by Blake Crouch
After thirty feet, he stopped, gulped down several lungfuls of thin air. He cocked the lever of the carbine, sat up, sighted a rock outcropping forty yards upslope that he suddenly realized was the pass, torn white ribbons of cloud streaming over it, driving the snow sideways, making it impossible to see anything distinctly.
A lead ball zinged past his right ear.
He swung his rifle around, sighted the left edge of a small boulder fifty yards away, and pulled the trigger on a vaquero hat that had peered around the corner.
It disappeared and he cocked the carbine again and clambered to his feet, now fighting toward the boulder field through chest-high drifts, smiling and swelling with all the murderous joy of a boy playing war.
THIRTY-ONE
E
zekiel walked into the boulder field and hunkered down at the base of a broken pitch of rock. He reached into his slicker and pulled the box of .44–40’s from an inner pocket of his sack coat, tore it open, and slid five cartridges into the loading gate.
With the wind subsided and his horse no longer braying, what struck him now was the silence, his senses heightened, everything distilled. The smell of wet rock and gunpowder. The sound of snow falling on his hat. His heart thumping like it meant to bust out of his chest. Burning cold spreading through the left side of his face.
He heard distant whispering, got to his feet, stepped out from behind the rock formation. What lay before him on the gentle downslope reminded Ezekiel of a snowy labyrinth—countless boulders of varying size, some no bigger than a barrel, others rivaling wagons and cabins, bunched together in spots, spaced out in others, and a million places to hide. For a fact, Oatha and Billy had deadwood.
Twenty feet ahead, he spotted what he’d been looking for—tracks in the otherwise smooth, unbroken snow. He waded through the powder, light-headed.
After three strides, he froze. From behind a table-topped boulder came an exhalation. He brought the carbine’s butt plate flush against his shoulder as something edged out from the rock.
He nearly shot a rawboned burro with missing ear tips, buried to its neck and laden with an empty cantia. It stood watching him through large dull eyes.
He moved on through the boulder field.
It had stopped snowing, and that seemed to magnify the silence.
He came to the tracks. Two sets. The snow so deep he had to squat down to find which direction the boot prints pointed, now pushing forward again with what he knew was deluded confidence.
Behind any one of the hundreds of rocks, they were laying for him, and this would all be decided by dumb luck: who saw who first.
The sound of a block of snow calving off a boulder drew his attention, and when he turned back to the tracks, a slouch hat poked out of the snow thirty feet ahead.
The carbine bucked against his shoulder and he lunged behind the nearest rock as a shotgun exploded the silence.
The shooter had disappeared when he peeked around the corner, Ezekiel figuring he’d ducked back under the snow to reload.
He sighted the spot where he’d seen the hat. Had there been only one, he’d have felt at ease staying indefinitely, pinning the man down, waiting for him to lift his head again. But the prospect of a standoff made him nervous with two men in play.
As he debated what to do, he heard the unmistakable snick.
Perhaps five yards behind and a little to the left.
Thought he was dead.
No sound like the hammer of a six-gun going back.
“Y-y-y-y-you go on and, and, and, and, and throw that rifle away.”
Ezekiel remained crouched in the snow, leaning against the rock.
“Swear to God. I-I-I got a bead drawed on the back a your head.”
“All right.” But Ezekiel didn’t throw his carbine aside. He kept a firm grip on the forend stock, a finger in the trigger guard, and turned slowly until he faced the boy standing waist-deep in snow.
Ezekiel had hoped to see the revolver trembling in Billy’s hand, but the enormous Walker Colt was steady and leveled on his chest like a small cannon. “That was some shootin back there,” Ezekiel said. “Head shot from what? Fifty, sixty yards?”
“Told you, throw that artillery down.”
Billy’s face twitched as if someone had placed hooks in the left corner of his mouth and was yanking them with a string. Ezekiel found the boy’s eyes, didn’t like the jitteriness he saw, would have preferred two rounds of ice. At least you saw it coming that way.
“We’re neighbors, Billy. Our wives are friends.” As he spoke, Ezekiel let the carbine’s barrel ease down. Another few inches, he’d take the boy’s head off. “You got a nice family in Bessie and Harriet, and I believe that shot that kilt the Doc was a accident. Now, I can’t speak for your partner, but your bark ain’t this hard.”
“Well, Mr.Curtice, guess you don’t know me so good after all.”
THIRTY-TWO
W
hen Oatha Wallace arrived, Ezekiel was leaning back on a small shelf in the rock. He’d pulled off his fleece-lined gloves and unbuttoned his slicker and sack coat and vest, unclipped his suspenders, torn open the muslin shirt.
“Where’s his rifle?”
“Somewhere i-i-in the snow yonder.”
“He ain’t got a sleeve gun, do he?”
“Naw, I checked.”
Oatha stared at Ezekiel. “He’s gut-shot.”
“I-I-I-I tried to shoot him in the head, but—”
“Naw, that’s fine, Billy. His horns is clipped. Lead ball from a Walker in the bread wallet. Helluva thing. Caught a case a the slow, didn’t you, old buscadero?”
Ezekiel watched the steaming black blood leak through his fingers as he tried to put back the gray tube of gut that kept pushing out. He could feel blood running down his legs and into his boots. Some had streamed down the rock and melted a burgundy hole in the snow. He looked up at Oatha, at the boy who’d set him on his sunset trail, and when he spoke, his voice came broken and strained by ragged exhalations. “Bushwhacking, huh? So that’s how you operate?”
“Whatever gets it done,” Oatha said.
“How much y’all come away with?”
“They’s sixty-nine bricks, twenty-two pounds apiece.”
“But you done the math.”
“Sure, I done it. Just over five hunerd thousand.”
Ezekiel nodded. “Maybe you can buy this boy a new gun. That Walker must be forty years old.”
Oatha grinned. “And some clothes, too.”
Billy blushed. Too poor to afford a greatcoat or a slicker, when he ventured out into winter conditions, his only recourse was to clothe himself in every ratty, moth-eaten garment he owned, so his ensemble comprised layer upon layer of old shirts, threadbare hand-me-down sack coats two de cades old, and a blue frock coat that had barely survived a house fire back in Tennessee, and still bore the black-fringed fire-eaten holes to prove it.
Ezekiel looked at Billy. “You’ve broke your wife’s heart, son.”
“Ain’t ye son. I want his Justins, Oatha. My feet are cold.”
“We’ll discuss the man’s plunder in a bit. You got even a jot a decency in you, boy?”
Ezekiel moaned, “Got-damn.”
“Hurt as bad as they say?” Oatha asked.
“They wasn’t buildin a high line.”
A dense cloud had blown over the pass and begun its rolling descent through the boulder field.
“You wanna go on and tell me, then?” Ezekiel said. “Don’t see what you got to lose now.”
“Tell you what?”
“I know my brother left Silverton with you back in the fall. He wired me before he left. I know it was you, Nathan, and two other men. Then you come into Abandon three weeks later all by yourself, sayin they decided not to go last minute.”
“And you called me a black liar.”
“And I stand by the claim. Christ.” Ezekiel winced.
Oatha tossed his double-barreled hammer shotgun to Billy, waded
toward Ezekiel, and knelt before him in the snow.
“Nathan was your brother.”
“My little brother.”
“What the hell. Don’t matter much now, does it? I didn’t wanna ride with ’em, but they caught up to me on the trail to Abandon in early October.”
“It was four a you?”
“That’s right. Started snowin the second afternoon, and it didn’t stop for a week. We’d only packed provisions for three days a travel and we was hungry by the time the snow quit. Didn’t have no webs. Ten miles from anywhere. Six feet a powder on the ground. Imagine tryin to walk any considerable distance in this shit.
“We tried to hunt, but all the game had gone down to winter in the foothills. Never saw so much as a rabbit.
“We was camped at timberline in a stand a dead spruce, and come October’s end, we was starvin. One man run off. Horses died and froze. Circumstances was dire. The other men had the look a death about ’em already. I weren’t far behind. There was enough snow melted, we coulda walked out if we just had a little strength.
“One mornin, I took my shotgun, so weak, I could hardly stand. Ways out from camp, I fired it into a tree. Started yellin I’d shot a elk. They come a-runnin. Hootin. Hollerin.
“McClurg arrived first, and I shot him. Nathan realized what was happenin, what we had to do, but he didn’t want no part of it. I was left with no choice but to kill him.
“I didn’t cook your brother, though. McClurg was plumpest, least gant up. I roasted his ass. Had both sides. Got my strength up, stowed everthing in a old bear den, and broke camp next mornin. Walked into Abandon three days later.”
Billy stared at Oatha, mouth agape, broken teeth showing, looking more than a little mystified. “You et a man’s backside?”
“Weren’t no face-lickin Thanksgivin dinner. I was starvin, Billy. And this don’t concern you anyhow. Just thought the man deserved to know his brother’s fate.”
In the midst of a cloud, mist blowing past and a few stray flakes of snow, Ezekiel was overrun by a coldness that settled so deep inside him, he knew he’d never be rid of it. He was dying and he thought of Nathan dying, felt a strange connection to his brother in that moment, wondered if he’d felt this alone in that moment before Oatha murdered him.
Ezekiel’s respiration slowed. He tasted blood in his teeth, felt it trickling from the corner of his mouth. He had a terrible thirst, and he trembled with cold as he looked up at Oatha.
“Don’t stare at me that a way,” Oatha warned. “Like you’re lookin at some kind a damn deviant. You lost your brother. I lost all three a mine to the Federals at Malvern Hill. You didn’t have to sit there with Nathan, tellin him about home while he’s near cut in half, everthin pourin out of him. Sight like that gets stamped on your mind, you can fuckin forget about ever gettin shed of it.”
But Ezekiel had already descended back into the canyon, to his little cabin, to Gloria. He saw her in bed, felt her grief, and all the memories of Leadville and the boys and whatever selfish strain of freedom he’d associated with them and had tasted today wilted into the sham they were. His lips moved, her name on them, and he loved her more, needed her more than he ever had, thought of all the things he’d not said, wondered if she knew them anyway, then reckoned not, because he hadn’t known himself until this moment.
He heard a deep unsanded voice. Fought to make his eyes open.
When they did, the boulderfield and mist and men and snow had faded to gray, and a darkness whose identity he well knew had whittled down his periphery of vision, so his whole world seemed to blacken around the edges like a winter-killed rose.
Oatha was only inches from his face now, his eyes such a pale and clouded blue, some might have mistaken him for a blind man.
It took Ezekiel a moment to comprehend the words.
“That man Billy shot. He kilt?” Ezekiel could only nod, utterly stove up. “Who else knows about Bart?” The darkness was closing in. “Boy, you best find the strength to provide a answer.”
Just me and Doc.
“Just me and Doc,” he whispered, his lips barely moving.
“How’d you know to find us here? Billy’s wife? Bessie tell you?”
Tracks.
“Your tracks.”
“Yours and the doctor’s wife know about all this?” Ezekiel shook his head. “Yeah, that tastes of a lie.”
Gloria don’t know.
“Well, I can tell you we damn sure ain’t takin no chances on a couple a leaky-mouthed bitches, feedin off their range.”
Gloria don’t know a thing.
“H-h-h-he’s sayin somethin, Oatha.”
You let her be.
“Well, if he is, I can’t hear it.”
“I-I-I bet Gloria knows. No tellin who else she’s told.”
“We’ll kill ever man, woman, and child in Abandon if that’s what it comes to. You set to see this through, Billy?”
“Y-y-yes, Oatha.”
“You sure? Ain’t gonna try to crawfish out a this?”
“For a fact.”
“Better go on and curl this one up then so we can sail away.”
“M-M-M-Oatha, he’s almost dead any—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn how almost dead he is. I ain’t quittin this spot with that star-toter still above snakes. Savvy?”
Ezekiel heard his death sentence, felt a glimmer of relief, the pain beyond anything he’d known, like someone had thrown liquid silver in his guts. He watched Billy pour a sixty-grain powder charge into one of the Colt’s chambers, followed by a wad of paper. The boy used a small built-in ramrod to seat a lead ball.
Ezekiel spent his last thought not on the horror of what might happen to Gloria, or his own inconceivable pain, or all the things he would not ever see or smell or taste again. He spent his last thought on his boy.
The sound of Gus’s laugh.
What it had felt like to cradle him.
The nape of his neck.
With the bore charged, Billy set about fitting a brass cap to the nipple in back of the cylinder.
You was the best thing. You and your mama, and I wished I’d knowed that when I coulda done somethin to preserve it.
Billy waded up to the rock where Ezekiel lay dying, leveled the nine-inch barrel between the man’s eyes. Ezekiel barely heard the hammer thumb back, because the possibility of heaven had dawned on him, and he was thinking how sweet and unexpected a surprise it would be to arrive there after all this, see Gus, sneak up on his boy, tickle his ribs, throw him in the air. And that laugh . . . Please, God, let me hear Gus laugh again if You’re real and have any regard—
THIRTY-THREE
O
Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before Thee. Let my prayer come before Thee.
The preacher lay shivering in a bank of snow at the base of the boulder field, so far beyond those innocuous, eloquent prayers he’d delivered to his congregation on Sunday mornings, beyond the decorum he’d always reserved for addressing his Savior. He could only manage a silent, desperate psalm.
Incline Thine ear unto my cry. For my soul is full of troubles.
In the distance, a horse snorted. Stephen raised his head, saw Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe loping through the powder on their mounts, leading a train of burros down from the pass.
And my life draweth nigh unto the grave.
Stephen ducked under the bank and burrowed deep into the snow, taking the cape from his black greatcoat and draping it over his head to keep the powder from falling into his collar.
I am counted with them that go down into the pit. I am as a man that hath no strength.
The preacher sat motionless and buried, his back to the snowbank, watching Russell Ilg’s mare wandering between the boulders.
Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom Thou rememberest no more. And they are cut off from Thy hand.
He heard the tinkle of harness bells on the other side of the snowbank, no more than ten fe
et from where he sat.
Someone said, “Whoa now.”
He envisioned Billy and Oatha tugging at their reins.
“Reckon these are Ezekiel’s?” Oatha’s voice. They were studying his tracks.
“O-o-o-or maybe that horse yonder.”
Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.
“Naw, that horse come from farther up. These here are the tracks of a man.”
Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and Thou hast afflicted me with all Thy waves.
“I’ll climb down and check it out if ye want, Oatha.”
Stephen closed his eyes.
Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction. Lord, I have called daily upon Thee, I have stretched out my hands unto Thee.
“They was just the two a them, right?”
“Yeah, I think—”
“Think?”
“Th-th-th—”
“You little stutterin greener, you better—”
“They was just the two a them. I know it for a fact. And we saw the other’ns body back there.”
“Well, all right, then. Naw, don’t get down.”
Oatha clicked his tongue and the pack train moved on. When he could no longer hear the harness bells, Stephen staggered out of the drift and brushed the snow from the wool of his coat.
He stood alone on the mountain, a hundred feet below the pass, listening to the wind and the sound of it pushing grains of snow over the surface like sand skimming a beach. He thought of home in the South Carolina low country, and the memory of it filled him with heartsickness in this frozen desolation.
Stephen found Russell’s horse sheltering itself on the lee side of a giant boulder. He swung up into the saddle, quirted the horse on its snow-matted neck, rode upslope in the tracks of the pack train.
At the Sawblade, the wind blew steady and scaldingly cold.
It had scoured out the snow and built a cornice on the north side, allowing Stephen to dismount onto bare rock.
He followed the burro tracks along an icy ledge. Despite the dizzying exposure, he couldn’t stop himself from peering over. He saw a red crater two hundred feet below—one of the burros had lost its footing, gone over, exploded in the snow like a viscera bomb.