Unbury Carol(82)

“Someone’s out there!” Kent screamed, and shot into the fire.

Lewis was beside him now, shooting, too.

The roof caught.

Garr dropped to his knees and dragged the box of gunpowder to the center of the shack. He covered it with his arms, his wild eyes scanning the corners where the walls met the floor.

“There’s someone out there!” Kent called again, trying to shy the flame from his face.

Kent was right. There was someone out there. Someone they once ran with. Someone they changed forever.

Smoke saw the faces of the men turn black with ash. Men who once stood above him as he woke in an alley, as rain crashed crazy to the earth and did not wash the blood from his severed legs but spread it wide instead: a growing pool of blood at his knees that flowed toward his shoulders with the slight sloping of the ground. Smoke couldn’t see them then, couldn’t see their faces, just four black ovals appearing and disappearing behind the thick columns of falling water.

Sorry we ’ad to cut you up, fella, Garr said then, the rusted ax still in hand. But coin is tight…and a four-way split is something better than a five.

Smoke didn’t yet know what they had done to him.

And I’ll tell you what else, Garr hissed. I never liked you none and you know it. Too unruly for your own good. Too loud. Men who have secrets don’t like loud.

Smoke couldn’t hear him or the others as they called out through the rain that night. He knew something terrible had happened to himself; something like being mangled now, deformed. Things had gone wrong. The world they ran in was ugly, angry, and smelled like pig-piss, and yet well within the lawlessness of that daily life, something had gone terribly wrong.

Smoke felt the blood pooling by his head then. He could smell it. Garr’s ax reflected the moonlight and Smoke’s hands went to his head first. He groped his chest, his waist, his groin, looking for the reason for that ax.

Try getting up, pig-shitter! Try getting up!

Smoke felt his thighs and knew it before he got to his knees.

Yes, things had gone wrong.

He looked about the alley, frantic. The rain fell chittering from the black sky.

I done warned thee, Garr called. I done told you I’d chop you up if you didn’t settle down.

Then Garr dropped to his knees and whispered close in Smoke’s ear.

Try getting up, pig-shitter. Try getting up.

Smoke saw them then, his lower legs, two yards from his body, beyond the boots of the others. The smell of horror and beer and Garr’s bestial odor overcame him and he vomited. It came up fast and hung on his chin and neck and the rain did not wash this away, either.

Garr hadn’t just severed his lower legs. He’d sliced him at the center of his knees.

Oh looky! Garr hollered, rising. The pig-shitter shit out his face!

Smoke heard their voices leaving him then, boots on wet earth fading, smothered by the volume of the rain. He saw the moonlight glisten once off the ax Garr carried.

Smoke, insane, screamed, My legs! Leave my legs! You can’t have my legs!

He passed out that way, with the mad idea that he just needed to reach his lower legs, if he could just get to them, then he’d be able to connect them, simple, back onto his body.

But when he woke, the reality of it woke with him.

If he was going to walk again, if he was going to catch the men who hurt him, Smoke was going to need new legs.

Now, standing at the head of a path of flames, he watched.

Vengeful. Motionless. Mad.

Soon the gunshots ceased.

James Moxie was gaining ground, but Smoke wasn’t thinking of the legendary outlaw at all.

I got better legs, boys. I got better.

He had.

When Smoke woke again, everything the same, the rain, the darkness, the blood, he started crawling for help.

Someone passed the entrance to the alley and looked inside. There he saw Smoke, dragging his partial body by his fingertips along the rocky wet earth, blood flowing from his knees like oil.

Smoke screamed for help. Black rainwater filled his mouth.

A doctor! I need a doctor! Take me to a doctor!

Now the memory of that doctor cauterizing his split knees was just one of a thousand crude paintings. None of them any good. But tonight some of those paintings, those nightmares, had life to them.

Art.

Smoke did not smile.

Smoke stood.

These legs were better legs indeed.

He watched as the lean-to lit up the early-evening sky. A crown of thick flaming hair, moon-orange snakes fighting over the scurrying rats beneath them. The right wall caved in first. An astonishing splintering of wood that did not echo but played out once, quick and flat. Howls for help erupted from within. Someone was still alive. Begging to be let out. But there was no getting out. The door was a perfect coffin of red raging arms. Smoke saw a figure inside, tearing at his own shirt, ripping off the buttons. Then the left wall fell, and with it the roof.

Smoke’s eyes watered.

It was magnificent. It was art.

He just hoped the pig-shitters didn’t pass out before burning.

Moxie Moxie Moxie mane…

He watched awhile longer but he had somewhere else to be. And he wasn’t interested in seeing their bones. Their bones meant the suffering was over.

He took with him the sight of Horace tearing at his shirt, his cheeks already blue with burn.

He limped to his horse, hitched to a tree on the Trail. Behind him he heard an explosion, a little something extra going up in the shack, and still Smoke did not smile. Rather, he recalled the four faces looking down at him in the alley. He recalled the blood. The stink. The fear.