Colin Winnette - Haints Stay

BROOKE AND SUGAR WERE ON A BRIDGE between a field and a crowded wood. They had lost their horses days ago and had been walking for miles on end. The bridge was where they decided to break. Out in the open. A kind of celebration.

Sugar unpacked a few slices of bread and a brick of old cheese. He tore chunks loose with his nails and set them on the open face of the bread at his side. Brooke spat between his knees and took pleasure in the smacking sound as his saliva met the water below.

They had finished a job. They were emptied of bullets and powder. They were satisfied men. They were on their way to collect the next few months’ security. To be cleaned and taken care of. They would be treated well again, their shoulders and their genitals rubbed. They would smoke and bathe at the same time. Sugar would buy dinners and drinks and comb his hair with scented oils. Brooke would gamble and win and lose, but no one would be after him. He would buy a new knife. They were victorious and cheerful as ever they could be.

It was another day or two before they reached the town. They camped out in the open, unsheltered. Sugar smoked on his back with a strip of fabric covering his eyes. Each night, Brooke counted the stars until he fell asleep and woke blinded by the one.

As they neared the town, they smelled smoke. Not the welcoming kind, the tin-chimney and clay-pot kind, but an acrid, overwhelming kind of smoke. They continued. It was only a few minutes before they noticed the thin gray funnels rising up and opening out to the clouds above them.

In essence the town remained, but its landscape had changed. Jenny’s had been razed. People moved past the bar as if it were nothing to see at all. And there wasn’t much. What remained of the walls was blackened and halved. A streaked set of spiraling stairs near the center of the lot wound upward to nothing. The pole at the banister’s base supported the charred head of an eagle.

The bathhouse stood fine as it ever had, only a man now hunched at the doorway. They didn’t know him. He had the clean, fat look of an out-of-towner. He wore a thin-brimmed hat and a charcoal vest.

“I’m Brooke,” said Brooke, “and this is my brother Sugar.”

Sugar nodded, put out his hand.

The clean, fat stranger nodded and opened the door to them.

Sugar lowered his hand, slid it into his pocket. They were used to disrespect. They did not take it personally.

Brooke followed his brother into the lobby of the bathhouse. It was cleaner than usual and bustling. They positioned themselves in line behind an elderly man hunched against a thin cane. He smiled at them and Sugar smiled brightly back.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Was there an accident at the

bar?”

The elderly man shook his head. He stuck out a nub where his tongue should have been. He turned from them and arranged himself against the cane again.

Sugar tapped Brooke’s elbow, stuck out his tongue, and pointed at what the elderly man had been missing. Brooke nodded. He saw what Sugar saw, just the same as Sugar saw it, but Sugar insisted on telling it back to him.

“You’re the two boys without a father,” said a very thin man, suddenly at their side. He too wore a vest and a thin-brimmed hat.

They nodded. It was how people chose to see them. The truth was they had plenty of fathers, but that wasn’t what people meant when they said father . They had that kind of father too, the kind that gave Sugar his thick hair and Brooke his crooked nose. There was a single man responsible for the husks of both brothers, only no one knew which man he was or had been and Brooke and Sugar did not care for them to.

“Come with me, then,” said the man at their side.

They followed. With the bar gone and their payment delayed, at the very least, they were willing to investigate whatever new opportunities were presented them. Things changed in town. They changed often. There was no use fighting it. What they did was, they found a way and worked it until they found a new one.

They were seated before an oak desk and the tiny man behind it.

“You see the bar?” said the tiny man. “Do you know who burned it?”

Brooke and Sugar watched the tiny man smile and lean back in his desk chair.

“Me,” said the tiny man, “and the women inside and the men inside. Your man inside. Your woman inside.”

The tiny man pointed at Sugar. He had soft eyes, the tiny man behind the desk. Soft and black, like pencil lead.

Sugar shifted in his seat. He brought a strip of fabric out from the front pocket of his tattered suit and wiped his brow theatrically. A signal to the man that he meant no harm, that he was willing to appear intimidated. It wasn’t their show, and they knew it.

Brooke examined the desk: a jar of pens, an ivory letter opener atop a stack of papers, an ashtray containing one smoldering cigarillo.

“You think I’ve got ideas I don’t,” said the tiny man. “I know this won’t stick. I’m not here to stay. I’m a link in a chain of things I’ve got no idea how to stop or predict.”

He barely occupied his chair. He was like a cat in the lap of a giant. He was sweating too, and Sugar thought to pass the fabric to him in a gesture of brotherly goodwill.

“But I’m here for now,” said the tiny man. “And you’re the first problem I can see coming.”

“Because we’re owed by the bar,” said Brooke.

“There isn’t a bar,” said the tiny man. “Not anymore.” He laughed and tilted back in his chair and laughed some more, his hand at his belly. Darkness and rot freckled the inside of his mouth. His teeth and gums were lit by the room’s light as he laughed and held his mouth open like an offering.

Sugar smiled. Brooke examined a nearby shelf, the spines of the books there and the dust that had long ago settled on them. The dust of another man’s body, another man’s toil and time.

After a moment the tiny man regained his composure and opened the drawer to his left. He slid the letter opener from the exposed desktop down into the drawer.

“Money,” said the tiny man, “or some other thing that will make you resentful of the bar going down. Maybe you two like to drink. Maybe you two like women. Maybe you’re sentimental. I can’t have two thorns wandering the streets, looking for a reason to stick in my side.”

The tiny man seemed to relax then.

“So,” he said, settling back into the enormous-looking chair and letting his thin arms dangle from either side, “how can I trust you two to keep your heads about you?”

“Do you read history?” said Sugar.

“Yes and no,” said the tiny man, a smile creeping back into his lips. “I don’t read much, but I know a few things. History, as you put it, it’s slippery.”

“Well I’m a student of history,” said Sugar, “and any observant man can see that power is like a gold coin. Some men squander it, throw it away on nothing worth noticing. Others simply lose it to a world that’s much hungrier for it than they are. Others still dedicate their lives to holding onto it. And some die, coin in hand, surrendering it only to the men who bury them.”

The tiny man inched forward in his seat, eyed Sugar for a point.

“My brother and I,” said Sugar, “it makes no difference to us what the world does with its money.”

“You’re too… uh, historically read, huh,” said the tiny man, “to get hung up on something like an unpaid debt? Or an ignorant, rot-mouthed cunt taking the reins?”