Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  It pained my heart greatly to see that it had come to this, for I could not help but wonder how the course of young Jim Wilson’s life might have run if I had been a stronger man and sent him back to his Iowa home without so much as a bowl of breakfast mush. It may be that I should have fired one or two of those warning shots a trifle closer and given him a crease along the leg that first day. I expect he would have lost all interest in me then, and the life I had to offer. Around me he had become no better than a frisky cur that has learned to kill chickens and must be put down, for it has picked up the habit young and can never be broken of something that it so enjoys.

  Or it may be that he would have turned this way no matter where he was.

  Well, get to it, you little whelp, I said to him. Don’t just stand there looking down the barrel at me.

  Few have been the times that I have seen a pistol go off so close in front of me, just a pace or two, and the fact that the bullet still swerves wide never ceases to amaze. And if it still has the power to surprise me so, I can scarce but imagine what must go through the head of the fellow holding the gun. He refuses to believe he could have missed, and so he tries again, and again, and again. And all the while, I just look him calm in the eye.

  Lord have mercy, Jim Wilson whispered through the smoke of his empty gun. That ain’t natural.

  That’ll make it my turn now, I said while drawing one of my Navy Colts from beneath the blanket. And damn your black little soul for forcing me to take it.

  This time he did not have me to hide behind. At least I made it quick for him, before he had a chance to blubber and do himself disgrace. And as he fell, I felt the familiar old pain, now lodged up in my chest and my spine, and all the way through me from front to back. While he did not know it, and never would, Jim Wilson had helped me take one step closer to the end of that long savage road of my own making.

  For that much, in spite of his treachery, I owed him a decent burying.

  So this was how I lost myself the one and only partner I have ever had, and in the year that has passed since then I have found no desire within myself to gain another. The lonesomeness has never grown so fierce that it could make me forget the look in Jim Wilson’s eyes when he saw that I meant to undo what my company had done to him, the only way left to undo it.

  Too, a man does not need a partner when he senses deep within his bones that his time is drawing short, that the end of his road lies just ahead around one or two bends more. This is the pull and the promise that have brought me here into Cheyenne, the place where I will at last, if there be any mercy in the world at all, lay down the burden of my life.

  You who are reading this tale, be you the first to discover what shall remain of my body, or any other who may later come to read it, I ask that you forbear from judging me too harshly for most of these killings I have done. They have been necessary, just to rid this earth of me, as you shall soon understand, but I have done my best to kill mostly those the world is better off without. I regret the lawmen I have shot, as I believe most of them were decent fellows who but wanted to keep the peace. More and more I have tried hard to limit myself to those men who come looking for me on reputation, men who have no better ambition for their lives than being the best at ending the lives of others, and I expect that being the one to cut me down would enhance a man’s notoriety by a considerable amount. Many have died trying, and I expect they are not much missed.

  So here I sit in a Cheyenne hotel room, with the first store-bought ink and paper I have possessed since the earliest days of the War. I have covered many a page with the nib of this pen, and still it feels to be a strange item to hold instead of a pistol, and my hand is prone to cramping. But the sun has scarcely a couple hours yet before rising and I want to be done and dead before it does, for the dark streets should still be empty, and I hear that those horse thieves tried and convicted here the other day are not due for hanging til an hour past dawn.

  I expect no one should have much objection if the gallows out there have already been put to good use by the time the fellows it was built for climb its stairs.

  I know that I will be a terrible sight to look upon, and that those who find me will like as not first suspect that such a thing was wrought by the hand of another. I implore you to hunt for no killer, for the one who did it is the same one who lies in the dust beneath the gallows planks, and the one who inks these pages.

  It is certain that you will wonder to the heavens how a man could do such a thing to himself, how he could tolerate even to think of inflicting so hideous a wound to his own flesh, but what you must realize is that most of it was inflicted already, and I was but finishing the job. And the finishing of it will likely be easier than admitting to how it came to be.

  It was late in the War, with but half a year to go in the fighting. In those days no one with a measure of clear candor in his heart could believe that the Union would be beaten. But the certainty of his defeat is not a thing a man can admit to, and so the knowledge of it turns inward. It eats away at him and makes him mean, and if he was mean before, it makes him meaner still.

  For Bloody Bill Anderson and the rest of us, many things we did in those days had nothing to do with fighting a war. Instead they were all about filling our pockets with plunder and bringing ruination to whatever offended our eyes and taking out our fury on a world we were not sure was still worth living in.

  I avow now it was the likes of us that went a long ways toward making it so terrible a place to begin with.

  When we rode into the Missouri town of Glasgow, Bloody Bill’s days by then numbered less than two weeks’ worth, and it was the final October that would see the War betwixt North and South. There was no fighting to be done in Glasgow. Our only mission was to rob from a rich Union-lover named Benjamin Lewis. The things that Bill did to him over the longest night of that man’s life are too atrocious to tell, and among the very worst I ever witnessed during the War.

  Come morning we decided to take our leave of Glasgow, and a group of us who yet remained at Lewis’s mansion deemed we would rather ride off with our bellies full. We ordered two of his house servants into the kitchen so as to fix us a breakfast of eggs and ham and biscuits and such. Both of them were free young Negro women, and as they went about their work they did it quickly and quietly and rare was the moment their eyes settled anywhere other than the food or the floor. I am certain that each man while he ate looked upon these two free women and must have thought that here was the reason for all the strife and violence we had borne these years.

  And once our plates had been licked clean, we forced ourselves upon these two, one after the other after the other. I took my turn same as the rest, and because I was the oldest by quite a margin, the boys and the younger men I rode with and shot with all laughed and took a vote amongst themselves that I go last. I might add that the boy who first gave voice to this idea was the same boy who a night or two later called me Methuselah, then died a minute later on the wrong end of my gun. I expect I must have been nursing a grudge some.

  The face of that young woman beneath me is still burned into my memory, even to the very tone of her skin. She had been stretched out along the length of a kitchen worktable, while the other was taken atop the banquet table in the dining room where we had just eaten our breakfasts, and everywhere there lay the sharp pieces of china plates smashed against the walls and floor. Beneath me, the girl in the kitchen did not move or struggle, nor did she look anywhere but the ceiling and her jaw was set firm and the breath whistled loud through her nostrils. There was blood across her mouth, but whether she had bitten her lip or it came from being slapped in the face by the earlier men to have her I do not know. I expect it is a small distinction at best.

  When I finished and got off her I saw that no one else was left in the kitchen, that the others had moved on in their getting ready to leave. This did not escape her attention either, and as I busied myself with hitching my trousers up and buckling my gunbelt, she rushed at me w
ith a kitchen knife. Rather than sink it into my chest or neck, she whipped it from below and chopped it up into my crotch, and when she gave the blade a hard yank upwards and out again, I could feel its cold keen edge split through the fabric of my trousers and underdrawers and slice into the skin beneath, just to the side of my sac. I fell back and to the floor, and must have howled loud enough to be heard in Kansas City.

  She did not force her advantage and further the attack, yet if she had I doubt I could have weathered it. Never have I seen, before or since, so much hatred in one person’s eyes, even the fearsome eyes of Bloody Bill himself, and every last ounce of it was directed at me. She stood above me in the rags of her dress and spoke, but I did not understand a word she said, for they were all in some language unfamiliar to my ear, and every last one sounded as though it were being spat at me. Her eyes were wide and wild as her voice rose to a scream, and her gaze traveled slow and deliberate from the bleeding wound at my groin up past my belt and past my filled belly and the center of my chest and on up past my throat and jaw and between my eyes and right on up to the crown of my head.

  Such commotion could not help but draw the attention of those fellow raiders of mine that yet remained in the house. They burst in though the kitchen doorway, and as they took in the sight of me on the floor and the raped girl standing with the knife, it was still her mind that worked swiftest. She had to know the kind of treatment that awaited her now. All that remained was for her to deny them this grim business, so she turned the knife around and using both hands plunged it up under her ribcage and into her own heart. Just as I had never seen more hateful eyes, so too had I never seen anyone die with a countenance that held more defiance.

  Yet still they shot her as she fell.

  I have lived with the events of that morning every day of my life since. How I wish I could tell you it was naught but conscience. And it is, but the matter runs deeper than that, for the wound she dealt me has never healed. Oh, it has knitted itself, of a fashion, so that I do not continually bleed like a woman on her monthly cycle, but the wound itself refuses to heal, and worse yet, it has spread.

  Over time it has slowly ascended through the center of my body, splitting me from front to back, no different than were I to have straddled a crosscut saw with a logger at either end.

  The understanding of what has happened to me did not come all at once. It came upon me gradually, a little here and a bit there. By the end of the war I could sink my fist up past the thick flaps of skin and into my internals and take hold of them like a nest of snakes. Some years later I could reach directly in through the front for a feel of my liver. A few years past that, my lungs. And still it climbs. As I sit here and complete this tale, it is within an inch of the bottom of my throat.

  There was no single day when I realized I could not be shot, only a day when I knew by all rights I should have been hit, and soon another day just like it, and then another, until there were more of them than I could count. And somewhere in that chain of days I came to understand that the wound cut deeper and climbed higher only after I had killed yet again. Thus was the full ghastliness of my life rendered complete: In spite of my body falling apart, my death could not be accomplished but by the killing of others.

  Over time, to keep the halves of myself together, I have learned to turn my clothing into a kind of shell, with stiff trousers, two pairs usually, and the thick leather of my gunbelt strapped tight around my middle. It is rarely off me, and only then when I am safely flat upon my back.

  I expect I must have been cursed that morning, a plague set upon me by a woman much wronged and who was herself doomed to die. The tone of the words she spoke, and the fury she spoke them with, were frightful enough, and though I still do not know their meaning, I have to wonder if at least a few of them did not echo the words proclaimed by President Lincoln at the start of the War:

  A house divided cannot stand.

  And so this brings it near to finished.

  I have lived about as miserable and worthless a life as a man can live, and blame no one but myself. The worst feature of this climbing wound has been not knowing how it will go once it rises past the collar of my shirt, into my very head. If my jaw will crack apart and I can no longer eat, if my nose will split wide and my eyes fall from their sockets and my brains be pulled in half.

  But it may be that I have found a way to have it done with all at once.

  Though it has been little used since the War, for all these years I have carried a cavalry saber picked from a Missouri field after the passage of General Jo Shelby and his men. Unlike most sabers, it is near to straight instead of curved, and some hours ago, after night had come to Cheyenne, I crept down to the street and checked the fit of its blade across the framework underneath the gallows built for the morning’s hanging. I expect with a little hammering I can set it solid enough.

  And then I will set that trap door ready to spring, and run a rope up from the lever so I can pull it myself. I will draw my Bowie knife and stick these pages to the timber of the gallows so that my demise will be no mystery. Then I will climb those steps and be glad to do it, and stand on that door and remove most all that binds me together. And once I am certain that I am straddling the length of the saber waiting below, I will yank that rope and trip the lever without another thought to it.

  I am so wearily sick of wearing this gunbelt, and the life it has meant.

  I am so sick of killing men so that I might hope to die.

  And you who have been first to come upon this tale, all I ask is that you turn and make a good inspection of the halves of me that lie beneath the gallows. I expect I will be dead, and you will surely think me so at a glance, but I ask you to look hard and long. And if some part of me yet twitches or tries to crawl, I beg you to show mercy.

  But do not waste your bullets.

  Try kerosene and fire.

  Driving the Last Spike

  The last time he’ll see her, Kerry will still be young, about the same as she is now. The last time he’ll see her, she will be reaching for his hand. The last time he’ll see her, there won’t be any tears — tears are for situations where there’s still the hope of turnaround.

  Her hair will still be blonde, but the roots will be growing out, auburn, nothing to have been ashamed of in the first place. The cut won’t have changed, falling close to her shoulders with her bangs trimmed straight across her brows, west coast Cleopatra with eyes blinking from out of an ash gray blur, painted onto her face or across the horizon. Their Pacific Egypt burning, don’t rule out the possibility of the sand itself baking to brittle glass in a tsunami of fire.

  Or maybe it’s only sunset through smog.

  Garrett can’t say how he knows this will be the last time he’ll see her, he just does, and he doesn’t need any billboard or neon sign or voices whispering in his ear.

  Just because you’re paranoid, we’ve all heard before, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  And just because you’re epileptic doesn’t mean you can’t actually see the future.

  “I don’t want to get into everything on the phone. You’ll understand when you get here,” she told him. Only this morning? Only. Harsh 8:00 a.m. jangle the culmination of Kerry’s few days’ worth of disappearance and fretting himself sick. Sicker. “Take whatever of mine that has any value, and sell it. Then bring me the cash. Would you do that for me?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “You mean you really haven’t guessed?”

  “It wouldn’t be Skip Ackerman’s house, would it?”

  She doesn’t answer, and, well, that says it all, doesn’t it?

  The box in his arms is lighter than it looks, bulky if little more than clothing inside, and maybe it makes him look seedy and pathetic along the blocks of shopfronts on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, not his fault there are no parking places any closer. Today’s forecast, sunny, but you knew that already. It’s September and miserable, the Santa Ana wind searing down from
the mountains, full of grit and recrimination.

  Ever since moving here, he has always thought of Southern California — Los Angeles especially, a natural epicenter — as a place where great epochs go to die. They arrive on powerful legs but are sore and rotten inside, heaving out lungfuls of corrupted air as they snort and bellow in fury over their lack of future.

  Garrett still remembering a time, if just barely, when he had one himself.

  He’s in the middle of the block when the warning flag starts to wave in his temporal lobe. Or wherever it hides in his skull — idiopathic, he has his condition but no evident cause, just born that way. Special, blessed. Once upon a more colorful time, didn’t we regard epilepsy as a divine illness, God poking his vast head between those misfiring synapses and chewing on neurons?

  Threw away his meds years ago after realizing that he was saner when he allowed himself to go ahead and have the seizures. Phenytoin, carbamazepine, valproic acid — into the trash with them, while he opened arms wide to his petit mal malfunction and began to love it back: you Sybil, you Delphic oracle, you polished obsidian mirror volcanized from my own nervous system. A different story, maybe, if he was prone to swallowing his tongue, but for Garrett it’s just like virtual reality, only wireless.

  His stomach knows first, abruptly weightless and frustrated, wanting to fly. A flash of light that is no color in the visible spectrum, and a sense of unstable ground; the snap of gulls’ wings in his ears and a smell like wet limestone in his nose. Long ago they told him his eyelids flicker and his lower jaw jerks. From onset to incapacitation takes about a minute, the reason he avoids driving in heavy traffic but has otherwise learned to live with the gamble.

  Weaving, now vertiginous, over to one of the sidewalk tables where couples sit drinking frothy concoctions from glasses that drip with clean, clear sweat, he sets the box down and just before zoning out hears the conversations cease, then resume, now full of loathing. Gone thirty or forty seconds, more than time enough to appall every last one of them — maybe not enough to ruin their day but lunch hour is shot to hell, because he is fingered by chaos and imperfection and for all they know it may be contagious.