Authors: Blake Crouch
“Yeah.”
“Well, goddamn you for that, Zeke.”
The wind had changed directions and the snow needled Gloria’s face. She turned her back to the barrage of ice. Ezekiel was saying something, but she couldn’t hear. She moved forward, their faces inches apart. She asked him what he’d said.
“Said he came halfway above my knee. Close your eyes, Glori, maybe you can see him. His hair was fine, color a rust, and his skin so white, we used to say it looked like milk. He had your eyes.” Ezekiel cleared his throat and
wiped his face again. “And when I . . . Jesus . . . when I kissed his neck, my mustache would tickle him and he’d laugh so hard, scream, ‘No, Papa!’ ”
Gloria had closed her eyes. “Keep going, Zeke.”
“And he called my knee his horsey, and he named it Benjamin.”
Ezekiel had stopped. Gloria opened her eyes. Her husband was shaking. He leaned forward into her cape and wept.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”
“Naw, it ain’t,” he said. “I lie in bed sometimes and try to picture what Gus would a looked like at ten or fifteen or thirty. I imagine him turned out a man. We was robbed, Glori. It ain’t never gonna be all right again.”
Ezekiel picked himself up and then lifted Gloria in his arms, both covered in snow. She bawled as Ezekiel carried her up the hill toward their dark cabin in the grove of spruce.
He’d have missed it, but the horses knew the way, making the turn just past the grouping of snow-loaded firs. They pulled the sled up a series of switchbacks and after awhile slowed to a walk, their legs punching through the snow, their nostrils flaring like bellows, Bart slapping the reins against their rumps, hollering, “Get up there! Go on, girls!” They climbed several hundred feet above the floor of the box canyon. The trail leveled out. “Now get on!” he yelled, and he worked the reins furiously until the horses trotted in the powder.
He wasn’t rushing them out of meanness or impatience. Nothing riled Bart like the mistreatment of horses, but they were approaching the most dangerous section of the ride home, where the trail passed through a gap between steep slopes that produced slides every winter. If caught in an avalanche tonight, he’d have almost no chance of survival.
When the sled had passed safely through the gap, Bart drew up the reins and brought the horses to a halt. He stepped down into the snow. It rose to his waist. He unfastened an ax from the side of the sleigh and waded over to a pool of ice the size of a wagon wheel. He hacked at the mouth of the spring, chipping away the ice until he could see water flowing down the rock. He let the horses blow. While they drank, he climbed into the sleigh and pulled a flask from a pocket of his wool overcoat, then leaned back, wrapped in the buffalo robe, sipping brandy, listening to the pair of horses slurp the icy water.
Maybe it was the alcohol, but he imagined his lips tingled from their contact
with Miss Hartman. He replayed the kiss. Why had he waited so long?
’Cause of your pride, man. Your fucking pride.
The horses lifted their heads and neighed. They backed away from the spring and stomped their hooves. Bart grabbed up the reins.
“What is it, girls?” His first thought was they’d sensed a slide. He peered up, listening for the rumble of snow raging down through the darkness above him, heard only the horses nervous ly clicking their teeth on the steel bits. He took a final swig of brandy, stuffed the flask into his coat, and had just lifted the reins to put his team into motion when one of the horses snorted.
Bart cocked his head, strained to listen. He heard the whoosh of animals struggling through deep snow. Two riders appeared twenty feet up the trail, their horses buried to their stomachs. It occurred to Bart that they resembled phantoms in the snow.
He blinked, half-expecting them to have vanished when his eyes opened, but they were still there, and close enough that he could see the clouds of vapor pluming from their horses’ nostrils.
“Evening!” Bart called out. There was no answer, and he thought maybe they hadn’t heard him, so he yelled, “Merry Christmas!” The rider on the left said something to his companion, and Bart heard the click of tongues. The riders came up on either side of the sleigh. They wore wide-brimmed hats topped with several inches of snow, had draped themselves in blankets and wrapped their faces in pieces of a torn muslin shirt, so that Bart could only see their eyes. Those belonging to the rider on his left exuded a cold focus. The other pair of eyes were wide and twitching with fear and nerves.
“Merry Christmas,” Bart said, more cheer in his voice than he felt, and wondered if he was facing a couple of road agents. “Hell of a storm. Ain’t on the prod. Just trying to get my ass to a fire—”
“I’d appreciate you shuttin that fuckin hole in your face.” The rider on the left had spoken, his voice low, metallic.
Bart said, “Sir, I’m sorry, I don’t understand what the problem—” The business end of a double-barreled scattergun peeked out from under the rider’s blanket. “You shoot that gun, sir, you’re liable to bring a slide down on us all.”
“Didn’t you hear what he said?” Bart looked at the rider on his right. He was smaller than his partner, much younger, barely a man, if that. But what struck Bart was his accent. Pure Tennessee.
“I don’t understand,” Bart said. “You work for me, son.”
The boy’s eyes darted to his companion, then back to Bart.
“N-n-n-n-not no more I don’t, Mr. Packer.” Bart saw the six-shot Colt patent revolver trembling in the boy’s hand, a huge sidearm, de cades old, a relic from before the war.
“Easy son,” Bart said, and though his intoxication had faded fast, he was
far from clearheaded. He thought for a half second that maybe he’d been caught in a slide and was lying packed in snow, suffocating, hallucinating this nightmare. “What in holy hell are you doing? I don’t under—” The other man put his horse forward and rammed the barrel of the shotgun into Bart’s face. Blood poured through his mustache, between his teeth, down his chin.
Bart pulled off a glove and cupped his hand over his nose.
“Goddamn you, it’s broke!”
“Now go on and drive the sled up to your mansion. We gonna follow behind. Don’t know if you got a shoulder scabbard, but I wouldn’t advise reachin into your coat for any reason. Rest assured I’ll err on the side a blowin your goddamn head off. Savvy?”
“What do you want? I’m a rich—”
“You remember what happened last time you opened that mouth? Now go on.” Bart lifted the reins and urged his team up the trail, his nose burning, tears running down his bloodied face. The riders followed close behind, and they hadn’t gone fifty feet when one of them retched into the snow.
The other muttered, “Christ Almighty.” Bart didn’t dare look back, but he figured it was the boy, wondered if he’d gotten sick because he was going to kill his first man tonight.
Lana had gone home for the night, and Joss hated to own up, but she missed the piano, sick as she was of the endless rotation of Christmas carols. Noise drowned out the hush of loneliness, though even loneliness was preferable to listening to that deputy blather on about what big shit he used to be down in Ouray. Joss had given serious consideration to cutting the young man’s throat while he slept—one deep swipe with the bowie she kept under the bar. She could picture his eyes popping open, him reaching for the revolver that she’d already slipped out of its holster, the puddle of blood expanding on the floorboards, sizzling where it touched the base of the stove. But that would just fuck everything up. Besides, where would she go, with Abandon as snowbound as she’d ever seen it? What was another twelve hours?
Joss smiled at the thought of Lana. On her way out, she’d actually bowed her head and mouthed “Merry Christmas”—by far the most verbose that pretty mute had ever been.
The front door swung open and the preacher walked inside and dusted the snow off his frock coat. Stephen Cole glanced around the dead saloon, then walked up and rested his forearms on the pine bar.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Evenin, Preach. Finally come to bend a elbow?”
Stephen smiled. Apparently, he’d left home without a hat, because his hair was wet with melting snow.
“Could I buy you a drink, Miss Maddox?”
“It’s Joss, and yes, always. You off your feed?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“You’re all gant up, just about the palest thing I ever saw.” She placed a new bottle on the bar, withdrew the cork, and set up two tumblers. “Pinch a cocaine with your whiskey?”
“No thank you.”
“Don’t reckon I ever got booze-blind with a man a God. Here’s to you—is it Reverend or Preacher or—”
“Stephen is fine, actually. Just Stephen.”
They clinked and drained their glasses, Stephen wincing.
Joss went to pour again, but Stephen waved her off. “No more of that snakehead for me, but you go right ahead.”
“I’ll mix you a cobbler.” She smiled. “Ladies seem to like it.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m gonna get a little more fine.”
Joss filled her glass. The preacher pulled two bits from his leather pouch, set it on the bar, but he made no move to leave.
“There somethin else I can help you with?” she asked.
Stephen pushed his hair behind his ears.
“Actually, I did have ulterior motives for coming here tonight.”
“And what might those—no, wait. Please, please, tell me you ain’t here to make some half-assed attempt to—”
“Save you? No. God saves. I am a very small part of that equation. Besides, it would be an insult to your intelligence for me to think I can convince you of your need for God. You’re a smart woman. You’ve lived many a year in this world and have certainly heard the Gospel at some point. You’ve chosen not to accept Him. It saddens me, certainly saddens God, but you have free will. I respect that.”
“Well, that’s a relief to hear. I didn’t relish the idea a throwin a Gospel sharp out on his ass, but I was prepared to.”
Stephen smiled. “I understand you’re to be sent back to Arizona in the spring to . . .”
“To be hanged. You ain’t gonna hurt my feelings sayin it.”
“Miss Maddox. Joss. I was walking home tonight from the Christmas Eve dinner, and I saw the lamps glowin in your saloon, and God put it on my heart to come in here.”
“He did.”
“I would like to pray for you, Joss. Right now. It’s Christmas Eve. You’re chained up behind a bar. I can’t imagine the fear you face at having to go back to Arizona next year. I thought I might say a prayer with you. If it could bring you any comfort at all, I would be most—”
Joss leaned toward Stephen. “You think I rejected God?”
“I just—”
“You said
I
had chosen not to come to God.”
“I just assumed—”
“You wanna hear a story about rejection? The cunt bitch who birthed me abandoned me in a alley in the California goldfields when I was a day old. Man who found and raised me put me up for three dollars to any son of a bitch who had a taste for ten-year-old pussy. Ever husband I ever had beat me. Now the way I figure it, God either approved or couldn’t be bothered to give a shit, so
don’t
come in here talkin to me about
my
rejection a God. I’d say He’s had His back to me ever since I took my first breath.” A vein had risen on Joss’s forehead and her big black eyes shone.
“You think God hates you?” Stephen asked.
“I stopped caring what He thinks or don’t think a me years ago.”
“Well, I can assure you that He loves—”
“Look, you don’t gotta come down here, hat in hand, makin amends for God. He knows where I live. He can come Hisself or not at all. Thanks for the gesture, Preach, but you’re barkin at a knot, and prayin with you ain’t exactly on my wish list this year. Now, I gotta close up.” She looked at the deputy. “Al! Get your ass up!”
The deputy startled into consciousness, instinctively touched the revolver at his side, his words slurring. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“We’re done for tonight,” Joss said. “Take me back to jail.”
“But it ain’t but—”
“Al, goddamn it, contradict me one more fuckin—”
“All right, Joss, you ain’t gotta yell.”
Stephen took a step back and regarded Joss with his sad, sweet eyes.