Abandon (5 page)

“By twenty-five, she’d been married three times to rich men, all of whom had died mysteriously. Her last husband’s family got wise, proved she’d slowly poisoned him with arsenic. She fled Arizona, ended up, of all places, here. Made a big impression. Men loved her. She was one of the guys—funny, raucous, horribly profane.

“In November of 1893, someone came prospecting from Arizona, recognized Jocelyn, and reported to Sheriff Curtice that there was a murdering fugitive tending bar in his town. The story checked out and Ezekiel had no choice but to arrest her.

“Everything had been arranged to extradite her back to be hanged, but the snows came. It was decided she’d winter in Abandon, be transported to Arizona in the spring. Since half the town was in love with her, instead of just letting Jocelyn rot in jail, they chained her up in the saloon, with a deputy to keep watch, and let her go on tending bar. Of course, she never had her reckoning in Arizona. Jocelyn vanished with everyone else that Christmas Day.”

They walked to the entrance of town, where the buildings ended. Off in the distance, set up on a slope in the spruce, stood a church. Its roof had caved in everywhere except in front, where a tiny bell tower dangled in the raf ters. Atop the tower, a crooked cross stood silhouetted against the darkening sky.

June stopped.

“Honey?” Emmett said. “What is it?”

“Nothing, just . . . very similar energy to Roanoke Island.”

“What’s that?” Abigail asked.

“The Lost Colony, that settlement that vanished from the North Carolina coast in the late 1500s, where the only thing left behind was CRO carved into a tree. People thought CRO meant the Croatan Indians, that maybe there’d
been an attack. We did some work out there a few years ago. Energy’s even stronger here.”

“What kind of energy?” Abigail asked.

June turned toward her, and those eyes that had seemed so kind just the day before at their first meeting in Durango had taken on a disturbing intensity. “Something awful happened in this place.”

Abigail couldn’t stop the smile from escaping.

“What?” June asked.

“I’m sorry.” She chuckled.

“Oh, we have a skeptic.”

“ ’Fraid so. Look, it’s nothing against—”

Emmett said, “No, least you’re up-front about it. I respect that. Most people just patronize us and pretend to play along. But since you are writing an article about what we do, I hope you’ll keep an open mind.”

“You have my word.”

They camped on the edge of town. Abigail climbed into her tent and fell asleep, and when she woke, it was evening and cold. She found a pair of gloves in the top compartment of her pack and crawled outside. Low, dark clouds scudded across the peaks. She saw Scott lying in the grass with the llamas, listening to a radio. Lawrence was sitting in the open doorway of his tent, thumbing through a tattered notebook by the light of his headlamp.

As Jerrod fed a piece of clapboard into the flames, she sat down across from him in the grass.

“Jerrod?” she said. He glanced up. “You think it’s a load of shit?”

“What?”

She cocked her head toward Emmett and June, who were a little ways off, on their knees, facing the ghost town, heads bowed in meditative poses.

“I don’t know. They aren’t quite as kooky as I imagined they’d be.”

Abigail pulled off her gloves and extended her hands toward the flames.

In the distance, the outline of Abandon formed an eerie profile in the dusk.

Scott walked over, followed by Lawrence and the Tozers.

“What’s up?” Jerrod asked.

“I was just listening to the latest report on my weather radio. . . . Doesn’t look good.”

“You’re kidding,” Lawrence said.

“This early-season storm was supposed to plow through New Mexico, and now the track is farther north. Not particularly cold, but it should be all snow above nine thousand feet. As you know, Abandon sits at eleven.”

“How much they predicting?” Lawrence asked.

“One to three feet. Winter storm warnings are already up. Supposed to start late tonight.”

“So what does this mean?” June asked.

“Means we should pack up our shit and make a beeline for the trailhead.”

Jerrod looked up. “You aren’t serious.”

“Actually, I am.”

“Hike back in the dark?”

“Maybe we get only halfway. Be better than postholing all seventeen miles in a meter of powder.”

“You don’t know that it’s gonna be that bad.”

“Don’t know that it isn’t.”

Jerrod looked at Emmett. “You paid a hefty chunk to come out here and shoot this town, have Lawrence give you the rundown—”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Scott asked.

“I’m talking to our client. Maybe he should make the—”

“
My
client. Don’t know if you forgot, but you work for me, bro.”

Emmett said, “We have to leave?”

“If this storm really winds up,” Scott said, “hiking out will be a bitch. We didn’t bring snowshoes or skis. You ever tried to walk in three feet of snow?”

“Let them decide, Scott,” Jerrod said.

Scott shot him a glare, then turned back to the Tozers.

“Look, I suggest we get the hell out of here, but if you want to stay, see what happens, I guess that’s an option. What do you think, Lawrence?”

“Their dime, their permit, their choice.”

Emmett glanced at his wife, then back at Scott. “This is our last chance to shoot Abandon this year?”

“Yeah, it’s late in the season and a miracle there’s not more snow already. We don’t do it now, you won’t be able to get back here until next June or even July, depending on how bad the winter is. And that’s assuming you get another permit.”

Emmett said, “Honey?”

In the silence, Abigail watched dark billowy clouds spilling over the top of the canyon, sweeping down into the ghost town like an avalanche.

June looked at her husband, nodded.

“We’ll take our chances,” he said as Abandon vanished in the fog.

While his fingers thawed, he surveyed Abandon’s only remaining saloon. The light was poor. It disseminated in a smoky dimness from three kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, never reaching the corners of what was little more than a thin-walled shack.

There were only four of them in the saloon tonight. He saw Lana Hartman across the room, seated at the upright piano by the front window, playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” She was always here, as much a part of the place as the bar stools. He’d never seen her in this dress—dark green, with red piping on the collar and cuffs.

Jocelyn Maddox sat on a stool behind the bar, watching Lana play, a cigarette burning in her hand, eyes glazed with boredom.

The young deputy tasked with guarding her had passed out in a chair beside the stove. A raging high lonesome, he snored, a line of tobacco-colored drool creeping down his chin.

Bart stepped to the bar, said, “Evening, Joss. Lively tonight.”

“Merry Christmas, you big fuckin walrus. Come to wet your dry?” She smiled and hopped off the chair, dressed tonight, as always, like a man—high-back canvas trousers and a cotton dress shirt with suspenders. The disparity between her masculine outfits and the pitch-black hair that fell in waves down her back and the dark liquid pools of her big eyes drove men mad. She looked Spanish, exotic. The chain between her leg irons dragged across the floor as she set up a glass and uncorked a bottle of whiskey, poured Bart a full tumbler.

“I’m afraid you’re drinking with me tonight,” he said.

“That so?”

“Reckon Miss Hartman would hoist a glass with our ilk?”

“I never seen her take a drink,” Joss said, “and as you well know, many a man, present company included, have sent a whiskey over to that piano.”

“How about our man by the stove?”

Joss’s dark eyes cut to the sleeping deputy, then back to Bart.

“Let that coffee cooler alone,” she whispered. “And keep it down. He sees me drinkin, I’ll hear about it all fuckin night.”

She got a glass for herself, and when she’d filled it, Bart raised his, said, “Joss, here’s how. May the coming year—”

“For Chrissakes.” She swallowed her whiskey—one long, deliberate tilting of the glass. Bart drained his. She poured again.

“Joss, love, wish you could’ve seen Abandon when it was a roaring camp. In ’89, night like this, there’d of been fifty men here, miners coming off shift, card games, whole flock of whores.”

“It’s all over now, huh?”

“Yeah. All over. All gone. The whores, the opium, the fun.” He clinked his glass against hers and they drank. He replenished their tumblers and they drank and he refilled them again. Soon his face had flushed and gone blotchy and the burst capillaries stood out like tiny red worms, so that his nose resembled a rotting strawberry. Lines of sweat rolled down the dome of his great bald head.

Bart was not a man to stand when there were chairs on the premises. He installed himself on a bar stool and he and Joss worked their way through the bottle while Lana played Christmas carols and the deputy snored. He said things he’d already said ten times before on nights just as quiet, about the town in its heyday, the art of following a rich vein deep into a mountain, and how he meant to close the mill next year and make a new fortune in Montana.

“Hey, how ’bout shuttin the fuck up for a spell? You’re makin my head hurt.”

Bart attended to his whiskey. Looking through the window behind the bar, he could see it snowing harder than before. The walls strained against the wind.

After awhile, he got up, staggered over to the piano. He stood beside Lana, watching the spill of her blond hair, her tiny gloved fingers moving across the keys. The piano had been out of tune ever since a miner had shot it two years ago in a fight, mistaking it for an adversary. When she’d finished the song, he said, “That was very pleasant, Miss Hartman,” and reached into his pocket. He withdrew a burlap sack that fit in his palm and placed it on the piano.

Lana picked up the sack, her hand dipping with the weight. She untied
the string and peeked inside, saw the dull gleam of dust and tiny slugs, probably two hundred dollars’ worth.

She looked up at Bart and shook her head.

“Oh no, it has been my greatest joy this year to watch you play. You’re too good for this deadfall.” He started to lay his hand on her shoulder but then stopped himself. He’d never touched her. Instead, he allowed himself a long drink of what he thought was far and away the softest face ever to grace the streets of Abandon.

Bart returned to his seat at the bar. “One more for the cold road home,” he said, and Joss poured the last of the bottle into his tumbler. Lana had begun to play again.

When he finished his whiskey, Bart dropped another poke on the bar. “And a merry Christmas to you, Joss,” he said. She weighed the sack in her hand, as if it might not serve, then smiled and leaned across the bar.

“You love her, don’t you?” she whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a seldom fuckin hombre. Come in here ever goddamn night, skip your own Christmas shindig just to listen to her bang—”

“Well, that don’t mean—”

“Calm the fuck down, Bartholomew, and listen. You never know when it’s your time. Mine’s comin in the spring, and I guess this is just the long way around the barn a sayin I hope you won’t leave this world with any regret.”

“I don’t understand what you—”

“Before you hive off, do what you been meanin to ever since you laid eyes on that filly.”

“What in hell are you—”

“I want you to kiss her.”

“I couldn’t.”

“What’s the worst she’ll do? Slap you? I’m sure you been slapped plenty. Hell, you ever tried somethin like that on me, I’d fuckin shoot you, but that’s neither here nor there. I reckon you love her, and this is my Christmas gift to you. Kiss her on your way out.”

Bart stepped down off the stool and walked toward the door. He put on his overcoat and his hat and reached for the doorknob.

He stopped. He walked back to the piano. His weak heart pounding, he leaned down and kissed Lana on the cheek.

She stopped playing and bowed her head. They both trembled.

“I apologize,” Bart said. “It’s just that . . .”

He hurried outside and shut the door.

Lana took a deep breath, then looked out the window, up to the second floor of the hotel across the street, at the woman sitting in the bay window.