Four Live Rounds (6 page)

“I guess.”

“But the question,” McClurg said, “is how you
feel about dishonest work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well think on it, get back to us.”

The men laughed again and Nathan swiped the
jar from Dan, tilted it back. McClurg hoisted a log onto the fire,
a spray of ashes engulfing Oatha. He rummaged through his satchel,
located the loaf of sourdough he’d bought before leaving
Silverton.

“Break me off a hunk a that,” Nathan said,
and Oatha tore off a piece.

“Got a round a cheese in here, too.”

“Don’t be stingy.”

They cut cheese onto the bread, set the
slices on hot stones in the fire’s vicinity to let it melt.

The storm brought a premature night, and in
the firelight, Oatha watched the snow fall without respite. They
played cards until the fire ran out of wood, won the last of
Oatha’s money, drank up his quart of whiskey, smoked all of his
tobacco.

As the other men snored, Oatha lay awake. If
it hadn’t been snowing so hard, he’d have attempted to sneak out of
camp, resaddle his horse, and get the hell away from Nathan and the
boys. He didn’t want to look it in the eye, but the truth of the
matter was that he’d backed himself into a bind, and if he didn’t
slip away from them tomorrow, he’d probably never reach
Abandon.

Oatha’s eyes opened. As he sat up, his vision
sharpened into focus and he saw the gray-white madness of the
blizzard, the canvas sheet sagging to the ground at one end, the
snow piled up three feet around the boundary of their little
shelter.

He held his hands toward the low fire, his
head throbbing again, a whiskey hangover that wouldn’t die until
noon at the earliest.

Nathan looked at him, shook his head.

“My horse and yours are dead. We’ve caught a
bad piece a luck here.”

They stayed under the canvas all day, taking
turns venturing out to gather wood from the abundance of rotted
spruce and melting snow in the emptied whiskey jars, a tenuous
proposition, the fire and ice resulting in shattered glass in two
out of three attempts.

By evening, the snow had quit but the wind
raged on through the night, and the sound of limbs cracking kept
Oatha from the depths of restful sleep.

The second morning dawned cloudless and
bright. They saddled the two remaining horses and broke camp as the
first rays of sunlight struck the Teats, Oatha clinging to

Dan, Nathan to the substantial girth of
McClurg.

A quarter mile out from the shelter, Dan’s
horse stopped in its tracks and refused to take another step, snow
to its belly, nostrils flaring in the thin air.

“I’ll make you go!”

He dismounted, grabbed the bridle strap and
fought to drag the horse forward, but it wouldn’t budge, even when
Dan drew his Colt and smacked the animal across the bridge of its
nose.

“Enough,” Nathan said. “These animals ain’t
built for this.”

“Maybe just one of us should take a horse,
try to make Abandon,” Oatha said.

“Who, you?”

“To what end?”
“To get help. Bring back a sled or a—”

“Snow’s too deep,” Nathan said. “Hell, it’s
just early October. We’ll get us a warm spell in a couple days.
Good sod-soaker.”

“We’re almost out a provisions,” McClurg
said. “We’re just supposed to wait around?”

“I ain’t in control of the weather,
Marion.”

Oatha climbed down from the horse, and Dan
screamed at the animal, “Go on! Get!”

“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said. “We need
‘em.”

“For what?”

“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck
out—”

“I ain’t eatin my horse.”

“Circumstances like this ain’t the time to
make declarations a what you will and won’t

do.”

It was snowing again by nightfall, and it
didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the
canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.

Oatha could tell by the brightness of the
tarp that the sun was out.

McClurg snored.

Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said,
“He left.”

“Who?”

“Who ain’t here?”

Oatha saw where the wall of snow had been
broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown
and sagging.

“Where are the horses?” Oatha asked.

“Dan took one. The other’n keeled.”

Oatha’s head was hurting again—dehydration
instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger. He’d eaten
the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.

“We botched it,” Nathan said. “Should’ve
walked out after the first storm. Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve
froze, but we’d of had a chance.”

“You don’t think we got one now?”

They butchered the calico that had just died,
cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them
over a low fire. The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of
what little fat there was burning off gave Oatha a charge of
energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.

The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate
with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it
and slept for the rest of the day.

“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later
as they roasted the last of McClurg’s horse. “God’s been waitin for
this, and I know he’s enjoyin ever minute of it. You just had the
misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my
ass.”

“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or
Silverton,” McClurg said.

“I hope he’s froze. Don’t mention his name
again.”

“He might come back and save us.”

“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings
toward the man.”

“So tell me,” Oatha said, “you boys weren’t
going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”

Nathan glanced at McClurg, let slip a little
smirk. “Let me put it this way. This horrible weather saved your
life.”

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“Sure you do. You was gonna try and take your
leave of us your first chance. If I’m wrong, you can have my
portion a Barney the horse.”

“You was gonna kill me?”

“Dan would of done the honors, him bein our
resident cutthroat.”

Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over
the horse’s leg.

“Why?” Oatha asked.

“For whatever money you had. For your horse.
Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton
saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin
pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take
you apart.”

Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his
windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped
in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill
him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever
been in his life.

“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.

“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a
luck, we’re in it together now.” Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife.
“Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”

Two days hence, their eleventh in the
shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the
task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen
straight through. He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day
wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha
waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their
last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their
reentry into civilization.

Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and
shivering uncontrollably.

Growled, “Not even a fire to come home
to?”

“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.

“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”

The weakness and hunger made negotiating the
snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded
and cold.

He spent two hours fighting his way downhill
under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following
Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the
trees.

At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a
glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his
strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow
instead.

The afternoon was almost warm, especially
sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill.
Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and
when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already
flushed with alpenglow.

In the dusky silence, he thought about what
Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in
that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of
some deep virus in the fabric of his character.

Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night
with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when
he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was
headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become
since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.

Damn if he hadn’t been right about
something.

Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha
lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to
build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to
childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field
behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained
purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of
bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the
humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long
dead on a Virginia hillside.

After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found
himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning
bright, the snow soft. Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across
his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his
thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the
agony behind his eyes.

There passed periods of sleep, stretches of
consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds
fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked
up, the sky stood empty.

The next day, no one left the shelter, the
men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of
color.

“We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.

Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring
at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in wonderment.

“Ya’ll hear that?”

“What?” Nathan said.

“Dan’s come back.”

Oatha cocked his head. “I don’t hear
nothing.”

“He’s callin out for me.”

“You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said.
“Ain’t a soul out here but us. Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a
ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze. Saw him
two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it,
but there you go.”

“That’s sad,” Marion said.

“No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of
the situation. Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk
into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”

“Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha
asked.

“Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever
done.”

Oatha lay there considering it, decided
Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the
strength to stand, much less walk the remaining ten or however many
miles it was into Abandon. And for the first time, lying there with
the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the
roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t
seem so bad.

Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a
pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how
much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away
the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture
ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of
his mind.

When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing
over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through
the opaque membrane of the canvas.

“I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice
straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back
with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this
unending misery.”

McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls
swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin.
His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died
until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.

“You awake, Marion?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Ask you something…you believe in God?”

“Don’t reckon. You?”

“Sometimes.”

“How you figure you’ll come out if in fact
he’s runnin this show?”

“Don’t know. Ain’t been particularly good or
bad. Just sort a plodded my way along. I was friends with a Navajo
when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Man named Sik’is. He was
always talking about walking on the good, red road.”

“Ain’t heard of it. Where’s it at?”

“Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you
know? Way a living. Balance and harmony—”

“This some spiritual bullshit?”

“It’s like walking the path where you’re the
best version of yourself. I don’t know. Always sounded nice to me.
Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out. Start living
right, you know?”

“Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of
a injun. You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”

“Me and my brothers fought against the
Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”

“I kilt five, two in fair fights. Three was
plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here
thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles
City. Young man. We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and
I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause
he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses
blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back
of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit
kickin.”