of the dirt onto his feet.
Marion yelling, “I could kiss you, Nathan, tongue and all!”
Oatha limped out of the shelter as fast as he could manage into sunlight that passed blindingly sharp through the dead trees, Marion twenty yards away, moving with considerable speed though the spruce, Oatha following as fast as he could, shoots of pain riding up his legs, the muscle atrophied, already wearing away.
There was Nathan in the distance, standing with the shotgun beside a scrawny aspen, its bark chewed up, near cut in two by buckshot, Oatha scanning the woods for the fallen elk as Nathan raised his shotgun.
Marion’s head disappeared in a red mist and the rest of his body collided into a tree and pitched back as Oatha ducked behind a spruce, the trunk too small to shield him from a spray of buckshot, figuring if it came, he’d catch a pellet or two at the least.
“The hell you doin, Nathan?”
“Livin, brother. Livin.”
“You mean to kill me, too?”
“I mean for us to eat this fat son of a bitch, get back to civilization.”
Oatha peered through the branches, saw that Nathan was still standing above Marion’s headless frame, the breech of the shotgun broken over his forearm.
“Why you reloadin then?” Oatha shouted. He didn’t own a gun anymore, hadn’t in three decades, but Marion’s was sitting next to the snowbank inside the shelter—a Navy—and he had to bet it was loaded.
“‘Cause I don’t know if you the type a man to go along with somethin like this.”
Nathan was fishing in the pocket of his oilskin slicker, pulled out a pair of shells, Oatha thinking if there was ever a time to make a break for it, this was it.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nathan said. “I kilt him out a pure necessity. Was you the fat fuck, I’d a cut your throat long ago.”
“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat the flesh of another man.”
“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.
Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.
He heard the report before he registered the blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through him.
By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight distraction.
He fell through under the canvas as the crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.
The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down even as his hands trembled.
Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.
Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse vibrating his ear drums.
“They’s still time,” Nathan said. He was close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable to pinpoint his exact location.
“For what?” Oatha asked.
“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little Marion. You wanna live, don’t you?”
“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”
“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you dead.”
“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some the other way entire.”
“Guess we know which way you went, tramping through country like this without so much as a revolver.”
Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him, a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know about any of it?”
“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till now in your voice.”
Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.
“What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”
“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”
Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into a snowbank.
Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”
“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.
The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be called unpleasant. His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached Abandon.
“I’ve smelt this before,” he said. “Or somethin like it.”
“You’ve et man?”
“No, in a San Francisco nosebag.” He thought on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal. Smells like veal.”
“Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about to—”
“If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe. But I think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical conversation about what we’re about to do.”
They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.
Nathan flipped the ribcage. “I believe this is ready.”
The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.
Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when the door opened.
“You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,” she called out. “Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”
The man paused in the doorway, as if to appraise the vacant saloon.
“Not for nothin, but it’s twenty degrees out there, and the fire’s low.” The barkeep motioned to the potbellied stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at this closing hour.
The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot, limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.
As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it, she saw that his face was deeply sunburnt, the tips of his ears and nose blackened with frostbite.
“You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she said.
The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches, then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.
“One a these has money in it,” he said at barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey bottle, setting up his first shot.
“The hell happened to you?” she asked.
The man removed his slouch hat and set it on the barstool next to him. He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How much for the bottle?”
The barkeep leaned forward, her big black eyes shining in the firelight.
