The move was simple—lift her serape and shirt, strike the match against the middle of three buttons that fastened her canvas trousers.
She set the candle beside her on the rock and lifted her shirt, reaching down in the dark, fingering the trio of metal buttons.
She held the match in her right hand and closed her eyes. Instead of being in a cave, she imagined herself chained up behind the bar in that beautiful saloon of hers, chewing the dog with Bart or Oatha, flirting with Zeke, glaring at that porch-percher Al, nooning by the stove. She conjured the aroma of whiskey, the cold rancid sweat of hardworking men. No big deal. No great importance attached to this match. Just time for a cigarette.
In the darkness, her hand moved, the match gliding toward her crotch. She was trying not to overthink it, but she noted she couldn’t remember the last time she’d snapped a punk—this thought interrupted as she felt the match head graze the surface of the button.
Acrid bite of sulfur, then the match flared and the lake lighted up, firelight reflected in the water and the crystals, and she could have cried as she reached for the candle.
Her hand slid across wet rock—nothing there.
“The f**k?”
Already, the heat of the flame was descending toward her thumb and fore-finger.
She leaned onto her right buttock, thinking maybe she’d sat on it, but no. Now, carefully, bringing the flame over to the rock, searching the contours, the crystalline veins—still nothing—edging her fingers farther down the match as the flame pursued, desperation setting in, and the heat building, nowhere for her fingers to go now, the fire blackening her thumbnail, her teeth gritted, her skin beginning to bubble, and the last thing she saw before the flame smothered was the candle, three feet from the bank, floating in the lake.
Again, the black, and, as if her brain sensed she’d seen her last light, disorientation flooded in.
“You ain’t dead yet,” she said, rising to her feet. She still had her bearings. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that on the other side of this lake stood the opening to a flat tunnel she’d have to crawl through. From there, she’d take it one room at a time. No rush. No panic. She’d scream. Listen. She’d find them, or they’d find her.
Joss took baby steps along the rocky bank, arms outstretched. She came to a wall she couldn’t feel the top of, but there were handholds, so she climbed, the waterfall getting louder, as though she stood above it now. And still she climbed, uncertain, just grasping in the dark, trusting her arms and legs to take her where—
Her right foot slipped, and she gripped wet rock, feet scrambling for purchase, her fingers cramping.
It hit her—a load of buckshot colder than Emerald Lake in June, with more properties of liquid metal than water, the current dragging her toward that hole that drained the lake deep into the mountain, kept the depth constant.
She came up gasping, lungs, heart, muscles, bones stunned, standing now in two feet of freezing water, stumbling on, no intended direction or destination beyond someplace dry.
After awhile, her knees banged into the bank and she crawled up onto it and climbed until her head struck a wall.
“Goddamn it!”
The way her voice blared back in her face, she figured she’d crawled into some kind of alcove. The air smelled fixed, and her hands shook so hard, she couldn’t grasp the buttons on her cotton shirt.
She ripped it open, pulled her arms out of the sleeves, undid her trousers.
Her boots poured out several jars’ worth of water apiece, and then she sat there naked, shivering in the black and colder than she’d ever been in her life, leaning against a flat-topped rock, sizing up her predicament, chuckle-headed with shock.
“Well, you got a Chinaman’s chance now a gettin out a this hitch, you f**kin yack.” She wiped her eyes, humiliated, facing death, and realizing she didn’t have as much sand as she’d thought. This was worse than looking up a limb at the string party awaiting her in Arizona. No hiding from it—she was down-in-her-boots afraid, with not even a blanket to fill to calm her nerves.
She thought about Lana, wondered if she’d gotten herself back to Abandon, imagined that by now she’d freed everybody. They’d probably have a big meal of soft grub, outdoing even their Christmas Eve supper. But not her. She was done. Done being a saloonist, only thing she’d ever loved, never pour a shot of rotgut in that dog hole again, never taste whiskey, feel the sting of tobacco smoke inflating her lungs, never spread mustard with the rich, never exchange corral dust with the miners, never tell another bugged-up, bandbox, mail-order cowboy he weren’t shit and to take his ready-mades and get the f**k out, never scheme with another picaro.
“Got me, didn’t Ye?” she yelled. “Congratulations! You picked one f**kin helluva way to save me. This funny to You? Wearin a big smile up there? Let me tell You the straight goods. You think I’m gettin down on my knees now my leg’s tied up and I’m feelin poorly, gonna beg You to spare me, make amends for my behavior and pledge everlastin loyalty, You got another f**kin thing comin. Thought it’d be like gettin money from home breakin my ass down in front a my unshucked self? Thought You’d steal my dignity while You kilt me? Well, f**k You! Don’t know if You was watchin back there, but I saved Your child, Lana. Won my spurs, far as I’m concerned. Why You hate me? Tell You what. You all-powerful, all-knowin? We can call the shit even if You end me right now. Don’t care how You do it, long as it’s quick and—”
She didn’t see it, but she felt it.
The alcove shook and filled with dust.
The waterfall went mute.
Her lungs burned, and within thirty seconds, the sulfur gas had killed her.
2009
EIGHTY-ONE
Abigail spun around, whispered, “No.”
Isaiah stood between two scarred aspen trees, his breath pluming in the cold, moist air. He reached down, lifted his trouser leg, unsnapped the ankle sheath he’d taken from Jerrod, and slipped out the little dagger.
“Your boy over there never saw it coming. Cut his throat mid-shit. But I want you to see me coming. I want you to watch me carve up that beautiful ass.”
Isaiah dragged on his cigarette, the ash cherry flaring and fading. Then he threw it down, blew out a stream of smoke, and started toward her.
Abigail sprinted up the dry creekbed as the mist thickened into rain, her lungs raw in the thin air. She spotted the chokecherry thicket in the distance, glanced back, tripped over a rotted log, plowing face-first through the soppy bed of the wash.