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Desert Reckoning

Trey R. Barker

It gets under your fingers, this brown dirt. Sticks and clots like a man's blood after you've killed him close and personal.

While the emerging moonlight overpowers the dying sunlight, a painful cough leaves its stain on my lips.

For a moment, I wonder if the dirt isn't blood at all, but more tumors. Beneath each of my nails, at the tip of each finger, growing while I traveled the miles from Boston to this foul smelling privy of a town. God knows how many more tumors there are now than when I got Palmer's telegraph.

"I'll be there stop Don't die until I get there stop I love you stop"

"I love you, too."

The old man, Topper, wearing tattered clothes that just manage to cover him, frowns. "Y'all say something, mister?"

A passing train -- maybe Palmer's train -- gives my answer. It fills the desert air with a roar somehow delicate, like Palmer's soft voice. Black smoke paints the evening air and smells like a burning homestead.      

It isn't Palmer's train. And his grave dirt is just dirt.

Ignoring the pain keeping such close company, I listen for Palmer's voice. I dig and dig, and hear, rather than feel, my nails tear away. But isn't enough pain to overwhelm the other pain, the other hurt.

While I dig, the moonlight finally settling heavy on the ground, I cry and my tears and sweat and blood soak the dirt I scoop out and toss aside.

"Wha'ch'all gonna do you find him?" Topper asks.

Stopping, I stare into the moonlight, into the scrub and mesquite of west Texas, toward the tiny railroad stop a half mile away. "You telling me he's not here?"

The old man, the nominal caretaker of the graveyard, shrugs. "Maybe is, maybe ain't. Somebody comes and buries a body, I got no idea who either of them is."

A gun fires then. Followed by another and another, from somewhere deep in the desert. Topper sucks his teeth.

"Shooting all the time. Cain't tell you how many times I woke up to bullet holes in my walls." He nods toward my forehead. "I seen that scar before. There's a whore in town, woman wants to be a nurse; the doctor lets her work. She came and got me."

Blood dripping from the tips of my fingers, I stand in the depression I've dug over the last hour or so. All I can smell is the dirt; grave dirt, death-dirt. The crumbling dryness of bones and a pine coffin.

"But I ain't so sure I'm talking about y'all's brother."

"Marshal Brack," I say.

Can I see Palmer through the dirt? Like looking through an opium haze, through a blast of fog, but yeah, I see him. Sharp cheekbones, strong chin, penetrating eyes. Well-muscled arms and back, bald head, and just a wisp of a mustache beneath that nose that had been broken so many times.

"Y'all ain't looking any too good, boy," Topper says.

"Not feeling any too good," I say, trying to stand tall though all I want to do is lay in his grave and see my brother again.

Truth is, I should be dead already. The tumors are everywhere. Yet there is another truth: that I'll keep going -- damn the weakness -- until I stare into Marshal Brack's dead eyes.

In the moonlight, my badge winks like a cheap whore.

"Brack's badge looks just like that," Topper says.

"I know."

"Gold with a five pointed star. His name right smack in the middle. Don't say marshal or sheriff or nothing. Just his name…like that was the most important part." The old man licks his lips. "Brack's brother is a lawman, too."

"I know."

"Thought maybe you did." The old man shakes his head, heads for a shack standing at the edge of the bone yard like a lonely, sentinel, comes back a few minutes later with a small shovel.

"Got some digging tonight?"

"Ain't I?"

"About a half-mile?" I ask. "To Midway?"

"Yeah."

I toss him a double eagle. Surprisingly, he tosses it back and I nod as I climb from my brother's grave, setting my eyes on the faint glow across the flat nothingness. Then I try to climb into the saddle. My foot slips, my right hand loses grip. I hit the ground hard.

"Y'all need some help there, cowboy?" Topper asks, helping me back to standing.

I wave him away, but after failing twice more to mount the animal, I swallow down my meal of anger and embarrassment and let him shove me atop the horse.

He says something -- maybe a warning to stay away from Brack, maybe an apology for my brother's death -- but it's covered by the noise in my head, a buzz and grind, like a blacksmith's tool against raw metal, that I believe it the noise of brain tumors.

After coughing, after wiping my blood on the brim of my hat, I spur my horse and ride to Midway.

***

The windmills sound like metal soldiers. They bang and clang in the dark, their blades stumbling along in the weak breeze, water trickling through their pipes and into the tanks. Just barely, nearly hidden beneath the air's dirt smell, I get a whiff of water. It doesn't smell how Palmer said the Pacific Ocean does. It smells rotted, like water standing in the summertime.

This place is just a water stop. Halfway between Ft. Worth and the rest of the world. Trains come through, fill up their tanks, drop a few passengers, maybe pick up a few. That I can see through the haze of a hot summer night, Midway only has a few saloons, a general goods store, a few businesses. There's a doctor's office -- where they took Palmer.

There is more shooting, but it fades quickly. Beneath it, I hear a growling dog and laughing men. When I spot them, still winded from the few minutes I dug at Palmer's grave, they ignore me, riveted on the dog.

And the man tied to the dog.

Even from here, better than thirty feet away, all of them stink like a brewery.

"Get 'im, hoss," one man shouts. "I got another V-spot says that damn dog kills him."

"Lay it down, boy," another says.

One of the man's hands is tied to the dog. The other is free and he uses it to slash at the animal with a knife while the mutt snaps and claws at him. Both scream, both bleed.

A block further, I tie my horse -- a giant black I named after my brother -- and slip into a tavern. When I step in, when I close the door and they look at me, I feel the hatred. Not for me because they have no idea who I am, but for Me, the darkie with balls enough to come inside their lair.

"What the hell you doing in here?" the barkeep asks.

Opening my vest so they can see, I order a shot.

"That a badge?" an old man asks. "Guess they givin' badges to anyone." A few other men -- and not a few women -- mutter in agreement.

The bartender hands me a shot and I pay him, the coin disappearing into his apron. May not like the color of my skin, but he's damn sure interested in the color of my money.

"I'm looking for a fellow lawman." I don't speak loudly but my voice carries to everyone. "Marshal Brack. I got some troubles in my county, heard he might be able to educate me on how to handle it."

It burns the barkeep that I'm here. I can see it in his body language, in his eyes, hear it in the way he talks to customers, the way they talk to each other. Maybe the man at the piano plays louder. Maybe the couples dance more frenzied. Maybe the two hounds hunkered in the far corner bare their teeth.

Mostly, they're all looking at me.

Just like my family, my neighbors and friends. Just like those first awful days after Doc Henson's pronouncement. Everyone staring, no one with the right word or the right thought. There had been times I would startle awake and realize again, as everyone stood over me as though they were at a dead man's viewing, I was the only one sick; outcast by virtue of ill-health.

Everyone had been unsure, scared more for themselves -- for their doubt about their own mortality -- than for me or the cancer eating me from my soul out. Except my brother. From across the country, he had acknowledged my cancer, had shaken hands with the uncertainty of what time I had left. He didn't ignore the sickness, he just chose to not let it define us.

"Another, marshal?" The barkeep slides his sneer across the word 'marshal' until it sits like a pile of horseshit in his mouth. "Gotta drink or get out. This is a drinking establishment, don't allow no loitering."

With a shrug, I order another shot. "Nice little town you have here."

"We aim to keep it that way, too," a woman says. "We got laws here, marshal, and they keep to. Don't matter who you are: the President -- " She says it as though there were ever a chance that an American president would come from this pisshole. "Down to Topper."

"A decent old man." I knock back the first shot in a swallow. "He's doing some work for me."

"All that old coot knows how to do is dig graves."

I nod.

The woman clears her throat. "Anyway, we all follow the law."

"Well, that's good," I say. "Guess I wondering if I'm breaking one right now. Maybe one has to do with caste."

At home with family in Boston, I was an outcast by dint of being sick, here I am an outcast by virtue of being Negro.

"Marshal or not," the bartender says. "Watch that mouth, boy."

I nod. "I'll be out of your town soon enough. Just need to take care of a little business."

"With Marshal Brack?"

"Sure, that. Had some other business, too." I nod toward the cemetery. "Had to lay some flowers down."

"Who's grave?" the barkeep asks.

"My brother's."

The air thicks up. Might have been tense moments ago but that's nothing compared to now. Sweat covers their faces like late-night rain on Boston's dirty streets and maybe it's heat but maybe it's fear.

The dog squeals then -- a screech that fills the air like a tornado storm and reminds me of a man I once heard stabbed in the gut -- and I guess the tied man finally got the better of it.

The bartender nods. "Ol' Sherry'll have fresh meat for lunch tomorrow."

Someone laughs but mostly they're quiet. Their knowledge of who I am splits my skin open like a whip against my back. These people, the cardsharps and piano man, the dancing girls and fucking girls upstairs, they all understand now who I am.

"Y'all bringing us trouble, y'all get more than you can handle, boy."

"It's marshal," the woman said.

"Maybe it's sheriff," another man said. "Somebody elect you, boy? You got some county somewhere had enough niggers to elect one'a they own?"

"Cain't be a Texas county," some old man says. "We got enough sense to keep 'em outta here."

"Guess we showed that at Brack's trial, didn't we?" the barkeep says.

They want me to say something, to get angry or violent. But I'm quiet and my silence offends them. It also touches them with a finger of fear as a train slides through town. Maybe this one is Palmer's train. He had gotten himself a porter's job, running east out of San Francisco through Phoenix and Midway to New Orleans. Then northeast toward Boston.

"Making good time stop A few more days I'll be there stop."

He couldn’t afford the trip without working the train. Him working the wharves in San Francisco and me, dying in Boston, torn down by pain that clamped itself onto my bones and muscles, by bloody coughing that hadn't let me pass a decent night's sleep in months.

"Have a trial recently?" I ask.

Some of the customers frown, surprised. "Yeah," an old man says. "Ain't that why y'all here?"

"Here to see Marshal Brack. I got some trouble in my county. I want to ask his advice."

The bartender frowns. He doesn't believe me but doesn't know what else to believe. Eventually, after the piano player starts up again, after the dancing begins anew, after the headboards upstairs start banging against the walls again, he shrugs. "Don't know where he at right now. Try him tomorrow morning…at the jail."

"Good enough. I appreciate your help."

I toss Topper's double eagle on the bar and leave. Even with the music and dancing, with the gambling and drinking, even with all the noise, my boots bang against the dirty floor. A shuffling sound, I realize, because I'm limping.

But the sound reminds me of Topper's shovel, biting into the dirt.

***

Tomorrow.

The world is filled with tomorrows and none are worth a damn, at least for me. Tomorrow has some bit of hope attached. Things will be better tomorrow. I'll have a decent job and a good, solid wife. Tomorrow I'll have my health back or a brand new baby boy or a string of ponies.

Tomorrow I'll see my brother when he steps off that train.

Except all the tomorrows were long since smashed beneath a quiet doctor's words. And seeing Palmer tomorrow -- when he gets off that train -- had been stolen by two bullets from Marshal Brack's gun.

I leave the horse at the bar, knowing I can't climb up. There is so little strength left in my blood and bones that I torture myself with the thought of not even being able to lift my gun when I find Brack. And I wonder if the smell stalking the dirt streets of this nice little water stop, that rotten meat stink, comes from around me or inside me.

Coughing, bleeding through my mouth, I stop behind a two-story clapboard building. Topper said if Brack wasn't at the bar, he'd be here. Five windows across each floor and all are open. I get a whiff of perfume and of stew, of fresh bread. But I also hear the girls in those rooms and all the cowboys sweating over them.

I hear the violence, too. A slap, flesh against flesh, followed by a woman's moan.

"Why'd you do that?" Hers is a thin voice, full of the same begging and pleading I heard in my own voice after Doc Henson. "No more. I'll be good, Marshal, I promise."

"Damn straight you'll be good."

Then the sting -- again -- of flesh on flesh. No other sound like it in the world. A man might never have heard the sound before, but the first time he does, he knows it exactly.

Like the tumors. A man might never have had one, might never have seen one, but as soon as it explodes beneath his skin, as soon as it presses against his heart and lungs, he understands fully.

The woman yelps and falls to the floor. Or to the bed. Or against the wall. I don’t know exactly.

"Damn right y'all be good…many times as I want."

"Damnit, leave me alone." A scramble, then: "Don't touch me."

Then the moment of her independence is gone, crushed beneath another thump, flesh against quivering flesh.

From other windows: moans and pleas, negotiations, haggles and harsh kisses. A cavalcade of sounds, pinching and boxing my ears. Maybe there are soft sounds, too, whispered 'I love yous,' or promises of marriage, but they're covered by a tinge of possible violence.

A breeze carries the smell to me again. Dry like dirt or rocks, like a man's empty bones. Dry like the desert into which I've ridden, covering -- for the moment -- the other smell, the stench of sickness that clings to me like melancholia. And beneath all that, at the backdoor of this place, the stench is also stale sweat, dirty clothes, unwashed bodies. It is fetid sex and rancid food with blood as a garnish. It is the stench of booze both to get the women drunk and clean up after the late-night abortions.

I grab the latch, shove against the door. It doesn't move. I push, push some more, and still it doesn't move.

"A little weak tonight, honey?" a woman's voice asks. She opens the door, frowns.

She doesn't expect a Negro.

"We don’t serve men like you." Black bruises surround both her eyes, no doubt payment from a customer, and does she see the irony? She will make no money for a few days because of her blackness yet she will refuse my money because of my blackness.

When I flip the eagle toward her, it catches the candlelight, winks at both of us.

"I ain't fucking you for this."

I set a second and third coin on the sideboard next to us. "Still ain't getting none'a me."

"Not the taste I'm looking for. Brack."

Her breath stops, hanging in the hot air between us. Is that what my brother sounded like when he stopped breathing? "He'll kill you."

"Pretty close to dead already."

It takes another coin before she casually holds up four fingers while slipping out the door. Yeah, she gives me the answer I want but come the next hour, when Midway tears itself inside out looking for me, she'll be as indignant and angry, as righteous and blood-thirsty, as everyone else.

Just with a few more coins. Maybe she'll use the money to get out of town, to get back to her parents or her sisters or brothers, to get away from these men. But as I mount the stairs, headed for room 4, I see her through the window, handing a dark-skinned Mexican a coin. He shakes his head. She hands over another and he gives her package wrapped in brown paper.

She's not going back to Mama. She's going to find a dark corner that smells of piss and shit; she's going to spend the next few days believing she is with Mama.

I stop on the stairs, my head light, dancing like a drunken hostess. My hands shake, maybe fear of Brack and maybe the sickness, it's hard to know which. Regardless, my face is quickly covered by a little girl's tears, as it is most every night anymore.

I cry because I am dying. And because Palmer is already dead.

The whore doesn't even look when I enter. Maybe she's used to interruptions, or to multiple customers at once. Whatever, she leans to the side, allowing the man beneath her to see around her breasts and shoulders, allowing the man -- the marshal -- to see who has come for him.

When Brack sees me, sees a Negro not only in his town but in his lovers' suite, anger flashes in his eyes. "Fucking nigg -- "

He shoves her to the floor as he stands. He has no badge other than his member standing long and still hard. "What the hell are you doing here, boy? You best turn your ass around, get outta this room, mosey on down the road."

"In a while."

"In a while? You don't get out now, you ain't gonna have a while." His eyes narrow. "You know who I am?"

"I do." My gun pins him to the far wall, opposite side of the room from his Peacemaker, snug and terrible in its brown leather belt, hanging useless on the bedpost. I've no problem with shooting him, though I'd rather do it by hand, close and personal.

"Do you know who I am?" I ask.

"Some fucking idiot, bent on a hard death."

The woman, still pretty in spite of Brack's mileage, nods. "I do."

I frown. "What?"

A thin, pale finger traces a cross on her forehead. "I seen that before. He told me your old Master Thomas did it…in South Carolina. When you were little boys."

"To mark his territory," I say. "Like a dog pissing on a bush."

"Woman, shut the hell up." Brack takes a step, but my gun shoves him back. "Why you smiling? Get that grin off your face, stupid bitch."

She strides to him, her anger making his nothing more than childish petulance. "I told you to leave me alone."

He grins. "Oh, something bad's gotten into you, woman. After I've killed the nigger, I'll get some work done on you, too."

Rather than shrink from his venom, she spits in his face. "I knew you'd get here," she says to me. "Palmer told me." Her eyes cast down to the floor. "Told me you were sick, too."

"I am."

"So was my mother. It killed her slow. She hurt all the time. You?"

I nod.

"She wanted a quick death, but it didn't happen that way."

"Yeah, me, too."

Brack sighed dramatically. "I hate to break up this little…whatever it is. But we got a problem here." He clenched his hands to fists. "Listen to me, boy, you done gone a heap too far. But you shuck-ass outta here now -- and I mean right now -- I won’t kill you."

I ignore him, concentrate on her. "You're the nurse."

With an embarrassed nod, she says, "I hope to be. I like seeing babies born the best." She shrugs. "Don't know why I said that. I was there when Palmer died. He told me all about you. He said you'd come."

"How'd he die?" I ask, something thick and powerfully painful in my throat.

"Shot."

I shake my head. "How did he die?"

Understanding flickers into her face. "Died good. Managed to stay alive for three hours. Last things he said were all about you."

"Dying and he's worried about me."

"'Cause you're sick."

Brack nods, understand now exactly who I am. "The nigger I killed. The train porter." A laugh, severe and brittle, broke through the room. "Y'all cain't do nothing about that, I was acquitted."

"I don't really care about trials."

A corner of his mouth curls like a snake. "You'll care about this: I'm the law."

I let him see the badge. "So am I."

His laugh grows, the sound of a violent summer squall. "Ain't no darkie never been no law." When he smiles, his laugh dead, all I see is teeth, flashing like the dog near the livery. "And no whore ever gonna be a nurse."

"Whereas you're the marshal," I say. "You're in charge."

"Damned right."

"And you got a problem with uppity negroes."

"I got a problem with all negros."

I show him the badge again and after a few long breaths, he stares at me. "Where'd you get that badge, boy?"

"Found it on a dead man." I take a step toward him. I'm not going to shoot him, I want to taste his breath, feel his terror. I want to feel the moment his blood stops.

"My brother, motherfucker. So, tit for tat…I kill, you kill."

At the Midway stop, Brack had tried to barrel his way onto the train without a ticket, tried to push past Palmer. Palmer had refused to let the man on, had, in fact, shoved him to the ground.

"I'm not done killing," I say.

"Me, either." Brack snorts. "Should'a seen his face. No son of a bitch, sure as hell no son of a bitch oughta still be wearing chains, keeps me off the train."

Two shots to Palmer's head and I still don't understand how he survived even for a few hours. Brack's brother didn't fare so well. No extra hours or minutes. Two shots and he was done.

"Since you don't care for trials, we'll just handle this here and now," Brack says. Straightens himself, still naked, takes a step or two toward me. "Just gonna kill you straight out, leave you for the coyotes."

I raise the gun, gentle back the hammer.

Hesitation, but only long enough for a cough to wrack me, for me to lower my head from the hurt. The gun wavers, as I've always known it would, and he's on me.

No punches, no blows, no kicks. His bear paw wraps around the gun barrel, shoves it down even as he spins me around. Before my cough is over, I'm pinned against the wall, my right arm painfully behind me, my gun useless.

They'd put Brack on trial, these people of Midway. Put him on trial because the circuit judge had demanded it. But then had acquitted him.  

"He weren't nothing but a nigger. They gotta learn to keep their place."

"Guess maybe you are done killing," Brack says. His breath is hot, putrid on the back of my neck.

"Son of a bitch," she whispers, standing at the bedpost.

"Looks like you bet on the wrong horse," Brack says to her. "Don't worry, I'll have time enough for you, I'm almost done here."

As am I. I've never wanted it to end here, in a shitty room in the middle of a shitty water stop. But I can feel it in the air, can smell Topper's freshly turned earth. I'd hoped that earth was turned for Brack, but maybe I was wrong about that.

My legs are weak, as weak as my hands had been trying to pry Palmer out of the dirt. Brack still holding me, I slump, bang my face against the wall. Why resist? It's time to see Palmer.

Instead, there is a shuffle, a scuffle, and Brack slides to the floor behind me.

She stands over him, the tip of his own gun bloody where she laid it against his head. She turns away from me and I take my gun from Brack.

"Are you going to kill him?" she says.

I fire twice, as Brack had done on that train platform. He'd given our family two bullets and now I've given them back.

"They'll lynch you," she says.

I had expected Brack to kill me. No, untrue. I had expected to die on the trail from Boston. I had never expected to make it this far.

"I'm dead already."

"Like my mother."

I nod. "Slow and painful."

In the tiny room, with the moans of the bought all around us, the click of the hammer of Brack's gun is terrifyingly loud. She understands, this woman who has seen both death and life, that she will be the hero, that the town will hold her up as their savior for killing an uppity nigger who killed their beloved marshal.

But she also understands that she can be mine, as well.

It is time to see Palmer.

Copyright(c) 2006 by Trey R. Barker

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