Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Dawn was coming to the valley. Warren was no longer mute and so shouted to it in anger and cursed the name of Gideon Long. The queer way his words echoed back unnerved him and Warren climbed down the terraces and through the forgotten pueblo and sought to leave that place. It was as he walked past the broken corpse draped over the rocks that he decided on a greater purpose. The corpse’s mouth hung open and its face was torn in such a way that it seemed to smile with dull white teeth.

  Warren felt mocked by the corpse’s gladness. He crushed the grinning face beneath a rock and the act was imbued with meaning beyond simple rage. It was his first movement of a new life. He did not intend to merely wander the desert or return to the hollowed shell of his old existence. He experienced a new though familiar craving and he knew it would not cease until it was satisfied.

  He would return to Spark and gather his things and become a killer again. He would find Gideon Long. He would hunt him wherever he went through the land and dog his every step and he would kill Gideon Long as many times as demanded by the growl of his desire.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Warren found Turk’s chestnut horse half-dead from exhaustion in the barn. It still wore its saddle and so he watered it and fed it and lashed onto its back the provisions he needed. He pried up the loose floorboard beside his bed and took out his secret cache of money. He belted his guns and brought along Gideon’s fancy rifle as well. He rode up to Red Stem in search of blood.

  Some folk recalled seeing Gideon Long come through town early in the morning. In a hurry and with two horses. The Indian guide Cody White was making water in an alley and saw Long leaving town early in the afternoon and on the back of a black gelding. Behind him he was leading another horse laden with trunks and sacks.

  Buffalo soldiers marooning in the shade of cottonwoods were well-positioned to have seen the comings and goings along the road. They were relaxed and laughing when Warren saw them at a distance but they drew up and went quiet and looked at him warily as he approached.

  He spoke to them on the subject of his need to find Gideon Long and gave them his quarry’s description. They confessed to spending almost the whole afternoon in that spot but went on to answer specific questions with a chorus of “No, suh” and “Sorry, suh.”

  He was fit to give up when he recognized among them the two called George and Sebastian who had helped dig Annie’s grave not a week ago. He called out to them and they looked surprised and afraid and their companions cut their eyes at them as if the two were traitors in their midst. With reluctance they came forward and Warren thanked them again for their help and he shook their hands. He pressed a Mexican gold dollar into each man’s palm.

  “Please,” he said and he leaned in. “The man I’m after killed my wife. He’s a murderer through and through, and if you’ve got anything to tell me, I promise it won’t get you into no trouble.”

  “We seen him,” said George. “Came up alone as we was setting up here. Saw him ride all the way up to the big house. Then he came back down later on with sundry items laden on a packhorse.”

  “Do you have an inclination of his direction?” asked Warren.

  “Musta rode out north or maybe east,” said George. “For sure. We can see all the way south near on to the table edge. Only saw wagons out there.”

  Warren thanked them and climbed into the saddle of Turk’s horse and rode out, heels down, for the northern trail. It was a long way to Santa Fe and with many possible hideouts and villages intervening. East was a difficult course from the Red Lines, traversing several ranges and some deadly Indian territory. No matter what sort of maniac Gideon Long had turned into, he was born and raised with the luxuries of wealth. Not the sort of man to attempt crossing unknown badlands while being pursued.

  Gideon would make for civilization. The more civilized the better. He had nearly a day’s head start and Warren rode Turk’s sickly horse. It didn’t matter. Warren knew he would catch him. It was only a matter of when and where.

  At Santa Fe there was a Spanish colonial hacienda become a hotel. Its aged splendor was long since surrendered along with the territory to the Americans and their guns. Colonial grandeur had fallen into disrepair and attracted seedy elements of frontier transience. Girls lounged in the garden and cowboys gambled and drank and groped the girls in the open. They stared with the hard eyes of criminals as Warren passed through their midst.

  The hotel manager was a short Anglo with little hair left on his head and a long hook nose topped with wire spectacles. He sat on a stool and peered at Warren over the fortification of the hotel desk. Warren didn’t doubt that a shotgun was kept beneath the counter and ready to fire dimes into a man’s face.

  For three U.S. dollars the manager told Warren the room he wanted. The old gnome even gave Warren a spare key so that he would not kick in the door.

  The room was around the back. Long’s stolen horses were hitched outside and drinking foul water from a trough. Warren put Turk’s half-dead horse beside them. At the door he crouched and carefully unlocked the mechanism. He listened for a sound that might suggest he’d been detected.

  Hearing no warning he stood and threw open the door. It swung violently into the darkness of the room and smashed over a table covered in emptied bottles and jugs. A stout blonde and a dark-haired Mexican girl screamed and bolted stark naked from the bed. Gideon was tangled in the sheets and only sat up with delayed alarm.

  The room was caught in an opium haze. Gideon struggled to keep his red-rimmed eyes open. His head drooped. He tried to get up and instead oozed off the mattress and onto the floor.

  Warren stepped into the room and was met with a loud crack and a puff of white smoke. A shrapnel of fragments of adobe cut the back of his neck. It was the blond whore crouched behind a chair. She was fumbling to reload the pepperbox with cartridges from her bag.

  “Don’t,” Warren said.

  She finished her reloading and clicked the pistol’s breech and as she brought it up to fire again Warren shot her. She dropped the gun and cried out and fell. She sat against the wall and grabbed at the hole in her chest just below her throat. Blood was running out in a great quantity and she was for certain mortally wounded. The other girl looked at her friend and wailed and pushed past Warren to flee from the room. He let her go. His interest was only in bringing harm to Gideon Long.

  Warren holstered one pistol and grabbed Gideon by his hair and dragged him upright. He splashed his face with the piss pot and slapped him again and again until he finally seemed to regain some sense. He threw Gideon onto his back upon the stinking mattress.

  The shot girl was gasping and wheezing in the corner. Her fat body shook and her legs were tightly together so that the blood gushing from the chest wound pooled in the crook of her pubis and formed a red line along the separation of her legs.

  “Why’d you have to kill her?” Gideon moaned. “She was so sweet. Such a—”

  Warren struck Gideon’s mouth with the butt of his pistol.

  “I want you to listen to me,” Warren said. “I want you to hear this before I kill you.”

  “Go ahead,” said Gideon, and the petulance of his voice struck Warren all wrong. “Go ahead. I did what I intended to here.”

  “Killed Robert Broken Horse? I woulda done it for you.”

  “Say your piece, and get it over with,” said Gideon. “I have other plans.”

  “I’d be obliged.” Warren sat down on the bed and put an arm across Gideon’s shoulders and held him tightly. “This is the once I intend to spare words for you again. We may as well parley like gentlemen.”

  Gideon wiped the back of his hand across his teeth and looked at the blood left behind. He spit onto the mattress and spared a glance for the girl still dying in the corner.

  “You done more in the past weeks than any man can account for in a lifetime. Fortunate that you seem to be offering more than one life to settle up,” Warren growled. “If the devil has given you so many I reckon you won’t mind sharing w
ith me.”

  He pressed the gun to Gideon’s cheek and turned his head with it so that he could look into his eyes.

  “Wherever you go, I will find you, and I will kill you. Never sleep easy, because soon I will be there, and I will kill you. And I’m gonna keep right on doing that until either you or the devil gives up.”

  Gideon began to object. Warren pressed the barrel of the gun hard into his cheek.

  “Just tell me you understand.”

  “I do,” said Gideon and without a second’s pause Warren shot him through the brain.

  The body flopped back with its head leaned over the edge of the bed. Warren got up from the bed and watched as its heart pumped away uselessly and emptied its blood and brains out the back of its skull and onto the floor. The girl in the corner was wide-eyed and dead.

  Warren left the carnage of the darkened room and entered the bright light of day. He could hear shouting and the excited cries of horses as men were gathered at the front of the hotel to come after him. He took his things from the saddle of Turk’s horse and put them on the black gelding Gideon had stolen from Warren’s barn. He intended to reclaim the horses Gideon had took from him and let Turk’s poor old thing rest.

  He escaped south on his own horse with Annie’s horse called Morgan following behind. He rode the rough trail back toward Spark in search of Gideon Long.

  Warren passed through the trading post at San Acacia and exchanged Gideon’s fancy rifle for a solid repeater and some ammunition and money to buy good canteens and a padded coat better suited to nights on the trail and cold mornings high in the mountains. He reckoned he was three days from Spark if he kept up the pace. It was exhausting the horses.

  When he slept beneath the stars he dreamed each twinkling light was an eye pressed to a peephole and he was caught in a jar. He assumed his every action delighted unseen observers. Some nights he dreamed of the pueblo and the grasshopper idol. Some nights he dreamed of the day he spent in hell. Most nights he dreamed of Annie.

  He was crossing through the meander of the Rio Grande on his course south when he spied at a great distance a donkey cart coming north up the road. There was a single man in the driver’s bench. He leaned lazily and reminded Warren in his posture of Gideon Long.

  Warren concealed himself and the horses in the folded curtain walls of the canyon to wait for the cart to pass. From the top of the scree pile he could see across the road and down the riverbank and just spot a crescent of dark and rushing water.

  The cart clattered down the road. Gideon was its driver and he sat oblivious and chewing licorice in a corner of his mouth and dressed as fine and fancy as a gentleman. Warren opened rapid fire from hiding and blasted the poor donkeys into a panic. One broke loose and ran and fell dead a few feet away. The other veered over the banks and fell along with the cart into a twisted ugliness of wagon and wounded beast and cargo.

  A splash was followed by waterlogged thrashing and Warren leaped down the scree pile and reloaded as he went. He crossed the road to the bank and looked over and saw Gideon lying among the shallows on his back. The river washed over him and leeched blood from two bullet wounds in a crimson ribbon.

  The wounded donkey was trying to run back up the bank. It trailed the broken-down cart behind it. Clothes and blankets and provisions for weeks were scattered in the shallows in heaps and caught on rocks and already drifting downstream. A great quantity of apples had spilled out the back of the cart and formed a merry bobbing parade down the river.

  “You cannot f—”

  Warren silenced Gideon with a blast of the repeater. Long flopped back into the water and lay with his arms above his head. His body swayed back and forth in the current. Warren splashed through the river’s shallows to the body and checked to be certain that Gideon was dispatched to whatever interim hell he visited before returning to life. He was dead.

  Warren picked up an apple from the cold water and held it in his mouth as he picked over Gideon’s body for money. He put the donkey still struggling to climb the bank out of its misery. He stood for a long time beside the dead donkey and watched the unfurling red tendrils of its blood flow with the river. He’d witnessed plenty of pack animals killed in accidents on the trail or in violence or by folks just being plain mean. He’d done in a few himself when they twisted a leg.

  He wondered where this donkey was supposed to be. Wondered what it was supposed to be doing. Maybe the donkey was always destined to end up dead in the shallows of the Rio Grande. No. It was dead because the world had stopped working how it was supposed to.

  Warren’s teeth snapped into the apple.

  Things did not go as planned at Spark. He got distracted. Someone had taken over his old house. Women’s laundry was draped over the porch rails and horses crowded around the hitching post. He could hear loud voices and shouts and revelry from inside. Thugs and Celestials patrolled the streets. Artemus Wick had finally usurped the law. Getting caught by Wick’s men would mean a fight or might mean jail. Time spent in a cage would be worse than losing at a draw.

  He left his horses with a Mexican crib girl named Silver and paid her ten dollars to water them and feed them herself. Gideon could move freely through this newly hostile territory without much worry of being waylaid. Spark’s former sheriff Warren Groves was forced to follow the footpaths through the twisting shacks and shanties.

  He took a knife and a pistol and crept through the squalor and stepped over drunks and glared at skinny kids watching him from doors and empty windows. His thick beard and long hair disguised him and he wore a kerchief piled around his neck not quite in the fashion of a bandit but near enough to lessen his chances of being recognized. In this way he passed by Ida Pinkney unnoticed.

  He glimpsed Gideon riding tall in the saddle of a rusty brown mare. He was nearly up the mountain. Nearly to his family’s home. There was too much distance and too many folks between to gun him down with a pistol. Warren kept after him and ducked from one hiding place to the next. He crouched behind rain barrels and ran along piss-stinking paths and squeezed between houses built so close even a dog would go around. He was filthy and hot and even though Gideon seemed in no hurry Warren was falling farther and farther behind.

  There was no sign of Gideon by the time he reached the iron fence surrounding the foundry and the Long family mansion. Warren looked either way and leaped at the fence and caught hold and climbed it with a painful bruising of his chest and stomach. He crossed the barren yard and dead garden and found a kitchen entrance that was quiet.

  He entered and was grabbed straightaway and thrown into the larder. He was assailed with punches and kicks. His gun was gone and his knife was pulled from his fingers before he could react. Four men. Five. Their fists were wrapped in rags and more than one used a table or chair leg. They hit and kicked until Warren was a bloody wreck on the floor. He looked up at them through swollen eyes and saw pity. They were a rangy gang of miners and out-of-work foundry men. They spoke to one another in a language Warren could not understand. Something ugly and mean.

  They discussed what to do with him and decided to shut him in the larder. He lay half-conscious and bleeding. It was dark when the door opened. A pretty young girl with a shy demeanor and a candle held in her quivering hand brought some food and water. He reached for her and she dropped the plate and cringed away. She ran at the sound of his voice and someone closed and locked the door behind her.

  The next day they let him go. Two men with their heads in cloth sacks marched him at gunpoint out through the gate. Took all his money and his gun. They never said who they were but he knew who’d paid them to do it. Gideon. He had slipped the tightening noose. He could be anywhere at all.

  It took six weeks. Warren caught him after a riverboat robbery and massacre in Kansas City. Gideon was with a gang he called his Chatholm Boys. Rough types. Rougher even than most who had helped with the train robbery. Warren waited for Gideon to be alone taking a piss and he killed him with a knife. Killed him in the
privy and took his scalp for his trouble. The first of many trophies he would claim from Gideon. The loyal Chatholm Boys didn’t seem to mind. They kept right on drinking and whoring while Warren slipped out the door.

  He caught Gideon twice on the road and shot him at close range. Both times Warren took Gideon’s thumbs and strung them around his neck on a length of Long-brand copper wire. The second time he took the thumbs while Gideon was still breathing. Gideon wailed at the popping knuckles. His eyes bulged at the sight of the fleshy ingots of his thumbs falling upon the trail.

  Warren caught him in Memphis coming out of a nice saloon. There was a girl on his arm in hat and frills and pretty as a Persian cat. Gideon was dressed in a nice suit too and he chewed a stick of licorice. He took it out of his mouth. His teeth were black.

  “Hello, Sisyphus,” said Gideon.

  Folks screamed at the sound of the gun. The pretty girl ran as best she could in all that crenellation. Warren got down on one knee and sawed off Gideon’s scalp and he tied it to his bloodstained belt and hung it beside the knives he had collected on the road. The newspaper folks might write about the wild man with the fresh collection of scars who shot down a gentleman and cut off his scalp. They could write their gruesome stories. By the time the law came down Warren would be gone.

  At New Orleans Warren found Gideon climbing the gangplank of a French steamer called Morocco. Gideon’s body shook from the bullets and tumbled over the railing and fell into the water with a splash. Ladies and gentlemen ran onto the steamer or fled. The deck hands cowered behind the abandoned luggage. Warren walked to the gangplank and aimed his pistols down and shot the floating body until both guns clicked empty.