And the Hills Opened Up

by Oppegaard, David

  A new round of gunfire rang out—shotgun blasts, one followed shortly by another, and then six rapid shots from a revolver. Lynch rubbed the sleep from his face and yawned.

  “Lord. Another brawl?”

  The priest searched the floor for his pants and shoes. He slipped the pants on one leg at a time, struggling to keep his balance, and sat back on the cot to put on his shoes. He took his time with the lacing, his vexation rising as he grew more alert. Sixty-two was too old to be woken so abruptly to such noise. Really, any age was too old to be woken so rudely. If the sheriff couldn’t keep the miners reasonably in line perhaps it was time the camp found herself a new sheriff. One less given to strutting and primping, somebody with a seasoned voice and the respect of hard men.

  The floorboards creaked beneath his weight as Father Lynch opened the door to the sanctuary and strode down the aisle, still buttoning his shirt. The gunshots and the screams had both died off, as if he’d been dreaming them all along. Lynch opened the back door, winced at the chill, and stepped outside. As he came round the church’s south side, he halted in his tracks—bodies lay piled around the Copper Hotel, both on its front porch and beneath its shattered front window. The upper floor was totally dark and, as Father Lynch watched, the last light on the first floor was snuffed out as well.

  Lynch crossed himself and turned his head. Across the street, the Runoff Saloon was shuttered and dark and the street before it was littered with bodies lying face down or upon their sides. In fact, a woman had fallen only a few yards from the church, her neck torn open and one arm outstretched toward the church as if in supplication.

  The priest searched his mind for some possible explanation for all this, something to do with the violence earlier that day, but could find none. He wanted to call out, to step into the street and see to the fallen, but instinct held him back in the shadow of the church and told him to wait a moment.

  He did not have to wait long. A tall, spindly man stepped through the Copper Hotel’s doorway and tilted his head toward the night sky, listening. The spindly man’s posture was strange, both stiff and slightly off-kilter, and he wore ill-fitting clothes as well—his white shirt sagged off his shoulders and his overlarge pants billowed around his legs. Lynch shivered, glad the wind was blowing toward him, and then wondered at his gladness.

  Perhaps it was the stranger’s hands. The right was much larger than the left, the fingers elongated and almost claw-like, like the pinchers of a crab. Was this because of a sickness of some kind? A defect of birth?

  The stranger lowered his chin and scanned the street. He had a large, scab-like patch on his cheek—the scab appeared to grow and recede in size steadily, as if it had a pulse of its own.

  The priest’s breath caught in his chest.

  This man was the reason for the gunshots and the screams. This stranger was the cause of the dead lying in the street.

  Father Lynch forced his body to stillness while the tall stranger turned his gaze toward the church. He did not wonder if the porch’s shadows shielded him from the stranger’s gaze or pray to the Lord to be passed over. He stopped thinking altogether. He was an emptiness…

  until…

  finally…

  the stranger turned away again, heading south down the street, his stride awkward and unsure, as if he were still learning to use his spindly legs.

  Father Lynch remained immobile until the stranger disappeared into the dark. Then, and only then, did he allow himself to breath once more, to slip slowly back into the church and lock the door behind him.

  25

  None of the girls came back from the town meeting. They’d all gone, all of them, hoping for excitement and gossip, and they’d wanted Ingrid to go along. They’d gotten all fancied up in their best going-to-town clothes, like proper ladies, with their hair combed and ribboned and their mouths rinsed with salted water. They’d all gone and begged her to come along, too. “I do not believe anything can be accomplished by men, or by any meeting involving men,” she’d told them, still stung by Revis Cooke’s rejection. “You ladies go on without me.”

  Anita and Gertrude and Sarah and Ruth and Elizabeth and Agnes and Alexandra and Rachel and Daphne and Odette and Grace and even Madam Petrov, the old iron-skinned Russian herself, hadn’t made it back from the doings at the Copper Hotel. Ingrid had a hard time imagining anything, man or bear or haunt, tougher than that woman—Madam Petrov drank nothing but hot black tea that tasted like tar, ate nothing but meat and potatoes, and could haul a keg of beer on her shoulder like it was a scrap of cloud.

  Now it was only her and Caleb left to run things. Well, her and Caleb and Elwood Hayes, who’d taken over while everybody else looked about the saloon stupefied and shocked. He ordered the folks who were badly hurt to be taken to rooms on the first floor and everybody else to start stacking furniture against the saloon’s front and back doors. He’d nailed the wood down as best he could, both into the walls and the floor. He also had Caleb turn all the lanterns low and shutter the windows—Ingrid had never seen a man so unsettled and sure of himself at the same time.

  When all the moving and hammering was over, she came up beside Elwood and touched his elbow.

  “You think he’s going to leave us be if we keep the lights down low?”

  “I don’t know. Never dealt with a demon before. Their reasoning is as strange to me as any woman’s.”

  Ingrid smiled and met his eyes. “We’re not that hard to figure, Mr. Hayes. We just want fair treatment and a look now and then.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Miss Blomvik.”

  “Actually, I’m Mrs. Blomvik, Mr. Hayes. I was married once, but he passed on a few years back.”

  “Is that so? I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Ingrid looked across the room at the three miner wives, all of them newly minted widows, who were sitting in a circle, pale with shock and drinking coffee without a table between them. Counting the widows and four prospectors who’d been lodging at the Copper, they numbered twelve healthy bodies on the saloon floor and five wounded in the rooms, including the National man Elwood had shot in the knee. Everyone else in town had either scattered back to their cabins or had already been killed.

  Ingrid crossed her arms, frowning at the furniture nailed to the walls.

  “I’m going to be seeing my husband soon enough, I suppose.”

  Elwood curled his arm around her shoulders and smiled.

  “Naw. We’ll get this figured, sooner or later.”

  “Like we figured robbing Mr. Cooke?”

  Elwood laughed.

  “Well, there’s no accounting for a company man. Once they’ve swallowed the hook, you can’t get them off the line for anything.”

  Ingrid leaned closer into Elwood. She liked his strong arm around her shoulder, his warmth.

  “How long—”

  “They’re dead,” somebody shouted, making everybody in the room jump. It was Owen Hayes, as pale and glassy-eyed as anybody she’d ever seen, even the girls she’d known who’d taken laudanum.

  “The three folks wounded at the Copper are dead. Their wounds turned black.”

  Elwood took his arm back and crossed the room.

  “What about Stubbs? Is Stubbs dead?”

  “Hell no, I ain’t dead.” Clem Stubbs stepped through the doorway to the hall, keeling to the side a bit and holding his wounded shoulder with his good hand. “I’m soused as hell, though.”

  Stubbs exhaled loudly, rumbling his lips together like a horse. His hat had gotten lost somewhere and his red hair was a tangled and wild as his beard—he reminded Ingrid of an overgrown lilac bush.

  “You should be in bed, Stubbs,” Elwood said, fetching a chair and lowering the big man into it. “That shoulder will howl at you for a week.”

  “Let it howl.
Besides, how’s a man supposed to sleep with all that hammering?” Stubbs nodded at the tables they’d thrown over the doors and windows. “Looks like a poor attempt at the Alamo.”

  “This is the Alamo,” Elwood allowed. “Our own.”

  Elwood told Clem Stubbs about what’d happened since they’d pried the bullet from his shoulder, occasionally looking to Owen or Roach Clayton to confirm what he was saying. The whole room listened to Elwood talk, like they were hearing the story for the first time themselves, and when he finished it was so quiet you could hear the wind outside. The story seemed just as wild to Ingrid as she heard it for a second time, like something out of a tall tales book you read to children before bed.

  “Jesus, that’s something,” Clem Stubbs said, scratching his bearded cheek. “That reminds me of the skin-walkers the Navajos talk about.” Elwood glanced around the room.

  “Skin-walkers?”

  “Yup, except they’re more like witches. They can turn themselves into animals when they feel like it. Bears and wolves and such. That Charred Man doesn’t sound like any kind of animal I ever seen.”

  “Maybe he was a skin-walker a long time back,” Owen said, “but the Indians in these parts found him out.”

  “Or maybe he’s a pure demon,” one of the widows said, staring into her coffee cup. “Sent by the Devil to take us all to Hell.”

  The room was quiet another moment, till Stubbs laughed.

  “Well, if that’s so, I’m not going easy. How many guns have we got, El?”

  “We tried shooting him already,” Roach said, his voice soft and far away. “Elwood told you that part.”

  “You must have missed him, that’s all. Look at those sorry spectacles you’re wearing.”

  Roach sighed and looked at the ceiling. One of the widows shifted on her chair, making it creak. They all looked her way.

  “We just need to figure this out,” Elwood said. “Anything can be figured if you chew on it long enough.”

  The night passed slowly in the dim light of the turned-down lamps. Four times they heard a scream outside, but none of them lasted long. The men checked and rechecked their guns, making sure what little they had was loaded and ready. Elwood, Clem, Roach, and Owen each had a revolver, Caleb the scatter gun he kept under the bar, and Ingrid the small one-shot pistol she’d found in Madam Petrov’s dresser. Elwood had placed the armed men so that each faced a corner of the room, with their backs to the bar and a second man at their side to help keep them awake. The widows had gathered up their own chairs and set them behind the bar counter, so that when they sat again only their heads showed above the bar. Ingrid sat on the landing halfway up the stairs, with the one-shot in her lap and a good view of the saloon floor.

  Elwood Hayes didn’t sit, though. He kept pacing the room and bothering the furniture they’d nailed across the windows and doors, testing it for weakness and muttering to himself. He was like a dog chewing its tail, wondering at the pain but still willing to give it another try. Everybody watched him cross back and fourth like he was a stage show, hoping that every pursing of his lips hinted at a breakthrough, at a thought nobody else had come up with yet. Something good to save their lives.

  Right at one A.M., the coach guard with the shot knee woke in his room, bellowed his pain and confusion, and passed out again. “Jesus,” Clem Stubbs said, shuddering. “I think I need to start drinking again. I can handle my shoulder—it’s the waiting that’s special agony.”

  “I’ll go check on him,” one of the widows said, rising from her chair. She looked at her two friends in a meaningful way, wringing her hands. They both sighed and agreed to go with her.

  “Thank you,” Elwood said, going round the bar again. “I appreciate that.”

  Owen Hayes turned in his chair to look at his brother. “What about upstairs, El? What about the windows in those bedrooms?”

  “I shuttered those, too,” Caleb said, yawning and stretching out his arms. “Locked them tight.”

  “But they’re not boarded, are they?”

  “No,” Caleb admitted. “I didn’t get to that.”

  “I’ll do it,” Elwood said. “You stay with Roach and Clem and see to it nothing gets through down here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Owen said, straightening in his chair and snapping his hand in mock salute. “Yes, sir, Mr. High and Mighty General, sir!”

  Elwood ignored the sass and made up a pile of boards, setting a hammer on top of the pile and jamming a fistful of nails into his pocket. He was relieved to have something to focus on, something that wasn’t pacing round the room and figuring. He picked up the stack of boards and started for the stairway.

  Ingrid rose on the landing and smoothed the front of her dress. “I can help,” she said. “I’ll hold the boards.”

  The stairs creaked as Elwood climbed the first flight.

  “Could use the help, now that you mention it.”

  The outlaw set the boards at the top of the stairs and drew his gun. “You hear anything funny, run back down and call the others.”

  “What—”

  “Wait here a moment.”

  And like that he was headed down the hall and opening the door to the first room, gun at the ready. He poked his head in, looked around, and stepped back.

  “Still empty, shutters locked.”

  “Well, I am glad to hear that—”

  He was already gone again, poking his head into the second room. He said the same thing when he came out of that room, too, and five rooms after that. His mind seemed to work like a train, moving steadily, sure, but one track at a time. After the last room, he picked up the hammer and some of the boards.

  “He’s not up here. Not yet, anyhow.”

  Ingrid nodded. Hayes took out a handful of nails from his pocket and hefted them in his hand.

  “Well, let’s start down at that first room.”

  “Sure. You’re the carpenter, Mr. Hayes.”

  They didn’t have much light to work with, only what came from downstairs. The first room, like all the others in the Runoff Saloon, had only one window, neither large nor small, which a board could easily be fitted across.

  “This was Madam Petrov’s room.”

  Elwood stuck a few nails in his teeth. Ingrid held the board across the window and he hammered a nail into the board’s upper right corner, taking only two knocks to send it home.

  “Smells like powders and perfume in this room.”

  “They all smell like that here,” Ingrid said, shifting her grip on the board. “Except Caleb’s, I suppose.”

  Elwood hammered a second nail into the board’s upper left corner.

  “Madam Petrov was scared of smelling like an old woman,” Ingrid said, releasing the board and letting it hang on its own. “And she only fifty.”

  Elwood grunted, holding on to his thoughts. Ingrid blew a puff of warm air into her bangs.

  “You think we’re going to die tonight, Mr. Hayes?”

  “Can’t say, but I hope not. Haven’t raised near enough hell to suit me. Figure I got a good ten more years in me yet.”

  Ingrid smiled and got a second board ready. When they’d boarded the window tight they moved on to the other rooms. They took their time, doing the job well. Ingrid went to the railing and checked on the saloon a few times, but nothing had changed down there except the widows had fallen asleep behind the bar, wrapped in blankets and huddled together. When they finished boarding the last window, the one in her own bedroom, Ingrid came up and hugged Elwood Hayes from behind. He stiffened at her touch, then exhaled and leaned into her grasp. She hugged him tighter, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “I don’t want Revis Cooke to be the last man I shared a bed with, Mr. Hayes.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes, sir. It is.” />
  They stood like that for a long moment, with her arms around him, both wavering slightly on their feet, as if they could fall in about any direction. He turned and she let him go, opening her eyes. He was a dark outline against a darker room, a hammer swinging loose from his hand.

  “You’re a lovely woman, Mrs. Blomvik. A pure beauty.”

  She flushed at the compliment. He leaned down and kissed her, his lips rough and cracked. She reached up and laced her hands behind his neck, drawing him toward her, and returned his kiss with a longer, more open one. A heat she barely recalled rose into her cheeks, something she had not thought she’d feel again. Not after putting Erik in the ground like that, dressed in his black Sunday best, a bouquet of cattails and sunflowers clutched between his stiffened fingers. The heat that drew you to a man like a pull you had no control over.

  She closed the door and lifted her dress over her head, pulling the cotton over her breasts and head in one swift, fluid motion, leaving her standing in her slip alone. Elwood reached behind his back, pulled out his gun, and set it carefully on the dresser.

  “Should keep that handy.”

  Ingrid smiled and reached for his belt, unbuckling it. She pulled down his trousers and he wavered on his feet again, stepping out of the pants one leg at a time.

  “You ladies don’t fuss around, do you?”

  “We don’t get paid for fussing, generally.”

  She ran her hands up his right leg, then the left. She ran her hands over the bulge in his drawers and slipped them beneath his shirt. She took that off, too, lifting the fabric over his head and pulling it off his hands. She kissed his chest, making him shiver as she took his right nipple in her mouth and bit down, softly.