Abandon

THIRTY

T

hey followed the burro trail up the slope, snow clinging to their slickers and greatcoats and hats and the horses and rigs and rifle butt plates and every other conceivable surface, until they resembled a trio of ghosts conjured up out of the snow.

Ezekiel rode point, holding his saddle horn, head lowered to the storm. The other men didn’t see it, but he smiled, even more immersed in the moment than when he’d emerged onto the roof of Emerald House several hours prior and witnessed the slaughter that had occurred there.

This last year, he’d existed in a state of numbness so complete, it felt like living death. In bed with Gloria, it would often be well past midnight, occasionally dawn, before he drifted into sleep, so intense were the memories of those exuberant, passionate, bloody Leadville years, his mind blazing back at full bore, trying to unblur the faces, invoke the familiar voices, and tears coming when he did, because they brought with them the fleeting sensation of freedom and his old swagger and the limitless potential every morning had once afforded him. He’d never lain in bed in Leadville, obsessing on the past. It had all been vivid rushing present. Fuck even the future.

One night, he’d recall a week spent specking with the boys near Crested Butte. Another, the rowdy drunken revelry of a Fourth of July celebration. Then he’d imagine himself sitting at a corner table in some bucket of blood, three in the morning, brimming with whiskey as the calico queens hung on his shoulders, watching the paling demeanors of his opponents on the final hand, when he pushed forward his pair of nickel-plated Smith & Wesson revolvers with their mother-of-pearl grips, upping the pot for the flush he held.

Sometimes, he’d just lie there retrieving faces—whores he’d felt tender toward, men he’d fought, men he’d loved, killed, buried—savoring them all, every face, repressed scent, lost sound, with a sweet and piercing nostalgia.

Gus, especially Gus, kept him up nights, Ezekiel’s lips moving in the dark as he spoke for them both—father-son conversations of God and love, guns and horses. Once Gloria had woken, asked, “Who you talking to, baby?” And he’d lied, told her he must’ve been whispering in his sleep. He loved his wife beyond words, but Gus, only Gus, had filled that vacancy, destroyed the angry, restless boredom left in the wake of his outlaw days.

But this Christmas, with his head bowed as the sky hemorrhaged snow, his mind blissfully attended to the present, to keeping his horse on the mountain, to listening for slides over the sounds of wind and snow pelting the leather of his hat, and how his feet had grown cold in the calfskin-lined cowhide boots, and what it would feel like to draw a bead on Oatha and Billy, see what they’d stolen from Bart.

Ezekiel was as happy as he’d been in years.

He felt like the true translation of himself again.

An hour into the climb, they stopped to let the horses blow.

“How close you reckon we are?” Russell asked.

Ezekiel shook his head. He had no way of knowing for certain, since after thirty yards in either direction, the trail disappeared into mist. They pushed on again, the horses panting and snorting, pausing every few steps.

Then the slope began to level out. Ezekiel found that he didn’t have to lean forward as much and the horses quickened their gait.

He finally halted his gelding, and the others came up beside him on his left, the Doc and the preacher still engrossed in the discussion they’d been having for the last four hundred vertical feet.

“I’m not saying you sull around, but you do strike me as a melancholic these days,” Russell said. “Are you daunsy?”

“I’d not deny it.”

“You sleeping peacefully?”

“Not often. My mind tends to race in the silence and I don’t know how to shut it off. I have these terrible headaches.”

Ezekiel studied the distance. His back ached. The burro tracks continued on as far as he could see, which wasn’t far in the blizzard. He suspected the pass lay just ahead.

“Do you ever experience desperate thoughts?” the doctor asked.

“Desperate? You mean like ending myself prematurely?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“It’s a grave sin, Russ.”

“I’m aware. Don’t mean it ain’t afflicting you.”

“I have, on occasion, considered it.”

“Recently?”

“Last night.”

At this elevation, no trees could thrive, but glancing up ahead, Ezekiel discerned a badlands—vague profiles of rock formations and a small boulder field, drenched in snow and looming like a herd of Gothic monoliths. He turned to his compatriots. Their conversation embarrassed him, a subject he felt uncomfortable being made privy to, though that wasn’t his reason for interrupting. It was merely to advise the Doc to slide his Big Fifty out of the rifle scabbard and keep on the eye in case they were dry-gulched.

Russell said, “You should come by my office, Stephen, let me examine you. Your gums have a blue tinge. Absent a full evaluation, I can’t say for sure, but it could be lead—”

“Doc, I’m sorry to break up your conversation, but—”

The ball made a loud crunch as it entered Russell Ilg’s head through his left eye, taking a large shard of his skull with it on the way out. Then came the thunderous boom that Ezekiel recognized as a big-bore six-gun. The lead ball had knocked Russell from the horse, but his stovepipe boots had caught up in the stirrups, so that he hung upside down, the contents of his skull dropping into the snow as his horse dragged him back down the slope.

Ezekiel dismounted. The snow rose to his waist. He grabbed the Winchester, yelled at Stephen as another report spooked the horses.

“Get off a there, man! You wanna get kilt?”

But the preacher sat stone-faced and frozen in the saddle, staring through falling snow at the two figures darting through the boulder field.

Ezekiel pulled Stephen’s boots out of the stirrups and knocked him off his mount into the snow. “Get back down the slope and stay hid. Take Doc’s rifle if you want and keep your head down.”

A shotgun blasted, and Ezekiel’s horse boiled over, neighing and rearing up on its hindquarters before collapsing.

He crouched in the snow, eyes peeking over the surface as the preacher crawled away, weeping.

Ezekiel scrambled from his dying horse.

After thirty feet, he stopped, gulped down several lungfuls of thin air. He cocked the lever of the carbine, sat up, sighted a rock outcropping forty yards upslope that he suddenly realized was the pass, torn white ribbons of cloud streaming over it, driving the snow sideways, making it impossible to see anything distinctly.

A lead ball zinged past his right ear.

He swung his rifle around, sighted the left edge of a small boulder fifty yards away, and pulled the trigger on a vaquero hat that had peered around the corner.

It disappeared and he cocked the carbine again and clambered to his feet, now fighting toward the boulder field through chest-high drifts, smiling and swelling with all the murderous joy of a boy playing war.