Abandon

THIRTY-TWO

W

hen Oatha Wallace arrived, Ezekiel was leaning back on a small shelf in the rock. He’d pulled off his fleece-lined gloves and unbuttoned his slicker and sack coat and vest, unclipped his suspenders, torn open the muslin shirt.

“Where’s his rifle?”

“Somewhere i-i-in the snow yonder.”

“He ain’t got a sleeve gun, do he?”

“Naw, I checked.”

Oatha stared at Ezekiel. “He’s gut-shot.”

“I-I-I-I tried to shoot him in the head, but—”

“Naw, that’s fine, Billy. His horns is clipped. Lead ball from a Walker in the bread wallet. Helluva thing. Caught a case a the slow, didn’t you, old buscadero?”

Ezekiel watched the steaming black blood leak through his fingers as he tried to put back the gray tube of gut that kept pushing out. He could feel blood running down his legs and into his boots. Some had streamed down the rock and melted a burgundy hole in the snow. He looked up at Oatha, at the boy who’d set him on his sunset trail, and when he spoke, his voice came broken and strained by ragged exhalations. “Bushwhacking, huh? So that’s how you operate?”

“Whatever gets it done,” Oatha said.

“How much y’all come away with?”

“They’s sixty-nine bricks, twenty-two pounds apiece.”

“But you done the math.”

“Sure, I done it. Just over five hunerd thousand.”

Ezekiel nodded. “Maybe you can buy this boy a new gun. That Walker must be forty years old.”

Oatha grinned. “And some clothes, too.”

Billy blushed. Too poor to afford a greatcoat or a slicker, when he ventured out into winter conditions, his only recourse was to clothe himself in every ratty, moth-eaten garment he owned, so his ensemble comprised layer upon layer of old shirts, threadbare hand-me-down sack coats two de cades old, and a blue frock coat that had barely survived a house fire back in Tennessee, and still bore the black-fringed fire-eaten holes to prove it.

Ezekiel looked at Billy. “You’ve broke your wife’s heart, son.”

“Ain’t ye son. I want his Justins, Oatha. My feet are cold.”

“We’ll discuss the man’s plunder in a bit. You got even a jot a decency in you, boy?”

Ezekiel moaned, “Got-damn.”

“Hurt as bad as they say?” Oatha asked.

“They wasn’t buildin a high line.”

A dense cloud had blown over the pass and begun its rolling descent through the boulder field.

“You wanna go on and tell me, then?” Ezekiel said. “Don’t see what you got to lose now.”

“Tell you what?”

“I know my brother left Silverton with you back in the fall. He wired me before he left. I know it was you, Nathan, and two other men. Then you come into Abandon three weeks later all by yourself, sayin they decided not to go last minute.”

“And you called me a black liar.”

“And I stand by the claim. Christ.” Ezekiel winced.

Oatha tossed his double-barreled hammer shotgun to Billy, waded toward Ezekiel, and knelt before him in the snow.

“Nathan was your brother.”

“My little brother.”

“What the hell. Don’t matter much now, does it? I didn’t wanna ride with ’em, but they caught up to me on the trail to Abandon in early October.”

“It was four a you?”

“That’s right. Started snowin the second afternoon, and it didn’t stop for a week. We’d only packed provisions for three days a travel and we was hungry by the time the snow quit. Didn’t have no webs. Ten miles from anywhere. Six feet a powder on the ground. Imagine tryin to walk any considerable distance in this shit.

“We tried to hunt, but all the game had gone down to winter in the foothills. Never saw so much as a rabbit.

“We was camped at timberline in a stand a dead spruce, and come October’s end, we was starvin. One man run off. Horses died and froze. Circumstances was dire. The other men had the look a death about ’em already. I weren’t far behind. There was enough snow melted, we coulda walked out if we just had a little strength.

“One mornin, I took my shotgun, so weak, I could hardly stand. Ways out from camp, I fired it into a tree. Started yellin I’d shot a elk. They come a-runnin. Hootin. Hollerin.

“McClurg arrived first, and I shot him. Nathan realized what was happenin, what we had to do, but he didn’t want no part of it. I was left with no choice but to kill him.

“I didn’t cook your brother, though. McClurg was plumpest, least gant up. I roasted his ass. Had both sides. Got my strength up, stowed everthing in a old bear den, and broke camp next mornin. Walked into Abandon three days later.”

Billy stared at Oatha, mouth agape, broken teeth showing, looking more than a little mystified. “You et a man’s backside?”

“Weren’t no face-lickin Thanksgivin dinner. I was starvin, Billy. And this don’t concern you anyhow. Just thought the man deserved to know his brother’s fate.”

In the midst of a cloud, mist blowing past and a few stray flakes of snow, Ezekiel was overrun by a coldness that settled so deep inside him, he knew he’d never be rid of it. He was dying and he thought of Nathan dying, felt a strange connection to his brother in that moment, wondered if he’d felt this alone in that moment before Oatha murdered him.

Ezekiel’s respiration slowed. He tasted blood in his teeth, felt it trickling from the corner of his mouth. He had a terrible thirst, and he trembled with cold as he looked up at Oatha.

“Don’t stare at me that a way,” Oatha warned. “Like you’re lookin at some kind a damn deviant. You lost your brother. I lost all three a mine to the Federals at Malvern Hill. You didn’t have to sit there with Nathan, tellin him about home while he’s near cut in half, everthin pourin out of him. Sight like that gets stamped on your mind, you can fuckin forget about ever gettin shed of it.”

But Ezekiel had already descended back into the canyon, to his little cabin, to Gloria. He saw her in bed, felt her grief, and all the memories of Leadville and the boys and whatever selfish strain of freedom he’d associated with them and had tasted today wilted into the sham they were. His lips moved, her name on them, and he loved her more, needed her more than he ever had, thought of all the things he’d not said, wondered if she knew them anyway, then reckoned not, because he hadn’t known himself until this moment.

He heard a deep unsanded voice. Fought to make his eyes open.

When they did, the boulderfield and mist and men and snow had faded to gray, and a darkness whose identity he well knew had whittled down his periphery of vision, so his whole world seemed to blacken around the edges like a winter-killed rose.

Oatha was only inches from his face now, his eyes such a pale and clouded blue, some might have mistaken him for a blind man.

It took Ezekiel a moment to comprehend the words.

“That man Billy shot. He kilt?” Ezekiel could only nod, utterly stove up. “Who else knows about Bart?” The darkness was closing in. “Boy, you best find the strength to provide a answer.”

Just me and Doc.

“Just me and Doc,” he whispered, his lips barely moving.

“How’d you know to find us here? Billy’s wife? Bessie tell you?”

Tracks.

“Your tracks.”

“Yours and the doctor’s wife know about all this?” Ezekiel shook his head. “Yeah, that tastes of a lie.”

Gloria don’t know.

“Well, I can tell you we damn sure ain’t takin no chances on a couple a leaky-mouthed bitches, feedin off their range.”

Gloria don’t know a thing.

“H-h-h-he’s sayin somethin, Oatha.”

You let her be.

“Well, if he is, I can’t hear it.”

“I-I-I bet Gloria knows. No tellin who else she’s told.”

“We’ll kill ever man, woman, and child in Abandon if that’s what it comes to. You set to see this through, Billy?”

“Y-y-yes, Oatha.”

“You sure? Ain’t gonna try to crawfish out a this?”

“For a fact.”

“Better go on and curl this one up then so we can sail away.”

“M-M-M-Oatha, he’s almost dead any—”

“I don’t give a good goddamn how almost dead he is. I ain’t quittin this spot with that star-toter still above snakes. Savvy?”

Ezekiel heard his death sentence, felt a glimmer of relief, the pain beyond anything he’d known, like someone had thrown liquid silver in his guts. He watched Billy pour a sixty-grain powder charge into one of the Colt’s chambers, followed by a wad of paper. The boy used a small built-in ramrod to seat a lead ball.

Ezekiel spent his last thought not on the horror of what might happen to Gloria, or his own inconceivable pain, or all the things he would not ever see or smell or taste again. He spent his last thought on his boy.

The sound of Gus’s laugh.

What it had felt like to cradle him.

The nape of his neck.

With the bore charged, Billy set about fitting a brass cap to the nipple in back of the cylinder.

You was the best thing. You and your mama, and I wished I’d knowed that when I coulda done somethin to preserve it.

Billy waded up to the rock where Ezekiel lay dying, leveled the nine-inch barrel between the man’s eyes. Ezekiel barely heard the hammer thumb back, because the possibility of heaven had dawned on him, and he was thinking how sweet and unexpected a surprise it would be to arrive there after all this, see Gus, sneak up on his boy, tickle his ribs, throw him in the air. And that laugh . . . Please, God, let me hear Gus laugh again if You’re real and have any regard—