meat.” Randy dug into his jeans and pulled out a wad of cash.

Barbie flapped open a bag like it was some kind of broken bird flopping in her hand and she started to fill it with fried legs and thighs. The metal tongs glistened in the heat lamp, tore away skin as she used them to snap up pieces of chicken and stuff them into the bag. Randy licked his lips. I kept looking. I kept thinking about my father coming around a corner, clipboard in hand, his expression going sour as soon as he laid eyes on me. “That’ll be four dollars, ninety-nine cents.” Barbie tossed the bag up on the counter. “Anything else?”

Randy looked at me and raised his shoulders in an inquiring shrug.

I shook my head.

“Nah,” said Randy. “That’s good. Maybe some napkins?”

I turned toward the door and one of the checkers, Natalie, walked by and looked at me and then stopped and came over and said, “Hey, how’s your dad?”

I must have looked stunned, maybe more than I did stoned, and I shook my head and said, “He’s fine.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Must’ve gotten him to the hospital in time. Tell him I hope he feels better.” She walked off toward the cereal aisle.

“Dude,” Randy said, already finishing a leg of chicken. “I’d so nail that ass.”

I stood there in the rain of fluorescent light pouring down from the ceiling. Everything went sharp and gleaming. There was a fragility there that I’d never considered. And I thought how stupid I was to be there, stoned, with Randy and the bag of fried chicken while my father was off in a hospital. I thought of my mother going frantic--the phone calls, my little sister blubbering in someone’s house across town because all she wanted to do was go home, but she couldn’t, because I wasn’t around. “Here,” Randy said and shoved the bag into my hands. “Let’s roll.”

I didn’t say anything about my dad. What could I say? What could I do about that? Show up at the hospital stoned with fried chicken breath and say, “Hey, dad. Natalie says hi.” Was that a way for a son to act?

But I was no longer a son. I wasn’t even a man. I was aimless and lost on a road without signs, without direction, and Randy was at the wheel.

Haypenny Western

2008-09-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

The man had to have been at least 500 yards out. The horse he was on was going at a slow, easy pace, but it was hard to tell if it was actually an easy pace, or one that meant the horse was almost spent. Randle Suthers wondered about it for a short while and then squeezed the trigger of the Springfield and watched as the horse stalled and the rider slacked and his posture failed, and he slid off the horse like a thing untethered.

Suthers checked the scope. The horse moved about in a small circle, it’s head lowered from time to time and nudged the crumpled figure on the hard ground and then it walked a short distance and started to graze on the tough grass of that country.

It had been four days since he had gotten severed from the group of eight other men all intent on taking the bank. A bad plan fueled by whiskey courage and rough talk over gold dust being held and waiting for safe transport to a nearby rail, and then an armed escort back east. “It’s ‘bout easy as liftin’ an ol’ lady’s skirt,” Dylan Grange had said. His face wrinkled and leathery--eyes crushed in a constant squint.

“You ever do that?” Eli Wagner said.

“What?”

“Lift an ol’ lady’s skirt? You ever?”

Dylan smiled. “No.”

Eli winked and nudged Dylan with a boney elbow. “Ain’t all that easy when she’s got a Colt pointed at your balls.”

The men laughed and drank, some lit cigarillos and the smoke trailed from their thin lips, and their smiles were yellow and foul.

Suthers took a drink and then said, “How many’re in the bank?”

Dylan looked up at the sky and tapped his fingers on his knee and nodded with each tap. “‘Bout five, I think. Maybe seven.”

“You don’t know for sure?"

“No.”

“And the gold dust? What about that?”

“That I do know. I’ve seen that. Piles of it. Bags all over.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure, Suthers. If you ain’t, you don’t need to go.”

Suthers looked around at the other men. “Just would be good to have a count on the people.”

Eli spat, and then said, “We all got guns enough for twenty or more.”

Suthers nodded, his face tight. “They armed?”

Dylan was drinking from the bottle of whiskey he was sharing with Eli and another man, a Mexican who was lying down on the ground, his head propped against a rock, his breathing steady and calm. “Don’t know, Suthers. All I know is that there’s gold in that bank and I aim to get it all.”

Each member packed bags of gold dust while Suthers stood watch and kept a gun on the four clerks that just happened to be working at that particular time of the day, on that particular day the week, Tuesday, a day that no one suspects anything. Dylan packed up the largest load. “Let’s go,” he said to the others and they headed out of the bank to their horses while Suthers stood empty of gold, and ready to spit hot lead.

“Hol’ up there, Dylan. What about my share?” Suthers stepped out of the bank, away from the clerks.

Dylan looked at the other men, and they all looked at him. And Suthers looked at each one of them, especially Eli, who was grinning stupidly and had his hand on his Colt, ready to draw it out. “Well Suthers, it’s a hard thing to say.” He nodded over to Eli and Eli drew the Colt and leveled it at Suthers, but Suthers was quick, and he ducked into the doorway just as the shot splintered the wood of the door frame.

“Goddamn you, Dylan!” Suthers shouted and poked his Colt out and fired off a round, then cocked it, and fired another.

Shots rang out from behind him, and wood and glass flew in pieces all around. The clerks had guns drawn and they were shooting at Dylan, and Eli, and the rest of the men outside, and they hadn’t seen Suthers yet.

Suthers hoped his horse was still tied up across the way, separate from the others. Maybe he should have fallen in good with them and then they would be leaving alive with gold enough to live on for a at least two years. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was getting away without a bullet in his guts.

He poked his head out the door and saw Eli down and bleeding, crawling through the dust of the streets. Dylan was already gone, and the other men were dispersing, guns firing at the bank. A clerk was struck in the head and his brains spilled out like the insides of a watermelon tossed against a brick wall.

Suthers saw his horse and made for it. He climbed up and ribbed the animal hard and it took off in a direction uncertain, and he rode and rode, out of the town and into the rocky canyons where he found water and quiet, and time to think.

He had gone north, that was what he had figured, as he had not seen the rocky canyons as they had approached the town from the south. He made a quick camp--one easy to set up and take down, and he scoped the land around him and made sure his place was a good one to defend, and he found that it was. The town was still visible in the distance, but hard to see, and when he scoped it, he saw a horse making its way out and toward him. It was loaded down by the way it moved, and he thought that it might be Eli’s horse, but there was no way to be certain. He looked through his supplies and found that he had at least two days worth of food, some jerky he’d picked up from some Ute, a little coffee, some dried up things he wasn’t at all certain of. He would need whatever that horse was carrying, and if it was indeed Eli’s horse, then there would be whiskey and lard, some sugar, maybe a little flour left in the pack, and gold dust he could use to buy feed for the horses, and move on to a little ranch of his own, or just keep moving.

He watched the horse for a long time, and when it seemed close enough and the land around was dead of any movement, he rode out to meet it, and he found that it was indeed Eli’s horse. He looked through the satchels filled with bags of gold dust, and then he opened the pack and where there should have been whiskey and food, there was more gold dust. Eli had taken the all or nothing approach and it looked like he might have more than Dylan, which would make Dylan less then happy, but it didn’t matter now. Eli was more than likely dead in the street, and Dylan was probably already heading back south with his gold, south to booze and whores for the next two years, and when the money ran out, he’d be back if someone didn’t kill him.

Suthers patted the horse down and talked to it, and he reached in his feed bag and held out a handful of oats and Eli’s horse ate them as though it hadn’t eaten in days.

Suthers climbed back up on his horse and took the reins of Eli’s horse and led it slowly away toward the rocky canyons and the water, and as he did, he though he heard thunder, but it wasn’t thunder at all. It was several horses riding towards him from the east. He stopped, rather then make a break for it and give away his position in the canyons, and it turned out that it was the Mexican, and some other man he didn’t know. “Eli is dead, and one of the other gringos, too,” the Mexican said.

Suthers looked at the other man. He had a wildness in his expression and his body was dark from the sun and the dirt of the trails he had ridden, and his eyes glowed hot blue in his head like some vicious, fabled animal and not like a man’s at all. “Figured he’d be.”

“That’s his horse, no?” said the Mexican.

The wild man spat black tobacco juice out of his mouth like it was something his body made.

“It is.”

The Mexican said something in Spanish that Suthers didn’t understand and the wild man nodded. “Is there gold?”

Suthers pulled out his Colt and pointed it at the Mexican. The barrel glistened with menace and he cocked the hammer and smiled. “I wouldn’t worry about it. This was Eli’s horse. Ain’t no more.”

The Mexican eyed the barrel of the Colt, but he was cool and calm because he had had many barrels of many guns pointed at him many times. “Senor Grange would like his gold.”

Suthers laughed. “Senor Grange can go fuck a nigger.”

The Mexican was still not shocked. He had many a man tell him that his boss could go fuck something or another, but the wild man did not take to kindly to Suthers’ insolence and he reached for his gun, but before he could pull it out, a shot cracked the sky and the horse reared, and he fell out of the saddle and was dead on the ground, the right side of his head open and the brains sizzling in the hot sun. The Mexican wiped blood off the left side of his face and he shook his head and sighed. “Suthers, this will be a problem for you.”

Suthers turned the gun back on the Mexican. “It will? I’ll tell you what. If Grange wants his gold, he can come and find it. You tell him that. Now get off your horse.”

The Mexican shrugged. He had been told many times to get off his horse and he had walked many miles back to many bosses, some worse and some better than Grange, with the same news. He slid off his horse and unhooked his gun belt and let it drop on the ground. “It is always the same, Suthers. Always,” the Mexican said and he started to walk east.

It was Dylan’s horse, and it was Dylan down on the hard ground, his chest ripped open and the blood all over around him. Suthers talked to the horse and went over and searched it and there was nothing. No gold. No food. Nothing. He went back over to Dylan and found that there was no gun. He scratched his head and looked around and nothing that he saw could help him make sense of it until he looked back toward his camp and saw Eli’s horse being led away by two figures, and then he felt as though someone had run into him and knocked him down.

He coughed and held his hand up to where it hurt and he felt the familiar wetness of blood. The sounds of a horse came to him from nearby, and the sounds of someone walking along the hard ground and the tough grass, and the sun in the sky was eclipsed suddenly by the face of the Mexican. “It’s always the same, Suthers. Always.”

The Mexican pulled out Suthers’ Colt and aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger, and then he called out in Spanish something that Suthers could not understand, something he would never understand.

From a new novel I'm messing with

2008-08-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

It was May, and the slaughter along I-90 was in high swing. Raccoons mostly, their black and gray fur emptied of flesh and bone during the nocturnal hours as if the night itself had snatched them and obliterated them in some frenzied sacrifice, their carcasses reduced to shredded meat for magpie and raven. An occasional deer clipped by the front chrome of a passing truck and sent spinning and jerking to the side of the highway, or ground down by eighteen wheels until nothing much was left but a red smear. Deputy Taylor was used to these things. It was common carnage. A season unto itself that held no surprises except for the lone moose that he was looking at in the center of the road just east of DeBorgia. He had never seen one outside of hunting in Alaska. It wasn’t that moose didn’t exist in that part of Montana, it was just that they didn’t tend to gravitate toward the highway and its grinding and churning wheels of commerce.

It was a big male, close to 800 pounds. Not quite full grown by the look of the rack that sat skewed and broken on its massive head as the crown of some violently deposed king, but a big male nonetheless. Its neck had snapped and its head was askew and its tongue out and stiff in a frozen loll. The left back leg was twisted so tight that the red meat had burst out of the hide. Taylor wiped his brow and hoped that the winch on the front of the Ford Explorer was going to cooperate or he’d be there more than half the day hacking it down into manageable pieces and then hauling them to the shoulder.

He set about igniting road flares and making some room for himself along the interstate and then repositioned the Explorer and pulled the steel cable wound up in the winch and hooked it round the moose’s neck and front legs, and hoped that the animal wouldn’t suddenly split wide open and roll its entrails out like a thick jumbled carpet all over the road. The radio came on as soon as he hit the switch for the winch, and it startled him. “Jesus Lorraine, why you gotta do that?” Taylor said.

“Do what?” said Lorraine.

Taylor watched the moose slowly slide out of the middle of the road and toward the Explorer, its legs up by its head and its head bouncing up and down slightly, tongue out, like it was amused with itself. “Never you mind.”

“Gotta report about a stolen Ford F-150, black. 2007. Outta Wallace, Idaho and headin’ our way. You copy that?”

Taylor looked out at the interstate. Nothing was coming westbound. “I copy. I don’t see anything, over.”

“Consider them armed and dangerous. It’s a kidnapping, too. Took some salesperson.”

Taylor laughed. “Well, it’s about time. They take so many themselves.”

Lorraine chuckled on the other end. “I’ll go with that. Keep your eyes out and stay safe, Taylor.”

“Don’t I always?”

“No.”

Taylor looked up at the sky. The sun was moving along, blocked here and there by crumpled stretches of clouds that were spreading out like sheets. “So when are we going out for dinner?”

Lorraine let out a gasp at the other end. “Taylor, that’s not very professional of you.”

Taylor laughed. “Yeah. I know. But still. When?”

“It’s not good practice.”

“It is for me.”

“It’s against policy.”

“No one has to know.”

“It’s against my policy as well.”

Taylor smiled out toward the world. “Well then, ‘spose I’ll just settle for coffee and donuts.”

“Don’t be an ass. Watch yourself out there.”

“I will,” Taylor said just as he felt a thump against the Explorer, and heard the winch making a horrible grinding noise. He hit the switch for the winch and got out and walked around front and saw the front legs of the moose, from the hooves up to the first joint in the leg, partially wound up in the steel cable. Its head dangled above the ground, and with its tongue out, it looked like every drunk he’d ever driven to the jailhouse or to home. “Aw, Jesus for fuckin’ Christ.”

He returned to the cab of the Explorer and tried the winch, but it did not come on. He flipped it several times to be certain and then he cursed again, and again, and then went to the back of the Explorer and pulled out a pair of bolt cutters.

Looking down at the way the front parts of the legs were intertwined with the steel cable, Taylor wasn’t sure where to cut. He looked at where the hook was, and decided to start there. The bolt cutters severed the cable like a Bowie going through a piece of licorice, and the hook hit the pavement with a light metal sound. The moose did not move. From the look of it, he was certain that all the cable would have to go. Certain, to a point, because when he checked the westbound traffic lanes again, he saw a black Ford truck, new enough to be the one that Lorraine had talked about, flashing feloniously in the noon sun. “Shit.” He looked at the front legs of the moose where they met with the cable, and snipped through the flesh and crunched through the bone until the moose flopped to the roadside, its front hooves still wrapped in the cable of the winch and dripping with gore.

He punched the gas and rumbled over the median, dirt and rocks flying out from behind him as the tires dug into the soft earth. He bounced out onto the interstate and hit his lights and siren and floored the vehicle. He came up close behind the truck and saw that there were only dealer plates attached to it, and his innards went cold as the training kicked in, his mind focused on the idea of a gun aboard.

“What seems to be the problem, officer?” the boy said. His dirty blond hair was blown all about his head. A few red dots speckled his face.

Taylor didn’t say anything. He peeked into the open window and saw a girl duck down behind the passenger seat, and he stepped back and pulled out his .44 and aimed it at the boy’s head. The boy glanced at the black hole of the barrel and then stared straight ahead as his knuckles went white over the steering wheel. He tried to say something, but his teeth chattered apart the words and nothing came out of his mouth but nervous air. “How many people in the vehicle?” Taylor said.

The boy kept chattering. And then he said, “Two.”

“You sure?”

The boy nodded.

Taylor kept peering from behind the black body of the .44 trying to gauge the threat. “You, in the back, I want you to step out of the vehicle, hands up. Do you understand?”

There was no sound save for the boy’s quick and rabbit breaths mingled with the chattering of his teeth. And then Taylor heard the door open. He looked down the length of the barrel and saw the girl standing outside of the truck, her small hands stretched out in the air. “Good,” said Taylor. “Now I want you to walk backwards toward me.”

The engine to the Ford was still running, and Taylor kicked himself inside. The boy could take off right now. Just head out. He watched the girl walking slowly backwards past the tailgate, and then he turned to the boy. “I want you to slowly turn off the vehicle and drop the keys out the window.”

“You what?” the boy said.

Taylor turned the gun on him, and repeated what he had said to the boy, word for word, and once the keys were out of the Ford and sparkling in the sun on the side of the road, he had the girl kneel down on the shoulder, her fingers interlocked behind her head. He then turned toward the boy. “Get out.” He held the gun up and watched the boy carefully open the door and slip out of the Ford as if the whole thing was made up of nitroglycerin and was about to blow at the tiniest movement. “Do the same thing she’s doin’.”

He watched the boy get down on his knees and wrap his hands behind his head. The boy looked at the winch and the cable, and the front ends of the moose’s legs jammed in it, marrow sliding down the front bumper like red melted butter.

Taylor glanced in the cab of the truck and saw the blood spattered on the door and the seat. It was still wet, and the smudges of it along the dash and glove compartment door glistened. He went over to the boy and pulled out some handcuffs and placed them on him, and did the same to the girl as the traffic rushed by on its way east. The girl went limp when he grabbed her by the arm to guide her to the back of the Explorer, and he yanked on her hard, like she was some dog that didn’t want to go anywhere, and she let out a whine. The boy looked over at her and said something that Taylor didn’t hear, and she stiffened a bit and stood up and went to the back of the Explorer without anymore complaint. When it came time for the boy, he complied without a single whiff of trouble. “There a gun in the truck?” Taylor asked the boy as he secured him in the backseat.

“Yes sir. On the floor.”

“He dead?”

The boy looked over at the girl, then out the window at the cottonwoods lining the Clark Fork River. “I don’t know.”

Taylor nodded. “Sure.” He opened the front door and grabbed the radio. “This is Taylor, over.”

The radio spat and fizzed, and then Lorraine came on and said, “Go ahead, Taylor.”

“That truck you talked about, remember, over?”

“Yes. You seen it, over?”

“I got it, over.”

There was a brief, elongated silence. “You got it? You mean, you seen it?”

“Nope. I got two kids in custody and the Ford with blood all over in it, over.”

There was a longer silence, and then Lorraine came back on and said, “Blood? You said blood? Over?”

“I did, over.”

“Hold on Taylor.”

Taylor looked over at the girl. She was shivering and he knew she was about to fall apart under all her clothes. “She all right?”

The boy looked over at her and touched her, and she let out a painful sound, not quite a cry, but more muffled and low, a lost, condemned animal sound. “I don’t think she is,” the boy said.

Taylor dropped the radio and went to the back of the Explorer and popped the window up and pulled out a grey wool blanket. He opened the door nearest the boy and gave it to him. “Here. Wrap her up. She might be in shock.”

The boy complied and draped the blanket over the girl, and she burrowed into it, the low, painful sound quieted by the dense weave. “She gonna be all right? I mean, I never saw her like this before.” The boy seemed very lucid and alert.

Taylor looked over at the wool blanket. “Keep her warm and breathing.”

The radio crackled back to life and Lorraine said, “We got all hell coming out everywhere over this one Taylor. News crews. The whole mess.”

“Over,” Taylor said.

“Funny,” Lorraine said. “Over.”

“So what should I do? Where do I take them?”

The radio shushed and whizzed, and then Lorraine said, “Well, if they’re minors, you know, we gotta protect that. But, first, where’s the salesman?”

Taylor looked over at the boy. The boy said, “Back there, near that Saltese place. I can show you.”

“The boy knows. He can show me, over.”

“He alive?” said Lorraine.

“Don’t know, over.”

“Just mark it, you know, if not, call it in. We’ll get a helicopter or somethin’ out there. And then bring them back here. Idaho State Police will be here soon to take care of it, over.”

“Copy that. Over and out,” Taylor said. He looked up at the sky and it was smeared with clouds and the sun was dim and its light drizzled down like weak rain.

He walked over to the F-150 and bent down to pick up the keys, and as he was down, he listened to the sounds of the Clark Fork and thought about getting his tackle and going fishing. He hadn’t done it since his father passed two years back, and he was going to need some down time when all this had finally come to its end. He secured the F-150 and pocketed the keys and then got into the Explorer and wheeled it over the median and back onto I-90, westbound toward Saltese, his mind locked into duty, his heart casting line.