Bullet Two

Two men came on horseback to the ranch house as the sun was setting. As they came across the land, they appeared to float quickly, like dust across the plains in front of a strong wind.

They knew nothing of the hat shop or any other specifics about the man’s deal with Dakota Inc.  They knew that Dakota Inc. had sent them to the man, but they did not know why.  It wasn’t their place to know.  They were instructed to speak little, and to ask no questions of anyone, not even of themselves.

The heads of these two men were like cannon balls. They leveled everything.  Heads full of metal, but they had very good eyes and ears.

Nothing rattled or clinked in their pockets.  Only the howls of coyotes and wailing were in the pockets of the men.  There was no money.  They carried no extra bullets, but only what they had in their guns.  Two pistols each, and each bullet was stuck in its chamber as snug as an egg in a robin’s nest.  A greedy man takes too many bullets, Leonard always said.  Dakota Inc. carried bags of bullets and bags of money, Leonard said.  Dakota Inc. was greedy.

The men were sent by Dakota Inc., but of course they were not part of the Company.  They were part of a group of men that Dakota Inc. hired for the job, and that group of men was led by Leonard.  Leonard’s men looked nothing like Dakota Inc.  They did not wear fancy black suits, and they did not jingle or shine or boast.

The men had come.

The men were there, at the ranch house.

Before, Dakota Inc. used to send their own men on errands like this.  That was back before the War ended; before the blue army from the east came swarming to the west like the locusts.  Now, Dakota Inc. couldn’t get away with things so easily.  They could not be so open. So they hired other men to go, and made for themselves very good alibis.

The two strange men got off their horses and walked to the door of the ranch house.  Their walking was as images floating across a wavy storefront window. And like those images, they approached silently, their boots scarcely making any noise upon the ground.

Lucy and mother saw them coming and knew there was nothing good about it.  The two women held each other until the men got to the door, and then mother let go and ran to the door to meet them…to charge them. Father was in the bedroom where he always was.  Jason was off in Shadow, working for the gambler, Van Carlo.

Lucy coughed and cowered near the tiny, lukewarm fire.  She was afraid, and longed to be back in Richmond.  But all she could think about was a room with a great hole in the ceiling and the moon looking down.  A hole made by a cannonball in the ceiling of the row house in Richmond.  It was all the same, she thought.  Everything was South Dakota now.  Everything was just a room with a hole.

Mother saw the men through the window as she approached the front door.  The men were very tall and lean.  So lean that they looked as if they might disappear if they were to turn sideways.  They were dark, too, with shadows falling all around their faces in places that most people did not have shadows.  As their faces moved the shadows remained, the darkness shifting inconsistently with the light.

They looked sick and diseased in their thinness and darkness.  Death was their disease, mother thought, but they did not die from it.

Mother knew instantly that she did not care for these men.  She cared nothing.  She would not care if they simply died in the doorway. She hated the men, and even though she knew that her hatred was just an impostor of strength, it made her feel better to hate them.

‘Yes, let them die in the doorway,’ she thought as she flung open the door.  ‘Let them die there and let their bones turn white and smooth until they look as flat as the land around us.’

But her heart fell and she knew it would never come to that.  She could tell that she stood no chance against these men.  Even if she fought them and got lucky and they died in the doorway as she wished, more would come.  There were always more men to come.  Just like in Richmond.

Mother stumbled back inside the house as they came for her.  She caught her balance, and then ran to grab a broom that was resting against the wall near the door.  She turned and waved the broom at them, as if to shoo them away.  They looked like animals and she would treat them like animals…rodents and critters.  Unwelcome by all, down to the very last person in the entire world.

But then, an instant later, she decided against the broom and instead grabbed the shotgun that was resting next to it against the wall.  They were not as small as rodents.  No.  They were the wolf or the coyote.  You did not use a broom on those animals.

She felt the thin, cold trigger on her finger.  The men moved quickly then.  For men such as these must move quickly to avoid the judgment.  Mother marveled at their speed, and she did not even have time to raise the gun up to her waist before one of the men snatched it from her hands. He took it and handed it to the other man.  The other man quickly put it somewhere inside his long, gray coat, and then continued moving forward, just as smoothly and easily as if the shotgun had never been there at all.

The two men turned mother around and roughly pushed her into the house.  Lucy tried to scream, but only her coughing came out, and this was a sound just as loud as and even more terrible than screaming.  She tried to stand, but in her fit of coughing her body convulsed, and she tumbled forward into the fire.

The fire.  Just moments before she had been kneeling in front of it, and with a coal had been drawing a picture of a little bird on thick paper.  But now she was face first in the fire, and when she pushed back, she burned her hands badly, and then she did scream.

She stood up quickly, shaking violently, and then fell to the floor, on top of the picture of the little bird.  The weight of her body and her dress smudged the picture and blurred the lines together and wrinkled the paper.

Lucy rolled over to look at the picture, and saw that it was ruined.  This greatly angered her.  She saw that the picture was crushed and smudged, and she screamed in rage.  Then she took the paper and threw it into the fire where it burned to ash, just before she fell back down on the rug.  The ash rose and floated away.  Flying, she thought to herself in the midst of her rage.  Flying beautifully, just like a bird should.

The men still did not talk or make much of any sound at all.  Even the sound of their boots on the floor was muted.  Their violence was their sound, and it covered up all other sounds around them.

Lucy was still screaming, but then the screaming turned once again to coughing, and mother was comforted just a little by this.  It meant that Lucy was still just dying from the cough and not from the fire.

Mother turned and beat her fists against the men’s coats.  She smelled the smell of duty on them.  It smelled just like it did in Richmond: a horrible, dusty, unwashed, nomadic smell, and all manner of the smells of nature.

Her blows fell with no more effect upon the men than the swish of a horse’s tail. One of the men made a casual sweep with his arm and knocked her down. As she fell she reached up with a clawed hand and tore something from the man’s chest.  It was cold and hard, with sharp edges.  Was it the man’s heart?  She closed her fingers around it, and then crashed onto the floor.  The cold, hard thing dug into her hand and drew blood, which seeped between her fingers.  She looked up at the man, and saw a hole torn in his vest just where his heart would be.  She waited for him to collapse and die, but he didn’t. Useless heart, she thought.  She drew the hard thing to her and decided she would keep it, and hide it from the man.  She would take something from him, just like he had come to take something from her.

“Where is your husband, woman,” the first man said.  He had the voice of a coyote: a soft rumble, followed by a howl. “He is in the bed,” the first man continued, answering his own question.  Then he continued speaking to mother:  “Help me find him.  I know he is in the bedroom.  We have come for him.”

Mother couldn’t think straight.  All she could do was scream, “He has no boots!”

The second man spoke, and he had the voice of an eagle:  screechy and abrupt, with the beginnings and ends of his sentences sharp like dagger points.

“We must take him.  He will go far.  South Dakota is very large.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh no!” mother screamed.  “Is it a dream?  Please tell me it is a dream!”

“It makes no difference,” the first man said.

             Mother staggered to her feet.  She moved away from them awkwardly, and stood next to Lucy who was on the floor near the fire, sobbing and coughing.

            “Then they sent you,” she said.

            “Yes,” the first man said.

            “And when did you know you’d be called upon to do this to us?”

            “We knew from the minute Dakota Inc. saw you get off the train.”

            Mother buried her face in her hands and began to sob.

            “Eyes.  Eyes everywhere.  I knew it!  How can a place so empty have so many eyes?  Eyes everywhere, where so many other things should be.” She fell to her knees, next to Lucy and continued to sob greatly.

            “I would take the noise of the cannon; the thundering noise and the heaviness of Richmond and the War.  But this quiet, and all of these watching eyes,” mother said.

            “It is true,” the second man said.  “We know what Dakota Inc. knows.  And yes, they have many eyes.”

            “Though perhaps they are not all in the right places,” the first man said.

            The second man turned quickly to the first man.

“I think you should be more careful with your words, Rifle,” the second man said.

            Mother shook her head and stared at the floor.

            “Done in,” she said.  “And not even by men.  At least the blue soldiers were men.  But these?  Dakota Inc.  They are trains on twisted tracks, casting huge, iron shadows.  And you they pull you behind them and us they run straight through.”

            Then she looked up at the men defiantly.

            “Don’t they?  Right behind them,” she said.

            The first man struck mother hard on the cheek, and the blow felt like the butt of a gun, not a hand.

            “We will not muzzle the ox, woman.  But we could.  Do not speak to us as though we have no choices,” he said.

            “You need to stop speaking now, Rifle,” the second man said sternly.  “Let’s get the man and go.  Leonard is not patient these days.”

            The first man nodded. His gaze shifted to the hallway and the open bedroom door at the end of it.  Then, in unison, both men began to move down the hall. The first man stopped and turned back to mother.  He marveled that she was still conscious after the blow, though her mouth was bleeding and she was not clearheaded enough even to sob anymore.

            “Don’t worry, woman,” the man said.  “Leonard will soon forbid Dakota Inc.  It is possible that your son will be left alone.”

            The second man’s eyes widened in disbelief. “I will have to tell Leonard about this, Rifle,” he said.  “You have been,” he paused, trying to find the words. ”Irresponsible with Leonard’s voice,” he finished.

            The first man pointed to the room.  “Go get him,” he demanded.  “And let me speak for Leonard.”

            “I think you should speak less, or tell Leonard to come himself, next time.  You sound very much like Rifle to me,” the second man said, spitting on the ground and giving the first man a suspicious look.  Then he turned and went to the bedroom.

Lucy stood quickly and ran out of the house.  At this point the sun had set and darkness had fallen, and Lucy was quickly lost in it.  Even the sound of her footsteps seemed to vanish only seconds after she was through the front door.

            Darkness had come with them, Lucy thought as she plowed forward into the freezing cold night.  And the darkness was following closely behind, as a dog follows its master.  Except these men were not the masters.  Dakota Inc. was, and Dakota Inc. meant to be master over everyone and everything.

‘But is it really this way?’ she cried in her mind.  And if it was, did it have to be?  All her memories of Richmond were fond ones.  All of them, in spite of the War.  And by the same way she survived Richmond and the War knew that she could survive South Dakota, too.  More than that, it was her only choice, for it was the only way she knew how to survive.

            Lucy stopped abruptly and knelt over coughing and panting and shivering.  There was blood in her mouth and she could taste it.  She looked all around and saw nothing but the faceless black of the wilderness night.  There were no bright windows from the row houses or other buildings, or the fires of the burning street lamps.  Richmond was never this dark.  Even after the blue soldiers came, there were fires burning everywhere at night.  But in South Dakota there seemed no bright side at all for her imagination to seize.

She turned back and saw the faint glimmer of the fire through the front door of the ranch house.  Reluctantly and weakly, she made her way back to it.  When she got to the house she stopped and did not go inside, preferring to linger at the window, trying to stifle her coughing but at the same time knowing that it didn’t matter.  The men were not there for her.  And even if they were, they did not have to take her anywhere to have her.  It was the same with mother.

***

            The first man, Rifle, watched the second man (who was named Fire) pull the heavy man from the bed.  The heavy man gave them no resistance, but he did not willingly rise get to his feet.  He rolled from the bed and landed on the floor with a meaty thud, and there he lay like a corpse.  The man called Fire had to beat him a few times to get him to move on his own.  Finally the heavy man got to his knees, but after that he could rise no further. He just stared at the ground breathing heavily and said nothing.

 Then Rifle turned back and looked down the hallway at mother, who was on her knees and holding her face, dazed, and looking at the floor.  He tilted his head.  Slowly, he walked towards her.  He reached down and put a hand gently on her head.

            “I’m sorry, woman.  It…” he paused, looking uncomfortable.  “It’s not me, you understand.  The Strangers….”

            Suddenly, behind him, he heard running footsteps.  He turned just in time to see Fire rushing at him with his gun drawn.  Before Rifle had a chance to move, the butt of Fire’s gun came crashing upon his head with the force of a falling brick.

            Rifle’s hat came off his head and he collapsed to his knees next to mother.  She looked over at him and saw that he had a bald spot in the middle of his head, surrounded by long, stringy gray hair, thick and tangled as old twine in some places.  The bald spot was white as the moon.

            “Rifle, when you speak you will speak only one thing!” Fire said.

            Rifle groaned and nodded, and rubbed the top of his head.  The bald spot was starting to bleed and swell.

            “Y…yes.  I will speak only one thing,” he said.

            “Say the one thing!”

            “When do I get paid?” Rifle said.  It came out as a confused whimper.

            “And what is the answer?”

            Mother held her hands over her ears and then began to sob again, loudly.

            The man called Fire was obviously annoyed at this.  He put his gun directly over her head and fired.  It was loud and startled her, and she sobbed more quietly.

            “S…soon,” said Rifle, still dazed.  “Soon.  There is nothing that is not soon.  And the payment will be worth the work, according to Leonard.  That is the answer.”

            Fire stood up straight and put his gun away somewhere inside his long, gray coat.  He nodded. “Good.  Now get up, Rifle.  Let’s get the man and go.”

            Rifle nodded and put his hat gently back on his head.  Standing, he followed Fire reluctantly to the bedroom.  There were shuffling sounds, and soon they emerged, carrying father.  And though father was not dead, he hung limp just like a dead man would hang, with stunned and pointless eyes, between the two strangers.

            “Please do not take my husband,” mother whispered as the two men walked past her, with father, and out the door.  But they did not hear her.

            As soon as the men left, Lucy ran inside the house and clung to mother and they cried out in front of the dying fire together.  The men rode and rode into the night, barely thinking about the ride.  These days, they never thought about the trails that they knew so well.  The moon fell upon the wide plains before them and made them and the land around them as pale as the moon itself, so that South Dakota resembled the moon.

            When mother and Lucy stopped crying the house was utterly silent.  The sound of the horses riding into the South Dakota eternity had long since passed away.  Everything was quiet, exactly like it had been for weeks before the two strangers ever came to them.

***

 

            It was a wide open space, with just a few trees around.  The sky was a bright, yet dismal gray, as were the flat, seamless clouds which covered it.  The light in the sky was strange.  It was both natural and unnatural at the same time.

It was morning of the next day, and the Stranger called Rifle sat by the campfire.  The collar of his long gray coat was up around his ears and his hat was pulled low.  He wasn’t eating, even though it was breakfast time in the camp.  He and Fire had had a long ride last night, and he knew he should be hungry.  But he did not feel like eating.  He did not feel well at all.  The ride had been a cold one, he thought, and the top of his head throbbed from where Fire hit him with the butt of the pistol.  Rightly hit him, Rifle thought to himself.  He deserved to be hit.  He’d been hit before, but why did it hurt so much this time, he wondered.  Why so much more than usual?  And with the swelling, he felt like his head was two sizes too big for his hat.

So he didn’t eat.  He just poked disinterestedly at the campfire with a stick.

Rifle glanced up and looked at his bleak canvas tent that was set up near the fire.  The tent was empty last night because he and Fire were in the saddle.  The front of the tent was open, and the heavy canvas flaps were waving and making thick popping noises as the wind blew them around.  Inside the tent was a bedroll that was still tied, and a small pillow was tucked inside it.  It had provided no cushion last night, for he did not lay on it.

Rifle could see the edge of the bedroll near the opening of the tent, and he realized that he was tired.  He thought he would very much like to go inside the tent and unravel that bedroll.  But it wasn’t time for that now.  Even though the ride was long, and they rode all night, it was now daylight and Leonard said there were things to do.

There were always things to do.  Things like the thing he and Fire did last night. Those things were tiring, though, Rifle thought, and he wished he could sleep a little.

Rifle turned his head and saw Fire near a tree a few yards away, speaking with Leonard, who was the leader of the Strangers Gang.

The other Strangers were sitting around the campfire, but unlike Rifle, they were all eating.  They were the tools of Leonard, and, like Rifle and Fire, had been given new names.  They were given these names so that they knew exactly how to answer Leonard and just what to do when they were called.  The names of the other Strangers were:  Blanket, Hammer, Wagon, Rope, and Fence. And though they resembled men, Leonard did not consider his Strangers human.

Including Rifle and Fire, there were seven Strangers.  Eight, if you counted Leonard, but none in the gang ever did.  Leonard wasn’t a Stranger like they were Strangers.  Not really.  Leonard didn’t seem to be anything real or familiar.  He only had the outline of a human being, which was barely a resemblance.  He was more of an experience than he was a man.  He would sometimes say he was the mask of South Dakota.  A human-like image that represented all of the things the Strangers did in South Dakota.  But that was as close to being a man as he would admit.

Rifle had been doing the things the Strangers did for many years now.  He knew well of them, and they were like the things that he and Fire did last night to the man and his wife and sick daughter out near Shadow.  They were usually dreadful things.

Yes, Rifle thought, Leonard was a sort of semblance of human form, like a mask, but nothing more.  And the other Strangers weren’t much closer, all of them having forgotten the names they were born with.

 Except for his left eye, Leonard kept his head and face covered completely with several dirty gray bandannas.  There were always gloves on his hands so you could not see his fingers and a gray hat always on his head.  His long, gray coat always covered him from his neck to the soles of his boots.  There were no holes in the coat.  Any holes were quickly patched, and there were many patches, but no holes.

Rifle looked at the other Strangers around the fire.  He thought to himself that it was good he was not hungry because breakfast time was almost over, and he would not have enough time to eat now anyway.  The Strangers finished up their breakfast and then all there was left to do was to urinate on the fire.  One of them stood up to do just that, and the others filed away to get things ready for the day.  None of them spoke.  They were not permitted to speak, except to ask only one question, and they were also allowed to answer their own question.  That question was: When do I get paid?  And the answer was always the same.  The answer was:  Soon, and the payment will be worth the work.

If there was a second person in charge of the Stranger’s gang, it was Rifle, and then came Fire.  Of the Strangers, only Rifle and Fire, whom Leonard referred to as his other voices, were allowed to speak and think beyond that one question and one answer.  South Dakota was a large place, and Leonard needed extra voices sometimes, and Rifle and Fire were them.  But Rifle and Fire had to keep their words and thoughts within boundaries, which was why Rifle was hit in the head last night.  He had strayed beyond the boundary.

At that moment, near the campfire, Rifle felt uncomfortable because he knew that the one eye of Leonard was on him.  The one eye he kept uncovered for seeing; the eye that was always bleeding, just a little.  Rifle pulled his collar up a little higher and his hat a little lower.  He was very tired.  The man named Holland was fat and heavy and dead weight on the horse last night, and Rifle was exhausted. For a man who had nothing, Holland Credence was very heavy.

Near the tree, Fire was telling Leonard about the things Rifle said last night to the woman, as well as something else.  He told Leonard that the boy, Jason, was still alive, and that it was true that this boy had been speaking and working with Van Carlo, the gambler, and the gambler liked the boy very much.

Leonard nodded when he heard this news.  All along he had thought that this was true.  When he went and spoke with Dakota Inc., and when they told him that they wanted the man named Holland as payment for the debt, he was suspicious that Van Carlo was in town and that he had a new telegraph; a telegraph from the East, not from South Dakota, and a telegraph that Van Carlo very much trusted.  He was the son of the man, Holland.  This boy had seen the War in Richmond, and it was rumored that he’d even killed one of the blue soldiers.

It was the whole story, Fire told Leonard.  There was nothing more Dakota Inc. knew.  Leonard nodded again.  He always told his Strangers to make sure they got the whole story when dealing with men like Dakota Inc.  Make them tell you everything, he said.

Leonard and Fire walked over to Rifle, and the other Strangers gathered around and stood behind them.  Leonard’s bleeding eye, all that could be seen from beneath his bandannas and his hat, began to bleed a little more as he approached.  This happened sometimes, especially when it came to times of punishment.

Punishment.  What Leonard liked to call “things”.  He never called punishment by name.  It was just things.  But Rifle knew what the things were.

Inside his head, Rifle heard Leonard’s voice.  It told him that he was indeed a good boy.  He was strong and useful.  The voice praised Rifle’s ability to ride the horse well, and his skills at tracking and shooting. Yes, you are a very good boy, Rifle, the voice said.  But there are things needed to make you better.

Rifle stood up and faced Leonard.  He looked uncertain.  Nervous.  He didn’t bother to hide it.

“When do I get paid,” Rifle said, his voice trembling.

“Oh, hopeful Rifle.  No more speaking.  And no more answers except for the things,” Leonard said.

Rifle looked at the ground and nodded.

Leonard reached out and caressed Rifle’s cheek with his thickly-gloved hand, then placed his hand on Rifle’s shoulder.  “If you want to be human in South Dakota, dear Rifle, then let’s talk about it.  You can be human, you know.  There is no law in South Dakota or in the Stranger’s gang against it.  But what we need here is perspective.”

He put his hand under Rifle’s chin and raised the chin so that their eyes met.

“Think of your life as a rod. At one end there is your birth.  Then, there is some blood.  Then your death at the other end,” Leonard said.  “So, Rifle, what am I to you then?”

“You are South Dakota,” Rifle said, closing his eyes.

“I am the rod, Rifle,” Leonard said.  “Everything is on it.  Your birth, death, all the blood, the man named Holland, the tents and the trains. Without me…” he brought his fingers together then pulled them apart, spreading them. “…poof, no more trains.  No more South Dakota.  No more you.”

“Yes, Leonard.”

“You see?”

“Yes, of course, Leonard.”

Leonard nodded.  “Good,” he said.  Then he gestured for all the Strangers to sit around the campfire that was now only smoke, because it had been urinated on.

“Let’s talk about this boy of Van Carlo’s,” he said.

Leonard and Fire spoke for a while, and the others, including Rifle, only listened.  They agreed that the boy was necessary, and that he was a very, very good boy.  If Van Carlo liked him so much, there must be something too him.

“And what about Dakota Inc.,” Fire said.  “They will want the boy, too, eventually.”

“Eventually,” Leonard scoffed. “They are imbeciles.  They would have asked us to take the boy in the first place, instead of the fat man, if they were not.  And they should have paid us more and we should have gone and left the fat man and taken the boy.  The boy, who used to be from Richmond but is now from Van Carlo; and those are the worst kinds of boys in South Dakota.”

“Rifle and I spent some time in Shadow, in secret,” Fire said.  “We heard some things about Van Carlo’s telegraph…Jason is his name.  He fought the blue soldiers during the War, even though he was only very young, just a boy.  He can ride and shoot well, and he can track.  He will go to the mountain if we give him time.  He will take the high ground, and it will be difficult to bring him down.”

Leonard’s eye began to bleed a little more.  It was a steady trickle now.

“There is no higher ground than my head in South Dakota,” he said.

There was a long pause at the campfire.  They all poked at the wet fire pit with sticks, except for Leonard and Rifle, who simply stared straight ahead.

“I will lead us to the mountain,” Rifle said, finally breaking the silence.

Leonard turned to look at Rifle, and Rifle thought he saw just a hint of uncertainty in the bleeding eye.  And suspicion.  The trickle of blood from the eye formed a little pool just underneath the eye, and this pool began to soak into the bandannas. Then Leonard blinked the eye over and over until it was all red.  This was a way that Leonard would scream sometimes.

Rifle stood.  “I am ready for the things,” he said, looking first at Fire, then at Leonard. “Then we can go and find this boy.  Even if he is on the top of the mountain, we’ll get him.”

“He won’t be like the fat man, Rifle,” Fire said, while Leonard looked on in interest.  “He can shoot, so it was said in Shadow, and he can track very…”

“He won’t be the one tracking,” Rifle interrupted, giving Fire a stern look.  “And so what if he can shoot?  We can all shoot.  It’s who shoots first that matters.”

“He will be able to see quite far up there,” Fire said, shaking his head.  “And you had trouble with the woman, Rifle.  What will happen at the top of the mountain where there are no walls and he can see all the way to the ocean?”

Leonard stood up and turned to face both men.  From somewhere underneath his long gray coat he pulled two rifles out and put one under the chin of each of the two men.  The rifles were like appendages to him, and the barrels were as cold as icicles.

“That’s enough,” he said.  “This boy, this new telegraph of Van Carlo’s is the worst kind of boy in South Dakota.  He’ll see nothing up there but South Dakota, and it will be as faceless as the walls and ceiling of his bedroom.”

He took the rifle from underneath Fire’s chin and placed it next to the one under Rifle’s chin.

“And you, Rifle,” he said.  “Your tongue is a wild horse. Fire is right. You had trouble controlling it for the woman.  What will you do when you face a boy who actually knows what he’s doing with a gun and a horse?  They say this boy has killed a blue soldier, even before he finished school.  You’ve never even killed a soldier, Rifle.”

Rifle did not reply.  He turned to look at his bedroll inside the tent, with the flap of tent still moving in and out like a tongue on the wind.  It was time for the things, and he wished he had something to dream about.  And then he remembered that he did.

“But we can help you, Rifle,” Leonard said.  “And I will let you track down this boy, even on the mountain, because I can help you.  But we cannot leave until after.”

“After, then,” Rifle said.

Then the rest of the Strangers came at him slowly with the sharp half of a broken horseshoe.  It was time for the things.  Two of the Strangers, Blanket and Fence, took him by his arms and led him to the tent.  Then they opened his bedroll, laid him down on it and began.  Rifle closed his eyes and started to dream about new things.

Leonard stared at the tent and saw Rifle’s boots sticking out of it.  He heard the men doing the things to Rifle.  He looked at Rifle’s boots, not with love, but something like it.  It was kind of like yearning….a yearning because Rifle was a very good boy, and could shoot and track very, very well, better than them all.

But then, Leonard thought about Van Carlo’s new telegraph.  What would happen if they found him on the mountain?  Perhaps he would prove to be a very good boy, too, if Van Carlo hadn’t brainwashed him fully.  And if he was a very good boy, then there might not be any more need of Rifle, and then Leonard could stop yearning.  He hated to yearn, anyway, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped.  And he hated that, too.

Deep down, Leonard hoped everything they said about this boy was true.  He hated Van Carlo, but he understood that the gambler had something of wisdom, and if Van Carlo liked the boy, then there was something to him.

This boy…what other rumors had he and Rifle heard about him?  Fire told him.  He could ride a horse well, with sharp movements, and up the sides of trees.

“Just like you, Leonard,” Fire said.  “I even heard that he killed that blue soldier with only a knife, while the soldier had a Spencer.”

He sounded like a good boy to Leonard.  As good as Van Carlo, even.

          “You’re not a very good gambler, Jason.” Van Carlo said.  It was early in the morning.  “I don’t think you’d ever make it on this side of the table.  Your family is starving, and you still don’t take any more from me than you did when you first started.”

            “I’m sorry,” the boy said, staring out the window of the casino.

            “And I’m angry about it.  Which is strange, I know.  I should be happy to have such a fool for a telegraph.  Maybe I’m the fool.”

Van Carlo turned away from the boy and looked at his chips.  He was on a break between games, and the other gamblers had stepped away from the table.

            “I don’t think you are a fool, Van Carlo” the boy said.  “You’re the only one who can look out this window and see things as they really are in South Dakota.”

            Van Carlo turned to look at the boy again.

“Boy, you are hard to read.  I look at your face, and all I see is nothing.  Maybe you would make a good gambler after all,” He paused for a moment.  The he said, “There is only one more thing you need.”

The boy looked out the window again, burying his head behind the velvet curtain. “What is that?”

            “To take more money. Until then, you are no gambler.  I don’t know what you are.”

“Mm,” the boy said. He was barely paying attention to Van Carlo’s words.

            Van Carlo shook his head.  “Dead.  Your family.  That’s what they are. At least they can claim it.  But you, I have no idea.  You come to work, but you don’t make any money.  You have a face fit for anything, but you do nothing with it.  Truly, you are a strange boy.”

            “Mm,” the boy said again.

            The boy turned to the side and the lethargic light from the window struck his face, making half of it gray and overcast.

‘He looks like a man today,’ Van Carlo thought.

The boy sighed and turned completely away from the window.  The velvet curtain fell across the panes and the streets of South Dakota were blacked out and only the dim of the casino remained.

“What’s going to happen to my family, Van Carlo?”

Van Carlo sighed.  “They are just a number in a book in some Company office in Shadow, Jason,” he said.  “That’s Dakota Inc.  You warned your father about them?”

“Yes.”

“Stuck in the drawer, he is,” Van Carlo said.  “I’m sorry.”

The boy nodded.  Then he didn’t say anything for a long time.

“What’s wrong?” Van Carlo said.

“I don’t want to say, Van Carlo.  You will think I am a fool.”

“I already think that,” he said.  “All boys are fools whose fathers are fools.”

“Then you know what’s happened to my father.”

“Yes. They have come and taken him away.  Now only your mother is left.  She has to be both your mother and your father now.”  He took a chip and spun it.  “It is a hard place to be in, especially in South Dakota.”

“Taken him away?” the boy asked.  “That’s not what I meant.  He is in bed, and he never leaves.”

Van Carlo looked very sad.  “No. They’ve taken him, and he is dead today.  So what I’m saying is…” he stood up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “…to take more money.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  I don’t go anywhere to spend it.”

The boy turned away.  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

Van Carlo sat down and picked up his cards.  “You don’t have to believe me.  Pretty soon it will be time for you to get out of here, and then you’ll go home and see.  When the daylight has broken and the gray clouds are bright enough for you to see the road, you’ll see.  Just as sure as you saw the blue general that they said would never come.  Dakota Inc. does not hide such things.  They make them plain for all of us to see.”

“Then I prefer to wait until then,” the boy replied.

“Suit yourself.”

The boy looked at the empty seats across the table.  The other gamblers were still taking a break.

“I wish I could read faces so well…like you Van Carlo,” the boy said.

Van Carlo shrugged. “Don’t do this to yourself.  This was your father’s doing.  None of this is your fault.”

“Yes, Van Carlo.”

The boy arrived home early the next morning, just as the sun was rising.  Van Carlo had sent him on several long errands after their conversation the night before, and he was tired.

He didn’t skim for himself any of the money Van Carlo sent with him to buy things.  He still didn’t feel entirely comfortable with taking money from the gambler. He didn’t fully understand Van Carlo and it didn’t seem right to take money until he really knew who he was taking it from.  For the time being, he was content to listen to Van Carlo and to take the little money he gave him outright at the end of the night.

When the boy arrived back at the ranch house, he was eager to talk to someone about all of the things Van Carlo had told him. But he did not want to talk with father just yet.  He preferred mother, or even better, Lucy.  He wanted to see what Lucy thought, but he could not find her.  He could not find mother, either.  A note on the stove told him that they had left early that morning for Shadow and would not be back until later in the afternoon.

There was a smoldering fire in the fireplace in the living room, and the boy put a tin cup of water on some of the burning coals.  It was just a small, useless fire, not dangerous. It was barely hot enough to heat his water.

He put a little tea in the water after a while and sat in a chair near the window and began to drink it in unhurried sips.  He heard a shuffling in the bedroom and what sounded like the whisper of two men talking to each other. One of the voices sounded like father’s.  Then, after a moment, he realized the other voice was father’s, too.  Father was talking to himself in whispers.

The boy went to the back of the ranch house to his parents’ bedroom.  He found father standing with his ear against one of the thin walls.  There were cracks in the wall, especially around the windows, and the boy could feel a little of the cold wind of South Dakota on his cheeks as he entered the room.

“What are you doing, father?” the boy asked.

“Oh.  Jason.  You’re back from work.”  His father turned to him.  “How’s work going?”

“Fine.”  The boy sat down on the bed.  “Are you okay?”

Father smiled.  “Oh, yes.  I’m just listening to the wind.  South Dakota is really screaming out there today.”

The boy nodded.  “Yes, it is.  It screams down from the mountain.  I hear it on my way into Shadow, screaming in my ears.  It’s like that a lot around here.”

Father sat on the bed next to him.  “Yes, well.  We’ll get used to it.”

“We got used to the muskets.”

Father nodded.  “And the soldiers out in our streets, playing like children away from their parents.”

“Which ones?”

Father shrugged.  “Ah.  Who can remember anymore?  Blue ones, gray ones; I don’t know.  I think it was the blue ones.”

“You think so?”

“I remember thinking they looked fat in their uniforms,” father said. “Or maybe that was just my own refection in the window.”  He smiled thinly.

The boy smiled thinly, too.  Then he got up and went to the window and looked at the mountain in the distance.  He sipped his tea, but it was already cold, so he put it down on the window sill and left it alone.

“Maybe you should be listening to South Dakota through the walls of your shop, father.  Instead of the bedroom,” the boy said meekly.

Father’s smile faded quickly.

“I don’t like the shop, Jason.  It’s more comfortable here.”  He looked up.  “Though, it seems like this ceiling gets an inch or two lower every time I lie down on the bed and stare up at it.”

The boy looked up.  “It looks all right to me.”

“Yes, well…it isn’t.  And the ceiling in the shop is even lower.”  He shook his head.  “I have to duck to walk in there.  And I can’t hear the wind through the walls there; too many hats lining them.  It looks the same as the shop in Richmond.  I like it better here in the bedroom.”

“I don’t understand.  What’s wrong, father?”

Father shook his head.  “I just think that people are comfortable in their own hats.  They only see a stranger in a new one, when they look at themselves in my mirrors.”

The boy pressed his ear to the wall next to the window.

“Is South Dakota speaking to you?” father asked.

The boy listened for a moment longer.  “No,” he finally said.  “I just hear the wind, and feel it, too.”

Father nodded.  “Sometimes it speaks to me.”

“What does it say?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

The boy pressed his ear again.  There was only wind.  But there was a lot of it.

“Are you sure you are hearing the wind, father?  Or is it something else.”

“No, it’s the wind speaking.  And I’m listening closely.  I’ve got some thinking to do, it seems.”  He tapped his temple and winked.

“The wind told you that?”

“South Dakota told me that.”

The boy removed his ear from the wall. “I thought you said the wind spoke to you.”

Father shrugged.  “Same thing.”

There was a long pause between them.

“I think you should go to the shop today, father,” the boy said, finally.

Father stood up and went back to the wall, and pressed his ear against it.

“Not now, Jason,” he said.  Father listened to the wind for a very long time, and whispered to himself.

Jason watched him for a few minutes, then left.  But every so often he would go back to the bedroom and check on him.  One time as he stood in the doorway watching father, the wind blew so hard it rattled the window.  The boy felt the draft on his cheek from across the room.  Father seemed to enjoy the feel of the wind in the room.  He stood there caressing the glass of the window and smiling a smile that reminded the boy of his dead aunt in her coffin.

The boy started to say something about the cold, but then he didn’t.  It didn’t matter.  He turned to go, but then father spoke to him, and he stopped.

“I think I’m going to sell the shop, Jason,” he said, still caressing the window, his ear still against the wall.

The boy nodded, but his eyes were wary.

“To whom?”

“They call themselves Dakota Inc.  They have their business in Shadow.”

“What kind of business?”

Father turned away from the wall and looked at the boy.

“The helping kind.”

“Who do they help, father?”

“People.  People like us.”

“You mean people from the East.  People from Richmond, not their own kind,” the boy said with suspicion.

“People from away, yes, Jason.”  Father went to sit on the bed with his back to the boy.

“They are, um…sympathetic to our situation.”

The boy walked over and stood in front of father. His boots made a hard, cold sound on the floor, and for the first time that morning the boy realized that except for the wind, he had noticed no other sounds in the house.

“Sympathetic?”

“That’s right.”

“About our situation?”

“Yes.”

“When did you talk about our situation with these men?”

Father shrugged. “I didn’t.  They knew much about us, though.  Our names, how much I had spent on the business, how much stock I had invested, our lack of savings, where we lived, how in debt we are…all down to the number.”

The boy did not speak for a moment.  He turned and looked out the window, then back to father.

“Do you want me to make you some coffee?” the boy asked.

“No.  I’m not thirsty.”

“Are you cold.”
“No.”

“I will go have some coffee, if that’s okay.”

“Fine,” Father said.  “I’m going to lie down for a while.”

            The boy went to make some coffee in the dying fire in the fireplace.  When he returned to the bedroom, he found father under the covers and rolled to one side.  His unpolished boots were on the floor pushed neatly together at the end of the bed.

            “I have heard of these men, Dakota Inc.,” the boy said, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. “I have heard about them.  I have seen them, too.  They are always out, whether it’s early in the morning or late at night, or if it’s clear or raining.  They are always on the streets. They have eyes like fish that never blink.  They always carry a lot of guns.  Three apiece, I think.  Seems a strange way to run a business, being out in the street all the time.  More like the soldiers in Richmond than businessmen.”

            Father sat up in bed and rubbed his face.  Then he looked at Jason.

            “We put our guns away in Richmond because our cause was lost.  Maybe theirs isn’t.  I don’t know.  But I do know that I have made up my mind.”

            “Father, I don’t think they understand Richmond, or us.  I’m not even sure they understand South Dakota.  Maybe we should talk to someone who does.”

            “Like who?”

            “Like Van…” he stopped, remembering Van Carlo’s admonition to not tell his father he had said anything about Dakota Inc.  But it was too late.  His father knew.

            “Van Carlo.  The gambler?”  Father did not look pleased.

            “Why not?  He’s lived here for many years.  He knows this place, and he knows Dakota Inc.  He says to stay away from them.”

            “He knows how to take a fool’s money, is all,” Father said.  “And maybe I am a fool.  But I’d rather give my shop to Dakota Inc.”

            “But Van Carlo says…”

            “Your friend Van Carlo speaks a lot of words for a gambler,” Father said, waggling a finger angrily at the boy. “Stray words cost a gambler money, I know that much.  And either he doesn’t know this and is a fool or he does and is an imbecile.”

            The boy stood up.  “That’s not true, father!  Van Carlo…”

            “You are a dullard, boy, with an imagination like a jar of grease.  You believe in the perspective of a man who has been sitting in one place so long that he can’t tell his body from his own chair?”

            “He’s not like that, father,” the boy said.  He sat back in the chair and hung his head.

            “How dare he judge men in the saddle when all he does is sit around all day.  Tell me, Jason, does Van Carlo’s chair take feed?  Is it in need of a grooming now and then, or a soft stable and a fresh drink of water?” He lay back down in the bed.  “Van Carlo is a fool and his employer is sloth.”

            The boy shook his head.  “Van Carlo’s job is to read faces.  And he knows the faces of Dakota Inc., and you should have nothing to do with them.”

            Father sighed, and the boy could see the condensation from his breath rise from his mouth and then quickly dissipate into the draft in the room.

            “If you weren’t practically a grown man, I’d strike your bottom, boy, like I used to,” he said. “But you are a man. Though no less a dullard, that is obvious.”

            “I’m sorry, father.  I didn’t mean to make you angry.”  The boy pulled his hat low over his eyes.

            “You used to be such quiet boy, but South Dakota has given you a big mouth.  Go spend some time against the wall over there, and leave me alone.”

            “Yes, father.”

            There was quiet between them for a long time.  Father’s breathing became regular and the boy realized he was asleep.  The boy put his empty tin cup of coffee on the floor and stood.  He put his ear to the wall and his hand on the window and listened to the wind outside, and felt the cold wind on his cheek, and his fingers became numb against the window.

After a moment, he heard the thrumming of horses in the distance.  Father sat up in bed slowly and slung his legs over the side.  He rubbed his face and looked at the boy.

            “They are here,” he said.  “Hand me my boots.”

            The boy’s face went white and he pulled his ear quickly from the wall and took his hand off the window as though the window had been a hot stove.  He looked at father for a moment, then went over and picked up his father’s boots and handed them to him.

            “Who’s here?” the boy asked.

            “Dakota Inc.”

            Father stood up and brushed his wispy gray hair back.  He bent over and pulled his boots on, and then he pulled up his suspenders over his shoulders with his thumbs.

            “What do you want me to do?” the boy asked.

            “You might as well come to the door with me,” father said.  “They know you are here.”

            Jason followed father out of the bedroom.

“Just make sure you stand behind me,” father said, opening the front door.  The men were approaching, just three black dots beyond the fence in the distance, getting larger.

They came up the road, which blended in so well with the rough and patchy land around it that you could hardly tell there was a road there at all. Or maybe all of it was a road, and there was no land.

They looked like very hard men, the boy thought to himself, when the men finally arrived at the ranch house.  No sense of humor to them.  No smiles.  Lots of teeth, yes; but no smiles.  They looked like black statues on their horses, and they stayed on their horses the entire time. The boy and father stood in the doorway, the men and their horses stood in front of them.

            Father spoke and the boy stood behind him in the doorway and said nothing.  He just stood there and kept his face very still, just like he did when he was working for Van Carlo at the casino.

            The icy sun was behind the men from Dakota Inc. and their shadows fell forward.  One of the men moved his head and the shadow of his very wide hat fell upon the boy’s hand in the doorway.  The boy pulled it away quickly, instinctively, as if pulling it away from a flame.  He drew back a little into the house.

            The men stood in a line, their horses only inches apart from each other.  They were wearing black suits of fine cloth, which had many extra shining things hanging from them.  They all had guns, three apiece.  Two pistols which they wore high at their sides in shoulder holsters, almost heart-level, and a rifle, which was in a long, leather holster and stuck out of the back of their saddles, making the horses look like they had a horn coming out of their backs.

            Both the men and the horses seemed unhurried and calm to an unnatural degree. They looked like men who had utterly no concerns.  Other people had problems, but not these men.  Their problems had become other people’s problems a long time ago.  They were men who were able to look out at a crazy world and realize that none of the craziness had anything to do with them.  They were not even themselves.  Everything about them, from their shoes, to their faces, to the guns at their waists, all belonged to other men. They could never be wrong. They could never be right.  They could never be anything that wasn’t passed off to the world with a shrug.

            When the three men spoke, they spoke together, so that the words came out in one heavy, layered voice.  Their words were not meant to be disputed.  They asked for no advice.  They invited no questions.

            It was very simple, the men said.  They would loan father a certain amount of money to keep the shop going.  In return, he would pay them a monthly amount and interest, as well as a percentage of the profits.  Payment had to be made at the end of every month, except for the first month, which the men said he did not have to pay.  It was a grace period.  After that, under no circumstances could the payment be deferred.

            There was no better deal to be found anywhere east of Richmond, the men told father.  If father didn’t believe them, they invited him to go to Shadow and ask around.  He would see that many other proprietors had made the same deal with Dakota Inc., and they were all doing quite well.

            “Will you send people to come buy my hats,” father asked.

            “We will try to send them,” one of the men said. “But this is not Richmond, and it is certainly not Richmond before the war, as you were accustomed to it.  We, unlike your old country, cannot force men to do things they do not wish to do.”

            “Well, I hope they come then,” father said with a sigh.

            “You do indeed hope, and you will have plenty of that in time, slave owner,” one of the men said.  “You refugees from the east are rich in hope.  But money works better in South Dakota.”

            “I did not own slaves,” father said.

            “No?  Sold them, perhaps?” the man in the middle said, tightening the black gloves on his fingers by pulling at them at his wrists and looking disinterested.

            “So, do we have an agreement, Mr. Credence?” another man asked.

            Father nodded.  He reached out his hand, but the men from Dakota Inc. did not return the gesture.

            “That will do,” one of the men said, turning to the boy hiding in the doorway.  “Don’t you think so, boy?”

            The boy was looking at the ground, and pulling slowly back into the house like turtle into its shell.  At the mention of his name, he looked up, and then nodded slowly.

            “Obliged,” the men said, tipping their hats.  Then they turned and rode off.

            “What do you think it would be like to fight them, father?” the boy asked, watching the men ride past the fence.

            His father sighed and turned to go back into the house.

            “Like they said, this is not Richmond.  But if that’s what you want, then you do it.”

Father disappeared into the dimness of the house, but the boy kept on staring out the front door until the men from Dakota Inc. disappeared beneath the horizon.

Father went to lie down in his bed.  Two days later, he still hadn’t gotten out of bed, and the boy and Lucy and mother realized he never would.

***

The weeks went by and the cold of December became even colder in January.  Christmas was a ghost, and noiselessly slipped by.

During the winter, Lucy developed a cough.  There was no money to pay for her to go see the doctor in town, and the doctor wouldn’t have seen her anyway because father was late on his payments to Dakota Inc.  The doctor did not see patients who were late on their payments to the Company.

No longer just a clearing of her throat several times a day, the cough soon became something of an inseparable part of Lucy’s personality; like a second language to her.  It frightened the family, especially mother, who knew the sound of that particular cough.  She had heard it from some of the gray soldiers during the winters in Richmond, before the blue general put an end to the war once and for all.  It was a cough that went beyond life and body.

***

One night, the boy was in his drafty bedroom, lying on his bed.  He stared up at the gray moon through the hole in the ceiling.  The moon looked ill.  Sick moon, he thought.  Sick like Lucy.  The wispy clouds galloped around it like ghoulish horses on a haunted merry-go-round.

The boy found himself missing Richmond.  He turned and looked at the candle on the table next to his bed and he remembered something Lucy said.  She said that Richmond, when looked at from South Dakota, or from any great distance during the war must have flickered gently and gracefully like the flame of a candle.  It was pretty, even endearing somehow from that distance.  But up close it was a nightmare:  cannon balls falling on houses; houses falling on houses; horses with shiny, bristling soldiers trampling houses.  But still, they boy missed it.

Father’s shop in Shadow was now gone, taken by the Company men who called themselves Dakota Inc., and father, for all practical purposes was gone, too.  He just stayed in his bed all day, not eating, and taking only a little water.  Mumbling something about a play he was hoping to write.  Richmond, he’d say.  He’d only ever wanted to write about Richmond.  And one day while sitting by his father’s side, the boy shoved a pencil and paper under his father’s nose as the old man lay covered in the bed.  “Write!” the boy screamed.  “If you want to write something of Richmond, write it then,” he screamed.

But father refused.  “Richmond doesn’t sell anymore,” he said, and rolled over.

As the boy lay on his bed staring at the moon through the hole in the ceiling, the clouds drifted away from it, the ghoulish horses galloping off in single file.  And then there was only the moon.

If this moon, this South Dakota moon could talk, what would it say to him, the boy wondered.  And would he be able to understand it?  After all, he was just a dullard, with an imagination like a musket spiked into the ground.