by Chloe Garner
“Won’t be no wood for miles, like this,” Sarah said.
“That’s right,” Jimmy said. “It does get cold here.”
“You forgot?” Sarah asked. He shrugged.
“I haven’t really been out much at night, since we’ve been back.”
“They’re gonna freeze ‘fore they starve,” Sarah said.
“Probably expected the desert to be hot,” Jimmy agreed. “We’ll figure something out.”
The clutter of men got thicker as they got closer to town, all the way to the main road, where men and their unfortunate debris blocked the entire street. Sarah dismounted and shook a finger at the black horse, then waded through to Granger’s.
The man was wiping the shiny top of his head with his kerchief when she got there.
“Sarah,” he called. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back.”
“How long’s it been like this, Granger?” she asked.
“Getting worse every day,” he said. “Worse every day. Did the train get in?”
“Just got off it,” Sarah said.
“I’m expecting another shipment of basics,” Granger said. “Blankets, Sarah. They don’t so much as have blankets. Food, canteens. I’m sold out of everything that no one in Lawrence needed until three weeks ago.”
“How’s the water holdin’ up?” Sarah asked. His brow creased.
“They aren’t much for maintaining the wells,” he said. “There are a few of the men from before who are trying to enforce it, but...”
“I’m on it,” Jimmy said from behind her. Sarah glanced over her shoulder. “I’ll have someone at each of the main wells by tonight.”
She nodded.
If they didn’t keep the wells drawing and clean, it would cause a lot of logistical problems very quickly. Most of the homesteads had their own wells, so they could make do, among the locals, but the young men would get desperate, and then sick, very quickly.
“The tavern?” she asked, turning back to Granger. He wrinkled his nose, taking his spectacles off and cleaning them.
“Busy every night. They come to me broke, begging for food, but they’re over there every night drinking and overpaying the girls.”
“That won’t last long,” Jimmy said.
“They’ll go broke,” Sarah agreed.
“No, we’ll get more girls in.”
She turned her head, not looking all the way back at him, but communicating what she thought of that, all the same. She heard him strike a match and draw air through a cigarette. What he thought, in return.
“What else do you need?” Sarah asked.
“Food, water, wood, shelter,” Granger said. “All the basics. I need someone to go up to the train to get the stuff I ordered. I can’t leave. The minute I step out of the store, they’re sneaking out like my boys can’t see them, trying to take what they won’t buy.”
“Give me an hour,” Jimmy said. “Your stuff stay pretty safe, up at the station?”
“It’ll take them three hours, at least, to get everything unloaded,” Granger said. “And as long as the railwaymen are there, no one picks through any of it. After that...”
Sarah shook her head.
“They’ll learn,” she said. “I’ll put bullets to a few of them, whip a bunch more, and they’ll learn.”
“Things are different now,” Jimmy said. “We’re going to have too many new men around for a while for that to work.”
“You’re just gonna to let it go?” Sarah asked.
“Not for long, but for now, yes. For now, we just keep enough armed men around all the valuable stuff. All right?”
She realized her hand was on her gun. She dropped it, pulling her duster back around her hip to cover the weapon.
“I see it,” she said. “I ain’t gotta like it, but I see it.”
He clapped her on the back once.
“I’m going to go see Willie and Paulie,” he told her.
“I’m gonna to head out and check the homesteads,” she answered. “Willie and Paulie is on their own.”
“Not anymore,” Jimmy said. “Will you come tonight for dinner?”
“Not on your life,” she said. “I’m goin’ home and lockin’ the door, once I’m done.”
“Not afraid of them, are you?” Jimmy asked.
“Just don’t wanna look at ‘em,” Sarah said. “They don’t belong here.”
“They may not belong,” Granger said, “but they’re here, all right.”
She shook her head.
“This had better work, Lawson,” she said. “Else we’re overrun with indigents ‘fore month’s end.”
“I know,” Jimmy said. “We’ll sort it out. It was going to happen. It’s a gold rush, Sarah. This is what they look like.”
“Worse and worse,” she said, shaking her head at Granger and turning, pushing and shoving her way back through the men and their piles of stuff to where her horse was standing. She eyed a pair of men darkly.
“You touch this animal, you will get a bullet,” she said, pushing her jacket off her gun again. “Clear?”
They muttered something and turned away, disappearing into the faceless crowd again. Bandits. They were all just future bandits. She mounted up, waiting to be sure Jimmy got back to his horse before she left. Too many men with sticky fingers, now, and too little respect. He forced his way across the road on horseback, to tie the animal up at the tavern as Sarah made her equally slow way the length of the main street and headed out toward the ranches.
She might not be in control any more, but she owed them an appearance. She’d let them know that she was still around, that she was going to be in control again soon, and then she’d go and check on her cattle and her dog and her house. Once she was sure everything there was still normal, she really would lock herself in. In there, nothing ever changed. She’d deal with the flood of men tomorrow, try to get a grip on everything that had changed.
Today, she’d had as much as she could take.
––—
She stayed up much of the night cleaning guns, the ones she used most often and the ones that had been cleaned least recently. She checked her supply of Perpeto and her medical supplies, gapingly aware of how short they would fall in a major event among the new population of Lawrence.
And then she sat with the claim map out on her pa’s desk, her boots up on the edge of the wood surface, looking over it.
Little squares.
They were going to take a huge amount of cash from men she’d met all of once, so that she would draw a little square on her map and remember that it was assigned to them. She’d marked out the claims that she thought were most likely, already, given the geography of the mine Pete had dug. Jimmy was right. There was a rush to it, looking at a bit of ground and imagining the riches that might be under the dirt. It was an addiction that ruined most of the men who formed it, and she was going to take their money.
It’s what the Lawsons had always done. Taken money from miners who all eventually went broke, in exchange for protection on a bit of land that ended up being worthless.
And then there was Eli Lawrence and a couple of his peers. The early men, the devoted men, the calculating men. They’d gotten filthy rich off of it. Elaine had controlled more wealth than Peter Lawson up until the last couple of years of her life, simply by inheriting it.
There was money up in those dumb rocks. Dumber than three-day-old dirt, those rocks, but there was money up there.
And now the world knew.
They would pour their energy out on Lawrence, for good or ill, trying to get at it.
She’d agreed with Jimmy that they’d let men take other claims, if they wanted them. Fools could buy rights to any piece of land they wanted, dig the same dirt, pan the same streams the last generation of broke prospectors had done. There was no more nothing there than there had been before.
She drank her tea, considering that map. This was her part of all of it. She’d be out on horseback with a rifle and a pair of pistols
, and she’d get after the claim jumpers same as the rest of the Lawsons and their hired men, but this was what she did that no one else would be able to do. The part that she kept in her head. Elaine had taught her that, and she and Jimmy had both taken it to heart. Anything you kept in your head was something no one could ever take away from you and use instead of you.
Finally, as the sun started to come up, she rose, going out the front door and toward the stable.
She had five healthy little calves running around, and the cows were eating their weight in gremlin. She needed to get them branded and put back up in the high country. She didn’t know when, or if, she’d find time.
She found the black horse laying on his side beside the barn, legs straight out. She nudged him with her boot.
“You look ridiculous,” she said. He made the characteristically equine cumbersome journey from laying prone to upright and onto his feet, throwing his head around with a certain glee. It was like he knew he annoyed her and he enjoyed it.
“Sunning is for cats,” she told him. “You lay like that too long, somethin’s gonna wander by and figure you for dead, come see what meat you’ve got left.”
She went in the barn and got a bucket of gremlin for him, then saddled and headed for the train station.
The station was quiet. The scuffmarks in the dust and the way it sat just screamed activity, but for now, there was no one there. The train had left for Jeremiah the night before, and the last of the drifters had made their way toward town, seeking shelter and sustenance.
She sat on her rocking chair, taking out a paper and rolling dried gremlin leaf into it, lighting it and smoking in the early morning quiet for some time, watching the tracks.
About half way through the cigarette, Jimmy walked across in front of her, going to lean against the station building. He reached out and took the cigarette from between her fingers, taking a draw on it and offering it back to her. She waved him off, taking out another paper and rolling it. They sat and smoked in silence for a while longer.
“Everything good at home?” he asked finally.
“Yeah.”
“Better than my house, then,” he said. She didn’t turn her head.
“Why’s that?”
“My brothers,” he said. She drew gremlin smoke into her lungs and held her breath for a moment then blew a cone of smoke up and away from her.
“Anythin’ interestin’?”
“They killed a couple of guys,” Jimmy said. “Petey’s temper. Rich and Wade were there.”
“Thought they’d be stayin’ in,” Sarah observed.
“Hoped they would,” Jimmy answered. “Need to get them working again.”
“They like that in Intec?”
“They’re like that everywhere,” Jimmy said.
Sarah shook her head.
“Lawsons.”
“I know.”
He finished the cigarette and stubbed it out under his heel, squinting down the line toward where the rails disappeared.
“You spend a lot of time here?”
“Maybe.”
“Seemed like the place to look for you,” he said.
“You lookin’ for me?”
There was silence that had probably been a shrug. She offered him the cigarette and he didn’t take it. She shifted in her chair, pulling her hat a fraction lower.
“We’ve got work to do,” he said. “Thought you’d want to come with me to the mining site to take a look at where to start.”
No, in fact, she didn’t, but she wasn’t going to back out just because she didn’t want to be there.
“You been horseback long enough at a time to survive the ride?” she asked, standing and flicking away her cigarette.
“No, but that never stopped me before.”
She shrugged.
“Up to you. You ride here?”
“Yup.”
She found a deep bay horse standing next to hers, actually hitched to the rail. The black was standing with his ears perked, watching the railway line like he could actually hear it.
“It’s just metal bars, stupid,” she said to him, mounting and waiting for Jimmy. Jimmy kept any thoughts to himself as they started for the edge of town, avoiding the main route.
“How often is the train runnin’ these days?” Sarah asked.
“I gather it’s twice a week,” Jimmy said. “If they sell enough fares, they’ll take it up again.”
“All those men,” Sarah said.
“We’ll manage them,” Jimmy told her.
The ride up through the mountains was long and quiet. Sarah could see Jimmy suffered for it, but he didn’t complain. She took out a compass a couple of times to make sure they were on course. Pete had known the way by memory, but she was working off of a rough map in her bag. She almost missed it.
“That peak,” she said, pointing. “He’s under that peak.”
They made a sharp turn north, finding the weather-scattered remainders of Pete’s encampment. Sarah turned the black horse loose to get water if he needed it, waiting for Jimmy.
“This is it,” he said, looking around. She nodded. He looked at the tumbled rock and bracing wood that was rapidly being obscured by ragged brush.
“Not much to see,” he said. She shook her head.
“The mountains claim everything pretty quickly, on this side.”
He looked up at the sky.
“It rains most days, doesn’t it?”
She nodded.
“We should get it in an hour or so.”
“And even if we started out now, we’d get home after dark,” he said.
“You ride slow.”
“You equipped for an overnight out here?” he asked.
“Not remotely.”
He nodded.
“That’s a long ride.”
“It is.”
“Well, let’s see what we see,” he said, heading for the small mine entrance. She stood, waiting, knowing what he would see. She’d seen caved mines before. So had he. He pulled some of the rocks loose, letting them roll down over the stickers and juvenile bushes.
She found a worn boulder that the soil was beginning to erode from and sat down, setting her hat on her knee.
He moved more of the rocks away from the entrance, then sat down on the pile he’d formed.
“There’s absenta down there, huh?”
“That’s what everyone says,” Sarah told him.
“Where was he dumping his refuse?”
She stood and looked around.
“That’s probably it, there,” she said, pointing at the mountainside where there were some abnormal shapes. Jimmy went to his horse and got out a lamp, lighting it and switching it over for methane.
“Won’t see it out here,” she said. “Methane don’t put out enough light.”
He shrugged, going over to the overgrown pile of rocks and dirt and working through it. Eventually he waved her over. She waited another moment, then pulled her hat off her knee and went to go join him.
He’d dug a small hole into the side of the pile and was shadowing the methane lamp with his body to block out the sunlight.
“This will be the last stuff he dug out,” Jimmy said. He held the lamp close, and Sarah pressed her shoulder against Jimmy’s to help block more light.
And there, in the weak blue methane light, the rock glimmered.
It wasn’t much, but even just that was worth the trip out. There had been miners, back when Lawrence was shutting down, who had chased veins just that strong across the roots of mountains. Jimmy took the stone and went back to his horse, stowing the lamp and the rock.
“You seen what you came for?” Sarah asked.
“I’m coming back tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll bring enough men to start digging, and enough equipment for them to stay up here for a few days. You can join us if you want, but I want to start getting this excavation under way.”
“Who’s watching town?” Sarah asked.
“Petey
and the rest, apparently,” Jimmy said, throwing his leg over his horse. Sarah thought about offering him pity - another hour on his feet - but they were going to be late as it was. She found her own dumb animal and led the way back to town.
About thirty minutes later, the rain started.
“We need to find a dry spot,” she said over her shoulder to Jimmy.
“Why?” Jimmy asked. “You ride in the rain all the time, I bet.”
“Not so much as you’d think,” she said, “considerin’ I live in a desert. But you’re not fit for this, and you ain’t dressed for it, neither.”
She found a small outcrop of rocks that was slanted hard enough to keep the ground underneath it dry and she dismounted, letting the black horse wander and waiting for Jimmy in the dry.
“We’re going to be out in the dark as it is,” he complained as he joined her.
“You in your fabric clothing,” she mocked. “You don’t remember anything ‘bout Lawrence.”
“It’s tough enough,” Jimmy said.
“But it ain’t waterproof, “she said. “And it’s going to chafe you, whether or not we stop. You ride home wet, you ain’t gonna walk for three days.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, leaning against the rock. She rolled a cigarette and handed it to him, then rolled another for herself.
“You’re babying me,” he said.
“You deserve it,” she said around the cigarette.
“Anyone else, I’d punch him in the face for saying something like that,” Jimmy said.
“Ain’t I glad I’m me,” she muttered. “And that’s Little Peter, not you.”
He hunched his shoulders as a whirl of wind brought spray into their faces.
“I don’t take it lightly when people treat me like this,” he said.
She sighed, blowing smoke at the sky.
“I hardly care what you think,” she said.
“I was so glad to be home,” he said. She frowned, glancing at him. He was looking out over the forest.
“I was glad to be home. Had this memory of a place where I was the only power there, where I had this great ally who was always there for me, this blank slate where we were going to do anything we wanted.”
She took her hat off to scratch her scalp, then put it back on. He squinted at her then looked away again.