Unbury Carol(18)

Carol told Farrah about Moxie. Why?

Dwight thought of pinching his wife’s nostrils shut.

It would be so simple, so quick, and then there would be no worry of when she woke, no concern about what Moxie would do if and when he arrived in Harrows.

Was he really coming? Now?

Dwight brought his fingers close to Carol’s nose.

“No,” he said. “Moxie will ask questions…ask to see if there are scratch marks inside the box. They’ll dig her up…check her nose. Not dead, he said. But not going to know, says I.”

Not dead.

The few words in Moxie’s telegram chilled his blood to snow.

He studied Carol a moment longer before stepping to the walls again and blowing the candles out in the opposite order he had lit them. Breath by breath the room darkened; breath by breath fresh shadows fell upon Carol lying still. He walked the circumference of the room slowly, quietly, his shoes in rhythm with the unseen rats. He took hold of the candlestick and quietly left the storm room.

He would go upstairs again and take his seat beside Arthur who was managing things, making fluid work of the guests. But before he got there, Dwight would stop in the kitchen and pull from a drawer a clean sheet of paper then write the following few words:

    Lafayette—

You are wanted.



And when he left the kitchen he would hand this paper to the waiting messenger and he’d give the young man an extra coin or two to make certain he got the message through soon, first, next. Dwight would then ask him to return with proof of its having been delivered.

On my way, Moxie had said. Boldly.

But Lafayette knew other people, other outlaws, other ways.





Smoke limped to the broke-down carriage blocking the Trail and pissed on it. He was far south, between Mackatoon and Baker, many miles from the colorful towns that offered the colorful thrills, but Smoke wasn’t the sort of triggerman who sought women, whiskey, or wagers. To him the real adventure existed on the Trail itself, the miles and miles of dirt, dimmed to shadows by arching trees, some low enough that riders, even gentlemen, had to remove their hats. Smoke wore no hat. He never had. And his thinning blond hair gripped his skull like the small fingers of the many children he’d frightened along the way. He refused to wipe the sweat that traveled down his face. Let it be hot. Let himself burn. A broken carriage was fun. A bad accident was the very variety of excitement he longed for.

When he was done urinating, he fastened his pants and felt for the string loops in his pockets. These simple general-store-bought cords led down the length of both pant legs and into his dust-covered boots. There they were tied to small doors at his heels, hatches Smoke could easily open with a simple tug of the loops.

A popping sound. A quiet creaking of small tin hinges.

And the oil that sloshed in his tin-shins, his false lower legs, poured forth.

A unique triggerman, even for the Trail. One that even the Trail-watcher Edward Bunny didn’t like to call on. Because the terrain was 80 percent shadowed at any time of day, there were plenty of places for bad men to hide.

And Smoke was a bad man. A mean man. Despite rumors of things worse than men on the Trail, Smoke was as monstrous as anything local folklore had invented.

The blue coach was on its side. Smoke’s urine traveled the length of a crack in the expensive wood. Observing the puddle at his boots, he thought the shape of it looked something like President Coopersmith. Coopersmith, like every president before her, had no good strategy for how to tame the Trail. So like every president before her, she did very little, ignoring the violence and horrors therein, leaving towns like Harrows and Mackatoon to hire lawmen and -women with enough mettle to do the protecting themselves.

Some were successful. Others were not. And Smoke, like most triggermen, knew that the spaces between these towns had no law at all.

This particular carriage was blocking Smoke’s passage back north after wrapping up a job in Mackatoon. Wreckage barred the entire width of the Trail, and even the smallest bits of it were higher than he wanted to climb. His tin-shins, though secure, were not easy to navigate.

It was a lot to get over.

One of the white horses had been crushed by the front end of the coach. The other whinnied and jerked, held down hard by a wheel half wedged against a willow. This horse, wide-eyed and loud, looked to Smoke as if specifically asking for help; perhaps it understood somehow that it was dangerously close to ending up like the broken unmoving man beside him, facedown in the dirt. A second man had been thrown farther up the Trail, and though Smoke couldn’t stand on his tiptoes (he had no toes, no physical legs below the knees) it was clear the man was dead. His head had caved in against another willow. The Trail was littered with splintered wood, torn white curtains, jewelry and gloves, luggage and clothes. Here…a rich accident.

“Hell’s heaven,” Smoke said. “Tough footing for a cripple to climb.”

But Smoke was no stranger to ruin.

Adjusting his weight so that he was leaning on the left of his two tin-shins, the oil audibly sloshing inside, he bent at the waist, squinting at the cracked window of the coach’s side door.

A bloodied palm appeared, sudden, flat against the glass.

There was someone stuck inside.

“Oh,” Smoke said. “Life…”

Moments before, he’d been leaning against a willow counting cardinals in the sky. Having traveled the Trail as long as he had, Smoke knew all the names: the outlaws and triggermen, the well-to-dos and the ne’er-do-wells, the lawmen, the doctors, the dogs. He knew that if a man waited long enough on the side of the Trail, something entertaining would be delivered to him. So when he heard the carriage wheels, he wasn’t surprised. Someone was always coming on the Trail. It was the only lifeline in the territory, here, shared by Ucatanani and Miskaloosa counties. Sometimes, hidden deep at the base of the shadows of the willows or pines, Smoke would remove his lower legs completely, roll up his dusty pant legs, and huff the rags that had absorbed much of that oil smell. Often this woke him up. The oil high was a good high. It was a great high today. And it wasn’t long after he’d wedged the rags back into place and re-belted the tin-shins to his thighs that the blue carriage showed, propelled by two gorgeous white steeds.