Marten stared him straight in the eye, unimpressed by what he maybe took for mere rhetoric. “So how’re you alive then, Mister Reese?”
Reese nodded, slightly. “How am I?” he repeated, without much emphasis. Having already asked himself that same question on many an occasion by now, and never yet received any satisfactory answer.
They beat on him some more for a while, after, before slinging him into a cell to wait on some judge they’d have to order from two towns over. The deputy (Jenkins, his name proved to be) sat there checking Reese’s guns in front of him, stroking their chased silver hilts admiringly and sighting down their long barrels at nothing in particular, before locking them safely away with the rest of the sheriff’s armaments.
“Wouldn’t do that, I was you,” Reese told him, carefully maneuvering one of his looser teeth around in its socket with his tongue-tip.
Jenkins frowned. “Why not?”
“‘Cause unless you’re planning on selling ‘em, you probably don’t want what comes along with ‘em. They was at Lincoln too, after all.”
Jenkins gave him a long, cool look. “I heard some things, about you and Haugh.”
“Did you, now.” A pause. “Well, since I think I know what, I don’t suppose it’ll do either of us much good to discuss it any further. Still—would you say I merited hangin’ less or more, I wonder, you happened to find out they was true?”
“There’s some would say more,” Jenkins allowed, flushing slightly. “But I ain’t with ‘em on that one, necessarily.”
“Kind of you. I do merit it, though, sure enough—for Bewelcome, and elsewhere. Make no mistake about that.”
That shut Jenkins up, at least for a little bit; must’ve been something he saw reflected in Reese’s eyes, under the lantern’s uncertain light. They maintained silence together, oddly companionable, until he finally had to ask—
“Whose blood was that you had on you, Reese?”
“Oh, somebody from round here’s, I expect. Didn’t you recognize it?” A pause. “Listen, Jenkins—you and yours seem good people, on the whole, from what I’ve seen. But there’s always a reason I run across places, and you have been unlucky, so might be that’s ‘cause there’s other people here, ones that’s just like me.”
Jenkins, paling: “I’d know, if there was.”
Reese really did have to laugh then, torn mouth bleeding just a bit as he did, streaking his smile like rouge. “Would you? How, exactly, saving the Word of God? Men lie, Jenkins, even when they don’t have something to hide—so how much more you think they’re prepared to do to cover true sin up, ‘specially if they don’t want to have to keep on runnin’ from its consequences?”
Which brought silence again, for a spell. Reese drank it in, leaned his head back against the cell wall, and waited.
***
As it soon turned out, the rest of the townsfolk didn’t plan on putting anything off for simple lack of a judge. Instead, they came for Reese at midnight, with guns and torches; shouted Marten and Jenkins down, then hustled him back
down Cow-track Avenue and hanged him from a tree outside that same burnt church he’d passed on his way into town. They also proved inexpert enough at this particular form of semi-judicial murder that his neck failed to break on the drop, which meant he dangled there a while—tongue out and blackening, face a-swell, some awful noise issuing forth from his throat like a half-swallowed rattlesnake—before Jenkins finally lunged forward and hauled at both his legs together ‘til the crack of bone rang out at last.
This last mercy loosed a flood of piss that ran down Reese’s fine trousers to foul them from the crotch down, soiling dirt and deputy alike; as he thrashed, strangling, his gay shirt flew open in front, revealing to all and sundry the black miracle of his wound . . . that awful fleshly Advent calendar with only one day left celebrated, laid open like a little bone window so everyone in town could see the cold pink meat framed underneath its ragged hole, unbroken yet unbeating.
He heard more than one woman or close-hugged child shriek out in terror at the sight, while many more than one man blasphemed in gutter-language he recognized from Lincoln, Dodge City, Bewelcome itself. But then the penultimate buzz was in his ears, drowning out even that damn betraying song, at long long last:
The owl the owl . . . is a lonesome bird . . .
It chills my heart with dread and terror . . .
That’s someone’s blood there on its wing,
That’s someone’s blood there on its feather . . .
Then Reese was not,
nor never would be,
strung to rot like fruit
from a gallows-tree.
But it wasn’t the end, of course; never was. Not since he’d woken that first morning with blood in his eyes, his mouth, his hair—with an open wound where his shot-through heart should be, and Bart Haugh’s faithless name still curdled on his lips.