2. The Gunfight Begins

Part I of the fight between the stranger and Carlyle. How does the stranger know the bossman? They seem to have a history...

***

The sky was cut into slivers of purple, the color of dried blood splashing across the cloudless expanse; twilight descended quickly upon the earth.  The hour of murder and blood was upon the town; a town that might have had a name once, though no one remembered it now.

The square filled quickly as word got round.  They gathered, the old and the young members of the gang bunched up in clots on balconies and in the spaces between the dilapidated buildings that surrounded the square.  The balconies were fullest, as they overlooked the fountain and they had the best view. 

If the bossman noticed, he gave no sign.

He wore heavy black clothes, and despite the heat he sweat little.  He sat serenely at the edge of the fountain whittling the edge of a broken chair leg to spearpoint.  The scene was familiar to the men of the club.  This was his ritual, his way. Every evening before night  descended proper, he sat for an hour in an open space until full dark. Sometimes reading a book.  Often whittling. Sometimes, though rarely, he played a wooden flute" badly, for he had no talent for it. And perhaps for this reason, he did it seldom. If one had not seen with one’s own eyes, the horrors and screams which the bossman’s hands had made and his lips enjoyed, one might think this scene pastoral and gentle; even ordinary in nature.  One might think the bossman a good natured ordinary man with salt and pepper hair under his an ancient wide brimmed hat. But the bossman was not a good natured ordinary man.  And the evil was pregnant in the deep-set of his eyes.  No one in the club ever looked at his eyes for long.  They thought they might go mad. Or worse, they feared they might lose what little was left of their souls. It was  his eyes that kept challengers from rising among the ranks of the club, even more than his legend.  The legend of a man that never aged.  That the oldest members of the club had seen rule as little boys. 

The minutes dripped like hours as the air became redolent with anxious sweat; as this small outlaw army that called itself a club gathered to watch and wait for the stranger they heard had come.  

If the bossman knew what was coming, he gave no sign.  

When the tension was at its peak, and the twilight heaviest, the bossman stood up and stretched.  Two men broke from the crowd and approached him.  The hour of challenging was in its last minutes; and his standing up was the signal that it was time to take orders and make ready for the night’s raid on the next village. Before the men reached him, however, they froze… and ambled slowly backward to their place among the onlookers.

The look on the bossman’s face would have stopped any man in his tracks. And sent running any who had never seen it. For that was not the face of a good natured, ordinary man any longer, but the face of a demon. The bossman’s face was cut in half with a terrible shark-toothed grin; his eyes seemed ablaze with green flame. In an instant it was gone and it was almost as if it had never been, replaced with a feigned expression of apathy.

The shark’s grin did not faze the stranger.

The stranger strolled forward, almost lazy with nonchalance. The borrowed rifle rested on his shoulder, rising and falling smoothly in his gait. 

The white skull insignia printed on the butt of the gun faced outward, and in the descending night, its alabaster print caught the blood-purple light and for a moment seemed suspended over the stranger’s heart like a crest; and like a spirit leading him onward.

The stranger knew by instinct, the emotion that prompted that shark-toothed gaze.  He knew it well and knew it by name. Blood lust.

They stared at each other for a long while.  Then the bossman burst out gleefully.

“Ha! It looks as if after all this time" thee has shown thy face!” he shouted.  By a trick of the acoustics of the square, and the pin-drop silence of the crowd, his voice carried to every ear gathered there. The bossman tossed aside the whittled chair leg and tucked his thumbs behind his belt loops.  

“Aye, I’m here,” said the stranger. “Did you miss me, Carlyle? Or had ya already given up hope of ever laying eyes on me again?” He smiled  his own horrible smile. “You didn’t think that dirty trick of yours put me in the dirt, did you?”

The stranger and the bossman stared at each other.  The flames of their black eyes glowed brighter as each man allowed himself to come into the fullest awareness of the other.

The bossman sniggered and reached into his black, soot ridden coat, moving deliberately and sarcastically, as to show that he did not mean to draw his weapon, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.  They were fine, filtered cigarettes neatly arranged in their silver wrapper.  These were expensive and rare. The cotton whites of the filters were aligned in neat rows facing upward. A single cigarette, however, framed in the center between the rows of whites was flipped upside down and showed the fine grains of the black tobacco; like a tiny eye among its fellows.  The bossman shook the box carefully, and picked the upside down cigarette.

“You know," the bossman said, “The first thing I do whenever I get a new pack of f**s is flip one upside down in your memory. I always smoke it last too.  For luck, you see.”  He grinned and held the slender cigarette between long, deft fingers.  “You’re the one that taught me that. Do you remember? Mmmm, remind me again, what was it you called it?”

“El burro,” said the stranger.

“Ah, yes, that’s right. The donkey.”  He breathed a deep breath and sighed. “Maybe after I kill you, I’ll cut the habit and save me the trouble of killing you again. It’s almost as if remembering you all this time has brought you back from the dead. Or maybe I’ll keep the habit after all.  Mayhap I get to kill you a third time. Besides, I love thinking about the humor of riding a f*g’s a*s until it burns out and dies.”

The bossman proffered his cigarette. “Would you like to smoke with me before we dance?” he said.  “You can have the burro.”

“Nah,” said the stranger, shrugging his shoulders.  “That s**t’ll kill you.”

“Suit yourself,” said the bossman, placing the cigarette loosely between his lips. He uttered an incantation under his breath and stuck out the little finger of his right hand; with a tiny crackle it produced a sliver of green flame that hung suspended on the tip of the nail. Cupping his hands over the end of the cigarette, the bossman puffed and lit the cigarette. 

There it was, out in the open.  A lick of the black magic.

The bossman smoked.  The stranger waited.  The people watched.

“It’s been twenty years,” said the bossman, eyebrows furrowing.  “I sent those a******s to kill you twenty years ago.  When they never came back, I knew you killed them.  When you didn’t come, I thought maybe you’d killed each other.  Now that you’re here, I wonder.  ‘The hell have you been up to? Off f*****g Sonora all this time? Living the married life?  How is that old w***e, anyway?”

The stranger stiffened.  It was a small change; and yet it was a tension like steel wire coiling to nearly breaking point. His finger inched toward cold curl of the trigger. 

The bossman smiled. “So then she’s dead after all.  Good ol’ Darl and Kenny could follow instructions after all. I wasn’t sure, you see.  I told those two to make sure they picked her off first" with a rifle just like the one you’re carrying.  Ah, that makes sense now, that you would choose…  Ha, ha. I guess that’s supposed to be poetic justice is it?”

They stayed, standing, facing each other, their posture at odds with the situation.  None watching could tell of the iron springs winding in the men, of the catlike readiness to strike should the other man make the first move. 

“Can’t believe you quit smoking.  Ain’t barely nothing left of the old ways. Cigarettes might be one of last. Maybe they got trains, planes and cars somewhere but… what the hell.”  

“You still got killing and raping.  Mayhap the world has moved on, but not by very much,” said the stranger softly. 

The bossman nodded, then took a luxuriant drag of the cigarette.  He grinned that impossible shark grin, eyes darkling, then said, “You know, big brother, I can’t help noticing you’re awfully calm for a dead man…” and the bossman exhaled a long stream of blue smoke, tossing the cigarette forward.  

Before it struck the ground between them, it winked brighter in the mid-air; a flaming torch in the darkness, sparks casting an afterimage in a long, golden arch.  

The stranger’s hands were a-blur in the black. He rolled the rifle from where it rested on his shoulder, and pointing the barrel forward. He propped the butt of the gun on his hip and fired all seven rounds in quick succession. There was the deafening roar of gunfire. Seven thunderclaps to seven blazes, and each missile found its mark.

The rifle was a curious choice for a standoff.  It was not an automatic weapon.  Instead, though it carried a magazine holding seven high velocity rounds of ammunition, it required the use of a lever after each shot to buck the empty shell from the chamber and to clock-in the next round.  It should have been impossible for the stranger to let loose faster than pistol fire.  And yet, it was so.

The rounds pierced the bossman’s gut, chest, and shoulder, sending him in a sprawling backflip through the air.  The last round found the bossman’s forehead even as the body soared mid-flip, cracking the skull and spilling brains on the dark dusty earth" and behind, also onto the fountain where he had sat whittling wood.

The bossman never even reached for his gun. He lay in a ragged heap like a dead animal by the road. In pieces like roadkill. Hollowed, like a corpse half eaten by jackals.

The stranger said nothing.  His face registered no change or emotion. No signs of savoring a victory. He rested the rifle in the crook of his arm once more and stood in the eddies of smoke his gun had made.

On the balconies and between the buildings surrounding the square, the club witnessed this in silence. They were afraid to breathe.  Afraid to hope.  There was a sound.  A boy in the crowd, a new recruit who could not have been older than eleven years of age, but was probably a veteran killer (it was kill or be killed in the club) let down his guard and whooped; he knew his own heart and wished to be freed from the hell of being forced to corrupt his soul. Another man, a club elder who had seen this scene before, slapped the boy’s head hard; and the boy looked incredulously at the man, tears welling in his eyes.

It was not a time to cheer.

Jaws dropped, faces paled, and there was a universal trembling of knees as a deep cackle of wild laughter erupted from the broken heap that should have been the dead bossman. The heap shook, the laughter growing louder and louder.  It was an inhuman sound.  A sound like a legion of devils.