Unbury Carol(69)

I weren’t in the huddle when the men chose sides but I can only guess Moxie asked for the side with the sun in his eyes. Much later he’d tell me it was ’cause it was the only side he could ask for and expect to get it. A third party informed the crowd that since the men would be shooting o’er a hole in the earth, there would be no pacing. My heart nearly failed me when they took their places, Prouds on the near side and Moxie on the far with, yes, the sun in his eyes. The well-dressed pig-shitter’s back was to me and his suit looked blood purple in the sunlight. Moxie knelt to the dirt and it appeared that he cleared a stone from under his boot and when he came up his face was lit up strong by the sky. I felt sorry his last expression would be so witnessed.

But I had something akin to hope. Maybe just the H of it.

Anybody could see by their stances that Prouds had done it before. And Jimmy looked like a child, a young fool about to spread a lady’s legs for the first time. Prouds was stiff as stone.

The moderator stepped to the center edge of the pipe hole. He looked from Moxie to Prouds and announced that all was ready. Both men held their hands at their sides, fingers out, slightly bent forward. Jimmy’s hands looked too far from his holster.

I made to say something, to scream it, but the moderator’s arm was in the air and he called it

Draw

before I said it.

Prouds moved snakelike but Moxie only made a fist.

There was a shot, a single shot so loud that me and everybody else winced and when I opened my eyes I saw Prouds stumbling…his guns still resting useless in his belt…his hands at his chest, red blood spilling out and over his fingers. He turned for a moment, still wobbling, and I got one good look at his face, his eyes like rolling marbles, before he fell forward at last, and fell into the hole at his feet.

The crowd was startled silent. To a man, and that includes me, everybody turned their heads to Jimmy who stood there breathing heavy and rocking lightly on the heels of his boots. The moderator didn’t know what to say. Nobody did. Jimmy’d performed some kind of magic. Already a rumor’d spread that Jimmy’s hand was so fast it was like he hadn’t drawn at all. It was the only way to relate to what they’d seen. When they replayed the memory and talked to others who did the same, the idea that Moxie actually didn’t draw was galvanized by the power of communal witness. And once they refused the idea of his hand being like lightning, it only left magic as an explanation.

The right one, it seemed.

Suddenly people were talking a lot and I seen the moderator step toward Moxie and I ran out there to be sure Jimmy weren’t going to jail, but when I got there the man was only shaking his head, looking at the hand that didn’t draw, looking at the cold gun in the holster, and no doubt trying to reconcile it with Prouds’s chest exploding deep red all over the pipe. Jimmy didn’t say a word. I’d never seen him as cold as I saw him in that moment. ‘What you say we skip town?’ I asked him. ‘You got your books?’ he asked. ‘My books, Jimmy? Don’ you worry none about my books. Let’s us wipe the pig-shit from our boots and get the hell’s heaven out of Abberstown.’

Already I noted how people were treating him like a legend. Whatever they seen, they never seen it before. We left the witnesses gaping on the street. By nightfall all of Abberstown would know Moxie’s name. By week’s end most of the Trail.

And by the next time Jimmy and I took to the Trail, everybody in every city was talking about James Moxie and the magic he done sent into Daniel Prouds’s good suit.

On the ride out I asked Jimmy how he done it. He shook his head slowly side-to-side and it was the first time I seen him look himself since agreeing to the duel.

‘It wasn’t magic, Jefferson,’ he said.

‘I know it weren’t. So what was it?’

Jimmy asked me if I remembered the old man looking at my books out back, I said of course I did, he said, ‘Yeah, well…’

Here the words were already smudged to black by Smoke’s oil and flames.





Manders sat at his desk and frowned.

The diggers were complaining of a figure lurking about the grounds. Manders had just received a delivery he was happy for when the diggers came in and told him they’d seen a man in and out of the tree trunks bordering the cemetery. Lucas said he might have seen the man up in one of the trees. Manders said that sounded like they were seeing things. No, boss, Lucas said, someone’s been around. Manders reminded him it wouldn’t be the first time a prowler lurked and Lucas agreed.

But Hank was a bit more shaken. Said he’d heard something fuddling beneath the dirt he was digging for a Missus Winifred Jones’s casket. Hank said it got to where he stepped out of the hole he was digging, certain as he was that something was about to break free of the dirt. I thought it was worms at first, he told Manders, but it’d have to’ve been a hundred thousand worms to make the noise it made. Manders said it sounded like they were hearing things, too, but promised to have the grounds checked for groundhogs and prairie dogs later.

Even Norman was flustered. The unflappable makeup artist came to Manders after the diggers left and told him he’d heard someone talking in the basement. He was working on Missus Jones’s lips when he’d heard it. I don’t mean to bother you, Norm said, but I don’t much appreciate the diggers lurking about the basement while I’m workin’. Of course, Manders told him, you just get back to work and let me know if anyone comes bothering you again. When Norm left, the director wondered. Either his staff was going cuckoo or they had some variation of ghouls. Manders had been hit by ghouls before. No doubt every graveyard along the Trail had. There was nothing a director could do but hire two or three corpse-sitters to watch the grounds all night, and that just didn’t make fiscal sense what with the low rate at which something like that happened.