Nearby a shotgun roared again and buckshot showered the Zephyr, clinking and clanking like hail. Roonie wailed and the two of them ran the rest of the way down to the woods. They crawled through the furry limbs of the pines until the hillside could only be seen through gaps in the treeline. Once there they threw themselves beneath a tree to wait and look.
“You see anything?” asked Roonie softly.
Connelly shushed him. Roonie took a breath, then dove across to another trunk to get a better look. As soon as he did the shotgun went off again and Connelly heard shot biting through the trees. Roonie fell behind the trunk and Connelly thought him dead until he saw the man’s face lift up, his cheeks covered in tears, hands shaking uncontrollably. Connelly motioned to get down again and he did.
They stayed still. They heard the crunch of dirt and gravel, a rain of loose earth tumbling down the slope. Nothing for a while. Then Connelly thought he heard soft branches being bent or needles being crushed, the whisper of a footfall. A dove grieved somewhere, but he was not sure if their stalker was calling for aid or if it was as simple as it sounded.
Roonie rose to a crouch across from him. Connelly shook his head no. Roonie nodded, pointing down the slope, and in return Connelly motioned to get back down. The little man shook his head, still trembling.
A branch snapped. Close by, too close, no more than a dozen yards. Something stopped moving and Connelly withdrew farther into the branches.
A gout of yellow-white flame roared up into the air a few feet away and Connelly knew the man had been closer than he had ever guessed. Roonie leapt up, startled like a partridge by the warning shot. As he tried to sprint away the other barrel fired and Connelly saw the little man’s side dissolve and his cheek burst open. He tumbled in a heap, thin lines of smoke rising into the air, a puppet whose strings had been abruptly cut. A voice cried out in triumph.
“Hot damn, I got you!” shouted the sheriff’s voice. “I got you, you big son of a bitch, I told you I would! I told you I would!”
The sheriff skipped over to the fallen man with the spryness of a child and looked down on the corpse. The mere action of murder made his face more boyish than it had ever been. He smiled and put a foot under it and turned the body over. Then he grunted in surprise.
“What?” he said.
Connelly sprang out from the cover of the tree.
He carried him deep into the forest, a quarter mile at least. It was hard going. The sheriff was not a big man but he was not light either, and the odd times that he resisted slowed Connelly considerably. But he kept on.
Connelly dragged him far away from his town, far away from any roof or hut or home. He did not cry out. Connelly had seen to that, having broken his jaw at the onset. When he judged he had carried the little man into the heart of the forest he sat down and went to work.
He broke his knees, his shins, his feet and hands. He broke his elbows and his wrists and put fractures in his pelvis. Connelly could not say for sure but he felt he broke the little man’s eye socket and maybe a few of his ribs.
Bones crushed to dust, grinding in the sockets. The little man writhing under his grasp, unable to strike back. To relish it was an evil thing, he knew, but he found resisting it difficult.
As he worked Connelly whispered, “This is the world I make for you. This right here. This is the world I make for you.”
He did not kill him. He would not give the sheriff the dignity of murder.
When he was done Connelly was covered in sweat from his toil and he turned and continued down the gentle slope of the mountain. The sheriff whimpered behind him, his limbs shuffling in the pine needles. Connelly did not look back. Soon the whimpers and noises faded and he could not hear anything at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Connelly walked for more than a day. He guessed he could not go back as all the woods close to the jailhouse were probably hunting ground, and besides, he knew if he followed the slope long enough he would eventually find water.
He did not realize how weak he was until three hours in, when he stumbled and fell down a gully. He twisted his ankle and tried to pry a dead branch off a tree for a crutch but found he had lost most of his strength. The starvation and sickness and lack of water had taken their toll and then some.
He saw and heard no animals, no other people. When the dawn rose it wove a silver forest world of mist and gray-green undergrowth. The air was fresh and thin here, perhaps due to the elevation, but Connelly was no longer sure where he was. Perhaps New Mexico, maybe Colorado. Maybe it was no state at all, just an empty land with no allegiance or creed. As all states were, if one walked long enough.
The silence was unbearable and soon the cold matched it. As the day wore on the frost wormed into his bones and his shivering made every step uncertain. He was still barefoot. He had done his best to keep his feet uninjured but now he could barely feel them.
He looked up as he stepped across another small gully and saw a thin, gray stream of smoke rising into the sky. He studied it and guessed the distance and changed his course.
He came to a rocky stream and examined the smoke again and decided they had to be camped next to the river. He stripped and washed himself first and drank deep, the water so cold it stung his lips and face. Then he limped along and saw the smoke was coming from a crumbling chimney whose snout poked above the tops of the trees, just off the river. He heard singing and he looked and saw there was a woman washing clothing in the water. She was old with skin like molasses and her voice warbled like a man playing a saw. She lurched back and forth between the stones, scrubbing down her laundry, and as Connelly approached she glanced up and grinned hugely.
“What you doing there, dead white boy?” she called.
“I’m not dead,” said Connelly.
“Sure you are. Just don’t know it yet.”
“Ain’t really a boy, neither.”
“Well, what you going to do to prove me wrong? Take your pecker out and wave it at me? That’d raise a few eyebrows, white fella doing that in front of a colored woman, wouldn’t it?” She cackled gaily.
Connelly leaned on his crutch and hobbled closer. The old woman stood up and looked him over.
“You seen some shit, white boy,” the old woman said.
“I’m… I’m hungry, ma’am. I don’t mean to interrupt, but—”
“But you going to anyways.” She sighed and clucked her tongue. “Oh, well. Set you on down by the bank there and try not to die anytime soon. I won’t have no corpse-water dirtying up my stream. You just set there and wait.”
He did so. He looked behind and saw a wide, low cabin hidden back in the trees. Its windows danced with the warmth of a hearth fire and on its porch sat three empty rocking chairs. A winding path led up through the trees to the front door. At the mouth of the path was a pile of loose odds and ends, shoes and fishing poles and even cheap jewelry. He listened to the old woman sing and toss her clothes into a wicker basket. Sometimes she would peer into the stream and dart her hand in and fish out some piece of junk, a shiny bauble that was no more than trash. Then she would caw happily and bring it over to the pile and carefully place it on the mound.
“You live here by yourself?” said Connelly.
“With my sisters,” she said. “I’m the only able one, though. They old. They old as hell. You know?”
“Sure.”
She laughed. “You don’t know.”
“Sure.”
