Chapter 12

Jean had spent his whole life discovering, on a regular basis, that he had but one talent, and that talent was shooting. Yes he was fast, and yes he was accurate, but it was without merit because he never truly tried. He tried at business once, operating a wagon trail, but that failed. He tried at soldiering but couldn't follow orders...failed at that too. He tried ranching for a time and failed at that. Always he returned back to what he never tried but which always worked, and that was a shootist's work.

Shootist work to lesser men meant stage plays and illusion, fame and drink. It was a depressing death. To Molet a shootist's work was in their allegiances, their ends. It was one thing to be a quickdraw and quite another to make money at it, to make a living. And Molet, uneducated, son of a failed trader, didn't have many skills besides. He was cursed to it, and as such took it for what it was. He saw nothing in it that was performative. To him, it was his whole expression, an extension of himself. He hated it because he depended on it.

For him, men like Julius Rice and Sebastian Tick bastardized the occupation, and gunslinging was an occupation. They made it about show and about perception. Rather, deception. When a situation went wrong they never reached for their iron, neither one of them. They looked for an escape. For them, all there was to lose was pay.

Not so with Jean Molet.

He had sat round the fire with his son and a few ranch hands after dinner, hearing the news about Glory's Dawn and offering his apocalyptic vision of Henry. "They'll come stalking across the plains for gold. Won't none of us resist them..." Later the hands went to bed and Jean stood out with Matthew a while longer. He wouldn't admit it to another soul or to himself, never out loud, but his son intimidated him. He didn't know if he was man enough to raise a child. But he was man enough to want to right a wrong. Matthew hadn't asked for life nor had his mother demanded it. Matthew had been born of sheer will, and Jean's will at that, so when three days after Matthew's birth his mother disappeared there wasn't nothing Jean could claim to be surprised or upset about. Drake had made it clear the child was Jean's responsibility.

Sitting with his son it hit him from time to time that the child was grown and become man but never when it hit did it strike to his bone because soon as Jean looked away Matthew became a child again, and a child he may remain always but for the want of a good life, of protection from the storm. Jean doubted he had given those to his boy, yet he liked to believe he had, to tell himself he was a good father to Matthew, if a little soft. It bothered him a little how closely Matthew resembled his mother. A sin Jean could not forget. Nor did he entirely wish to.

"Why don't when we get out gold we leave?" Matthew asked. Fourteen years of a hard life sculpted sorrow and exhaustion in his young eyes. Fine lines were set already along his jaw and across his forehead. He had his father's mane of dark chestnut hair. "I mean leave for real. Go to Montana or something."

Jean nodded, staring at the flames of the small fire. He was holding a bottle of gin and nipped it. "We could." He thought of Drake. "Lot will have to go our way for that."

"Mr. Rice was saying they got moose so big there that a man could hollow em out and live comfortably inside of them. He was saying they got forests and mountains but no Ixopaw. That has to be something, right Dad?"

"I don't know. I don't know about Montana. Why you talking to Rice?"

"Not everyday I see a negro. Ain't every day I see one's a gunslinger."

Jean scoffed. "Julius Rice ain't no gunslinger. Nor is Tick. Don't be impressed by a few pistol tricks. There's more to those men I'd rather you didn't see."

"I ain't saying their any better than you, sir."

"Exactly. Just watch yourself with them."

"You still meaning to go to town tonight?"

"I am."

"And why can't I come?"

"I don't need worrying over you getting shot. If it was a couple of rustlers or some no-account it'd be different. But as it stands I cannot allow it."

His son said nothing else. He got up and walked away, headed towards the small cabin on the property that he and Jean lived in. Jean watched him leave before turning and heading back to the stable for his horse.

He lit a cigarette and watched the moon. He the saw silhouettes of an owl cross the full moon. Racoons skirted across the plains ahead of him, into some brush. He heard men talking quietly around small fires, two or three of them going across the ranch, each with its own circle of hands and guns. This was Drake's Army in repose.

Molet always hated that name. He hated that Drake never called it what it was, a gang. He hated that Drake had the heart of an outlaw but the trappings of a noble.

He passed the home itself, the mansion of Sid Drake, and upon arriving at the stable found it was occupied with two others. A man and a women. As Jean stepped closer he heard giggling, sounds of passion, the a hushing as he came to stand just outside the building.

He went and pulled open one of the large stable doors and there bathed in moonlight was a stark naked Julius Rice holding his clothes in one hand and in the other the buttuck of an Ixopaw girl.

"Aw, shit," Molet groaned.

"Oh, Molet! It's just you. Thank God." Rice spanked the woman and said something in her ear that made her laugh.

When she made eye contact with Molet her smile disappeared at once and she bowed her head, covering herself with her own clothing as she bustled past Jean and out into the night.

"Like fucking in horseshit, do you Rice?" Molet said, heading past Rice towards his steed.

Rice was pulling on his boots and trousers. His gun belt was sprawled out beside him where he sat in the dirt. "I ain't gonna complain about it, if I can keep myself entertained. It is bleakly tedious round here, contrary to what Drake says."

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"Just you wait," Molet said. He was opening his horse's stall and hitching up his saddle. "Won't be tedious when the Army comes through."

"Where are you headed?"

Jean glanced at him, then went back to his work. "Ain't no concern of yours."

"Why you gotta be like that, Jean? Always pissed off, full of vinegar. When's the last time you had a woman?"

"That is also no concern of yours." He finished fastening the reigns and led the steed out and past Rice and out of the stable. Rice followed him, slipping his arms into his shirt.

"Seriously, where are you goin?"

"Henry."

"For what? The saloon? Shit, Jean."

"Like I said, it ain't no--"

"Aw, shut up. I'm coming. Ain't nothing here."

"What about your lover."

"There's nothing left I can do for her. Let me get my horse."

When he came back Jean was mounted up and itching to go. Julius put on his jacket and jumped onto his horse without a saddle. Molet noticed that Rice rode a Mustang too.

"You got bullets?" Molet asked.

"What? Course I do."

"Might need em. And Rice, before we get too far?"

"What's that?"

"Stay away from my boy."

He had dreams, terrible all, of Fort Unity in the desert, dreams of dust and of endless nights, of fear so omnipresent and dominant it started feeling like nothing at all. He had dreams of Nooney, a young black boy, who had bright green eyes, so bright they were almost yellow. Happy kid who was found one afternoon strung up in the center of a New Mexico ghost town, stiff as wood and his eyes all bugged out and glossy. Well, his eye. The other had most likely been snatched by a condor.

He dreamt of Luis Delmot sometimes, kindly and quiet boy of twenty who liked books and girls, who got washed out by cowboys and left penniless in the woods, only to be picked by Utes and killed when they discovered he was useless to them as a hostage.

Another young man, Lawrence Stills he was called, used to talk on and on about owning a farm in East Andrea. Smart kid. Rebels caught him after a bushwhacking and enslaved him again. Last Sass heard of him the young man was in New Orleans, his hair greying and his skin all turned to ash. Supposedly, he was missing a leg along with a few fingers.

Seemed whenever Sass closed his eyes the dreams would come, the young men's deaths with them. For many years he'd wake from such haunting a with a scream and a cold sweat beading on his arms. After a while he woke up crying. Crying beneath the weight of his guilt, guilt he never knew what to do with. Finally, after many years, he trained himself to always dream. The young men were with him at all times, their deaths, their bodies, their eyes always right behind his eyes. And after all these years, the feeling never got any better.

Wales understood him. At first he figured Wales an abolitionist, or at the least an extremely tolerant man. Then it hit him that Wales loved and accepted him because he had bad dreams too. The two of them were two old houses stuffed with ghost stories and not much else. Sure, Sass was smart and capable with a firearm and had a lifetime of experience fighting and riding and surviving a place that was almost biblical, but in the end what won him the favor of Major Wales was that Sass was one who had nothing left to sacrifice, no part of himself left to give. It had all been given when he laid eyes on those tortured black kids, children whose lives were stolen at the moment they were conceived. And what can you do to a man whose seen that?

Looking at the Captain, who had kept himself largely a stranger through his recovery, Sass wondered what kind of shit the man had seen in his time, or what he might have left in him to keep him going.

How old was he, anyway? Sass was fifty-three and there was no way he'd guess the same out of the Captain. Probably late thrities, maybe early forties. Long enough to see a few things but maybe not long enough to have grown cold against them. But who could really guess at something like that? Some men squeeze sixty years into thirty, others fifteen out of eighty.

They stood out on the drooping balcony looking over Henry, just he and the Captain. Sass had come up for air and solitude. He suspected the Captain had come up for a different reason.

The man looked whiter in the encroaching disk. His flesh had a pallor of ivory.

"So what's your real name?" the ivory man blurted. He sounded awkward.

Sass pretended to have just noticed him. "Aw, who the hell gives a damn?"

"You don't drink?"

Sass scanned over the single road going through town. He watched and listened to men and women getting into arguments, laughing, fighting and then laughing again. He watched someone take hold of another's neck, wrestle them about, then let go. The two proceeded to enter the saloon with their arms around each other's shoulders. "No," he answered through all of this, "I ain't one to make my death come easy. Though I can't say why."

"You're an uptight man. I mean that in a good way of course."

"So you say," he pushed off from the balcony rail and crossed his arms. The Captain wasn't holding any drink either. "You don't like Guerrero's beer?"

"Dont feel like drinking beer. This is pretty country ain't it?"

"Except for the parasites." Sass glanced at the street again. A small group tumbled out of the saloon. "They'll turn this all to shit in a few years. Factories, paved roads, railroads, entrepreneurs...yep, we're pretty well fucked."

"I seen it," answered the Captain, perhaps not oblivious to Sass's reticence but neither was he flustered by it. "I'm from Chicago. I got a family, a boy. I seen what It does, what Holy Industry wreaks. Took my wife when she was but thirty-three. That's some years back now. And I seen what that did to my boy."

"You got a son, huh?" They were lurking again, on the fringe of his psyche. The still bodies, skin flaked white in the hot sun. Poor dead boys all.

"I got a son. Fourtee he is. Nearly a man he is."

"'Nearly?'" Sass scoffed. "When I was fourteen I was a man already. I was a man for four years running, to that point I guess."

"I believe that black folk grow up quicker. It's too bad really. I ain't John Brown or nothing, but it ain't right. That war, this war, the next war. It ain't right."

"It don't gotta be right," Sass said, "if only it was fair."

"There will come a time for the white man, I reckon. Perhaps it's now. What happened at the River, to Custer...maybe it's our time. Maybe we bit off more than we can chew, but I aim to see how it all ends."

"It won't end," Sass said. "Not never. And I don't presume you'd ask the opinion of a negro, but I'll give it anyway. You do what you need to at Fort Abraham, and then you get out. Out out. You get back to your boy because he needs you. Believe me, the White Man, this Country, it'll be just fine."

"I don't know," said the Captain, shaking his head. "I don't know..."

"I do," Sass left the rail and headed back for inside. He wanted to head over to their room and maybe read a little something before he fell asleep. He was too old and had seen too much to be a carouser. He stopped at the Captain and padded his shoulder. "You think on what I said, now. I spoke truth."

With that he left the Captain on the balcony and headed inside. As he walked through the saloon he kept his head down and pretended he was all alone, that he wasn't being watched.

He was always being watched.