Ten years in prison breaks a man.
It broke him.
Youthful indiscretions had landed him with the wrong bunch. Now he was a free man again—had a new wife and three kids. Had found the Lord and Jesus and preached off a stump for a full year, winter, summer, wind, rain, and snow. Folks started coming round listening to him preach. Fire and brimstone, the wages of sin, Glory Hallelujah.
She was a good woman, Anne Pryce. Her kids were good too. Treated them like his own and he loved them greatly.
The community got together and built him a small church. Put up the frame in one day. Started on a Wednesday and the whole thing was up and ready for a full-out sermon by that Sunday.
He could smell the fresh pine sap warmed by the sun. Looked out at the faces upturned and thought: What’d I do to deserve all this?
He worked hard trying to raise enough vegetables to feed them all—a hog to be butchered in the early winter. Between these and scant donations they got by. Preaching wasn’t fast money, it wasn’t even slow money. You didn’t have to take money from people—whatever came, they readily gave. And if they didn’t give money, sometimes they gave a chicken or vegetables and once a shoat hog. It was a different life than the one he’d led and he liked it better this way than the old way. Getting by on little and have around you those who loved you, those you could trust was a sight better than having a lot and not being able to trust anybody, worried about getting shot in the back by a man who called himself “friend.”
That’s all he needed, was to stand it, figuring it would sooner or later come to better times financially if he could just hang on long enough, get through enough winters. Anne took in laundry, the kids helped best they could. Three years as a free man came and went. He thought sure he’d die old in his bed now he got beyond the early years of wildness and settled down. Thought maybe he’d die in the rocking chair reading the Good Book, Anne there by his side, the kids, singing him to his heavenly home with sweet hymns.
He thanked God for his good fortune of finding her and them, for finding the path of the straight and narrow life. This new life helped him forget about those long lonely days looking through iron bars at freedom.
They’d broke him good.
Then the third winter came and brought sickness with it. The littlest girl was the first taken. Little Alice they all called her; little and sweet she was too.
He led the prayer over her grave, felt soul’s grief sliding down his cheeks. Her little face like a doll’s wearing a tatted bonnet. In less than a month the same sickness took the two boys—Ike and Jack—and it seemed like to him he’d suddenly and somehow been handed the life of Job.
“Please, no more,” he prayed aloud, down on his knees in that small church they’d built him. Folks stopped coming around, afraid the sickness was still there in the walls, the floor, and all around. Feared God had for some reason saw fit to curse the place, the man, his family, even though they couldn’t name a reason why He should. He couldn’t blame them for not coming, for being afraid. They were folks who believed in unseen powers, and left all reasoning to God. He was having trouble holding on to his own belief, for what God would ring down such hardship? He told himself and her, they’d be no different if the shoe was on the other foot.
“You’re wrong,” she said.
It came down to just him and her, and still she believed in him, but he knew she was all wrung out with sorrow. Every day he had to look into those sad, hollow eyes and try and lift up her spirits when he could barely lift up his own.
“I ain’t strong as you might think,” he said to God.
She got so she wouldn’t eat and went about calling the names of her dead children as she stalked the night, the empty rooms. Word got around she’d lost her mind and it scared folks even more. They stopped coming to the house, as well as the church. They stopped bringing by pies and chickens and a little something from the garden. Superstition is a powerful thing that spreads like its own sort of disease and sickness and infects everyone.
“All those years I was locked up,” he said to the God he could neither see, nor who spoke back to him, “it’s as if that wasn’t enough punishment for the wrong things I done. Why this? Why them kids, those innocents? And why her, now, after all she’s already suffered? Better me than them. Kill me, crush me, break me upon your wheel and let her be. Have them put me back in prison. Anything but doing it this a way.”
But the God he sought remained silent in the silent heavens. The winter bore on long and harsh as he’d ever seen a winter. Its weight of snow was like a white mountain. Its sharp winds were like knives. Its cold was like iron you couldn’t break.
He found her on just such a brittle cold morning. She had tied the bucket rope they used to lower into the well around her neck. She must have tied it sitting on the rock edge then slid off into the black hole. He went out looking for her and the taut rope drew his eye first—a pair of small shoes empty in the snow beside the well.
Prison had broken him but this broke him worse than prison ever could.
He did not know if he could survive after finding her like he did. He hauled her small, frail body up from the well. He carried her into the house blinded by his own tears. He no longer had any purpose he could see. And, as if all that weren’t enough, someone came in the night and burned the church to the ground after word got out Anne had killed herself in that terrible way. He figured rightly enough that those who had built it felt it their rightful duty to destroy it, and thereby destroy whatever curse had befallen the place and the man who stood in its pulpit—the man who had now lost his entire family through unexplainable tragedy. Surely there must be some reason behind all the terribleness!
He’d awakened in the night to a dream of flames that seemed like hell had surrounded him, saw the fiery yellow tongues licking at the black night. He heard the window glass shatter, heard the crack of timber, its sap popping. He saw first the roof cave in, then frame walls collapse in on themselves as the church came tumbling down. He did not bother to get out of bed.
In the morning, he walked among the charred and blackened dreck poking through a fresh snow. Strangely enough he found his Bible, the pages curled and brittle so that when he picked it up the words of God sifted through his fingers like tiny dead black birds.
“That’s it,” he said to no one. “It’s finished.” And immediately felt crucified but not redeemed.
Took a trip to town and bought all the whiskey he could afford and drove back again to the small clapboard house, wondering if they’d take it in their head to burn it down too, maybe with him in it. The cold wind reddened his face and chafed his hands while the whiskey fortified his innards and stole his senses. He wandered drunkenly among the unmarked graves of his wife and children—the sunken places sagging with snow—and sat cross-legged and talked to them.
He figured just to lie there next to them and drink himself to death. He had heard that death by freezing wasn’t such a bad way to go. Heard it was just like going to sleep.
U.S. Marshal Tolvert found him before he had a chance to fully expire and put him into the back of his spring wagon, then wrapped heavy wool blankets around him and took him into town thinking he could well have hauled in a corpse by the time he got there. He had hauled in plenty of other corpses and this would just be one more.
The town’s physician did not believe in such things as spirits or vengeful gods or curses, but believed in science and medicine and with these revived Wes Bell to working order by means of hot compresses, rubbing his limbs with pure wood alcohol and submerging him in a copper tub of brutal hot water and Epsom salts.
“It’s a wonder you didn’t lose your parts,” the marshal said afterward. “I’ve seen men with their fingers and toes froze off. Even saw one feller had his nose froze off and another with both ears turned black.”
“You’ve wasted your time saving me,” he said. “I don’t appreciate your interference.”
“Duly noted,” the marshal said. “But you wouldn’t be the first I hauled in half dead, nor the first I hauled in fully so. As an official of the law it is my duty to save those I can and kill those that need killing.”
The next day the marshal came again, dressed in his big bear coat and sugarloaf hat and said, “Well, since you ain’t going to die this time around, how’d you like to do a decent deed and make some money doing it?”
“I don’t give a damn about money or doing any more decent deeds,” he said.
The marshal winced at such talk.
“I thought you was a preacher.”
“I was a lot of things I ain’t no more.”
The marshal had eyes as colorless as creek water that danced under shaggy red brows that matched his shaggy red moustaches. “From what I understand you are a man who has fallen on hard times. Now tell me this, what does a man who has fallen on such hard times and without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of plan on doing next?”
“I’ll tell you what such a man plans: he plans to join his wife and children.”
“Well, sooner or later you will get your wish—that is a natural fact. But for now, maybe you’d be interested in a little job I’m offering.”
“You must spend all your time in opium dens.”
This brought a chuckle from the marshal.
“I’m an excellent reader of a man’s character,” he said. “I’ve had to deal with woebegone folks and fools and killers all my professional life—I’d judge you to be somewhere in the middle of that bunch.
“I don’t believe you want to die while still an able-bodied man with plenty of good years ahead of you yet. Why, you can’t be more than forty. Look here, I’m proposing to offer you a fresh start. Who can say what awaits us, or why God intends us to be here on this earth—what our purpose is?”
“Believe what you want, lawman. But me personal, I’m done believing. I’m quitting the game.”
The marshal slipped a fine Colt Peacemaker with stag horn grips from his holster and handed it over butt first.
“She’s loaded,” he said. “If you aim to finish yourself, might as well do it right this time. But before you pull the trigger let me stand back out of the way because I don’t feature having your blood and brains splattered all over this nice coat of mine.”
And the marshal stood away from the sickbed there in the physician’s fine old house with its gingerbread scroll work and tall windows and fancy shake roof and flocked wallpaper.
Wes took the revolver and remembered in an instant when such a thing in his hand was as familiar to him as breathing. But it wasn’t nothing he wanted to be reminded of now, nothing he wanted to take up again.
He thumbed back the hammer.
“Before you pull that trigger,” the marshal said, “I understand your people rest in unmarked graves.”
Such talk pinched his nerves.
“Wind and time will rub out any trace of those poor folks—your wife and children. Is that what you want, for them to be forgotten—yourself along with them?”
He turned the cocked gun instead at the man who had offered it to him.
“It don’t matter about me,” he said.
“Shooting me won’t solve any of your problems,” the marshal said. “It’ll just make them worse. Let me tell you, hanging is about the worst way a man can die. Bullet’s much easier and quicker and a lot more honorable, case you place any stock in honor.”
He lowered the hammer on the pistol and set it on the bed.
“I’d pay you good money,” the marshal said. “Enough to buy your family some nice headstones. There is a fellow in St. Louis—an Italian—who carves the best headstones you ever laid eyes on. Carves them out of marble comes all the way from Italy, and gets a handsome price, but you could easily afford it on what I’d pay you. Think how nice that’d be—headstones for your wife and children. Why a hundred years from now people would be able to see who they were and where they rest, maybe put flowers on their graves out of sheer kindness ’cause that’s the way some people are. They aren’t all like you and me, Wes.”
“You’ve got a hell of a gift of gab,” Wes said.
“Don’t I, though?”
“How much money?”
“Let’s say two hundred dollars, cash.”
“What do I have to do for this cash money?”
“Kill a no good son of a bitch who needs killing.”
“What makes you think…?”
The marshal lit a cigar he’d taken from the pocket of his waistcoat, blew a stream of blue smoke toward the plaster ceiling, noted the fine wood furniture that adorned the room. French, he thought.
“I know all about you, Wes Bell. I know more about you than your Ma.”
“You don’t know nothing about me.”
“No sir, you’re wrong. It’s my job to know about people—and what I don’t know, I find out and I found out everything about you. I know before you took up preaching you was in Leavenworth prison. I know how bad you was. And that is why I’ve come now, to ask you this thing, because I know you got the grit to get it done.”
“Killing for money ain’t part of me.”
“You’ve killed plenty for free before the law caught you and put you in the jug. Now tell me if I‘m wrong.”
“That was a long time ago and I never killed nobody who didn’t deserve it or wasn’t trying to kill me first.”
“Hell, me too. But you haven’t forgot how to pull a trigger on a man have you? It’s like riding a bicycle.”
“No, I haven’t forgot how.”
“Let me just go ahead and tell you about this fellow,” the marshal said, retaking his seat by the bed and taking up his hogleg again and putting it back in his holster. “He’s a scourge, worse’n the plague. Everywhere he goes he leaves a bloody trail behind: dead folks, raped folks, hurt folks. He ain’t never done a good thing in his life. At least you seen the light, Wes. You got broke down and turned your life around ’cause that’s what a normal human would do at some point when he saw the errors of his ways. But not this fellow. This fellow is as bad a seed as ever was planted in the devil’s garden and he needs weeding out.”
“It makes no sense you asking me to do it. You’re the law, why don’t you do it, if he’s so bad?”
“Oh, believe me, I’d do it in heartbeat, wouldn’t think twice about doing it. Hell, I’d hang him and then shoot him and then burn his body just to make sure no man woman or child ever had to cross his path again. But I can’t do it, Wes.”
“Why can’t you?”
“’Cause I’m a dead man myself. Got cancer of the ass. Eating me up bad and there’s no way of knowing I’d find him before the grim reaper finds me.”
The marshal smoked casual as though waiting for his steak to come.
“There is one other thing about this fellow, Wes, one more reason I come to find you and no other for this job.”
He waited to hear what the marshal’s reason was.
“He’s your brother, Wes. This no good son of a bitch is your kid brother, James, and if there’s anybody knows his ways and where he’d go to ground when he’s being chased it would be you, Wes.”
“James?”
“None other.”
James was only nine years old when Wes got sent to the pen. And while behind those bars, his ma took James to somewhere in New Mexico, he’d heard, and married a miner and all contact between them was lost.
“I haven’t seen him since he was a kid,” he said to the marshal.
“Yes, that’s probably true, but kin is kin and blood is blood and I do believe of all the men in this world you are the one who could find this little murderer and put him down. Do you want to know what all crimes he’s committed? Should I tell you about the raping of women and young girls, how he slashed their throats afterward? Should I tell you about how he murdered an old man and his grandson who weren’t doing anything but fishing and he shot them in the back of their heads merely for what was in their lunch pails? Shall I tell you how he burned down a house with a man and his family still in it because they were colored? Shall I tell you such tales, Wes, or will the money be enough?”
“Oh, you give a long and windy speech, marshal…”
“Yes, I do, Wes. Yes, I, by God, do.”
“Even if I agreed to do it I wouldn’t know where to begin and would not know if and when the time came I could do it—not my own blood, my own flesh. Could you do it?”
“Yes, by God, I could and I would.”
“Still…”
“I know all about blood being thicker than water—but its blood he’s spilling more than water and the blood stains you as it does all your people who ever carried or will carry the Bell name and only blood kin can make it right in the eyes of the innocent. Only you can set things right with James, Wes Bell.”
The marshal blew a ring of smoke toward the ceiling and watched as it became shapeless before dissolving altogether. Then he leveled his gaze at Wes.
“You see, I have studied you like a schoolboy studies his books and I know everything about you and everything about that little killing son of a bitch brother of yours, James. Ironic ain’t it, in a way, you’re preaching the gospel and him named James, which was Jesus’ brother’s name. You ain’t Jesus, are you, Wes? You ain’t the second coming, are you?”
“To hell with you.”
“To hell with us all if that boy keeps up his killing and rampaging. To hell with every last man, woman, and child he comes across in this old world unless you stop him.”
Then the marshal reached into the side pocket of his bear coat and pulled out a triple-framed tintype of a woman holding an infant and two other children—a boy in each of the attached frames. Anne and her youngsters—and pressed it into Wes’s hand.
“To hell with them too,” he said, “for the sickness that took them is no less than the sickness that sets in that wild boy’s mind, Wes. No different. Dead is dead no matter how you come to be that way. But what is different is whether or not you just drew a bad hand in life’s game or some no good son of a bitch come along and took life without the right to do so. How’d you feel if it was James killed your wife and those kids instead of them dying of sickness?”
Then the marshal stood and adjusted the weight of his heavy coat and settled the sugarloaf on his head.
“I’ll come round tomorrow for your answer, Wes. And the two-hundred dollars if you so decide.”
“Five-hundred,” Wes said. “Gold double-eagles, no script, and the name and address of that stone carver in St. Louis.”
“Well now, Wes, you sure you wouldn‘t like to make it thirty pieces of silver…”
And so it was that the very next morning the marshal came again and stacked five gold double eagles on the bedside table and a piece of paper with the St. Louis stone carver’s name and address written on it.
“Down payment,” the marshal said. “The rest is waiting for you at the bank upon your return and proof the deed is done. Now raise your right hand so I can swear you in official with Doc Kinney here as eyewitness.”
Doc Kinney looked on at the abbreviated ceremony.
Then the marshal placed a small badge stamped out of brass next to the double eagles and said, “Get her done, son. Sooner rather than later. I’d like to still be breathing when I read the good news.”
“What makes you think I won’t just take the money and run?”
“Because,” the marshal said, with an air of confidence, “you know what the inside of that state prison looks like and I venture to guess it ain’t worth no two hundred dollars to go back. I hired you and I can hire others to track you down and for a lot less money. Sweet dreams, bucko.”
Fifteen days had passed since he struck his bargain with the marshal.
He began the trail where the marshal said the last crime had been committed—a place called Pilgrim’s Crossing, a small Mormon community in the high country of Utah. Saw the woman’s grave and asked her husband to describe the man who had raped and killed her. The man described had a mark on his cheek like a red star. James had been born with it—the one single thing he could recall about the kid before they hauled him off to prison: the red star birthmark.
The man had pointed to some distant mountains when asked which way the killer went.
“I just come in from working in the silver mines when I saw a man on a paint horse riding fast away toward them mountains then found Lottie tore up and dead.”
The man was dressed in dark clothing, looked like a crow, soft gray eyes that spoke of nothing at all.
“What lays that way?” he asked the man.
“Los Muretos is all I know,” the man said.
“How come you didn’t follow?”
The man gave a slight shrug.
“I have other wives to care for,” the man said. There were four small houses on the land each with a bonneted woman staring from the doorways.
“Well then, I suppose you are one lucky son of a bitch you got spare wives to concern yourself with. Most men just have one and some don’t have any.” He felt disgust and turned his horse toward the north road.
Another day’s ride and he met a man pulling a handcart.
“How far to Los Muretos?” he said.
The man was large as an ox himself and needed to be. The cart was burdened with a full load of watermelons.
“Five or ten miles,” the man said, thumbing back over his shoulder.
“You come from there?” he asked.
The man nodded. A blue scarf kept his straw hat tied down against the cold air.
“Three days ago.”
“Any chance you come across a man with a red star on the side of his face?”
The man shook his head.
He rode on and the man took up his load again—each man seeing to his duty.
Two more days of riding brought him to the top of a rocky backbone of a ridge where he looked down upon the town. In the long distance, a line of saw-toothed snow-covered mountains shimmered under a cold dying sun.
A song of wind sang along the ridge and fluttered through his clothes and ruffled the mane of his horse. It chilled his blood, or something did.
He glassed the town below him with a pair of brass Army field glasses. Then he swept them along the brown slash of road that ran uneven west and east. He saw nary a solitary thing moving along the road.
Nothing moved in the town either, but it was still some distance off and maybe too far to see human activity. He was sure from the campfire he’d found that morning he had closed the gap between him and his kid brother—embers still sighed in the ashes.
“We’ll wait,” he said to the horse. There was nothing for the horse to graze on among the rocks. “When the sun is down good and proper, we’ll ride down there and find James.”
He squatted on his heels and waited for the sun to sink below the mountains, thinking of his lost family as he did, the real reason he was doing this thing, and when the sky turned dark as gunmetal and night came on like a cautious wolf, he tightened the saddle cinch and mounted the horse and began his descent into the town he figured had to be Los Muretos.
With darkness he saw the town’s lights wink on. A hunter’s moon rose off to the east casting the landscape in a vaporous light. He and the horse traversed the slope and came to the very edge of the town’s first buildings.
He went on.
The street was empty but he could see shadows moving behind the lighted windows. And farther up the street he heard the sound of a piano being played roughly. He followed the sound to its source—a solitary saloon, false-fronted, in the center of town.
He tied off and stepped cautiously through the doors.
Rough-looking men were bellied up to the long oak bar, the soles of their worn boots resting on the tarnished brass rail. They drank and laughed and swore. A cloud of blue smoke hung over their sweat-stained Stetsons, the smoke so thick it turned the men into shadows of men.
The interior of the saloon was narrow and dim—like the inside of a cave—and there was a feeling about the place that did not set well with him: a feeling of trouble and danger and worse.
The saloon girls were dressed in dark crimson gowns and looked like wilted roses lost in their seeking the sun as they moved wraithlike among the men.
Along the wall opposite the long bar men played cards at tables, their backs to him, their faces shaded by the brims of their hats.
He stepped inside quick, shutting the door keeping out the wind. Nobody bothered to look up. His right hand rested inside his mackinaw on the butt of his revolver.
He’d had plenty of time to think about what it would be like to shoot his own brother. Told himself he wouldn’t feel anything because he never knew the boy that well, and if he was as snake mean as the marshal had claimed, well, then it was simply an act that if he didn’t do, someone else would. Blood and kin had nothing to do with it he told himself. Justice had nothing to do with it. Italian marble headstones is what it had to do with.
His gaze took in the men along the bar and he did not see anyone he recognized as being James, a man with a red star birthmark on his face. Even without the red star birthmark he figured he would know James in spite of the long passage of time. Like a mother cow knows its calf, a brother knows his brother.
Then his gaze shifted to the card players and not one of them felt familiar to him either.
He moved farther into the saloon, pushing his way through the crowd, fingers curled around the gun-butt riding his left hip.
He wanted to see who was there in the back.
A sloe-eyed woman neither young nor pretty pressed suddenly against him. She had the cloying scent of dead flowers, and awful teeth when she opened her mouth. He tried not to look at her directly for fear of what he might see.
“How’s about buying a gal a drink, cowboy?” she said, and before he could stop her, her hand snaked between his legs. “A drink will get a free toss with me.”
He looked down then, but her own eyes were averted to where her hand now rested. “Well, how about it?” she said through the din.
He’d consorted with many such women in his younger days and taken pleasure from them. He had drank with them and fornicated with them. He was as wild and wooly and reckless as a Texas cowboy. This woman’s presence reminded him of every such woman he had sinned with and he didn’t have any favor for her, or any other woman since Anne.
He took two bits and set it on the wood and said, “There’s your drink, Miss, but the rest don’t interest me.” He pushed on through the crowd toward the back where he saw a wheel of chance and a faro table with men bucking the tiger. But none of them at either station had a red star birthmark on his face.
There was a low flat stage against the back wall and to the left of it a set of stairs leading up to the upper level where several private boxes ran the length of the saloon. These were the places the saloon gals took men and fleeced them like sheep—fleeced them of their money and their pride and still left them wanting more.
His every sense told him James was in this place, in one of those boxes.
He took the stairs and looked down upon the crowd below, the miasma of writhing human desperation it seemed to him, and was just as glad to have left it down there. To see them from this vantage point caused his belly to clench, his flesh to sweat, his muscles to knot. He could not imagine himself like those below ever again.
An odd thing happened just then as he was looking down: a face of one of the men at the bar looked up, and it could have been his twin. Then the man looked away again, down at his drink there on the hardwood. Wes was sure it was all his imagination.
He eased down the narrow hall to the first private box and drew back the curtain enough to peer inside. A pudgy man stood with his trousers down around his ankles facing a woman sitting on the side of a narrow cot doing what such women do.
Wes let the curtain fall back and he moved on to the next box. This time he saw a young soldier sitting talking to his gal, both of them facing away—just sitting there on the small bed holding hands the way lonely people do.
He eased down to the next box and the next, finding three in a row empty.
Then there was just one curtain left to draw and he moved to it, the pistol in his hand, cocked and ready. Oddly, he felt calm. His heart rhythm was slow and steady as an old Regulator wall clock. He nearly always felt the same way as a young buck when trouble presented itself. He didn’t know what it was or why the calm had descended on him, it just had.
And when he eased the curtain back with the barrel of his pistol, he saw the man he’d been looking for. James with the red star birthmark sat in the bed, his eyes shut. A slattern with black hair lay against his chest, his hand stroking her head as one might a cat.
It would be easy enough just to push his way into the room and empty every round and be done with it. But he’d have to kill the woman to do it. He didn’t ride all this way to kill a woman.
Looking upon that rosette-marked face he saw a single scene from their past, when James was just a small kid running around in a hardscrabble yard chasing chickens, flinging rocks at them. Even then the boy had a cruel streak in him. The old man whipped James with his strap, trying to beat the meanness out of him, but it could be he’d just beaten more meanness into the boy than out. And maybe the old man knew the family secret, that James wasn’t of his own seed, but the seed of another man and that’s why he beat him so terrible.
There on the bed’s post hung a gun rig within easy reach. A holster with a fine ivory-handled Colt. It was the sort of gun a man used to gunfighting might own. Not your typical twelve-dollar single action bought in some hardware store to let rust on your hip.
And in spite of everything, he suddenly felt a strange connection to the boy, but not one that could be described exactly as brotherly love—more a simple indebtedness of same bloodlines.
James suddenly shifted his weight and the woman fell away from him, exposing the stain of blood on James’s hairless white chest. Wes could see now the gaping wound of her exposed neck, the straight razor lying open and bloody on the floor next to the bed.
He drew back the curtain fully now and stepped quickly into the room aiming the revolver right where the woman’s head had rested. James’s eyes fluttered open.
“Wes,” he said as casually as if they’d just seen each other yesterday, that there’d never been any separation between them. “I figured you’d be along some day, and now here you are.”
“And now I’m here,” he said.
“They sent you, didn’t they? Them who want me dead?” James looked at the still form of the woman beside him.
“Her name is Chloe,” he said. “She was real nice to me for a time. Then she got like the others—like Ma used to get. You don’t remember none of that, I bet. You was up in the prison doing your time whilst I was at home doing mine with Ma once the old man passed and she went in search of another. Gambling man he was…and a pimp to boot. Made sure we earned our keep, Ma and me.” A smile drew the boy’s lips up at the edges. “He was the first son of a bitch I ever killed.”
So there it was, some of the reason at least, if James could be believed, and maybe he could and maybe he couldn’t.
“Call me sinner, Wes, call you the saint. Heard you went to preaching and married yourself a fine woman. How’s that working out for you, Wes?”
“Never said I was nothing but what I am, but I never killed a woman or anyone else that was innocent.”
“Innocent! Ha, ain’t none of us innocent, Wes. You think she was? You think any son of a bitch in this place is?”
“I only came just for you, James.”
“Then you’re a fool, Wes.”
“Maybe so. I guess time will tell.”
“I guess maybe it will.”
“I’ll give you a chance to defend yourself,” Wes said. “We’re kin of some sort according to the heavens, otherwise I’d already have shot you.”
“Jesus Christ, Wes, but that’s awfully white of you.”
“You can defend yourself or not, either way, I’m going to pull this trigger.”
“Hell, Wes, you’re wasting your sweet time, boy. We’re already dead, men like you and me, been dead since we first drew breath. Same God that made you, made me. Go on and pull your trigger, Wes. I’m ready to go. Question is, are you?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” Wes said.
James was snake quick, just like Wes thought he would be.
Both men fired at once. Witnesses said it sound like a single gunshot, but they were wrong.
At last he felt a great peace, for the first time since he’d fallen in love with Anne and his days of winter became days of summer. He saw James buck on the bed, then his hand empty of the smoking gun, and close his eyes as if falling asleep, a bright ribbon of blood flowing from his heart.
Good-bye, James.
Wes found himself ankle deep in new snow playing with Anne and the kids, throwing snowballs, laughing. Her smiling face made him happy. Then she faded into mist—all of them.
He opened his eyes and found himself standing on a rocky windswept ridge glassing the town below and the road that cut through it and saw not a solitary thing moving. Somewhere down there in that place they named Los Muretos was the man he was looking for—his kid brother.
He waited until dark, then rode his horse down the slope in the moonlight and entered the town from the east and and went on up the street to the only establishment open—a saloon with the words LAST STOP—painted on a hanging sign out front that the wind blew back and forth, the two small chains holding it creaking with rust.
He tied off and went in and worked his way through the smoky crowd until he saw the stairs, the private boxes on the upper level. A woman in a bloodred dress cut him off and asked if he wanted to buy her. He swept her aside with a hard look and went up the wood steps leading to the upper boxes.
He tried each chamber until he came to the last and found James marked by the red star cheek and a dead woman. And for a moment it was uncertain as to what he would do and what James would do, but now that they had faced the storm, there was nothing to be done. James’s pistol was in his hand just that quick, a wicked grin like the devil’s own followed in a split second by a resounding blast of gunfire.
And in the white storm that followed he opened his eyes and found himself again standing on the same windswept spine of rock overlooking the ramshackle town below, the shimmering mountains beyond, the dying sun in a glazed sky off to the west.
He had a deep and abiding sense he had been here before, that he had ridden in the moonlight down the slope of loose rock and entered the town and found James, but how was that even possible?
He thought he heard Anne’s voice calling him and looked around but no one was there. And when he looked back down toward the town again, he saw a lone man riding a white horse ascending the ridge.
The rider came on steady, the hooves of his mount clattering on the stones until at last the rider and his horse topped the ridge and rode along it to where Wes stood. The rider dismounted. He had a red star cheek.
“You might as well give in to it, Wes,” James said.
“Give in to what?”
“To the fact you’re dead.”
“I’m not dead.”
“Yes, you are dead and so am I. We killed each other that night in the Last Stop—don’t you remember?”
“No, I don’t remember nothing except I shot you.”
“And I shot you,” James said rolling himself a shuck and lighting it with a match pulled from his waistcoat pocket, the wind snuffing out the flame almost as quickly, carrying away the first exhalation of smoke.
“I was goddamn fast, but you weren’t too slow.”
He saw it then, James, quick as a snake strike, jerking his pistol free of the hanging holster, felt faintly the bullet’s punch even as James bucked back on the bed, eyes rolled up white in his head.
“It ain’t as bad as you’d a thought,” James said. “Is it?”
Wes turned round and round looking in all directions at the world spread out—the sky, the mountains, the town. He felt like if he’d had wings he could fly.
“We’re still down there,” James said pointing to Los Muretos. “We’re down there with all the others who died there in those glory years when the mines were still giving up their silver. We’re still down there with the whores and the gamblers, the merchants and the pimps who came for the easy money. Some were lucky and left when the silver ran out, but you and me and some of the others weren’t so lucky, Wes. We came and never left.”
The wind sang over the ridge like angel voices.
“Come on, Wes, let’s go back down—they are waiting for us—Chloe, the one you found me with that night, and that whore who wanted you to buy her a drink and you wouldn’t—she killed herself that same night, Wes. When a whore can’t sell herself for the price of a drink, she’s got nothing left.
“Me, it was my time to go. Sooner or later, some law dog or bounty hunter would have run me to ground if you hadn’t. In that way, I’m glad it was you, Wes, and not some stranger. I’m sorry I killed you. You were always the better of us two. You didn’t give me no choice. I guess it was meant to be like everything is—like brother slaying brother, Cain and Abel. It’s in us to kill when we feel we have to. We’re a lonesome bunch to be sure…”
“No,” Wes said. “I was hoping you would. I let you do it because I didn’t have nothing more to go home to. I just wanted to go home to them is all.”
“There’s nothing for any of us to go home to, Wes. Yonder is your home. Down there in Los Muretos. It’s home, not some other. No heaven and no hell—just the place we died in—where our corpses rot and our bones turn to dust again, and our spirits are once more free. That’s what going home is, Wes.”
Along the road something raised up the dust.
“What is that?” Wes said.
“Automobile, Wes—it’s what they ride these days, the curiosity seekers, the historians, the tourists. They want to see how we once lived, to see a town that is as dead as us. A ghost town. What better place than Los Muretos where we got ghosts aplenty? They come because they read about the gunfight, about how two brothers killed each other in a whorehouse—over a woman or over gold—the story keeps changing with time and every telling. They tell how one was a good Christian man and the other was an outlaw. And they like to believe we’re still there, in the town, raising a little hell, scaring the kids, the hucksters selling us like boiled peanuts and ice cream, putting our photographs on picture postcards.
“They even stage the gunfight—paid actors—men with bellies hanging over their belts—only they do it out in the street and not inside in that little whorebox where it happened. They bring folks in on buses just to see you and me kill each other again—three shows a day except on holidays.
“They must have written a hundred stories about that night and that town. And we’ll be here always—as long as the sun rises and sets over the mountains. We’ll be here long as it rains and the snows fall and the oceans curl against the shore.
“We are legend, Wes. They’ll never let us die or rest in peace. We’ll live forever as punishment for our sin.
“You and me.
“Come on down, Wes. Ride with me for a little while.”