Unbury Carol(34)

The few words on the paper dug fast. Little knives. Big wounds.

His first inclination was to race back to the post office and tell them there had been a mistake. It was impossible these were the words he’d played a part in sending.


James Moxie STOP Mackatoon STOP On his way to Harrows STOP Send the Cripple STOP Urgent



There in the road the sun felt uncomfortably hot. He sweat as though under the stage lights of a magic show of his own.

One in which he had failed to fool anybody.

Now, in the shed, reclining in a cloud of smoke, Rinaldo leaned forward and stuck his short arms into the box of tricks on the chest at his bare feet. He removed a pack of cards and shuffled them, laying some out upon the dirt.

He cried.

“Pick any card in the deck!” Rinaldo said, loud, to the empty shed. “Any card in the deck and I’ll show you which card you have chosen.” Then he removed a card and looked at it. “Don’t tell me what it is, though I must admit that it doesn’t matter for this trick whether or not I know what it is.” The word trick made him ill and Rinaldo looked about the shed, suddenly feeling cold, strange, and very alone. “Now slide it back into the deck and I’ll show you which it was!” But there was no thrill, no sleight of hand deft enough to conceal the ugliness he felt.

The guilt.

He slid the card back in the deck.

He exhaled until he felt empty of air.

Rinaldo, so long a stranger to guilt, set the cards back in the box and blew out the candle.

He exited the shed, tiptoed quickly across the sunny yard, and entered his home by the back door.

Passing his son and daughter’s bedroom he stopped, thinking he would slip inside and tell them hello. Perhaps their warmth would make him feel better.


James Moxie STOP Mackatoon STOP On his way to Harrows STOP Send the Cripple STOP Urgent



But in the hallways of his home, his hand upon the children’s bedroom door, he thought he knew who the Cripple was.

He thought of a hatless man on stilts. Tin legs. A limping cowboy. The cruelest man Rinaldo had ever encountered on the Trail.

Smoke.

As if by opening the door he would be exposing his children to this madman, Rinaldo went instead to the master bedroom, where Liliana still slept.

He knelt beside the bed.

“I did something terrible today, Liliana!”

He shook her.

At first she did not stir, and Rinaldo saw that man again, as if he had already been here, to Rinaldo’s very home, had already stolen the life from Liliana.

“Liliana!”

His wife shot up in bed. Eyes wide.

“What? What is it, Rinaldo?”

“I killed James Moxie!”

Rinaldo couldn’t see his wife well but heard her grunt and knew she had rolled her eyes.

“You smoke too much, Rinaldo! You smoke too much!”





Holding the razor to the hatless man’s neck, Quint couldn’t quit thinking about his client’s legs. There was something too fitting about it. Like all Quint had to do was move quick and then the crazy-talking man (a triggerman, possibly) would be symmetrical. No legs and no head. And if the man thought he was fooling anyone by covering them with his pants, he was surely mistaken. Quint had a peg leg of his own. But even he marveled at the fact that this man must have two.

“I heard word that the magic man was in town a bit earlier,” Smoke suddenly said, pivoting from the subject he was on quickly. The heavyset barber hardly heard it happen. Quint’s partner, the thinner Franklin, was busy washing hair in the back tub.

“And who would that be?” Quint asked, setting the razor on the counter and picking up the scissors again. The limper had asked for “only a little bit” and Quint wondered if that was because he had “only a little bit” of money. Hard to tell these days.

Smoke smiled. In the glass, the smile looked genuine.

“An outlaw,” Smoke said. “Heard he was in this very place of business.”

Quint frowned. Began cutting.

“Just a little bit,” Smoke said. His eyes were fixed on Quint’s in the glass.

“I don’t know of any magic man coming in here,” he said. Then he called out to his partner. “Franklin! You know of any magic outlaw who came in here earlier today?”

“Magic outlaw?” Franklin repeated. Smoke watched him in the glass, too. Saw the way he stroked his chin with one hand. Thinking. “You mean James Moxie?”

Smoke turned his head to face Franklin, and Quint cut off more than he’d meant to.

“I’m sorry, mister—”

But Smoke didn’t care about the hair.

“That’s him all right. Heard it on Nero Street a moment ago. Someone said James Moxie himself had been here in Baker. Here in this shop.”

Observing him in the glass, Quint felt suddenly uneasy at the sight of him. Surely this limper was a triggerman. And yet…no guns.

“Quint?” Franklin asked. “You think that…was him?”

Smoke’s eyes traveled from one bald barber to the other.

Quint considered.

“I don’t think so, Franklin. That man was in a huff.”

“A huff, you say?” Smoke asked. “What was he huffing about, then?”

“Started shoutin’ at a customer,” Franklin said. “Damn near scared the hog-piss out of him.”