Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

  The women moved into the inn methodically, shooting and knifing all those who had the misfortune of being there.

  Only a few of the men gave fight.

  They had crude weaponry, shovel handles and table legs, which they swung frantically, but the women had been trained to fight soldiers, and made quick work of them. Jilly was especially pleased at herself when she took a machete from a one-armed weirdo with a hooknose and used the thing to hack off his other arm. The blade was dull, so it took some doing, but it was worth it to her.

  The man scowled down at the spot she fought the arm off from. “Bitch, bitch, bitch” he kept calling. Then Jilly hit him in the head with his own arm, dropped the thing and fired a shot between his eyes and a belch of his brain popped out the back of his head, spritzed the liquor bottles behind the bar with gray matter.

  For a few minutes, the melee was obscene. The screaming and gunfire and the begging and pleading. The smell of blood and gunpowder. Fire and spilled booze.

  “Don’t kill me, don’t . . .” but they were already dead.

  After a bit, it quieted down, only the crackling of the inn on fire providing a kind of background score to the quick defeat, and then the piano caught ablaze and its strings popped and hollered making some murderous music.

  Broken bottles rolled about, tinkling. Moonshine dripped from surfaces like rain.

  Jilly stepped from the inn, her face soot smeared, holding her newly acquired machete.

  And that’s when Murk and Bale saw it.

  Above Jilly in the deep-dark distance.

  Like a miniature fist of light throwing a haymaker across the heavens, Halley’s Comet hung.

  Jilly appeared glorious beneath it.

  Some countess of the apocalypse come to carry off souls in a cauldron.

  “Where’s this goddamned jail?” she screamed.

  Murk tilted his head in the direction and Jilly stomped off proudly, unaware.

  “Is that it?” said Bale, his eyes glued to the comet.

  “Gotta be,” said Murk. The streaking thing of white against the navy, sullen sky.

  “And Clover?” Bale asked. “Y’all get him?”

  Then they heard the bang.

  Jilly and Murk

  When Mole entered the jail, the damage was done.

  “What happened?” she said to Jilly, who laid on the ground bleeding.

  “That motherfucker shot me.” Doc lay dead on the ground, a machete blade through his face. In his hands, he cradled some ancient musket. A single-shot kind of thing with a six-foot barrel.

  Mole lowered herself to Jilly to inspect her. Baby Boo came running in, followed by Murk and Bale. Mira screamed with joy when she saw the boys.

  “Will I make it?” Jilly asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Mole

  “That fucking sucks.” Her eyes went every which way. Came back to Mole’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It hurts like a thing there’s no cuss big enough for.” She looked down at her stomach. You could’ve fit a child’s fists in the wound. “I can’t make it stop bleeding.”

  “Don’t try. Just let it go.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  Mole touched Jilly’s brow. “Wanna hear a story?”

  “You fucking serious?” Jilly’s face spasmed with pain. “You fucking with me now?”

  “It’s good. I just thought of it.”

  Jilly rolled her eyes. Swallowed hard. Her face was sweaty and pale. “Ain’t like I could stop you.”

  “I once had a friend named Jilly,” Mole said. “And my stories bored her to death.”

  Jilly giggled some. “You’re making me bleed more,” she said. Her eyes went wide at nothing and she was gone.

  Mole gaped over at the cell. “Where’s the redhead?”

  She eyed Murk. Murk tilted the Dutch oven as if offering it away.

  Then, “I knew’d you was lying,” Baby Boo screamed. A rifle went off and the Dutch oven clanged to the ground. Murk heaped back at the wall behind him, dragged to the floor. Black blood smearing the wall as he dropped off with closed eyes.

  Mole jumped up, stepped toward Baby Boo. “Your year starts again,” she said, and Baby Boo broke down into sobbing and Mole ordered her out of the jail.

  But Mira was crying too, and the jail was thick with panic. Great sobs and confusion.

  “You,” Mole said to Bale. “Come with me.” She grabbed him by his ear and tugged him along. She took the cell keys from a hook on the wall and unlocked the door, forced Bale into the quarters along with Mira and dead Clover. Locked the door of the thing. Pitched the keys at Murk’s bloody guts.

  “I never want to see either of you ever again.” She hoisted Jilly over her shoulder and walked her into the night. For a solid hour Bale and Mira listened to Mole and Baby Boo working their way through the town, killing whoever was left.

  Then, the craziest thing, Murk’s eyes opened wide. He looked about. “They gone?” he asked.

  Mira jumped up, grabbed the cell bars, leaned into them hard as though she might be able to push through them. “Murk,” she sobbed. “You okay?”

  “Oh, fuck no.” He said. “I don’t know what all the bullet got, but most nothing on me’s working. Look at my right hand.”

  Mira did, and he was wagging his middle finger back and forth.

  “It’s the only movement I got left, and I’m gonna keep doing it till I can’t no more.”

  “That’s fine,” Mira said.

  “You sure,” said Bale. He had dragged up to the bars. The shaved part of his head cool against the iron. “Can’t just toss the keys at us?”

  “Keys?”

  “On your stomach,” said Mira.

  “Yup,” said Murk. “Can’t do shit about it.”

  “It’s okay,” said Bale. “Just relax.”

  Murk looked down at his hand. “It stopped,” he said.

  “Short lived,” said Mira.

  Murk laughed. “Shit,” he said, “she’s right. The laughing and bleeding. They’re tied together somehow.”

  “Murk,” said Mira, “do you remember any of it?”

  Murk lowered his eyes. A million moments rolled into a breath. “All of it,” he said.

  “Not me,” said Mira. “Last thing I remember is we were walking to town. And then somehow you got me my pot back. In between, I’ve forgotten.”

  Murk smiled black blood at her. “I was thinking,” he said, “when you get back,” he coughed some and redness bloomed at the corner of his lips, “if it didn’t work. Our killing Clover. Just tell your mom to change her mind. Tell her that it’s fair now.” His eyes dropped to his shot-open belly. “That this makes it fair. You know?”

  “Okay,” said Mira.

  “Cause you owe me,” Murk said. “On account of my jacket.”

  Mira motioned to the other cell. “I’ll be able to get it back for you soon,” she said, “your jacket.”

  “Nope,” said Murk. “It’d never be the same.”

  Then he quit breathing and his eyes got gray and Mira had never before seen them that color, and she wasn’t certain if that’s the true color they were, or if they’d been stained that way somehow by Murk’s lifestyle.

  envoi

  Father and Son

  Across that world, the inhabitants were caught in personal adventures. Mira, Murk, and Bale had their thing, but elsewhere similar missions were underway. Dome people boarded trains; warring women loaded rifles. Symbiotic, perhaps.

  Not too far away, a lesser but similar journey was afoot. A man named Jessup helped his father Rondell along toward a hopeful murder that could never occur. They’d been traveling for days and days across inhospitable terrain, entirely ill-equipped for their expedition. This is the thing about people: they overe
stimate themselves or underestimate the world. They see mountains on the horizon and they set out for them with grandiose expectations. Perhaps they’ll summit the thing by sunset. A day later, after having walked nonstop, the mountain is still on the horizon and their expectations have mollified. They want merely to camp in its shadow.

  Jessup and his father had not yet given up entirely, but the germ of surrender was beginning to incubate, at least for Jessup—he had less at stake in the endeavor and was becoming less certain that the healer’s words were true.

  “What if we kill him,” said Jessup, “and the comet comes, and you stay the same?”

  Rondell shook his head. “Let’s not think like that.”

  Hope is a great motivator, but it’s a great deceiver too. They continued on in unwarranted pursuit, aiming at any clue afforded to them, asking strangers with black eyes for information that seemed laughable.

  “Redhead? Sure. There’s a town of them. Three days north of here. By a lake filled with mermaids, each one with the nicest pair a titties you’ve ever seen.”

  Sad thing was, while these fibs came, Rondell listened intently as if he was audience to some kind of sermonizing.

  “Hear that,” he’d say to Jessup. “North. Just three days.”

  And Jessup would sort of lead him on.

  But, his patience for all this was wearing thin.

  You have to understand how rare a thing a father was. The whole world seemed to be against their existing. It was hard enough to keep your shadow on the outside: to be surrounded by prey was irrational.

  Rondell was the only father Jessup or Rondell knew by name. If you met a man, clearly he’d been begotten, but the begetter was always off attending to his own affairs, often leaving behind sleepless women and hate-filled children, and Jessup was deeply indebted to his father for proving an anomaly in that regard. The man was his hero.

  They lived together in a hut surrounded by vast acres of grapefruit groves that Rondell and Jessup would harvest for grapefruit moonshine. They did this not to act as suppliers for folks, but, rather, they hoarded alcohol and lived a kind of loose life deeply hid away from the world in their thorny labyrinth of grapefruit trees.

  Jessup’s mother had died in childbirth.

  He’d never seen a picture of her, but Rondell would often describe her.

  “Prettier than the stars when you’re drunk.”

  Deep, high praise for such an alcoholic.

  Some days, for no reason, Rondell would wake Jessup up and tell him, “Let’s celebrate your ma today.” And that meant they’d drink more than usual, and he’d sing half-remembered tunes they used to dance to, and he’d show Jessup blankets she made.

  It was after one of these celebrations that Rondell passed out in the grass and the redheaded boy gobbled his shadow. Jessup caught a glimpse of the thief tarrying off after the deed was done.

  He gave chase, following him down the thorny tree rows, but couldn’t catch him.

  When he returned to his father, Rondell sat Indian style bawling.

  “I’ve lost your mother and now I’ve lost my shadow and it’s not fair,” he said. “It’s not fair how life’s treated me.”

  Once Jessup had shaken some of the moonshine from his brain, he took Rondell to see the healer.

  Then their real journey began, but now it was beginning to seem pointless to Jessup, and Rondell sensed this, and he tried to explain:

  “I got a hooker once. It’s the only thing I can compare it to. It was in this botched place called Boys’ Town, a bunch of stinky streets with bedroom doors that opened right onto it. Little bedrooms, they were, and whores stood in those doorways. Most of them had diseases, I guess, but I still went inside, and the room was the smell of old sex and lavender and I got lost in the bad magic of it, fell into the bed with my whore and we did a gross amount of sex. Maybe hours. But for all the thrashing and all the wanting and all desirousness that dwelled in me, I could not seem to finish. We were yanking and snatching and tugging and what have you. And the whore was laughing at me, and she called in a friend, and I thought that might help, the indecency of it all. But outside the sun rose. And at some point I just gave up. Right now is like being in that room and knowing that it won’t end how I want it to.”

  “Can you stand?” Jessup asked.

  “I can try, but I just wanna fucking sleep.”

  Jessup helped lift his father from the earth. Shouldering most of his weight, he led him, exhausted, across that desert.

  Days went on like that.

  And then the comet came.

  They watched it streak the sky with sadness in their hearts. A decapitated head of magic being lobbed across the sky.

  Where were they even then?

  And Jessup addressed his father.

  “We can’t get you all the way home like this.” It was the next morning and Jessup was bearing the brunt of Rondell’s load. His feet worked over the grasses and brambles while his father’s slogged through them.

  “Leave me, I suppose. I don’t want to drag you down.”

  Jessup couldn’t catch shade: his father had barely slept. “I can’t leave you, but we’ll need to detour.”

  “Detour? Add to the journey?”

  Jessup let Rondell slip from his shoulder, let him rest on the ground.

  Rondell fanned himself with a hand.

  “Nearby,” said Jessup, “there’s a town with a machine that makes shadows, kind of. I’ve only heard about it. They take trade, I don’t know what, and we don’t have much. But I think we have to try. Get you some sleep.”

  Rondell closed his eyes. “How far?”

  “Maybe a day.”

  “And home? The goats?”

  “Maybe three.”

  Rondell opened his eyes again, looked off at the clouds, smiled as much as he could. “It’s worth a shot,” he said.

  Cellmates

  For hours after Murk died, Mira and Bale stayed silent.

  The only noise was their pained breathing.

  “I didn’t want it like this,” Mira said.

  “I know.”

  “Can you untie my hands?”

  “I can try.”

  Bale wriggled on the floor to her and she picked at the ropes.

  “I can’t get it.”

  She draped her arms over his shoulders.

  She pressed her face to his face.

  There were dead bodies all around them.

  There was blood and the gunshot smells.

  But inside that cell, their shared warmth was dazzling.

  “You think we’ll die in here?”

  The puddle of blood around Clover discolored, the plasma separating.

  “I’m not sure.”

  They dozed in and out. Dreamed with their eyes open. The shock of the world kept them living in fear. Kept reality blinking on and off like a strobe light—revealing brief snippets, scattering infinite shadows. Promising naught but captivity.

  In Need of Sleep

  Bale’s eyes opened.

  Had something woken him?

  “Hello?” he heard the faint call. Some parch-throated holler.

  “Mira,” Bale said. “Wake up.” He gently shimmied her shoulder with his foot.

  She stirred, opened her eyes uneasily seemed confused by her surroundings until she saw Bale’s face. “What?”

  “Do you hear it?”

  The quiet so spare it took a while to be certain.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  They waited, their eyes out of focus, striving at something with their ears.

  “Hello?” it came again—their ears like dry tongues against a form of wet in the noise of it.

  “That?” said Bale.

  “Maybe?” Could Mira be certain of anything sitting in that rook
ery of death, in that nest of lifeless bodies akimbo?

  Bale got to his feet, “In here,” he screamed. “Hello! In here!” He leaned his shoulder into the bars, his scalp grazing the cold of one.

  Two men showed at the door. One with a face that Bale knew.

  “You,” Bale said. “I know you.” He strained toward him, all of his strength behind the gesture.

  The recognized man shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He made some sound that wasn’t language with his throat, “I don’t know prisoners.”

  “Jessup,” said Bale. “From the train, you shadow thiever.”

  Jessup went gentle in his eyes. “Oh yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “Let us out of here,” Bale said.

  Jessup touched his forehead, rubbed a bit where Bale’s barrel had been. “I don’t know, son. Think if you were in my position.” He scrutinized the distance, the way a preacher might when saying something hard to the congregation. “I just come to a town of death, and you think I should let its only prisoners free?” His eyes back on Bale.

  “Look,” said Bale, “I coulda blasted you to death and didn’t.”

  Jessup and Rondell conversed in whispers. “Sorry, son,” Jessup said. The plaintive silence of an implied go fuck yourself. “It just don’t seem right.” And they made to leave.

  “But you owe me,” said Bale, his voice cracking against the word owe so it sounded the way an animal might chirp it.

  Jessup and Rondell didn’t answer. Only disappeared from the doorway. The thing just a rectangle of pitiful light.

  Wildly, Bale’s mind spun to produce some sort of incentive. “The machine,” he hollered. “I bet you’re looking for it.” Bale spoke to Mira, “You know where it is, right?”

  “Right outside,” Mira said.

  In an inside-only voice, “See how it worked?”

  “Kind of.”

  Bale yelled as loud as he could. “We can get your dad fixed up on the machine,” he said. “He can use it for sleeping.”

  A few moments passed. Long shapeless ones. The light in the doorway. A sort of signal of the end.