33

The storm moved on, the snow melting, and the atmosphere seemed covered in a gray haze. No sun, no clouds, and the only thing left was a cold wind. Sophia rode my Missouri, and I rode the dead man’s horse.

She’d found me in a rock quarry north of the Chisos. She held her pistol to her breast and when she saw me she noted the blood on my hands and nodded, and we set out to the north at hard ride with hopes of outpacing those who were sure to follow.

We rode up through the desert toward the Horse Head Hills and past the frozen agrito berries, which fell as they thawed and dotted the ground with red. We rode through the night, twice spelling the horses at stock tanks near the roadway. The sky was dark and starless. The hills before us were embellished by the blackness and we rode through each pass expecting always the next until the dawn cowed away the night, unraveling its hold on the earth and bringing forth an end to our slow stumblings.

Sophia led us into a canyon and under an overcast sky she picked up an all-but-hidden game trail twisting out of a draw and finding the road again five miles north. At midday we rode through the forgotten dreams of a long-deserted township. Two rows of rotted wood and broken adobe structures ran perpendicular and crossed near an old well with neither rope nor bucket. Most of the buildings were in the throes of collapse and had been for some time. The entire town seemed to be leaning, as if it were too exhausted to stand but too proud to fall, and in the grayscale of the day it appeared even more unsure of its place among the living.

Three dogs came out from one of the abandoned clay houses and trotted alongside us for a while and then stopped, all three of them, and stood in the middle of the road as if they’d been stayed by some invisible command. I twisted in the saddle and looked back and they matched my stare for a while and then turned and plodded back off the street, their ribs pressing into their skin with each breath.

“What is this place?” I asked her.

“Nothing, now.”

“Well, what’d it used to be?”

“A Mexican village.”

“This ain’t Mexico.”

“Not anymore.”

The sun appeared just in time to set and we watched it and then rode on. The stars shone for a while but were replaced by the moon and in the absence of clouds, the new light helped outline the mesas and horizontal strata. We rode toward the dark shapes and found a path up and took it and the horses shied and stamped and we urged them on up traprock switchbacks and false summits until finally the trail spilled out onto the tableland.

Coyotes unhappy with our being there yelled out and the horses didn’t much care for that either and I threw a handful of rocks into the night and told the predators to move on and I told them they could have it all back tomorrow.

We sat together and held one another and looked out over the low plain we’d crossed and watched for movement but all we saw was the still silence of the world. We slept on and off and rose before the sun and Sophia made a fire just big enough to boil coffee and I fed the horses and went through the supplies she’d stolen and matched a day to each scoop of oats, and I marked lines on the sack of beans and I didn’t bother looking at the dried meat.

From the nothingness of night came the false shapes of the dawn and every bush in the lowlands became a man or beast and only once the sun had topped the plateau did they turn back to their true form.

The Mexican village was ten miles to the west and we could see the shadow being lifted as the sun moved higher still and from where we sat drinking coffee the buildings did not look broken and the town was not filled with ghosts.

I thought I saw movement on the plain and reasoned it was one of the dogs from the village, but when I looked again there was nothing there save whatever lay hidden in the brush.

I took my coffee cup and tapped it against Sophia’s in a celebratory gesture, and she shook her head and smiled and stood to saddle her horse. I shrugged, looked once more for the dog, then tossed the grounds from my cup over the ridge and watched them fall.

We rode into a creek and followed it north against the soft current, and the horses weren’t pleased with the cold water. They turned their heads and walked sideways and tried to come out onto either bank but we kept them to the middle until we were satisfied our tracks had been gone long enough.

“Tom will still track us,” she said.

“I know.”

We doubled back and out a different side and split up and came back together and the whole time leaving some tracks while covering others. It was a practice in patience, and a frightful one at that, to stay closer to those hunting you rather than to ride wide open in one direction.

We slept little and less and drank cold coffee and the more we rode the more this thing began to chew on me.

I thought of the boy and my brother and all the others. If I didn’t stop the thought it would go back forever to the beginning of time and take me with it over the graveyards of old. Death hung in the air around me and I had begun to believe it always would. I thought of Grimes and his ghosts and how only the innocent ones haunted him. And so it chewed on me until we came upon familiar country and I looked to the west and then at Sophia.

“Do you believe bad men deserve to die?” I asked her, and she looked at me concerned.

“Some men are worse than others,” she said.

I nodded.

“That old Mexican’s ranch is yonder, up against them sierras.”

“Guerrero?” she asked, then nodded in confirmation.

“Well.”

“You mean to kill him?”

“He’s your grandfather.”

She nodded.

I looked again toward the darkening mountains. The sun flagged below the horizon but its luster remained as a memory upon the land and turned the sky all manner of violet and red. And there, under the day’s amaranthine recollection, I pressed my lips to Sophia’s and hoped that in her kiss I would find some answer. When we pulled free from one another, each seemingly unwilling to let the other go, she told me of the agua escondida above the ranch and said she would wait there with the horses.

My worry over my soul, which I couldn’t say if I believed in or not, was a worry fettered to my own destiny. After my conversation with Señor Guerrero I had decided I had no authority to judge or intervene and yet I found myself now changed in heart, believing myself some servant of the world, believing that if I were to kill an evil man, then the world might be a better place upon my doing so.

We take these liberties, as Grimes had warned again, as if they were given by God and of course they are not. But Grimes and I differed in our supposition of God, to the point where my own judgment was my own judgment and if my soul were to face a tribunal it would be only what I myself could conjure in the way of morality.

All of this, and still the Dawson boy remained. My crime, for which moral acuity was unnecessary, layered the far reaches of my mind and thus could not help but affect and even direct my future actions. Grimes, Guerrero, and every evil man in a world full of them, might die by my hand and yet never could I heal the scar of guilt and culpability from my life or any I might thereafter seek to lead. I thought these things, and more, as I crept slowly into the big house with my hunting knife at my side.