Colin Winnette - Haints Stay

Soon, the coloring went. Brooke was without a guide or water source. He aligned himself with the sun as if to follow the same direction as before, but there was no way of knowing if the water still ran that way or ran at all. It could have just as easily curved off or died out. He imagined himself sitting on a stool in a bar. There would be some kind of plunky music playing. People laughing indiscriminately. He liked a noisy room. Liked the way a drink would settle in and everything would seem suddenly to pool there in the back of your skull. He shook away the thought when it led to the memory of a bartender they had drowned in a horse bucket just beyond the church steps. They were out of view but the man had made considerable noise. Still, no one had looked between the buildings to discover them. It had been a hasty, unthoughtful act. They had been successful, however, in killing the man and collecting their pay. Brooke realized that much of their success was luck or good fortune or poor decisions gone unpunished. Finally, he had made a poor decision he was paying for. It was no longer about trying to figure who had sent those men after them. It was more than likely the little man who’d razed Jenny’s. That was the obvious, easiest thought. It wasn’t worth dreaming up other scenarios. But it was now a kind of game he was playing with himself. Something he was interested in seeing out, interested in pursuing, at least until he was no longer in dire straits.

He was torn between the sudden desire to know more about the men and women they’d dealt with, and the simultaneous understanding that they were better at their work for not knowing. Details clogged things up and slowed you down. The more you knew about a person the more complicated it became to shut the light.

He was so horny he would have fucked a hole in the sand if it would have stayed a hole long enough. It was something that came suddenly and strongly. Just like his hunger. It dug into him and made him unreasonable and mean. He did not require much in this life, but what he did require felt to him like pure necessity. He knew he would not die out there in the desert for lack of something to fuck, but it hardly seemed like a life worth living, if he could go on forever like this. He had not given a direct thought to how well set up he was before this mess. He decided that if things were ever again as they had once been, he would appreciate it more: his freedom, his brother, their life on the road and in the woods. What he got to see and experience each day. Most people held up in a small town or on a dried-up farm and each year passed as plainly as the last until a bullet or a fire found you or time just plain ran out. That was not the life for him.

He had had one wife. They were never legally married. She had had one husband before him and it had not ended well. But they were as married as anyone could ever be in all other respects. As it turned out, he was not a good husband. After the first few months, he grew mean. He did not seem to care for her in any kind of regular way. He could feel himself being mean but could find nothing in him that would stop it. He would observe its happening and take stock. This is a cruel act and those are cruel words , he would think. And one day she left him for the man she had been married to before. It was out of nowhere that the man arrived and she joined him on his horse, without so much as a goodbye. Brooke had gone in for a bath at the time, but heard the noises of his arrival and her leaving. He pieced it together as he watched them ride away. He was in a towel on the porch as the final moments passed. That man had a quick horse and he had outrun Brooke with little effort. Brooke had chased them south through a desert for three days without ever meeting them, before finally turning back. Then he spent a year drinking and fighting with his horses. They’d shared a small house on a small plot in a small town, and he had four horses and a well to his name. He would gather the horses up and try to knock them out with his bare fists. Mostly they ran from him, but occasionally one would rear up and do him some harm. After more than enough of that, his brother Sugar returned and they started a life together. Brooke was no good keeping still. No good at doing it, and no good when doing it. So they built themselves a reputation for mobile meanness with a professional demeanor. And they’d kept at it until now. He did not know what ultimately became of his ex-wife. He would like to know but would not like to bother finding out.

He was losing his mind. He was chasing down stories and putting one boot in front of the other. There was no water in this direction, no imaginable source of food. He paused a moment then doubled back.

Mary was learning to plow. Or, more accurately, she was at her father’s side, pulling rocks and shells from the soil and nodding as he spoke to her. He was smiling a lot. He was grinning like a fool. She was running circles around him and chasing insects back into the earth. The plow was an angled wooden thing, dragged by a horse and steered by her father. It was slow work. He looked pleased and determined.

“So Bird just fell?”

“He fainted, Mary.”

“Why?”

“He’s still healing.”

“He’s uneven.”

“He’s unwell.”

They were startled then by a sound like thunder.

Bird and Martha were still in the house. Bird spooked at the sound and Martha tried to comfort him, but he climbed under the bed and lay there flat and unlistening. Then the windows began to break. One by one. And the voices of strange men rose up and the wall behind Martha burst into flame. They were burning them out. Bandits, marauders, rustlers, thieves. Hell was finally at their door. Martha retrieved a rifle from the trunk at the base of Bird’s bed. Bird inched away from the fire, gathering himself into a little ball. Martha stepped to the window and fired. A thud. A horse’s panic. Another shot and then the same.

“Come out, John,” a voice said. “It’s been long enough, and we are here to collect.”

The men moved from view and circled around the house. They were firing but bullets were not striking or passing through the walls. She moved from window to window, watching the front then the back of the house. She caught glimpses of the men, their horses, but they were moving fast, protecting themselves by doing so.

There was a family plot at the top of a well-wooded hill. The field Mary and John were working was a rough halfway point. John instructed Mary to hide with her grandmother, as she liked to do during family games.

“What will happen to you?” she said.

“I will be safe,” he said. “These are just men who want money.”

“We don’t have any,” she said.

“I can reason with them,” he told her. “Now go.”

She ran, stayed low, and vanished into the woods. The sounds of gunfire and horses and voices obscured the hurried footsteps of her leaving. John found a manageable rock and worked his way toward the barn, which was only a few hundred feet from the field and a few hundred more to the house. He was going for his father’s rifle and pistol, which he kept with the animals as both a way of honoring the old man and putting him in his place. One of the men turned the corner at the far side of the house and stopped. He was remarkably nondescript. He was dirty. He had hair on his face and wore a hat that shadowed his eyes. He spotted John and John froze.

“John,” said the man. “Do you have the money?”

John raised the manageable rock. He looked for any unique features to the man who was aiming the pistol at him. His spurs were rusty, but not remarkably so.

From the window, Martha saw John freeze, raise his arm, then fall. Then she heard the shot. She stepped into the living room and out through the front door where the man who had shot John was turning his horse back to the business at hand. She fired and he fell. She shot the horse as well. It fell upon the rider. Two other men turned back to her after the shot and she fired on them both. One fired his own shot, but it was redirected toward the sky as her bullet landed. The last of them, though she saw him only as the sixth, fired at her from a good distance. The bullet broke the wood of the banister at her left. She walked toward him steadily and he fired again, blasting a hole in the dirt just behind her. He wrangled his horse and tried to still it. She reached what seemed a reasonable distance for her trembling arms, raised the rifle, and placed a bullet in his chest. He received the bullet, hunched forward, dug his heel into the horse’s side, and moved past Martha, forcing her back a few steps but not down. She fired several more times but failed to meet the moving target.