His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  Breathe.

  I don’t know how long I swayed there over Keswick Everett’s body, but when Miss Garland came to me, I smelled her rich perfume seconds before her shivering hand cupped my shoulder. “Faust,” she said, though from the distance of her voice, I knew she was staring at the body.

  “Did you see them?” I asked.

  She picked up her pistol and shook off the mud. ​When she breathed so did I.

  “I saw a man get shot. We should go,” she said. “Ivanmore can handle this. You know he’s discreet.”

  Ivanmore. Blackpeak’s undertaker. A fellow who found himself flush with cash in a town where people like to keel over and die of boredom or because they said something wrong to the wrong set of guns. Ivanmore. Right. Rarely asked questions, rarely said much, just found proper spots for bodies that no mother and father cared to visit.

  I stuffed Billy Gregdon’s confounding paper into my back pocket. Then I stood. “We have a problem. I don’t think I can trust Ivanmore with this, Lachrimé.”

  “Why not,” she said. “He won’t say anything. We should go, Elias. There’s badness here, and if you don’t feel it floating in the air and picking at your skin…”

  I turned and showed her the object I’d pried out of Keswick Everett’s stiffening fingers. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Christ.”

  Pristine. Well-polished. A pride piece.

  A bronzed star affixed in a circle.

  On it, engraved with an artisan’s care:

  Alabama

  Northern District

  U.S. Marshal

  After we both stood there for some time basking in the weight of shadow and rain, wondering if maybe we didn’t move that this whole problem would resolve itself, Miss Garland touched my elbow. “That’s…not the only problem we’ve got,” she said, before she shrunk away from me and Keswick Everett’s steaming body. She looked small. Like if the world turned sideways, she’d fall right off the whole thing.

  “Okay,” I said steadily. “What’s the other?”

  “Did you see his eyes? Oh my God, Elias. Who plucked out his goddamn eyes?”

  I kicked Cicero’s chair to wake him up. All at once he sprang to life like a wooden puppet. His eyes might as well have been two pissholes in snow. “Sheesus Christ,” he whistled. “You look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Took you long enough. I had a birthday while you were gone. Raised up a few kids. Got married, settled down.” Sunlight crept in through one of the parlor’s slatted windows and slashed across his face. “The hell time is it?”

  “About eleven.”

  “I’m about overdue for a piss,” he said. “And you for a bath and a shot, looks like.”

  I reached out my right hand, which I’d wrapped up to the elbow in cloth, and took up someone’s long-abandoned, half-empty glass of wine. It stuck to the sides of the glass like silty molasses as I drained it. “You know you could have slipped that cuff off the leg, and high-tailed.”

  “Sure could have. Sure should have.”

  My fingers left muddy prints on the glass. The wine hit my stomach like acid. “But you didn’t.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  Pressure-blisters smarting on my palms screamed like sin. I clenched my fists to silence them. “So. Everett,” he began.

  Had nothing to say on that front, though. So we just sat for a bit.

  Truth was, we could bandy words back and forth all we wanted, but we’d just circle all around the things that either we needed to say or couldn’t dare to utter. When Aremeda De Santos floated downstairs in a dressing gown to find two ugly men seated in her parlor, she boiled up some coffee and obliged us with unnecessary courtesy. “You two haven’t much more than an hour. And Faust,” she said, “you tracked mud in on my rug.”

  That one cell in my run-down office was enough for a bag of skin like Grady Cicero. Officially, story was that I kept him there so that a judge from a nearby district could process him accordingly. For trafficking illegal monies. And for public indecency, of course. But whenever it came time to minister to the paperwork, the words fled. I spent my time digging dirt out from under my fingertips. It never seemed to get any less.

  Almost a week later I sat on one of the gray stones on the outskirts of Miss Garland’s Café and watched as a ham-fisted Jolly got pounded so hard by a barrel-shaped girl named Peg Winters that a tooth came out his left nostril. I smoked cigarettes. The sun blared down on the back of my neck. Everett’s knife hadn’t but scraped the skin raw. A final and unexpected kindness.

  “You ever done much fighting before,” Miss Garland asked her new girl.

  “Naw, nodda lot. Jes bet up my brodders awful. Fer fun.”

  “You got a good pair of fists on you, girl.”

  “Shaw do.”

  “You think you can perform that well a few more times today?”

  “Shaw do.”

  “And if you do – Peg, is it?”

  “Paiggy Winters, ma’am,” Peg said.

  “Word on horseback is that Crown Rock’s got itself a fledgling strawfloor circuit up that way. I like you. You’re solid. You’re fast. You aren’t afraid to scuffle with a fellow.”

  “Fellas is jes girls with dicks, ma’am.”

  Miss Garland wore a smile that could cut the world in two.

  Peg Winters was something else. She shed a lot of blood. It covered up almost all the scuffs we’d left last week in the muddy center of the Café. Just like that, everything vanished. They drank their beer and they shouted and no one knew any the wiser. Blackpeak’s got a short memory. It has to. You live this far out on the outskirts of civilization, most goings-on aren’t good. So people drink and they cause a ruckus and I suppose somewhere on that timeline they up and die, too, and that’s that. All that for nothing.

  I went into my pocket for a smoke. Paper crinkled.

  I withdrew the folded piece of paper. The bloody fingerprints in their fine little triangle still bore flecks of ash. I blew them away.

  Peggy Winters had just more or less turned a man inside out when the paper came to life in front of my eyes.

  Black ink began to draw itself in long hooks and sweeping arcs along the note’s center crease, right between the burns.

  Look behind you, it read.

  My shoulders tightened. I stopped breathing. In a gust of too-hot wind I ran suddenly cold.

  It took me what felt like a lifetime to turn my head.

  Flatlands stretched on for eternity. Mountains danced yonder and wriggled in lines of heat. A bird whisked by. Tiny illusions tried to trick my eyes. Every time I glimpsed what I took as a meaningful stir, it proved itself anything but: here, a rustle of long-scorched brush; there, the scamper of an animal darting out of the sun.

  The ink rolled down the paper like water off canvas. New words bloomed to life on the page, each appearing in the casual scratching flicker-flack of an unseen hand.

  This town will choke for what it did to my Billy.

  Flicker.

  Choke and burn.

  Flicker.

  And so will you, Elias Faust.

  Part III

  The Eye

  11

  “Poindexter,” I said to the Frenchman behind the bar. “I’d like some of that stew and a biscuit with gravy if you don’t mind.”

  He gave me a glare that ate right through me. He swabbed out glasses with a rag, slammed them down, then disappeared into the kitchen. I don’t think he liked what I called him, but I couldn’t pronounce his real name, so Poindexter it was.

  I returned to the table where I sat with company. The Crooked Cocoon Saloon was barely active this early. The dust and stains in the wooden furniture stood out in the scouring sunlight like badly faded tattoos. Old booze and old blood look a lot alike. The place smelled of too much drink, too much sweat, and not enough washing. Regardless, it was the only place I could think of meeting for breakfast in Blackpeak. The only people in the place besides Poindexter, me, and my company was a lonesome fel
low drinking coffee at the bar. He munched on a Fat Bastard. White powder snowed down to his lap.

  “Biscuit and gravy on the way, Mrs. Fulton,” I said as I took my seat. “Paul, you sure you don’t want nothing?”

  “Just fine, Elias,” my friend Paul Fulton said from across the table.

  “Thank you, Marshal,” his wife said. “There’s something about not needing to cook a breakfast in the morning that appeals to a lady.”

  Paul Fulton and his wife Eliza were a pretty cute pair, as cute as anybody could ask for in a roughshod place like Blackpeak. Paul was a thin as a ramrod, tan as a keg of ale, and wheat-field blond. Forty-five, give or take a few years. Eliza was a little younger, always smiling and talking about God and all the good He did. She toted her Bible and rosary everywhere, ready to sweep away every little bit of sin like dirt out the door. “Glad I could catch you for a quick meal,” I said. “How’s that new barn of yours coming along?”

  “Quite nearly done,” he said. “Foundation, roof, frame, and walls are all up. Now I’m just trying to get the stalls raised so we can start moving the horses in. If I had help…”

  “’Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might,’” recited Eliza. “The boys usually want to spend the day doing fun things.”

  “Them boys of yours need to learn the nature of hard work,” said Paul.

  “Boys will do what’s in their blood,” I said.

  “Seems to be every time I catch you, Elias, you’re on the mend. You look run ragged. You alright?”

  Poindexter brought two platters, beef stew for me and a biscuit and gravy for the lady. “Best a body can be with Kallum in one ear and the rest of the town in the other. What you up here doing this early?” I asked Paul.

  “Looking to talk to Mr. Sloman at the trade shop, see if he doesn’t have a few plots of land open to sell near us. I’d like to expand our fields, give the horses we raise a little more of their own grazing area. It’s picky living out in the drylands. Wanna plant crops, but my boys couldn’t be caught dead helping.”

  His wife stabbed another chunk of biscuit off of her plate. “The three younger boys don’t have a problem lending hands. It’s Joshua, our oldest, that Paul’s got his little rivalry with. It’s just natural. As boys get older, they’ll do as they desire—“

  “Even if it means sleeping in the loft of the new barn, reading books by lamplight and getting intimate with nature. Whatever that means,” Paul said.

  “Still just a boy,” said Eliza. “He’s learning, sprouting his own leaves, reaching out his feelers for something special to him.”

  They talked about feelers and sprouting things, so I chose to get real interested in my stew. They raised good boys – even that Joshua they talked about – and knew how to keep a solid family together even in a godforsaken place like Blackpeak. They were horse farmers. They bred and sold them. Good stock, Fulton horses.

  When I finished my stew, I wiped my mouth and stood, pushing the chair out from behind me. “Paul. Ma’am,” I said. I tapped the edge of my hat.

  Eliza said, “It’s nice to see you again, Marshal. God bless you.”

  “And you too, Mrs. Fulton.”

  “Don’t go pissing off any knives today, Elias,” Paul said.

  “You didn’t bring me any coffee?” said the man behind the rusted bars as I entered the broom-closest I called an office.

  “Do my hands look occupied?”

  Grady Cicero reached his hands out between the bars and let them hang. Long strips of rusted paint flaked onto his sleeves. “Maybe you’re holding out on me.”

  “More important things to do than bring you treats.”

  “If by important you mean smoking cigarettes, thumbing through yellow-backs, kicking your feet up, and polishing the old Yellowboy over there.“ He nodded to the lever-action Winchester rifle leaning against the wall near my desk.

  “Need to care for a gun if you want it to work,” I said.

  “It’s a gun, Marshal,” said my prisoner, “not a trust fund.”

  Grady Cicero was going on two weeks under my watch. In his free time, he tried to keep himself in impeccable order: he polished his jacket buttons, and every other day, he shaped up his mutton chops like a damn topiary. He’d mostly straightened his spectacles after his run-in with Jolly. Despite his expensive, road-weary clothing, I’d long dodged my belief he was an accountant. When I’d booked him, I’d found a dog-eared Shakespeare collection and some crumbled cake-makeup in his left pocket.

  In this place, only two kinds of men dress like Cicero did: men who don’t know how to survive, or men who are trying too hard to do so. “You mind if I stretch my legs, Marshal?” he asked.

  I grabbed up a match and one of my hand-rolled smokes from the desk drawer. Cicero’s nicked-up pair of brass knuckles rattled around inside. I tossed a rusted key to him. He caught it in his palms between the bars. “Any word on when I can depart?” he asked.

  “When I can get a Crown Rock judge to grace us with his presence.”

  “I’ve served plenty of time already. It was just a few hundred bucks, and I doubt your judge is going to make heads or tails of any of it by the time he trundles his ass on down here. People get shit stolen all the time,” he said. ​”Make an exception.”

  “Principles, Cicero. Principles.”

  When he managed to unlock the cell with the key, he stepped out and tossed it on my desk. He sat across from me. He leaned back in the seat and the whole frame creaked beneath him. His face had mostly knit back together. Mostly. “You want to play a game of dominoes?” he asked me.

  “Nope. Just want to smoke.”

  “Got some whiskey?”

  “Nope.”

  “You ever going to give back those brass knuckles of mine?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s thievery,” he said.

  I smiled at him through a plume of tobacco smoke.

  “A man asks a question, he at least deserves a dignified response, especially when he’s been stuffed in this rusty cesspit you call a cell for the past two weeks.” He waved a hand at me. “Give me a smoke, Marshal Asshole.”

  I pushed my tin of rolled cigarettes and matches across the desk, from which – with an obvious amount of indignation – he took a smoke and lit up. I said, “You planning on staying here in Blackpeak, Cicero?”

  “If you ask nicely and let me go.”

  I flicked my cigarette, tapping it at the air like I was teaching a grammar-school lesson. “I’m a champion of your preservation. If I let you out of here, I’d probably find your body in a trough soaking for the pigs. Rough types around here don’t take kindly to seeing a man’s bits flapping out in the air.”

  “Just my luck I happen to stumble into the asshole-nest and piss off the no-fun crew in the process.” When he smoked he blew it out the side of his mouth like a steam-engine.

  Cicero went through the pile of dime novels I kept by my desk and frowned at each one. “You have absolutely nothing of any literary merit in this bunch of smut.” ​He tugged a thinner book out from the middle of the pile. He adopted his temporary Englishman’s accent as he read the title. “Mistress of the Plains by Edward F. Puntney.”

  “It’s a good one,” I said. “It’s got a farmer in it who befriends this runaway lass from a rich family, and they bond over sowing seeds while sowing a little bit of their—“

  Three gunshots – crack, crack, crack – rattled in the air outside my office. I put a palm to one of the guns on my belt and leaned forward, as if at any moment expecting a hail of lead to pop through the walls like angry bees.

  Another gunshot rang, sharp and fine, breaking the quiet morning. Then a voice.

  “Elias Faust!”

  Cicero frowned. “Sounds like you’re cordially invited.”

  I took out one of my Colts and half-cocked the hammer so I could spin the cylinders. I checked to make sure I saw brass in each one. I started to hate the thought of my name being regarded in ful
l. A clatter of bothersome thoughts I’d buried over the past week or two started to flare like embers in the back of my brain.

  “You going to go check what’s happening?” Cicero asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Could be people getting hurt,” he said.

  “Nobody shouting or crying.”

  That’s the thing about gunshots: they have very fickle personalities. They’re intimidating but captivating at the same time. If a gun’s discharged into a crowd, then sure, people are going to scramble and scream because fear motivates. But if they’re just being fired in the air for show, to get attention? People will come watch. Ineffectual bullets don’t achieve much but to get innocent folk more damn interested.

  “Elias Faust,” the voice bellowed again. “We needs to have a talk, you and me.”

  I caught myself refusing to breathe.

  Cicero raised an eyebrow over his glasses. “You’re a popular man. You should go.”

  “You ever seen someone run at someone shooting a gun?”

  “Just heroes or madmen,” said Cicero.

  “Both good candidates for being dead,” I said.

  Two more gunshots in rapid succession. That made six. I got to my feet.

  “Only takes one bullet to kill a man,” Cicero added, grinning from beneath his bushy mustache. “I imagine he’s got more where those came from.”

  I grabbed my hat off of the table. “Cicero?”

  “Yes, Marshal?”

  “Get back in your goddamn cell,” I told him as I headed for the door.

  12

  In front of Blackpeak’s town hall, it looked like there was a party of suits and skirts and sooty suspenders. People filled the corners of the square like a big horseshoe, lingering in the shade on porches. I knew some of those faces. Picked them out from among the ones I didn’t. Paul and Eliza shrunk behind a feed-cart, trying to watch and disappear all at once. Miss Garland, rarely far from events of note, had her arms crossed and stood beside her prized Peggy, who’d brought all her jowls to the gathering.