Unbury Carol(39)

Moxie would talk about Carol’s condition. Moxie would tell Sheriff Opal. Opal would tell Manders. Together they’d exhume Carol, check, find scratch marks inside the coffin, ask Dwight why he hadn’t mentioned her condition, surely he knew of it, didn’t he think it might apply?

Stepping to the bed, Dwight held an image of the two men, the outlaw and the triggerman, lost somewhere in the darkness of the Trail. Where was Smoke now? Where was Moxie? For all Dwight knew the Cripple was drinking his own blood on a riverbed, possibly facedown in pig-shit, full of holes. Maybe James Moxie was plunging a knife in Smoke’s back this minute as he, Dwight, sat on the edge of his large hard mattress.

It was foolishness, placing a thing of such importance in the hands of a risky stranger.

You’re trafficking in madmen now, Lafayette had said in their meeting. Dwight’s hands shook with the memory.

He pulled off his socks and tossed them onto the bearskin rug.

It was possible that Moxie was holding the Cripple’s head underwater now, an old rusty tub in some woeful hotel washroom. It wasn’t difficult for Dwight to imagine water splashing over the sides of that tub, the name of he who’d sent him already out of the triggerman’s mouth and into the mind of the outlaw.

…who would then come for you, Dwight ol’ boy…

Another flat reality of Lafayette’s. And Dwight knew the sow wasn’t exaggerating.

But did Smoke know who’d hired him? Had Dwight overlooked that aspect? Should he have told Lafayette to leave his, Dwight’s, name out of it?

And more important right now…could a crippled man defeat a legend like Moxie?

The chaos frightened him deeply.

Dwight was out of his element.

Way out.

Ninety-five percent of the couple’s money came from Carol and her family. The house, the company, the clothes: All were either bought by or initially funded by Carol’s side over the course of their seventeen-year marriage. That Hattie; always lurking, always present, long after her own death. Not only had Dwight never hired a man to murder before…he hadn’t paid for laundry in almost two decades.

Where was Smoke now? Right now?

Lafayette had assured him there was no question the Cripple had enough time to get to the outlaw. Yet these things had a way of happening, former lovers coming together, old love, people connected by the dust traces of a past bond, something to do with fate or the way things were and the way they still are.

Anxious, he got up off the bed and removed his pants. He blew out the candle on the small table where Carol used to set her handbag, her hat, her mirrors. The bedroom was now lit by a single candle on the other side of the bed, his side, and early moonlight slipped in through the open drapes. He crossed the room and peered outside, through the glass, to the front yard below.

Was Moxie out there, crouched in the shadows beneath the sill?

Dwight inched back from the glass. Maybe there was a gun pointed at him. A gun in the hand of a legend, a legend whose name struck fear into the hearts of heartless men and women like Lafayette. Dwight could feel it: the cold tunnel a bullet might pass before shattering the glass, shattering the bones of his ribs, splintering his bones against the green stone wall above the bed. He could smell it, he thought, the smoke rising from a hot gun…a gun that was always hot…a gun that was boiling the moment it was drawn. He could hear it, too. A click out there. The swoosh of the steel against the leather holster, the horse hoof clacking, and the explosion of a pure shot, all just before his skull cracked, a dropped soup bowl, his bones held twiglike together by baggy skin.

Dwight physically shuddered.

Where was James Moxie…right now?

Dwight got into bed, leaned across the mattress, and blew out the remaining candle. The bedroom went dark and he stared into the blackness beyond his feet. The moonlight did not reach that darkness. But it did touch some of the furniture along the window’s wall, distorting it, changing the chair into a crouched crippled man, the highboy into a legendary outlaw without remorse.

“He walked out on her twenty years ago,” Dwight spoke into the darkness. “Why would he come back now?”

The unfairness of it squeezed him.

A vision again of Smoke, his head in a trough, Moxie above him, soot-faced, howling, Who sent you? WHO SENT YOU?

But did Smoke know?

Dwight’s lack of knowledge of the ways of the Trail scared him deeply.

Soon the night birds called beyond the window glass. The frogs and grasshoppers followed.

Dwight lay on his back, his hair soft upon the pillow. He pulled the blanket up to his chest and closed his eyes.

Moxie’s telegram appeared like blood-red letters typed into the ceiling:





DO NOT BURY


NOT DEAD


ON MY WAY




The unseen threads of former lovers.

Dwight stared long enough for his eyes to get used to the dark; long enough to feel confident that the shape in the corner was Carol’s vanity, the shape beside that the door. Breathing heavy, he fell asleep…images of the crippled madman roving a featureless landscape outside all time and detail. And the outlaw, too…as Dwight dreamed…James Moxie was out there, too.





Smoke was sitting on a stool at the bar and Rinaldo came to him.

He’d beckoned the local from across the saloon, an exaggerated twirling of a finger, as though expressing that he, too, had an affinity for the magic outlaw Moxie. Rinaldo had been shouting about the Trick at Abberstown and, much more important, about how the “magician” had been in Griggsville this very afternoon.