***
By dawn on the third day he was deep in unhallowed ground, sand and stones piled haphazardly atop to ward off coyotes. But the morning opened dark above his grave, only to grow steadily darker, a storm lowering constantly overhead yet never breaking fully into much-needed rainfall, while ball- and sheet-lightning chased each other up and down the sullen, swollen sky.
And just after sunset, once more, was when Reese came limping into town again, up the main street to Marten’s office, covered in the same dirt and piss they’d buried him wearing. His tongue black-tinged yet in a still-torn mouth, when he opened it to wish Sheriff Marten and Deputy Jenkins alike a raspy—
“Good even, gentlemen.”
Marten gaped. “Sweet King Christ Jesus, ‘One-Shot’ Reese.”
“That’d be a ‘no’ to the first, ‘yes’ to the second,” Reese replied, with all the bleak coolness of his condition. Adding, to Jenkins: “Now, I’d much appreciate havin’ my guns back, deputy, if you don’t mind; they were a gift, you see. And the plain truth is, I’m sentimental about such things.”
Jenkins nodded a tad at this, as though he quite took Reese’s point—but Marten drew his own sidearm instead, aiming it straight at Reese’s midsection. Blustering: “You can just go right on back to Hell and stay there, this time, you damned murderin’ secesh—”
Reese shook his head, dusty gold hair flapping a bit with the gathering wind. “I believe there’s some following behind me may want a few words with you, Sheriff, on that very same subject.”
He said it gently, though—perhaps too much so. For under cover of that howl-din which suddenly rose up all around them, a great chorus of disembodied plaint knit to a hundred skittering shadows, Reese’s warning seemed almost entirely lost on Marten, whose eyes grew wide and crazed. Even as Jenkins turned to inquire if he was all right, the sheriff found himself abruptly surrounded by nothing and borne away in some phantom twister of screams, kicking and yelling, bound for whatever black country Reese had already left behind.
Now it was Jenkins’ turn to freeze, face slack and wondering. For all over the rest of town, similar harsh magic was being worked: a new-made widow far too infatuate with her state over here, a rival whose dispute had been settled through apparent chance over there; one veteran who boasted, another who did not; those with unsupported claims to their pasts, as well as those who never spoke of what had brought them there at all. Interestingly, almost none of Reese’s own lynch-gang were to be counted amongst the judged—save for one or two Jenkins knew had once delivered other, similarly rough, instances of frontier “justice.”
Reese—who had seen this same drama played out many times previously, in many different places—ignored it all, strolling past Jenkins into the sheriff’s vacant office, where he broke the weapons cabinet’s lock with Marten’s empty desk chair. As he walked back out, adjusting his holsters down low on his hips, he found Jenkins there to meet him . . . and paused, courteously, barely flinching, to let the deputy bury a few slugs in his gut; the very least he could offer, as recompense for the night’s awfulness. Nothing poured from the wounds except for a few slack streams of sand and reddish dust, admixed.
Reese peered at Jenkins, frozen once more, some vague semblance of sympathy in his yellow eyes. “Feel better?” he asked.
Jenkins swallowed. “Why him? Why not me?”
“Well, he had blood on him too, I expect; you don’t. Not yet, anyhow.” Turning away: “Better look to keep it that way in future, don’t you think?”
He left Jenkins standing there—probably the town’s best choice for new sheriff, now—and made off, without much haste, down that muddy cart route which might never quite pass for a true main thoroughfare, while dark tides of vengeance eddied back and forth all about him, leaving few but him (their harbinger, their slave) untouched. Musing as he did on how Bart Haugh, always over-proud of his Eastern university learning, had once read from Bullfinch’s Mythology the tale of King Cadmus, who killed the dragon guarding the river outside Thebes-to-be, knocked out all its teeth and sowed ‘em in the nearby fields . . . like seed, like salt. Then stood there astounded when men came up instead of crops, all over armor, and did what men in armor do best . . .
Amusing once, now the story was only bitter true: He knew himself a walking dragon’s tooth, sent to lie in other folks’ earth a while, and see what might rise up along with him, afterwards. And yet, even supposing some variety of judgment (divine, or otherwise) drove what he did, he could never count what he brought along with him as vengeance, not even for whatever the people there might wreak on him beforehand; as he’d told Jenkins, that was only what he deserved. If he were to be hanged in every town from here to Missouri, it still might not be enough to wash him clean of everything he’d done.
On reaching the western-most border of town, Reese paused again, craning his neck to the sky. And cried out, to no one in particular—
“There. Am I done yet? Can I stop?”
Silence, only; the lightning’s flash, clouds a-boil like lava. Reese felt it twist in him, knife-like, ‘til he could not restrain his next demand, torn cold and bloody from the dry hole where his perforated heart should keep time still, unbreached. Screaming up at those hidden, condemning stars, ‘til his throat fair cracked:
“Look, just—where in the Hell is he, Goddamnit? So I know which way to go, at least! You want me to keep on working Your will much longer, You surely need to tell me, right damn now—”
But: Nothing replied, as he’d come to expect, save for the thunder, which cracked the vault above him open, wide, to loose the promised torrent. A scarlet, sticky rain, warm and salty, which fell only on him, soaking him from tip to toe with the leavings of his own sin. Covering him completely, erasing all he was, or might have been.
An answer, of sorts—long-expected, bitter in his torn mouth, on his blackened tongue. So Sartain Stannard Reese bowed his proud bushwhacker head to the wind of comeuppance, prepared to walk until he fell. Knowing that by the time the sun rose he would wake yet again, dew-stiff and cold, crusted all over with blood not his own. That he would seek his “friend”-turned-enemy Bart Haugh eternally and never find him, for vengeance . . . once that most satisfactory of all commodities . . . was no longer his to administer.
Not now. Nor never.
He set his raw feet to the desert’s hard road, therefore, that same song dinning ceaseless in his ears. And let darkness take him, praying that this time—this time, of innumerable other occasions—
—it would not be so unkind as to even play at letting him go, once more.
TWO CAPTAINS
“One captain to a ship, always, or that ship flounders.” It was good advice . . . most especially so, in hindsight.
***
“Found somethin’ for ye below-decks, Cap’n,” the bo’sun told him, with a wink. And thus, with little warning, Solomon Rusk’s last great set of troubles began.
“Something” soon proved a man in rags, enchained, with a possessed saint’s face and a cough that racked him stem to stern, shaking him like a high wind. He attempted to rise as Rusk pushed the door to, barely making his feet before falling back again, panting slightly. This creature’s feverish eyes were the same shade as silver pennies bleached almost to pale green by tarnish; they so well caught the light that Rusk all but thought he might be able to see himself mirrored in them, if he only moved closer—and wanted to, the sudden impulse deep-set, like a bone in the throat.