by Frank Owen
I could just get up and walk home, she thought. Take a wide berth around Fieldstone and be back with Ma sometime in the night. Garrett and the old man and even Dyce would be a memory, a dreaming sidestep from the path of her real life.
But then her breath returned, and Vida stood up, her biceps and knees stiff with effort. I’ll keep that thought, she told herself. Keep it for when I really need it. I always have the option of quitting.
She worked her way out of the trees and past the cottonwood stump. Cursing her own loyalty, she began the walk to the door, making her steps slow and heavy-footed, scuffing her feet in the dirt.
Garrett heard the shrill, tuneless whistle, faint and distant. Then a whisper from above them.
‘He’s coming, Pa.’
Garrett had left his gun upstairs, but he had two knives – one his own and the other he’d taken from the Weatherman’s table, the sharpened arrow of a weather vane.
Garrett crept up the stairs and crouched down beneath the trapdoor, ready.
Today I’m the spider.
He lifted the lid a crack and then, hearing no movement, he opened it wide, letting the weak light into the room, thin as vapor. Still the Callahans didn’t move, too focused on the door and the whistling to notice the lightening of the dead black around them. Garrett could see their outlines on either side of the door, the bison and the sapling. He glanced over to Dyce’s corner and caught the glint of his eyes like a cat in a car’s headlights. He was awake.
Finally! My hard work toughening you up’s paid off.
Garrett prayed his brother was sensible enough not to give the game away.
Dyce groaned, theatrical, as Garrett lifted himself from the hole in the floor. He kept on moaning from the gut, deep animal sounds that disguised the tap of his brother’s boots on the wood, and disgusted the Callahans. Walden shushed him.
Gus shushed Walden.
Vida was close now. She’d finally found a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’.
Garrett waited for the last moment, till the footsteps were right outside the door and he knew the hairs on the Callahans’ necks would be bristling like hunting dogs’.
Garrett lunged at the bigger of the shadows. He sank the spoke of the weathervane into the man’s neck and felt the warm spurt of blood on his hand. There was a gurgling scream, the sound of a man waking to find that his nightmare had come true, and then Walden was shouting, ‘What’s happening, Pa? Where are you?’ To his credit, he started forward. Dyce was rolling around, panicked, struggling to hear where Garrett was placed.
Gus’s body collapsed, the feet drumming like a hanged man’s heels, and Garrett swiped at Walden with his fist, sure that the son would be too terrified to fire his piece. The punch met Walden’s jaw and there was a crunch – teeth? Bone? – and Walden staggered backward. He had raised his gun in the dark, half-falling over Dyce as he went. The boy on the ground took a hold of Walden’s leg and tried to hang on. Walden kicked him off and fired again, the gun kicking back against his hand even after all his years of practice.
Dyce, deafened, scrambled over to Garrett’s bag, felt for the Webley, and held it up, the red blindness keeping him from finding a target in the stillness.
‘Garrett?’
The shack was quiet.
Except for the gurgling.
A hand took hold of Dyce’s bicep and then made its way, spider-like, all the way down his arm. It pulled the gun from his fingers.
‘Garrett?’ he asked again, hopeful.
He knew it wasn’t his brother.
Walden turned the gun on Dyce in the dimness, saving his own bullets, and pulled the trigger.
The undersized bullet jammed in the chamber and exploded: it blew the top clean off the gun, and took all the fingers on Walden’s right hand as it went. In the flash of the blast Dyce thought he saw a man through the veil of red: Garrett standing behind them with a knife. Walden shrieked, and kept shrieking, his calls for help, for his mama, for anyone to please-Lord-Jesus-help-me! a soprano against the roaring that was coming from Garrett. Oh, Christ! He was hurt too!
Dyce blacked out.
When Vida tried to open the shack door, it was lodged tight up against a body. In the low daylight seeping through she saw the thick, hairy arm, and the released blood.
She leant on the door and pushed. With one foot inside, she managed to roll the man away. Gus Callahan was still alive, one hand clamped down on his neck, keeping his ghost from escaping through the gash. She ignored him. Let the asshole suffer.
Beyond Gus was Walden, lying in the pooling blood, his gun hand and arm a mess of bone and toasted flesh. And the smell! Bacon, Vida thought. I’ll never be able to eat it again. She covered her nose and mouth and kept looking.
Garrett was on his knees, his shirt dark and wet, one hand cradling Dyce’s face.
‘Garrett,’ she called, trying to make her voice soft, the way you would for a horse.
He toppled backwards off his heels and Vida rushed forward to catch him. He was drenched in blood. It took her a moment to realize that it wasn’t Dyce’s. My God! My God! My God! Look at the hole in his chest! Vida felt her brain wheeling for escape.
She grabbed Garrett under the arms and pulled him towards the door, over Walden and over Gus because it was easier not to go around. She laid him down in the dirt outside the shack, the horse pole at his head like a gravestone. There was no point.
She sat cross-legged and held his head in her lap. The scars from his old acne looked as if they had smoothed out a little. They must have bothered him back then. If he had lived till he was sixty, they might have disappeared altogether.
‘Fuckers,’ rasped Garrett. He bubbled as he tried to speak.
Vida laughed and shook her head. The tears fell on Garrett’s face.
‘How is everyone?’
‘Dyce seems okay. As okay as he was before. And I saw the Weatherman’s pruny butt cheeks running off into the trees.’
Garrett smiled.
‘No one should have to see that.’
‘Callahans are not in great shape, but you knew that. Big guy’s bleeding out and the weedy one’s stabbed to shit.’
‘Then it all worked out okay.’
‘Yeah.’
Garrett closed his eyes, and Vida shook his shoulder gently. The blood welled out of the hole again, unstoppable. Garrett moaned.
‘Sorry, buddy. But you got to keep those baby blues open.’
His tongue came out, licked at the corner of his mouth. ‘Tired.’
‘Then I got something to show you. But you’re gonna have to imagine the cigarette smoke, and some honky tonk.’
Vida stood up in the fading afternoon light in the bare dust outside the Weatherman’s shack and began to undress, her eyes dark on the dying man.
She took off her filthy shirt first, then her boots and her socks and her jeans.
‘Does this mean I’m not going to make it to the other side?’
‘Shut up for once, Garrett. Don’t ruin it.’
She stepped at last out of her underwear and stood naked before him.
There was not a scar or pockmark or welt upon her. Vida was whole and perfect, smooth as a clay vase.
Garrett strained to keep his eyes open, mesmerized and disbelieving, the revelation she’d saved up for the very end.
‘You’ve never been sick!’
‘Yup. This is what it looks like.’
15
Garrett fell silent. Vida stood still in the gathering dark, dumb with divulgement. She’d learnt not to tell her secret to anyone, to keep herself covered up, to act as though beneath her shirt and jeans she was just as twisted and scarred as the next. The secret of her health metastasized with each year that passed.
An unscarred five-year-old? How lucky!
Ten and no blemishes? The Lord is watching this one.
Disease-free at twenty? She is a wonder and a sign.
But thirty-four years old with not a mark? Cut off her hair to make a poti
on. Boil her fingernail parings into a broth. She is protected and she must pass it on.
Vida looked around for her discarded clothing. Maybe that was what had prevented her and Ruth from joining a settlement, she thought. Having to explain the inexplicable. Maybe it had worked out for the best. Vida had always had a hard time liking settlement folk: they came contagious with judgment and fear. Those things seemed to step arm-in-arm with the real bad sicknesses. Spared both by being spared the one, Vida told herself.
The sharing had felt right, for her and for Garrett both. The slipping away of your spirit had to be a terrifying thing, like the shock of birth, with its transition into the cold, dry world. He was gone.
Vida shivered, and not only with the evening air. The first stars were out, determined, prickly as pins. The foliage behind her kept rustling, and Vida made an effort to scramble back into her shirt, shiny with dirt and poor as it was. If she was going to be a coyote’s dinner, it would have to undo her buttons. ‘Opposable thumbs, motherfucker,’ she said under her breath.
When the Weatherman stepped into the clearing, she was panting, on the last button. He looked at her, his scabbed head to one side. He held two books and nothing else.
‘Go on. Say something,’ Vida told him. ‘I dare you.’
He pinched his fingers together and motioned to zip his lip. ‘There ain’t much high ground for a man wearing his birthday suit.’ He regarded Garrett’s half-closed lids and sighed. ‘He gone?’
Vida nodded, and found her bottom lip trembling. Don’t you do it, she told herself. Dead is dead and at least he didn’t suffer. Later. Later you can cry like a baby.
She squinted down at her front and began re-buttoning where she’d mismatched the holes.
‘You didn’t stick around? What about the rest of your books?’
The Weatherman flapped an arm at her. ‘Gunshots have a way of setting a man’s priorities straight.’
He didn’t seem cold, despite his nakedness. Now he walked over to Garrett and squatted beside him, his scrotum hanging low in the dirt.
Good thing he died midway through the nudie show, thought Vida.
‘Ah, shit,’ said the Weatherman. While he was offering his Western prayer, Vida looked back at the shack in the distance. No sign of any activity now, but part of her continued survival was never giving up the habit of watchfulness. Maybe women were more used to doing it.
As she checked the entrance to the building, the shadows in it shifted. Vida saw a figure leaning in the doorway: a golem, one meaty hand to the neck where she knew he’d been stabbed.
‘Fuck!’
The Weatherman stopped his rumination and turned around. ‘Gus?’
Gus staggered out into the grass.
He must be bleeding badly to move as slow as he was, Vida thought.
Should she go back into the shack and find one of the discarded guns? She could shoot Gus in the back without a flicker: no fair’s-fair, high-noon showdown here. It would even up Garrett’s sacrifice, bring the final tally to a neat and favorable score: two–one to the survivors.
The Weatherman moved to help him, but long before he reached the man, Gus’s free arm shooed him away like a cobweb. The two watched him warily. They could save him the torment, lay him down beside his useless son. Big Gus was a suffering animal, a buffalo wheezing through a torn throat, hobbling out into the night to find some place to die.
The Weatherman tried again to take Gus’s arm, but he would accept no help. The back of his open hand caught the old guy and knocked him down. He stayed there in his defeat, panting. He and Vida watched Gus Callahan walk to meet the approaching dark.
‘Vida?’
‘What?’
He pointed at Vida, at the body of Garrett, as if it had just dawned on him. ‘You never said it was Callahans.’
‘Was that important?’
The Weatherman pounded the ground where he lay, like a little kid in a tantrum. ‘Goddamnit, woman! You never said it was Callahans!’ The shouting was the sudden eruption of an afternoon’s worth of attack and surprise, of escaping with his life.
Vida pursed her lips. ‘Didn’t know it’d make a difference.’
The Weatherman scrambled to his feet, as though he’d been stung by a scorpion.
‘It makes a difference.’
He began jogging back to the shack, and got inside and down the steps to his laboratory. Vida expected him to slam the door on her, but she followed. She went through the doorway as the Weatherman returned with his lantern. They looked around.
‘Jesus.’
Walden was a mess of gashes. He’d been run through a dozen times in the chest, and four or five times right in the face. Dyce lay beside him, his pants leg soaked through with blood, solid as a crayon. Vida came closer. Dyce’s chest was rising and falling, hitching shallow breaths, like a dog under anesthetic.
‘Oh, God. He’s been lying here the whole time.’ It was a kind of baptism, Vida thought. All that blood. She would never get used to it. And if Walden was carrying some sickness, they were all fucked.
The old man tightened his lips. ‘Move him, then.’
Vida took Dyce’s feet and the Weatherman grabbed him under the arms. ‘To the mat there. Let’s go.’ They tugged, panting. The Weatherman was grunting with effort. For a sick boy, Dyce was sure heavy.
‘You know, I’m no fan of the marshals. But it don’t make them any less family.’
Vida dropped Dyce’s feet. His boots thunked unhappily on the floorboards.
‘You’re a Callahan?’
The old man stood up with his hands on his hips. Dear God! When would he get some clothes on?
‘By birth and by name.’
‘Shit.’
‘Come on now. Pick this boy up and finish the job.’
They wrestled Dyce’s limp body onto the dusty carpet, away from the blood, and Vida listened again for his breath, careful not to inhale.
‘So now what?’
‘Now there’s going to be more of them coming. They’re going to want, want, payment for these lives. And I’m going to tell them word for word what happened here: I got no reason to protect you and this kid. But for the sake of keeping everyone’s blood in their veins, I’m not going to tell them what I’m going to tell you now.
‘You listening? Walk off now, into the dark. And when I can’t see you no more, change course and go some other way, ’cause I’m going to sing like Tweety Bird.’
‘But what about Dyce?’
‘Take the kid if you think he’s going to make it. No sense burdening yourself with another corpse. We seen enough of that today. Just put some distance between yourselves and this place, and pray that rain falls to cover your tracks and the night-time critters don’t get a scent on you.’
‘Thanks,’ muttered Vida. ‘You’re a real fairy godmother.’
She grabbed her pack along with both the boys’. She got busy laying out their contents on the table. She’d only be able to take one bag: she had to cull.
Garrett had had nothing of real value, save for the needles and the dried turkey meat. At the bottom of his pack there was a stuffed squirrel, the tufts on its ears like aerials in the lantern’s light. She turned it over. It was beautiful in its craftsmanship, the stitching invisible, sewed to look alive. The squirrel didn’t smell none, so Vida packed it. Something for Dyce to keep.
He moaned. Vida went to him and tipped some water from her canteen into his mouth. He choked and she sat him up like a baby, patting his chest clear.
‘How are you feeling, little brother?’
Dyce groaned, the sound deep and rising from his guts, up through the chest, over his swollen tongue – leaking out into the air like the cough of a sweet potato left too long on coals.
‘Got to keep going. Callahans still coming. More of them than there are of us.’
Vida stood up. She reached down and pulled Dyce to his feet. He hung limp, and then he managed to stand on his own two feet, gingerly, as if he had
pins and needles.
‘If it gets too bad, I can try and carry you. Fireman’s lift.’ Vida grinned, and then remembered that he couldn’t see her.
He leant on her and they went out slowly into the night.
Behind them the Weatherman followed, keeping to the bushes around his shack, then to the kindly almond trees in the stand. The leaves rustled in the shadows. When he saw that they were okay, he stopped, and then watched them disappear from sight.
Vida looked back as they went. When she judged that the light of the shack was distant enough, she changed their course.
‘Come on, big guy. We’re heading for the last place they’ll expect.’
16
Felix pulled Garrett’s body inside. Then he closed the shack door and pushed the table, sliding its legs through the pooling blood until it was shoved under the door handle. He tried not to look at the blood. It made him dizzy. He saw Rorschach pictures – horses galloping through water; spirits caught and twisting in the branches of a cottonwood. The table wouldn’t stop intruders – stall them at best – but the barricade made him feel as if he was doing something useful.
He said, ‘Sorry, boys,’ and stepped carefully over the stiffening bodies of Garrett and Walden. Then he opened the lid of the trapdoor that had slammed shut in the scuffle, and climbed back down into the darkness. He’d move the bodies in the morning light. Right now he was twitchy as a gopher. Felix stood at the bottom of the ladder and put his hand over his heart. Still pounding. There’d be no point in lying down to sleep. The battery had died and he had to fumble in the blackness for the bottle of booze – it was around here somewhere – and oh, the burn and blessing of the liquor as it seared a new pathway down his gullet!
But he needed a little light on the outside too. That battery was always dead when he needed it. ‘Fuck Renard,’ he muttered. ‘Fuck him for the goddamn ’lectricity, too.’ Felix heaved himself onto the split foam of the bike’s saddle and started to pedal slowly. It was always hard-going at first. You had to limber up. But it was getting more difficult. He didn’t know how many more revolutions his knees could take. ‘Spent my whole life on them,’ he said out loud, and took another short one from the bottle. He coughed, but the light was growing as he pedaled, like he was the god of the dawn or something, the wheels of his chariot dragging the morning across the sky. Felix laughed at himself, and slapped at his bony yellow chest with his free hand.