Chapter 11

 

I have no idea how long we rode for before the horses slowed, and eventually came to a standstill. It may have been fifteen minutes; it may have been an hour. I was in a daze. My mind was racing even more widely and randomly than it had done whilst in the burning house. There were moments when I thought I was back in that inferno. Other times I found myself gasping for air as if I was still suffocating. I remember trying to talk to Jia and One Leg, shouting to them, my throat hoarse, my voice weak and lacking volume. I don’t recall them answering. So we raced on and I think we may have all ridden all night had the horses not decided otherwise.

We stopped deep in a gully. There were trees silhouetted on the skyline, stars visible behind them. I could smell smoke and it took me a terrible minute before I realized that nothing was burning, that my clothes were impregnated with the stench of fire.

The horses were foaming at the mouths and they were slick with sweat. Their chests heaved and I could feel my horse trembling with the effort it had put in.

I looked over my shoulder, convinced that they – Moose Schmidt and his friends – would be there, just a few horse lengths behind us, guns drawn.

Nobody was there. We were alone.

That didn’t mean they weren’t coming, but we had ridden fast and hard. Whether they were out there or not, we had to rest. The horses couldn’t go on.

‘Did we kill him?’ Jia asked.

It was the first thing she had said since almost falling unconscious in the flames. At some point during the ride, early on, I assumed, she had pulled herself upright on her horse.

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

I looked over at One Leg. He’d lost his hat, the blue felt hat I’d first seen him wearing at the cock fight and had recognized when he had flung open the door of Schmidt’s house. His head was lowered as if it was too heavy for his neck muscles. His dark hair hung down over his cheeks.

‘One Leg?’ I said.

Slowly he turned towards me. His face looked yellow in the moonlight.

‘I think I might have shot him,’ he said. His mouth stayed open after he’d spoken as if closing it would take too much effort.

‘How. . . ?’ Jia said. I don’t think she was asking how he’d shot Moose, but how had he found us.

One Leg closed his eyes. I saw his chest was heaving.

‘One Leg?’ I said.

‘Help me off the horse,’ he said. ‘I need to lie down.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I think I shot him,’ he said, and before I could dismount and get to him, he slid sideways off his horse and slammed into the ground.

 

One Leg was still breathing when I got to him. I raised his head gently, just enough to get my hand under the back of his skull, to lift it from the hard ground, to hold him.

‘One Leg,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. Lie still.’ Not that he was able to move.

His eyes were closed. The lids flickered briefly but behind them were just the whites of his eyes. He convulsed, but it was the slightest of convulsions as if his body didn’t even have the strength for that.

I held him a moment longer then lowered his head, and not knowing what else to do I looked over my shoulder. Jia was off her horse and coming towards us.

‘Water,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Water might not be the best thing.’

I saw how wet One Leg’s coat was. My hands came away slick and dark and when I opened his jacket there was so much blood that his shirt was pasted to him as if he’d been caught in a thunderstorm.

He shuddered again. The tiniest of shudders.

The bullet had hit him square in the chest. It was as close to being a heart shot as I could imagine.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ I said. But I looked up at Jia and I shook my head.

When I looked back at One Leg I realized he was too still, the slight moving of his breathing had stopped. There was no flicker behind his eyelids, no shudders, no convulsions.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

He had saved our lives. He couldn’t leave us. Not now. Not after everything.

I felt Jia’s hand on my shoulder. She knew.

‘One Leg,’ I said, the words obscured by something caught in my throat. ‘One Leg.’

I leant my face close to his. I prayed that I would feel breath on my cheek. I turned my head, praying to hear that breath.

But there was no breath felt or heard.

One Leg was gone.

 

Later, the more I thought on it, the more I realized it had been an instant-killing shot. One Leg Hawk should have died there and then outside that burning house. The bullet wound was huge and devastating. No one could take a shot like that and even stand up. Yet he had pushed Jia onto her horse, had helped me up, and then had ridden with us at full pace for however long it had been.

It was impossible.

But he had done it.

And when we were safe, only then had he allowed himself to die.

 

Jia and I held each other and we let tears come. For a while it felt like the tears wouldn’t stop. But the very fact of One Leg’s death, the smell of smoke on our clothes, and the burns and pains we had ourselves suffered reminded us that Mustang, and the people there, were only a few miles away.

We couldn’t stay here, not in the open, not in a gully like this.

So, somehow, we managed to wrap One Leg in his blanket and tie him onto his horse. I reloaded our guns and we remounted and we rode slowly and in silence, out of the gully, and toward some dark tree-lined hills in the distance.

Again, time seemed to have no substance, and when eventually we reached the trees and stopped deep inside the cover, I had no concept of how much of the night remained.

We laid One Leg’s body on the ground and we drank water from our skins and I filled my singed hat with water and let the horses drink. I tethered them loosely where the grass was good and then I came back to where Jia was sitting on a blanket.

‘You’re limping,’ she said. Her voice sounded quiet and tired and flat in the darkness.

‘I’m OK.’ I had forgotten about the bullet that had cut through my leg back at the house.

‘Let me see.’

‘I’m OK.’

But now that she’d mentioned it, I did feel the pain in my leg. A pain sharper than everything else I felt in the rest of my exhausted body.

I sat down beside Jia. She reached out for me.

‘Your trousers are soaked in blood.’

‘I can’t believe he’s dead,’ I said.

There was a moment’s silence and then Jia said, ‘He said he thought he’d shot Schmidt.’

‘Yes.’

‘We need to know.’

‘We need to take One Leg home. We will soon hear if Schmidt is dead.’

‘And if he’s not, then we will kill him.’ It wasn’t a question.

I nodded in the darkness. One Leg Hawk was another on a growing list of people we needed to avenge.

‘Your boot is full of blood,’ Jia said. ‘We need to take it off.’

‘I’m fine.’

But she was already pulling at my boot and although my foot itself wasn’t hurt, the leg above the boot screamed when she did that.

Once the boot was off she put it to one side and then removed the other.

‘You need to take your trousers off. Either that or I need to cut them. And aside from all that blood and a couple of bullet holes they look pretty good to me.’

I tried to come up with something funny in response but my mind was blank. So I undid my gun belt and I placed the gun in easy reach, and then I undid my trouser belt and the buttons and I started to work the trousers down. Where my blood had clotted it had glued the frayed material into my wounded flesh and now, as I tore the trousers free, it felt like a dozen white-hot knife blades had all been inserted into my right calf. I inhaled sharply and held the air inside in my lungs. I squeezed my eyes closed and I heard Jia whisper, ‘It’s OK, Cal.’ Then she was pulling my trousers down over the wound and the worst of it was past. I felt cold air on my legs and I breathed again. I shivered and I lay back and rested my head on the ground and looked up at the trees and, between the branches I saw a few stars, and I thought of One Leg Hawk, and of my father.

Jia poured cold water over the wound and it stung worse than the bullet had stung. I raised my head to look at her and saw her taking her jacket off. She was wearing a man’s shirt. In the darkness I couldn’t tell what colour, although I must have known because we’d been riding together for two days. She undid the shirt buttons and then she slipped it off just as the moonlight found its way between trees. She wore a thin white sleeveless top under the shirt, and in the moonlight I could see the lines of her body, her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach. The skin on her arms shone and looked so smooth I wanted to reach out and run my fingers down her. She tore first one sleeve off her shirt and then the other. She soaked one of the lengths of cloth in water and she used it to wash and wipe the blood away from my leg.

‘I’d like to use hot water,’ she said. ‘But no fire tonight.’

‘No fire,’ I said. My heart had started beating a little harder, pushing hot blood throughout my body. She was crouched down with her back to me as she worked on my leg and her white undershirt was riding high. I reached out and touched the small of her back. She shuddered a little. I thought I heard the breath catch in her throat. But it may have been imagination.

‘I think the bullet went straight through,’ she said. Her voice was soft and a little lower than normal.

I could feel her fingers on my leg, resting there.

I spread my fingers on her back and I could feel her warmth, her softness.

She started to twist around to look at me, but then she turned back and I felt her quickly wrapping the other torn sleeve around my leg, tying it crudely.

Then she rested her hand on my leg above the wound, and I could feel her thumb moving slowly, making tiny circles on my skin.

I reached out with my other hand and I held her waist. I could feel her body’s movement beneath my hands. She, like me, was breathing faster than we had been just a minute before.

Now she did turn and she looked down upon me and although her face was in darkness I could see the shape of her eyes and her lips and her nose, I could see how her hair was haloed against the moon, and then she leaned forward and she kissed me. Her lips tasted of salt and smoke, of blood and tears. I returned her kiss and then suddenly everything from that night, the anticipation of killing a man, the shooting of what we thought was that man in his bed, the fire, the terror, the relief as One Leg had rescued us, the smoke and the crazy race to safety, and most of all watching One Leg pass away before our eyes, all swept over us and once again time disintegrated and now instinct and a deep human need took over.

We made love and it didn’t seem wrong that One Leg’s body was lying just yards away. The sudden and unexpected passion helped drive everything else from our minds and bodies. We held each other and we kissed and we moved together as if we were one and it was proof that we were alive and that we had each other, that we each had someone, that for a few minutes amongst all the darkness, we were OK.

And afterwards we held each other and waited for the night to pass.