Unbury Carol(21)

How soon would Dwight get her into the earth?

Sheriff Opal!

But her lips did not part. As she felt rage rush through her still body, as she fought against ascribing any hope to a man who once deserted her, her lips did not part.

And the labored breathing, the hoarse rhythm that acted as a clock in Howltown inhaled.

Exhaled.

Again.

And between these thunderous respirations, the bitter music by which she worked, Carol tried.

Tried to move.





Nine years…

The words came quickly, and they hurt. It’d been nine years since Moxie quit the Trail. Nine years since he’d last left Mackatoon under the morning sun. And in those years—even in the years before those—Carol’s condition hadn’t entirely left his mind. Her sudden comas, the state she fell into, the death-trance, where not even the finest instruments could detect a heartbeat.

Oh, the appearance of death, the limp body of the woman he desired, was not something a young James Moxie could handle. It was enough to send him running, directionless, toward the Trail. And it was on the Trail, this Trail, that he became legend—a myth he foolishly believed had ended nine years ago but that he had taken up again this morning.

Do you have another magic trick in you?

Thoughts were always shinier, wider, more difficult to corral on the Trail.

Fifteen years…

Because that’s how long it was since Moxie had been to Harrows. The well-to-do town’s name brought with it many memories, most of which were peaceful. Harrows was where he and his longtime riding partner Jefferson slept under the stars, out there in the wheat fields at the town’s southern border. The pair had fun in those sleepy willow trees, dancing with women from town, drowning in wild youth, drunk and free.

Yet not entirely free. Never free of the guilt for having left a lover because she was sick.

At the word lover Moxie felt a familiar tugging on his heart.

Was it possible he had never fallen out of love with Carol? Could a man sustain such a feeling, twenty years since seeing her?

Harrows was also the name of the place where Carol got married to a man named Dwight Evers, and long ago this news tore holes in Moxie’s soul. For a long time Moxie believed he was past all this, had grown bigger than these memories. But now that they had returned, it was clear they’d always been close.

He spit in the dirt, barely missing his boot and the body of the mare. Of course Harrows was the farthest town on the Trail; all things Carol, for him, were as trying, as cumbersome, as out of reach.

Twenty years…

Had it really been over two decades since last he saw her? And could she, as she was now, replace the vision he’d held for all those years? Looking into the dark shadows of the Trail, Moxie didn’t believe she could. Carol would always come cleaner than he, younger than he, smarter than he, and better. Carol, whether or not she had grown bitter, could never shake the perfect temperament his memory afforded her. What was she like now? Free? Happy? Anxious? These were not romantic notions, but rather the refined and whittled forms of once true, literal images, forms reshaped from years of the guilt-squeeze, the scalpel of regret, as it came again and again from a distance Moxie could never quite locate. Every line in Carol’s face, every fold in a skirt she once wore, even the dust at the tip of her boots—any and all of it were the rendering of this guilt, this good-promise destroyed, by him, two decades past, before his name was known on the Trail, before he assumed the life of the outlaw for having broken his own inner codes, the laws within, without the knowledge of course of how to fix them.

Moxie was only half a mile outside of Mackatoon, and already the sunless borders were shifting in the spectral darkness of the Trail. At all points wide enough to allow a carriage passage, and at many points two, the solid earth of the Trail reached sudden walls of heavy vegetation, the towers of plant life, the very greens that brought so much claustrophobia to those who rode. Today, for all the memories these walls stirred and for all the movement within the shadows, the Trail was certainly quiet. Moxie wondered if it had always been so, the early hours, the sun not yet high enough to expose all that traveled, crawled, or pulled itself along the packed earth and dry mud, in those rare places where the sun bore down in full. Perhaps, this time, this journey, he was finally seeing it for what it was.

He thought of all the men who once wanted to ride with him, long ago, having heard of his Trick at Abberstown.

He felt the false glory of that now.

The mare was steady, breathing hard but breathing well. Moxie looked ahead, where the black borders seemed to meet, to close up, to swallow.

It was on this stretch that Moxie and Jefferson raced drunk on horseback, each fueled by individual bad moods, trying to beat them, trying to feel good again. Reborn! Jefferson kept calling. Reborn! Moxie recalled closing his eyes, the horse then leading him blind as dirt pelted the skin of his face. The hooves were thunder that day but an actual storm enveloped the Trail by night, and he and Jefferson were small dry islands beneath an oak under the inevitable black wave of rain.

Reborn!

The false freedom of the Trail. The impossibility of living a life with no rules.

It hurt, these memories, seeing it all, himself, so clearly now. Who had he fooled?

Certainly not Carol.

The guilt was and always had been tremendous.

Something big moved in the brush to Moxie’s right, and the old outlaw did not make a sudden move. He looked slowly from under the tan brim of his hat. It’d been a long time since Moxie had to distinguish between animal and man, but he would never unlearn the lesson of the Trail.