Unbury Carol(43)

Moxie fingered the pistol in his right holster.

“You were wrong, Doctor.”

The doctor stepped forward, his face changing again, a ram’s head upon his shoulders.

“You will suffer like her if you continue to ride!”

Moxie drew his gun and fired. Through the smoke of the shot the doctor appeared, whole, himself again.

“You see,” the doctor said. “You’ve made me mad.”

The breathing from the other side of the fire became wind and the doctor blew apart, his pieces floating as the embers had moments ago.

Moxie turned to face the thing from the tavern in Portsoothe. The impossibility whose face was not fixed.

“Please, sit.”

“I’ll stand.”

“You’ll sit.”

Against his will, Moxie fell to the dirt.

“I will tell you this once more, James Moxie. Turn back now. Go home. Blood no longer flows through the veins of the woman. You ride for a corpse, James Moxie. There is no meaning in your journey, there is no journey. You cannot rid yourself of the guilt for having left her once, for having turned your back on her then. All you can do now is repeat your choices, reenact the spineless steps of your youth. Do you remember them? Here…I have given you the footprints to follow.” Moxie saw fresh prints appear in the dirt by the fire. “Your boots have not changed since then. You will recognize the shape of your own steps walking away from the very thing you rush to now. Here…I have given you the same weather.” Moxie shuddered as the wind turned to ice. “The same air that coddled a mind that once decided wisely. Do you sense it? Can you feel the same day upon you? Your face has changed, but the bones beneath it have not. Here…I give you the same food in your belly. Do you feel it? Yes. I can see you do. Nothing has changed, but the skin upon your body is slack. Nothing has changed, but the color in your eyes has gone gray. Here…I give you the footprints, the air, the food, and the sounds, too. Do you hear? Can you hear her sobbing for your exit?”

Shivering, Moxie felt the sudden food in his belly, and as he shook his head no, the water in his eyes began to freeze.

“Can you hear the woman weeping for the man who turned his back once and will do so again? The thing you try to change is not the noble thing you think it is. The thing you seek is immovable, unchangeable, dead. Guilt cannot be overcome, only endured. Turn back now and you will make worthy your decision then, for it will still be true. The woman is dead. Do you see the path? Do you see the prints? Yes…you know the steps well. I imagine they look different from the ones you remember…the ones that replay in your sleepless slumber. They look different from the ones you try to avoid when you walk the dirt roads of your memory. They look different not because they are, but because you remember them wrong. You remember them as smaller than they were…someone else’s steps…the decision of a younger man. But that younger man is you and these are your prints. You have altered them to fit the bottom of boots you can live with…a size you no longer recognize…someone else’s choice. Here…I give you the boots…try them on…tell me they do not fit. They do…James Moxie…they do…”

The fire rose higher than the trees, melting the ice in the sky.

Moxie saw old boots in the flames. Red boots, wet with snow.

“The only choice you have,” Rot said, “is to convince yourself there was never anything to feel guilty for to begin with.”

Moxie, still on his back, looked to the prints in the dirt by the fire’s edge and felt too much of everything. All of it at once. His bones ached. His body was bloated. The voice continued, twisting his mind in braids.

But Moxie rose to his knees. Rot laughed: black wings taking flight, the rhythm of hammers driving nails into a casket. Moxie tried but could not stand. Rot laughed and the cachinnation dug into Moxie’s ears as the worms would soon dig into Carol’s.

Soon.

Soon.

Soon.

On his knees beside the fire, Moxie believed he was going to die. His day’s ride was a journey to death, to die alone, here in these Trail woods. With Carol, she of so many deaths, on his mind.

He closed his eyes and he cried. And when he opened them again the feeling was gone. His body was not bloated. He did not shiver from cold.

Slowly, Moxie rose and looked through the flames and saw no one was there. The shape, the thing, Rot was gone.

He stepped cautiously around the fire, guns drawn, and saw only sticks, no trace of the fiend, the voice that exhumed his mistakes, the words that burned bold in his brain.

But the prints of his past remained.

Moxie eased himself carefully down to the ground and lay back on the blanket, still gripping both guns, his eyes fixed on the stars. His body hurt from riding. His body hurt from the guilt.

He lay this way a long time, thinking of Carol, ignoring every cracked stick in the dark wood, every fallen leaf on this side of the Trail. He thought of Carol and of the black-haired, green-eyed girl Molly, too…as she beckoned him…asked him to come…come on…come meet my friend Carol…Molly’s gesture as innocent then as it was today in the glass of a barbershop in Baker…come meet my friend Carol…you’re going to love her…my friend…you’re going to love…

Carol





Memories more like nightmares and dreams like true visions, scattered, fallen from a shelf, out of order, or maybe proof that the order never mattered to begin with…