The Legend of Winstone Blackhat (22 page)

From the top of the ridge Winstone watched the western sky. It was black. He’d sat under midnight skies less dark, but the day wasn’t more than a handful of hours past noon and far away above the line of the Old Woman Range a yellowish light still shone. The long slit in the dark was eaten and frayed by the wind and the wind flew through it across the valley and over the ridge and raked the grass and his hair and he could have taken shelter somewhere but he didn’t trust the wind or the sky.

The slanted sun ahead of him was a search beam picking out the feathered heads of the grass and the mottled grain of the tors and behind him the shadows were massing. When he looked down at the dam it seemed no longer a lake but a hole in the world where a lake had once been and similar voids were spreading behind each rock and each clump of grass as if that cold yellow light had the power to dissolve the ground like day-old snow.

The light was cold and the rocks were cold and the wind was colder. Winstone was wearing all of his clothes except for the Danish guy’s socks and he would have been wearing them too if they’d fitted inside his trainers. He’d tucked the kitten under the khaki fleece and he stroked it there and against his stomach the kitten revolved and seized his hand in all four paws and bit his fingers.

The windows of the huts began to flare but Winstone knew there were no lamps in the windows and no one was there and they hadn’t been there for a while. Since before his gas ran out which was weeks at least. With nothing to divide one week from the next he was losing track of them and for all he knew the end of the world had overtaken the plains and neither the hut-owners nor anyone else were ever coming back and under the present sky it didn’t seem unlikely.

It was Friday maybe. He was pretty sure some days had escaped him but he didn’t know how many or which. It could definitely be Friday. He thought he’d wait one more day the last and then come nightfall he’d break into the Red Hut and pull the old lady’s checked curtains and light the stove and lay his sleeping bag beside it. He’d eat warm beans and look at the fish.

He glanced up again at the sky.

The sun didn’t seem to want to stick around to see what the wind and sky had coming. It was going fast and Winstone watched it run out over the hills until the rip in the dark above them turned blue as a cop-car light and he could almost hear the siren coming.

Come on, he said to the kitten. Let’s go.

He tried to take the kitten out but it clung to his fleece with its claws so he held it there with one hand while he climbed down from the rocks and he realised that in spite of the watch he’d been keeping on it the day had got darker than he’d thought.

He could still see the road and he made his way to it and followed its line around the lake past the Sliding Door Hut with the last blue glow of the day in its glass and the Scout Hut and the Green Camo Hut and beyond the black cut of its access track the Red Hut and he paused and looked at it there.

Tomorrow, he told the kitten. If it stays cold.

His hands were past red and tending to blue by the time he
got back to the cave and he climbed straight into his sleeping bag without getting undressed and he only just remembered to take off his shoes. He pulled the bag over his head and drew in the cord and hunched up and he could feel the warmth of the kitten under his shirt and while he waited for the rest of his skin to catch up he thought about food and putting on his spare socks but both of those things would involve getting out and his eyes were starting to close and it was a hard decision. Then the cold took hold of him and shook him and would not stop and in that judder of teeth and bone his grip on the range grew loose and he was falling down through the holes in the world towards a dusty floor where all the discarded beginnings and ends and unwanted scenes of his life lay waiting for him and rattled and snaked and began to splice together.

THE CAMPFIRE CRACKED
and sparked. Its light moved over the old willow leaves where they lay thick and brown and soundless beneath the Kid’s boots and caught on the shifting yellow flecks of that season’s fall. In the heart of the fire orange flame curled and at its edge a tin of beans sat roasting.

Her hair beneath his hand was a yellow mirror to the flames. It spilled through his dirty fingers and his fingers twitched and strands of it remained caught in the cracked and bitten nails as the Kid kicked his hand away.

The Kid looked down at the girl with the yellow hair and she looked as she always had and the night had not changed and behind him the river still ran. He stood and took off his hat and passed it across his face and in the wake of its passing his face softened just as over his shoulder Cooper stepped out of the dark and his eyes followed the Kid’s and his face grew
hard as stone and the light of the flames flickered in his eyes.

Slowly Cooper sank to his heels and he put his hand to the girl’s rosy throat and then he looked back up at the Kid and he said, She’s cold.

Cooper stood up then and he too took off his hat and he and the Kid stood side by side with their hats in their hands looking down at the girl who in the light of the fire was a warm and living girl resting with no care in the world and her gold hair spreading but when the Kid tried to lift her up from the ground he saw that her skin was crazed and under her skin she was cracked like a china doll.

What did he do? Cooper said.

I don’t know, the Kid said. I don’t know.

Winstone Blackhat lay on his back and his arms were spread to the night. His hat had come off and his hair was as pale as the girl’s but without its lustre. His blanket coat was buttoned up to the neck and above his breast pocket the Kid’s .44-40 had opened a way that was black and frayed and from its entrance rose the smoke of the slug that lay deep in his cooling heart. Blackhat’s own gun was still in his belt and the small scuffings beneath his boot heels were the only signs of struggle.

I know one thing, the Kid said. Aint nobody can undo it.

Come on, Cooper said.

The Kid and Cooper each laid hold of a boot and together they dragged Blackhat away from the circle of light and his open and empty hands trailed through the fallen leaves and into darkness.

The light that picked out his boots again was flinty and sharp and in it all objects lay equally cold.

So what do we do with him? said the Kid.

Nothin, Cooper said.

Above Blackhat’s boots their shapes stood flat and dark on
the breaking grey and it was hard to see what was in their faces.

Nothin?

It’s moren he deserves.

Yeah, the Kid said. It is. But I don’t like lookin at him.

They laid Blackhat’s own stained blanket over his face and they piled stones from the river upon him one by one and the mound grew with the light. The Kid stood back and wiped his bandana over his face and the cold wind whipped at the cloth in his hand.

You fixin to leave a marker?

Waste of wood, the Kid said. Caint think of a soul would care to read it.

They rode out upriver the way they had come and the grey water and the grey sand rose in the wake of their horses’ hooves and the hooves of the riderless horses they led and the spray caught in the weak and slanting sun and between their departing shadows and the black hat set on the stones it turned and fell like snow.

Winstone’s chest hurt. He couldn’t see or breathe for the cloth pressed over his face and there was something – coyotes or wolverines – clawing his ribs and none of these things alarmed him. He lay still and he thought his eyes were open and he was awake but he wasn’t sure. Then he remembered the kitten and some few seconds later the sleeping bag and he tried to find the top of the bag and open the cord and eventually he did and the kitten scratched him one last time across the face as it departed. It was too dark to see where the kitten went after that but he figured outside and since being inside the cave didn’t feel so good any more he decided he’d go with it. There
was something about the particular kind of dark it was and the sounds of the tarp and the wind and the range that made him think the night was a kind of night he hadn’t seen before and it seemed wrong to miss it.

It took him a while to find his way out and when he did he stopped right there on his hands and knees in the mouth of the cave because the Rough Ridge Range was John Wayne Texas Hollywood blue.

The sky was a daylight sky crushed and bleeding to black and the moon shone through it bright as the sun and the sky around the moon was blue and beneath the moon the snow that covered the range shone back at the sky and it was blue and white and white and blue in every degree and shade and it ran thick and unmarked as far as the eye could see.

The snow was still falling and he held out his palm but he was in the lee of the rocks so he climbed them to get closer to the snow and it took a long time to get up there and on the way he noticed he wasn’t wearing his shoes and he thought for a second about going back but it didn’t seem important. On top of the tor he sat and held out his hand again and watched a fat flake settle upon his skin and lie there at ease and the flake did not shrink and another settled upon it. He wasn’t shivering now but steady as stone and the snow fell over him and over the rock and bound them fast.

It was relaxing watching the snow falling through the sky and Winstone thought in a little while he’d sleep and he liked the thought of sleeping up there in the open air with nothing over his head and not even feathers to weigh him down and nobody coming. He thought it would be a good sleep.

He was hollowed out and empty with cold but the cold had passed on and in its resonant place was wonder at the snow that was wiping the range and the screen of the sky and all that had
moved upon it. He was glad he’d seen the American night and the big blue moon but the snow was rolling over them slow and slowly they disappeared and he was alone in the musicless live and rolling dark between the end and the place the film stopped and nobody was coming tonight. Nobody was coming.

Winstone closed his eyes or maybe he already had and he didn’t want the screen to dull and the lights to come up and the noise of the world to restart and they didn’t. Around him the wind hissed through the rocks and the snow swirled like static over the night and the black world faded to white.

A big thank you to Buddle Findlay and the Frank Sargeson Trust, with whose support a large part of this novel was written, and to Martin Cole for his unfailing kindness and good humour; to Harriet Allan and the team at Random House; to my editor, Anna Rogers; to Ian; and, last but not least, to all the directors, cinematographers, sound operators, editors, designers, writers and actors whose work inspired Winstone and me.

Tanya Moir was born in Invercargill and grew up in rural Southland. She now lives on the west coast of Auckland with her husband, Ian.
The Legend of Winstone Blackhat
is her third novel.