Unbury Carol(19)

Horses that couldn’t know poor footing was near.

Smoke watched the legs of the steeds buckle together, their hooves caught in matching divots, as the carriage plunged forward, splintered to bits—in slow motion it seemed to Smoke—from front to middle to back. Smoke saw the looks on the drivers’ faces as they were thrown. Heard the caterwauling terror of its passenger.

Then, just as suddenly, all was still.

Smoke watched the dust settle. He enjoyed the sound of rich wood cracking. Good kindling, he knew, for a good fire.

Now, eyeing the bloody hand against the glass, Smoke half sang to whomever it belonged to.

    Lady trapped in a coach of clover,

I’m not going around you,

so I’ll have to go over.



Smoke knew better than to chance the brush that bordered the Trail. False legs didn’t do well with unknown footing. Once, his boots had sunk deep into jelly mud, so deep his tin-shins were buried. That day, as he decided to unfasten the shins, a lawman patrolling the Trail stopped to assist him. Smoke played the helpless cripple magnificently. But today, having just broiled a Mackatoon home to cinder, Smoke wasn’t waiting for support.

“Help!”

The woman banged on the glass.

The leather belts that ran up Smoke’s thighs, binding him to his tin-shins, had long doubled as leverage when he needed them to. Gripping one now, he lifted his right leg up and balanced one muddy boot heel on the cracked white window ledge. A faint slosh sounded as his foot connected. The boot stable, he reached high for the white trim, the cracked decorative molding wide enough for his fingers to grip. He pulled himself up.

“Help! I’m in here!”

Smoke reached level footing, the broad side of the blue coach. But the angle was not easy. And getting down was always harder than climbing.

He put his hands in his pockets. He slid his fingers into the loops.

He pulled on the strings.

Draw.

The popping sound always delighted him, the opening of the heels.

The oil spread quick on the coach.

Smoke watched it travel that angle, divining toward the dead driver. The scant sunlight swirled in its stream and the oil cascaded over the body’s edge, splashing the side of the coachman’s nose below. Smoke inched farther up the wood and let his right leg hang over the broken back left wheel.

“Help! I’m in here!”

A red palm pounding on the glass.

The oil poured symmetrical down both sides of the circle wheel, and Smoke watched it drip to the dirt beneath it.

“Is that oil?” the woman cried. “I smell oil!”

Smoke let go of the strings in his pockets, and the soft clicks at his heels echoed their closing.

He limped carefully to the edge of the blue wood. He gauged the drop.

“Help me! I’m still inside! Can’t you hear me?”

He closed his eyes. Held his breath. And stepped over the edge.

When he landed, dirt rose and pain exploded up his legs and back. Smoke howled. He cried out and he tried to keep quiet about it and then he cried out again.

“Who knows what shapes you’ll see on the Trail!” he sang, limping, stiff-legged, north, as blood from his knee-stubs drooled down the tin-shins he balanced upon. “Who knows which way you’ll turn!” He stuck two fingers into the chest pocket of his cream button-up country shirt and retrieved a small box. “Who knows how clever you are with the reins!” Opening the box, he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve at last. “Who knows how fast you’ll burn.”

The match head came quick to life.

He tossed it over his shoulder.

Whump

BOOM!

Behind him, the carriage went up, and Smoke knew it was a good one. He limped north, toward all the mad towns of the Trail, all mapped out in great detail in his memory and mind, from the boot smiths to the bawdy houses and all the bricks in the alleys between them. As if he were traveling a sheet of paper, an actual map, a series of playing cards like the ones Edward Bunny kept stitched into his brown coat to track all the outlaws and triggermen on the Trail. As if the crinkling he heard was not the sound of wood catching behind him, not the sound of somebody clamoring for escape, not even the sound of her skin, heated, hot, then flaking, but rather like Smoke was leaving boot prints on the maps he’d seen in so many sheriffs’ offices in every town on the Trail.

From the same chest pocket that held his matches, Smoke removed a folded piece of paper and read the name printed there.





JAMES MOXIE




He whistled a single syllable, as though part of the song the flames sang behind him.

Moxie was the biggest name Smoke had ever been hired for.

And the legendary outlaw wasn’t far away.

Smoke limped on. Burning for hire was a way of life. But burning for no reason at all was living.





The name Moxie, spoken by Dwight, resounded so heavily that it nearly blotted out the words that followed. As if words with more emotional meaning echoed louder in Howltown.

There was no doubt now that Dwight wanted her dead. And while Carol wanted desperately to tell herself that there had been no signs of this, no indication of Dwight’s horrific unhappiness, she had to admit that there were.

And the knowledge increased the darkness she fell through. And the horrific anxiety that came with it was blue, untamable lightning through her body. Even at eight years old, with no understanding of what she was enduring, Carol had never been so scared in the coma.