Unbury Carol(41)

Rinaldo belched. “I might have saved his life. One could say.”

“You might’ve. You just might’ve.”

Then flat silence between them. Rinaldo breathed heavy with booze. Smoke sat still as a spider.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir,” Rinaldo said. “I’ve drunk more than my share celebrating and I need to step outside.”

In the glass behind the bar, Smoke watched Rinaldo exit the saloon.

Giving Rinaldo enough time to enter the outhouse, Smoke rose and limped, navigating the web of Griggsville drunkards. Outside, the moon seemed to outline his body, trace the contours, stopping where the stubs of his knees met the cloth at the top of his tin-shins.

A drunkard in the shadows thought Smoke might be the angel of death, floating toward Rinaldo in the outhouse.

“Everybody’s gotta use the shitter,” he called. “Everybody’s gotta go.”

The black sky seemed to extend from Smoke’s very mind. Anger wide enough to dome the Trail.

“It’s a nasty shame to go this way,” he called, not worried about witnesses. He’d burn them, too.

For as slowly as he moved, Smoke acted fast. He took hold of a wood board from a pile beside the outhouse and jammed it hard under the black handle.

He slipped his pointer fingers into the string loops in his pockets.

Draw.

A magic all Smoke’s own.

He felt the string pull along his thighs, heard the soft click of his boot heels opening.

The oil came next.

No windows on the box, the door secured, there was no exit for Rinaldo.

Smoke sang.

    Oh, it’s a pity it’s a patter it’s a pitter!

To lose thy life on the shitter!

Oh, it’s a queer it’s a quail it’s a quitter!

Who falls down dead on the shitter!



The tavern’s back door opened and a man stumbled out and Smoke turned to him and the man saw him and stumbled back inside.

Smoke pulled a matchbook from the chest pocket of his shirt. A flame quickly came to life between his dirty fingers.

He limped to the door, a silhouette on half stilts, and pressed his forehead against the wood.

“You think it smells bad in there now, hog-sucker? Just wait. You’re gonna be your own legend after this one. Just like your man. A hog-blessed legend of the Trail.”

He pushed off from the door. He dropped the match.

The outhouse went up fast.

Smoke did not wait to watch it ash. But he watched for as long as he could. Knowing that sometimes the pride one takes in one’s work is better for the job than any pace or progress can ever be.

Halfway through the burning Smoke limped toward the saloon, his horse, and the outlaw who now knew he was not alone on the Trail.





Night of the first day had come. Moxie knew he was exactly half the distance to Harrows. He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t want to have to stop but the horse was breathing heavy and Moxie knew that, in the end, a rested horse would get him there faster.

The sky was already black, and the stars were uncountable. The pines had gone from green to gray, and now even their tops were difficult to see. Many years had passed since Moxie last watched the sun go down so slowly, in this way, the gradation in step with his travel north, the Trail turned black. The horse moved slowly during the summer sun’s descent and when Moxie saw the first vestige of illumination ahead, moonlight at last, he felt relief, the rest somehow indicating that the ride tomorrow had already begun.

He jerked the reins, and the mare pulled up lethargic. Moxie dismounted, untied the bedding, and laid out a blanket for himself. He walked the horse to a solid pine near the blanket’s edge and soothed her, rubbing her mane. There was still plenty of water and feed. After caring for her, he set to finding himself some wood.

In the dark, he thought. Carol, a day closer now, felt infinitely far. The reality of her was something from his youth; riding to her was something like riding to the breakfast table he shared with his mother and father as a child. Gathering wood in the dark, Moxie questioned what he was truly doing.

Can a man set right his past?

With these questions came the possible futility of the ride and the hopelessness of absolution.

The guilt was unbearable.

With an armful of sticks and smaller logs, he stomped through the dark back to camp. He made a small fire near the blanket, and the horse stood silent. It was a good fire and it felt good and Moxie hadn’t realized how cold he had gotten until he was sitting, warming his hands. He studied the mare, the way the flames altered her features, changing her eyes from white to black and back again. The way she looked into the darkness beyond the fire.

Moxie thought of Carol. Carol on her back, arms folded, sleeping. Decades ago, Moxie was plagued with nightmares that resembled these thoughts. Horrible visions of her death recurring: Carol, young, floating in the bathtub, her skin pruned by the time he found her, her body bloated, waterlogged, stiff. In those days he worried about leaving her for even an hour, lest he return to find she had collapsed into a fire like this one. But the worst was the dream in which Carol was already buried…muffled screams from the earth…the scratching of her nails against the wood…her grave-bell echoing through the graveyard. Moxie would rush in these dreams, breaking apart the dirt with his hands, an unfair race with the oxygen left in her box. Even now, looking into the fire, he could hear her voice, pleading, getting weaker as he dug three feet, six feet, nine feet, twenty feet…until the sun was blocked by the height of the grave and the sky was a pale-blue square at the end of a tunnel going up…up…a square from which insane laughter escaped…a tiny impossible place to be…Carol’s salvation out of reach…out of air…