Haints Stay (11 page)

The water had vanished beneath the sand but Brooke
could still follow its coloring. The sand was a bit darker and looser where the
stream ran. He could extract the water from the sand using a sock, and carry on.
There was no certainty at all in the direction he had chosen. Many towns set
themselves up alongside a water source, but not all, and there was no telling what
the situation with this water would become. It had already begun to leave him. He
was out of wood and keeping warm only by applying his clothes and coat as a poor
kind of blanket. It was brutally cold at night and hot during the day. It occurred
to him to follow the stream the opposite way, back in the direction from which they
came, but he had walked for several days in this direction and doubling back was a
hard decision to make.

There was one man among them all who had put up a considerable,
worry-worthy fight. Either an ex-soldier or a man with soldierly inclinations. It
turned out that his barn was home to a historical armory of sorts, topped off with a
cannon and enough balls and powder to give them lasting trouble.

The fighting between them was extensive and this man had the upper hand.
It ended, finally, when he bothered with the cannon. Brooke and Sugar were given
enough time to approach the barn on horseback. Before the lengthy pause of his
wheeling it and gathering the supplies, they had been hiding in the trees, moving
about to avoid his rifle fire. He was a miserable shot. At first, they read his
pause as their success. They imagined him gunned down and bleeding. They pictured
victory. They were cautious in their approach, avoiding the door at the front of the
barn and moving quickly past the windows at its sides. How he did not hear them is
still a mystery to Brooke. The cannon fired on the trees where they had initially
been held up. It cleared
a great path, which then surprisingly
snapped back into place. A few of the older trees lay stricken, but the younger,
thinner ones bent and bent back as if it were a child's game. The barn was filled
with smoke then and the noise was of a stunning kind. Ears ringing, Brooke and Sugar
broke in through the front door. The man had fallen back from the cannon blow and
was discovered by them on his rear in a bit of horse mud. His horses were dead
around him as if stricken by a plague. A goat was in the corner, without its mind.
They shot the man and butchered the goat. They lived on its meat for the following
week.

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.

Dust held in the air. There were no sounds from outside, only the fire
cracking the walls. Bird wet himself and began to cry. He cursed himself and
demanded that he get out from under the bed. He told himself again and again,
get
out from under the bed
, but he did not move.

The gunshots that echoed throughout the valley sounded almost
patient. Inexplicably, the birds in the trees lining the graveyard were still
singing. Or chattering. Gossiping. There were no more horses. No more yelling. Just
gunshot, gunshot, gunshot. Then nothing but birds. Mary was pacing between the
headstones and pulling up dandelions not aligned to a particular plot. She'd pieced
together a bouquet. She was not fully ignorant to what was happening, and there was
a flood of emotion for each imagined possibility. There was joy and pride at the
thought of John rescuing Martha and Bird and the farm, and of them obtaining several
new horses to break and befriend. There was sadness
and fear for a
handful of other, darker, reasons. She kept herself busy and did not allow herself
to settle on any particular thought for very long. The birds flitted from tree to
tree as if to spread the news of her bravery, her stoicism. She was like a
historical person, going up against the difficulties of the world and working to
change things through her survival. She had not known this grandmother. She was not
a blood relation. Mary set the dandelions on the grave and asked her grandmother
what she thought about the whole thing. Her grandmother said nothing, or she blew
through the grass and chirped in the trees — Mary hadn't decided how she felt about
it. Mostly when she talked to her grandmother, she imagined she was speaking into a
well.