His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  Quick exchanges, quick escapes. Take your pick.

  “So here we are,” I said. “You frequent this place a lot, Curtis?”

  “If it weren’t for the Western Elbow and the Gregdons, that piss-ant town wouldn’t be around and you wouldn’t have that fat star on your chest or the salary that comes with it.”

  “Really rolling in it,” I said.

  “Always beer in the Crooked Cocoon and the Horseshoe Junction. Always feed at the feed shop. Always coffee in your mug when you want it. That ain’t Kallum at all. You think any of those so-called businessmen gonna hump it all the way out here? That’s a Gregdon job. We buy all the goods from the Western Elbow, maybe sometimes we take it, and we sell it back to Sloman and the Frenchman behind the bar and whoever else wants it.”

  “Black market.”

  “Mutual business interests,” he said.

  “I take it Kallum knows?”

  “Kallum doesn’t give a fuck as long as business is good. Miners mine, outlaws scuffle, drinkers drink, and the marshal marshals,” he said, stifling a grin. “God, you some damn fool, sliding right into the general plan.”

  “So what, Kallum constructs this town to work like clockwork so he can—” I spun my hand in the air like a windmill, “—spend his days searching for your so-called Well?”

  “Now you’re not so stupid,” Curtis said. “Enough talk. The seven-fifty from Crown Rock makes its way through here in about twenty minutes, and all goes well—”

  “That’s your ticket out of here?”

  He tightened his hand around his horse’s reins. “Let’s get this shit done with.”

  Curtis traced his way down to the tracks. His horse’s hooves knocked stones down in front of it. Once we both hit the flatland, Curtis motioned for me to follow him along the tracks.

  I didn’t pry into Curtis about this Well. I rathered he tell me what he wanted to. Whether or not I was dealing with high-strung stories or low-brow rumors, you couldn’t toss a question at Curtis and expect a clear response: he thought more like buckshot than straight bullets. Before Nycendera, before seeing the Magnate bend the rules of the world like some cheap bit of leather-work, I would as soon spit as I would believe a single sound that rolled off Curtis’s greasy tongue.

  Nycendera’s warning came alive in my memory: Below our feet lingers that which should be claimed by no man. He yearns. He knows.

  So Kallum and the Magnate. Was it some kind of race, then? A dash to whatever end this Well allowed them? And how the hell had I managed to go all this time ignorant to it?

  We rode for a thousand yards, keeping the rocky hills on our right and the tracks on our left. Gregdon halted us when he got to where he wanted to be. He leaped off his horse and led her a few more paces up, where a hitching pole had been driven sloppily into the earth. I dismounted and tied mine up too. “Up this way,” Curtis said.

  Set against the side of the stony hill I saw an outcropping. I climbed up after him, my boots scraping against the dust and my fingers finding every crack. Tucked between two large boulders, made out of wood the same dull brown as the dry earth itself, there was a tiny shed with a slanted roof and a single boarded window. The tiny railhouse overlooked the tracks. Wasn’t no bigger than those fishing shacks you see in winter paintings. It hovered, held up by frail supports between the rocks. I imagine you had to know it was there to see it in the first place. Curtis helped me up the rest of the hill.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  “This is what you wanted to show me?”

  “That’s inside.” He swallowed. “It’s good of you. To do this. Most wouldn’t have. Not for me.”

  He reached forward and pulled open the door to the shack. All the wood creaked.

  The first thing I noticed was the stench.

  The rancid smell punched me in the mouth, stabbed my nostrils, made my ears start to ring as my senses all exploded inside of me. It reeked like pools of stagnant blood, thick as milk.

  “Inside,” said Gregdon, who covered his mouth and nose with his hand.

  “Shit no,” I coughed. “You first. No fish, no barrels.”

  “I wouldn’t have brought your ass out this far if I just wanted to put you somewhere you couldn’t escape and shoot you full of holes, Faust. In. We ain’t got time for this.”

  Order didn’t matter. Gregdon could have shot me if I went in first, but he wouldn’t, just like I wouldn’t shoot him. Thought about it, of course. He did too. Our eyes said as much.

  Lawmen, outlaws, all the same mold at the heart.

  I slipped inside.

  He yanked the door shut. There was a bundle of burlap on the floor, curled up like a pillbug. In the darkness, cut only by slants of dusty light coming in through the boarded window, I recognized the shape as well as I could. Could’ve been blind and known enough by the stink. “How long has it been here,” I asked.

  “Few days. Didn’t know where else to put it. It’s why I came to get you. What I wanted to talk about.”

  “You want some kind of investigation?”

  “I want you to look at it. Go ahead,” Curtis said, sweat running down his face. “Go ahead, Faust.”

  The burlap had just been draped over the corpse. I slid the tip of my knife underneath the cloth and lifted. The skin had almost gone gray, wrinkled like a grape left out in the sun. A new blast of stink hit me, made my mouth water. The sweltering little room started to spin. I caught a glimpse of knotted white hair crawling with white slugs and a wide, gaping grin, toothless and laughing.

  Rufus Oarsdale was just as ugly dead as he had been when he was alive.

  “Goddamnit!” I lunged back on reflex.

  “Had to show you the body, Faust. You had to know. You had to know, because if you didn’t, fuck, who was going to?” With a cold and deliberate hand, Curtis drew his .44 Russian and placed himself against the single door to the small hut. He cocked back the hammer and pointed it at my gut from his hip. “Keep your cool, Marshal. I need you to.”

  “Did you do this?”

  Rufus Oarsdale’s stony face didn’t tell me shit. He just kept staring at the ceiling. A fly perched on his upper lip, then crawled curiously into his left nostril. The old wound in my leg started to act up, the scar spasming with every heartbeat. I had taken a bullet for Oarsdale. His lucky bullet.

  Curtis took off his black hat and threw it down on the floor between the tips of my boots. “I’ve been running for three days, Faust. After three days, there ain’t many other places you can run when you know the world’s on your tail. Sooner or later, you have to find a place that feels right to be, turn your back, and close your eyes to it all.

  “This is my place. This is the place where I’m going to turn my back to everything else.”

  “Why bring me this far,” I said, “if you only plan to tail it out of here? You want me to clean this up and not ask questions? Not demand you answer?”

  “I done this for Rufus. Wanted to clear my conscience.”

  Gregdon thrust the gun down toward Oarsdale’s dead body and discharged three quick shots. The gunshots sounded like flat boards being smacked together on the inside of my skull. “I didn’t know where else to stash the fuckin’ body, Faust. Three days ago I lured him here, ‘cause the old man always liked cheap trades, because he didn’t have much, you know? Man, you should’a listened to him babble all the way here, apologizing to me for what you done.” Curtis wiped his mouth. “When he came inside, I drew and put two slugs in his back without him ever knowing.”

  “So you did him,” I said, “for some kind of revenge?”

  “I don’t give a shit about revenge, Faust.”

  “You gave a fuck when it concerned me.”

  “I was told to go for you,” he said. “Hell, before Rufus here, I ain’t ever killed nobody. It scares the shit out of me, idea of killing a man.” His shoulders shook as he tried to pull a laugh from somewhere inside. “You’d think all the ways I’d played around the past few years, t
otin’ guns and threatening people just because they breathed, I’d actually have the balls to do something.”

  “You didn’t have any issue drawing on me.”

  “Ain’t the same as squeezing the trigger, Faust. You know that.”

  Somewhere in the process, my knife had found its way back into its sheath and I’d slid one of my Colts out of its holster. I’d already cocked the thing and was aiming at him from the hip. Some things come natural. Almost too natural.

  While Curtis tried to keep his seams together, I spoke. “I think it’s time you start telling me why we’re here, Gregdon, besides clearing your pretty shoulders of all that hard burden.”

  “Can’t. Nervous. ‘Fraid of saying what I got to say.”

  Maybe it was the reek of death thickening the air, maybe it was the trickle of sweat sliding down my neck, but I was restless, ready to flee. I wanted it all over with as soon as possible. I tapped a finger on the bridge of my nose. “Raise that revolver of yours, Gregdon. I want you to take aim right on this spot.”

  His eyes flicked left and right before he raised the gun and steadied it.

  “Take control, Gregdon. You’re not ready to say shit because you’re too much of a child to be responsible for what you do or what you say. Find the irons and put them right between my eyes.”

  His hand jittered. The metal frame of the gun started to rattle. “Faust, you’re pissin’ me off.”

  “Take control, you little shit,” I said. “Aim at me. Cock the hammer.”

  His teeth chattered like an off-time clock.”Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “You’re the man with the secrets,” I said, “but you’re the man with the gun, too. You could tell me you still suck your thumb like it was your Mama’s tit and still be in control, because that’s your gun, and I’m your target, and if I don’t play shit straight, that’ll be my bullet.”

  I saw little flashes of light in his eyes like thoughts coming to the surface. A gun can make any man feel stronger, and with Blackpeak’s sole authority pinned down under his sights, Curtis Gregdon started remembering his boldness.

  Training an outlaw how to be an outlaw. You learn to do new things every day.

  “I didn’t want to kill him,” said Curtis with a steady voice. “Faust, I ain’t no killer. It don’t take no killer just to be an outlaw. It’s always been easy, doin’ shit that ain’t always right, but killing?” Then his tone fell flat as a sheet. “Pa, he told me—” He shook his head. “The Magnate, he wanted him.”

  “Dead?”

  “Alive. Rufus Oarsdale was the only one who knew the way to it. To the Well. To that end-point all these power-hungry dipshits are fumbling over themselves to find. Magnate might’ve thought him just some two-bit thief and a drunk that couldn’t do anything that wasn’t worth being fixed right again, but if it meant having Rufus Oarsdale lead him to the Well, he’d kiss his ass.

  “Pa told me, he told me—” Curtis’s words became frantic and breathless, a broken-dam rush of rapid whispers. “‘The Well chose Rufus Oarsdale to be its Arbiter.’ He divined it, right out the air. Did his spells, called on his spirit broker, discovered through whatever dark avenues he travels that there was somethin’ special about old Rufus here.”

  A tickle in my brain. A little spark, blown in from far, far away.

  There was something special. Until Curtis spilled it...

  I gritted my teeth.

  Shit. I realized too late—

  I hadn’t re-soaked the whiskey-rag.

  “You could dig and dig and dig for centuries to find that Well and never find it. Dig yourself straight to Hell and back, never get a glimpse unless the Well wants you to. Shit, Rufus barely even knew, too damn drunk and blasted out his mind to ever be of much use if the Well called on him. Can you believe it?” The outlaw laughed, a loud and barking noise. “An Oarsdale. Rufus fuckin’ Oarsdale, special inside and out. How you ‘spose it picks some pimple like him to be its Arbiter?”

  You weren’t supposed to know about this, the Magnate said.

  Curtis began to tromp in a wary circle, shaking the edge of his gun like a maddened baton.

  I asked, “If the Magnate wanted Rufus, why’d you plug him, Curtis?”

  “Because he wanted him,” he snapped.

  The Well protects itself. And if putting the knowledge of its location in the mind of a drunken half-wit is how the Well fortified against prying eyes and prying minds…

  “Two shots to the back. Dropped dead. No mess, no crying, nothing to come back and haunt me, Faust.”

  …then I suppose I’d need to play whatever game the Well had in store, even if it meant ripping that title of Arbiter straight out of Rufus Oarsdale’s veins.

  “One minute he was alive, the next, there was smoke, and he was still.”

  He blinked twice, then wiped sweat off his runny forehead.

  “If fate lined up,” Curtis sputtered, “and fuckin’ Kallum could find the Well, and if…if the Magnate could find the Well, then who says I couldn’t? If I killed Rufus—” he knocked his pistol against his chest, “—maybe I could be Arbiter. Maybe it’d choose me. Maybe I could find that goddamn Well, and ask it to bring my brother back, ask it to put back together what you fuckin’ took away from me, you bloodthirsty sonofabitch!”

  His gun reached out to me.

  My son, the Magnate muttered. Such a greedy little prick. Avarice is a child’s call to action.

  Curtis had started to light up like the sulfur head of a match. “None of it’s fair. None of it was ever supposed to be fair. My own father put his own sons out to do his filthy bitch-work, and for what? To put them under his heel? Make’em do whatever the hell he wanted? Billy’s dead. Billy’s dead, and there ain’t a damn thing in this world that’s worth going through it all feelin’ like I’m half-put together without my brother near me.

  “So fuck the Magnate, and fuck Kallum and the Well, and all these little otherworldly games. And you too, Elias Faust. Fuck you too.” I thought his teeth would shatter in his mouth. “I put two bullets in this old bastard’s back to hope I could be the Arbiter of the Well. Just one chance to make a wish and set the world in reverse. For once, let Curtis Gregdon be at the top of it all. The Well didn’t want that, though. World didn’t want it either. Faust, how do you do it?”

  “What,” I said.

  “Kill,” he said. “I’ve seen you do it. You don’t ever stop, don’t hesitate.”

  “I’m good at it,” I said.

  “Only until you die. But there’s something else,” he said, realigning the sights with the spot between my eyes. “There’s gotta be something else about you. Some reason it’s so easy…”

  Faces started coming to mind, hovering inside the black pistol-mouth like pictures in a metal frame. Billy Gregdon. Harman, who still felt enough like my own kill. The memories didn’t bring with them the quick pangs of belly-weight you usually get when you feel connected to something. No happiness, no sadness, nothing.

  “I just don’t linger on it much, Curtis,” I said. “I don’t think about blood or pain or bullets or dead things. I don’t think about how there could be other options. I sort of think of it like a circle, one just between you, my gun, and me. Have to complete the circle.”

  “A circle,” he said. “You just make a circle.”

  “All it seems to ever need is—“

  “A bullet?” Curtis said.

  “A bullet,” I said.

  “So,” he said, “who’s going to close our circle, Faust? Is it gonna be you, or is it gonna be me? The circle’s gotta close.”

  “Here, Curtis, we’re just people with guns. We’re just solving problems.”

  He’s gone against his loyalties.

  “But the circle’s gotta close.”

  His recklessness has put Blackpeak – and the Well – at risk.

  “Maybe some other day, Curtis,” I said. “Maybe not today.”

  I can’t forgive this of him.

  Cur
tis locked his elbows. The Gregdon inside of him started to awaken. “It ends today, Faust. It needs to. I killed the Arbiter of the Well. They’ll be out for blood. They’ll have me. Sooner or later, no matter where I’m at, they’ll have me.”

  There has to be an accounting. He stole from me. My son sought to steal the Well from me.

  I ground my teeth until my jaw shot through with pain.

  Curtis tilted his head to the side. “How long has he been talking to you?”

  I reached, very carefully, into my breast pocket.

  I showed him the Eye.

  “Not long,” I said.

  “He’s inside you, Faust. You ain’t even touching it,” the Magnate’s son said, “and he’s got hooks under your skin. God. God.” He swiped his hand down his face, then turned to the wall and drove his head against it several times, until a hearty gash smiled on his brow. “I never let him. I never let him. He didn’t own me. He never will. You don’t own me. You hear me? Now it’s all just circles, isn’t it?”

  I swallowed. “Come with me, Curtis. There can be a fair reckoning. A fair accounting. Let me help.”

  “No,” Curtis said, tone as sharp as a knife. “I told you Blackpeak runs you foul, Faust. I told you it does. Place fucked me up, fucked up all the Gregdons. Fucked up the Magnate and Rufus Oarsdale, too, and now it’s on the way to getting inside of you, too, not letting go. Thought I’d try to give you a warning, but it’s like talking to a goddamn rock. But I’m stronger than that. I refuse. I’m my own man. I’m my own circle.”

  Curtis lowered the gun. He examined the pistol from a distance. Seemed to settle up and relax. He looked at the Eye.

  “Steady hands,” said Curtis. “Steady hands.”

  He opened his mouth like he was going to say something. Curtis angled his wrist, crammed the .44 Russian into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  A volcano of blood exploded out the back of Curtis’s head. A slaughterhouse splatter whipped across the wall and ceiling behind him. A whole mouthful of smoke rolled out from around the barrel. He didn’t fall over back or forward or even to the side, but instead right down like an accordion crushed down by two meaty hands.