Rueful Regret

by Steve Vernon

  The darkness crawled on and Bass just lay there, smelling the dead meat and listening to the seething crackle of the maggots as they fed. He kept trying not to give in to panic. He knew damn well that if he started panicking he would use up what little breath he had left in this stinking wooden box.

  Damn it.

  “Grimes?”

  Bass started to kick against the side of the coffin, figuring on breaking his way free – and once he had broken himself free he was going to kill the bastard who had put him down in here.

  The bastard who was still out there, sitting upon the coffin’s peephole.

  Bass knew it – because every now and then Grimes would fart straight down the air hole that he was sitting on – and Bass would kick all the louder.

  Chapter 14 – The Song of the Maggots

  A day later Bass stopped kicking.

  He might have slept for a while but he wasn’t certain. He might have kicked while he was sleeping.

  He had kicked so long that his feet didn’t know anything else.

  Finally, he shit himself.

  Not just a little pucker of fear but an honest-to-god fill-your-pants buttload full of crap.

  Shit.

  He had already pissed himself several hours before that.

  There was something about lying in your body’s own shit and piss and stink that really brought things right down to earth.

  Bass figured that he was fucked in every sense of the word.

  Here he was – lying in his own shit – on top of the dead body of the very first woman that he had ever cared about, being tasted by her very own private funeral service of maggots.

  “Grimes?”

  He had been calling for Grimes off and on throughout the entire morning with no answer at all. He figured the bastard had left him somewhere out in the desert to die.

  He had given up on the kicking some time ago. Whatever this coffin was made out of it was too hard to kick through. He might have tried shooting his way through if Grimes had only left him with his pistol.

  He might even have shot himself.

  He could have.

  Hell, what would it matter now?

  Once you’ve bedded down with maggots there was really no way on earth you could ever hope to make any sort of comeback.

  Shit.

  No such luck.

  “Grimes?”

  He kept on calling.

  He could not stop.

  You never know, he told himself.

  You never know.

  Shit.

  You never know when you might wind up burying yourself in your own crap.

  “Grimes?”

  Another day crawled on by and the maggots began to sing.

  Chapter 15 – Sliding Away Into the Peyote Darkness

  The coffin lid opened but Bass was just too damn weak to do anything about it, beyond opening his eyes.

  He saw Grimes leaning over him.

  “Do you know,” Grimes said. “You don’t look all that tough laying there in all of that shit and piss.”

  “I don’t feel all that tough,” Bass admitted.

  “It wasn’t always that way was it?” Grimes asked.

  Bass stared up at the man questioningly.

  “You don’t know just how worried you had me back there in the cabin,” Grimes went on.

  “Worried?” Bass asked.

  “Yes, worried,” Grimes said. “I really thought I was done for. I mean here I was being hunted by the great bounty killer, Bass Clayton himself. I figured I was as good as dead so I invited Helen up to the cabin for one last poke before you came and killed me. I figured you would ride in and shoot me down. I figured you knew what you were doing.”

  “Ha,” Bass laughed. “I guess you figured wrong.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  Then Grimes leaned down and pushing something into Bass’s mouth.

  The something looked a little like a slice of dried horse turd.

  “Here,” Grimes said. “Chew on that for a while.”

  Whatever the horse turd really was it sure tasted a whole lot worse to Bass.

  “Damn,” he choked out. “This would go down a lot better with some water.”

  “Water?” Grimes asked. “Do you want water?”

  Bass tried to shut his mouth but it was far too late. Grimes dropped his trousers and pissed straight into the coffin. As far as Bass could tell Grimes was aiming for his mouth.

  Grimes had a pretty good aim for a one-armed man.

  “Is that better?” Grimes asked.

  Bass just choked.

  Grimes waited until Bass was ALMOST done choking and then he shoved the horse turd into Bass’s mouth.

  “Now get this down your neck and into your gullet,” Grimes ordered. “Chew and swallow or I will feed you some freshly dropped shit the next time around.

  Bass dutifully chewed on the turds and got them down his throat just as best as he could. He didn’t see what other choice he had. He was too damn weak to fight back with much effect.

  “What is it?” Bass asked. “Poison?”

  “It’s a little late to ask now, isn’t it?” Grimes asked.

  “Goddamn it,” Bass swore. “Is it poison?”

  Grimes shrugged.

  “It is for some,” he allowed. “It is peyote. The Indians chew on it when they want to walk wide.”

  Bass wondered just what the hell Grimes meant by wide-walking. Was that his way of telling Bass that he was getting ready to shoot him, once and for all?

  Goddamn it.

  “Are you going to let me go?” Bass asked.

  Grimes kind of half-grinned.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he replied.

  Bass didn’t like the sound of that one little bit.

  “It wasn’t my fault, you know don’t you?” Bass argued. “Her dying. I didn’t set out to kill her.”

  “That’s just it,” Grimes replied. “Maybe you didn’t set out to kill her but she sure as hell got shot.”

  “That wasn’t my doing.”

  Grimes just laughed.

  “Says you,” Grimes said. “It was your fault. Your doing. And now you’ve got to stay here with her until you truly own just exactly what you left behind.”

  That last of it, what Grimes had said, the words began to smear the air around the man’s mouth. The smell of the shit blurred around Bass’s ears. Grimes looked down and grinned at him – a mouth full of shotgun shells and rain clouds, his eyes wide and round like silver dollar full moons.

  Bass slid away into the peyote darkness, walking wide without the aid of a compass, a map or a single solitary hope in hell of surviving.

  Chapter 16 – Talking to God

  Bass circled high over the desert like a giant pink naked buzzard, high up in the heavens, looking down at someone lying in a coffin filled with golden shit.

  Blown buzzard high, the wind in his feathers and fingers, an army of horse flies carrying him high above the clouds and the moon and everything else that he could ever imagine.

  Whatever he had left below was completely forgotten.

  He flew up until he bumped against a trapdoor in the sky. He had a shotgun in his hand and he used it to blow the door off of its hinges.

  Then he pulled himself up through the door.

  A coyote looked down at him.

  “Are you a coyote?” Bass asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” Coyote answered. “Everybody knows that coyotes cannot talk.”

  The coyote’s face stretched and rounded out until he looked a little like something that looked a little like a pig with a double barreled shotgun in place of a snout.

  “We can’t fire shotguns for shit, either,” Coyote-Pig said.

  Then the Coyote-Pig sneezed and blasted off Bass’s arms and legs. Bass felt them letting ago and falling away.

  Damn it.

  If this was a dream it was a goddamn painful one.

  He supposed that he should be worri
ed about losing his arms and his legs but what the fuck did he really need them for anyway?

  He could fly now.

  So how come he was wiggling around in the dirt like a maggot in a shit-stained cowboy hat.

  “Goddamn it,” Bass swore. “I am nothing but a goddamn snake.”

  He tried to crawl.

  Something kept getting in the way.

  “Wrong guess,” Coyote-Pig said. “You’re no snake. In fact, a snake would most likely be embarrassed to call you anything else but what you really are.”

  Bass looked down.

  He could see the stumps of his legs, swollen and protruding from the blast – like a pair of ball sacks.

  Damn it.

  He didn’t look like a snake at all.

  He looked more like a...

  “Come on, pecker,” Coyote-Pig called. “Come on with me.”

  The Coyote-Pig inhaled Bass like he was nothing more than a loose and rattling booger. Bass felt himself being lifted up out of his boots and as he was being inhaled towards the Coyote-Pig’s flared nostrils it looked to him like he was being sucked towards a pair of open puckered lips.

  He felt a kissing swallowing sort of sensation washing over him and then he was down into a twist of innards that tangled about him like a seethe of maggots. Everything was dark and wet and he looked up and he could see the shape of a rotting woman looking straight at him through a pair of shotgun barrel eyes.

  “It took you long enough to get here,” the rotting shotgun-eyed woman said.

  “I aimed to get here sooner,” Bass said, although he wasn’t really certain just hwy he had said what he had said.

  Right now “here” was one of the very last places that Bass ever wanted to find himself. He would have rather been back in Willy Jake’s saloon, pouring back another bottle of whiskey rather than floating here and talking with this rotting woman with shotgun eyes.

  “Aim harder next time,” she said. “Aiming starts a whole lot deeper than the hand or the eye.”

  “I heard that,” Bass said.

  “Is that so?” the woman said. “I think you might have missed it, myself.”

  “That and a bouquet of posies will buy you a kiss from Sheriff Joe Partridge,” Bass pointed out.

  “I been kissed before,” the rotting woman admitted.

  “By a blind man with no sense of smell?” Bass asked.

  “My mother kissed me,” the rotting woman said. “My dad might have kissed me too but I don’t really remember. And Silver Grimes kissed me and you kissed me too, come to think of it.”

  “I did not.”

  “Oh yes you did,” she said, leaning towards him. “Right now.”

  Bass did not have time to pull away.

  He didn’t even see it coming. Besides, there wasn’t all that much room to back away from anything in this coffin. Her face pushed in around him, over him, all of those maggots parting and surrounding like a face full of warm runny horseshit.

  Bass heard the chewy twittering of the maggots curling about his ears and diving down into his pores and whispering soft wet secrets that he could not even begin to imagine.

  In that brief moment Bass felt exactly what it was like to be that woman who had lived and breathed and walked upon the earth. A woman who had been hardened by time and raped by experience and who had shown her love in return - to Silver Grimes. A woman who had seen the buckshot coming at her out of the darkness and had reached out for one single blind half-half-half of a second just wanting one single more moment of life.

  And in that moment Bass felt like nothing more than a stupid maggot squirming blindly across the face of the moon.

  He had seen all that he would ever need to see.

  “Hell,” Bass swore – reaching his thumbs up blindly in an attempt to root out his eyes.

  “Hell,” a voice repeated – and then someone reached down and grabbed Bass’s wrists and held them before he could finish gouging out his eyes. “I don’t want it that badly.”

  Bass squinted up through the pain and the memories of the woman he had killed so long ago – and as he squinted he swore to himself that he could see the face of God.

  “Her name was Helen,” Bass whispered to God.

  “You’re goddamn right she was,” God answered. “Get out of bed, Lazarus, it’s time to wake the hell up.”

  Bass blinked his eyes.

  Damn it.

  For some unfathomable reason, God looked exactly like Silver Grimes.

  “Come on up out of that coffin,” God said. “You and I have got ourselves a really good long talk.”

  Chapter 17 – Dig With The Nails God Gave You

  Bass struggled to sit up out of the coffin.

  “You could give me a hand up,” he said.

  “I’ve only got one hand to spare,” Grimes replied. “You already blasted the other one off of my arm at the elbow bone, in case you forgot.”

  Bass braced both hands on the sides of the coffin and leaned himself upright. He wanted out of that goddamn box more than he wanted a drink right now – but he still needed a moment to gather his strength.

  “Have you ACTUALLY been dragging that girl’s body around with you for two whole years?”

  “That girl has a name,” Grimes said. “Her name is Helen.”

  “I know what her name is,” Bass said. “I know what she tastes like too – and not in a good way.”

  Grimes smiled bitterly.

  “So did I,” he said. “I just wanted to make certain you did too, is all.”

  “You loved her, didn’t you?”

  “Sure I did,” Grimes answered. “Didn’t you ever love anybody?”

  Bass thought about Sally Jezebel.

  He wondered if what he felt for her was anything like what Silver Grimes must have felt for that...must have felt for Helen.

  “I can’t say that I’ve ever really fallen for anyone like that,” Bass admitted, right before someone hit him hard on the side of his head.

  Bass hit the dirt like a dropped turd.

  He lay there blinking away the pain.

  Then he saw her.

  Sally Jezebel was standing above him, holding the shotgun that she had just brained him with.

  “Consider yourself fallen, asshole,” Sally said.

  Bass could hear the bitterness in Sally’s voice. He could hear the anger and he could see the pain burning in her eyes as she stared at him lying there next to the coffin of the woman that he had killed so very long ago.

  In that brief instant he could not tell the difference between Sally Jezebel and the woman that he had shotgunned to death two long years ago.

  “I thought you were dead,” Bass told her.

  “Did it matter to you?” she asked.

  “Damn it,” he swore. “I thought he had killed you.”

  “He didn’t,” Sally said. “You did, two years ago.”

  Things were finally making sense.

  Bass felt the pieces falling together.

  “Oh hell,” Bass said. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?”

  “Worse than that,” Sally said, pointing the shotgun straight at him. “She was my friend.”

  Bass looked at her coldly.

  “So all of that feeling you said you had for me,” Bass said. “That was all just a lie.”

  “It was worse than a lie,” Sally said.

  Bass just kept on looking, waiting for the truth to fall.

  “It was God’s simple honest truth,” she said. “I fell for you and I felt for you – only I felt for her a whole lot more, is all.”

  Bass felt what he’d had, what might have been – all washing away from the tips of his fingers and gone. She had really loved him and he had been too damned busy feeling sorry for himself to ever really notice.

  Damn it.

  “Get it over with then,” Bass said.

  He still couldn’t wash his memory clean of the truths that Helen’s maggots had told him.

  “You’ve got
the shotgun,” he went on. “Why don’t you just finish what I started?”

  Sally looked at him.

  Her knuckles knotted about the shotgun, one finger hooked into the trigger.

  “Just dig,” Sally said.

  “I don’t have a shovel.”

  “Then dig with the nails that God gave you,”

  Bass started digging.

  “Dig it deep enough for two,” she told him.

  Bass kept on digging.

  He figured he would wind up in China or Hell or maybe somewhere deeper still and it didn’t really matter which.

  Chapter 18 – Not All Of The Maggots In Nebraska

  It took Bass along time to claw the grave out of the dirt from where it was hiding beneath.

  While he was clawing Grimes and Sally took turns telling him everything he needed to hear about Helen.

  Grimes told his part of the story by talking.

  Sally told her part of the story by not saying a goddamn thing.

  One of them was worse – but Bass wasn’t sure which.

  Grimes told Bass of Helen’s childhood. He knew her eye color and the way that she wore her hair. He sang a song that Helen had told him that her Momma had sung to her before bedtime.

  All the tiny little pieces of memory that made up a single human being – Grimes told them all in infinite detail.

  “Would a shovel hurt?” Bass asked for the thirty-eighth time, trying his damndest to change the subject for just a minute or two.

  “You got it easy,” Grimes told him.

  “How do you see that?” Bass asked.

  “I dug her up with one hand and an axe,” Grimes said. “I dug her up and I dragged her coffin to a man named Medicine Ass. Oldest looking fucker I had ever seen. He used to live around here he told me.”

  Bass kept on listening, figuring things out as he went.

  “So you asked Medicine Ass to bring her back,” Bass decided. “I’ve heard tell of those native shamans being able to bring the dead back.”

  Grimes shook his head.

  “That’s not how it happened. Medicine Ass said that he couldn’t actually bring her back. He said he wouldn’t even if he could. He said that bringing things back was something that always ending up feeling sorry for itself.”