nessman and I’ll weigh it careful and give you my de-
cision in a day or two.”
The corners of her mouth lifted slightly.
Not long after, they saw the others returning, the
men tucking in their shirts, adjusting their hats and
gunbelts.
“Well, that was right pleasant,” said Zeb when they
reached the wagon. “You got any more wheels need
fixing?” He had the grin of a jack-o’-lantern.
“We’ll be getting on now,” Ellis said, giving the
girls a hand up in the wagon.
“Say, I don’t suppose in your travels you come
across a man named William Sunday?”
Ellis ran the name through his mind. He’d heard of
William Sunday. Probably everybody west of the Mis-
sissippi and east of it, too, had heard of William Sun-
day. And if memory served, he’d once seen him drink-
ing in a saloon in Fort Sumner.
“No, I don’t recall running across anyone with
that name,” he said. “He a friend of yours?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, good luck in finding him,” Ellis said, and
snapped the reins over his two-horse team. It felt
good to be back on the move again and not broke
down in the middle of nowhere and at the mercy of
strangers. He determined that from now on he’d carry
a shotgun with him just in case. He could use it for
future negotiations.
The Stone brothers felt as weary as children who’d
played all day and decided that before continuing
their search for William Sunday, they’d lie down and
take themselves a little siesta in the grass. Their blood
felt warm and lazy, their thoughts slow as some old
river, the sun settled nicely on their closed eyelids.
Life for the trio seemed as though it could not get
much better.
In a way, they were right—life couldn’t get much
better and was about to get a whole lot worse.
17
He lived alone. Old shack so far-flung and off the
beaten track you had to be lost or unlucky to come
across it. Nobody knew his name. Hell, he didn’t even
know his name. The sound of his own voice startled
him. He disdained the company of strangers, kin,
anybody. He subsisted on squirrel, prairie dog, ante-
lope, occasionally deer, and even rattlesnakes. In a big
heavy Bible set on a plank shelf above a cot, half its
pages gone—used for firestarter or outhouse paper
when nothing else was available—there was a name
written just inside the front cover: genius jackson.
The shack was rough-hewn logs with a leaky
shake roof, oilskin in place of where window glass
once was. A heavy oak door that used to stand as the
front entrance to a Negro sheriff’s office in Okla-
homa was fastened by leather hinges and ill fitted; its
history of how it had found its way all this distance,
long forgotten. It had the goddamnedest fanciest lead-
glass doorknob that ever could be found in the whole
territory.
Blackened-tin stovepipe poked through an outer
wall like an arm crooked skyward. Off to the rear of
the place rose a rusting pyramid of cans. And farther
out, up a worn path of grass, an outhouse leaned as
though ready to fall over, as though the rotation of
the earth had shaped it over time. The original owner
had been wise enough to place it downwind of the
shack.
Genius Jackson wasn’t any more sure of when he’d
arrived at this place or how than he was his name or
any of his other personal history. Didn’t matter to
him. Nothing about the past mattered anymore than
did the day not yet arrived. It was enough just to get
along hour by hour, to get past the pain of old bones
broke how many times he didn’t know, mostly from
being tossed off horses into fences, down ravines,
onto rocks. Fist fights and such. Horses were the god-
damndest cruelest creatures ever was made other than
humans and he had no truck with either now that the
old days were behind him.
Still, he dreamt of such horses, and it frightened
him: being bucked off in dreams, stomped, bit, kicked.
His fear of horses was only matched by his fear of
fire. He’d been in several: old houses, a warehouse,
once, prairie fires. All of which he did not like to
think about, but whose memory came unbidden to
him as unexpected as did his dreams. He hated sleep-
ing and he hated being awake. He hated being old and
he hated being forgetful and he reckoned he hated
about every goddamn thing there was to hate in life.
He learned to eat crows and turkey buzzards in ad-
dition to the badgers and prairie dogs and snakes
whenever such availed themselves to him. His habit
was to sit all day in the yard with an old single-bore
.50-caliber rifle—his acquisition of which was as much
a mystery to him as everything else—and wait for
something alive to present itself. He was an uncanny
shot with crack good sight in one eye. He didn’t re-
member how or where he’d learned such a skill as
