by Dyer Wilk
THE
CANYON
Dyer Wilk
THE CANYON Copyright © 2018 by Dyer Wilk
Cover art & design © 2018 Dyer Wilk
ISBN-13: 978-1949140934
ISBN-10: 1949140938
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
Twisted Publishing is an imprint of Haverhill House Publishing
For more information, address:
Haverhill House Publishing
643 E Broadway
Haverhill MA 01830-2420
www.haverhillhouse.com
A special thanks goes to John McIlveen for his sharp eye, and for noticing the little things I missed; to Michael Smith for providing me with a heavy book on the plants of Arizona, when Google searches just weren't working out for me; to Linda Angel for encouraging me to pursue this project even as it grew much larger than I intended; and to Chad Eagleton for being a sounding board on all things fiction and non-fiction. They made this book possible when lack of sleep and a heavy workload nearly kept it from happening.
Dedication
For You.
The world was thunder and pain and choking dust, and then darkness.
Some time later, a minute or a year, he felt daylight on his face and opened his eyes to the blinding sun. It beat down on his sprawled-out body as it always had, hot and unforgiving.
Gordon pulled himself up from the hard earth, his bones aching deep from the fall and his head full of hurt. He rubbed his face, and felt the dust bring stinging tears. He tried to blink them away, raking a soiled sleeve across his cheeks, but it did little good. He cried and cursed and coughed, and tried to walk to a spot where the air was fresh. But the dust was everywhere.
Somewhere close by he heard feet crunching on gravel.
Through the swimming distortion of tears and the pall of dust, he saw a man walking away from him.
“Over here,” he called.
The man stopped and turned, trying to find him.
“Who is that?” the man asked.
He knew the voice, but his head was pounding too hard to determine which one exactly.
“It’s me,” he coughed in reply. “Gordon.”
“You hurt?”
Gordon considered the question carefully, trying to measure the pain he felt against the worst kind of pain he could remember.
A clear answer didn’t come.
“Can’t say for sure,” he said. “Not bad as far as I can tell.”
“Wait right there.”
Gordon waited. He still wasn’t sure who he was talking to.
He watched as the man drifted further away, deeper into the blur of gray and brown.
“Hey, wait!” he called after him. “I’m over here.”
A voice called back, faint. “I know that. Hold on a second. I need to check on…”
Gordon took half-a-dozen steps, trying to chase the fading words.
“You need to check on what?”
He stopped and listened closely.
The sound that came back was a whisper, maybe not even a voice at all. It could have been a faint breeze.
In the same moment, he felt the itching hot dust thin out around him and cooler air kiss his sweat-drenched skin.
For the first time since the fall, he could see where he was standing. The ground at his feet was nearly flat, but a few yards to his right it climbed sharply into a scree of chipped sandstone and gray-green shale. His eyes traced the length of the slope, and spotted a horse lying twisted midway up. He didn’t need to come any closer to know that its neck had been snapped, just as he didn’t need to inspect the saddlebags to see that the horse had belonged to him. He’d ridden that Appaloosa mare for the last eight months.
Sadness prodded him, but he quickly buried it within himself, refusing to let it fully blossom into regret. There was nothing he could do.
Gordon batted the dust away from his face with the flat of his hand, and walked toward the scree, stopping as his boots touched the incline of broken stones. Through the thin chalky haze, he saw the canyon walls towering high above him, marked three-quarters of the way up by a jagged scar of eroded dirt and rock where the trail had been only minutes before.
It must have been eighty feet up. Maybe a hundred.
He could hardly believe it.
A man had no right surviving a fall like that.
But he had.
He and whoever it was he’d seen loitering in the dust.
For the first time, since he’d come to, he wondered just how many of them had survived. When the trail had given way and become a surge of falling rock, there had been six of them.
No.
Not six.
Five.
Five because Tom hadn’t been with them.
Gordon turned away from the scree and knelt down to sit. He closed his eyes and ran his fingers over his temples, trying to work the ache out of his head.
Less than a minute later, he heard the scream.
Gordon opened his eyes and sprang to his feet. The indeterminate pain that he felt everywhere became a sharp needling in the back of his neck.
In the distance, the cry echoed off the canyon walls. “I can see the bone!”
The words repeated, over and over, full of pain and desperation.
He ran toward the voice, knowing who it belonged to before he could put a name to it.
As he crested a rise of cracked mud and sand, he saw Jimmy Jones staggering away from a dead horse lying a few yards from the base of the cliff. His left arm hung at his side, dripping red.
“Kid!” Gordon shouted.
Jimmy looked up at him, relief and agony bringing him to the verge of crying.
He hurried toward Gordon, and stumbled on a rock, going down on one knee. He tried to stand again and quickly gave up, choosing to sit instead, gripping the wounded limb tightly.
The tears trickled down his dusty face, forming drops of mud on his chin. “Feels like my arm’s on fire.”
“Hold on, kid. You wait right there.”
Gordon slowly made his way down the steep embankment, choosing his steps carefully on the loose gravel. As he neared the bottom, Bill Webb appeared from nowhere, running over the uneven ground in a jackrabbit sprint. He crouched beside Jimmy and began tending to the arm before he could say a word to him.
The kid squeezed his eyes shut, bellowing at the slightest touch. “I’m gonna lose my arm. For Jesus’s sake, they’re gonna cut it off. I know they will.”
“You just hush now,” Bill said. “You’re gonna be all right. It’s just broke. Seen far worse than this during the war.”
Bill was gentle with him, treating him more like a boy of five than a man of nineteen. He began to wrap the arm in a length of torn shirt, but made an effort not to touch the wound or the bone protruding from it.
Gordon turned away. He was starting to feel numb.
“Either of you seen Frank?”
Bill shook his head. “Not as yet. Seen Sam though. He’s just over a ways. Got his leg caught in a stirrup, but he can still walk. He’s getting the saddlebags off his horse.”
“His mount alive?”
“No. And I can’t say mine met with a kinder fate either. Your constitution unsullied, Gordon? You don’t look too good.”
“The fall knocked me out cold. But I’m all right, far as I can tell. ”
“Thank the good Lord above for that. Think I’m about the same as you. Came to lying face down in the dirt, but if anything is broke, it hasn’t hindered me yet. Did you see Tom?”
Gordon inhaled sharply, the deep ache in his head growing stronger until he could hear the blood pounding in h
is ears.
He could see Tom Talbert clearly, riding like hell along the top of the canyon with the rest of them, the faint report of rifles crackling from behind as the posse closed in.
He saw Tom, loosely gripping the reigns of his horse, turning to smile at him, as if he was enjoying this, as if nothing scared him at all.
He saw that smile go flat.
He saw the hole in his chest.
It had only been a moment, but it had been long enough.
He’d seen the look on Tom’s face as he fell from his horse. The sound of the shot had come later. Delayed by the distance. By the time he’d heard it, Tom had already gone over the edge of the canyon and disappeared.
Gordon pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes. “Yeah, I saw him.”
“Damn shame, going like that, if you ask me, but there are worse ways. Once knew a man out of Missouri…name of Seaton, I think…He was riding through a stand of oaks and didn’t see this low branch. Sharp end went and stuck him right through the –”
“Are you almost finished?”
“Oh yeah. The kid’s gonna be rolling his own cigarettes in no time. You want one before then, Jimmy, don’t you hesitate to ask me.”
Jimmy nodded, his face slicked with sweat.
“Still gonna have to set the bone though,” Bill said. “You might want to bite down on a stick for this part.”
A gruff, baritone voice replied from up on the hill behind them: “He’d be better off biting a Peyote button. It dulls the pain some.”
Gordon looked up and saw a tall bull of a man with a rifle strapped to his back descending the slope, casually working the creases out of a dusty Boss of the Plains hat with his thick fingers.
“You hurt, Frank?” Gordon asked.
Frank cracked a worn smile. “Only my feelings on account of that five dollars you still owe me.”
“I’ll have to get around to paying you back. How about your bones though? Anything broken?”
“Busted my ribs up some. I’ll live. Kid looks like he’s destined for the saw though.”
Jimmy’s eyes filled with panic. He looked at Bill as if every reassurance up to that point had been a lie.
Bill looked at Frank, scowling. “Now why in the Lord’s name did you have to go and put such a notion into the boy’s head?”
“It’s the truth, ain’t it?”
“It’s…well, damn it, we don’t know as yet. Provided no abscess forms in the wound, I’d say he has as good a chance as any.”
“And that’s an educated assessment with you being a horse-thief and all instead of a doctor?”
Bill stood up fast, his bloodied hands balling into fists. “I don’t see you stepping over here to tie a tourniquet.”
“Never said I wouldn’t.”
Bill held out a hand, gesturing an invitation. “Then would you be so kind as to put your ass into motion and hold him while I push the bone back in?”
Frank put his hat on and spit into the dirt. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Bill and Frank worked quickly, but the screams still came. By the time the bone had been set, Jimmy was whimpering like a beaten dog, the stick between his teeth nearly chewed to splinters. There wasn’t much else that could be done for him. They gave him room to lie in the dirt and left him to his tears.
Frank went off to fetch a canteen. When he came back, Sam Merton was limping beside him with two pairs of saddlebags and a coiled rope over his shoulder.
“Look who I found beating a dead horse,” Frank said.
Sam let out an exhausted laugh. “I did no such thing. Only kicked him on account of my bags being stuck under him. Sonofabitch was heavy.”
“How’s your leg?” Gordon asked.
“Still attached. Ankle’s twisted though. Much as I hate to say it, if our friendly lawmen up there happen to make their way down, don’t think I’m gonna be doing much running.”
Jimmy sat up fast, his voice gripped with fear. “You don’t think they’re coming down here, do you?”
Sam slipped his saddlebags off his shoulder and let them drop into the dirt. “Haven’t seen them dangling down the cliff by a rope yet. And I’m starting to get the feeling that’s the only way down at present.”
Gordon looked out across the dry flatland toward a grove of trees lying in a deep hollow. Beyond that, perhaps a quarter-mile further, was another face of sheer rock, rising up to the desert plateau above.
They were at the bottom of a box canyon, he was almost certain, and not a particularly large one at that. But if the posse who had chased them down here was still committed to apprehending them, it would take some time to find another way down, maybe enough time for them to come up with a plan.
“You see any trails?” Gordon asked.
“Some worn ruts in the dirt,” Sam said. “Nothing that looks like it’s been used in years though. You thinking we can walk out?”
“Do you think we have any other choice?”
“From what I can see? No. But with my ankle being as it is, I’d prefer riding to walking. I don’t suppose any of the horses are still alive?”
Bill Webb shot an irritated glance at him. “You see one standing here, sniffing the dirt? I thought you Tennessee boys were supposed to be sharp.”
Sam lifted his left leg and gripped it below the knee with both hands, pulling it toward his chest to stretch it. “You know me, Bill. I’m as dull as a doorknob. But I figured I’d ask anyway.”
Bill slapped his hands on his trousers, wiping off the blood. “We’re walking out or we’re climbing out. And after that, it’s still a good twenty miles to Branchwater. And twenty miles when we’re walking wounded might as well be a hundred. Of course we have you to thank for that.”
Sam’s eyebrows went up. “Me? How the hell do you figure that?”
“You were riding out ahead of the rest of us. And I didn’t hear you ask for our opinion when you tugged on the reigns and turned onto the trail that led us down here.”
“Hey, you didn’t have to follow me either! But at the time, I didn’t see us having much in the way of a choice, unless we wanted to end up like poor Tom. You gonna stand there and tell me you would have done something different? Or were you comfortable with the idea of riding over open country and taking the risk of having a bullet drill into your back?”
Bill shrugged. “It’s no worse than getting nearly killed in a rockslide. No worse than getting trapped at the bottom of a canyon with no way out either. And being trapped down here with you is just about the worst thing I can imagine.”
Sam charged forward, moving surprisingly quick despite his twisted ankle. “Listen, you rotten-mouthed bastard –”
Gordon stepped between them just as the fists began to fly. On any other day, he’d let them have at it. Their tempers had flared more times than he could count. And a black eye or swollen knuckles wasn’t uncommon for either of them. But down here, after what they’d already been through, he couldn’t allow it.
“Stop it,” he said. “You just cut it out and save it for another time. Before you two kill each other, let’s talk about how we’re gonna get out of here.”
Sam unclenched his fists and nodded toward the hollow behind them. “I know I’m not too sharp and all, but trees mean water. So there’s a creek or river back there. We crossed one up at the top, remember? Chances are, it runs all the way through. Chances are we can follow it.”
Gordon smiled, feeling optimistic for the first time since they’d gotten here. “Yeah, we might try that. Maybe it leads to –”
“Shit!” Bill said, his eyes widening.
He dropped into a crouch, making himself small behind a negligible mound of dirt.
“What?” Gordon asked. “What is it?”
“There,” Bill said, pointing over the treetops towards the other side of the canyon. “There’s someone up there with a rifle.”
Gordon felt his heart jump. He started to move, to seek out cover where
there was none, his eyes darting back and forth between the dusty ground and the wall of rock beyond the hollow.
Then Frank was beside him, grabbing him by the arm, and pushing him down into a depression barely large enough to fit a coyote. The big man took cover beside him, pulling the rifle from his back.
“Where is he?” Frank yelled.
Bill pointed, trying to keep his head low. “In a tree. Near the top. Saw a flash.”
Gordon squinted, searching the face of the cliff, moving from crag to crag. Three-quarters of the way up, he saw it – a flash coming from a small pine clinging to the rocks, the unmistakable glint of sunlight reflecting off the barrel of a rifle.
“You think he’s seen us?” Gordon asked.
“If he hasn’t, he will,” Bill said. “Got a view of the whole canyon from up there. We’re no good here. We’ve gotta get to better cover. We should make for those trees.”
Gordon lifted his head slightly, his heart hammering against his sternum. He looked in every direction, at the piles of fallen rock and the broken bodies of the horses, at the men crouched around him, at the place high up where the flash had come from.
He turned to Frank. “Help the kid.”
They ran and limped and staggered over open ground, moving at a speed that felt deathly slow, stumbling and picking themselves back up, their feet sliding through the hardpan and sending thick clouds of choking dust rising into the air around them. It invaded Gordon’s nostrils, carrying the smell of burning, cut only by the scent of his own sweat, and, more faintly, the blood from Jimmy’s wound.
He was half-blind now, chasing the silhouettes ahead of him.
The seconds passed, and the fear grew.
A bullet was going to find him.
He knew it as a fact.
He could see it in his mind as clearly as he’d seen Tom go over the edge of the cliff.
He would fall right here, and they’d leave him in the dirt to rot.
Then it was over.
They stood in a grove with branches over their heads, surrounded by mesquite and scrub oak and Arizona pine, breathing hard and taking stock of themselves. There was good cover here. Gordon could barely see the wall of the canyon through the small gaps in the canopy.