The bartender stood from behind the bar, a green hue to his face. A thick sickness in his visage. “Sorry, Doc,” he said.
“The girl?”
“What?” said the bartender. He grabbed a pitcher and brought it toward his face like he might vomit.
“Oh hell. From last night. The stranger girl.” Doc started up the stairs, pointed toward the rooms. “Which one?”
The bartender held up a finger.
“One?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said and gagged. “Three.” Then he coughed up some yuck, caught it in the receptacle.
Doc wasted no time. He stormed to three and kicked in the door, and it burst wide, splinters coughing off the jamb, and Mira shot up wide eyed from her bed, clutching blankets to her chest.
“How’d you do it?” Doc asked her.
Mira rubbed her eyes. “I won’t tell you anything.”
Murk in Disgust
His eyes fired open and his heart filled with haunts.
What had he done?
Vague threads of the night before came back to him and he gazed about feverishly. The thing, as it was that he now considered her, with which he’d spent the night, lay passed out, her face smothered into a pillow, so only her skull showed to his eyes, with its patchy, thin hair clinging to it like spiderwebs. She seemed skeletal in her repose. A crypt thing out of its resting place. There were crude tattoos across the wrinkly skin of her back. Varicose veins rose from her legs, everywhere.
From beyond his door, Murk heard commotion. Tussling and hollering and then heavy steps on the stairs.
He fumbled from the mattress and crept to the window to watch the street below.
Doc and Monroe dragged Mira toward the jail, Mira screaming at some point, “I ain’t telling nothing.”
They handled her roughly.
Murk set to thought.
Of all the bad doings for which his behavior brought to fruition, this was the worst of it. It had been intended, as planned before Murk visited the machine, that they’d meet up as soon as able and leave town together. His conversation. The haircutting. It came back to him in lewd heaves, and he curled up with his hands holding his head, disgusted at himself for how he’d behaved. But could he fix it? His head spun circles, but he seemed clearer minded than the night prior.
Murk scrutinized the nude thing on the bed.
Was this why the leaving hadn’t happened?
Murk went to the door and put his ear to it. He could hear conversation below, so he cracked the door and stared down into the saloon.
“Think,” some stranger was hollering at the bartender, who was doubled over with his face in a pitcher’s mouth. “Where’d he go?”
The bartender shook his head and puked some, and Murk eased the door closed.
He probed the room, surveying the situation.
When he saw the wig, his escape plan came clear to him.
Mira the Prisoner
She’d been deposited in the cell with Clover and the door had been locked tight. She pressed against the wall, slumped to the ground, mortified.
“How?”
“I don’t know anything,” said Mira.
“Earlier,” said Doc, “you said you wouldn’t tell anything.”
“What’s the difference?”
“At this moment,” Doc said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure what I think should happen to you on account. But I am certain of this. You’re gonna stay in there until I figure it out. And he’s gonna stay in there with you.” He motioned to dead Joe Clover. “And I am a patient man. If it takes me a year to decide your fate, so be it.”
Doc left the jail.
Mira hid her eyes from her dead cellmate.
Murk the Woman
He looked in the mirror and messed with the wig some more—blonde and a bit tiny on his noggin, stringy and napped. The dress’s neckline was low, showed off the hairs on his chest, was tight on his shoulders. He couldn’t fit his foot in her shoe, so he kept his boot on.
“Heinous,” Murk said to his reflection, but then he saw the dress’s owner in her stew, and decided that the black garment probably looked better on him by a bit.
He closed his eyes at his reflection, opened them, said, “Let’s see how it goes.”
Murk opened the door and made his way to the staircase. When he got to the top of it, the bartender hollered. “You see that stranger last night?”
“I did not,” said Murk. He made no attempts to disguise his voice. He figured, if his chest didn’t give him away, nothing would.
The bartender nodded up at him, puked a bit more, and Murk climbed down the stairs, his peg tapping as he descended.
He crossed the saloon. Regal, sort of, in his getup.
He stepped out into the street. All the light of the world.
No one seemed to be watching him. He turned left. He headed out of town. He sort of had a plan.
Jilly saw him first. She had her eyes to a pair of binoculars and was surveying the distance for Murk and Mira. “Well,” she said to Bale. “I thought maybe this was them, but it appears to be some kind of hideous, one-legged woman. So I might get to shoot you still.”
“Lucky me,” said Bale.
“Wait, wait,” said Jilly. “She’s taken her hair off and looks even worse.”
Mole was juggling a few rocks she’d found. “Taken it off?”
“Like a wig maybe,” said Jilly. “Oh, hang on. Maybe.” Jilly lowered the binoculars and went to Bale. His hands were still tied behind his back. “Look that way,” Jilly said. “That your friend?”
It took Bale a second. “Focus,” he said. Jilly turned the focus wheel. “Stop. What the hell?”
“Is it him?” Mole asked.
“Yeah, but where’s Mira?”
Murk started waving his wig toward them all. “Don’t shoot,” he hollered out, his voice thinly coming from the distance.
“You can ask him when he gets here,” said Jilly, and, when he finally walked up, she said, “You make an ugly bitch.”
“Thanks,” said Murk. “I need some water.”
Mole handed him a canteen.
“Where the fuck’s Mira?” Bale asked.
Murk motioned back toward the town. He swallowed hard, cleared his throat. Every eye in the small encampment was locked on him. “I got good news and bad news.”
“The fuck you mean bad news?” said Bale.
“And good.” Murk took another sip.
It was quiet.
“Well, let us have it,” said Jilly. “No need to gather further invitation.”
“The good news is,” Murk said, “I found your friend.”
“Friend?” said Mole.
Murk held his hand up to his chest, palm toward the earth. “Round this high tall. Redheaded. Tells people to suck on his dick and such. Paints skulls on stuff.”
Jilly clapped her hands. “That’s our shithead for certain,” she said.
“But,” said Murk, “it’s complicated.”
“Complicated?” Mole dropped her rocks.
“Mira and I were hoping to do y’all a solid. We thought we’d planned it out perfect.”
“Planned what?” said Bale.
Murk stared at Bale hard, trying to convey something. “A jailbreak. They got him in a cell back there. Guarded.” He sipped again from the canteen.
“Well shit,” said Jilly, “he probably deserves it.” She looked at Mole. “What do ya think? That good enough just knowing that? Take the news to his mom.”
“But what about Mira?” Bale asked. He kicked dirt at Murk.
“That’s the bad news. We were trying to get him out of there. We were worried about you. We thought if we came back and just said we’d seen him that it wouldn’t be enough. We figured we’d get him out and, like
, use him as trade. We’d come to camp with him as a hostage, a knife to his neck or something, and say that we wouldn’t give him up unless they gave you up, but Mira got caught in our trying, and right now, they got ’em both in the same cell. Sitting in the center of town. And I don’t know what they’ve got planned for them, but my guess is a hanging. They got some kind of scaffolding built, it looks like. Not far from the jail.”
“That settles it then,” Jilly said. “We wait for him to hang, and we go in to round up his corpse. Take him back to the Founder, let her know we tried.”
“It does not settle a damn thing,” said Mole. “Shit. Listen to you. I’d rather him just disappear than our showing up with his neck-broken body. You ever see a hanged man? Their heads go a willy-nilly, and often their eyes pop from their skulls. We’d get demoted, showing up with him like that.”
“Then what, Mole? Go in there guns blazing?”
“Normally, I wouldn’t suggest it, but look at these past few days. This past outing. I’m done chasing this boy, and maybe the domer is right. Our going in there might be a way to get a more important, important job. Worst case, we get killed and don’t have to worry about any of it anymore anyway.”
Jilly looked so proud. “You’re the boss,” she said. She grinned at Baby Boo, “Ash your eyes, bitch! We’re gonna murder some black-blooded scoundrels.”
The three women went then to the fire, and Mole grabbed some dark soot and distributed it as they made ready, clucking incantations at one another as they rimmed their eyes with black.
Bale whispered to Murk. “The redhead? I thought you . . .”
“I did.”
“So what the fuck?”
“The other part’s true. The Mira part. They got her, man. And I ain’t got no better ideas.”
Bale nodded. He didn’t either.
Doc Shuts Down
the Machine
It was only late afternoon, but Doc motioned for Monroe to flip the switch early.
“You okay, Doc, you don’t seem yourself?”
“Monroe, I am bothered. That is the only word for it. I’ve been thinking about it all day. What is it? I keep asking myself. Doc, I say, what is it that you feel? Earlier I toyed with the term depressed. But I think depression implies a sort of sedentary reaction, a sort of letting the world happen and feeling small against the happening of it. Then I tried molested, but that word is too sexual in nature, and it also implies that something was done to me, and that’s not really the case. Something was done to a possession of mine. I do not feel swindled, because that girl told me her intentions, and I don’t feel naïve, because I knew that if given the opportunity to disobey me she would have taken it. I suppose I overestimated myself. So, it might be that I feel susceptible, but all that really means is I feel affected. So, I ask myself then, what is the nature of this affectation? And so, bothered is what I’ve come to decide is how I feel. Sort of troubled by the pestering of others. It seems like a generalization that, but I assure you I’ve come to it after much deliberation.”
“But you still want me to throw the switch, right?”
“Yes, Monroe, I do,” said Doc, and he sat on his bench and watched for the day to gray.
Plan of Attack
Once the women had ashed their eyes and had loaded up their rifles and had chanted their war cries, the five made ready to head toward town.
“Y’all are just staying back,” Jilly said to Murk and Bale. “You’ll just get in the way.”
“What’s the plan?” asked Murk.
“You don’t need to know,” said Mole.
“You’re at least waiting till sundown, right?”
“Sunset,” said Mole. “We’ll enter the town from the west and the sun will be behind us and it’ll disorient them and we’ll have good light by which to aim our rifles.”
“Yeah,” said Murk, “but your shadows will be as long as they can get.”
“What?”
“They’ll drink them,” said Murk. “That’s the first thing they’ll try to do.”
“You see my shadow on the ground?”
“Forgot,” Murk said.
“I’m a pretty good shot,” said Bale. “If you want to untie me and give me a rifle.”
“Truth is,” said Jilly, “I’m not really sure of your status. You might should be shot dead right now, and you’re probably most definitely a prisoner of war.”
“But Murk came back.”
“But our promise was to the girl,” said Jilly. “Not this black-eyed she-man.”
Murk tugged at his dress. “I’m kind of getting used to it,” he said. “Lets the breeze in.” He walked over near the fire and picked up the Dutch oven. It had been taken out of the ashes and had cooled enough to carry.
“What the hell you doing with that?” Jilly asked.
“It’s Mira’s,” he said. “I’m taking it back to her.”
Doc in Thought
But maybe depressed was the right word. The sun was setting and Doc sat on his bench, thinking about it. He fetched lines of poetry from his mind, whispered them as he watched the day go:
Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.
Was he bereaved? Did Clover’s passing do that to him? He always hated the man, but now that he was dead, did his absence create some kind of void in him?
Monroe walked up with a bottle of spirits and a glass and handed the two things to Doc, but Doc declined the glass, instead dislodging the cork and sipping straight from the bottle.
“Anything else I can bring you, sir?”
“I don’t think so.” And, in all that, he never took his eyes off the sun.
“I’ll be at the inn saloon a bit, and I’ll stick my head out every so often to check.”
“Mighty kind of you, Monroe, but I imagine I’ll be fine. Enjoy yourself, I guess. Do whatever you feel.”
Monroe shrugged, made off silently, going back to the deformed music and festivities at the saloon.
Smote maybe? But that just suggested a general striking of feeling. Pangs. But what is a pang anyhow? The shape of the feeling more than the feeling itself, as it occurred to Doc. How the feeling came at you. In a pang. But this feeling was like a long thick thing. An oppression? A setting down upon? As though burdened by a bother. A bother of someone else’s forming and for someone else’s pleasure.
Saddled?
Shit. He felt saddled.
That’s what it was.
Not only by the girl who’d done in Clover, but by all of it. The town. The shadow addicts.
Look how much he had done. Look how much order he had given his little corner of the world.
And for what? What was the trade? What had he asked in turn?
That he be allowed his prisoner. That if he felt so inclined to keep a man in a cage in misery for eternity, he be given that privilege.
But now that Clover was dead, the ungrateful repayment for all his labors seemed to stick the saddle firmly on him. He felt a beast of burden. “Sure, Doc will carry the weight of you all,” he thought. “Sure, Doc will hold the load.”
He drank more. He beheld the thinning sun.
He half thought about tearing the whole place down.
Tearing the
Whole Place Down
But Doc would have to get in line.
They came with violence in their hearts and discipline in their steps.
Jilly came from the north. Mole from the east and Baby Boo from the west.
The idea was not to get in and out unnoticed.
“We’ll leave no one alive, save a few to spread the word of us. The Founder needs to know what we’re capable of.”
Mole’s orders, and so be it.
Carnage was the course of action.
The women soldiers affixed bayonets to their rifles, walked stealth-like with their barrels raised. Just because they wanted to take the fight to them, didn’t mean they wouldn’t use the element of surprise.
“Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes,” Jilly joked, and she tiptoed down the road, staying near the buildings, headed for the hum of the inn.
Once there, hid up in shadow, the glow of the electric lights pulsing out in the dusk-laden street, Jilly lit a coal-oil explosive and lobbed it at the bat-wing doors of the place, and it burst open into flames which spat beyond the entrance, and the merriment making inside transformed to commotion and folks spilled toward the street.
That’s when the rifles rang out. Some ten or twelve of the saloon patrons were mowed down before they realized the trap. Most likely, they thought some mere fire had broken out, but when folks started falling out with holes in their heads, pushed back into the saloon by projectiles after trying to flee outdoors for safety, the realization of an aggression became clear to them.
“Quit playing the fucking piano,” someone screamed, but the thing still twinkled on in absurd fashion.
Murk and Bale were a bit down the road, watching it all go down. Thick heaves of smoke stenched up the air.
“You think you can untie my wrists?” Bale asked.
Murk raised the Dutch oven he held. “My hands are full.”
“How many people you think they’ve killed so far?”
“Sixteen?”
From the second story window of the inn, a bald, naked woman dove into the street, landing on her feet, running toward the women soldiers, a razor blade in each hand, slicing in every direction at once, or at least trying to. Jilly ran her bayonet through her throat, kicked her to the ground.
“Seventeen?”
However many folks there were in the town, it seemed almost painfully clear that aside from those in the inn, there’d be few to lend assistance. If folks were in the surrounding buildings, they were staying hid up in them.
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