Drawn Up From Deep Places

A gruffer voice, from some further distance off:

“‘Course he don’t, Doc—don’t even know his own name, I bet. How long you think he’s been walkin’?”

The doc sighed. “Couldn’t rightly say, not without I question him directly. Help me shift him up on that table, will you?”

This last was followed by a vertiginous rush and roll of movement, balanced ineptly with a hand or two on every slack limb before he came crashing down again, his skull connecting table-top-wards with a sick little crack. And: “Not so hard!” the doc cried, fussily. “You’ll tear his scalp open, start him back to bleedin’—”

Then came the gruff voice once more, chiming back in—someone in authority; Sheriff? Mayor? Or both? Saying:

“You sure that’s all his blood, Doc? ‘Cause he don’t look too ‘sanguinated to me, from where I sit.”

He didn’t have to open his eyes to “see” the doc’s mouth crimp at that, unbelieving. “Well, I suppose I don’t quite take your meaning, Mister Marten. For pity’s sake, whose else would it be likely to be?”

“That’s the question, all right,” Marten murmured.

***

When he did open his eyes, some hours later, they came apart smoothly; someone had finally run a hot cloth over his face, paying special attention to all those varying nooks and crannies where the blood had collected most deeply.

He got up, still moving slowly—didn’t seem to move any other way, these days. He remembered how his pulse had once run so hot, his every movement a fever, resting heartbeat faster than a grouse across level ground. In the pier glass above the wash basin, he saw his own pale visage blink back at him: bushwhacker hair to below his shoulders, meticulously groomed in anticipation of whenever the South might rise again, plus a narrow blond beard and luxuriant moustachios, a pistoleer musketeer; sand-light eyes under similarly bleached lashes, almost yellow from some angles.

And: Why, Sergeant, he thought, I never looked to see you here, down amongst the dead men and the drifting trash. Not without your dear companion to spur you along in any necessary endeavors, at any rate.

Oh, but it was bitter, too, no matter how he might try to smile at it; the pain inside him felt abruptly greater than before, not that it ever grew small. So hollow with grief and hate and longing that it fair came off of him in waves, the way heat boils up from the veiny crust of some fallow field at noon. In that one dreadful moment he at last knew himself little more than a husk set endlessly roaming this world, always in search of one who fled from him (as youth flees from youth, or shadow flees from light), and might well have wept at such terrible understanding, had the desert not long since rendered him incapable.

But now there was a knocking at the door, impatient for entry; he stood there stock-still, unable to hide his true nature anymore. Spotting his guns slung over a chair by the bed-stead even as they kicked through, and knowing himself far too slow to reach them before they broke through their initial shock at seeing him laid thus bare, jumping forward all at once to take him down in a single sprawling pile.

***

Face-on, Sheriff Marten proved as bluff and craggy a Union bastard as any Reese’d ever plugged through the brain-pan, or anywhere else. Marten held up a broadsheet from which the same face he’d seen mirrored upstairs stared, wall-eyed; next to it his “friend” quirked just the slightest of smiles, as though thinking it a fine irony that they meet again this way.

“Your name Sartain Reese, same’s it says here?” Marten asked.

“Sartain Stannard Reese, yes.”

“Folks call you ‘One-Shot’?”

“They do.”

Marten’s deputy, a clean-browed young man whose eyes were masked by little round-lensed spectacles, put in, at that: “You really at Lincoln, Reese?”

“When I was fifteen, yes.”

“And I guess you was at Bewelcome, too,” Marten said. “With Bart Haugh.”

“ . . . Yes.”

“Uh huh. So where’s that sumbitch now?”

Reese glanced down, head hung low, ridiculous hair falling between them like a shield; replied, carefully—fighting hard to keep any further tremor from his already-shaky voice, which thankfully might be put down to him having been punched in both throat and belly during their earlier tussle—

“Don’t rightly know. We had a fallin’ out.”

“What happened?”

At this Reese looked up again, grinning against the pain, and tapped his chest one time above the breast-bone, neat and clean and hard, like knocking on a coffin’s lid. Saying:

“Well, as to that . . . he shot me, Sheriff, just about here. You see it, where I’m pointin’? Right through my Goddamned heart.”