Unbury Carol(22)

A man, he thought. An outlaw.

A deer materialized in the graying shadows. Had he no feel for this place anymore?

This stretch of Trail was the very length he came south down, nine years ago, heading for Mackatoon, done with the Trail at last. Mackatoon was hardly more than a name to him then, a peaceful place, far enough from the towns that called him legend. He was thirty years old then, had years then, years he would tend to his garden, his library of books, and the better side of three aging horses in an uneasy but deserved solitude. And yet…was any of it deserved?

Carol, he suddenly thought.

And the town of Harrows felt very far away.

The few words delivered in Farrah Darrow’s telegram were enough to suggest volumes of memory in great detail, a floating diary of heart-pounding episodes. His mind was with Carol, but Carol was only the start, the spark that flamed the years to follow: his years alone, breathing the air of the Trail he no longer wanted to be famous on. It was enough to puncture his spirit, enough to drive Moxie a little mad, with memory, with morality, with whether or not the years had been wasted. He’d made a name here, the letters of that name constituting as much a myth as any to have raised hell’s heaven through these woods, these waters, this dirt. It was enough to confuse him, too, to mock him, to arouse in him warring conclusions.

The Trail did this to troubled men. Tangled them like unseen strings on a magician’s stage.

Two days of riding could kill him.

Movement from the brush to his left. Moxie turned slow.

Moxie had heard more than his share of Trail myths, yarns rolled down steep hillsides, unraveling until they shape-shifted from fiction to fact. Chilling tales that lent the long, winding, and often isolated path a shade of something darker. A color deeper than midnight blue, more blinding than black.

Some rumors were worse, Moxie thought, than robbery, rape, and murder.

These stories dressed the Trail in a cloak, gave it claws. These stories gave the Trail its horror.

For who that rode so far from reason could deny the possibility of hysteria?

Movement again. Moxie eyed it.

There was a man in the brush. Standing. Facing the Trail.

Moxie slowed the horse.

He placed his right hand on his right holster. It wasn’t uncommon for strangers to draw guns without a warning on the Trail. Moxie had done it himself many times. Nobody walked the Trail alone with good intentions, and a man half hidden by the branches of a hackleberry tree certainly was hiding.

Drawing first was wise, and the dance that followed was often an ugly one.

Draw, Jefferson used to say. Before you even know they’re there.

But Moxie did not draw.

And as he passed it, the shape in the shadows became only the bulging of a tree’s trunk, as if the tree itself were trying to fool him.

Moxie nudged the mare along. The fabled outlaw, famous for his duel in Abberstown, continued.

Not a man, Moxie thought.

And yet…behind him now…the shape laughed. A sound Moxie could not hear.

As the mare entered deeper shadows still, the shape emerged from the tree trunk and followed. The shadows came with it, as if flowing from the figure, a cloak, an afterimage, a blackened second being. The figure had features, details buried in the body of its silhouette, but these were no more than gradations of black…lips only a bat could see…unseen wrinkles in a face that rippled without wind.

It laughed again, a subtle ripple in the leaves of the birch, a wave in the bark, too. The borders of the Trail shook with it.

Moxie noticed and so did the mare.

“You saw me,” the shape whispered. “Perhaps you recognized me, too. We once cheered whiskey in Portsoothe. How long till you admit you know me? Not long.”

Moxie, sensing a whisper on the wind, pulled gently on the reins, cocked his head to one side.

“You carry me all the way to Harrows,” Moxie told the mare, “and I’ll let you sleep in the house.”

There existed maps that declared the boundaries of these woods. Maps in the souvenir shops, the welcome posts, on the very wall behind which Sheriff Opal of Harrows sat back in his chair and thought nothing of James Moxie or Carol Evers at all, not yet. Yellowed paper maps like a monocle on the black beady eye of a bird, a photo, a moment, a view. But there was no accounting for the scope of experiencing the Trail firsthand. The Trail, it seemed, was bigger in person than it was on paper. The legends were off. The space immeasurable.

And within that space…trickery.

More laughter now, a sliver of it heard, a piece, the unfolding of a triangular corner of a memory.

Moxie rode steady, quiet, listening. His red shirt a nosebleed on the dark lips of the Trail.

A definitive path of sunlight appeared as the trees overhead parted at last. No longer early morning, day was nearly at hand.

Moxie recalled a night at a tavern in Portsoothe twenty years past, seated at a wet wood bar, a stranger suddenly beside him.

It’s love, Moxie drunkenly declared that night, speaking to the stranger with no introduction. But it’s more…too much more…

The stranger was somehow featureless. Moxie attributed this to the whiskey.

Leave her then.

A voice sharp as the barber’s blade. The meaning even sharper.

Moxie, then, in love for the first time, turned to the man he couldn’t place, could not entirely define.

Leave her? What do you mean by that?