Growing Dark

by Kristopher Triana

  Soon the flames were licking upward. I thought about opening the garage door further for ventilation, but I found that I didn’t want to move. I was hunched over on my bench, just looking at the growing fire, and that was just fine by me. As I stared into the licks of the wild light, I saw everything that could have been, simply disintegrating, and so I made myself think of happier times. Another Christmas came to mind, and I saw myself with my arms around Jenny Johnson, keeping her warm by a bonfire that was not unlike the one before me now. I could feel her body, not yet withered from crack, wrapped up in my embrace, and her wanting more than anything to be within it. I saw myself there, and Jenny, and sitting across from us was Sal. His hair was whipping in the wind just like that fire, pulling away from his innocent face just as innocence itself was surely pulling away from Sal. I could see him exactly as he had been, my young and unbroken cousin, his eyes dilating as he looked into the wild fire, stoned but not hooked yet.

  I closed my eyes and tried very hard to hang on to the image. I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t cry, but I was surprised that I wanted to so badly.

  Merry Christmas, Lewis.

  Legends

  A cowboy had to ride on nights like this, when dusk cooled things and the stars peeked out of a fading sky. The smell of the horse beneath him would fuse with his own sweat, reminding him that he too was an animal roaming wildly upon but one rock in a fathomless universe. The fireflies would throb in the twilight, the owls and crickets serenading his ride in rhythm with the galloping, the sounds and sights of the prairie fusing into one lulling spell of night.

  A cowboy had to ride on nights like this, just as Bronson rode now, his heels rapping the ribcage of the Tennessee Walker as it brayed, snorting hot mist. The terrain was getting rougher as they charged up the draw, but they couldn’t slow down. He knew it, and so did his horse. To slow down now was suicide of the worst kind, for that ashen blackness wanted to swallow the world.

  He knew why cowboys always rode into the sunset. A cowboy had to ride on nights like this, to keep his own darkness from catching him.

  * * * * *

  Charles Bronson died on a hot August afternoon in 2003. The pneumonia had finally taken him, at the age of 81. Even though Alzheimer’s had plagued him in his later years, he was surrounded by his family in his final days, and he knew it. He went as peacefully as he could because of their love. He’d lived a long life, and while his youth had been hellish in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, his adult life had led him to be a movie-star sensation. He’d done damn well in life, and he’d been happy; just as rich in family as he’d been in the bank. He died at peace, optimistic about the afterlife and, in retrospect, perhaps a little naïve.

  His moment of death was a dreamlike transition that unearthed the forgotten memory of being born. But this time, instead of leaving his mother’s body, he was leaving his own. He realized in a numbing flash that all the world’s artists had it wrong. Dying was like being carried by a lightning that stretched you across time, thrusting you through everything you’ve ever known with the backhand of a hurricane. His entire life flooded his consciousness, distracting him as he was torn from his carcass. He felt fragmented, omnipotent in his own wonderland of self-aware recollection, as if examining the very merit of his lifespan. Loves, battles, tragedies, successes, and failures, all of them as fresh as when they’d happened. He was living every memory, and even every dream, all at once. He felt like a pinball whirling through an endless machine of emotions, feeling pleasure and pain, love and fear, disgust and joy all in one explosive mélange.

  He awoke as if from a nightmare, standing there in all that emptiness. It was a colorless void, infinite and without form. It gave the illusion of floating, but there was no wind.

  Before he could even try to make sense of it, he heard the familiar gravelly voice behind him.

  “It’s one hell of a roller coaster, isn’t it, Charlie?”

  Bronson turned around, aware of how limber he felt. The old aches of his body were behind him now, as was his Alzheimer’s. He had no trouble recognizing the man he shared this strange void with, but he was the last person Bronson would have expected to greet on the other side.

  “Lee?” Bronson asked. “Lee Marvin?”

  Marvin stood before him, not as the old Marvin who’d passed away, but as the younger, though still white-haired, Marvin whom he’d starred with inThe Dirty Dozen. He stood tall in a pair of cowboy boots that matched his full Western wear, complete with gun belt and Stetson hat. Aside from being clean-shaven, he looked as Bronson remembered him from his filmMonte Walsh.

  “Nice to see you again, Charlie,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  “I’ll say it has. You’ve been dead for almost 20 years.”

  Marvin grinned his best head-shot smile.

  “Only where you come from,” Marvin said. “Time is not as linear as you think. But then, a lot of things are not as you think, as you’re about to discover.”

  Marvin pointed, and Bronson followed till his gaze fell on a pinprick of light. It expanded in the nothingness to form a reflective sliver, like an oblong mirror. Bronson stared into it, stunned. His appearance was his own, but from when he was in his late 30s. He was muscular again, his body tan and vascular. His face was no longer swollen with old age. His hair was black as a crow’s wing, his features as if carved from marble. It was hard to not feel a little vain.

  Marvin was not the only one dressed in cowboy gear. Bronson saw that he was wearing tight jeans and a worn Wrangler jean shirt that was taut across his shoulders. A faded hat was atop his head, and the weight of the pistol in its holster made him lean to one side. He was reminded of the catalog of Westerns he’d made, fromThe Magnificent Seven, toRed Sun, to the fan favorite ofOnce Upon a Time in the West. He appeared now before himself, looking like a sort of hybrid of those roles.

  He was glad that he still had his mustache.

  “What is this?” he asked. “Are we in movie cowboy heaven?”

  He was only half joking.

  “Not exactly,” Marvin said. “We look like this because it is how we’re remembered. Our celebrity has forever burned our images in the minds of millions. Their notion of who we are and what we stood for, fictionalized or not, is what makes us what we are now. Belief is everything.”

  “What are we?”

  “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “Well, try.”

  “Spirits, I suppose. Angels, in a way.”

  Bronson let that sink in and then shook it off.

  “Horseshit,” Bronson said. “We look like gunslingers, not angels.”

  “Yeah, and this don’t look like heaven.” Marvin stepped closer to amplify what he was about to say. “If you’re waiting for white clouds and a bunch of pantywaists with harps, you can forget it. Heaven, angels and God are not exactly what any of the religions came up with. Man, being alive, cannot know death. In many ways, even when we’re dead, we don’t get all of the answers.”

  “If this isn’t heaven, then what is it?”

  “A portal. Think of it as a hallway between life and death. I just came to greet you.”

  “Well,” Bronson said and laughed. “No offense, Lee, but why you? I mean, we always got along, but you’re not exactly who I would expect to greet me in the afterlife. Why not my mother? Why not Jill?”

  Bronson’s second wife, Jill, had died of cancer when she was only 54. Their marriage had spanned almost 30 years, and he had considered those years the very best of his life. Although he later remarried, his love for Jill had never faded, and neither had the pain of seeing her wither away, the cancer slowly eating her. He had always tried to remember her the way she had been before the cancer: young, beautiful and lustrous, riding her horses and playing with their children in the sunshine of their Vermont farm. If anyone should meet him in the afterlife, it should have been her. Instead, here stood Lee Marvin, dressed for high noon.

  “I wish it was like that, Ch
arlie,” Marvin said. “I really do. There are a lot of people I would have liked to see again on this other side. Maybe we will be reunited with them at some point. But right now we’ve got a job to do.”

  The nothingness began shining in a color Bronson had never seen before. The light seemed fluid, and out of that fluid the two horses pushed forth. The horses stood next to Marvin, completing his Western theme. All he needed was a Morricone score.

  “The power of belief is everything,” Marvin explained. “The real heroes of the world get their 15 minutes of fame sometimes, and other times they just die on a battlefield. But movie heroes stay heroes forever. As long as there is an audience, the belief in the heroes is there. The world thinks of us as cowboy heroes, and that is what we are now, in this second level.”

  “Second level?”

  “The next step. The second level of existence.”

  Marvin put a boot into a stirrup and mounted his horse. The light grew brighter, silhouetting him in a cosmic display.

  “Call us angels,” Marvin said. “Or call us ghosts. But what we really are is legends.”

  Bronson looked at the other horse. Its eyes were like two small moons glowing in the night. He waited for Marvin to say more, but he fell quiet, as if waiting for Bronson to understand. As a child of the Great Depression, toiling in the dismal mining town, Bronson had felt deep despair. In World War II, as a tail gunner in a B-29 bomber, he’d felt the adrenaline rush that came with battle, particularly when a bullet had dug its way into his arm. When Jill had died, he’d felt a shattering loss, and he knew then what it was to have a wound that would not heal. But he had never felt so confused before, so utterly lost, as he did right now. He stood there in some inexplicable phantom realm, being told he was a legend and not knowing what to make of that, not knowing where he was headed or what awaited him when he got there. There were so many questions. He figured he’d start with the simplest one.

  “So, where are we riding to?” he asked.

  * * * * *

  They were driven as if by the wind, pulled by instinct and little else. The horses followed their rein pulls just slightly before the riders could issue them, they too moving with an unseen force, drawn like magnets to whatever was beyond the void. He rode beside Marvin, and the portal absorbed them. Bronson felt tranquil, the fluid nothingness engulfing him in a thunderous wave.

  The light gave way to a more comfortable blue as they burst through Earth’s stratosphere, sailing through the sky on the backs of their steeds, galloping and yet in a way flying back to the world these men had come from. The oddest thing about it was that it didn’t seem odd. He was riding a horse through clouds and charging back toward the Earth below, and yet it seemed like second nature. There was no fear, no vertigo. He wasn’t gasping for air, as he should have been at this altitude. He wasn’t even cold.

  The horses didn’t break stride as they landed in the pasture. The dust was heavy there, swarming. They pulled the horses back into a trot.

  “How you holding up?” Marvin asked.

  “Not too bad, for having just flown on horseback.”

  Marvin chuckled, his gaze on the horizon.

  “It's weird,” Bronson said. “I feel like I know where we’re supposed to go, even though I’m not sure what we’re doing. I know we need to head west.”

  “You’re right, and you’ll get used to that. Follow those premonitions. That’s fate guiding you.”

  As they carried on, Marvin began to explain.

  “Since I died, I’ve come to figure out a few things. I don’t have all the answers. All I can tell you is my take on it. The way I see it is that the afterlife, or at least this stage of it, moves in phases, much like life. You have good times and bad. Both of us had our hard years, been to war. But we also had some good times: money, fame, and beautiful women. Good and bad, like the yin and the yang and all that mystic shit.”

  “I never took you for the mystic type,” Bronson said with a smirk.

  “I never was, but we just rode horses out of the sun.”

  “Point taken.”

  “So anyway, we both started our lives off hard. We had to earn the good times in life. I think the same goes for death. We have to pay our dues before we get to see our loved ones and be at peace. I think we, more than most people, have to do this because we allowed ourselves to become heroes in the eyes of the world. We accepted those titles.”

  “I never considered myself a hero.”

  “It doesn’t matter how humble you may have felt about it. What matters is how you came to be perceived. They may have just been roles to us, but they have become something more to the world.”

  “A news clip once referred to me as a white knight in dark times,” Bronson said, remembering. “Is that what I am now? A knight in shit-kickers?”

  “It is what we were becoming for all of those years without knowing it.”

  “Legends,” Bronson repeated, looking at the small town ahead.

  “Legends,” Marvin replied.

  “So what is it that white knights do when they come back from the other side?”

  There was an ominous quiet to the town up ahead that sulked under a black plume of smoke. Bronson felt the hairs on his arm stand up, and in unison his horse became antsy. Marvin’s eyes hardened, staring straight through the falling ash at the shadowy buildings ahead.

  “Well, cowboy,” Marvin said. “We hunt us up some demons. But first things first: I need a drink.”

  * * * * *

  The town had seemed vacant from the outskirts, but while it was a bit of a wasteland, some stragglers still remained. The buildings were haunted-looking, with forgotten cars corroding in the relentless heat. Fires had ravaged much of the area, and smoke still lingered, hinting at more. The businesses looked as vacant as the homes, but Bronson knew, as Marvin did, that saloon keepers and undertakers never starve. They found an open bar, dismounted and tied their horses.

  Marvin was as thirsty as Bronson had remembered him, kicking back the bourbon with flicks of his wrist. They’d received a few stares coming into town on horseback, but the townsfolk were few and so beaten-down-looking, as if poverty and hopelessness had long ago eaten their interest in the world around them. They didn’t speak. Seeing people in such a state always reminded Bronson of his hellish youth in the mining town, toiling in blackness.

  “Another bourbon, pal?” the bartender asked. He was a heavy man in his 60s. The wrinkles of a hard life cracked his tanned and leathery face, allowing him to smile out of only one side of his mouth.

  “Three fingers,” Marvin said, and the barman poured.

  Bronson drank his water.

  “Come on, Charlie,” Marvin said. “You don’t have to be such a health nut anymore. The game is over.”

  The barman wandered off, pouring beer for some worn-out ranchers at the end of the bar. Bronson studied them, noticing their hair and clothing as well as the décor of the barroom itself. It was a farming town, he could tell, which made them stand out a little less, not being alone in wearing cowboy hats. But there was a nostalgic air to it as well.

  “Something tells me this isn’t the same year I left from,” Bronson said.

  “You’re catching on,” Marvin replied.

  “The shaggy hair, this wood paneling, the cars out front; I’d say we’re in the mid-’70s.”

  “I’d say you’re right. Like I told you before, time is not linear. It only seems to work that way for the living.”

  “What about for demons?” Bronson asked.

  Marvin kicked back his drink.

  “The demons love nothing more than fucking up history. Whatever is happening herenowdidn’t happen inour’70s. They’ve come to try to make an alternate history. If they ruin the past enough, then they contort the future. It poisons the universe.”

  Bronson rubbed his temples, overwhelmed by it all.

  “There’s no whiskey in the beyond,” Marvin told him. “That’s one of the many problems with it.”
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  He put down his glass and looked at Bronson, his stare unwavering.

  “When I died,” Marvin began, “I was greeted by John Wayne. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Sorry, Lee, but we’re all out of booze, and if ever you needed a drink, it’s now.’ Not long after that, we were galloping through Colorado, battling these goddamned things from the other side.”

  “Demons?”

  “I don’t know what else to call them. They all look different, and they all look worse than anything you could ever imagine: turned inside out and twisted into real horrors. You always know them, though, even when they try to pass for human. You’ll find that you can sniff them out like a warden’s bloodhound on a prison-break hunt. It’s because we’re supposed to hunt them, Charlie. It's what we do now. Evil is everywhere and rampant. I don’t think it can ever be contained, but we have to try to at least keep it in check.”

  The barman came back to refill Marvin’s tumbler. He looked at them both, recognition glowing in his tired eyes.

  “Say,” he said, “I wasn’t gonna say nothing, but I just have to ask. Aren’t you fellas in the pictures?”

  “Used to be,” Marvin said.

  “Yeah, you’re Lee Marvin, ain’t ya?” he asked. “And you’re Charles Bronson, right?”

  Bronson nodded and smiled politely.

  “I knew it,” the barman said. “I’ve seen tons of you guys’s pictures. I love Westerns. You guys are the best cowboy heroes we’ve got.”