Stephen Graham Jones has published six novels, including Demon Theory and the Shirley Jackson Award finalist The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, one collection, Bleed Into Me: A Book of Stories with another, The Ones That Almost Got Away forthcoming from Prime Books. His short fiction has been published in Cemetery Dance, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Brutarian, Juked, and almost one hundred other magazines. He teaches in the MFA program at The University of Colorado at Boulder. More at http://demontheory.net.
Like every month, the horse was new. A mare, pushing fifteen years old. Given his druthers, Lonegan would have picked a mule, of course, one that had had its balls cut late, so there was still some fight in it, but, when it came down to it, it had either been the mare or yoking himself up to the buckboard, leaning forward until his fingertips touched the ground.
Twenty years ago, he would have tried it, just to make a girl laugh.
Now, he took what was available, made do.
And anyway, from the way the mare kept trying to swing wide, head back into the shade of town, this wasn't going to be her first trip across the Arizona Territories. Maybe she'd even know where the water was, if it came down to that. Where the Apache weren't.
Lonegan brushed the traces across her flank and she pulled ahead, the wagon creaking, all his crates shifting around behind him, the jars and bottles inside touching shoulders. The straw they were packed in was going to be the mare's forage, if all the red baked earth ahead of them was as empty as it looked.
As they picked their way through it, Lonegan explained to the mare that he never meant for it to be this way. That this was the last time. But then he trailed off. Up ahead a black column was coming into view.
Buzzards.
Lonegan nodded, smiled.
What was dead there was pungent enough to be drawing them in for miles.
"What do you think, old girl?" he said to the mare. She didn't answer. Lonegan nodded to himself again, checked the scattergun under his seat, and pulled the mare's head towards the swirling buzzards. "Professional curiosity," he told her, then laughed because it was a joke.
The town he'd left that morning wasn't going on any map.
The one ahead of him, as far as he knew, probably wasn't on any map either. But it would be there. They always were.
When the mare tried shying away from the smell of death, Lonegan got down, talked into her ear, and tied his handkerchief across her eyes. The last little bit, he led her by the bridle, then hobbled her upwind.
The buzzards were a greasy black coat, moved like old men walking barefoot on the hot ground.
Instead of watching them, Lonegan traced the ridges of rock all around.
"Well," he finally said, and leaned into the washed-out little hollow.
The buzzards lifted their wings in something like menace, but Lonegan knew better. He slung rocks at the few that wouldn't take to the sky. They just backed off, their dirty mouths open in challenge.
Lonegan held his palm out to them, explained that this wasn't going to take long.
He was right: the dead guy was the one Lonegan had figured it would be. The thin deputy with the three-pocketed vest. He still had the vest on, had been able to crawl maybe twenty paces from where his horse had died. The horse was a gelding, a long-legged bay with a white diamond on its forehead, three white socks. Lonegan distinctly remembered having appreciated that horse. But now it had been run to death, had died with white foam on its flanks, blood blowing from its nostrils, eyes wheeling around, the deputy spurring him on, deeper into the heat, to warn the next town over.
Lonegan looked from the horse to the deputy. The buzzards were going after the gelding, of course.
It made Lonegan sick.
He walked up to the deputy, facedown in the dirt, already rotting, and rolled him over.
"Not quite as fast as you thought you were, eh deputy?" he said, then shot him in the mouth. Twice.
It was a courtesy.
Nine days later, all the straw in his crates handfed to the mare, his jars and bottles tied to each other with twine to keep them from shattering, Lonegan looked into the distance and nodded: a town was rising up from the dirt. A perfect little town.
He snubbed the mare to a shuffling stop, turned his head to the side to make sure they weren't pulling any dust in. That would give them away.
Then he just stared at the town.
Finally the mare snorted a breath of hot air in, blew it back out.
"I know," Lonegan said. "I know."
According to the scrap of paper he'd been marking, it was only Friday.
"One more night," he told the mare, and angled her over to some scrub, a ring of blackened stones in the packed ground.
He had to get there on a Saturday.
It wasn't like one more night was going to kill him, anyway. Or the mare.
He parked the buckboard on the town side of the ring of stones, so they wouldn't see his light, find him before he was ready.
Before unhooking the mare, he hobbled her. Four nights ago, she wouldn't have tried running. But now there was the smell of other horses in the air. Hay, maybe. Water.
And then there was the missing slice of meat Lonegan had cut from her haunch three nights ago.
It had been shallow, and he'd packed it with a medley of poultices from his crates, folded the skin back over, but still, he was pretty sure she'd been more than slightly offended.
Lonegan smiled at her, shook his head no, that she didn't need to worry. He could wait one more day for solid food, for water that wasn't briny and didn't taste like rust.
Or—no: he was going to get a cake, this time. All for himself. A big white one, slathered in whatever kind of frosting they had.
And all the water he could drink.
Lonegan nodded to himself about this, leaned back into his bedroll, and watched the sparks from the fire swirl up past his battered coffee pot.
When it was hot enough, he offered a cup to the mare.
She flared her nostrils, stared at him.
Before turning in, Lonegan emptied the grains from his cup into her open wound and patted it down, told her it was an old medicine man trick. That he knew them all.
He fell asleep thinking of the cake.
The mare slept standing up.
By noon the next day, he was set up on the only street in town. Not in front of the saloon but the mercantile. Because the men bellied up to the bar would walk any distance for the show. The people just in town for flour or salt though, you had to step into their path some. Make them aware of you.
Lonegan had polished his boots, shaved his jaw, pulled the hair on his chin down into a waxy point.
He waited until twenty or so people had gathered before reaching up under the side of the buckboard, for the secret handle.
He pulled it, stepped away with a flourish, and the panel on the buckboard opened up like a staircase, all the bottles and jars and felt bags of medicine already tied into place.
One person in the crowd clapped twice.
Lonegan didn't look around, just started talking about how the blue oil in the clear jar—he'd pilfered it from a barber shop in Missouri—how, if rubbed into the scalp twice daily and let cook in the sun, it would make a head of hair grow back, if you happened to be missing one. Full, black, Indian hair. But you had to be careful not to use too much, especially in these parts.
Now somebody in the crowd laughed.
Inside, Lonegan smiled, then went on.
The other stuff, fox urine he called it, though assured them it wasn't, it was for the women specifically. He couldn't go into the particulars in mixed company though, of course. This was a Christian settlement, right?
He looked around when no one answered.
"Amen," a man near the front finally said.
Lonegan nodded.
"Thought so," he said. "Some towns I come across . . . well. Mining towns, y'know?"
Five, maybe six people nodded, kept their lips pursed.
The fox urine was going to be sold out by supper, Lonegan knew. Not to any of the women, either.
Facing the crowd now, the buckboard framed by the mercantile, like it was just an extension of the mercantile, Lonegan cycled through his other bottles, the rest of his jars, the creams and powders and rare leaves. Twice a man in the crowd raised his hand to stop the show, make a purchase, but Lonegan held his palm up. Not yet, not yet.
But then, towards mid-afternoon, the white-haired preacher finally showed up, the good book held in both hands before him like a shield.
Lonegan resisted acknowledging him. But just barely.
They were in the same profession, after all.
And the preacher was the key to all this, too.
So Lonegan went on hawking, selling, testifying, the sweat running down the back of his neck to wet his shirt. He took his hat off, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and eyed the crowd now, shrugged.
"If you'll excuse me a brief moment," he said, and stepped halfway behind the ass-end of the buckboard, swigged from a tall, clear bottle of nearly-amber liquid.
He swallowed, lifted the bottle again, and drew deep on it, nodded as he screwed the cap back on.
"What is that?" a woman asked.
Lonegan looked up as if caught, said, "Nothing, ma'am. Something of my own making."
"We—" another man started, stepping forward.
Lonegan shook his head no, cut him off: "It's not that kind of my own making, sir. Any man drinks whiskey in the heat like this is asking for trouble, am I right?"
The man stepped back without ever breaking eye contact.
"Then what is it?" a boy asked.
Lonegan looked down to him, smiled.
"Just something an old—a man from the Old Country taught this to me on his deathbed. It's kind of like . . . you know how a strip of dried meat, it's like the whole steak twisted into a couple of bites?"
The boy nodded.
Lonegan lifted the bottle up, let it catch the sunlight. Said, "This is like that. Except it's the good part of water. The cold part."
A man in the crowd muttered a curse. The dismissal cycled through, all around Lonegan. He waited for it to abate, then shrugged, tucked the bottle back into the buckboard. "It's not for sale anyway," he said, stepping back around to the bottles and jars.
"Why not?" a man in a thick leather vest asked.
By the man's bearing, Lonegan assumed he was law of some kind.
"Personal stock," Lonegan explained. "And—anyway. There's not enough. It takes about fourteen months to get even a few bottles distilled the right way."
"Then I take that to mean you'd be averse to sampling it out?" the man said.
Lonegan nodded, tried to look apologetic.
The man shook his head, scratched deep in his matted beard, and stepped forward, shouldered Lonegan out of the way.
A moment later, he'd grubbed the bottle up from the bedclothes Lonegan had stuffed it in.
With everybody watching, he unscrewed the cap, wiped his lips clean, and took a long pull off the bottle.
What it was was water with a green juniper leaf at the bottom. The inside of the bottle cap dabbed with honey. A couple drops of laudanum, for the soft headrush, and a peppermint candy ground up, to hide the laudanum.
The man lowered the bottle, swallowed what was left in his mouth, and smiled.
Grudgingly, Lonegan agreed to take two dollars for what was left in the bottle. And then everybody was calling for it.
"I don't—" he started, stepping up onto the hub of his wheel to try to reach everybody, "I don't have—" but they were surging forward.
"Okay," he said, for the benefit of the people up front, and stepped down, hauled a half-case of the water up over the side of the buckboard.
Which was when the preacher spoke up.
The crowd fell silent like church.
"I can't let you do this to these good people," the preacher said.
"I think—" Lonegan said, his stutter a practiced thing, "I think you have me confused with the k-kind of gentlemen who—"
"I'm not confused at all, sir," the preacher said, both his hands still clasping the Bible.
Lonegan stared at him, stared at him, then took a respectful step forward. "What could convince you then, Brother?" he said. "Take my mare there. See that wound on her haunch? Would you believe that four days ago that was done by an old blunderbuss, fired on accident?"
"By you?"
"I was cleaning it."
The preacher nodded, waiting.
Lonegan went on. "You could reach your hand into the hole, I'm saying."
"And your medicine fixed it?" the preacher anticipated, his voice rising.
Lonegan palmed a smoky jar from the shelves, said, "This poultice, yes sir. A man named Running Bear showed me how to take the caul around the heart of a dog and grind—"
The preacher blew air out his nose.
"He was Oglala Sioux," Lonegan added, and let that settle.
The preacher just stared.
Lonegan looked around at the faces in the crowd, starting to side with the preacher. More out of habit than argument. But still.
Lonegan nodded, backed off, hands raised. Was quiet long enough to let them know he was just thinking of this: "These—these snake oil men you've taken me for, Brother. People. A despicable breed. What would you say characterizes them?"
When the preacher didn't answer, a man in the crowd did: "They sell things."
"I sell things," Lonegan agreed.
"Medicine," a woman clarified.
"Remedies," Lonegan corrected, nodding to her to show he meant no insult.
She held his eyes.
"What else?" Lonegan said, to all.
It was the preacher who answered: "You'll be gone tomorrow."
"—before any of our hair can get grown in," an old man added, sweeping his hat off to show his bald head.
Lonegan smiled wide, nodded. Cupped a small bottle of the blue oil from its place on the panel, twirled it to the man.
He caught it, stared at Lonegan.
"I'm not leaving," Lonegan said.
"Yeah, well—" a man started.
"I'm not," Lonegan said, some insult in his voice now. "And, you know what? To prove it, today and today only, I'll be accepting checks, or notes. Just write your name and how much you owe me on any scrap of paper—here, I've got paper myself, I'll even supply that. I won't come to collect until you're satisfied."
As one, a grin spread across the crowd's face.
"How long this take to work?" the bald man asked, holding his bottle of blue up.
"I've seen it take as long as six days, to be honest."
The old man raised his eyebrows. They were bushy, white.
People were already pushing forward again.
Lonegan stepped up onto his hub, waved his arms for them to slow down, slow down. That he wanted to make a gift first.
It was a tightly-woven cloth bag the size of a man's head.
He handed it to the preacher, said, "Brother."
The preacher took it, looked from Lonegan to the string tying the bag closed.
"Traveling like I do," Lonegan said, "I make my tithe where I can. With what I can."
The preacher opened it.
"The sacrament?" he said.
"Just wafers for now," Lonegan said. "You'll have to bless them, of course."
Slowly at first, then altogether, the crowd started clapping.
The preacher tied the bag shut, extended his hand to Lonegan.
By dinner, there wasn't a drop of fox urine in his possession.
When the two women came to collect him for church the next morning, Lonegan held his finger up, told them he'd be right there. He liked to say a few prayers beforehand.
The woman lowered their bonneted heads that they understood, then one of them added that his mare had run off in the night, it looked like.
"She does that," Lonegan said with a smile, and closed the door, held it there.
Just what he needed: a goddamn prophetic horse.
Instead of praying then, or going to the service, Lonegan packed his spare clothes tight in his bedroll, shoved it under the bed then made the bed so nobody would have any call to look under it. Before he ever figured this whole thing out, he'd lost two good suits just because he'd failed to stretch a sheet across a mattress.
But now, now his bedroll was still going to be there Monday, or Tuesday, or whenever he came for it.
Next, he angled the one chair in the room over to the window, waited for the congregation to shuffle back out into the streets in their Sunday best.
Today, the congregation was going to be the whole town. Because they felt guilty about the money they'd spent yesterday, and because they knew this morning there was going to be a communion.
In a Baptist church, that happened little enough that it was an event.
With luck, nobody would even have noticed Lonegan's absence, come looking for him.
With luck, they'd all be guilty enough to palm an extra wafer, let it go soft against the roofs of their mouths.
After a lifetime of eating coarse hunks of bread, the wafer would be candy to them. So white it had to be pure.
Lonegan smiled, propped his boots up on the windowsill, and tipped back the bottle of rotgut until his eyes watered. If he'd been drinking just to feel good, it would have been sipping bourbon. For this, though, he needed to be drunk, and smell like it.
Scattered on the wood-plank floor all around him, fallen like leaves, were the promissory notes for yesterday's sales.
He wasn't going to need them to collect.
It was a funny thing.
Right about what he figured was the middle of lunch for most of the town—he didn't even know its name, he laughed to himself—he pulled the old Colt up from his lap, laid the bottom of the barrel across the back of his left wrist, and aimed in turn at each of the six panes in his window, blew them out into the street.
Ten minutes and two reloads later, he was fast in jail.
"Don't get too comfortable in there now," the bearded man Lonegan had made for the law said. He was wearing a stiff collar from church, a tin star on his chest.
Lonegan smiled, leaned back on his cot, and shook his head no, he wouldn't.
"When's dinner?" he slurred out, having to bite back a smile, the cake a definite thing in his mind again.
The Sheriff didn't respond, just walked out.
Behind him, Lonegan nodded.
Sewed into the lining of his right boot were all the tools he would need to pick the simple lock of the cell.
Sewed into his belt, as back-up, was a few thimblefuls of gunpowder wrapped in thin oilcloth, in case the lock was jammed. In Lonegan's teeth, a sulfurhead match that the burly man had never even questioned.
Lonegan balanced it in one of the cracks of the wall.
He was in the best room in town, now.
That afternoon he woke to a woman staring at him. She was sideways—he was sideways, on the cot.
He pushed the heel of his right hand into one eye then the other, sat up.
"Ma'am," he said, having to turn his head sideways to swallow.
She was slight but tall, her face lined by the weather it looked like. A hard woman to get a read on.
"I came to pay," she said.
Lonegan lowered his head to smile, had to grip the edge of his cot with both hands to keep from spilling down onto the floor.
"My father," the woman went on, finding her voice, "he—I don't know why. He's rubbing that blue stuff onto his head. He smells like a barbershop."
Lonegan looked up to this woman, wasn't sure if he should smile or not.
She was, anyway.
"You don't see its efficacy," he said, "you don't got to pay. Ma'am."
She stared at him about this, finally said, "Can you even spell that?"
"What?"
"Efficacy."
Now it was Logan's turn to just stare.
"Got a first name?" she said.
"Lonegan," Lonegan shrugged.
"The rest of it?"
"Just Lonegan."
"That's how it is then?"
"Alone, again . . . " he went on, breaking his name down into words for her.
"I get it," she told him.
"Regular-like, you mean?"
She caught his meaning about this as well, set her teeth, but then shook her head no, smiled instead.
"I don't know what kind of—what kind of affair you're trying to pull off here, Mister Alone Again."
"My horse ran off," Lonegan said, standing, pulling his face close to the bars now. "Think I'm apt to make a fast getaway in these?"
For illustration, he lifted his right boot. It was down at heel. Shiny on top, bare underneath.
"You meant to get thrown in here, I mean," she said. "Shooting up Molly's best room like that."
"Who are you, you don't mind my asking?"
"I'm the daughter of the man you swindled yesterday afternoon. I'm just here to complete the transaction."
"I told you—"
"And I'm telling you. I'm not going to be indebted to a man like you. Not again."
Lonegan cocked his head over to her, narrowed his eyes. "Again?" he said.
"How much it going to cost me?"
"Say my name."
"How much?"
Lonegan tongued his lower lip out, was falling in love just a little bit, he thought. Wishing he wasn't on this side of the bars, anyway.
"You like the service this morning?" he asked.
"I don't go to church with my father anymore," the woman said. "Who do you think swindled us the first time?"
Lonegan smiled, liked it.
"Anyway," the woman went on. "My father tends to bring enough church home with him each Sunday to last us the week through. And then some."
"What's your name?" Lonegan said, watching her.
"That supposed to give you some power over me, if you know?"
"So you think I'm real then?"
Lonegan shrugged, waiting for her to try to back out of the corner she'd wedged herself into.
"You can call me Mary," she said, lifting her chin at the end.
"I like Jezebel better," he said. "Girl who didn't go to church."
"Do you even know the bible?" she asked.
"I know I'm glad you didn't go to church this morning."
"How much, Mister Lonegan?"
He nodded thanks, said, "For you, Jezebel. For you—"
"I don't want a deal."
"Two dollars."
"They sold for two bits, I heard."
"Special deal for a special lady."
She held his stare for a moment longer then slammed her coin purse down on the only desk in the room, started counting out coins.
Two dollars was a full week's work, Lonegan figured.
"What do you do?" he said, watching her.
"Give money to fools, it would seem," she muttered.
Lonegan hissed a laugh, was holding the bars on each side of his face, all his weight there.
She stood with the money in her hand.
"I bake," she said—spit, really.
Lonegan felt everything calming inside him.
"Confectionary stuff?" he said.
"Why?" she said, stepping forward. "You come here for a matrimony?"
" . . . Mary Lonegan," Lonegan sung out, like trying it out some.
She held the money out, her palm down so she'd just have to open her fingers.
Lonegan worked it into a brush of skin anyway, said at the last moment, "Or you could just—you could stay and talk. In the next cell, maybe."
"It cost me two more dollars not to?" she said back, her hand to her coin purse again, then stared at Lonegan until he had to look away. To the heavy oak door that opened onto the street.
The Sheriff was stepping through, fumbling for the peg on the wall, to hang his holster on.
"Annie," he said to the woman.
Her top lip rose in what Lonegan took for anger, disgust. Not directed at the lawman, but at her own name spoken aloud.
"'Annie,'" Lonegan repeated.
"You know this character?" the man said, cutting his eyes to Lonegan.
"We go back a long ways, Sheriff," Lonegan said.
Annie laughed through her nose, pushed past the lawman, stepped out into the sunlight.
Lonegan watched the door until it was closed all the way, then studied the floor.
Finally he nodded, slipped his belt off with one hand, ferreted the slender oilcloth of gunpowder out.
"For obvious reasons, she didn't bake it into a cake," he said, holding the oilcloth up for the lawman to see.
"Annie?" the lawman said, incredulous.
"If that's the name you know her by," Lonegan said, then dropped the oilcloth bag onto the stone floor.
The lawman approached, fingered the black powder up to his nose. Looked to the door as well.
By nightfall, Annie Jorgensson was in the cell next to Lonegan's.
"Was hoping you'd bring some of those pastries you've been making," he said to her, nodding down to the apron she was still wearing, the flour dusting her forearms.
"Was hoping you'd be dead by now, maybe," she said back, brushing her arms clean.
"You could have brought something, I mean."
"That why you lied about me?"
"What I said, I said to save your life. A little courtesy might be in order."
"You think talking to you's going to save me?" she said. "Rather be dead, thanks."
Lonegan leaned back on his cot, closed his eyes.
All dinner had been was some hardtack the Sheriff had had in his saddlebag for what tasted like weeks.
Lonegan had made himself eat all of it, though, every bite.
Not for strength, but out of spite. Because he knew what was coming.
"You're sure you didn't go to church this morning?" he said to Annie Jorgensson.
She didn't answer. It didn't matter much if she had though, he guessed, and was just lying to him about it, like she had with her name. Either way there was still a wall of bars between them. And he didn't know what he was going to do with her anyway, after. Lead her by the hand into the saloon, pour her a drink?
No, it was better if she was lying, really. If she was a closet Baptist.
It would keep him from having to hold her down with his knee, shoot her in the face.
Ten minutes after a light Lonegan couldn't see the source of was doused, the horses at the livery took to screaming.
Lonegan nodded, watched for Annie's reaction.
She just sat there.
"You alive?" he called over.
Her eyes flicked up to him, but that was all.
Yes.
Soon enough the horses kicked down a gate or a wall, started crashing through the town. One of them ran up onto the boardwalk it sounded like, then, afraid of the sound of its own hooves, shied away, into a window. After that, Lonegan couldn't tell. There was gunfire, for the horse maybe. Or not.
The whole time he watched Annie.
"Mary," he said to her once, in play.
"Jezebel to you," she hissed back.
He smiled.
"What's happening out there?" she asked, finally.
"I'm in here," Lonegan shrugged back to her. "You saying this doesn't happen every night?"
She stood, leaned against the bars at the front of her cell.
One time before, Lonegan had made it through with a cellmate. Or, in the next cell, like this.
He'd left that one there, though. Not turned, like the rest of the town, but starved inside of four days anyway. Five if he ate the stuffing from his mattress.
It had been interesting, though, the man's reactions—how his back stiffened with each scream. The line of saliva that descended from his lip to the ground.
"I've got to piss," Lonegan said.
Annie didn't turn around.
Lonegan aimed it at the trap under the window, was just shaking off when a face appeared, nearly level with his own.
It was one of the men from the crowd.
His eyes were wild, roving, his cheeks already shrunken, making his teeth look larger. Around his mouth, blood.
He pulled at the bars of the window like the animal he was.
"You're already dead," Lonegan said to him, then raised his finger in the shape of a pistol, shot the man between the eyes.
The man grunted, shuffled off.
"That was Sid Masterson," Annie said from behind him. "If you're wondering, I mean."
"Think he was past the point where an introduction would have done any good," Lonegan said, turning to catch her eye.
"This is supposed to impress me?" Annie said, suddenly standing at the wall of bars between them.
"You're alive," Lonegan told her.
"What are they?" she said, lifting her chin to take in the whole town.
Lonegan shrugged, rubbed the side of his nose with the side of his finger.
"Some people just get caught up when they're dying, I guess," he said. "Takes them longer."
"How long?"
Lonegan smiled, said, "A day. They don't last so long in the sun. I don't know why."
"But you can't have got everybody."
"They'll get who I didn't."
"You've done this before."
"Once or twice, I suppose. My oxen gets in the ditch like everybody else's . . . "
For a long time, Annie just stared at him. Finally she said, "We would have given you whatever, y'know?"
"A good Christian town," Lonegan recited.
"You didn't have to do this, I mean."
"They were asking for it," Lonegan said, shrugging it true. "They paid me, even, if I recall correctly."
"It was that poppy water."
Lonegan raised his eyebrows to her.
"I know the taste," she said. "What was it masking?"
In reply, Lonegan pursed his lips, pointed with them out to the town: that.
"My father?" Annie said, then.
Lonegan kept looking at the front door.
Her father. That was definitely going to be a complication. There was a reason he usually passed the night alone, he told himself.
But she was a baker.
Back in her kitchen there was probably all manner of frosting and sugar.
Lonegan opened his mouth to ask her where she lived, but then thought better of it. He'd find her place anyway. After tonight, he'd have all week to scavenge through town. Every house, every building.
Towards the end of the week, even, the horses would come back, from downwind. They'd be skittish like the mare had been—skittish that he was dead like the others had been, just not lying down yet—but then he'd have oats in a sack, and, even if they had been smart enough to run away, they were still just horses.
Or, he hoped—this time—a mule.
Something with personality.
They usually tasted better anyway.
He came to again some time before dawn. He could tell by the quality of light sifting in through the bars of his window. There were no birds singing, though. And the smell. He was used to the smell by now.
Miles east of town, he knew, a tree was coated with buzzards.
Soon they would rise into an oily black mass, ride the heat into town, drift down onto the bodies that would be in the street by now.
Like with the deputy Lonegan had found, though, the buzzards would know better than to eat. Even to them, this kind of dead tasted wrong.
With luck, maybe one of the horses would have run its lungs bloody for them, collapsed in a heap of meat.
With luck, it'd be that onery damn mare.
They'd start on her haunch, of course, finish what Lonegan had started.
He nodded, pulled a sharp hank of air up his nose, and realized what had woke him: the oak door. It was moving, creaking.
In the next cell, Annie was already at the bars of her cell, holding her breath.
"They can't get in," Lonegan told her.
She didn't look away from the door.
"What were you dreaming about there?" she said, her voice flat and low.
Lonegan narrowed his eyes at her.
Dream?
He looked at his hands as if they might have been involved, then touched his face.
It was wet.
He shook his head no, stood, and the oak door swung open.
Standing in the space it had been was the Sheriff.
He'd seen better days.
Annie fell back to her cot, pulled the green blanket up to her mouth.
Lonegan didn't move, just inspected. It wasn't often he got to see one of the shufflers when they were still shuffling. This one, he surmised, he'd fallen down in some open place. While he was turning, too, another had fed on him, it looked like. His face on the right side was down to the bone, one of his arms gone, just a ragged sleeve now.
Not that he was in a state to care about any of that.
This was probably the time he usually came into work on Monday.
It was all he knew anymore.
"Hey," Lonegan called out to it, to be sure.
The thing had to look around for the source of the sound.
When he found it, Lonegan nodded.
"No . . . " Annie was saying through her blanket.
"He can't get through," Lonegan said again. "They can't—keys, tools, guns."
For a long time, then—it could sense the sun coming, Lonegan thought—the thing just stood there, rasping air in and out.
Annie was hysterical in a quiet way, pushing on the floor with her feet over and over, like trying to back herself out of this.
Lonegan watched like she was a new thing to him.
Maybe if he was just seeing his first one too, though. But . . . no. Even then—it had been a goat—even then he'd known what was happening. It was the goat he'd been trying all his mixtures out on first, because it would eat anything. And because it couldn't aim a pistol.
When it had died, Lonegan had nodded, looked at the syrup in the wooden tube, already drying into a floury paste, and been about to sling it out into the creek with all the other bad mixes when the goat had kicked, its one good eye rolling in its skull, a sound clawing from its throat that had pushed Lonegan up onto his buckboard.
Finally, when the horse he'd had then wouldn't calm down, Lonegan had had to shoot the goat.
The goat had looked up to the barrel like a child, too.
It was the same look the thing in the doorway had now. Like it didn't understand just how it had got to be where it was.
The front of its pants were wet, from the first time it had relaxed into death.
Lonegan watched it.
In its other hand—and this he'd never seen—was one of the bottles of what Annie had called poppy water.
The thing was holding it by the neck like it knew what it was.
When it lifted it to its mouth, Annie forgot how to breathe a little.
Lonegan turned to her, then to the thing, and got it: she knew what that water tasted like, still thought it was the water, doing all this to her town.
He smiled to himself, came back to the thing, the shuffler.
It was making its way across the floor, one of its ankles at a bad angle.
Now Annie was screaming, stuffing the blanket into her mouth. The thing noticed, came to her cell.
"You don't want to—" Lonegan started, but it was too late.
Make them take an interest in you, he was going to say.
Like anything with an appetite, jerky motions drew its attention.
Annie was practically convulsing.
Lonegan came to the wall of bars between them, reached for her hand, just to let her know she was alive, but, at the touch she cringed away, her eyes wild, breath shallow.
"You should have gone to church," Lonegan said, out loud he guessed, because she looked over, a question on her face, but by then the thing was at the bars. It wasn't strong enough to come through them of course, but it didn't understand things the way a man would either.
Slowly, as if trying to, it wedged its head between two of the bars—leading with its mouth—and started to push and pull through.
The first thing to go was its one good eye. It ran down its cheek.
Next was its jaw, then its skull, and still it kept coming, got halfway through before it didn't have anything left.
Annie had never been in danger. Not from the thing, anyway.
She wasn't so much conscious anymore either, though.
For a long time, Lonegan sat on the edge of his cot, his head leaned down into his hands, the thing in the bars still breathing somehow, even when the sunlight spilled through, started turning its skin to leather.
It was time.
Lonegan worked his pantsleg up, slid the two picks out, had the door to his cell open almost as fast as if he'd had the key.
The first thing he did was take the shotgun off the wall, hold the barrel to the base of the thing's skull. But then Annie started to stir. Lonegan focused in on her, nodded, and turned the gun around, slammed the butt into the thing until its head lolled forward, the skin at the back of the neck tearing into a mouth of sorts, that smiled with a ripping sound.
When the thing fell, it gave Lonegan a clear line on Annie.
She was dotted with black blood now.
He might as well have just shot the thing, he figured.
"Well," he said to her.
She was crying, hiding inside herself.
"You don't catch it from the blood," he told her, "don't worry," but she wasn't listening anymore.
Lonegan pulled the keys up from the thing's belt, and unlocked her cell, let the door swing wide.
"But—but—" she said.
Lonegan shrugged, disgusted with her.
"What?" he said, finally. "I saved your life, Mary, Jezebel. Annie Jorgensson."
She shook her head no, more of a jerk than a gesture.
Lonegan twirled the shotgun by the trigger guard, held it down along his leg.
The easy thing to do now would be to point it at her, get this over with.
Except she was the cake lady.
For the first time in years, he wasn't sure if he'd be able to stomach the cake, later, if he did this to her now.
"What's the name of this town?" he said to her.
She looked up, the muscles in her face dancing.
"Name?"
"This place."
For a long time she didn't understand the question, then she nodded, said it: "Gultree."
Lonegan nodded, said, "I don't think I'll be staying in Gultree much longer, Miss Jorgensson. Not to be rude."
She shook her head no, no, he wasn't being rude.
"I'm sorry about your father," he said then. It even surprised him.
Annie just stared at him, her mouth working around a word: " . . . why?"
"The world," he said to her, "it's a—it's a hard place. I didn't make it. It just is."
"Somebody told you that," she said weakly, shaking her head no. "You don't . . . you don't believe it."
"Would I do this if I didn't?"
She laughed, leaned back. "You're trying to convince yourself, Mister Alone Again," she told him.
And then she didn't stop laughing.
Lonegan stared hard at her, hated Gultree. Everything about it. He was glad he'd killed it, wiped it off the map.
"Goodbye then," he said to her, lifting the fingers of his free hand to the hat he'd left . . . where?
He looked around for it, finally just took a sweated-through brown one off the peg by the door.
It fit. Close enough, anyway.
For a moment longer than he meant to, he stood in the doorway, waiting for Annie to come up behind him, but she didn't. Even after the door of her cell made its rusty moan.
Lonegan had to look back.
Annie was on her knees behind the thing the Sheriff had become.
She'd worked his revolver up from his holster, was holding it backwards, the barrel in her mouth, so deep she was gagging.
Lonegan closed his eyes, heard her saying it again, from a few minutes ago: "But—but—"
But she'd drank the poppy water too. Thought she was already dead like the rest of them.
She only had to shoot herself once.
Lonegan narrowed his lips, made himself look at what was left of her, then turned, pulled the door shut.
Usually he took his time picking through town, filling saddlebags and feedsacks with jewelry and guns and whatever else would sell.
This time was different, though.
This time he just walked straight down main street to his buckboard, folded the side panel back into itself, and looked around for a horse.
When there wasn't one, he started walking the way he'd come in. Soon enough a horse whinnied.
Lonegan slowed, filled his stolen hat with pebbles and sand, started shaking it, shaking it.
Minutes later, the mare rose from the heat.
"Not you," he said.
She was briny with salt, from running. Had already been coming back to town for the water trough.
Lonegan narrowed his eyes at the distance behind her, for another horse. There was just her, though. He dumped the hat, turned back around.
Twenty minutes later, her nose to the ground like a dog, she trotted into town.
Lonegan slipped a rope over her head and she slumped into it, kept drinking.
All around them were the dead and the nearly dead, littering the streets, coming half out of windows.
Ahead of him, in the straight line from the last town to this one, there'd be another town, he knew. And another, and another. Right now, even, there was probably a runner out there from this town, trying to warn everybody of the snake oil man.
Lonegan would find him like he'd found the last, though. Because anybody good enough to leave his own family to ride all night, warn people twenty miles away, anybody from that stock would have been at the service Sunday morning too, done a little partaking.
Which meant he was dead in the saddle already, his tongue swelling in his mouth, a thirst rising from deeper than any thirst he'd ever had before.
Lonegan fixed the yoke on the mare, smeared more poultice into her wound.
If things got bad enough out there this time, he could do what he'd always thought would work: crush one of the wafers up, rub it into her nostrils, make her breathe it in.
She'd die, yeah, but she'd come back too. If she was already in the harness when she did, then he could get a few more miles out of her, he figured.
But it would spoil her meat.
Lonegan looked ahead, trying to figure how far it was going to be this time. How many days. Whether there was some mixture or compound or extract he hadn't found yet, one that could make him forget Gultree altogether. And Annie. Himself.
They'd been asking for it though, he told himself, again.
If it hadn't been him, it would have been somebody else, and that other person might not have known how to administer it, then it would have been one half of the town—the live half—against the other.
And that just plain took too long.
No, it was better this way.
Lonegan leaned over to spit, then climbed up onto the seat of the buckboard. The mare pulled ahead, picking around the bodies on her own. The one time one of them jerked, raising its arm to her, Lonegan put it down with the scattergun.
In the silence afterwards, there wasn't a sound in Gultree.
Lonegan shook his head, blew his disgust out his nose.
At the far edge of town was what he'd been counting on: a house with a word gold-lettered onto the back of one of the windows: Wm. Jorgensson. It was where Annie lived, where she cooked, where she'd been cooking, until the Sheriff came for her.
Lonegan tied the mare to a post, stepped into Annie's living room, found himself with his hat in his hands for some reason, the scattergun in the buckboard.
They were all dead, though.
"Cake," he said aloud, trying to make it real.
It worked.
In the kitchen, not even cut, was a white cake. It was smeared with lard, it looked like. Lard thick with sugar.
Lonegan ran his finger along the edge, tasted it, breathed out for what felt like the first time in days.
Yes.
He took the cake and the dish it was on too, stepped back into the living room.
The father was waiting for him, a felt bowler hat clamped down over his skull. He was dead, clutching a Bible the same way the Sheriff had been carrying the bottle.
The old man was working his mouth and tongue like he was going to say something.
Lonegan waited, waited, had no idea what one of these could say if it took a mind to.
Finally he had to say it for the old man, though, answer the only question that mattered: Annie.
"I got her out before," he said. "You don't need to worry about her none, sir."
The old man just creaked, deep in his throat.
Walking across his left eyeball was a wasp.
Lonegan took a step back, angled his head for another door then came back to the old man.
If—if the buzzards knew better than to eat these things, shouldn't a wasp too?
Lonegan narrowed his eyes at the old man, walked around to see him from the side.
He was dead, a shuffler, but—but not as dead.
It hadn't been a bad mixture, either. Lonegan had made it like every other time. No, it was something else, something . . .
Lonegan shook his head no, then did it anyway: tipped the old man's bowler hat off.
What spilled out was a new head of hair. It was white, silky, dripping blue.
The old man straightened his back, like trying to stand from the hair touching his neck now, for the first time ever.
"No," Lonegan whispered, still shaking his head, and then the old man held the bible out to him.
It pushed Lonegan backwards over a chair.
He caught himself on his hand, rolled into a standing position in the kitchen doorway. Never even spilled the cake.
"You've been using the oil," he said to the old man, touching his own hair to show.
The old man—William Jorgensson: a he, not an it—didn't understand, just kept leading with the Bible.
Lonegan smiled, shook his head no. Thanks, but no.
The old man breathed in sharp then, all at once, then out again, blood misting out now. Meaning it was almost over now, barbershop oil or no.
Again, he started making the creaking sound with his throat. Like he was trying to talk.
When he couldn't get it out, and Lonegan wouldn't take the Bible, the old man finally reached into his pocket, came out with a handful of broken wafers, stolen from the pan at church.
It was what Annie had said: her father bringing the church back to her, since she wouldn't go.
Lonegan held his hands away, his fingertips even, and stepped away again. Not that the wafers could get through boot leather. But still.
The Bible slapped the wooden floor.
"You old thief," Lonegan said.
The old man just stood there.
"What else you got in there, now?" Lonegan asked.
The old man narrowed his half-dead eyes, focused on his hand in his pocket, and came up with the bottle Lonegan had given him for free. It was empty.
Lonegan nodded about that, got the old man nodding too.
"That I can do something about, now," he said, and stepped long and wide around the old man, out the front door.
The heat was stifling, wonderful.
Lonegan balanced the cake just above his shoulder, unhooked the panel on the side of the buckboard. It slapped down, the mare spooking ahead a step or two, until the traces stopped her.
Lonegan glared at her, looked back to the house, then did it anyway, what he knew he didn't have to: palmed up the last two bottles of barbershop oil. They were pale blue in the sunlight, like a cat's eyes.
He stepped back into the living room, slapped the wall to let the old man know he was back.
The old man turned around slow, the soles of his boots scraping the wood floor the whole way.
"Here," Lonegan said, setting the two bottles down on the table, holding up the cake to show what they were in trade for.
The old man just stared, wasn't going to make it. His index finger twitching by his thigh, the nailbed stained blue.
"I'm sorry," Lonegan said. "For whatever that's worth."
By the time he'd pulled away, the old man had shuffled to the door, was just standing there.
"Give it six days," Lonegan said, touching his own hair to show what he meant, then laughed a nervous laugh, slapped the leather down on the mare's tender haunch.
Fucking Gultree.
He pushed out into the heat, was able to make himself wait all the way until dark for the cake. Because it was a celebration, he even sedated the mare, cut another flank steak off, packed it with poultice.
He'd forgot to collect any water, but then he'd forgot to collect all the jewelry and guns too.
There'd be more, though.
In places without women like Annie Jorgensson.
Lonegan wiped the last of the mare's grease from his mouth, pulled his chin hair down into a point, and pulled the cake plate into his lap, started fingering it in until he realized that he was just eating the sweet off the top, like his aunt had always warned him against. It needed to be balanced with the dry cake inside.
He cut a wedge out with his knife, balanced it into his mouth, and did it again and again, until something popped under his blade, deep in the cake.
It was a half a wafer.
Lonegan stared at it, stared at it some more. Tried to control his breathing, couldn't seem to.
Was it—was it from this Sunday's service, or from last?
Was what was in the old man's pocket been the whole take, or just part of it?
Lonegan's jaws slowed, then he gagged, threw up onto his chest, and looked all the way back to town, to the old man in the door, smiling now, lifting his Bible to show that he knew, that he'd known, that he'd been going to get religion into his daughter's life whether she wanted it or not.
Lonegan shook his head no, no, told the old man that—that, if she'd just waited to pull the trigger, he would have told her that it wasn't the poppy water. But then too was dead certain he could feel the wafer inside him, burrowing like a worm for his heart, his life.
He threw up again, but it was thin now, weak.
" . . . no," he said, the wet strings hanging from his chin. It didn't—it couldn't . . . it didn't happen this fast. Did it? Had it ever?
His fingers thick now, he sifted through the cake for another wafer, to see if he could tell which Sunday it had been from, but all the shards were too small, too broken up.
Annie. Goddamn you. Which Sunday?
But—but . . .
The oil, the barbershop oil. Hell yes. It slowed the wafers.
Lonegan stumbled up through the fire, scattering sparks, the cake plate shattering on a rock, and started falling towards the mare. To ride fast back to Gultree, back to the old man, those two blue bottles.
But the mare saw him coming, jerked her head away from the wagon wheel she was tied to.
The reins held. The spoke didn't.
She skittered back, still sluggish from what he'd dosed her with, and Lonegan nodded, made himself slow down. Held his hat out like there was going to be something in it this time, really, come on, old gal.
The mare opened her nostrils to the night, tasting it for oats, then turned her head sideways to watch Lonegan with one eye, then shied back when he stepped forward, shaking her mane in warning, flicking her tail like she was younger than her years, and when he took another step closer, leading with the hat, she ducked him, and in this way they danced for the rest of the night, her reins always just within reach, if he could just time his steps right. Or what he thought was his reach.