His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  Breathe.

  “This,” I said, “isn’t how it goes. Whatever we do, it happens away from the public. Too many innocents in a place like this. None of this money is worth a single drop of their blood.”

  Keswick’s tense forearm twisted like a screw under my grip. I didn’t doubt Miss Garland would blow a divot in his abdomen. I didn’t doubt he thought the same way. He licked his lips. “Then whose blood is it worth, Faust? Whose?”

  Lady De Santos had some fine wine, though. It did the job. I drank it all at once. “Mine,” I said.

  When he heard my proposal, Cicero’s face scrunched and he racked his shackled wrist against the underside of the table. “You can’t suggest that,” he said. “You can’t do that. You can’t put a human being up as bloody collateral, man.”

  Truth was, I could do whatever I damn well pleased. Kallum wouldn’t care.

  You keep a town clean however you got to.

  Keswick Everett, whose lone arm was crossed as if it still had its brother, leaned back in his chair to consider the offer. “Uh-huh. I could choose not to take it,” he said.

  “But it’s a solution,” I said.

  “So is putting a bullet in the head of a horse you don’t feel like riding anymore,” Cicero tossed in. “This is a real comedy of cowshit if I’ve ever seen one.”

  Everett's fingers picked at his mustache. “The money’s off the table, then, if this goes down?”

  “You leave the money behind,” Miss Garland agreed.

  “We all come away with something,” I reasoned.

  The proposal I’d put forward was easy.

  No killing.

  No grudges.

  No guns. Not even mine.

  Miss Garland said, “You go until one submits. I call it for nothing. Either a man yields, or he doesn’t. And what happens—"

  “Happens,” I said.

  “I want assurance: I keep the sum regardless?” Miss Garland asked.

  “Regardless,” Keswick and I said simultaneously.

  Excitement flickered in the Alabamian’s eyes. He’d already made his decision. An unsure man doesn’t buzz like a cloud before a thunderstorm. “You happen to win,” he said, “you never see my face again. And if I happen to win—”

  “You get Grady Cicero.”

  We shook. Skin of his palm was as greasy as the breast of a plucked chicken.

  Cicero threw his unchained arm in the air. “Oh, good. Good and grand. Fucking remarkable. I’m so excited about this I could shit right where I’m sitting.”

  “Language,” Aremeda De Santos snarled at him from across the room.

  9

  We left Cicero there with four glasses of wine and one simple command: look, don’t touch.

  Control was important to me. Couldn’t keep your thumb on the heartbeat of a town without it. Sometimes being in control meant drawing a weapon. Sometimes it meant firing one. This time, it meant redressing a long line of wrongs by bartering with a man’s life. Chances were that Keswick Everett would do some ghastly things to Grady Cicero in order to visit the displeasure of inconvenience back on him. Probably already had a real carnival planned. While I wasn’t keen on putting a man’s life up for auction, to be bought and sold with some fists, it afforded me what I’d lost in the Horseshoe Junction Inn: a stake in the situation. Turned it into my circumstance to gild or tarnish. Wrong or right, I’d shaved off all the unnecessary tangles.

  Win or lose. That’s what mattered.

  The three of us strode through needles of pelting rain toward Miss Garland’s Café. Blackpeak disappeared behind us. This far out in sheets of rain, you wouldn’t know there was even a town at all. Water sloshed in my boots. Miss Garland guarded her face with the tongue of a slouch-cap. Even in a storm, a Texas moon still gleamed like a clean, silver platter behind the clouds. Enough eerie light to fight by.

  Surrounded by round stones that jutted up out of the ground like teeth, Miss Garland’s Café had become a circle of dark mud. Keswick stepped inside of it, bit down on his cuff, and drew it up to his elbow.

  Perched on a stone like some great bird, Miss Garland said, “Clean and fair, gentlemen. And for God’s sake, don’t take the whole night.”

  Maybe I overestimated my assumption of the meaning of the word fair, because I started shrugging off my jacket when Keswick Everett’s lone fist exploded against my jaw.

  I sprawled into the mud. Blood flooded my mouth. A plug of foul-tasting snot leaped into the back of my throat.

  Hell of a start.

  Everett was on me without a moment’s hesitation. Before I could gather my bearings in a spinning world, he had my hair in his fist. Rain spilled into my mouth. Apparently, only hoping you still had a fist was as good as still having one: he pummeled the rounded edge of his stump against my skull. Lights popped in my eyes.

  “You surrendered that man’s life to me, Marshal Faust. What kind of lawman do you think – hrrk—” ​I mule-kicked him from the ground, right in his gut. He was off me. I sucked in precious breath and leaped to my feet.

  As he staggered back, I closed the space. I threw a left jab out toward his jaw, not so much to strike, but to distract. It worked. He flinched. My right came in like a wild battering ram.

  Fast as a goddamn mountain-cat, he slid in, knocked that hand away, and drummed a tattoo of one-handed blows against my chin like the tick-tick-tick of a clock. Pain howled in my head. I fell. My ass struck something damp and hard.

  “You forget how to walk, Faust?” he poked. “Is this how you marshal your town, by letting women dictate rules and deciding fates on the heels of fistfights?”

  I pushed myself up. The world almost tumbled away again, but I held onto it. “It’s a lifestyle,” I reasoned, tasting metal. “It works.”

  “What you need are foundations,” he said.

  I spit in my palm. Rain washed red away.

  “Is that what you called it,” I said, “when you bled those folks dry for protection? Foundations? Something to build on?”

  He came at me again, shooting through the rain like a bullet. I managed to sidestep him. I clapped a palm across his brow as he passed, sent him spinning. He was on his feet in an instant, shaking off his discomfort. I couldn’t take a breath without him being all over me like an old blanket. His feet left prints in the mud as he came again, swiveling at the hips.

  His knee darted up into my stomach.

  His stump hammered down on the back of my neck and drove me to my knees.

  “You don’t know the first thing about me, Mister Faust,” he said over me, so close that his body shielded the rainwater from my heaving back. “Just because they call you a lawman don’t mean you keep it. You’re a meaningless title. Pickens folk paid me for what I knew I could do, not what I just hoped I could.”

  My muscles refused to obey. You either have it or you don’t. Everything from my brain to my bones was on fire.

  He peeled my head back. The heel of his palm crashed across my forehead. “The money doesn’t matter. Money can be made. With enough time, I’ll squeeze the paper out of a man’s purse and convince him every cent was worth it. Four hundred or a thousand, doesn’t matter. Why make it back in Pickens when I could just pick up where I left off, right here in Blackpeak?”

  His greasy palm captured my face. I thrashed, but he rolled me over and pressed my mouth and nostrils down into a half-inch pool of mud left behind in the print of a boot.

  Then he kicked my ribs.

  My mouth opened like a struggling fish’s.

  I inhaled lungfuls of filthy water. Silt scraped my teeth.

  “Problem with you, Faust, is that you let these people run roughshod on you. Little towns like this, they need a figurehead. ‘Cause believe-you-me, there are dangers out there that lurk in the shadows that want to eat them up or tear them into ribbons. A few bucks out their pocket means they stay alive, guaranteed.”

  Stars swam in my eyes. Fire swelled in my lungs. Keswick dug his knee one more tim
e. My jaw hinged open. I could see the future printed on the imaginary papers flashing in my mind: Blackpeak’s Finest Found Drowned in a Boot-Print. “They pay, and that means they’re loyal and expect loyalty. When I walk back in that town tonight to tell your mayor that I’ll be taking your spot, he’ll smile and nod, because—”

  He rammed my face into the mud.

  Seconds ticked away in my head. I only had a few left…

  Breathe.

  “Because I imagine they never respected you to begin with.”

  Nerves began to scream, desperate and twitching.

  Drowning like a fucking dog.

  “Just because you can kill a man, Mister Faust,” Everett said, “don’t mean you have what it takes to make him regard you.”

  In my last few moments, I heard the muffled demand from Miss Garland to “Get off him,” before his weight shifted and something cold, sharp, and all-too-familiar rested across the nape of my neck.

  A boot-knife.

  “You kill him,” Miss Garland shouted, “I’ll put a shot in you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Everett said. “You so sure from that distance?”

  “I got two rounds.”

  “Aim true,” he said.

  My hand jittered of its own accord. I fought back the swelling blackness...

  Sand squelched under my hand.

  An icy hardness greeted my fingertips.

  “This wasn’t part of the agreement,” she said.

  “Fair’s relative,” Everett said.

  “Blood’s a vulgar way to repaint a town in your image,” Miss Garland said. “You come off him, I’ll give it to you. Every cent of what I got and more. Money’s not money if it can’t buy a man’s damned life for him.”

  The world reduced to a pinpoint.

  Last chance. Last…chance…

  I closed my hand around the stiff coldness I’d found in the mud.

  I bucked my whole body up with a final desperate heave. Burning heat from the knife scraped across the nape of my neck, but terror ensured I felt none of it. Everett faltered. His weight shifted. So did mine.

  The moment I scrambled free from the puddle, coughing out ribbons of saliva, I went for him, wielding my found treasure. Cicero’s brass knuckles, half-caked in mud, crashed across the side of his face.

  Shards of crumbled teeth like pieces of broken soap fell free from him. He tried to keep the knife leveled in my direction. “My town,” I spat, barely managing even those two words.

  I knew it wasn’t my town. You couldn’t lay claim to a whole lot of lives and buildings. In the moment, though, I was selfish and wild; I dared him try to steal it from me, like one rabid dog staking ownership of a bloodied hare from another. Wanted to come into my town, drown me in a half-inch of rainwater?

  I went for him.

  You don’t get out of a knife-fight without getting cut. A man doesn’t need particular talent with an edge to do much damage. Two gashes snipped across the forearm of my sleeve. The brass knuckles did their work: I hit him again, landing blows on his stomach until I snapped a fist out and cracked the relentless brass against the back of his only hand.

  Bone snapped. Everett howled. The knife fell to the mud. His wrist hung loose as a washrag from his sleeve. He dropped.

  I kicked the knife away. It vanished in the darkness.

  I crammed the knuckles against the underside of his chin, ignoring the smarting ache in my own bones. “Tha’sh innof,” he bleated. Whatever remained of his jaw sagged like a bag of crumbled ceramic in his chin.

  “Yield,” I said.

  “Doan hi’ me, doan—”

  “Tell me you yield, man,” I barked.

  His broken, trembling hand lifted into the air.

  “Yealt. I – I yealt.”

  Could have been easy to hit him again. Felt the urge, too, like a thunder under my skin. He breathed, watching me, waiting for me. An ill wind could have chucked my elbow right then and I’d be holding onto a dead man’s lapel.

  I let him go. He slumped, a half-filled scarecrow. I staggered over to Miss Garland, the old gunshot wound in my foreleg reawakened. I held out my hand.

  She regarded me with a long stare, then nodded and placed her dark hand over mine.

  The pocket pistol was friendly and warm and dry.

  I returned to Everett and leveled it at his brow. “Don’t have to kill a man,” I said, “to make him regard you. Or your town. Or the rules you set down. I could give a shit less whether or not you regard me. You want your life, you’ll get to those feet of yours, and you won’t look back.”

  Like a poleless flag flapping against the wind, he stood. “My gun’sh. In town, it’sh—”

  I glanced down at the gun. He saw too.

  No more words.

  So Keswick Everett turned his back to me, and with the remnants of his pride in more or less the same state as his lower jaw, he left Blackpeak. I didn’t know whether or not his broken body could make it to Crown Rock.

  Miss Garland took up my arm and took stock of the slices on my skin. “Shallow,” she reasoned. “Some long nicks, but nothing we can’t wrap. You’re a knot loose, I hope you know. He could have had your throat, and he would have been right to have it. He had you from the beginning."

  She slung her shoulder underneath my arm and gave me her help. As the moments passed by, exhaustion cycled its way into my body. I paused to retch muddy water outside the circle of stones. She tugged her hem away just in time. “You gonna give me back my gun?”

  “Christ, you mind waiting until I’m whole to ask me?”

  “Never gonna be a time when you’re whole, Faust. You get it all out?”

  “Nothing some whiskey won’t fix.”

  We weren’t a stone’s throw away from her bloody Café when a noise cracked through the air like a distant peal of thunder. Both of us thought it was that, at first, rolling over the hills.

  We turned.

  Another. And another. Each accompanied by a flash.

  Miss Garland and I watched in silence as, in the darkness several hundred yards away, Keswick Everett broke in half and fell to the earth.

  10

  We squatted down in the mud like hunkering children. “Jesus,” Miss Garland said. “Faust, was that—"

  A tonguelash of fire. Another report snarled out across the flatlands.

  “Gunfire,” I told her. “Stay low.”

  “Can they see us?”

  I didn’t know. The fiery afterimage still throbbed in my eyes.

  With my heart punching against the inside of my chest, I scrambled out across the rain-beaten earth, half-crouched, half-sprinting, trying to remember where I’d seen Keswick teeter over. There was time for bleeding later. The hairs on my neck began to prickle through the blood. Tightness gnarled my stomach into knots.

  Click.

  The zipping-back of a pistol hammer.

  I dropped flat.

  Boom.

  Another blast. This time the light illuminated the world in sickly yellow. In the flash Keswick Everett’s body jerked and spasmed on the ground. Around him loomed three brooding figures. Each one of them was a smeared shadow, proportions all jagged and wrong.

  Several sensations ripped through me at once:

  First, an uneasy vibration behind my teeth, a rattling in the marrow of my bones.

  Second, a coil of nausea in my gut, an instinct awakened that told me stay back, get away. Every crawling step, I could swear I was tearing my skin off invisible hooks desperate to get me to turn, forget it all, forget what was in front of me.

  I slithered across the ground, leveling the pocket-pistol toward one of the faint figures. My mouth filled with the taste of rust and metal and gun-oil. A surge of revulsion rolled through me. My muscles went silent.

  The monolithic shadow turned to look at me.

  It extended a gangly arm from beneath the cuff of a torn, wind-mangled cloak.

  Then it fired one more time. Everett stopped moving.

&nb
sp; In the flash I saw the eyes, set like flawless gems in the divots above sagging cheeks. No pupils. No recognition. Just…coldness. Each of them a little ball of silver, mirroring the dark world. Staring through me. The others turned to regard me, too. Sitting there in the mud, I might as well have been naked, just a trembling gumdrop of fear.

  I responded how I knew to, like a rat brushed into a corner with a bartender’s broom. I took to my feet, leveled Miss Garland’s little pistol, and—

  “No.”

  The voice shook through me with an earthquake’s force. ​My fingers jerked open against my will. The pistol fell out. ​The nearest figure sucked in a wheezing breath. Like dry leather, its loose tongue rolled out. Then it exhaled.

  A swirling blast of foul-stinking sand blew from its mouth across my face and cheeks and shoulders. It stuck in my eyes, stinging like broken glass. I raised my hands, expecting blows. I didn’t know how long I’d last in this state against those figures, but I sure as hell didn’t plan to go without clawing the hell out of them. Of course, that remarkable intent didn’t account for the rapid rabbit-foot snare-drum corps trilling away inside my chest.

  If my heart exploded, I wondered how long my brain would keep working.

  I opened my eyes, expecting to die.

  All that was left was Keswick Everett's corpse.

  He lay in the stillness of death, his arm across his chest. One of his legs was bent up like a broken twig. A series of bloody holes gleamed on his shirt-chest. He clutched something tight in his palm, holding onto it with the same death-grip a Christian might hold their cross.

  Around him, there were three pairs of boot-prints in a triangle, each one of them slowly filling with the run-off of his blood.

  I squatted there, trying to silence the sudden rushing windmill of confusion dashing through my head. Amid my gasping breaths, I smelled smoke. I felt burning. I tore at my shirt until a button snapped free.

  Billy Gregdon’s finely-folded bit of paper smoked in my hand. Each one of his tiny fingerprints burned like a cigarette-ember until I smothered them with my thumb.