Unbury Carol(66)

“You be about ready to die, Cripple! It’s coming now…”

Fresh pain gripped his back; pincers along the spine. When he rounded the schoolhouse, gun held high, he saw the Cripple was facing him.

The cockiness that graced the triggerman’s face was no longer there. In its stead was rage.

Jefferson was only twenty feet from him but Smoke didn’t move. Jefferson saw a second match come to life.

He watched it fall.

whump

BOOM!

Moxie’s old riding partner saw it coming but didn’t understand what it was. He hadn’t seen Smoke’s hands in his pockets when he rounded the house himself. He hadn’t seen when Smoke laid bare a path of oil thick enough to trap a horse.

The flames rose like a living wall and got to Jefferson before his debilitating back would let him get out of the way.

Smoke watched him burn.

Jefferson’s body contorted strangely as he fell to his knees. As if, in death, the old outlaw was more mobile after all. The flames rendered him like the blackened yard tools on the burnt grass. Smoke didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He watched.

When it was over, Smoke limped around the schoolhouse and kicked in the front door. Oil splashed against the open cut on his knee. He looked inside.

All he saw was books.

And all he saw was paper.

All he saw was a burn to be.

The hermit had shot him in the shin. The hermit was ashes on the grass.

“All you had to do was tell me!” Smoke screamed, knocking things from the table. “All you had to do was tell me what the old man stopped by for!”

Sweating, he turned around and saw the writings on the walls. He grabbed a mug from a counter.

“I’m gonna burn it all, hermit! Burn every pig-shitting word!”

Books…papers…pages…

Smoke burned it all. The hermit was dead and the outlaw was getting closer to Harrows but for one magnificent moment Smoke just needed to burn.

By the time he was done, the words on the walls had melted into unintelligible marks, symbols, nonsense. Black smudges like the writings of a blind madman.

And all the hermit had to do was tell him what the outlaw came for.

“Could’ve saved your life, pig-shitter.”

But all Smoke had to do was look up and he would’ve seen what gift Moxie had received.

Jefferson had just finished writing about Abberstown when Smoke knocked on the door…





…The people in West Franklinville don’t tell it right. The people in Juniper don’t tell it right. The people in Mackatoon don’t really know the truth about it and the ones who do don’t tell it right, neither. Some say James Moxie dropped six men with one shot. Others say he breathed fire. Even the ones who was there, the crowd that started all the talking in the first place, even they don’t get it right. ’Cause that’s how easy it is once a legend begins. Moxie done his thing with mayhaps two dozen watchers but a story like his travels quick. It’s got to, ’cause it done pop up so much in their memories that they gotta tell the nearest person or they’re liable to implode. What’s more interesting anyway? Men talk fishing. Men talk women. Men talk cards. But shudders aplenty if bearing witness to a magnificent move don’t trump them all.

Imagine yourself, sitting on a stool, drinking good beer, and the fella next to you starts off ’bout how his crop ain’t coming up like it ought to and how it’d sure be nice if some rain would drop and how fertile and wonderful his dirt usually is. And here you are, listening, but bubbling over with that story of your own; not so much wanting to beat his but wanting to hear something better than this and you know the scene you witnessed is just about as exciting as it gets. Why, after some time, you’d tell it. You’d have to. ’Cause in the landscape we all live in, the outlaw can be artist. The outlaw can be entertainment. Lest he be the black-soul kind that kills for sport, the outlaw is the man men can get together o’er.

The outlaw is the man made of stories.

Some people say it was a trick. I know Moxie would say the same himself but you can’t go on the word of the man who done it. I’ve heard people call it cheap and I’ve argued with those people. It’s not a fair fight, some say. No matter what he done. I ask them what was unfair about it? Some answer they don’t know and others say, Well, if magic were used and both men don’ know magic, then it ain’t a fair fight. I laugh and say, What if guns are used and one of the men don’ know how to use guns? The outlaw’s object isn’t always fairness. In fact, the outlaw’s object is usually whatever he came there to get. Frank Tilly robbed a bank in Bully by dressing up as the manager after noticing he looked an awful lot like the man. Some people say that’s not a fair fight. They say Tilly ought to’ve come in and held the place up and made the tellers put the coin in a bag and seen if he could outrun the law through the streets of Bully. As it stood, Tilly left at lunchtime through a back door, a sleeping sack loaded with coin. He was discovered in Harrows living like a prince. People don’t like that no chase was involved. People don’t like that no guns were drawn. But I say that’s as clean a pile of pig-shit as any I ever stepped in. Tilly used his brain. And hell’s heaven if his story ain’t a good one to tell.

Now, Moxie was something different altogether. Moxie’s story scared some. People don’t like magic when it’s black and nobody could figure out any other way to title what he done. I rode out of Abberstown with Moxie after he did it and it was the last ride he took as an anonymous. Next time we saw others after, people inched their way to ask him how he done it, and when Moxie turned to face them you saw fear fill their own. What if he does it to me, they were thinking. What if he drops me right now without drawing a gun?