by Harvey Click
Chapter Twenty-One
Jeremiah Ring didn’t much care for fighting. He didn’t like the earsplitting blast of black powder or the smell of blood leaking out of men. He didn’t like the endless days of marching or the moldy bacon. He didn’t like taking orders or the Godawful situations those orders put you in. He didn’t like the brainless joking of tired stinking men talking loud so they wouldn’t think about the corpses they’d seen today or how they might be corpses themselves tomorrow. Jeremiah Ring was eighteen years old. He didn’t much care for killing, and he cared even less for getting killed.
He had no idea what this fight was about. He didn’t care one way or another about slaves because his family was too poor to own any and he didn’t happen to be one himself, at least not before he was drafted. He didn’t care about the North or the South or whether they should be one country or two countries or no country, and he didn’t care what kind of flag flew over them or which particular asshole should be President. All he cared about were his Ma and his Pa and his two kid brothers and his one kid sister and the little patch of ground back in Arkansas that they called home. Next to his ma, he missed his sister Sarah the most, thirteen years old with a sweet happy face, and she could sing even sweeter than she looked. He dreamed about Sarah’s songs while he slept on the ground and while lead balls sang past his face killing the men beside him.
They were fighting in some hellhole he didn’t know the name of when the guns went silent and the sky went black and a voice asked him who he was and he couldn’t remember. When he regained consciousness he was terribly confused, and for a while he thought he was dead. He could still hear shooting, but the forces had moved beyond a ridge and their guns sounded like distant thunder. The voice in his head was much louder.
“Who are you?” it kept asking.
He touched his aching head and found blood on the side and figured that a minnie ball had grazed his skull. There were bodies on the ground, and a few of them were still groaning, but the world and its foolish troubles seemed far away.
“Who are you?” the voice asked.
At last he remembered and said, “Jeremiah Ring.”
“I give you a new name,” the voice said.
A horse galloped toward him through the trees and stopped, steaming the air with its nostrils. It was a big tan and white paint, muscles sleek beneath its gleaming coat and spirit burning in its eyes. There was a rider hunched forward in the saddle with the top of his head missing.
“My servant Buford Ransom took a bullet that could very well have been yours,” the voice said. “Now you shall take his clothing and take his place.”
The stallion pawed the ground and snorted while Jeremiah pulled the corpse off its back. He fished through the dead man’s coat pockets and found a letter signed by Jefferson Davis saying that Buford Ransom was exempt from military service on account of a bad back. Time seemed far away over the ridge where distant lightning flashed, but the voice told him to work quickly. Jeremiah dressed himself in Buford Ransom’s wool suit and put his own uniform on the corpse.
“Now you’re a dead man,” the voice said. “But even the dead must move quickly and carry good weapons.”
Jeremiah shoved Buford Ransom’s pair of Colt Navy revolvers into his belt and left his battered Richmond rifle beside the body. There was a nice Enfield Musketoon carbine in the saddle scabbard, and he found powder and balls in the saddlebag.
“They hang people for deserting,” he muttered.
“Dead men don’t worry about the laws of the living,” the voice said. “But they must ride quickly or they may die a second death.”
The stallion bucked and kicked as Dead Man AKA Jeremiah Ring AKA Buford Ransom mounted its saddle, and then it galloped away like a demon. He dug in his knees and headed home. Thunder roared behind him, but the battle had plenty of blood to drink and wouldn’t miss his little bucketful.
The voice spoke to him off and on all the way home, especially nights when he slept in the saddle. Its words were like dreams, and he paid them no heed, but even when it was silent he believed it was savoring the misery through his eyes, whole towns burned flat and women so busy sorting through the wreckage they scarcely noticed him riding by. Some dark new ache in his head seemed to enjoy the grief on their faces and the smoky smell of the ashes, but he tried to ignore it. He pictured his mother’s soft round face and sister Sarah’s shy smile and her silky blond hair and sky-blue eyes. He thought about cornbread and baked beans and fried chicken and collard greens with salt pork, and maybe Ma would bake a nice sugar pie.
But when he got home, his ma wasn’t there or Sarah or his two kid brothers or Pa. All that was left was a pile of charred wood and five crosses pounded into the ground behind it. Union raiders had come through two weeks before to teach a lesson about equality and human rights.
Jeremiah Ring AKA Buford Ransom rode west. He tried not to think about the crosses or the pile of cinders or the voice in his head that told him only blood could repay blood. He thought instead about finding water and something to shoot so he could eat, but each night he stared at his campfire and the ashes beneath it until sleep overtook him. Some nights it never did.
In Texas he got hired on at a ranch. He’d never handled a rope before, but in a couple of weeks he could make a lasso dance through the air like a streak of thought. He could handle horses better than the other cowboys, and when there was a bronco that needed breaking, he was the one who could do it. He could shoot prairie dogs or coyotes farther away than the other men could see them. When spring came he joined the cattle drive up to Abilene, and a couple years later the trail boss had him riding left point at the head of the herd.
Now that his cracked skull had healed he no longer heard the voice, except maybe when he dreamed, but he was a quiet man as if hoping in the quiet he might hear it again. Nights while the other men talked and joked, Jeremiah kept to himself and stared into his fire, chewing his plug and thinking. He liked his job, liked the wide black sky filled with stars too far away to be any threat, liked the smell of burning hide as the branding iron bit into the haunch of a steer, liked riding point watching for prairie dog holes and bogs and Indians, liked the wild excitement of heading off a stampede, liked the sound of wolves howling at the moon, liked the bite of his spurs in the sides of his horse, liked the thunder of its hooves as it galloped through the prairie, liked the long hours of empty time when he stared into a fire and saw the ashes that had been his home and family, and he would chew over his thoughts like tobacco and spit them out one spit at a time.
The men got paid at the end of a trail drive, and most of them wasted their pay on the cardsharps who haunted the saloons with aces stuck up their sleeves. When Jeremiah Ring got paid he’d buy himself new boots and shirts and a couple pairs of Sweet Orr corduroy pants, and then he’d head to the gun store and buy all the ammo he could haul. He traded his cap-and-ball Colt revolvers for a Remington bored for cartridges, and he traded his musket carbine for an 1866 Winchester repeater. He stocked up on biscuits and jerky and pemmican and tobacco because you never knew when you might be alone and hungry.
After these necessaries were done, he’d go to a saloon and have a meal and a few glasses of whiskey and buy himself a whore for the night. One year a young one approached him, and a fire blazed up in his brain when he saw her shy smile and sky-blue eyes and silky blonde hair. She looked like his sister Sarah, six years older than the last time he’d seen her, but still a child. Maybe she had somehow escaped the war and fled west the way he had. An old voice mumbled in his head old pain old ruins, and all he could do was stare at her and say her name.
“The name is Becky,” she said, “but if ya got two dollars you kin call me whatever ya want.”
While he stared at her, old voice mumbling in his head, a stinking cowboy grabbed her arm and started pulling her toward the stairs. Her eyes stayed fixed blue and sweet on Jeremiah, and whatever she claimed her name was, he could see plain as day that she was Sarah an
d she needed his help.
“Let her go,” he said.
The cowboy stuck his hairy hand up Sarah’s dress and sneered. “What’sa matter?” he said. “Maybe this whore’s your sister or something.”
Sarah pulled loose from the cowboy’s grip, and the fire blazing in Jeremiah’s head was suddenly spitting out his Remington. The cowboy stood there for a few seconds with his hairy hands twitching, and then he fell backwards.
Time seemed somewhere far away, but the old voice told him to move quickly. He had to think back to know how many shots he’d fired, just three, and that left three more for any son of a bitch who tried to stop him. Nobody did.
He ran to the stable, stuck his cocked gun under the livery boy’s chin, and said, “Gimme a bag of oats and get my horse saddled up before my finger slips.” The boy moved quickly, Old Paint pawing the dirt and snorting with excitement, but Jeremiah heard men running and shouting before the boy got the stable gate open.
He reloaded his Remington and fired behind him as he galloped out of town, and the voice in his head was happy whenever his lead found flesh. He rode southwest down the cattle-drive trail, hoping to lure the first wave of bastards to a high bluff he remembered. If he could get to it and hide up there behind the rocks, maybe he could pick them off with his Winchester. It would take time to organize another posse.
***
Joe Ryver drove southeast out of town toward his piece of land in Hocking Hills. He figured Kat had hidden a tracing bug on his truck, but he couldn’t hunt for it now. Best plan was to lure the first wave of bastards onto his home turf where maybe he could pick them off with his Winchester. It would take time for the Society to organize another posse.
He drove a little way up the first slope of his land and parked his truck behind some trees where it looked hidden but wouldn’t be hard for the punks to find. He stuck his Colt Peacemaker into his belt and loaded his Winchester ‘94 carbine. Both of them used .45 Colt, a cartridge that had been around about as long as he’d been working for the Man and was still one of the best means available to put a hole in someone big enough to make him shut up quick. He filled his pockets with ammo and wondered if their orders were to kill him or take him alive. Dead was one thing, but being hung from the ceiling like Johnny Burne was another.
He wouldn’t let that happen. He always kept a Hermesium bullet in his coat pocket, and even hell had to be better than the New Goddamn Society.
***
Jeremiah Ring could see the Rockies in the distance day after day, but they seemed to get no closer. What he couldn’t see was a posse, but he knew one was back there. The first one hadn’t amounted to much, seven fools who didn’t know how to shoot and didn’t know what hit them, but he knew the second batch would be sharper. By now he surely had a good enough price on his head to attract good bounty hunters teamed up with some Indians who could read tracks like preachers reading Gospel.
He wanted to ride day and night but didn’t want to wear out his horse, so he’d stop and let it rest whenever he found a safe-looking place with water and grazing and something solid to hide behind. He was frugal with his jerky and biscuits even though there was plenty of game to shoot, because he didn’t want to make noise shooting it or make smoke cooking it. Water was a greater concern than food, but he had a good nose for finding it. The old voice was back, speaking to him when he dozed in the saddle, talking more in directions than words, and he knew it was leading him to someplace where it wanted him to be.
At last he could smell the mountain pines. His horse smelled water and trotted with new strength, but it still took them half a day to reach the first slope. Pine-scented breeze cooled them as they climbed to a cold fresh stream. Jeremiah and his tired paint drank, and then they climbed farther up into the timber. He made camp and made his first mistake since leaving the livery stable: he built a fire.
The next morning when he awoke, he looked down the side of the mountain and saw the posse moving through the prairie grass below. They must have seen his smoke.
***
Ryver climbed up and down his land setting his traps, old rusty metal waiting harmlessly up a tree or beneath the sod until he pried steel teeth apart or pulled down a chain against a trigger. When he was done, he climbed to a boulder hidden behind brush at the highest hump of the ridge-top. The only way to get there was up the side of the ridge, so he could pick off the punks as they struggled up the steep slope.
Cold wind swept the hills getting colder and going into his bones. He huddled shivering behind the boulder and wished he could build a fire.
***
After the long prairie miles, the mountain slopes wore out Jeremiah’s horse in a hurry, and he looked for a good hiding place where they could rest. Halfway up a mountain he found a wide flat ledge thick with brush and saplings. The only way to get there was up the side of the mountain, so even if the posse spotted his tracks he could pick them off as they struggled up the steep slope.
He found a cave behind some bushes at the back of the ledge, and that evening when the sun got low enough to shine into the mouth, he cocked his Winchester and crawled in for a look. The cave was too small to interest a bear, but it must have interested a man one time long ago because Jeremiah found his skeleton lying in the back stretched out with bone hands beneath the skull like he was taking a short nap instead of the endless sleep. A rusty Brown Bess flintlock musket lay beside him, which meant the dead man had been lying there for maybe a hundred years.
His saddlebag was so brittle the leather crumbled to dust when Jeremiah tried to open it. He found seven gold nuggets in the dust and a carved buffalo horn. It looked like a powder horn, but when he pulled off the metal cap a strange purple chill spilled out and a familiar voice spoke.
“You followed my directions well,” the voice said. “Now we can speak more easily.”
***
Wind swept past the hills like an old voice sweeping down the long years asking, “Who are you?” and Joe Ryver didn’t know the answer.
He couldn’t remember all the names he’d worn, names forgotten by now even by their weather-beaten tombstones. The name Joe Ryver he’d picked up from a birth certificate in the Phoenix courthouse after killing a woman in Flagstaff or maybe Tucson, but he couldn’t remember the circumstances.
Reckon I’m nothing but dead names, he thought. Nothing left in my head anymore except the shit Cypher put there.
He thought about a time in 1963 when his buffalo horn went dead, date easy to remember because it was when Kennedy was shot. Two assholes down in one week, he had thought at the time.
He remembered talking into the dead horn night after night not trusting its silence to mean that he was free at last. Free to do what? All his life he’d worked for the Man, and now he didn’t know what to do, so he holed up in a flea-bit hotel in Dallas and began to drink too much for the first time in his life, hardly getting up except to buy more whiskey. He told himself he was sorting out his life, but there were too many years to sort out and the only years that made any sense were the ones before that Goddamn war, back there when he helped his pa plow a few acres while sister Sarah helped his mother shell peas for supper. He could still smell the peas and cornbread, so he got in his truck and went to visit the only place that ever made sense. As near as he could figure, the old pile of rubble with the five crosses was buried beneath a gas station with some black velvet paintings of Elvis for sale in the window.
It’s difficult to drink yourself to death when you’re a Longevital, but he gave it a good try. Then one night the buffalo horn started talking to him again. It told him to get himself cleaned up and sober, and it was a great relief to be taking orders again. He got up and took a shower and killed a man in Texarkana.
But the Man in the horn was never the same again after his voice died and came back to life. That was when Cypher started his crazy talk about being God and turned the Lost Society into a mob of hippie trash who heard him talking through the cold purple haze of their
LSD telling them to walk on the wild side and kill Sharon Tate and brain-death themselves into higher consciousness. The world got crazier, and the Man got crazier along with it, New Society with no room in it for an old man with tombstone names.
“Who are you?” the cold years asked, and Ryver didn’t know the answer.
***
Jeremiah Ring AKA Buford Ransom never spoke his private thoughts to any living man, but he spoke freely to the Man in the horn because talking to the Man was like talking to himself. The Man’s words reminded him of Bible passages his mother used to read out loud in the evenings after the supper dishes were washed.
“Even in this long distance of outer darkness, I can see your eyes, Jeremiah Ring,” the voice said. “I can see cold gray ashes dusted over dim memories, and I can see the inferno that blazed there before. I can teach you to throw your voice into the trees and make the branches speak with a dozen voices, and I can teach you to turn shadows into dancing phantoms that will lead men astray. I can teach you to make the sun glare off mirrors of air so your enemies can’t see you, and I can teach you to carve spells out of rattlesnake skins and wear them on your face so no one will recognize you. I can teach you to make a wire sing through the air like a knife, and I can teach you to make a man forget he has ever seen you.”
“And what do I have to do for you?” Jeremiah asked.
“Little jobs that you’ll enjoy.”
Jeremiah learned quickly. Two days after finding the buffalo horn, he saw the posse riding into the valley beneath him. He confused them with voices and apparitions, and he shot them one by one as they galloped around in circles chasing mirages.
It was a job that he enjoyed.
***
Ryver’s dead eye heard the cars coming before his ears did. Headlights appeared on the road below, but the first two cars drove past too stupid to see his truck. The third car stopped and waited, cell phones yacking until the other two cars returned and pulled off the road.