Welcome to Hard Times

1

The Man from Bodie drank down a half bottle of the Silver Sun’s best; that cleared the dust from his throat and then when Florence, who was a redhead, moved along the bar to him, he turned and grinned down at her. I guess Florence had never seen a man so big. Before she could say a word, he reached out and stuck his hand in the collar of her dress and ripped it down to her waist so that her breasts bounded out bare under the yellow light. We all scraped our chairs and stood up — none of us had looked at Florence that way before, for all she was. The saloon was full because we watched the man coming for a long time before he pulled in, but there was no sound now.

This town was in the Dakota Territory, and on three sides — east, south, west — there is nothing but miles of flats. That’s how we could see him coming. Most times the dust on the horizon moved east to west — wagon trains nicking the edge of the flats with their wheels and leaving a long dust turd lying on the rim of the earth. If a man rode toward us he made a fan in the air that got wider and wider. To the north were hills of rock and that was where the lodes were which gave an excuse for the town, although not a good one. Really there was no excuse for it except that people naturally come together.

So by the time he walked into the Silver Sun a bunch of us were waiting to see who he was. It was foolish because in this country a man’s pride is not to pay attention, and after he did that to the girl he turned around to grin at us and we looked away or coughed or sat down. Flo meanwhile couldn’t believe what happened, she stood with her eyes wide and her mouth open. He took his hand off the bar and suddenly grabbed her wrist and twisted her arm around so that she turned and doubled over with the pain. Then, as if she was a pet bear, he walked her in front of him over to the stairs and up to a room on the second floor. After the door slammed we stood looking up and finally we heard Florence screaming and we wondered what kind of man it was who could make her scream.

Jimmy Fee was the only child in town and when Flo was stumbling over her dress up the stairs, he ducked under the swinging doors and ran down the porch past the man’s horse and across the street. Fee, his father, was a carpenter, he had built up both sides of the street almost without help. Fee was on a ladder fixing the eaves over the town stable.

“Pa,” Jimmy called up to him, “the man’s got your Flo!”

Jack Millay, the limping man with one arm, told me later he followed the boy across the street to fill Fee in on the details — little Jimmy might not have made it clear that the customer was a Bad Man from Bodie. Fee came down the ladder, went around in back of his place down the street, and came out with a stout board. He was a short man, bald, thick in the neck and in the shoulders, and he was one of the few men I ever met who knew what life was about. I was standing by the window of the Silver Sun and when I saw Fee coming I got out of those doors fast. So did everyone there, even though the screaming had not stopped. By the time Fee walked in with his plank at the ready, the place was empty.

We all stood scattered in the street waiting for something to happen. Avery, the fat barkeep, had brought a bottle with him and he tilted his head back and drank, standing out in the dirt with his white apron on and one hand on his hip. I had never seen Avery in sunlight before. The sun was on the western flats to about four o’clock. There was no sound now from the saloon. The only horse tied up in front was the stranger’s: a big ugly roan that didn’t look like he expected water or a rub. Behind him in the dirt was a pile of new manure.

We waited and then there was a noise from inside — a clatter — and that was all. After a while Fee came out of the Silver Sun with his cudgel and stood on the porch. He walked forward and missed the steps. The Bad Man’s horse skittered aside and Fee tumbled down and landed on his knees in the manure. He got up with dung clinging to his britches and lurched on toward Ezra Maple, the Express Man, who said: “He can’t see.” Ezra stepped aside as Fee staggered by him. The back of Fee’s bald head was bashed and webbed with blood and he was holding his ears. Little Jimmy stood next to me watching his father go up the street. He ran after a few yards, then stopped, then ran after again. When he caught up to Fee he took his belt and together they walked into Fee’s door.

Nobody went back into the saloon, we were all reminded of business we had to do. When I got to my office door I glanced back and the only one still standing in the street was Avery, in his apron. I knew he’d be the first over to see me and he was.

“Blue, that gentleman’s in my place, you got to get him out of there.”

“I saw him pay you money Avery.”

“I got stock behind that bar, I got window glass in my windows, I got my grain and still in back. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

“Maybe he’ll leave soon enough.”

“He cracked Fee’s skull!”

“A fight’s a fight, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Goddamnit!”

“Well now Avery I’m forty-nine years old.”

“Goddamnit!”

I took my gun out of my drawer and shoved it over the desk toward fat Avery but he didn’t take it. Instead he sat down on my cot and we waited together. About dusk Jimmy Fee came in and told me his father was bleeding at the mouth. I went out and found John Bear, the deaf-and-dumb Pawnee who served for our doctor, and we went over to Fee’s place but Fee was already dead. The Indian shrugged and walked out and I was left to comfort the boy all night.

Once, around midnight, when it got too cold for me, I walked back to my office to get a blanket. And on the way I sneaked across the street — running where there was moonlight — to peek into the window of the Silver Sun. The lights were still burning. Behind the bar, Florence, with her red hair unpinned to her shoulders, was crying and pouring herself a stiff one. I tapped on the window, but she knew Fee was dead and she wouldn’t come out. I ran around back. The upstairs was dark and I could hear the Man from Bodie snoring.

When I came West with the wagons, I was a young man with expectations of something, I don’t know what, I tar-painted my name on a big rock by the Missouri trailside. But in time my expectations wore away with the weather, like my name had from that rock, and I learned it was enough to stay alive. Bad Men from Bodie weren’t ordinary scoundrels, they came with the land, and you could no more cope with them than you could with dust or hailstones.

I found twelve dollars in Fee’s bureau when the sun came up and I gave them to Hausenfield, the German. Hausenfield owned a bathtub, he had brought it in his wagon all the way from St. Louis. At the beginning of each month Hausenfield would fill that tub with water from his well and sit right down in back of his house and wash. He also owned the stable.

After I gave him the money he went into his stable and pushed out his wagon by the tongue and hitched up his mule and his grey. The wagon was an old stage with the windows boarded and the seats torn out. It was black, the one painted thing in town. He drove it over to Fee’s door.

“Put him in dere please.”

Jack Millay, who was standing by with his one arm, helped me take Fee out and put him in the wagon.

“Don’t you have a casket Hausenfield?”

“He never build me vun. He said he would build ten for me, but he never build even vun.”

I closed the door on Fee and the wagon creaked down the street and into the flats. It was cold and early but nearly everyone was out watching it go. A pickaxe clanked on top of the stage, one of the wheels squeaked each time around, and the clanking and squeaking was Fee’s funeral music. Hausenfield’s grey pulled harder than his mule and so the wagon turned eastward slowly in an arc. About a mile out in the flats it stopped. Behind the wagon, from the southeast, rain clouds were coming up under the sky. I didn’t know where Florence was but Jimmy Fee began to walk out after, now, with his hands in his pockets.

“Look there Blue!”

Across the street, in front of the saloon, the Bad Man’s roan stood shivering where he’d been tied since yesterday.

“Cold got that man’s horse,” Jack Millay said, “he never did see to it.” Even as Jack spoke the horse went down on its knees. That was all we needed — I wanted the man to go away with no difficulty, no trouble to himself. I walked into my office to think, and a few minutes later some fool who couldn’t bear to see animals suffer but who didn’t care if people did, stood a good safe way from the Silver Sun, probably behind some porch, and shot his carbine at the roan.

When I ran out the roan was twitching on his side and the street was empty.

“Who in hell did that!” I shouted.

Then, in a minute the Bad Man from Bodie came out of the saloon buckling his gun belt. I didn’t move a muscle. He looked down at his horse and scratched his head and that was when I stepped slowly back inside my door and closed it. On the back wall of my office, behind my cot, there was another door and I went out that way.

I found Avery standing near my outhouse talking to his other girl, Molly Riordan. Along with the rest of us Molly scooted out of the Silver Sun when the man had taken Flo. She sheltered for the night with Major Munn, the old veteran who liked to call her his daughter; and now Avery had her back and they were arguing.

“You’re a son of a bitch, Avery,” she said to him. Molly was never to my taste, pale and pocked, with a thin mouth and a sharp chin, but I liked the way she stood up to Avery.

“Blue, this son of a bitch wants me to go across there and get ripped open by that big bastard.”

“Not so loud Molly, for God’s sake!” Avery said.

“How do you like this fat-assed son of a bitch? He’s some man, isn’t he Blue?”

“Molly I got stock behind that bar; I got all my money under the counter. I’m telling you everything I got is in there.” To make his point Avery slapped Molly hard across the face and when she put her hand to her cheek and began weeping, he pulled a stiletto from under his apron and held it out until she took it.

“You go on over there and when he holds you around, bring the knife out of your sleeve and put it in his neck. I can’t have that gentleman in my place, I want him out of there.”

Just then a hoot and a holler came from the street. I looked down the alley in time to see the Bad Man prancing by sideways on a big bay. He was on Hausenfield’s good horse.

“He’s not in your place now, Avery,” I said.

The Bad Man was celebrating the new day riding bareback back and forth from one end of the street to the other. Jack Millay met me in the alley: “Hausenfield left his barn door open.”

“Too bad for Hausenfield.”

“That man just walked over and took the bay for his own.”

We watched from the shade: he kicked the horse this way and that, yelling and whooping through the street. When the horse got accustomed, he spurred him up the steps of the Silver Sun and then rode along the porch, ducking low for the beams. The horse kicked over the sack of dried beans in front of Ezra Maple’s store and then jumped back into the street, and the Bad Man laughed and yelped some more. I was hoping he’d stop soon, saddle up, and then go riding toward the lodes. The clouds were moving from the south and if it rained he couldn’t poke a horse up on wet rocks, even if he had a horse. But when he stopped it was at the north end of the street where John Bear had his shack.

John Bear did his cooking on the outside over a stone fire. Next to his shack he had a small plot he had worked on so that it gave up a few tubers and onions. John was squatting by his fire, cooking up some meal, when the man walked into his patch, stepping all over the plants. If John was deaf and dumb what he saw was enough. The man pulled up half a dozen plants before he found an onion that suited him. He wrung it free of its green and wiped it and peeled it and then bit in.

“Breakfast,” I said to Jack Millay.

The man ignored John Bear as if he wasn’t there. He stepped over to the Indian’s fire and lifted up the skillet and walked away with it to sit down with his back against the shack. The Indian didn’t move but just looked into his fire.

Avery and Molly Riordan were standing behind me, watching.

“Here’s your chance to get back to your place, Avery.”

“I don’t know, Blue.”

“Why don’t you just walk across and go on in?”

“He’ll see me.”

Jack said: “Shit, Avery.”

“Don’t run and you’ll be alright. Molly you get inside somewhere. I think you better not be seen.”

Avery walked across stiff-legged, trying not to run, and I saw the Bad Man glance up for a moment from his eating. When Avery got inside the Silver Sun he closed the full doors in back of the swinging ones and pulled shades down over the windows.

“Now what’s that man gonna do when he finds Avery’s bolted the door?” Jack said.

I took a deep breath and walked out into the sun myself. I headed across the street, stepping around the man’s dead roan, and when I got to the porch I coughed and went into Ezra Maple’s store.

Ezra was standing by his window looking at the spilled sack of beans.

“He still sitting there?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll take some plug, Ezra.”

“Help y’self.”

I went behind the counter: “Ezra I want to ask you when the stage is due.”

“A week. Maybe two.”

“Well now what day is this? We get a fair crowd from the mines Saturday night.”

“That’s true …”

“Well what day is this?”

“Thursday.”

I walked over to the window and looked with Ezra at the spillings on his porch: the beans could have been flocks of birds flying high, southerly.

“Not much country, Blue.”

“I took some cartridges with the plug.”

In a while we saw Hausenfield driving his hearse hard into town, pulling on the grey’s traces and whipping his mule. He stopped in front of the store and came in, tripping and cursing.

“Are you here, Blue? You have to do something!”

“Tell me what, Hausenfield.”

“Dat is my horse he has.”

“I saw.”

“Are you not the mayor!”

“Only to those who voted for me.” Ezra smiled when I said that: I had not been elected mayor, I had taken it upon myself to keep records in case the town ever got large enough to be listed, or in case statehood ever came about. I kept the books and they called me mayor.

Hausenfield looked at Ezra and smiled back: “Dat is alright,” he said, “I have my veapon.”

He stalked out and got his gun from his wagon. To this day I don’t know whether Hausenfield meant to shoot the Bad Man or not. Probably, he didn’t know himself. His horse was standing in John Bear’s patch eating off the tops of the plants. Hausenfield marched down there and grabbed a fistful of mane and began leading the horse back to his stable. When he’d gone a few yards, he turned almost as an afterthought and shot twice at the Bad Man who sat watching him — once into the dirt in front of the man, once into the wood above him. The horse reared then and pulled away. Hausenfield fell down in the dust and I thought he would fire again from the ground; but I saw him crawling and trying to get up at the same time, waving his pistol at the horse and shouting in German. This put his back to the stranger who was up and running low, squeezing off rounds into his legs.

Faster than a cat the man was on top of Hausenfield, straddling him with his gun holstered now and swinging at his face with the flat of the skillet.

“He never let go of that pan,” Ezra whispered.

Hausenfield had begun to scream when the bullets hit him but the man swung at his face until he could only moan. After a while the man threw the skillet away and looked up: the bay horse had cantered over to his stablemates in front of the black wagon and that must have given the man his idea. Laughing, he dragged Hausenfield by the collar over to the wagon and threw him in. This happened right in front of Ezra’s window so we had to step back in the shadows. The man closed the door, found Hausenfield’s pickaxe, still caked with the dirt of Fee’s grave, and used it to bolt the door tight. Inside the hearse, Hausenfield was screaming again, pounding on the floorboard. The man jumped up on the driver’s box, brought the grey and the mule around, and began to rein-whip them down the street. Hooting loud, he rode them close to the porch on the other side, and at the last porch beam at the end of the street, he hooked his arm around and stood easily on the rail while the wagon kept on going into the flats. To make sure that the team kept its pace he fired a few shots after it and even the mule ran with his ears back.

Walking to the bay in front of Ezra’s store, the man was laughing to himself and smacking his hands together. Every few steps he would turn around to look at the wagon rumbling away south and each time he looked he laughed harder. He took the bay over to the Silver Sun and saddled it with the gear from his dead roan. Then he tied his new horse to the rail, mopped his forehead with a red handkerchief and stepped up to the saloon doors, which he found locked. He kicked them open and from where I was I heard Avery’s voice say heartily: “Come in, come in!”

After the man had been a while in the Silver Sun, everyone began to come out of doors, standing in ones and twos on the porch or in the street, watching that wagon going away smaller and smaller ahead of its dust cone. Jack Millay saw me and limped over swinging his one arm: “Did you ever see such work, Blue?” Jack’s face was pinked with excitement, he took his joys how he could. In the alleys some of the people were bringing their buckboards to their side doors and at the rock end of the street John Bear had his travois lying in front of his shack.

I watched the Indian now. When Hausenfield had taken his pot shots Bear had jumped for cover fast enough although his back was turned to the noise. If he was deaf he had another sense to make up for it, if he was dumb he wasn’t too dumb. He came out of his shack and lashed his things to the travois. Then he picked up the poles and pulled. When he reached his skillet lying in the middle of the street he walked right over it and he went right down the street and past the last house. Later I saw him standing half a mile in the flats. He laid his travois down and stood still facing the town.

Behind him and east, tiny Jimmy Fee who had never come back in was sitting by his father’s grave. Clouds were over half the sky now, the sun was covered and a little breeze was blowing.

I went to my office and found Molly Riordan looking in my desk.

“Haven’t you any whiskey, Blue?”

“Whiskey’s across the street,” I said and just then we heard Avery yelling with a laugh in his voice: “Molly! Molly-y!”

Molly ducked behind the desk, and through a hole in my oilpaper window I saw Avery holding his swinging doors open, bellowing with good nature: “Molly where are you, gentleman here wants to see you!” Even across the street I could hear the bottle crashing somewhere behind him. He laughed as if he was enjoying it, called Molly again and went back in.

“Christ!” said Molly. “Isn’t anybody going to do anything?”

“Why don’t you go on over?”

“What?” She stood up then, watching me fill the cylinders of my gun.

I said: “That knife Avery gave you. Do as he said, hold it tight against your wrist and if your moment comes slip it out and use it. But I don’t think you’ll have to.”

“Oh sure, sure! Christ that Bad Man’s the only man in town! I can’t believe it, you’re no better than that son of a bitch Avery, using a lady, for Godsake, marching brave behind a lady’s skirts. You’re some comfort Mayor, go to hell!”

I tucked the gun in my belt and opened the door. People were waiting in the street.

“Oh God,” Molly said, “so this is what it’s come to, how did I ever end up in this forsaken town, oh Christ this is the end. I’ll tell you something you didn’t know, Blue, I left New York ten years ago because I couldn’t bear bein’ a maid, I was too proud to say ‘Yes Mum.’ Doesn’t that tickle you?”

“We do what we can, Molly.”

Her face was twisted up and tears were streaming down her cheeks as she walked by me saying: “I hope he gets you Mayor, I swear I do, you and the rest of the crawling bastards in this miserable town.”

I followed behind her as we walked across — everyone stepping out of our way — and went up on the steps to the Silver Sun. She turned to look at me once more.

“You’re alright, Molly,” I said.

But when she walked up to the doors the stiletto slipped out of her sleeve and clattered on the porch. I kicked it aside before the Bad Man might see it and I pushed Molly through the doors and stepped in behind. Then I saw what made her drop the knife, Florence bent over the upstairs railing, bare, with her arms dangling and her red hair falling down between them.

Now Avery must have seen the woman dead that way when he came back to close his doors and pull his shades down. But he wasn’t too concerned when we came in, he greeted us laughing and jovial.

“Here’s Molly, hello Blue! Come on, come in, drinks on the gentleman!”

Behind the bar the Bad Man from Bodie was grinning and setting up two more glasses. Avery went to the doors and opened them, calling into the street: “Everybody! Drinks for the whole town on the gentleman here!” The Bad Man laughed but outside everyone began to run, I could see under the doors the feet running in the dirt. The only one Avery got was Jack Millay, who had followed us onto the porch and was peeking over the doors when Avery shouted out his invitation. Avery pulled Jack in and I know that in a few minutes the town was empty but for those of us in the saloon.

It was a celebration. Avery, Jack Millay and I stood at the bar while the man poured for us. Molly sat at one of the tables staring up at Flo with her knuckles in her mouth. The man came around the bar and served her a drink from a tray, making a mock bow like a fancy Eastern waiter. She sat looking away from him and didn’t even stir when he took the bottom of her skirt between two fingers and threw it back over her knees. Avery laughed at that and Jack laughed too and the man backed away from Molly, looking at her and chuckling. He went behind the bar again and lifted his glass to her.

The Bad Man drank Avery’s liquor like water and every time he poured for himself, he poured for us too. The other two kept up with him but I emptied my glass by throwing the stuff over my shoulder. The man finally saw me do that and then he broke the neck off a fresh bottle and filled my glass slowly and then raised his and looked me in the eyes. He was a younger man than I expected but his skin was shot red under the stubble, there was a blaze on one cheek and he had the eyes of a crazy horse. Right then my hand began to move and I meant for it to go for my gun. But it went instead for the glass on the bar; I felt at that moment that I wanted to please him, I was almost glad to drink.

After that the man began to break open a bottle for each round. One time, as Avery had his drink up to his mouth, the man stuck his arm out and whacked Avery’s glass with the heel of his hand. Avery stumbled back, spitting out teeth and blood and trying to laugh at the same time. A bit later, the man fixed his attention on Jack Millay’s stump and with an eyewide amazement he swung at it with a full bottle of whiskey. Jack went grey and sunk to the floor right where he was standing.

I suppose it would have been my turn next but that his eye caught Molly again, sitting just as he’d left her. He gave the rebel yell and jumped over the bar.

“Blue!” Molly screamed. She was trying to put tables and chairs between them and the Bad Man was laughing and tossing the furniture aside; Jack Millay was out on the footrail and Avery was slumped at the bottom of the stairs, crying and wiping at the blood on his apron. I drew my gun at that moment but it was too late. The man caught Molly by the wrist and almost at the same time I sent my shot, wild, across the room, he was crouched in front of her and shooting back. Molly was struggling and pulling or I’m sure he would have killed me; as it was his shots drove me through the doors, I fell back onto the porch and rolled off into the dirt. I heard him coming to the doors, laughing, and I picked up my hat and began running, stumbling, down the street, staying close to the porch and keeping low. He was at the doors now, sending shots into the dirt at my heels, into the porch alongside me, and what I thought then was that I wanted those records in my desk, I wanted to go across to my room and get those ledgers to safekeeping. But it was almost as if he knew, his bullets tore up the ground on my right and kept me going straight, I was limping from the pain of my fall, tripping in the dirt, my heart like a hand clenching my insides, and I didn’t stop until I was out in the flats with everyone else.

So we all stood scattered on the flats looking back at the town — the boy Jimmy Fee, John Bear, Ezra, and the rest — some with gear, some by a horse or a buckboard, some with bundles and some, like me, with nothing. Overhead the sky was heavy with clouds, a wind was blowing, and although it couldn’t have been much past noon, the day was black. We watched for a long time. Every once in a while we could hear a scream or something crashing, small sounds now in the flats. And then, after a long silence, flames began to lick out of the saloon. Hausenfield’s horse in front whinnied and pulled back on his ties and then the Bad Man came carrying a chair on fire. He whooped and threw the chair across and it landed on the porch in front of my office. Then he saw something and ran across the street. What he saw was Fee’s ladder still leaning where it was left against the stable. He picked up that ladder and went around poking out windows with it and when the wind had caught the flames and both sides of the street were framed in fire, he used the ladder to knock down the porch beams, jumping aside and hollering when the hot wood fell into the street.

But then the bay was going mad so he untied him and got on his back and held him to a walk toward the rocks. We couldn’t see the man for a long while after that, but finally Ezra Maple pointed to the hills: He was well up on the trail toward the lodes, lighted for a moment by the fire down below him, picking his way through the stone and not even looking back. He disappeared again and that was all we saw of the Bad Man from Bodie, though we waited to make sure. The rain finally began to come down hard and we stood watching it fall into the fire and watching the fire lick up at the rain.

2

The Silver Sun made the brightest flame and the cleanest smoke. Once or twice part of the roof blew into the air above the fire — and that would be Avery’s kegs of alcohol. By and by the rain began to let up. The wind came back and whiffs of the smoke blew out on the flats. Off to the left of me Major Munn, the veteran who liked to call Molly Riordan daughter, was standing up on his buckboard with his arm raised. He was a bent old man with long white mustaches, and he was yelling into the smoke and roar which came out to us on the wind: “If I’d had you before me at Richmond, I’d have put the ball in yer eye, God help you, I killed twenty like you when I was younger,” his voice piped over the flats. “Let the sun drop you in the badlands and let you not die before the shit of prairie dogs is in yer mouth and the buzzard’s claw is on yer belly. May yer pizzle fry in Hell and your eggs wither to peas, may the marrow boil in yer bones and yer eyes melt in their holes for what you done here, God damn you, God damn you …” He was shaking his fist toward the town but for a moment I had the feeling it was me he was cursing.

Then the fire’s roar smothered his words, and a gust of smoke hid him from my sight. When it cleared again I saw that Major was not up behind his horse, but down on the ground under him. I ran over: he had toppled with a stroke, his fist was still rigid, there was froth on his lips and a rattle in his throat. I put my hand on him and his eyes opened and he stared at me and died.

Someone leaning over my back said: “Well I have seen the elephant.” Others came to look at the Major and it was enough to break the spell of the fire. People began tying down their gear, pulling cinches tight. In a few minutes half the town was strung out across the flats, only the women in the wagons looking back.

The rain didn’t hurt what fire there was but it cut the wind down and that saved two structures: in the back of what had been Hausenfield’s place the gawky windmill over his well was still standing; and at the far end of the town, near the rocks, the Indian’s shanty was untouched. By the time the sun came out again everything else was gone, only some quarter posts still stood, charred and half eaten, and also one or two half-burned house sides where Fee had used green lumber.

When I walked back a few little fires were still working along the ground and smoke from the ruins was rising straight up into the sky. The street was covered with ashes and everywhere you looked there were mice running in circles, dozens of squeaking little miseries twisting around in the dirt, flopping from their bellies to their backs. A jackrabbit was jumping into the air, trying to get off a jumble of glowing timbers, but he couldn’t jump clear. I almost expected one-armed Jack to come tugging at my sleeve to tell me what a fine sight that was.

Stepping high over the rubble I found my desk upended and smoking. The drawers were burnt out and I found just the covers left of my ledgers. My mattress was gone too, it was a corn-husk mattress, the best I ever slept on. The only other thing of mine I could identify was a patch of brown blanket. The desk and the blanket and the ledgers I had bought from a lawyer who had passed through a year before, dumping everything he owned so as to march on unencumbered up to the mining camp in the lodes.

I kicked around in the debris and finally saw something else: it was my habit to keep my fortune of two pouches of gold dust under the floor of my office, but the pouches were gone and my dust stood in two solid cakes. Those nuggets sat there like somebody’s eggs. There were other people poking around in the rubble up and down the street and I wondered what any of them would say if they found a pair of balls lying independent like that. I tried to pick up the gold but it crumbled and spilled and I only got a few pinches into my pockets. I didn’t try to reclaim the rest, after just a few minutes in this smoke and heat my face was grimy, my eyes were watering and my clothes were about dry although the rain had left me drenched. There was a terrible stench over everything that made me remember the people lying under the Silver Sun.

All that was left of the saloon were the three steps leading up to the porch, and there was a small fire under them. Just beyond, up where his store had been, Ezra Maple was taking inventory, pushing boards aside, kicking his ruined goods. He was the one who saw Molly lying on the ground in back of the saloon rubble.

“Blue! Look here!”

She was lying face down, the whole back of her dress was burned away. I kneeled down by her side and after looking hard I was sure she was breathing.

“She’s alive,” I said to Ezra.

“Well what do you mean to do?”

“We can’t leave her here this way.”

I straightened up and saw John Bear pulling his travois back down the street toward his shack. I yelled at him but he didn’t turn around so I had to run and get him. The three of us picked Molly up by the hands and feet and carried her over to the Indian’s hut. The front of her dress hung down like a flag.

“Wait a minute,” Ezra said, wanting to stop, “it’s not decent.”

“You can’t cover her up,” I said, “her whole back is burned.” From her shoulder blades to her ankles, Molly was covered with blisters. We laid her down on the hard earth inside Bear’s place and then the Indian went out and drew some water from Hausenfield’s tank. When he came back he scraped a pile of earth from his floor and poured the water on it till it was a mush; then he took a tin from his pack and sprinkled whatever was in that tin — saleratus maybe — on the mud; then he spread the mixture along Molly’s back and haunches and legs and covered it up with some kind of flat weed he had. John Bear was a true doctor, there was no hesitation in his moves. By the time he was finished Molly was moaning, a good sound although I didn’t like to hear it. I stepped outside and a shadow passed over my eyes.

I don’t know where the buzzards come from but they’re never late. Three or four were making slow circles above the town, another few over the flats. I had left the Major’s body out there, lodged against a back wheel so his pony couldn’t run. But one of the carrion birds glided down, spread his big wings and perched on the buckboard and I saw the pony shy. A second later I heard his whinny and then he was rearing; the wheel rolled over the Major, and the pony was trotting free toward the town, pulling the rig with him, leaving the old man’s body exposed to the birds.

A few hundred yards to the east the little boy, Jimmy Fee, was running around his father’s grave, waving his arms as if the shadows of the buzzards were cobwebs in his hair.

I ran to the end of the street and caught the horse, turned him around and rode him back out. The birds on Major Munn spraddled their wings and flapped into the air. They had already blooded his neck. I lifted the old man on the buckboard, sitting him down among his possessions. There was a blanket and I threw it over him. Then I rode the wagon to Jimmy Fee. A few more buzzards had come up over the flats and now they circled Fee’s grave in a procession. Hausenfield had not dug very deep. The boy was huddled on top of the mound with his hands over his head, he was crying and screaming although he had hardly whimpered when Fee died.

“Come on up here, boy,” I said still holding the reins. “Come on up beside me.” But he only cried the more. I had to step down and carry him in my arms and hold him in my lap all the way back to town. He kept crying: “They’re gonna get my Pa, the birds are gonna get my Pa …” And I knew that before anything else we had better hurry up and bury the dead. Someone in the street was shooting and cursing and a coyote was running fast back to the rocks.

Ezra found one shovel from his store that was only charred along the haft, and I found a rusty pick that was lying at the foot of Hausenfield’s windmill. To give Jimmy Fee something to do I sent him looking for his own digging tool and he came on the skillet lying in the dirt where the Bad Man had flung it. Even if we had ten new shovels it would have done no good, only two of the men besides Ezra and me were willing to help dig. The rest of those who had come back to the town were packing their saddles or loading their rigs with what was left to them and riding out in ones and twos.

I chose to dig in the flats, making the holes in a line beginning with Fee’s. There is no work harder than cutting a grave. Though the rain had softened the ground, it was a few hot hours of taking turns at the pick and shovel before we had the five holes dug. The bodies we had gathered were lying under blankets. When it came time to put them down and to rebury Fee I didn’t want the boy there, I shooed him away. We stood waiting while he walked back, turning every few yards to look at us. He finally squatted down at the edge of the flats, not going as far as the town, I suppose, because the buzzards were all down in the street now eating from that dead roan.

We did what we had to and the two men besides Ezra and me got on one horse and rode off south. Everyone else had already left. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, the sun was low in the west but I was warm. My foot ached and flies were buzzing around my head.

“Shall we say a word, Ezra?”

“Expect so.”

“Well what should it be?”

He took his hat off and I took off mine and we stood looking down at the fresh earth: There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all. I thought of Fee putting his trust in wood, and fat Avery worrying for his establishment, and crippled Jack with a one-armed interest in things; I thought of the old Major who always wore his dress blues on Sunday; and I thought of the way redheaded Flo, who had plump knees, could sometimes get interested. I had been in the town a year and I knew them all. Behind me the town was now a ruin, and who would remember in another year that it was ever there or that they had ever lived?

The Bad Man’s grinning face came back to me and I felt my shy hand choosing the glass he offered. Twenty years before I had put my young wife into the ground after the cholera took her and the same rage rose in my throat for something that was too strong for me, something I could not cope with.

Kicking a clod with his toe Ezra said: “Well the Lord says blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

We rode back in to Hausenfield’s well to wash the grave dirt off. Jimmy Fee followed us and squatted with his back against the bottom of the windmill, but he wouldn’t wash and he wouldn’t look at us.

I saw from where I stood that it would not do to leave that dead roan lying in the middle of the street. He was covered with the birds and I knew if the birds flew off he would be covered with bluebottle flies. When I finished washing I said to Ezra: “Between your mule and the Major’s pony I think they could just about pull that carcass out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Down along the rocks about a mile.”

“No sense to that,” Ezra said, “unless you’re fixin’ to stay.”

“I am.” I had hoped he was too.

He looked at me: “Town’s gone, Blue.”

“Now I don’t know,” I said. “We got a cemetery. That’s the beginnings of a town anyway.”

Ezra poured half a bucket of water over his head. Then he wiped his face and neck with a rag, and then his arms and hands.

“Blue, I came West from Vermont. They have trees in that country.”

“Is that right?”

“Water flows from the rocks, game will nibble at your back door, and if you’re half a man you can make your life without too much trouble.”

“That’s what I once heard about this country.”

“That’s what I heard too. Back in Vermont.”

Ezra was a long-faced man, taller than I was, with a stoop in his shoulders and eyes like a beagle hound. He put on a coat and turned to look at the black smoking street and the scrubby stretches beyond:

“Truth is, if the drought don’t get you and the blizzards don’t get you, that’s when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.”

He walked over to his mule, fixed his saddle and climbed on. With his hunched shoulders and his long coat and sad eyes Ezra was not much of a sight on muleback.

“There are other towns westerly,” he said. “A man’s a fool if he don’t know when to move on.”

And I said: “Ezra, all my life I have been moving along. I have trailed cattle from Texas to Kansas, I have whacked bulls for Russell and Waddell, I have placer mined for myself through the Black Hills, I have seen minstrel shows in Cheyenne and played poker in Deadwood and Leadville and Dodge, I have moved from one side of the West to the other, like a pebble rolling in the pan, and if you think this place here is not much country I can tell you none of it is.”

He was looking down at Jimmy Fee: “Come with me if you like, sonny. I’ll teach you to storekeep.”

Jimmy sat there on his haunches, poking a twig in the dirt.

“So be it,” Ezra said. He kicked his mule and rode off.

Well I couldn’t waste time watching Ezra go, I had only an hour’s light to do something about that stinking horse. I couldn’t move him with just the little rig pony, it seemed the only thing to do was throw dirt on and make him a hill. So I did, piling ashes and dirt alongside his back and building up from there. Overhead the buzzards were turning, not too happy, and each time I threw a spadeful on the carrion, a horde of flies buzzed up around me.

I finished by sundown and my back was sore. I rubbed it some and that’s when I realized the gun in my belt was gone. At first I thought I had dropped it but then I noticed little Jimmy was nowhere about. I walked over to the Indian’s shack.

John Bear was on his knees making some more medicine pack, and Molly was crying on the buffalo rug. An oil lamp was in the corner but the boy was not there. I went outside and looked up to the rocks. Sure enough, there he was scrabbling along, waving the gun in his hand, he was going after the Bad Man from Bodie.

It was something to bring him back, I had to do it so he wouldn’t shoot himself or me trying to get along that trail. I caught up with him and grabbed him from behind and carried him back down while he kicked and clawed. He was light but he fought hard, and he didn’t begin to whimper until I threw him down in a corner of Bear’s shack.

I sat down myself to draw a breath. But Bear built up a small pit fire and by its light, Molly — turning her head in pain — strangled a wail in her throat and locked my eyes in a terrible green gaze. A moment later she was crying again and the boy was crying too and the night breeze started to moan through the shanty boards like an awful chorus of ghosts, and with all that misery in such small space I thought for one second to get up and get out of there and ride away fast. But I could no more do that than Fee and Flo and the others could get up from their graves — the Bad Man had fixed us all in the spot and he had fixed me by leaving me alive. Before long I could hear the coyotes jumping down from the rocks and panting past the shack over to the dead horse. They snarled and scratched and when I looked out the door I could see their shadows throwing up dirt all over the hill. Smoke still rose, blue now in the moonlight, and embers were glowing on the ground like peepholes to Hell.

3

Now the saying is common that Sam Colt made men equal. But if it is true then our town wouldn’t have burned up in the rain; instead that Bad Man would have been buried with due honors and a proper notice sent to the Territory Office. He would have had a hole in his chest, or his back, and the one who shot him would have Avery standing him a drink and maybe redheaded Flo and Molly smiling his way. Colt gave every man a gun, but you have to squeeze the trigger for yourself.

A few times during that long cold night I thought the Bad Man was coming back. The Major’s pony, tethered outside, would whinny or snort, or some pebbles would roll down from the rocks, or Molly would cry out as if he was walking through the door. But really there was nothing he would come back for: In the morning I went out to stomp the numbness from my feet, and my eyes felt the shock of seeing air where the town had been. The chilly dawn rested right on the charred ground, the flats began at the horizon and came up to where I stood. I could not see a soul.

I was stiff and sore and bleary from no sleep and my first breath of the frosty morning sent a pain into my stomach. I went over to the ruins of Ezra Maple’s store and started to poke around. Jimmy Fee woke up and came out of the shack and stood watching me while he made water in the middle of the street. He had his father’s wide-set eyes, the Fee look on his face that took you in but didn’t ask any questions, and his hair needed to be cut so bad that his head looked too large for his body. I had never seen such a skinny boy.

“Are you hungry?” I called, but he didn’t answer.

Two fallen planks lay like hands with their fingers touching and under them I found some dried apples and peas in the ashes. The peas were well roasted.

“Jimmy, look around for a coffeepot, find us a pot, boy.”

That was the way to talk to him, he went right to it. I had not picked a handful of peas out of the ashes before he was running up with a good pot. We drew some water and washed the soot off and I built a fire out of China matches from my pocket and we brewed up some pea coffee. With the apples it helped the hunger, but it tasted bad enough to make me remember all the good coffee I had drunk in my life and the beef and bacon and bread I had eaten.

I took some of the breakfast into the shack but Molly was asleep. She had cried almost until dawn. She lay with her arms out in front of her, thin and white, and her matted hair was caked at the tips with Bear’s mud medicine. The Indian was sitting by her side, chewing on some dried corn. I put down the pot and the apples and went back outside to scavenge with the boy.

We recovered two charred tins of milk from Ezra’s store, a tomato can, a box of.45 shells, the head of a hammer, a handful of horseshoe nails and a hunk of lye soap. From the remains of the Silver Sun we picked out a length of balustrade, three oil lamps — one with the glass unbroken — and lots of black bottles and chipped glasses. Elsewhere we found a charred saddle and a round stove, intact, and Jimmy even came up with an almanac that was only burnt around the edges. As we hunted the sun rose warm and took the chill out of my back, and by noon we had a pile of goods sitting in front of Bear’s shanty.

But I didn’t want to spend another night there.

I stepped inside to see if Molly was awake. Slits and speckles of light lay across the floor and one strip of light fell on her open eyes. She looked bad. Her face was so thin I could see how the bones and blue veins went under her skin. The food beside her was untouched. I didn’t know what to say to her, I didn’t know what she would say to me, but I said:

“Molly I’m going to build a dugout over by the well. Earth is the one thing we’ve got in supply and a good sod wall will do better against the weather than these boards will.”

For a second I thought she was dead, she was so still. Then she was whispering something and I bent down to hear:

“A man gave me a little trinket once. On a chain. I left it with the Major to hold.”

I lowered my own voice: “Molly, I must tell you the old man is dead.”

“Ah,” her eyes closed, “I knew …”

“He died of a fit, he was cursing the Bad Man. Wait—”

The pony was in the flats grazing on what he could, I had sent Jimmy out on his back after our salvage; but the Major’s rig was outside the door and under the seat I found a carved box of private things — pearl buttons, a tin of mustache wax, a collar, a Union medal and a small cross on a chain.

I brought the cross in to Molly. I held it out to her and she reached up and gently took it from me with her long fingers and clutched it tight as she laid her head back down on her hands. Then she smiled. My heart jumped with that smile and I asked her would she eat something.

“Take care of me Blue?” she said softly.

“Yes Molly, if you allow.”

Still smiling she said “Mayor”—whispering so that I bent down and put my ear almost to her lips—“if I had that knife now I wouldn’t drop it. I would stick it in you and watch the yellow flow.”

For a moment I didn’t understand, I could not reconcile the words with the smile on her face. But I looked at her and saw what a sweet smile it was, full of hate, and I felt as if I had been swiped to the ground by the paw of a big cat.

John Bear was turning over his garden patch with a piece of rock and he came around to the door just as I stepped out. I pushed by him without a word. The shovel was where I had left it, over by the offal. The coyotes had scalloped out one side of the dirt mound and eaten clear down to the bone. I knew they would be back at night for the rest, but I had to throw new dirt on anyway. An awful sense of hopelessness came over me. In this ruin and desolation, the ache of all my years rose in my bones and I was ready to sit down where I was and give up the ghost. What was the use? The woman in John Bear’s shack was no longer Molly, what had happened in Avery’s saloon could never be undone. The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures, and Molly’s grin had burned the hope right out of me.

My hands were sore gripping the shovel again, they had swelled and blistered from all the grave-digging yesterday, it was only their needling distress which made me hold on tight as I could and march with that shovel over to the windmill. For no other reason than the pain shooting up my arms did I stick the blade into the ground and begin laying out a dugout.

This windmill was the one thing of value that the Bad Man had left. Hausenfield had paid to have the well drilled and then he had made back his costs by charging everybody for the water. It was either the German’s good well water or the tepid stored from a rain or a long climb to a trickle spring up in the rocks. Most people paid. Fee had met the charge by building Hausenfield’s stable, Avery had used his girls. Some others took what they needed when Hausenfield wasn’t looking. I cut an eight-foot square near the windmill and wet it down with pails of water. I dug blocks of sod and piled them on the line. By digging four feet down and piling the sod two feet high you were sure of a ceiling you could stand under if you didn’t stretch. Jimmy Fee came riding in on the pony’s back and he gave the animal a drink. He held the bridle and watched me dig.

“You makin’ another grave?” he said.

Well I felt I was. But I said, “Hitch up that pony and find us some lumber you can’t break. I’m making a place to live.”

By mid-afternoon there was a dead hot sun in the sky. I took my shirt off and put a cloth around my neck and as I worked I lifted my hat every few minutes to let the air in. There was no wind and the water in the tank went down and I had to climb the scaffold to turn those stubby mill blades. The digging and the climbing wore on me, I had worked all my life but the year I had lived in the town I had grown soft as I thought I had a right to do in my old age. I felt that year now. Luckily for me, Bear came out of his shack to take a nap in its shade side, and afterwards he walked over and without a word gave me a spell on the shovel. I guess he didn’t want me in his place any more than I wanted to be there. The digging was done by sundown.

We found a fairly good shake in the rubble and dragged it over for a ridgepole. When it was in place I laid the odd bits of lumber Jimmy had collected across from the shake to the sod walls. Then I laid other wood over the cracks. Then we went up to the rocks and brought back armfuls of scrub and covered the boards and threw some dirt on and there was a dugout, roof and all. Of course it lacked a door for the hole on one side, but that was a refinement which could wait. What I wanted now was to set up the stove inside and eat some of the apples and maybe open one tin of the milk.

I said to Jimmy: “Get in there and jump a little, tamp that floor down.” I had learned early in the morning that he was alright as long as you ordered him about. All day I had been telling him what to do and he had done it. This time he just stood with a far-off look on his face. I thought the dusk was recalling his father to him, but he pointed out to the flats and said: “There’s someone comin’.”

The clouds were red over the flats and darkness was moving in. About a mile to the south something was making dust, and as we looked it showed itself to be a canvas-top wagon.

“Jimmy get over by the Indian’s next to those things we gathered.” This time he moved. “And put that box of shells inside your shirt!” I called after him.

John Bear went inside his hut and closed the door. I put on my shirt and stood in front of the dugout, and I loosened the Colt in my belt.

We waited without moving for the wagon to arrive. It came on with a bump over the graves. When it reached the town’s edge the team slowed to a walk, a six-horse team, and I wondered what kind of covered wagon needed six horses. They were well used. Slowly down the burnt-out street they came as if the driver was taking in the sight. Then they turned and pulled the creaking rig on toward me.

“Hollo!” the driver called. He reined in just as I thought he was going to ride on past. He sat up there behind his steaming horses, a stout man, smiling widely under a bushy mustache, he might have been a smith except that he wore a striped shirt with sleeve garters. Turning in his seat he said to someone inside the wagon: “See, was no prairie fire, where is grass for prairie fire?”

“Well you’re a damn genius, Zar,” a woman’s voice came from inside, “but I don’t see no Culver City neither.” I saw her come up behind his shoulder and the thing that struck me was she had no bonnet on her head.

They both looked down at me.

“Frand,” the man said, “there is mine camp in these hills, am I right?”

“I’ve heard of one,” I said.

“Ah hah! I am right. And what has happened here?”

I said, “Well a man come by preaching hellfire.”

He laughed and I could see the glint of a gold tooth: “Frand, listen. Two days past I learn is a mining camp westward, a place of business. But westward is big, and yesterday I am lost. Is rain, is dark, and only one strange light is in bottom of sky. You see what I’m telling you? There is good in everything, what for you was a town burning was for me a lamp in the window.” The man shook as he laughed. His jowls shook, his stomach shook.

The woman said: “Don’t mind Zar, he’s a Russky.”

“I am,” the man agreed. He jumped down from the seat and I was surprised how short he was. “We make the night here, Adah, and tomorrow to the gold.”

The woman disappeared in the wagon. The man said to me: “Now frand I have thirsty horses. Is that well yours?”

“That’s right.”

“I pay of course. You are a survivor, you will need provisions.”

“Maybe.”

He looked at me then as if he was hiding some joke.

“You like beef? I carry beef.”

As he spoke something fell off the back of the wagon and then someone jumped off and although my view was obstructed I thought it was a boy. I heard some high voices. At the same time the woman appeared at the front of the wagon and climbed down easily despite a mess of skirts.

“Adah, horses to water,” the Russian said. “Others make tent in back of dugout. Like in homeland — two houses make willage.”

Without unhitching the team, the woman Adah pulled them away to the water barrel. When the wagon moved off I saw three figures standing around a square bundle of canvas. This was dusk and it took me a moment to understand that they were all women. One, in pants, whom I had taken for a boy, I saw now to be a Chinese.

“You see my prize herd, frand?” the Russky poked me in the ribs and chuckled. “Water for beef, is fair?”

“Hey Zar,” one woman called, “can’t you wait till we’ve been in a place five minutes? I swear you’d trade with a cactus if you met up with one.”

“Hey Zar,” another called, “that little old boy yonder looks more able than the feller you talkin’ to.”

The Chinawoman giggled and Zar raised his fist and shouted: “Shod up!”

But I almost laughed myself. Here I was with nothing between me and the Fates but the clothes on my back, I was hard put just to stay alive, and this fellow had come in off the flats to offer me luxuries. I shook my head. I told him I would rather take vittles and maybe some of his alcohol when his camp was made.

“As you weesh,” he shrugged. He was disappointed, the ladies were his stock in trade. He walked over to them, did some shouting, cuffed the Chinese girl on the ear, and before long the women were putting up their tent nearby.

Well I went about my business. Together with Jimmy I toted our property inside the dugout. I got one lamp going, I put up the stove and built a fire. We tamped the floor and spread the two blankets which belonged to the Major. All the while I was thinking of the provender to be had from this Russian. I hadn’t figured past the few peas and dried apples and tins of milk we’d salvaged; and I didn’t relish the idea of hunting prairie dogs. These traveling people — the more I thought about them the better I liked them.

There was a commotion just as we had things about settled. Jimmy stuck his head out of the door: “It’s over by the Indian’s!” he called.

I looked out. It was already dark. There were lights in front of Bear’s shack, and a lot of yelling. “Stay here Jimmy,” I said and I ran over. The Russian’s women were standing in the door waving their lamps and jabbering away. Inside, John Bear was lying face down on the ground. This Zar was trying to lift Molly under the arms and she was screaming and tearing at his face with her fingers.

“Here, let her be, mister!” I said. I pulled my gun out and trained it on him. He put Molly down readily enough and turned to me, but he didn’t seem to notice I was covering him.

“Ah frand,” he said, “you tell me what this is? My girls come to say hollo and what do they find but this savage?”

“That’s right,” the woman Adah said. “Sittin’ on his haunches starin’ at her behind. I never seen the likes!”

“Oh you sons of bitches,” Molly moaned.

“That don’t go where I come from,” one of the women said. “No damn Indian—”

“This lady is burned,” I said.

“Well alright if that’s so, we can fix her up fine in the tent, we can take care of her.”

“Don’t you touch me!” Molly screamed. “Whores! Keep away from me!”

“Well I like that for being grateful,” Adah said.

I said: “The Indian’s a good doctor.”

The Russian raised his bushy eyebrows: “He doctors?”

“He’s been taking care of Molly.”

“Wal I have killed him with my fist. On his neck I hit him.”

I kneeled down for a look at Bear. He wasn’t dead, he was stunned. I helped him sit up in a corner.

Molly was saying, “Blue get these whores away from me, oh Christ get them away from me!”

“Honey,” one of the women said to her, “look at you all covered with dirty redskin medicine, no wonder you’re complainin’. Now you come on with us and Adah’ll fix you up proper.”

I thought Molly would have a fit. She was crying and beating her fists on the ground: “For Godsake I’ll die if they touch me, oh God, keep them away …” But what was worse, she suddenly left off and crawled around in the dirt until she found her little cross. She clutched it in her hands and began to mumble to herself, her lips moved fast and her eyes began to roll upwards.

“Ay, poor woman,” Zar said fingering the scratches on his face, “she has sharp nails for a believer.”

“It’s a cryin’ shame,” said Adah, “lyin’ in the mud that way.”

I looked at John Bear, still sitting groggy in the corner. And I looked at these righteous people crowding the shack. “Molly you’ll come with me,” I said.

Bending down, I lifted her arms and put her over my shoulder. I expected her to struggle but she made no move to stop me, she weighed like a baby. The air was chill so I told the Russian to put the buffalo robe over her. The minute the robe touched her, Molly gasped and dug her nails in my neck. I carried her out of the shack and toward the dugout, the ladies of the brush following me with their oil lamps throwing a jumpy glow on the ground.

When I got to the dugout I stepped past Jimmy and laid Molly down on a blanket. Then I hung up the other blanket for the door and poked my head out and said to these still-chattering women: “Alright, I’ll take care of her, she’ll be alright.”

But when I turned back inside, Molly was looking at her palm — she couldn’t find her cross. “They took it from me, they stole it!” she cried out. And then she began to wail again and to curse. She cursed her father and her mother, she cursed the day she was born, she cursed herself for coming West, she cursed me. And while she ranted and carried on, Jimmy slipped out and found the cross lying on the ground halfway to the Indian’s shack where she had dropped it. He came back in and went to his knees by her side and held it out with that solemn Fee look on his face.

Molly, all streaked with tears and dirt, looked up at Jimmy as if seeing him for the first time.

I was wishing she could look at me that way. I said:

“Molly, you remember Fee’s boy …”

A few minutes later they were both sleeping sound. It was warm in the dugout, we were like three creatures in a hole, and I sat down to rest a bit before I followed the Russian and his ladies to their tent. I stretched my legs and closed my eyes and I fell asleep. Now I’m trying to write what happened and I wonder, does a dream come under that? I dreamed the Man from Bodie was driving a herd across some badland; and riding each head was a wolf or some buzzard with its claws planted. I was in the middle, running with the rest, and I couldn’t shake free of those claws. They drove me to my knees and I tumbled and was stomped into the earth by those behind me, dirt was filling my mouth. It was the taste of dirt woke me. Pieces of dried-out sod were falling from the wall, on my face. I got a shock because through the edge of the blanket hanging for a door I saw it was broad daylight outside. I had slept right through. Molly and Jimmy were still asleep as I crawled out and stood up stiffly, blinking in the sun.

It was well along in the afternoon and I was sure those traveling people were gone. But I turned and ten yards in back of the dugout there they were striking their tent. It was a big army tent and they were having trouble, they were too busy to do the striking — they were arguing. When one made to pull up a stake another shouted something, and then they all had to shout something. In the light I could see the women better than I had the night before: the one called Adah seemed to be older than the rest, the Chinese and the other two — one tall, one kind of dumpity — were not much more than girls.

I was happy to see them.

But this Zar caught sight of me in the middle of a long harangue and he tacked me on to the end of it: “And you, frand, are no frand of mine!” he shouted.

I didn’t know what to say to that, I walked over to the well to wash off. He came up to me, talking every step of the way: “So what shall I do now? All morning I search for trail to mining camp! You did not tell me there was none, you said nothing. And now I have women who should be on their backs and they are on my neck. Four days have I lost!”

My head was still filled with sleep. “Trail up through those rocks plain as day,” I said.

“You call that trail? It is for ants. How can I get my wagon on that trail?”

He was right there, I hadn’t understood he wanted to wagon straight up to the lodes — I should have, there was nothing else he would want to do.

“Well mister, that’s just a back trail. The town you wanted is on the trade roads another two days travel from here. I guess you followed the wrong light after all.”

He was mad. The veins in his neck stood out. He let go in Russian and in English and the words flew. When I bent down to pour some water over my neck he bent down too, and when I threw my head back to drink he addressed my Adam’s apple. When he ran out of names to call me, he pointed to the scratches on his face and went on to Molly — a “cat woman” he called her — and when he finished with that subject he turned and stalked back to his girls.

Well I thought for sure I had lost the trade on the well water. This Russian wouldn’t hand me a bean now. And if he had ridden up two days before he did or two days after, that would have been the end of it.

But my head cleared and I remembered something.

I ran after him: “Look here,” I said, “if you can’t get to the gold maybe the gold will come to you.”

“What’s this?”

“Come on Zar,” the dumpity girl said, “we’re wastin’ time, this place gives me the chills.”

“What gold?” he said, ignoring her.

I talked for all I was worth. I told him — exaggerating a little — what a thriving town this had been until two days ago. I told him how the miners came every Saturday night, a regular crowd of them, to spend money and blow off steam. I told him there was no reason they wouldn’t show up just like they always did — for as I’d remembered, this was Saturday.

For a few seconds I had him. He pulled on his mustache and frowned and worried the idea some. But then he made up his mind: “No. We go.” What saved me was that he and the ladies weren’t in agreement which way to go. He was for striking west to the big roads, they wanted to turn back. The bunch of them bickered and sulked, shouted and threatened each other while I kept glancing up to the rocks and hoping the time would be with me. Whenever it seemed as if an accord was about to be made, I put in a word that would start the arguing up all over again. Only the Chinagirl had nothing to say, she stared from one to the other, wondering how things would turn out. She was the one who first spotted the three figures on muleback looking on from high in the rocks.

“Wave, girls, wave!” Zar shouted.

And they did, jumping and waving their kerchiefs, calling “Hey! Hey!” until the miners began to ride down.

The sun was just setting. Zar snapped out orders to the girls and while they got busy preparing he took me over to his wagon and gave me a bag of flour, some strips of dried beef and a can of lard. He was smiling, I was his frand again.

But I wasted no time tucking that barter in the dugout.

4

A few hours later there were a good dozen mules and horses roped out by the tent. Singing was coming from inside and it was a strange sound in the night air. Those miners hadn’t taken but a few minutes to get over the wonder of the town ruins; one or two had put off their interest in the new whores for a few moments while they rode out to the graves to take off their hats.

But I talked with one man I knew, Angus Mcellhenny, a short old digger who kept a pipe in his teeth and had likely shot a hundred grubstakes before he gave in to work company lodes. Angus couldn’t believe what had happened.

“Just one of them Blue?” he kept saying.

“Just one Angus.”

“They roam in packs mostly, they like to put on fer each other.”

“Well he was alone.”

“My God. The doorty bastard. Say him once more.”

“Well he was a big man, a head taller than me, and he had this blaze over one side of his face. But what you’d remember are his eyes. He had eyes like a spooked horse.”

“Sure. I know the mon. It would be Clay Turner.”

“He was headed your way.”

“My God, likely he rode right by the camp.”

“You know him?”

“I know of him. Why he should be dead, he went bad years ago.” Angus took his pipe out of his mouth and spit: “I wish him in Hell, he’s been ridin’ too long.”

There was a big laugh from the tent and the tall girl came out leading a man by his ear. He was guffawing, he was well along. Angus and I stepped out of the way as she led him around to the side of the tent and pushed him up in the covered wagon and climbed in after him.

“Blue,” said Angus, “come have one with me and we’ll drink to old Flo, God keep her.”

It was hot enough for midnight in that tent. Kerosene lanterns were hooked to the tentpoles and they threw a yellow cast over all the smiling faces. Over on one side the Russian had a bar set up, a plank laid across two sawhorses. His sleeves were rolled and a big apron was tied around his stomach and he was drawing whiskey from a cask to fill the orders of the girls. Zar was in a sweat, his face was red, his eyes bright. On the plank right by his hand was a shotgun. And on the ground by his feet was a sack into which he dropped the silver the girls brought him, or the pouches of dust.

“On house frand,” he shouted, and poured two drinks in tin cups. Angus Mcellhenny and I drank to the memory of redheaded Florence.

Some of the customers were sprawled on camp meeting chairs, some on the ground; there were those who made a point of pinching the dumpity girl or the Chinese as they went by, there were a few gathered around Adah, who was leading the singing and playing on an old melodeon.

All I need in this lifetime

Pretty girl and a silver mine …

is what they sang but the song broke up when one man in back of Adah leaned over, put his hands in her dress and gave her a good shake. Adah shrieked, stood up and slapped him smart, and that made everyone laugh including her.

Adah called to the dumpity girl: “Do your dance Mae!”

And then all attention was fixed on Mae as she lifted her arms above her head and began turning around and around. The miners started to clap time and she spun faster and faster until her skirts rose and showed her legs above the shoes. At the height of the dance she stopped suddenly and yanked a man to his feet and led him right out of the tent while everyone laughed and yelled after him. The tall girl — Jessie, they greeted her — brushed back in a minute later and she went directly to sit on the lap of a glaze-eyed boy who still had his pimples. I saw the Chinagirl, dressed in a red satin shirt and bloomers with a yellow sash around her waist, she was on her knees offering a drink to one grey old fellow who stared at her while he pulled on his beard. He reached for her instead of the whiskey but she held up her hand and smiled, I suppose she had to wait her turn for the wagon.

These girls knew how to work, they didn’t pick but the drunkest of the lot, or the least able. It looked to me like Zar the Russian had an establishment that put old Avery’s to shame.

Angus Mcellhenny still wanted to buy me a drink and I let him. But when he turned away and got caught up in the revelry I took the cup and left. The song began again and I could hear it as I walked through the cold air to the dugout:

All I want before I’m old

Big fat woman and a mountain of gold …

In the dugout Molly and Jimmy were chewing on strips of the dried beef like a pair of dogs, lying there with only the light of the glowing stove, listening to the sound of the frolic outside. It was a mournful sight. I poked up the fire, and with our skillet and some lard I made up a batter of flour-and-water cakes. I gave two of the cakes to Jimmy and put two down in front of Molly. She turned her head away.

“Molly,” I said, “I have some liquor here and if you eat those cakes you can wash them down with the liquor.”

She said nothing. But at that moment I heard a woman’s voice just outside: “Not that way you old ass!” At the same time someone stumbled against the dugout and one of the roofboards fell inside, hitting Molly on the back. Molly set up a yell and I picked up the board and ran out. That dumpity girl, Mae, was pulling her customer back to the tent while he laughed and coughed and stumbled along.

Well I put the board back in place and I sat down against the sod wall so I could watch and keep the drunks away. I sat there sipping the whiskey Molly didn’t want; it was good whiskey and it warmed my gullet, but the rest of me grew cold in that chilly air. The windmill creaked in the darkness and one of the horses would nicker now and then and I must have heard twenty verses of that song rising out of the tent. But what I listened to was the talk coming through the sod wall at my back.

“Go ahead,” it was Molly’s voice, “take a look. Go on now, is it bleeding back there?”

“No.”

“Alright, you’re a good boy … I knew your Pa.”

“Yes.”

“He liked Flo—”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead now, for all the good it did him.” There was no answer, but a burst of shouts and laughing came over from the tent. “Why d’you cry!”

“I–I ain’t.”

“So he’s dead. There’s worse than that, look at me. You don’t have to cry for Fee. How old are you?”

“He said twelve.”

“When?”

“I don’t — I don’t remember.”

“Twelve. Well you’re small for your age. Go on and eat up that prairie cake, you want to grow into a man don’t you? Oh God my back is on fire, oh Christ! … Go on and eat, little boy, I can tell you a man is hard enough to be even with proper eatin’!”

Later I fell asleep sitting there and through the night I kept waking to the shrieks of the women or the roar of the men. The light streaming from the tent fixed in a yellow square on my mind and from time to time I saw figures buck through it and disappear like phantoms beyond its edge. Toward the dawn I was aware of some mules trotting off and when the night lifted and I woke, stiff in the grey light, I could see miners sleeping all around, like stones.

I got up and walked about and came on Angus Mcellhenny: he was slumped and snoring in Hausenfield’s old bathtub which sat out in back of the ruins like some stranded schooner. The sight of Angus that way did not cheer me up, I felt a great melancholy looking on him in the gloom of the grey morning. What good anyone could come to on this ashen townsite I could not see.

As the day came up I found enough to do: I mixed up more batter for our breakfast, I looked for a pot for Molly’s use, I knocked a frame together for the door of the dugout, I gathered chips for fire from under the feet of the animals still tethered near the tent, I took the Major’s pony out where there was some brush he could work on. As the sun got higher the miners began to stir, and one by one they got up cussing or groaning, and they left. I heard one man say to his mule: “Now Blossom you walk nice and easy so as old Jake’s head don’t topple.” And another, that pimply boy, who looked sick and miserable in the daylight, came over with a crumpled letter in his hand.

“I always post my letters with Mr. Maple,” he said to me.

“Well Ezra’s gone,” I said.

“Alright, you can hold my letter for the stage.” He brought two cartwheels out of his pocket and put them in my hand. “It’s two dollars the ounce and I never say more than an ounce’s worth.”

He was off before I could say yes or no, and I think it was this as much as anything which caused things to go as they did. Zar the Russian was climbing down from his wagon with a whistle on his lips when he saw the boy give me the letter and ride off. He buttoned his shirt and called to me. Together we built up a fire and he brewed some real coffee and gave me a mug. Then, sitting on the ground, he asked me to tell him what, truly, had happened to the town. I told him.

“So,” he said, “was a sudden man.”

“That’s right.”

He pointed to the boy’s letter which I had put in my shirt pocket: “And town is gone but use for town may not be gone. Am I right?”

“You’re right.”

“And will stage come again?”

“I reckon. If it pays.”

“Will come stage again. Will come miners again!” He couldn’t contain himself at the idea, he jumped up and began pacing and pulling his beard, a round barrel of a man muttering to himself in Russian. I drank the hot coffee and watched him. He stopped to look around: he looked at the windmill, he looked at the rock hills, he turned a full circle, looking east over the rubble of the burnt-out street and looking south over the flats to the horizon. The sun was at noon and it bleached the flats almost white with shimmers of yellow or pale green where the ground dipped or lay in the shadow of a cloud.

“Frand,” he said taking a deep breath, “what do you smell?” He looked at me: “You smell the coffee? You smell the horse? You smell the burn in the air?”

I nodded. “Ah, you have not the merchant’s nose. You know what I smell? The money!” He looked at me and that gold tooth showed out through his beard and he was laughing hard, holding his hands on his sides and shaking fit to bust. He laughed so loud that Jimmy came out of the dugout to see.

“You unnerstand what I’m telling you, frand,” Zar said. “We shall be neighbors here!” He leaned over and slapped me on the shoulder. Still laughing he walked quickly over to the tent and went inside.

Well his coffeepot was still on the fire so I filled my cup again and motioned for Jimmy to come over.

“Drink this up Jimmy,” I said. He took the coffee without a word. I noticed he looked better with a good night’s sleep in back of him, those Fee eyes were not so deep in his head.

“Is Molly still asleep?”

“No. She’s saying words.”

“What?”

“She’s saying words to herself. With that cross.”

“Is she praying?”

“Yes, she’s praying.”

When he finished I filled the cup again. “Take this to her,” I said, “she’ll take it from you. Maybe a cup of coffee is what she’s praying for.”

Walking carefully Jimmy went toward the dugout. But then some loud protest caterwauled from the tent and he stopped for a moment and looked back at me.

“Go ahead,” I called, “that’s just those people.”

I put more water in the Russian’s coffeepot and set it back on the fire. Then I stood listening to the awful sounds from the tent. The ladies were sleeping in there and Zar had gone in to tell them they were going to be founders of a new town. It was a furious racket. I could hear him shout and I could hear them shout back. I figured the only one not putting up a squawk was the Chinese, and I was right. In a few minutes she pushed the flap aside and came out, limping a little, to stare at the rocks and the flats and the ruins.

I had an idea at that moment. I went over to the bathtub and rolled Angus out on the ground. He didn’t even miss a snore. I dragged the tub back to the well, washed it out as best I could, and filled it with pails of water. I could see the sun shaking in that water and it showed back the blue sky. Given time to warm in the day’s heat it would be an inviting thing; I have my share of cunning.

As I waited the argument inside the tent fell off until I could hear only one of the women standing up to Zar’s tirades. She appeared outside and it was the plump one, Mae. Mae stalked over to the wagon and climbed in and started to throw things over the side. A pot, a blanket, a carpetbag. “I ain’t goin’ to, no sir,” she was yelling, “y’all can fry here in this hole for all I care!”

Zar had followed her and he was standing by waving his fist: “You think you are too good for this place! You think you know better than Zar what to do! I will kill you with my hands, Maechka!”

For answer she threw out an oval looking glass and it caught him square on the side of the head. I could have laughed but the Russian roared with rage. Jumping up on the wagon he stuck his arm inside and pulled the woman out and threw her to the ground.

“Hey Zar!” the tall one, Jessie, called. “None of that!” She and Adah were standing in front of the tent, red-eyed, watching the battle. In the bright daylight and rumpled with sleep, none of the women looked too good. Their face paint was rubbed off and their hair was hanging and they all looked the worse for wear.

“I say what we do, no one else!” Zar was shouting. And to make his point he was kicking Mae as she tried to get up. When she got to her feet and tried to run he knocked her down and kicked her again. She was screaming and he was saying, “You will shod up, shod up!”

I ran over and pulled him away from the girl, she had given up trying to get away and was just lying there curled up and crying with her head between her arms. Zar let me lead him away but he turned every few steps to curse her in Russian.

The Chinagirl had run inside the tent when Zar came out but Jessie and Adah went over to Mae and helped her up. Adah put her arm around the bruised girl and mothered her. Witnessing this I was ashamed of myself. But I left Zar sitting cross-legged and surly by his cooking fire and I went over to the unhappy women and allowed they could use the bathtub by the well if they liked.

They must not have seen a tub in months. Mae forgot her peeve in a moment and she and Jessie stripped themselves clear down to their hides and took turns sitting in the tub, splashing and laughing like children. They rubbed themselves with a piece of scented soap which Adah brought out to them. “It’s genuine Parisiun!” Adah called to me. “Got it from some son of a bitch what stole it from a Colonel’s lady!”

The Chinese stood off a ways just looking on, and she was smiling with delight. Those two jumping in and out of the tub, red down to their necks and up to their wrists but white everywhere else, were as unmindful of anyone watching as if they had been whole dressed. One watcher was Jimmy, standing against the dugout, and I couldn’t tell him not to, I was another.

That evening I sat at the Russian’s fire and I told him it would be a good idea to put up some tolerable buildings before the stage came. I remembered that Fee bought some of his wood from the mines but that most of it he garnered from dead towns in the territory.

“So let us find such a town,” Zar said.

“Well there’s one I know of,” I said, “name of Fountain Creek.”

“Good. We go now.” He stood up. This fellow had a better mind than Avery ever had but it would outrun you with your own intentions. I used to own a horse like that, you spurred him once and you couldn’t hold him.

“Wait on,” I said, “it’s a half day’s travel. You don’t gain anything losing a night’s sleep. We’ll head out at sunup.”

But once it was decided I began to worry the whole idea. It was all too quick for me; glad as I was to be staking out in earnest I couldn’t believe in it altogether, almost against my will I found myself glancing up at the shadows of the rocks. I didn’t like leaving Molly and the boy untended for a day and maybe a night too.

Well I was up and waiting for the dawn. When the first light ran through the sky I went over to the Indian’s shanty. As I feared, John Bear was in no humor to keep a watch out for anyone, he had not come out of his shack since Zar had knocked him down; and I saw him through the door sitting hunched up in front of a dead fire, he was deep in a brood. There isn’t much worse you can do to an Indian than touch him. Bear wore a shirt and britches and he was living in this shack where ten years before he wouldn’t have sat down under a roof — but for all he felt now he might just as well have stayed a blanket Indian.

In the chilly early morning Zar had unloaded his wagon and now he was stripping it down, pulling off the canvas and lifting the struts away. On the ground were trunks, sacks of grain, boxes, a barrel, bedding — he packed a lot in that wagon. The women were up and about, laboring to get it all inside the tent.

“I am soon ready, frand,” he called. I went over to him and told him Bear was in the dumps. He wasn’t too concerned, he said: “The savage will get over it.” I remember those words.

“Well that may be,” I said, “but meanwhile there’s no one here to keep an eye out while we’re gone.”

“So?” He shrugged. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to leave — especially with Molly in the dugout the way she was. But there seemed to be no way out of it. I finally asked around till the tall girl, Jessie, said she had an old dress she might be willing to sell. I offered her the two dollars that pimply boy had given me to post his letter.

“No,” she said, changing her mind, “it’s too good for Madam Bitch in there.”

“Give it him,” Zar said, scowling.

So the exchange was made and I took the frock in to Molly. She was sitting up facing the doorway and she was holding the buffalo robe to her shoulders. Those green eyes in that peaked face made me feel again the queerness, the dismal shame of trying to speak to her. I had to clear my throat.

“Molly, things are going good, these people want to stake out here. I’m going off with the Russian to find a load of wood for building.”

She nodded, she didn’t seem to care.

“Jimmy’ll stay behind,” I said. “And this is a dress.”

It was to plague me for a long time, like this, that I couldn’t tell what she would answer or if I might find a moment’s favor in her eyes. She didn’t say anything till I began to wonder if she’d heard me; and then I saw she was crying, not making a sound, just looking at the ground as if her whole life was laid out in front of her, while the tears ran down her face.

“Molly, it’s a proper dress,” I said. But she wouldn’t take it. “Wear it yourself, Mayor.” She sat there biting her lip and running her hand through her hair. I didn’t know what to answer, so I went back outside with the dress.

Jessie saw me and by the time I reached the tent she and Adah and Mae had stopped what they were doing to gather around me.

“I knew it,” Jessie said, “why she suckles bobcats, she’d do it with a horse, that bitch, the dress is too good for her.”

“I’ll be damned,” Adah said.

“How do you like that Lady Bacon Ass,” Jessie said to Mae, “that’s somethin’ ain’t it?”

“Trouble with that ol’ girl,” Mae said slowly, “she were burned not hardly enough.”

I was scratching the stubble on my chin; and listening to these women made me say something I don’t understand to this day. Maybe I wanted to keep Molly from their scorn; maybe it was just some mournful deviltry in me.

“Molly’s my wife,” I said. I think I was just saying what I knew, that we had been wedded by the Bad Man from Bodie.

Well they looked at me as like struck dumb. I saw a doubt in Jessie’s eye — she may have wondered why I’d left my wife to lie in an Indian’s shack where they found her — but it was gone in a second. I suppose there is nothing that a whore will respect more than a married woman. Those ladies stammered and blushed like virgins, and the next thing I knew Adah had taken me inside the tent, opened her trunk and dug something up from the bottom of it.

“This here’s my wedding dress,” she said to me, “I wore it once only, on my marriage day. Twenty years ago. My husband was a minister. This was his tent, those were his meetin’ chairs, that was his melodeon and I played the hymns for him. I don’t have a ring on m’finger ’cause I’m ashamed to wear it, but you can tell her this dress is clean.”

“Well now Miss Adah—”

“Go on, you take it.” She folded this white dress over my arm. “It’s simple, it will do her fine, poor woman, gettin’ burned that way it’s no wonder she ain’t herself.”

“That’s right,” said Jessie.

“And give him his two dollars Jessie,” Mae said.

“That’s right,” Jessie said and she put the money back into my hand. “Gimme that old dress, it ain’t fit, I ought to bury it.”

“Ladies,” I said, “you are awful kind.” I was doing alright for a liar, but I meant what I said; it should have saddened me how kind they suddenly were except I knew what they might have done to Molly if they’d found she was one of their kind.

When I stepped out of the tent Zar was up on his wagon and his team was in place: “Wal frand,” he called, “I wait.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said. I found Jimmy around at the front of the dugout. He had been up and about for just a few minutes and the sleep was still in his eyes. He was using his fingers to comb the tail of the Major’s pony.

“Jimmy,” I said, “listen to me careful. I’m riding out now to scare up some wood. I want you to give this dress to Molly after I leave. She needs some covering and she’ll take it if you give it to her. While I’m gone I want you to keep the pony hitched to the rig and right by here. If you see any sign of that Bad Man take Molly and light out south to the wagon trails. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have any trouble. Just don’t stray, stay close by. Don’t bother the Indian, he’s in the dumps, he might be mean. Eat up those prairie cakes I made. Probably those ladies’ll give you some hardtack if you ask them. Alright?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be back.” I started off and then I turned back: “If someone asks you how your Ma is feeling, they’ll mean Molly.”

A minute later I was up on the box beside the Russian; he snapped his whip and we skidded off with a clatter. I turned in my seat to look back: no one watched us go but Jimmy; he stood by the dugout staring after us, and as we drew further away and I looked back again he still stood there without moving. I wished I had said something to make him feel better, or maybe tousled his head.

The Russian drove his horses as if he was racing a train, I had to grab the box while the empty wagon swung out one way and then another behind the team. I pointed south and west across the flats and that’s the way we went, rumbling, bumping through the stumped-up dust. It was no situation for any kind of talk but the Russian didn’t know it. He was one of those people proud of himself and his station in life and he shouted out his story as we rolled on under the sun, and he kept up even after the flats gave way to fixed swells of sand, sparsely weeded, that stretched on ahead of the eye like a solid sea. I only half listened, I was thinking of Molly and would she wear that dress. “Frand … I come West to farm … but soon I learn, I see … farmers starve … only people who sell farmers their land, their fence, their seed, their tools … only these people are rich. And is that way with everything … not miners have gold but salesmen of burros and picks and pans … not cowboys have money but saloons who sell to them their drinks, gamblers who play with them faro … not those who look for money but those who supply those to look. These make the money … So I sell my farm … and I think … what need is there I shall fill it … and I think more than picks and pans, more than seed, more even than whiskey or cards is need for Women. And then I meet widow Adah, owner of tent … And I am in business.”

We reached Fountain Creek at noon. It stood in some tall yellow grass by the banks of a dried-out arroyo, a deserted street of shackly buildings, corrals rotted by the weather, porches grown over with weeds. Before we got to work we took some pulls on the Russian’s water bottle and ate some tack he had brought. Rusted tin cans were lying all over, half buried in sand, the hot pebbly wind was swinging the door of a roofless hut at the far end of the street. I spotted a mangy slant-eyed wolf crouched under a porch not fifty feet from where we were. He was watching us close.

“He’s a hungry one,” I said to Zar, “he’ll go for these horses if we let him.”

“So, we won’t let him.” Still chewing a mouthful, Zar reached for his shotgun and slowly brought it around and shot off both barrels at the wolf. The animal was out of there fairly, along with his mate that we hadn’t seen, and the two of them bounded away along the arroyo.

“Their courage’ll be back by and by,” I said, “let’s get to work.”

We went for the corrals first, untying what rawhide lashes we could, cutting the rest, laying the poles down lengthwise on the wagon bed. Then we began collecting lumber from the frame houses and barns, staying away from places where the white ants were too thick, prying off boards, knocking away doors, pulling up porch planks, shakes, beams, shingles. There was so much rot in everything it was a wonder the buildings were upright at all. We worked all through the afternoon hardly stopping for a drink, coughing with the dust that rose, the sand blown by the wind. Our friends the wolves had cut down the mice and burrowing owls to be found but bugs and spiders scuttled away from our axe and pick. We worked till we judged the wagon could hold no more, the wood was stacked a tall man’s height above the driver’s box. Then we went around picking up every nail in sight. And we came on a set of bright white human bones sitting in the arroyo. We stood looking at that skeleton. It was clean. I had to think what an indecency it is that leaves only the bones to tell what a man has been.

“Fountain Creek,” Zar said. He was mopping his neck with his handkerchief. “Frand, you see the peril. Always the ghost city is one with name full of promise. Is that not so? We must have care in our naming not to make this mistake …”

It was dark when we were ready to leave. I took the reins and the Russian sat atop the lumber to weight it. The horses strained to get the wheels turning and we moved off at a walk. I’ll tell you I was weary on that trip: the night was black with stars and the wagon creaked and swayed and I slipped in and out of dreaming. I couldn’t believe the horses had a destination, I kept thinking I was traveling to no purpose. What good was this to that woman and that boy? What could I hope to do for them? Only a fool would call anywhere in this land a place and everywhere else a journey to it.

I must have fallen asleep and the horses must have stopped — because I awoke to the boom of the Russian’s shotgun and the wagon lurched forward and the reins went taut in my hands. There was a light in the sky ahead of us.

“Those damn wolves have been following,” Zar called down, “but they are running now!”

Later we rode up to the town and Jimmy came running out to meet us. “A man’s here with that same wagon,” he said, “the one they put my Pa in—”

He was about to cry. I got down, stiff, and took his hand: “Say what Jimmy? What, boy?”

“Over there.” Standing by the well was Hausenfield’s hearse. I didn’t trust my eyes, I went over for a close look. There was the mule and the grey; the pick was still wedged across the black door. And a skinny, chinless fellow with a leather vest was leaning against a wheel, looking at me sly.

“Howdo.”

“Where did you find this wagon?” I said.

“Hit waer jes setting out thaer. I tuk it up.”

“And you’ve not looked in the door?”

“Didn’t think to—”

“Well that’s alright,” I said, “this is a burying wagon, you ever do any burying?”

“Never have.”

“Well you’ll find your first customer inside.”

Then I turned and saw Molly holding herself up at the side of the dugout. She had on that white dress and she was smiling at me, a queer, bitter smile. I rubbed my hand across my eyes and I thought why I have a safe name for this town, we’ll call it Hard Times. Same as we always called it.