by Brian Henley
in a rented room before. There is a chair for sitting. There is a bed for sleeping. There is a nightstand to hold particulars and a window to let in light. It is all so… reductive, somehow. It is as if this is all a person is, this short list of wants and actions. He feels almost… insulted, but looking around there is nothing insulting. He sits on the bed and knows that he hates it, the room. But he can’t describe why. He has never heard the word “dehumanizing”.
The gun in its holster is poking his back. He looks for a place to put it. Not the windowsill or on top the nightstand, they seem too open. There is a drawer in the nightstand. He opens it.
Inside there is a bible. It comes sliding out at him with the inertia of the drawer and comes to rest against the front. “Provided by the Gideons”, it says.
He has never read the Bible. He was not raised devout. But instinctively he knows that this thing does not fit this room. It was placed here separately, and with separate intention, than the chair, and the nightstand, and the bed. He goes to touch it, but holds off. Instead he plunks the gun down next to it.
That bible, he decides, is the only thing in this room meant for humans, and not just people.
The saloon comes alive at night. People laugh and chatter, louder than they have to, crowded in the warm yellow lamplight. A man plays an upright piano. The bartender is swamped. Two of the older women have to help him washing glasses.
There are places in this world where the night holds few terrors. There are places with city lights and streetcars, and the communal hum of thronging humanity to assuage and assure. But here as night falls the forest looms, deep and still, and the collected weight of the vast wild spaces seems to marshal and gather, like a giant black wave that never crests, just grows and grows. And the people huddle together, and cling to each other with encouraging smiles. And through the crowd, in and out and in between, the girls move like vampires.
Outside in the black is Rocky. The wind carries frost off the mountains. He crouches by a back door, his eye to a knot hole. He follows a particular couple. The man is a dandy, dyed in the wool, with a turquoise feather in his turquoise bowler and a fob and a thick chain for his golden pocketwatch. Rocky knows this man’s name is Daniel. It makes sense. He looks like a Daniel.
The woman is thin, her wrists fine and white, her eyes large and wet and entreating. She wears a pale blue dress, and her hair is astonishingly blond.
Rocky watches the girl. She is happy. She smiles her quiet smile. She laughs her quiet laugh. She looks at her Daniel each time before she does either, to get his permission, which he gracefully bestows. She clings to his elbow as if he’ll vanish in the air, as if he is a kite on a string.
But her happiness is a sick thing. It is like the shine a fever brings. Rocky knew she was prone to this. He saw it in her, like a nugget sparkling at the bottom of a pool, the first time, the first moment. She was like a bird in the weather locked out of its golden cage, beating itself against the bars. And all he has wanted since was to keep her close against his front, and put his back to the driving rain.
She looks up at him, her Daniel, and her eyes are shining. She rests her head against his chest. And her hair falls across his heart.
It was right around one in the morning. One in the morning it was, and damned if it weren’t right at that special moment. You know the one I mean. These hill folk, well, you could shoot one in the knee and he’d turn blue from shutting his mouth before he’d cry out. So it takes some generous amounts, some substantial thinning of the blood, before an evening approaches what an impartial observer could call boisterous. Then, of course, once they got the taste for it they over-indulge, and the rest of the night is a brush fire. But in between, right after they lose their awkward and right before they start misunderstanding, there is that special moment.
And it was then that the damn back door, the one lets out on nothing and dirt that’s been locked since anyone knows, blew clean off its hinges. It lands on a spare piece of floor with a sound like lightning up close, and there’s this scrawny little boy with frost on his too-big hat and a gun on his hip like an oil derrick with a handle.
“Danny boy!” he roars, and his face is ashen pale and he’s got this grimace like the grin on a skull. “This here’s a showdown!”
Lord only knows what thought was in his head, busting through the door like that and calling a man out instead of just shooting at his back like any knowledgeable soul. His gun weren’t even in his hand. But no sooner was it said than there’s a shot and there’s Danny, cool as you please with a derringer and a puff of smoke. And that fool boy was on the floor, curling around his stomach like he was keeping it in.
Rocky is in and out. Take it or leave it, he thinks. I took my shot. He sees a hallway ceiling. He sees a bedroom ceiling. I’m seeing a lot of ceilings, he chuckles in his head. He sees a doctor. The doctor’s face is very close and there’s sweat on his upper lip. Then the doctor is far away, rolling down a sleeve with two fingers. The other fingers are bloody. Rocky has something he wants to say. It will be perfect: “Doc, it’s only a scratch.” There. That was fantastic. Only he can’t tell if he managed to say it out loud. A choir of angels sings.
Sometimes the girl that fed him is there. Her name is Amber. Sometimes she has a glass of water. He doesn’t want her crumby water. Rarely the doctor is there. Once he sees the doctor and Amber together, looming over him like sentinels. “All his happy things are all mixed up with sadness,” she says. Shut up you doxy, he thinks. It must be the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. But later, one of the times when he’s alone, thinking and thinking and thinking about it he can’t find a reason why. He continues to probe it, every chance he gets, trying to find fault with it every way he can.
But in the end he can’t. He can’t find fault with it. It might be, he decides, in fact a very smart thing she said.
Rocky left. He felt well enough one day so he left. Before he left he folded the sheets and the pillowcase. It seemed the thing to do. He didn’t know what else.
On his way out he stood by the window, lingered by the bed. He lightly touched the back of the chair. Saying goodbye, he thought. When he got to the nightstand he opened the drawer and looked at the Bible. He realized in saying goodbye to the table and chair and bed, he had just been putting this off.
The thing was, he didn’t even want the Bible. But he knew he would take it. He knew he would take it, and he would study it, and parts of it would make him stop and look inward before he read on. And gradually it would work on him, into him, in ways he couldn’t foresee. He didn’t want that.
But he didn’t want to stay still, either.
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Inspired by “Rocky Raccoon” by The Beatles
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