Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  “Warren Groves,” said Gideon.

  “You’ve got me at a disadvantage,” said Sheriff Groves. Even his accent rankled, slow and broad as the graben desert.

  More men came out from the sheriff’s office and stood on the boardwalk. Some wore U. S. Cavalry blue, and others Gideon recognized from the cemetery. Pinkertons. Gideon laughed that Warren Groves would not remember his face.

  “I knew your wife,” Gideon said. “Annabelle.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. Knew her well, Sheriff. I am surprised you don’t remember me. I used to call upon Annabelle when she lived on the charity of Bo Fairway, over at the Whitney. Met her when she first came west. Still don’t recall?”

  “Get to the point, mister.”

  This sent Gideon into a swaying, unseemly fit of laughter. He could not help it. He was quivering and giddy at the thought of finally acting out his fantasy.

  “‘Mister,’” said Gideon. “You’re a peach, Sheriff. No wonder Annabelle fell for you. Must have been that sense of humor.”

  “I’ve got to warn you,” said Sheriff Groves. “I’ve had about enough of this nonsense, so unless you want to be laid out in a wagon rut, get to what concerns me.”

  “No need for hostility. I only wanted to offer my heartfelt condolences. Annabelle was a kind, beautiful, wonderfully bright young woman. It is a tragedy that she had to be taken from this earth so prematurely.”

  Sheriff Groves did not reply; he only stood and glared down from the boardwalk at Gideon.

  “Had to die alone, like some sort of kept cat gone and hid under the porch. Had to die ‘cause you stole her away. She only married you to protect herself. Did she ever tell you that one? She was afraid and—”

  “I’m about one second from putting you down.”

  Gideon’s face twisted up in anger, and he waved a finger and shouted at Sheriff Groves. “You cocksucker! You killed her. Murderer! She didn’t love you. She—”

  Sheriff Groves stepped down off the boardwalk and came for Gideon with the clear intent to do harm. Gideon retreated instinctively from the fury. He had not planned to draw out the sheriff so early, but he had talked himself out of any alternative. He reached for the pistol in the waist of his trousers. He gripped the body-warmed wood of the handle and dragged the barrel out along his leg. He brought the gun up.

  Sheriff Groves had both his pistols skinned, and they spoke fire and thunder and smoke. Death came suddenly to Gideon. No time to reflect or see the wheel turn. Two slugs made different paths straight through his head. He tasted blood in his sinuses and saw the battle flag of his memory sink, tattered by canister. He was moving with great speed, moving so fast that Gideon Long was gone before his body hit the dirt.

  “What in God’s name was that?” asked Turk.

  Warren Groves holstered his pistols and looked at the body lying in the road. Blood was spilling beneath its head in a dark pool and ran out of both nostrils and one ear. One leg was out straight and flat, and the other was bent at the knee and began to stretch out with involuntary spasms of the muscles.

  Warren knelt beside the body. Blood poured out of the holes in its forehead and covered the face down to its upper lip in a scarlet veil. The eyes were open and white amid the blood, and they looked up, unseeing, into the twilight sky. He studied the eyes. He recognized them from Green Creek.

  “That is Harlan Long’s son,” said Warren. “He used to walk around town with a brace on his leg. I have killed the man responsible for the train robbery.”

  He crouched and dragged his fingers over the dead man’s eyes to close them. He reached down to the corpse’s shirt just above his trousers, dragged the fabric out of his pants, and exposed the corpse’s pale belly. He felt the stomach with his hands and found not even a scratch.

  “I shot this fella,” Sheriff Groves said. “Before, I mean. I shot him yesterday.”

  “How’s that?” said Turk.

  “Just how I said. I shot him yesterday. He came up out of Green Creek with a kerchief over his face. Recognize his eyes and nose.”

  They turned the body over, and Sheriff Groves lifted the back of the shirt and found no mark there either.

  “Fixed himself in a hurry,” said Turk.

  There came a fragile, fluid gist, in the shadow-shape of a man, telegraphed along unseen wires and through the place where things were not, haunted by vistas that could not be. To this shifting, unfocused eye, no place was seen for more than a moment. Thousands of smoking stones fell from a red sky. Tea-colored seas broke against chiming shores of knife-edged crystal. Black, fallen stones spanned an empty canal that reached to the horizon. Faceless idols leaned haphazard in desert clay. Everywhere yawned the black chasm, not quite infinite but without the white man’s maps.

  Through these shuffling, impossible terrains a parade of liminal beasts moved on two legs and four and ten and none at all and floated with gas-filled bladders on the currents of storms and wriggled in the decay accumulating in fathomless trenches. All these places smelled and tasted the same and were dying, and the light was never warm enough.

  The shadow-shape passed unnoticed, moving far too fast to sense by any means of flesh or device.

  For a waking man it was only a single instant, the time it took Sheriff Groves to holster his pistols, but there existed different things than waking men, and this shadow-shape traveled for ten thousand years and none at all and emerged, encapsulated in the sack of foul liquid, onto the smooth shores of the pool that smelled like fresh marrow cracked from bones. It was Gideon Long, vomiting out a bellyful of cursed broth, retching and heaving himself out of the liquid.

  On hot and sloping rock, transfixed by shafts of colored light, Gideon Long found himself restored again to life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Warren was not sure of the hour and kept the shutters closed so the house remained dark throughout the day. The objects he touched were soft at the edges in the gloom. The house trapped and magnified the sweltering heat. He sweated constantly. The dog refused to stay indoors and lay on the porch while Warren labored within. He packed Annie’s fine things into a trunk for Libby Cole.

  Revenge had come too quickly and easily. He wallowed in the sticky anguish that was meant to be pushed aside by a need to hunt down the man responsible. With Gideon Long dead and already buried there was no new direction only more whiskey and a house filled with Annie’s things.

  Annie kept her pens and pencils in a drawer in the bedroom. She had filled a scratch pad made from pulp paper he’d bought in Santa Fe and a fine art diary picked out of a catalogue and brought by mail all the way from Chicago. Not since before the baby was coming did Warren recall seeing any drawing in the diary. He took it out of the drawer and felt the weight of it and admired the calfskin cover. He opened it to the last page and looked at himself.

  It was clear by the mustache and the brow that it was he sitting at the kitchen table. In the sketch he sat with back bent and arms resting on knees. His hat dangled from one hand. The way the crosshatch shaded his face and the room it was clearly at night. The only light source was the lantern he took with him out to the barn and put on the table late at night with the flame so low it barely shed any light at all.

  This was a private moment and he was surprised that Annie had witnessed it and been able to capture such a thorough sketch without his knowing. The sketch was dated five months ago. He tore it from the book and stuffed it into his pocket. He placed the book in the chest of her belongings.

  In the settling heat of daylight Warren was often tricked by memory and the sound of the house to think that Annie was there. He heard her open the door of the stove and he heard her turn in the bed even though he’d burned it behind the house. He fed carrots to her horse called Morgan and oiled her kidney saddle as if she might ride in the afternoon.

  When night came and he was too drunk to be useful Warren sat down at the kitchen table with the last bottle of whiskey and stared at the lantern’s flame. She w
as gone, along with the baby who’d killed her and everything else of this life. The house would burn. He’d planned it already. Wanted to see the fire swallow it as he rode away to maybe find a new life or maybe find no life at all. Let the damned thing leave a charred wound on the mountainside.

  The pistol was in his hand without his even thinking about it and he looked down the barrel and opened the cylinder to see the empty brass from killing Gideon Long. He thought about what he might do with the gun and put it down on the table beside the box.

  The box was the last thing he’d found while emptying the bedroom. It was small and heavy and made from cheap tin faintly corroded at the corners. A length of red ribbon trailed out one side and was pinched closed in the lid. The top was green and painted by hand with the image of a woman wearing a halo made of flowers and leaves.

  “Vervains,” Warren read aloud.

  Holy herb. The Indians believed you could inhale its smoke and see the world as it truly was. He drank a slug of whiskey and said Vervains several more time before deciding he did not like the taste of the word. The hinges creaked as he opened the box with a motion more languid than momentous. There was a stack of letters wrapped up in ribbon and under that he could see the glint of metal. He took the letters out. Didn’t recognize them.

  Underneath was a treasure of jewelry he’d never seen Annie wear. There were different sizes and stones that could only be real and gold and silver that caught the flame of the lantern and sparkled. These were exquisite pieces of fine craftsmanship and not a crude ring of frontier gold of the sort Annie had worn to her grave. He rolled his matching ring with his thumb.

  There it was. There was the gut-shot heaviness of unwanted discovery. The sick sensation a man feels when he realizes that his horse haa been stolen or leaves a room only to hear a close friend talk him down to a stranger. It was a secret kept from him by the only person he couldn’t bear keeping one. He did not want to look at the letters and for a short time he put them back in the box.

  The letters somehow reminded Warren of the strange words Gideon Long had said to him in the street outside the sheriff’s office. The drunken fool had spoken as if he knew Annie and why she had married Warren. He reached for the stack of letters. The need to know regardless of the hurt it might cause was stronger than the will to only suspect. He tore the ribbon from the envelopes and rattled the papers and opened the first letter. He read them all. Every miserable word of them. They were all from Gideon Long and full of romantic discussion and French and poems that crawled over his skin like ticks.

  Gideon’s letters to Annie contained references to matters private and personal between Warren and his wife. Gideon wrote of future plans and of love and of how Annie might rid herself of the burden of her husband. Warren read between the florid pages and sensed the dark catfish shape of the sweet words Annie must have written in return. He wondered if she was ever his at all or if there was a moment when she had stopped being true. There were no dates on the letters for him to know when he’d lost her.

  He felt the need to stick a knife into someone’s heart and wished Gideon Long still lived so that he might kill him again.

  The sheriff’s dog left its mark on Gideon’s hands and arms before it died. It lay where he’d killed it, mouth hanging open, the slowing blood gushing out along the curl of its tongue. It seemed small and very different from the animal that had fought him, diminished to little more than a rat in death. He would find a use for the horrible animal soon enough. An experiment of sorts.

  He wrapped the wounds it had caused him in strips torn from a horse blanket. He draped himself in the blanket, hissing when the coarse fabric glued itself to the sores on his shoulders.

  He reached into the nearest stall and hefted the water bucket. The water sloshed, wetting the blanket, pouring over his chin and washing away the filth of the road and some of the blood. He drank and drank until his stomach hurt from fullness.

  He threw the bucket away and put a saddle on the larger of the two horses, a tall black gelding with a touch of white Appaloosa spotting on its rump. The horse was not glad to be handled, and Gideon made a poor job of it in the darkness of the barn. When he was at least satisfied the saddle would not simply fall off the horse’s back, he crept to the door of the barn.

  Gideon fell into the shadows and waited for Warren to come outside. Surely he’d heard the dog snarling from the house. Gideon waited to slit Warren Groves open like a pig. Minutes passed. Blood ran out from the crude bandages and over the flesh of his sunburned hands. Strange, how the salt of his own blood could sting his skin. Or was it the dog’s blood? He could not be certain, there was so much of it. Gideon waited and waited, and the lights remained dim through the shuttered slats over the windows.

  Days in the desert without food, water, or clothing had raised Gideon into a savage. His shoulders and face were blistered, lips chapped with thirst, tongue swollen from the same, and his entire body was as red as ribbon. Gideon’s bare feet were toughened into bloodied leather by the rocks that hid in sand.

  Gideon counted each misery against Warren Groves as surely as the bullets that had blasted his head in the road outside the sheriff’s office. He was thankful too. Thankful for what he was learning. He knew, more and more, what he was capable of and what he could endure. Anything.

  Warren Groves was late. Taking his time. Shut up in his ugly, pretend, rich-man’s house, celebrating the murder of Annabelle Moraud, planning to share his seed with all the whores in the Whitney. Gideon ran a fingertip up the hollow tooth of bleached mule thighbone sharpened by the luck of the break into a ragged needle. He craved unlocking the sheriff’s heart with the dagger, snapping it off in his breast, watching it quiver with Warren’s slowing pulse.

  No more waiting. No more skulking in the shadows of the barn. Gideon set off across the pasture, making no effort to hide himself. He would throw open the door and search the pathetic house until he found where Warren Groves was cowering. Gideon peered in the slatted windows facing the pasture, could see nothing, continued to the front of the house, and stopped with an intake of breath.

  Only a few yards up the road to Red Stem came one of the sheriff’s deputies astride a muscular palomino with a white blaze. Gideon recognized the man by his olive skin and dark hair. He was some breed of Castizo or more exotic creature imported from the Orient.

  He remembered the man from when Sheriff Groves had gunned Gideon down in the road. Gideon fell back around the side of the house and listened as the newcomer reined the horse to a thundering halt. He heard the jingle of spurs and the sound of the horse being tied to the porch’s railing. Boots thudded against the wooden decking.

  Gideon rose no louder than the desert and the distant sounds of town and camp. He crossed the dusty wooden planks with quiet feet and put the knife of thighbone through the back of the deputy. The man twisted and convulsed and reached back as if to tear out the blade. Gideon stabbed him twice more and let the man turn and pull his hands from the bloodied knife and roll with his back against the railing as he slid down to the porch.

  Gideon wanted the man to see his face, to know who killed him. The bone splintered in the deputy’s back as he turned, driving it deeper, and the man, finally, lay gasping, eyes wide, mouth moving without sound, staring up into Gideon’s scabbed, sun-baked flesh and white smile.

  “Yes, I know, it is rather cruel. You were only audience to my killing. In the road up there. Do you remember?” Gideon wrapped his hands around the man’s throat and began to choke him. “Don’t fight it. I am dead, and yet I am here, putting an end to you. Don’t feel bad. Release. Be free. I no longer hew to the laws of heaven and earth that govern you. It is really rather cruel.”

  The deputy’s eyes seemed as if they might explode from their sockets. Veins bulged from his forehead, and his entire face turned so red, it was nearly purple. He choked out a series of words in a heathen tongue Gideon did not recognize.

  The deputy kicked his feet and pried at Gideo
n’s fingers until the strength drained from his wounds and his arms fell to his sides. The deputy was limp against the railing when Gideon let go of his neck, stared at the raw band around his throat and the way drops of blood welled in his nose and never spilled down his lip, and said to the impassive horse, “Poor, sad Sheriff Groves. Should I give him this same luxury of death?”

  The crude poncho of the horse blanket hung heavy with the deputy’s blood. He patted the man’s horse on the nose.

  “I think I will give him worse than that.” He reached beneath the horse’s chin and scratched the curb groove. The horse flicked its ears back and repeatedly stomped a foot like a dog pantomiming with its back paw.

  Gideon took a wood axe from one of the crates filled with workman’s tools and walked in the door to Sheriff Groves’ house as though he were invited. Sheriff Groves was lost in thought, slow to look up as Gideon entered. He was studying the secrets of a biscuit tin lying on the table. There it was. At last he saw the monster that had crept into his house. Gideon savored the moment of Sheriff Groves’ gaping horror and smashed him across the face with the axe’s handle.

  The sheriff offered little resistance. He grunted on the second blow and tried to stand, but Gideon relentlessly beat his face and shoulders and head, and when Sheriff Groves weakly raised hands to shield his face from the falling blows, Gideon broke his fingers and beat him over the head. Gideon’s shoulders heaved with his breath, his arms shook with the power in his blood, and when Sheriff Groves finally lay unmoving, Gideon sat back in a chair, blood and bits of flesh dripping from his hair and down into his eyes. A window caught his reflection, and Gideon saw his red face in the glass and thought, I am the devil. And he was.

  Sheriff Groves was still alive, even semiconscious, and his breath formed bubbles in the blood drooling out of his mouth.

  “Hello, Sheriff Groves,” said Gideon.

  Gideon departed in the night with the sheriff tied over the back of the horse in tow behind him. He also brought the sheriff’s dog in a muslin sack saturated with the animal’s blood. He knew, generally, the direction to the canyon. As the night wore on, he could recognize certain landmarks—the sand-eaten bones of a wagon, a tree that seemed to bear the face of a woman, the leaning bricks of a hilltop mission—and knew by the position of the mountains on the horizon and the encroaching white sands that they were on a course for the pueblo village.