MEN LAY DEAD IN the street, slathered in mud. Sid looked at them. No longer men. Bodies and rags, the ghosts blown from their flesh. Their limbs flung helter-skelter, their brains dark as mine shafts. The wet heavens pelted them without regard. Same as the quilts and crockery they’d hurled into the muddy streets earlier that day. The broken chairs and cracked mirrors and patchwork coats, the ridey-horses and play-pretties and dolly-rags. Meanwhile, several more men quivered or moaned or shrieked from their wounds. Snakes of blood spooling out of them, coiling red-bright under the gray sky, slithering among the discarded guns and hats and bags.
Sid’s pistols were still hot, smoking slightly, like smithy’s irons just quenched in the tank. His hat had been shot from his head, lifted light as a bird—a finger-size hole in the crown. He’d chased down one of the detectives and shot him dead in the post office. A fourteen-year-old bystander lay by the railroad tracks, gun-killed. Tot, his name. Several of the detectives had escaped, possibly wounded. Shots in the distance.
Sid replaced his hat and took a step back, looking toward the swinging bridge over the Tug Fork River, which crossed the state line into Kentucky. A border his people had crossed so many times over the years, wading or swimming or fording the river on horseback, midnight errands of love or fun or vengeance. A border they still crossed daily for work or well-water or whiskey from the Blue Goose saloon on the Kentucky side. Some of the miners were shooting down into the water, trying to hit the last of the Baldwins swimming toward the far shore.
Sid set his guns back in their leathers and stood over the body of Albert Felts as the street puddles quivered with the arrival of the 5:15 train out of the county seat. Felts was staring up at the drizzling gray sky, flecks of moisture beading over his still-open eyes. He was the only one of the bunch with any legal authority. A deputy’s commission from an antiunion county—the kind handed out like penny candy in certain jurisdictions. A worm of blood had crawled out of the hole in his forehead and rolled down his nose, sliding beneath his right eye like a tear. A ragged crown of blood and brain matter seeped from the back of his skull.
Sid squatted down beside him, resting his metal teeth on his bottom lip. He glanced down. “Got ye a lot of brains for a fool, Albert.”
Around him, miners were venturing forth from doorways and alleys, climbing down from roofs and tiptoeing onto Mate Street. Their backs hunched, their rifles still tucked to their shoulders. Behind them, dazed townsfolk stared at the bodies or touched the bullet holes in brick storefronts or shop windows. A woman screamed. Sid followed the sound around a corner. Bloody handprints on the wall and the mayor lying bull-necked in his bowtie, holding his bleeding abdomen.
He looked up at Sid. “They shot me, Sid. I think I’m dying.”
“The hell you are, Cabell.” Sid knelt down in the mud and latched his hands on top of the wound, applying pressure. The mayor was a friend of his, a chunk of a man married to the sweetest, prettiest woman in all the Tug Valley, Jessie Maynard, who had bold dark eyes and always called him Sidney.
The blood was pulsing from the wound, coming up dark between Sid’s fingers. He raised his head. “Somebody get Doc Moo!”
He’d hardly said it when he heard hooves and looked up to see the doctor galloping down the street. The man leapt down from his horse and handed off the reins. “I heard the shots from the mine and came as quickly as I could.” He dropped to his knees beside the mayor and tore off his white cotton shirt, popping the buttons, folding it sleeve over sleeve to stanch the wound.
Cabell’s blood had begun pumping blackish from his belly, pulsing like Texas crude. Sid and Doc Moo looked at each other. Liver-shot, they knew. Moo gave a grim shake of the head.
No chance.
Sid blinked, his eyes deep-set in his skull. A wet sting in those dark coves, strange to him. He blinked it back and looked down at Cabell.
The man’s mouth was open. “They shot me, Sid. How come they shot me?”
His pupils were wide as wells, the light spilling out. Sid placed his free hand on Cabell’s head, awkward-like. Like he was checking the temperature of a schoolboy. “Because they’re sons of bitches, Cabell. But they’re in Hell now. Burning this minute. Sent down as many as we could.”
“Will I go down with them?”
“Hell, no, Cabell. You got a big kingdom waiting on you. Ain’t one thug in the whole damn place.”
They loaded the mayor onto the No. 16 train bound for Welch and the state hospital there—the same train the Baldwins had planned to take. Jessie and several others accompanied the dying man. She looked to Sid as she boarded the train, her dress bloodied in the fading light. She nodded to him, as if to say he’d done right putting those Baldwins down, no matter the cost.
Her dark eyes bored into him, same as they did during their long twilight walks along the Tug when the mayor had to be out of town on business and trusted Sid as his close friend and chief of police to keep his wife company. Evenings when the swells of her flesh moved beneath the thin cotton of her dress and a silver sheen of perspiration shone in the well of her throat and the dark green river burned like madness beneath the rising moon. Even now, Sid could feel his blood roving toward her, rising like a pistol.
One of the miners stood beside him as the mayor’s train chuffed out of town. “That poor wife of his. Girl-bride to gun-widow. She’ll be lonesome now.”
Sid said nothing. He was still thinking of her, the dark sparking of her eyes in the dusk. Maybe the prettiest thing he ever saw.