Sweetwater

by Lisa Henry

  “Hey.” Grady balled the handkerchief up and tucked it back into his pocket.

  Elijah raised his gaze with difficulty.

  “Come on, now,” Grady said quietly. He took Elijah’s chin gently and raised it for a featherlight kiss.

  Elijah closed his eyes as tears stung them.

  Wasn’t supposed to go like this. He wasn’t supposed to be undone by kindness. Elijah couldn’t afford that now. He wanted to hurt; he wanted to nurture his anger, to stir it into a blaze like the embers of a stove. He wanted to be used. He wanted a man to mortify and scourge his flesh. And if Crane wouldn’t do it, Elijah wanted it to be Grady.

  Elijah turned his face so that his mouth was close to Grady’s ear. The words almost caught in his throat, but he forced them out. His face burned. “Fuck me hard, Grady.”

  Grady nodded, and Elijah followed him out of the alley.

  In the cabin, Grady drew Elijah down onto Dr. Carter’s bed.

  “No,” Elijah said. The blankets still smelled of him, and panic rose in Elijah’s chest. He scrambled to his feet. “No!”

  Bad enough in the cabin. Bad enough surrounded by the walls he’d grown up within. Bad enough with Dr. Carter’s memory filling the place and Dr. Carter’s sigh in his head: “Oh, Elijah.”

  “Not on the bed,” Elijah said and saw Grady glance at the table. “Not there either.”

  Elijah could still see the blood, a dark stain spreading across the scarred surface of the wood. Could still see it, could still smell it, even though Dr. Carter had been lying for days in the dirt, beyond all care. Reposing, some folk called it, but Elijah knew better. He was rotting, and it was Elijah’s fault.

  If he’d been there . . .

  If he’d been there, Francis McCreedy might’ve killed him too, and Elijah wished he had. A week ago, he hadn’t been the man he was now. A week ago, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine an anger like the sort he carried around in him now, down to his bones. All his fear gone, and all his hope drained away and replaced with anger that was so cold, so sharp, that it burned like ice.

  Except he was afraid of Grady, of what kisses and closeness might mean. And maybe Grady’s tenderness might wear away at the edges of Elijah’s anger, might make him weak, except this was only one night. One night, one man, and Elijah’s reserves of anger were bigger than this. Maybe Grady wouldn’t fuck him the way Crane did, wouldn’t hone his anger to good, sharp edges, the sort that could draw blood with a whisper, but it didn’t matter. Grady’s strange warmth wouldn’t touch Elijah’s heart.

  “I want to fuck on the floor,” Elijah said, lifting his chin.

  “Okay,” Grady said. He gathered up the blankets from Elijah’s cot and spread them out on the floor. “Come here.”

  Elijah stepped forward.

  “Elijah,” Grady said, and his smile wasn’t at all like Crane’s—knowing, sly, possessive. Grady’s smile was genuine. It lit up his face.

  Nobody, nobody had ever smiled at Elijah like that. Like he was sunlight. Air. Like he was everything.

  Grady kissed him. His stubble burned, but Elijah pressed closer.

  This didn’t touch his heart. Didn’t come close.

  “I thought of you.” It was only a whisper but pitched so that Elijah heard it. “Thought of this.”

  So different from Crane.

  Grady was gentle, patient, quiet. Elijah leaned into his touch and watched Grady’s fingers whispering across his skin. He shivered as they left gooseflesh in their wake.

  Grady knelt down and unlaced Elijah’s boots, and helped him step out of them. He murmured something that Elijah missed and rose to his feet.

  Elijah’s cock was hard again by the time that Grady tugged his trousers and his sticky drawers down. Elijah was beyond shame about that, at least.

  “Fuck me hard, Grady,” he said.

  Grady narrowed his eyes at that, an unasked question or maybe an accusation leveled at Elijah. Elijah gazed back at him, wondering what the man wanted. If he was seeking some sort of reciprocity for this slow seduction of gentle words and touches, Elijah couldn’t give it.

  Grady had thought of him, he said.

  Simple deaf cunt?

  Zurr zurr zurr.

  No. Something else. Something different. Something Elijah didn’t want to look at.

  “Grady,” he said, stepping forward into the man’s embrace and hiding his gaze against his neck.

  Give him tenderness, give him softness, and he’ll fuck you in return.

  Elijah was no different than a whore, probably. Led down the path of evil by his own moral weaknesses. Maybe even worse than some girl who opened her legs for money, because it was no dire economic circumstance that had worn away at Elijah’s virtue. Elijah was no pitiful, weeping fallen creature like those that could be found in the pages of lurid dime novels. Elijah was sinful for no other reason than he’d wanted to be.

  “Give me your hands,” Crane had said, and Elijah had obeyed.

  Sinner.

  And tomorrow he’d be a killer.

  When the sky was on fire and the world was crumbling away into ashes, when the trumpets sounded, when Elijah was judged, he wouldn’t fear that stain. He would wear the mark of Cain proudly. Killing Francis McCreedy was no sin at all. It was a reckoning.

  Elijah tugged at Grady’s clothes.

  Grady was in better shape than Crane. Younger, harder, with the sort of muscles that came from working with cattle. He was imperfect. Scars and blemishes drew Elijah’s gaze. His face, his throat, and his lower arms were a shade darker than the rest of him, tanned by the sun. Elijah drew his fingers through the hairs on Grady’s chest and followed them down to his abdomen, and then to his cock, where the hair grew thick, wiry, and dark. Grady’s cock was hard as well, the foreskin already drawn back to show the wet, shining head.

  Elijah pulled Grady down onto the floor and turned over onto his hands and knees. Grady took him by the hips and turned him around again.

  “Come here,” Grady said, sitting back and pulling Elijah into his arms.

  Elijah straddled his thighs. Grady’s heavy cock pushed against the back of Elijah’s balls, and Elijah raised himself up as far as he could on his knees. Grady’s hands gripped his ass. Elijah’s cock slid along Grady’s belly. He put his arms around Grady’s shoulders, and Grady licked and sucked his throat. A tremor traveled through Elijah’s body as he felt the head of Grady’s cock nudge his hole. Grady released his ass, brought a hand up, and spat on it, then worked the spit into Elijah’s ass.

  “Go on, now,” Grady said in a low voice. His breath was hot against Elijah’s ear.

  Elijah sank back down, Grady’s cock stretching him open.

  He hissed at the sting.

  “Okay?” Grady asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The hurt was the best part. The part that was sharp with the promise of pleasure. Elijah closed his eyes and pushed down. He shuddered as Grady filled him.

  Eyes closed, the blood pounding in his skull, Elijah rocked himself on Grady’s cock. Slowly at first, as Grady’s mouth left hot trails across his throat, then faster. Elijah raised himself up again, his thighs burning, fucking himself as Grady fucked him. Grady scraped his teeth along Elijah’s collarbone, and Elijah clenched tightly around his cock.

  He cried out and thought that maybe Grady echoed him.

  Elijah’s breath rasped in his throat. He dug his fingers into Grady’s shoulders, demanding more. Let the pleasure tighten in him like a coil, until it was too much.

  “Elijah,” Grady groaned against his throat as Elijah came. “Elijah, Elijah.”

  Grady came too.

  Elijah slumped forward, breathing hard, eyes still squeezed tightly shut.

  Grady ran a hand down his sweaty back, and a shiver followed the gentle touch.

  Elijah shied away from the touch, crawling off Grady’s lap and reaching for his drawers. He stood up, stepping into them, and realized that Grady was saying something. Elijah turn
ed around too late to catch it. “What?”

  Grady looked up at him from the floor, his wet cock lying against his thigh. Elijah had to force himself to look at Grady’s mouth instead, to follow the words as he spoke them. “You mind if I sleep here?”

  “I don’t care either way,” Elijah said, knowing that Grady didn’t mean sleep.

  Except he did. Grady rose to his feet, pulled on his drawers, and stretched himself out on Dr. Carter’s bed. Elijah dragged his blankets off the floor and back onto his cot, his heart thumping wildly. He climbed under the blankets and watched Grady for a long time. Watched his profile in the gloom, the rise and fall of his chest, the one hand that slipped off the edge of the bed and hung there.

  Watched him until he fell asleep too.

  “Elijah? Elijah?”

  Elijah broke free from sleep, coming up gasping. In those brief seconds nothing made sense, because if someone was here, waking him with a touch, then Dr. Carter wasn’t dead, and if Dr. Carter wasn’t dead, then he was okay. Except Elijah couldn’t be that lucky. This wasn’t Dr. Carter leaning over him. It couldn’t be. It was someone else, in his cabin, looming over him in the faint predawn light.

  Elijah jolted upright, a thin noise of panic escaping him. He struck out, still fuddled with sleep, but the man caught his wrists.

  “Settle down, kid!”

  He squinted. “Grady?”

  The cowboy released his wrists. “You gonna take another swing at me?”

  Elijah drew his knees up, his back against the wall, and clamped his mouth shut.

  Grady watched him closely. “You always wake up fightin’?”

  “What are you doing here still?” he asked and followed the answer on Grady’s lips.

  “Making coffee,” Grady said. “You want one?”

  Elijah nodded.

  He watched as Grady stood at the stove in just his underwear. Elijah studied the line of his back, remembering how Grady’s skin, sliding over bone and muscle, had felt underneath his fingertips. Last night had wrapped him in warmth, but Elijah didn’t know how much of it was real or if it would prove as passing as a dream.

  In the night, it had made sense. It had felt real.

  Elijah didn’t know now.

  People were always looking for meaning, in their smiles and their words and their hymns on Sundays. Always looking for something more, for a connection, for something hidden, digging deep into their own lives like the miners who blasted their way into the earth. Elijah didn’t understand at all what they were looking for. Now he thought he might.

  He wanted to know if it was real. He wanted to know if Grady had felt it too. It would be nice to have that to hold on to, when tonight it would all be finished.

  He watched Grady a while longer, then climbed out of his cot and got dressed.

  Coffee was no breakfast.

  He trailed outside and fed the chickens and checked the nesting boxes. Five eggs this morning. Elijah held them in the hammock of his shirt. They were still warm. He carried them inside again and laid them on the table.

  Grady smiled when he saw them.

  Elijah took down the half loaf of bread from the shelf. The bread was old. Stale. Elijah cut two thick slices and set them on the top shelf of the stove to toast them. He had salted ham too, that would fry up nicely with the eggs. Not as good as bacon, but Elijah hadn’t been expecting to be making breakfast for anyone.

  They ate at the table.

  Elijah chewed his toast and remembered the black blood in the darkness, shining like oil. He could still measure the dimensions of it. He could taste the stench of it, caught in his throat. Could still see the water turning scarlet, bubbling like froth from lungs as he’d scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.

  A quiet calm settled over him.

  All his pain and all his sorrow would end today. He’d ride out to Adavale, and it would end one way or another. With more blood.

  “You got work today?” Grady asked him.

  Elijah shook his head. “It’s Sunday.”

  A slow smile spread across Grady’s face. “So it is. I sometimes forget the days, out under the sky. Sometimes forget the weeks too.”

  “You . . .” Elijah began and didn’t like the way his mouth twisted the word. He started again. “You spend most your time out there?”

  “Most of it,” Grady said. “I reckon I know the country about as well as anyone. Spent most of the last few years out there but always end up here awhile. South Pass City is the end of the road for us.”

  It was the end of the road for everyone, Elijah thought.

  Grady stretched out and sighed. “We sell most of our stock to ranchers, just bring the last few here for Dawson, then back to start all over again.” He flashed Elijah a grin. “Sold one fellah his own herd back.”

  “Didn’t he see the brands?” Elijah asked.

  “Got our own brands,” Grady said. “They’ll cover most anything. Lot of yearlings as well, though, most still unbranded. These ranchers, they don’t get in there fast enough to see to their own branding, we do it for ’em.”

  Elijah wondered what that life was like. Dodging lawmen and ranchers on one hand, and maybe even the Arapaho and the Shoshone on the other.

  Elijah looked up at him. “You ever seen a man get scalped?”

  “Nope,” Grady said. “Seen the finished product once. The man, I mean, not the scalp.”

  “No difference between a man and a beast when it comes to blood and bone and muscle,” Elijah said.

  Grady looked at him curiously. “You think so?”

  Elijah knew it.

  “I think,” Grady said quietly, “there’s more difference than you know.”

  Elijah shoved his plate back. “I gotta go. Take as long as you want over breakfast.”

  “You leaving a stranger in your house, Elijah?”

  “You ain’t hardly a stranger no more,” he said, jutting out his chin.

  Grady grinned at that. “I guess not.”

  Elijah sat on his cot and laced his boots. Then, when he thought Grady wasn’t watching, he slid the boning knife out from under his pillow and down the side of his right boot. It was warm today, and he liked to imagine that it whispered against his skin. He wasn’t sure what it whispered, but imagined it was something full of fierce consolation. Words weren’t worth nothing anyhow. What he was feeling came from someplace where words didn’t exist. It was in his bones. In his thumping heartbeat.

  He rose to his feet and crossed the floor, the uneven boards of the cabin creaking under his boots like they had every day he could remember. Every day that counted. Every day since Dr. Carter had saved him.

  Elijah had a debt to pay that he had never managed when Dr. Carter was alive.

  “Close the door when you’re done,” he said to Grady.

  He took his hat from the hook by the door and walked outside into the sunlight.

  Elijah was no Arapaho scout. Took him over five miles to realize that someone was following him on the road that cut through the landscape toward Burnt Ranch. Although not following, necessarily. Maybe just heading the same way.

  He caught a glimpse, every now and then, of a man on horseback traveling the same road. When the road turned, when it lifted, or when a gap suddenly appeared in the ridges, he saw the man behind him. The first time he’d spotted him by chance when twisting in the saddle to dig out his canteen. After that, he’d kept checking.

  He was traveling slow and figured the man would catch up in a mile or so, but he didn’t. It made Elijah think the man was deliberately keeping pace with him.

  Elijah waited until he’d rounded a bend in the road, then slid off Dulcie and led her into the scant shelter of a windblown copse of stringy trees. He looped her reins around a bush and stood there with his hands on his belt, half-turned away from the road. Elijah didn’t want anyone to think he was lying in wait for them. Much easier to make it look like he was stretching his legs and taking a piss.

  Insects drifted aro
und Elijah’s face, and he brushed them away. He watched the road for a while. Watched the breeze pick up the dust and lay it down again in thin sheets.

  The shape of the man, the way he sat in the saddle . . . Elijah couldn’t be sure. And why the hell would Grady follow him anyhow?

  But it was Grady, all right.

  He reined his horse in when he saw Elijah watching from the trees, tipped his hat back, and nodded at him.

  Elijah walked Dulcie back onto the road, frowning. “Why are you following me?”

  Grady didn’t answer.

  He swallowed and tried again, taking care not to slur his words. “Why are you following me?”

  “It’s a nice day for a ride,” Grady said. “Thought you might want some company.”

  “I don’t.”

  Grady shrugged.

  Dulcie bumped her nose against Elijah’s shoulder, and he rubbed it for her. “I don’t,” he repeated firmly.

  Grady looked down at him. “Where you going, Elijah?”

  “That ain’t your business,” he said, his heart thumping.

  “Just making conversation,” Grady said.

  Elijah swung himself up into Dulcie’s saddle. “I don’t talk much.”

  “Suits me just fine.” Grady shot him a quick grin.

  Nothing about it suited Elijah, but he didn’t know what he could say to Grady to make the man turn back toward South Pass City. Elijah had wanted to savor this ride, savor the bitter sting of having only made the same journey a little over a week ago with Dr. Carter. How he’d ruined it then with his secrets and his guilt and how he’d never have a chance to make that up to Dr. Carter. Every mile would have added fuel to the slow burn of his anger, but Grady was here instead, distracting him. Grady was ruining it.

  They turned off the main road just past Burnt Ranch, and still Grady didn’t ask where they were headed. The horses splashed through the first of the tributaries of the Sweetwater that cut across their path. The creek was running shallower even than last week, littered with brown and yellow leaves that floated like dappled sunlight on the surface of the water.