I paused. ‘The sad ones don’t actually make me sad.’
‘You are just like Mother, in many ways.’
‘You’re not. And you’re not like Father, either.’
‘I am like no one.’
He said this casually, but it was the type of statement that eclipsed the conversation, killed it. He pulled ahead and I watched his back, and he knew I was watching his back. He stuck Nimble’s ribs with his heels and they ran off, with me following behind. We were only traveling in our typical fashion, at our typical pace, but I felt all the same to be chasing him.
Chapter 5
Short, late-winter days, and we stopped in a dried ravine to make up camp for the night. You will often see this scenario in serialized adventure novels: Two grisly riders before the fire telling their bawdy stories and singing harrowing songs of death and lace. But I can tell you that after a full day of riding I want nothing more than to lie down and sleep, which is just what I did, without even eating a proper meal. In the morning, pulling on my boots, I felt a sharp pain at the long toe of my left foot. I upended and tapped at the heel of the boot, expecting a nettle to drop, when a large, hairy spider thumped to the ground on its back, eight arms pedaling in the cold air. My pulse was sprinting and I became weak-headed because I am very much afraid of spiders and snakes and crawling things, and Charlie, knowing this, came to my aid, tossing the creature into the fire with his knife. I watched the spider curl up and die, smoking like balled paper, and was happy for its suffering.
Now a shimmering cold was traveling up my shinbone like a frost and I said, ‘That was a powerful little animal, brother.’ A fever came over me at once and I was forced to lie down. Charlie became worried by my pale coloring; when I found I could no longer speak he stoked up the fire and rode to the nearest town for a doctor, whom he brought to me against or partially against the man’s will—I was in a fog but recall his cursing each time Charlie walked out of earshot. I was given a kind of medicine or antivenom, some element of which made me glad and woozy as when drunk, and all I wanted to do was forgive everyone for everything and also to smoke tobacco ceaselessly. I soon dropped off into dead-weighted sleep and remained untouchable all through that day and night and into the next morning. When I awoke, Charlie was still at the fire, and he looked over to me and smiled.
‘Can you remember what you were dreaming of just now?’ he asked.
‘Only that I was being restricted,’ I said.
‘You kept saying, “I am in the tent! I am in the tent!” ’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘ “I am in the tent!” ’
‘Help me stand up.’
He assisted me and in a moment I was circling the camp on wooden-feeling legs. I was slightly nauseated but ate a full meal of bacon and coffee and biscuits and managed to keep this down. I decided I was well enough to travel and we rode easy for four or five hours before settling down again. Charlie asked me repeatedly how I was feeling and I attempted each time to answer, but the truth of it was that I did not exactly know. Whether it was the poison from the spider or the harried doctor’s antivenom, I was not entirely in my body. I passed a night of fever and starts and in the morning, when I turned to meet Charlie’s good-day greeting, he took a look at me and emitted a shriek of fright. I asked him what was the matter and he brought over a tin plate to use as a looking glass.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s your head, friend.’ He leaned back on his heels and whistled.
The left side of my face was grotesquely swollen, from the crown of my skull all the way to the neck, tapering off at the shoulder. My eye was merely a slit and Charlie, regaining his humor, said I looked like a half dog, and he tossed a stick to see if I would chase it. I traced the source of the swelling to my teeth and gums; when I tapped a finger on the lower left row, a singing pain rang through my body from top to bottom and back again.
‘There must be a gallon of blood sloshing around,’ said Charlie.
‘Where did you find that doctor? We should revisit him and have him lance me.’
Charlie shook his head. ‘Best not to search him out. There was an unhappy episode regarding his fee. He would be glad to see me again, it’s true, but I doubt he would be eager to assist us further. He mentioned another encampment a few miles farther to the south. That might be our wisest bet, if you think you can make it.’
‘I don’t suppose I have a choice.’
‘As with so many things in a life, brother, I don’t suppose you do.’
It was slow going, though the terrain was easy enough—a mild downhill grade over firm, forested earth. I was feeling strangely happy, as though involved in a minor amusement, when Tub made a misstep and my mouth clacked shut. I screamed out from the pain, but in the same breath was laughing at the ridiculousness of it. I stuck a wad of tobacco between my uppers and lowers for cushioning. This filled my head with brown saliva but I could not spit, as it proved too painful, so I merely leaned forward and let the liquid leak from my mouth and onto Tub’s neck. We passed through a quick flurry of snow; the flakes felt welcome and cool on my face. My head was listing and Charlie circled me to stare and ogle. ‘You can see it from behind, even,’ he said. ‘The scalp itself is swollen. Your hair is swollen.’ We passed widely around the unpaid doctor’s town and located the next encampment some miles later, a nameless place, a quarter mile long and home to a hundred people or less. But luck was with us, and we found a tooth doctor there named Watts smoking a pipe outside his storefront. As I approached the man he smiled and said, ‘What a profession to be involved in, that I’m actually happy to see someone so distorted.’ He ushered me into his efficient little work space, and toward a cushioned leather chair that squeaked and sighed with newness as I sat. Pulling up a tray of gleaming tools, he asked tooth-history questions I had no satisfactory answers for. At any rate I got the impression he did not care to know the answers but was merely pleased to be making his inquiries.
I shared my theory that this tooth problem was linked to the spider bite, or else the antivenom, but Watts said there was no medical evidence to support it. He told me, ‘The body is an actual miracle, and who can dissect a miracle? It may have been the spider, true, and it may have been a reaction to the doctor’s so-called antivenom, and it may have been neither one. Really, though, what difference does it make why you’re unwell? Am I right?’
I said I supposed he was. Charlie said, ‘I was telling Eli here, Doc, that I bet there’s a gallon of blood sloshing loose in his head.’
Watts unsheathed a polished silver lance. Sitting back, he regarded my head as a monstrous bust. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said.
Chapter 6
The story of Reginald Watts was a luckless one dealing in every manner of failure and catastrophe, though he spoke of this without bitterness or regret, and in fact seemed to find humor in his numberless missteps: ‘I’ve failed at straight business, I’ve failed at criminal enterprise, I’ve failed at love, I’ve failed at friendship. You name it, I’ve failed at it. Go ahead and name something. Anything at all.’
‘Agriculture,’ I said.
‘I owned a sugar beet farm a hundred miles northeast of here. Never made a penny. Hardly saw one sugar beet. A devastating failure. Name something else.’
‘Shipping.’
‘I bought a share in a paddle-wheel steamboat running goods up and down the Mississippi at an obscene markup. Highly profitable enterprise until I came along. Second trip she made with my money in her, sank to the bottom of the river. She was uninsured, which was my bright idea to save us a few dollars on overhead. Also I had encouraged a name change, from The Periwinkle, which I thought bespoke frivolity, to the Queen Bee. An unmitigated failure. My fellow investors, if I’m not mistaken, were going to lynch me. I pinned a suicide note to my front door and left town in one hell of a shameful hurry. Left a good woman behind, too. Still think of her, these many years later.’ The doctor took a moment and shook his h
ead. ‘Name something else. No, don’t. I’m tired of talking about it.’
‘That’s two of us,’ said Charlie. He was sitting in the corner reading a newspaper.
I said, ‘Looks like you’re making a go of it here, Doc.’
‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘You’re my third customer in three weeks. It would appear that oral hygiene is low on the list of priorities in this part of the world. No, I expect I’ll fail in dentistry, also. Give it another two months on the outside and the bank’ll shut me down.’ He held a long, dripping needle next to my face. ‘This is going to pinch, son.’
‘Ouch!’ I said.
‘Where did you study dentistry?’ Charlie asked.
‘A most reputable institution,’ he answered. But there was a smirk on his lips I did not care for.
‘I understand the course of study takes several years,’ I said.
‘Years?’ said Watts, and he laughed.
‘How long then?’
‘Me personally? Just as long as it took to memorize the nerve chart. As long as it took those fools to ship me the tools on credit.’ I looked over to Charlie, who shrugged and returned to his reading. I reached up to check the swelling of my cheek and was startled to find I had no feeling in my face.
Watts said, ‘Isn’t that something? I could pull every tooth you’ve got and you wouldn’t feel the slightest pain.’
Charlie’s eyes peered over the paper. ‘You really can’t feel anything?’ I shook my head and he asked Watts, ‘How do you get ahold of that?’
‘Can’t, unless you’re in the profession.’
‘Might prove handy, in our line of work. What would you say to selling us some?’
‘They don’t hand it over by the barrel,’ Watts said.
‘We’d give you a fair price.’
‘I’m afraid the answer is no.’
Charlie looked at me blankly; his face disappeared behind the paper.
Watts lanced my face in three different places and the colorful fluids came trickling out. There was some remaining in the head but he said it would go down of its own accord, and that the worst of it was passed. He extracted the two offending teeth and I laughed at the painless violence of it. Charlie became uneasy and retired to the saloon across the road. ‘Coward,’ called Watts. He stitched the hole closed and filled my mouth with cotton, afterward leading me to a marble basin where he showed me a dainty, wooden-handled brush with a rectangular head of gray-white bristles. ‘A toothbrush,’ he said. ‘This will keep your teeth clean and your breath pleasant. Here, watch how I do it.’ The doctor demonstrated the proper use of the tool, then blew mint-smelling air on my face. Now he handed me a new brush, identical to his own, and also a packet of the tooth powder that produced the minty foam, telling me they were mine to keep. I protested this but he admitted he had been sent a complimentary box from the manufacturer. I paid him two dollars for the removal of the teeth and he brought out a bottle of whiskey to toast what he called our mutually beneficial transaction. Altogether I found the man quite charming, and I was remorseful when Charlie reentered the office with his pistol drawn, leveling it at the good doctor. ‘I tried to bargain with you,’ he said, his face flushed with brandy.
‘I wonder what I will fail at next,’ Watts said forlornly.
‘I don’t know, and I don’t care. Eli, gather the numbing medicine and needles. Watts, find me a piece of rope, and quickly. If you get shifty on me I will put a hole in your brain.’
‘At times I feel one is already there.’ To me he said, ‘The pursuit of money and comfort has made me weary. Take care of your teeth, son. Keep a healthy mouth. Your words will only sound that much sweeter, isn’t that right?’
Charlie cuffed Watts on the ear, thus bringing his speech to a close.
Chapter 7
We rode through the afternoon and into the evening, when I became dizzy to the point I thought I might fall from the saddle. I asked Charlie if we could stop for the night and he agreed to this, but only if we should find a sheltered place to camp, as it was threatening to rain. He smelled a fire on the air and we traced it to a one-room shack, wispy cotton-smoke spinning from its chimney, a low light dancing in the lone window. An old woman wrapped in quilting and rags answered the door. She had long gray hairs quivering from her chin and her half-opened mouth was filled with jagged, blackened teeth. Charlie, crushing his hat in his hand, spoke of our recent hardships in a stage actor’s dramatic timbre. The woman’s oyster-flesh eyes fell on me and I grew instantly colder. She walked away from the door without a word. I heard the scrape of a chair on the floor. Charlie turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘Let’s keep on.’
‘She’s left the door open for us.’
‘There is something not right with her.’
He kicked at a patch of snow. ‘She knows how to build a fire. What more do you want? We’re not looking to settle down.’
‘I think we should keep on,’ I repeated.
‘Door!’ cried the woman.
‘A couple of hours in a warm room would suit me fine,’ said Charlie.
‘I am the sick one,’ I said. ‘And I am willing to move on.’
‘I am for staying.’
The shadow of the woman crept along the far interior wall and she stood at the entrance once more. ‘Door!’ she shrieked. ‘Door! Door!’
‘You can see she wants us to enter,’ said Charlie.
Yes, I thought, past her lips and into her stomach. But I was too weak to fight any longer, and when my brother took me by the arm to enter the cabin I did not resist him.
In the room was a table, a chair, and an unclean mattress. Charlie and I sat before the stone fireplace on the twisted wooden floorboards. The heat stung pleasantly at my face and hands and for a moment I was happy with my new surroundings. The woman sat at the table speaking not a word, her face obscured in the folds of her rags. Before her lay a mound of dull red and black beads or stones; her hands emerged from her layers and nimbly took these up one by one, stringing them onto a piece of thin wire to fashion a long necklace or some other manner of elaborate jewelry. There was a lamp on the table, lowly lit and flickering yellow and orange, a tail of black smoke slipping from the tip of the flame.
‘We are obliged to you, ma’am,’ said Charlie. ‘My brother is feeling poorly, and in no condition to be sleeping out of doors.’ When the woman did not respond, Charlie said to me he supposed she was deaf. ‘I am not deaf,’ she countered. She brought a piece of the wire to her mouth and chewed it back and forth to snap it.
‘Of course,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t mean any offense to you. Now I can see how able you are, how sharp. And you keep a fine home, if you don’t mind my saying.’
She laid her beads and wire on the table. Her head swiveled to face us but her features remained hidden in slipping shadows. ‘Do you think I don’t know what type of men you are?’ she asked, pointing a broken-looking finger at our gun belts. ‘Who are you pretending to be, and why?’
Charlie’s demeanor changed, or resumed, and he was once more himself. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘who are we then?’
‘Would you not call yourselves killers?’
‘Just because of our guns, and you assume it?’
‘I assume nothing. I know by the dead men following behind you.’
The hair on my neck stood up. It was ridiculous, but I dared not turn around. Charlie’s tone was even: ‘Do you fear we will kill you?’
‘I fear nothing, least of all your bullets and talk.’ She looked at me and asked, ‘Do you fear I will kill you?’
‘I am very tired,’ came my lame reply.
‘Take the bed,’ she instructed.
‘Where will you sleep?’
‘I will not. I must finish my work. In the morning, I will be mostly gone.’
Charlie’s face had grown hard. ‘This isn’t your cabin, is it?’
At this she stiffened, and did not look to be breathing. She pulled back her rags,
and in the firelight and lamplight I saw she had almost no hair on her head, only white tufts here and there, and her skull was dented, appearing soft in places, pushed in like an old piece of fruit. ‘Every heart has a tone,’ she said to Charlie, ‘just as every bell has one. Your heart’s tone is most oppressive to hear, young man. It is hurtful to my ears, and your eyes hurt my eyes to look at them.’
A long silence followed with Charlie and the old witch simply staring at each other. I could not, from either of their expressions, understand what they were thinking. Eventually the woman rewrapped her skull and resumed her work, and Charlie lay down on the floor. I did not climb onto the bed, but lay down beside him, because I was frightened by the woman and thought it safest for us to sleep close together. I was so weak that despite my uneasiness I soon fell away into a dream state wherein I envisaged the room just as it was, though I was standing by, watching my own sleeping body. The old woman rose and came upon us; my body began to fidget and sweat but Charlie’s was calm and still and the old woman leaned over him, opening his mouth with her hands. From the dark space in her folds there flowed a slow and heavy black liquid; this dropped into his mouth and I, not the sleeping I but the watching I, began to scream that she should leave him alone. With this the dream abruptly ended and I came to. Charlie was beside me, looking at me, eyes open though he was sleeping, as was his unnerving habit. Behind him sat the old woman, her bead pile significantly smaller—a good deal of time had passed. She remained at her table but her head was turned all the way around, looking in the far dark corner. I do not know what had caught her attention but she stared for such a time that I gave up wondering and returned my head to the floor. In a jump I was dead asleep once more.
Chapter 8
In the morning I awoke on the floor, and Charlie was not beside me. I heard a footfall at my back and turned to find him standing before the open doorway, looking out at the field before the cabin. It was a bright day and the horses stood in the distance, tied to the root of an upended snag. Nimble nosed about in the frost for a mouthful of grass; Tub shivered and stared at nothing. ‘The woman has left,’ Charlie said.