Four Live Rounds (7 page)

“Why?”

“‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a
seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”

“You ashamed of it?”

Marion seemed to reflect on the question,
then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon. But it’s
a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the
one you’re starin at. Figure it was that young man’s time, and if
it hadn’t been me, it’d a been—”

A shotgun blast exploded in the forest,
trailed by a shout of unabashed joy.

Marion struggled up off the ground. “Son of a
bitch hit somethin.”

Oatha felt the excitement bloom in his gut,
Marion already on his feet, lumbering out of the shelter.

Nathan hollering, “Boys, come look at this!
Shot us a elk!”

It required immense effort for Oatha to sit
up, and he had to employ a spruce branch to leverage himself out of
the dirt onto his feet.

Marion yelling, “I could kiss you, Nathan,
tongue and all!”

Oatha limped out of the shelter as fast as he
could manage into sunlight that passed blindingly sharp through the
dead trees, Marion twenty yards away, moving with considerable
speed though the spruce, Oatha following as fast as he could,
shoots of pain riding up his legs, the muscle atrophied, already
wearing away.

There was Nathan in the distance, standing
with the shotgun beside a scrawny aspen, its bark chewed up, near
cut in two by buckshot, Oatha scanning the woods for the fallen elk
as Nathan raised his shotgun.

Marion’s head disappeared in a red mist and
the rest of his body collided into a tree and pitched back as Oatha
ducked behind a spruce, the trunk too small to shield him from a
spray of buckshot, figuring if it came, he’d catch a pellet or two
at the least.

“The hell you doin, Nathan?”

“Livin, brother. Livin.”

“You mean to kill me, too?”

“I mean for us to eat this fat son of a
bitch, get back to civilization.”

Oatha peered through the branches, saw that
Nathan was still standing above Marion’s headless frame, the breech
of the shotgun broken over his forearm.

“Why you reloadin then?” Oatha shouted. He
didn’t own a gun anymore, hadn’t in three decades, but Marion’s was
sitting next to the snowbank inside the shelter—a Navy—and he had
to bet it was loaded.

“‘Cause I don’t know if you the type a man to
go along with somethin like this.”

Nathan was fishing in the pocket of his
oilskin slicker, pulled out a pair of shells, Oatha thinking if
there was ever a time to make a break for it, this was it.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nathan said. “I
kilt him out a pure necessity. Was you the fat fuck, I’d a cut your
throat long ago.”

“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat
the flesh of another man.”

“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells
into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.

Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots
sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.

He heard the report before he registered the
blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under
his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through
him.

By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s
shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break
through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of
sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight
distraction.

He fell through under the canvas as the
crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the
dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.

The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo
blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized
the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down
even as his hands trembled.

Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.

Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to
listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse
vibrating his ear drums.

“They’s still time,” Nathan said. He was
close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable
to pinpoint his exact location.

“For what?” Oatha asked.

“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t
no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little
Marion. You wanna live, don’t you?”

“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”

“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic
life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you
dead.”

“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War
does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some
the other way entire.”

“Guess we know which way you went, tramping
through country like this without so much as a revolver.”

Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh
conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that
had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him,
a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that
moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he
said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and
think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the
Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood
like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know
about any of it?”

“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till
now in your voice.”

Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.

“What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call
ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”

“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll
know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”

Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken
through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into
a snowbank.

Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the
same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”

“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.

The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump
sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be
called unpleasant. His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of
its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones
was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached
Abandon.

“I’ve smelt this before,” he said. “Or
somethin like it.”

“You’ve et man?”

“No, in a San Francisco nosebag.” He thought
on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal. Smells like veal.”

“Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about
to—”

“If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe. But I
think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical
conversation about what we’re about to do.”

They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless
and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the
black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.

Nathan flipped the ribcage. “I believe this
is ready.”

The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of
knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three
tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.

Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when
the door opened.

“You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,”
she called out. “Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”

The man paused in the doorway, as if to
appraise the vacant saloon.

“Not for nothin, but it’s twenty degrees out
there, and the fire’s low.” The barkeep motioned to the potbellied
stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at
this closing hour.

The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn
noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot,
limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle
to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.

As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it,
she saw that his face was deeply sunburnt, the tips of his ears and
nose blackened with frostbite.

“You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she
said.

The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the
bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches,
then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.

“One a these has money in it,” he said at
barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey
bottle, setting up his first shot.

“The hell happened to you?” she asked.

The man removed his slouch hat and set it on
the barstool next to him. He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How
much for the bottle?”

The barkeep leaned forward, her big black
eyes shining in the firelight.

“Yours, free a charge, you tell me what you
been through.”

He hesitated, then said, “Rode out from
Silverton three weeks ago. Got waylaid by an early snowstorm. I
been walkin three days to get here.”

“Was you alone?”

He shook his head, poured another shot of
whiskey.

“Where’s the rest a your party? Where’s the
men these wallets belong to?”

“They didn’t make it.”

“But you did.”

“Maybe I should just pay you for the bottle,
‘cause this line a questioning is gettin pretty old.”

“You ain’t gotta worry. I’m on the scout
myself, and this ain’t the worst town for layin low.”

“That right.”

“For a fact. So, how’d you make it when your
friends didn’t.”

“I et ‘em.”

Jocelyn threw back her head and laughed as
hard as she could remember since arriving in this dying town, a
fugitive in her own right, the man wondering if she was laughing
because she thought he’d made a joke, or because she was crazy, and
on the fence as to which reason he might prefer.

He drank the whiskey, poured himself another
shot, said, “Care to hoist a glass with me?”

Jocelyn set up a tumbler for herself, and
they raised their glasses, the man feeling better already. Maybe it
was the hunger and the thirst, exhaustion bordering on madness, but
he felt a surge of something, and though he couldn’t name it
outright, having never known it, he suspected it was peace, the
embracing of a thing he’d had his back to going on thirty
years.

He said, “To you—what’s your name?”

“Joss.”

“To you, Joss.”

And he made a quiet toast to himself also, to
finding his good, red road, to Dan and to Marion, and to Nathan of
a now crushed skull, having brained the man in his sleep with a
still-warm stone from the fire-ring upon which they’d roasted
Marion.

He wondered what Sik’is would’ve thought of
this new thoroughfare he’d found for himself, then realized he no
longer cared.

As he swallowed his whiskey, the glow
spreading through his stomach, to the tips of his filthy fingers,
dulling the pain in his shoulder, he was overcome by a joy that
sheeted his cloudy irises with tears. He felt thankful for every
painful second of those twenty-one days in the wilderness, for the
starvation and the thirst. He regretted nothing. If he’d never met
Nathan and the boys, he’d have rolled into Abandon right on
schedule, that weak, miserable fuck of a man he’d been for thirty
long years since he’d watched his brothers die on Malvern Hill.

“You all right?” Jocelyn asked.

Oatha reached for the whiskey bottle.

“Strange to say, but I believe I just woke
up.”

An introduction to “Shining Rock”

When I was a boy, I did a lot of backpacking
with my parents and younger brother, and one of our favorite places
to go was Shining Rock Wilderness in the North Carolina Mountains.
One summer evening as we were setting up camp in a remote area of
the wilderness called Beech Spring Gap, a gentleman came over to
our camp and introduced himself. He was a burly fellow in his
fifties wearing blue shorts and a vest brimming with camping
accessories and various patches. He also had a machete lashed to
his back and mentioned in the course of small-talk that he’d fought
in Vietnam. The interaction was unsettling and more than a little
awkward. I was twelve at the time but found out years later from my
father that he’d been terrified, so much in fact that he and my mom
had whispered in their tent late that night, debating leaving
because they were afraid this man was going to come back and murder
all of us while we slept. Obviously, that didn’t happen. My family
struck up a friendship with the man (who turned out to be a gentle
soul) and we accompanied him on future backpacking trips. But the
strangeness of that initial encounter and the fear my parents must
have felt never left me, and the experience inspired a short story
called “Shining Rock.”

shining rock

They’d been coming to the southern
Appalachians for more than a decade, and always in that first week
of August, eager to escape the Midwestern midsummer heat. Last
year, it had been the entire family—Roger, Sue, Jennifer, and
Michelle—but the twins were sophomores at a college in Iowa now,
immersed in boyfriends, the prospect of grad school, summer
internships, slowly drifting out of their parents’ gravitational
field into orbits of their own making. So for the first time, it
was just Roger and Sue and a Range Rover filled with backpacking
gear, heading south through Indiana, Kentucky, the northeast wedge
of Tennessee, and finally up into the highlands of North
Carolina.

They spent the night in Asheville at the
Grove Park Inn, had dinner at the hotel’s Sunset Terrace, watching
the lights of the downtown fade up through the humid dark.

At first light, they took the Blue Ridge
Parkway south into the Pisgah Ranger District, the road winding
through primeval forests, green valleys, past rock faces slicked
with water that shimmered in early sun. Their ears popped as the
road climbed and neither spoke of how empty the car felt.

By late morning, they were pack-laden,
sunscreen-slathered, and cursing as they hiked up into Shining Rock
Wilderness on a bitch of a path called the Old Butt Trail. Roger
let Sue lead, enjoying the view of her muscled thighs and calves
already pinked with high-altitude sun, glistening with
perspiration. He kept imagining footsteps behind him, glancing back
every mile or so, half-expecting to see Jennifer and Michelle
bringing up the rear.