Sweetwater

by Lisa Henry

  “I’m not simple.” Elijah reached out for the bottle of whiskey.

  Crane leaned forward and caught his wrist. “I never said you were, and I reckon you’ve had enough to drink for one night.”

  “Didn’t just come to drink, sir,” he said. Anticipation coiled low in his gut.

  Crane swiped his tongue over his lower lip and fixed his gaze on Elijah’s. “Never thought you did.”

  He heard Dr. Carter’s voice again: “Oh, Elijah.”

  But you’re not here. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. You’re not here, and I can’t break your heart.

  “I want to go upstairs now, sir,” Elijah slurred. “And I want you to fucking hurt me.”

  Crane smiled and tightened his grip on Elijah’s wrist until he winced and tried to pull away. Crane laughed and released him. “That was always gonna happen, boy, don’t you worry.”

  The day after Dr. Carter’s funeral, Elijah woke up facedown in Harlan Crane’s bed with a hangover pounding his skull and Crane’s cock pushing into his aching ass.

  “Don’t,” he whispered.

  Crane reached down and turned his face into the pillow.

  Elijah curled his hands in the sheets and closed his eyes. His body rocked under Crane’s thrusts, and the sharp pain of entry brought him out in gooseflesh. He sucked in a breath through the pillow. It tasted of sweat and hair oil and stale whiskey. It was that, that stink of sin, that made Elijah’s cock harden.

  The pain dulled, transformed into something with blunter edges. Something that didn’t squeeze tears out of Elijah’s closed eyes. More pressure than sharp pain, slipping into a rhythm that allowed Elijah to relax. He began to lift his hips into Crane’s thrusts, chasing the friction, the sting, the ache—anything that Crane could give him.

  Crane stroked his hair. “Good boy.”

  Elijah craved this, the intimacy and the pain. He couldn’t distinguish between them. He felt no need to. He was no wailing whore with black eyes and busted lips. Crane didn’t beat him, not like that. This pain was different. It was secret, special. Elijah didn’t know how it was possible, but it felt good when Crane hurt him.

  Like the pain was a gift.

  He wasn’t a whore. This was something else, something he didn’t understand, but something he needed.

  He had no memory of the night before, not once he’d stumbled up the stairs from the barroom, but there was a leather strap hitched around his right wrist. The ends trailed over the mattress, and Elijah wished they were still attached to the bedpost. He liked to fight against his bonds while Crane fucked him.

  Crane finished quickly, grunting and gasping, his hand slipping from Elijah’s hair to his neck, his fingers tightening. “Fuck. You’re fucking tight, boy!”

  Elijah squeezed his eyes shut as Crane rolled off him, savoring the last sting.

  Crane leaned close to his ear. “Get dressed and get out.”

  Elijah rolled over, eyes wide.

  Crane stared at him. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Elijah covered his aching cock with his hands.

  “You’ve got work,” Crane said. His eyes were dark. “Nothing changes, nothing stops.”

  Elijah sat up, his head pounding, his muscles sore. He reached down to the floor for his clothes. “Does this change?”

  Crane showed him a smile. “I’ll fuck you every time you walk in the door, boy, just the way you want it.”

  Need it.

  “Thank you, sir,” Elijah whispered.

  “Get dressed now,” Crane said, and Elijah wondered if he’d imagined the softening in the man’s tone.

  He dressed quickly, and left.

  Downstairs, Walt was sitting at a table squinting at a newspaper. He looked up when Elijah appeared and narrowed his eyes. “What the fuck you still doing here, kid?”

  “Leave him alone, Walt.”

  Elijah almost jumped as the woman touched his arm. Lila.

  She reached out and smoothed his hair. “There you go, sweetheart.”

  Walt’s scowl deepened. “Don’t you touch him.”

  Lila ignored him and bent forward to peck Elijah’s cheek. “You’re a sweet little thing, ain’t you?”

  Elijah backed away. “I gotta go to work.”

  Outside, the sunlight blinded him, his guts churned, and he hardly made it around the side of the Empire before he vomited in the street. He leaned against the outside wall, his weight braced on one hand, and spat until he got the worst of the taste out. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and stood there awhile longer to catch his breath.

  He didn’t want to go to work. He didn’t want nothing to have changed because everything had changed. Maybe the rest of the world didn’t know it, maybe everyone who’d climbed the hill to the graveyard yesterday in their Sunday best had put on their workday clothes again this morning and gone about their business, but Elijah didn’t want to.

  He wanted to run free for a while, to be wild and angry, to scream at the sky until it brought down a storm to drown him.

  Up on the road to the west, on a hill overlooking the town, Dr. Carter lay buried.

  Elijah couldn’t go to the graveyard again.

  He wasn’t a kid anymore. Couldn’t just chase lizards and throw rocks until his growling stomach drew him home.

  “Nothing changes, nothing stops.”

  Harlan Crane could see inside him, but he was wrong.

  That’s where he had to put his rage for a while: fighting against the bonds that Crane put him in. Put his rage there until he could use it. Crane knew him and knew what he needed. Bit by bit, he could lose himself in Crane. Bit by bit, it wouldn’t matter.

  There was nobody left to disappoint.

  On Friday night, Elijah went to the Palace with Dawson’s spare boning knife tucked into the side of his boot. The blade pressed against his anklebone. This was what revenge felt like: a stammering heartbeat, an itch in his throat that he couldn’t swallow, and an unyielding blade that stole his body’s heat.

  The Palace was on the block behind the Empire. It was smaller than the saloon, its purpose more singular. Whiskey and cards, and nothing in between. No music, no dancing, no girls. Just drinking and talking and gambling. The atmosphere was different too. Elijah felt it as soon as he walked in. He stood his ground and hoped Crane’s men knew his face. Hoped they’d let him walk in without a handful of cash. The place was full of miners, rushing in to lose what they’d dug out of the ground all week. Elijah didn’t understand that.

  He scanned the room.

  “I ain’t coming in tonight,” Elijah had told Dawson earlier, hanging his apron on the hook by the door.

  Dawson had gaped. “What’d you say to me?”

  “I said I ain’t coming in tonight.”

  He’d be fucked if he was going to spend half the night wrestling stolen yearlings and the rest of it lifting their badly butchered carcasses onto hooks in the smokehouse. If the McCreedy boys were in town, Elijah didn’t want to miss them. Not when the blade in his boot was aching for blood.

  “You’ll fucking come in when I say, you deaf cunt!”

  “I won’t,” Elijah had said. “And if you want to make an issue out of it, I’ll go talk to the deputy.”

  It was more than he’d said to Dawson in years probably, but for once the man hadn’t mocked the way he spoke. Dawson hadn’t done anything but stare and gape then stare some more. Maybe he’d figured Elijah would never find his backbone, but Elijah was done being bullied by Dawson. His old self was gone, buried up on the hill with Dr. Carter, and his dream-self—laughing, confident, clever—was nothing but a lie. Somewhere in the gap between the two was this Elijah, the new Elijah. He didn’t know much about him yet, hadn’t tested him out, but he knew he didn’t take shit from Dawson anymore.

  Elijah scanned the faces in the cardroom as he walked toward the bar. His stomach was clenched with anticipation, but Francis McCreedy wasn’t there. Maybe it was too early. Maybe he just had to wait.
>
  He put fifteen cents on the bar and nodded at the man behind the bar.

  The man poured him a whiskey.

  Fuck, but it burned. It loosened his gut, though, and killed that itch in his throat for a moment.

  Thaddeus Sherlock had come by the cabin that morning. He’d been out to Adavale the day before and spoken to the McCreedy boys, and Francis had been over at Miner’s Delight the night Dr. Carter was killed and said he had a woman there who could vouch for him. If one could believe that. Somehow, Sherlock did, but Elijah remembered the way that Francis McCreedy’s face had twisted with hatred the night his brother died: “Harry’s dead! Harry’s dead because of this goddamn quack!”

  Anders the Swede had shot Harry McCreedy in this very room. What then? Did the other men just take their cards up and keep playing?

  It would never be right again, what had begun in this room, but Elijah could make it even. The debt he had incurred the moment that Dr. Carter had saved him, Elijah could repay.

  He knew Dr. Carter wouldn’t want this—“Oh, Elijah.”—but this was the only thing he knew how to do. Maybe he was a simple deaf cunt, but three years working for Dawson had taught him how to use a knife. Fast and hard. Worst thing you could do was hesitate, lose your nerve, and make a mess of it. Done right, every kill was a clean kill.

  Elijah wasn’t afraid of blood.

  He leaned on the bar and watched the door. A few men came and went. None of them spared him more than a glance.

  He was good at waiting.

  When the doors swung open the fourth time, it still wasn’t the McCreedy boys. It was Walt from the Empire and some more of Crane’s men. One of them spotted Elijah, tugged on Walt’s sleeve, and said something in his ear, and Walt turned his head and stared at Elijah. A moment later, he was beside him at the bar.

  “What are you doin’ here, kid?”

  “Having a drink,” Elijah told him.

  “You don’t fucking drink here.” Walt’s breath was hot on Elijah’s face. “You drink with Mr. Crane.”

  Elijah’s heartbeat stammered. “I can drink where I want.”

  Walt snorted. He gestured to the bartender, and the man handed over a wad of cash that Walt folded carefully into his pocket. “This all?”

  “Slow night.”

  “This little cocksucker gives you any trouble, let me know,” Walt said, loudly and clearly enough for Elijah to hear it. For the whole place to hear it probably.

  His face burned.

  “Will do,” the bartender said.

  Walt and the men left.

  The bartender eyed Elijah curiously for a moment, then went and served another customer.

  Elijah pulled more coins from his pocket with shaking fingers. He wouldn’t let Walt scare him off. Wouldn’t let an insult do it. It didn’t matter what he did or what he was. The only thing that mattered, that had ever mattered, was Dr. Carter. But if McCreedy didn’t come soon, maybe Elijah would wait outside in the dark.

  Fifteen minutes later, the doors opened again, and Harlan Crane walked in.

  Walt and the others were waiting outside when Crane emerged, dragging Elijah by the collar like a recalcitrant dog. Crane flung him off the single step and into the dirt. He stumbled into one of the men, who laughed and pushed him away. Walt caught him and twisted his arms behind his back. Elijah didn’t struggle.

  “What are you doing, boy?” Crane asked him, leaning close.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  One of Crane’s men mimicked him—“Nu-hing zurr!”—and Elijah clamped his mouth shut and turned his face away.

  Crane said something and then gripped Elijah’s jaw tightly and twisted his face back. “You’re supposed to be at work tonight.”

  Fuck work, and fuck Dawson, and fuck the cowboys with their stolen cattle.

  “If Dawson wants you to work, you work. Understand?” Crane’s face was unreadable in the darkness.

  “Why should I?” Elijah said around Crane’s iron grip. “I don’t get a cut.”

  The suddenness of the blow shocked Elijah. He’d hardly had time to realize Crane had released his jaw before the man’s hand was back, open-palmed, slapping him full force on the right side of his face. It felt like fire. Elijah cried out, jerked uselessly against Walt, and hot tears spilled out of his eyes.

  “Don’t ever take that tone with me again.” Crane rubbed his hand on his jacket. “You remember your manners with me, you understand?”

  Elijah gulped in air. “Yes, sir.”

  “Zurr, zurr, zurr,” one of the men laughed.

  Crane shot the man a look that shut his mouth and turned back to Elijah. “And if you ever think about bringing trouble to one of my establishments again, I will fucking gut you, you little prick. You hear me?”

  He knew. He knew what Elijah had planned.

  Elijah nodded.

  The other men shifted around them restlessly in the darkness. Elijah sensed movement in the street—miners, workers, cowboys all finding their way to this end of South Pass City for a night of gambling, drinking, and whoring—but nobody intervened. Elijah didn’t look away from Crane. A dangerous man, Dr. Carter had always said, and Elijah had never doubted it. If he were smarter, he would have been afraid. The slap. The threat. But he wasn’t. He couldn’t articulate what he felt in this moment. It was something a little like pride. He wasn’t just a groveling pup after all, was he?

  Crane had said that nothing changed, but Elijah had. Could Crane still see inside him?

  Crane’s face softened slightly. He reached out and stroked Elijah’s stinging cheek.

  Elijah wanted to ask—burned to ask—What is this? What are you to me? but he couldn’t. Did Crane give a damn? Elijah didn’t know if that was what this strange, sudden tenderness meant, and he didn’t know if he wanted it or not. He’d understood the slap, no mistaking that, and the threat, but this . . . He didn’t understand this.

  He leaned into Crane’s touch.

  Crane withdrew it. “Walt, let him go.”

  Walt released him, and Elijah rolled his aching shoulders.

  A group of men passed by and then stopped, looked back. Elijah recognized them: the cowboys. Grady was with them.

  Crane’s eyes were black in the darkness. “Go home, Elijah.”

  “Yes, sir,” he whispered and turned away.

  Home. He hated home.

  Home was empty.

  Home was a fucking accusation.

  Where were you? Why weren’t you there? Why is Francis McCreedy still breathing?

  Home was a judgment.

  Simple deaf cunt.

  He went anyway, because if he wasn’t welcome at the Empire, there was nowhere else to go. He wasn’t even surprised when Grady fell into step beside him. He glanced at him in the darkness but didn’t ask what he wanted. He figured he already knew.

  Maybe Crane was right. Maybe he was nothing but a pup that rolled over and showed his belly when the bigger dogs growled. Maybe Grady had sniffed him out just the same as Crane had. He didn’t care anymore.

  Didn’t care when Grady stuck by him the whole way home and walked into the cabin behind him.

  He watched as Grady looked around the cabin. His gaze swept over the place and came back to Elijah.

  “Just fucking do it and get out,” Elijah said.

  Grady raised his eyebrows. “You talk to Crane that way?”

  A knot formed in his gut. Stupid to show the man disrespect, when he didn’t know how quick he was to anger. “No, sir.”

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, Elijah.”

  Elijah dropped his gaze.

  Grady said something that he didn’t hear with his gaze averted and the blood pounding in his skull.

  “What did you say?”

  “Have you got coffee?” Grady asked him. “I want coffee.”

  Elijah watched as Grady checked around the stove. The knot in his gut didn’t loosen, because no fucking way was Grady here for coffee. Except he tipped some water into a pot, s
et it on the stove, and smiled to himself when he found the packet of Arbuckles’ Ariosa Coffee in the cupboard.

  Grady caught his gaze. “You want one?”

  He shook his head.

  “Come sit at the table,” Grady said.

  Elijah sat at the table. He wanted to reach for the knife in his boot, but he couldn’t. That knife was for Francis McCreedy, not Grady. He kept his hands in his lap.

  Grady pulled up the chair next to him as he waited for the pot to boil. “You gonna tell the deputy about our little arrangement with Dawson?”

  He shook his head, his heart thumping. “No, sir, I never was.”

  Grady nodded. “That’s what I reckoned. You ain’t stupid, are you?”

  Simple deaf cunt.

  They sat in silence for a long time, then Grady stood up and finished making his coffee. When he sat down again, he raised the mug to his lips and inhaled the steam. He sighed, smiled. The smile was crooked, half-cocky, half-embarrassed. “Been thinking about you, Elijah.”

  Elijah hunched over. “I’m not a whore.”

  Grady’s smile faded. “I know that.”

  Now. You know that now. You didn’t the first time you talked to me. Means you asked around. Talked to Walt about me, maybe even Crane.

  “So what am I?” Elijah could hardly form the words.

  “You’re someone I think about,” Grady said.

  Elijah dropped his gaze but couldn’t stop it from creeping up again.

  Grady caught him looking. “You all right, Elijah?”

  He nodded.

  Grady’s face was solemn. He reached out and touched Elijah’s cheek, the same one Crane had slapped earlier.

  Again, Elijah leaned slightly into a touch. This time the other man didn’t pull away.

  “I missed you tonight, at Dawson’s. Didn’t even realize I was watching out for you until you weren’t there.” Grady traced Elijah’s jaw. “When Walt told me what happened to your pa, I didn’t like to think of you alone.”

  Elijah’s breath caught. It couldn’t be that simple. Nothing was that simple.

  Grady leaned forward, and Elijah closed his eyes as their lips met.