Abandon (17 page)

When it opened, a man with disheveled sandy-blond hair and thick spectacles grinned at them. He wore a brown sack coat and matching trousers, and his enormous mustache was freshly combed and waxed. The scent of soap emanated from him, the sour spice of whiskey on his breath.

Over Russell’s shoulder, Ezekiel saw Mrs. Ilg carrying a pot from her cook-stove to a candlelit dinner table already sagging under its load of steaming graniteware.

A fire blazed in the hearth and balled-up pages of newspaper lay around the base of the spruce tree; their gifts—mostly homemade crafts—were lined up on the makeshift log mantel.

“Merry Christmas, Zeke. Stephen.”

“Tell me you ain’t fixin to eat, Doc.”

“Yeah, in about five minutes. Something wrong?”

“I really hate to do this to you—”

“What?”

“You ain’t roostered, are you?”

“Had a nip of whiskey in my coffee a bit ago.”

“A nip.”

“I ain’t drunk, Zeke. What’s the problem?”

Mrs. Ilg walked over, her silvering hair pinned up, purple evening gown flowing across the dirt floor in her wake.

“I’d rather say in private.”

“Merry Christmas, gentlemen,” Mrs.Ilg said.

Ezekiel and Stephen tipped their hats.

“Ma’am.”

“Ma’am.”

“Well, do we have time to eat first?” Russell asked.

“ ’Fraid not.”

“What’s going on here, Zeke?”

“We’re having to borrow your husband. I apologize for the poor timing. It can’t be—”

“I’ve been cooking all morning. Can’t it wait just an—”

“Honey, if they need me now, they need me now.”

“Doc, we’ll be waitin for you at the stables. Best bring your possibles and your rifle. Don’t dawdle. We gotta light a shuck on this.”

The livery had been erected a quarter mile north of town to save the residents from the per sis tent stench, but the wind, when it blew, tended to sweep in from the north, so it carried the odor of shit and trail-worn animals right up Main. In the boom years, the stink was eye-watering, even on the south end of town. But on Christmas Day in 1893, you couldn’t smell the stables until you saw them.

Ezekiel struck out with the preacher and the doctor, the sheriff astride a moon-eyed bay gelding he’d purchased in Silverton that fall. They rode through Abandon and up-canyon toward the Godsend, the horses sinking to their knees, the riders’ heads bowed, hat brims shielding them from the heavy slanting snow.

At the turnoff to Emerald Lake, they picked up the only tracks they’d seen—a ten-burro head-and-tail string led by two horses.

“Can you think of a reason somebody’d be quick-freightin up to the Godsend on Christmas when the mine’s shut down?” Russell asked.

“Sure can’t. And from the look of it, these poor animals are carryin some load. Probably sinkin past their stomachs.”

They rode on, the sides of the canyon closing in, the blizzard diminishing their world until they could see only the tracks they followed. Another mile through deepening powder and Packer’s twenty-stamp operation appeared in the distance, a multilevel mill built into the back of the canyon, flanked by the mine office, lower boarding house, and a blacksmith shop.

“Strange not to hear those stamps,” Stephen said.

They stopped twenty yards from the mill, Ezekiel, already cold, beginning to shiver. “That’s a concern,” he said, pointing to where the tracks continued on, not toward the mine, as he’d anticipated, but up the south slope of the canyon.

“You don’t reckon Oatha and Billy were foolish enough to drive that pack train up to the Sawblade?” Russell said.

“Well, unfortunately it looks that way, don’t it?”

“That’s desperate behavior. I don’t like taking the dugway to the Sawblade in July, when the snow’s gone.”

“The hell they got to lose? They murdered five people last night.”

“I’m fair tired of this snow, and I don’t relish the chore it’ll be getting our horses up there.”

“Well, Doc, I don’t, either. I’d rather be back with Glori at the cabin, sittin by the fire, sippin whiskey, but that don’t appear to be in my immediate future.” A great wedge of snow slid off the mill’s sloped roof. The horses startled.

The preacher said, “Y’all think that slope could slide on us?”

“Yeah,” Russell said. “I think it’s entirely possible.”

The three riders followed the tracks away from the mill. At the canyon’s end, they paused, gazed up the smooth white slope, Ezekiel counting five switchbacks before the burro trail vanished into the roiling snow-swollen clouds.

“Two thousand feet up. Madness, Zeke. Pure madness.”

“I know it, Doc, and you’re slick-heeled. Hope that cremello a yours is clear-footed.”

“Don’t worry. She may be light in the timber, but she’s lady-broke and she’s got bottom.”

Ezekiel spurred his horse on and the riders began to climb.

Ezekiel rode point, holding his saddle horn, head lowered to the storm. The other men didn’t see it, but he smiled, even more immersed in the moment than when he’d emerged onto the roof of Emerald House several hours prior and witnessed the slaughter that had occurred there.

This last year, he’d existed in a state of numbness so complete, it felt like living death. In bed with Gloria, it would often be well past midnight, occasionally dawn, before he drifted into sleep, so intense were the memories of those exuberant, passionate, bloody Leadville years, his mind blazing back at full bore, trying to unblur the faces, invoke the familiar voices, and tears coming when he did, because they brought with them the fleeting sensation of freedom and his old swagger and the limitless potential every morning had once afforded him. He’d never lain in bed in Leadville, obsessing on the past. It had all been vivid rushing present. Fuck even the future.

One night, he’d recall a week spent specking with the boys near Crested Butte. Another, the rowdy drunken revelry of a Fourth of July celebration. Then he’d imagine himself sitting at a corner table in some bucket of blood, three in the morning, brimming with whiskey as the calico queens hung on his shoulders, watching the paling demeanors of his opponents on the final hand, when he pushed forward his pair of nickel-plated Smith & Wesson revolvers with their mother-of-pearl grips, upping the pot for the flush he held.

Sometimes, he’d just lie there retrieving faces—whores he’d felt tender
toward, men he’d fought, men he’d loved, killed, buried—savoring them all, every face, repressed scent, lost sound, with a sweet and piercing nostalgia.

Gus, especially Gus, kept him up nights, Ezekiel’s lips moving in the dark as he spoke for them both—father-son conversations of God and love, guns and horses. Once Gloria had woken, asked, “Who you talking to, baby?” And he’d lied, told her he must’ve been whispering in his sleep. He loved his wife beyond words, but Gus, only Gus, had filled that vacancy, destroyed the angry, restless boredom left in the wake of his outlaw days.

But this Christmas, with his head bowed as the sky hemorrhaged snow, his mind blissfully attended to the present, to keeping his horse on the mountain, to listening for slides over the sounds of wind and snow pelting the leather of his hat, and how his feet had grown cold in the calfskin-lined cowhide boots, and what it would feel like to draw a bead on Oatha and Billy, see what they’d stolen from Bart.

Ezekiel was as happy as he’d been in years.

He felt like the true translation of himself again.

An hour into the climb, they stopped to let the horses blow.

“How close you reckon we are?” Russell asked.

Ezekiel shook his head. He had no way of knowing for certain, since after thirty yards in either direction, the trail disappeared into mist. They pushed on again, the horses panting and snorting, pausing every few steps.

Then the slope began to level out. Ezekiel found that he didn’t have to lean forward as much and the horses quickened their gait.

He finally halted his gelding, and the others came up beside him on his left, the Doc and the preacher still engrossed in the discussion they’d been having for the last four hundred vertical feet.

“I’m not saying you sull around, but you do strike me as a melancholic these days,” Russell said. “Are you daunsy?”

“I’d not deny it.”

“You sleeping peacefully?”

“Not often. My mind tends to race in the silence and I don’t know how to shut it off. I have these terrible headaches.”

Ezekiel studied the distance. His back ached. The burro tracks continued on as far as he could see, which wasn’t far in the blizzard. He suspected the pass lay just ahead.

“Do you ever experience desperate thoughts?” the doctor asked.

“Desperate? You mean like ending myself prematurely?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“It’s a grave sin, Russ.”

“I’m aware. Don’t mean it ain’t afflicting you.”

“I have, on occasion, considered it.”

“Recently?”

“Last night.”

At this elevation, no trees could thrive, but glancing up ahead, Ezekiel discerned a badlands—vague profiles of rock formations and a small boulder field, drenched in snow and looming like a herd of Gothic monoliths. He turned to his compatriots. Their conversation embarrassed him, a subject he felt uncomfortable being made privy to, though that wasn’t his reason for interrupting. It was merely to advise the Doc to slide his Big Fifty out of the rifle scabbard and keep on the eye in case they were dry-gulched.

Russell said, “You should come by my office, Stephen, let me examine you. Your gums have a blue tinge. Absent a full evaluation, I can’t say for sure, but it could be lead—”

“Doc, I’m sorry to break up your conversation, but—”

The ball made a loud crunch as it entered Russell Ilg’s head through his left eye, taking a large shard of his skull with it on the way out. Then came the thunderous boom that Ezekiel recognized as a big-bore six-gun. The lead ball had knocked Russell from the horse, but his stovepipe boots had caught up in the stirrups, so that he hung upside down, the contents of his skull dropping into the snow as his horse dragged him back down the slope.

Ezekiel dismounted. The snow rose to his waist. He grabbed the Winchester, yelled at Stephen as another report spooked the horses.

“Get off a there, man!
You
wanna
get kilt?
”

But the preacher sat stone-faced and frozen in the saddle, staring through falling snow at the two figures darting through the boulder field.

Ezekiel pulled Stephen’s boots out of the stirrups and knocked him off his mount into the snow. “Get back down the slope and stay hid. Take Doc’s rifle if you want and keep your head down.”

A shotgun blasted, and Ezekiel’s horse boiled over, neighing and rearing up on its hindquarters before collapsing.

He crouched in the snow, eyes peeking over the surface as the preacher crawled away, weeping.

Ezekiel scrambled from his dying horse.

After thirty feet, he stopped, gulped down several lungfuls of thin air. He cocked the lever of the carbine, sat up, sighted a rock outcropping forty yards upslope that he suddenly realized was the pass, torn white ribbons of cloud streaming over it, driving the snow sideways, making it impossible to see anything distinctly.

A lead ball zinged past his right ear.

He swung his rifle around, sighted the left edge of a small boulder fifty
yards away, and pulled the trigger on a vaquero hat that had peered around the corner.

It disappeared and he cocked the carbine again and clambered to his feet, now fighting toward the boulder field through chest-high drifts, smiling and swelling with all the murderous joy of a boy playing war.

With the wind subsided and his horse no longer braying, what struck him now was the silence, his senses heightened, everything distilled. The smell of wet rock and gunpowder. The sound of snow falling on his hat. His heart thumping like it meant to bust out of his chest. Burning cold spreading through the left side of his face.

He heard distant whispering, got to his feet, stepped out from behind the rock formation. What lay before him on the gentle downslope reminded Ezekiel of a snowy labyrinth—countless boulders of varying size, some no bigger than a barrel, others rivaling wagons and cabins, bunched together in spots, spaced out in others, and a million places to hide. For a fact, Oatha and Billy had deadwood.