His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  “Shut your mouth,” she said.

  Another voice, too. But this one wasn’t spoken. This one awakened itself in the darkness and wound itself like a snake around my brain. Dodging death only remains so practical. After awhile it becomes exhausting, doesn’t it?

  “You don’t want to do this. It won’t fill the holes, Mrs. Fulton.”

  “What do you know about holes.”

  “Enough to know what won’t fill them.”

  The heartbeat. The pulse. All these systems working away like a wound-up clock. And for what, really?

  “He burned my baby. He burned my baby,” Mrs. Fulton said.

  The stars spun in circles, like someone had plucked them all out of the sky and tacked them to a pinwheel.

  It’s tiresome, watching it all play out. But balance is worth it. A man loses a boy, a woman loses a boy…

  Eliza again. “Who the fuck are you to teach me about holes?”

  “Nobody, ma’am.”

  “Then get out of my way—“ I heard the zip of two gun-hammers being drawn back, “—before I blow your teeth out of your head.”

  We all lose something, Mister Faust, the whisper said.

  I reached into the air with my fingers. I could feel the cool wind of the night brushing across them. Two silhouettes stood above me, facing each other. Eliza looked little and scared and pale, almost dwarfed by the long shotgun – my shotgun – with its butt tucked into her shoulder. She stared down its shaking barrels at Grady Cicero, whose big hands were flat in front of him.

  When I stirred, they both stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

  “Faust,” said Cicero. “Holy hell.”

  I lapped up lungfuls of chilly air like it was cool, life-giving water. After coughing myself ill, I swiped a mouthful of black phlegm on my sleeve. “Mrs. Fulton,” I groaned, grimacing as I sat up. “He’s with me.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Marshal Faust. God as my witness, I’ll put him in a grave if he doesn’t move out of my way.”

  I looked around as I staggered to my knees. My clothes were burnt in places, creased with sooty black. My guns were still miraculously tucked in their holsters. A series of fat blisters and wet, pink sores adorned my knuckles. Burns. How had I gotten out of that?

  The minute I balanced, the world crashed back into me. I stumbled against Cicero, trying to regain my center. Behind me, fire flared on a massive pile of smoking wood. The barn used to be there. Partridge was still unconscious on the ground several feet away from his molars. Harman squirmed on the ground behind Cicero, holding his guts.

  “She wants to kill them,” Cicero said.

  I reached out one of my scorched hands to Eliza. Cold silver still rested in the other. “Cicero is a friend of mine, Mrs. Fulton.”

  “I’ll kill him, too.”

  “I’m sure he’ll get himself killed good on his own one day. Where are your children?”

  Cicero said, “I got them all inside when you ran for the barn. Eliza insisted on coming back out.”

  “That man burned my baby,” Eliza said.

  “I want to talk with you, Eliza,” I said.

  “Tell your friend to leave.”

  “Cicero? He’s not a bother.”

  “Tell him to leave.”

  I nodded. I turned to look at my associate and motioned to the farmhouse. “You good with children?”

  “Good enough,” he said.

  “Mrs. Fulton, you mind if my friend Cicero goes and talks with your children until your husband wakes up?”

  Her fingers flexed on the wooden stock of the gun. She licked her lips. “Children need someone to watch over them,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “He’s a good shot,” she said. “Like lightning.”

  “Like lightning.”

  She said, “Alright.”

  Cicero took the command for what it was: a chance to let Eliza win this round, to give her something of a victory even if her world felt like it was falling apart around her. He adjusted his spectacles and then turned, approaching the farmhouse with a tired canter.

  Harman kept squealing, grabbing at grass and pulling even though it didn’t do him a damned bit of good.

  “Jonah came out of the belly of the whale when all was said and done, Marshal Faust.” Eliza never watched me, just looked through me like I didn’t exist. “He was on his way to Nineveh, where he would have brought God to those who needed Him. But he never got there. He fled God’s purpose for him. He threw himself into the seas.”

  “So the whale got lucky?”

  “Three long days,” she whispered, barely audible. She searched in herself for something. Her eyes were wet. “You came out. My baby didn’t.”

  There were pieces she was putting together – pieces of other puzzles – while still trying to pick up her own. I couldn’t imagine what it had felt like from the outside, watching the fire spread, waiting every long, dragging moment. I hurt, but by the grace of something I wasn't yet willing to consider, I was alive. I couldn’t imagine what it felt like inside of little Mrs. Fulton.

  “I need you to move aside, Marshal Faust.”

  I eyed the struggling Harman. “He’s already going to die, Eliza.”

  “It’ll be my choice.”

  “Is that God’s law?”

  “God has no part of this.”

  “He did. And now He has my son. We’ll have to talk, He and I.”

  I wished Paul was there. Paul would know how to talk to her. He likely knew how to pluck all her little strings. I just threatened to break them. She looked up at me like she had never seen me before. I told her, “It’s not so easy for warm folk to be cold-blooded.”

  “My child, Marshal. My Joshua.”

  “You’re not a killer.”

  She kept swallowing down hard like she was trying not to throw up. Her tears were like little crystals on her face. “I need this from you, Marshal Faust,” she said to me, softer than she had before, hawk inside a sparrow. “Not so many things Paul and I ask for. Not help for the barn, not free meals, not anything. But this...”

  “This is big.”

  “I need it,” she mouthed to me. “Give me this, Faust.”

  “It’d be best if I had someone alive to put on the bench, Eliza. Sometimes I can swing it, but this time?” I didn’t say it to her, but this time, a boy was dead, and that could make things problematic. “This time, I need a living face for the judge to put a name to. Somebody he can look at and hate just as much as you and I. Otherwise, it’s just our word to vouch for a whole wagonload of corpses if somebody comes asking questions. In the end, we feel good and avenged, but nothing gets done. Blood for no reason.”

  “What about Joshua?”

  She cried loudly now, grunting through a storm of sobs that threatened to tear her apart from inside. She stood, because standing, in that moment, was everything. She needed to balance the scales. It was the only thing that would feel right to her. To turn a man into a dead thing.

  “Don’t talk to him,” I said. “You’ll remember he’s a man.”

  “He ain’t a man to me.”

  “God will tell you otherwise.”

  She nodded.

  “Don’t overthink it. Don’t look at his eyes. Aim the gun, look away, squeeze the trigger.”

  “And it’ll be done?”

  “He will,” I admitted. “You won’t be.”

  “It’ll always be there?”

  I nodded.

  “I want it,” she whispered. “He burned my baby.”

  “Anybody asks you, Eliza, things got hairy here.”

  “How?”

  “Bad turn. He had me down. You were deputized by the moment.”

  “You were going to die,” she said, understanding.

  I stepped away from the barrel of the shotgun. She stiffened when she saw Harman again. The coils of bloody sausage he juggled in his hands didn’t seem to bother her. He started to hobble to his elbows, trying to stand up, to say
something, but she did good.

  The deep, throaty howl of the twelve gauge echoed out over the mountains. Smoke swept away in the dry wind.

  Eliza dropped the shotgun. She lowered her head and didn’t look up at me, but when she reached out and fell into me, everything came loose. She screamed as she cried. She bit my shoulder. We stood in the field, smelling the burning wood, listening to the crickets mourn for her.

  We turned away from the barn. Away from the bodies.

  16

  A week later it rained. The drops were big and fat. The wind cut sideways. The water didn’t care. It went on for hours at a time, turning everything misty, gray, and dull.

  Cicero and I sat outside my office, avoiding the rain by sitting under the awning. We shared a small bit of whiskey, not enough to get drunk, but enough to get us thinking. There was a lot to think about, but like all other things, likely not enough time to think it.

  A few blocks down the street, Blackpeak’s church bustled with life. People came and went, men dressed in nice suits, women in long dresses that they had to keep up from the mud. Umbrellas stuck up like mushrooms from the crowds. Some people stopped in the street and gave how-do-you-dos and God-be-with-yous.

  “Think we should go?” Cicero asked me.

  “Maybe. Maybe good to give them some room, too.”

  “You their friend?”

  “I am.”

  “It’s their son’s memorial. You have every right to be there. You tried your best to protect him.”

  I nodded, sipping whiskey.

  “You risked your life for his.”

  I kept watching the people. “He’s not alive.”

  “So?”

  “I tried. I didn’t succeed.”

  “And that matters because?”

  “Because they know.”

  Because there’d been nothing left of Joshua to find.

  I poured us both more whiskey. The people eventually swarmed into the church and the road went silent except for the rain pooling in its dips. Inside the chapel, a booming voice praised the Lord and said some things from the Book. I couldn’t hear what, exactly.

  I was surprised Cicero was still around. We never spoke much after the incident at the Fulton farm. I nudged him some gratitude money and invited him to finish out the rest of his sentence in a comfortable room. The next day he came back, and the next, even though I didn’t tell him he needed to. I owed him something for his riflework. For dragging me like a lump of half-cooked beef out of the burning remains of the barn.

  I turned the glass in my hands. ”Where’d you learn to shoot?”

  He squinted at the church but didn’t give me an answer.

  “You got an eye that can put a bullet into a target a few inches out of a cigarette at a hundred yards. You’ve got no problem killing a man.”

  “Or a woman,” he said, both out of playful pride and out of something else. A hint of ruthlessness.

  “So you’ve done it before.”

  “When I’ve had to. I’m just an actor,” he admitted. “Shakespearean. Deal with a bunch of actors and Englishmen all day and you’ll learn that you don’t get any acknowledgment in a pair of suspenders and dirty long johns, and even less with shitty aim.”

  “What did you do that’s bad enough to send a Shakespearean actor halfway across the country into a shithole like Blackpeak?”

  “You didn’t mention Gregdon’s ear.”

  “Huh?”

  “You can’t leave that off of my list of credentials,” he said, taking on his fake British accent. “I worked bloody hard at that. Don’t you forget it.”

  Ten minutes or so went by. Father Steward stopped shouting inside the church. The doors didn’t open yet, but I expected them to burst at any minute with the mourners looking to fill their bellies. “I appreciate what you did at the Fulton place. So do they.”

  “What you’re saying, Marshal Faust,” Cicero clarified, still tapping his hat, “is that I can leave when I’m ready. I’ve paid my due.”

  “Judge is coming now, just not for you.”

  Partridge wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon. The rifle had knocked something out of place in his head. Ever since the night at the Fultons, he’d been under guard at Doctor Levinworth’s, fading in and out of consciousness. Citizens of Blackpeak jumped at the chance to be deputies for a few hours at a time, even if it just meant keeping a beefy old prick like Partridge in his bed at gunpoint. “I never asked: the third man on foot – not Harman, not Partridge, but—“

  “The one you shot, but didn’t kill?” Cicero smiled at me. His mustache twitched. “Found him bleeding next to the house. I was going to knock him out, but he sort of took care of things for me.” He put two fingers in his mouth and flicked his thumb like a pistol-hammer.

  “He was scared.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Not of you, though,” I said.

  “I was the only person with a gun around.”

  “Not the gun,” I said. “Of the Gregdons. He’d rather die than face their disappointment. Or the Magnate's, whoever the hell he thinks he is."

  “I take it they won’t like you much after this, Faust.”

  I heard the joyous sounds of hymns emanating from the church. They got louder as the front doors opened and a small figure dressed in black swept her way out, ignoring the rain. She seated herself on the front stoop of the church and buried her head in her arms. Eliza Fulton looked like she was trying to escape the noise, the praise, and the memories. “I’ll be back in a bit, Cicero,” I said.

  “I might not be here, Marshal.”

  He leaned forward and extended a hand to me. We shook. He adjusted his glasses and placed his bowler back atop his head, peering out along the landscape of Blackpeak. “It’s been fun.”

  I walked in a brisk stride toward the church, hoping every step would carry me further away.

  I sat down next to Eliza Fulton. She wore a thick veil around her face, but even through it, I could see the tears working their way down through the caked makeup she wore. “You’re getting wet, Mrs. Fulton.” I put my elbows on my knees, cupping a cigarette to keep it from the rain.

  “It's suffocating me in there.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “Things have changed.”

  “You two have that talk yet?”

  She picked invisible burs on her skirt, trying to find something to do with her shaking hands. Normally, they would have had something in them – a Bible, a rosary – but they were unoccupied, and she seemed particularly restless. When she turned her face to look at me, I saw an Eliza Fulton I had never really seen before. There were dark bags under her eyes, liquor on her breath. “I asked Him to protect you. Did you know that? I asked Him to protect you both when it all came crumbling down. Why He’d only do half of what I asked,” she wondered aloud, tugging at fabric, “I can’t ever understand. What did Joshua do that God didn’t like, Marshal Faust?”

  “Being your boy, I’d bet everything I owned that he did everything the way he was supposed to.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  I still had the blisters on my hands, but they were fading every day. I blew out smoke into the rain and watched it get sliced apart. “I can’t. I can just hope real hard.”

  When I finished my cigarette, I flicked the remaining paper into the street and let it drown in a muddy puddle. Before I walked away, her tiny hand reached up to grip mine. It squeezed. Her muscles felt colder and harder. “Your friend, he found your hand and pulled you out of the rubble and the fire. It was like God had put you in a little papoose and made sure you wouldn’t get burned so badly. Did you feel Him, Marshal? Did you feel His favor?”

  “I don’t remember, Mrs. Fulton. It was black and hot. I was scared.”

  “You must have known He was there with you.”

  “And if I didn’t?”

  She’d scraped up her sleeve by then, until the tender skin beneath showed its face to the world: a s
eries of half-healed gashes glistened on her wrist, some fresher, some more angry and red than the others. Under her breath, she said, “I can just hope real hard.”

  Paul came out into the rain a few minutes later, decked all in black save for the gauze bandage wrapped around his head. He said nothing to me. His pupils were just holes, empty and vast. He leaned down next to Eliza, took her hand, helped her stand.

  “He did what I wanted, didn’t He,” Eliza said to me. “He protected you. So why don’t it feel right?”

  “Come on, Eliza,” Paul said.

  “Why don’t it feel right at all?”

  I walked away from them. He could pick up the pieces better than I'd be able to.

  Several more days passed. Away from the town where the ground was soft, Harman, Knox, and the other two members of the Gregdon clan were stuffed in a shallow and unmarked grave. Nobody would remember them. Ivanmore did good work.

  Things began to trickle back to their normal ways. I breakfasted at the Crooked Cocoon Saloon every morning, trying to avoid the pastries at all costs. And despite his say-so, Cicero never left. I suppose he liked the girls, the booze, and the fights.

  “Thought I’d stick around,” he told me over a pitcher of cold coffee I’d made the night before. It tasted like oil and dirt. “Enjoy this place a little more without getting the hell beat out of me. Fulton situation’s on everybody’s mind. I’m old news. Thought I’d do my part and vouch for Partridge’s being such a piece of shit when the trial comes. Never been a witness,” he reasoned. “Sounds exhilarating.”

  Trial came and went. Barely an hour’s time out of the town’s morning. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Wasn’t much fuss. Couple of Crown Rock lawmen with stiff jackets and even less exciting senses of humor came to collect Partridge up. Didn’t matter; speaking wasn’t his forte anymore. The only mouthpiece to the Gregdon situation rattled off in the back of a cart, and justice being what it was, it left without satisfaction – and without the last bullet to put everything back to balance.

  “How long are you staying in town, Cicero?” ​I asked as we played dominoes in my office.

  “As long as it stays interesting.”