Here by the Bloods (20 page)

“Mabel,” she says. “Mabel Pitts. Of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Nice to meet you, Harlan.” She turns from me and sails up onto her horse, the mule rope tied off to her saddle. She leads her horse to the other mule and fastens that rope to hers as well.

“It's cold in the Bloods. You'll need to find wood before you get too far in.” She waves me off, as if she has already thought of this.

“I'll burn money. I've sure got enough of it.” She guides her horse out of the rocks, the two mules in tow. “Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” I say, watching her disappear into the snow.

An hour past sunrise, I pull into the Bend and find Merle taking his morning coffee on the back porch of the Jewel. Big Jack is with him, mug in hand. Rico, under Merle's watchful eye, sweeps off the steps. The boy comes over to untie the travois from Storm, who is more than happy to be rid of it.

“What's the matter, Rico,” Merle says, “you never seen the way the Navajo wrap their bodies?”

“No, sir. I no like it.”

The piss puddle has nearly dried, the stench a mere nuisance. Order seems almost restored. Life, as it does, goes on. The silver star pinned to Big Jack's shirt shimmers in the early light. It is a heavy, proper badge, not the cheap tin he garnered off the mayor.

Jack sees me eyeing it and humbly taps it with his thumb. “Town voted,” he says. “It all happened so fast, I guess I never got around to saying no.”

“Every town needs a sheriff,” I say. “Will be needing a new mayor too, I reckon. How 'bout it, Merle?”

“Not a chance in hell.” Merle climbs down off the steps to get a closer look at LaForge. The Snowman's reentry to town, draped over Storm's haunches, is a far cry from the elegant carriage that brought us Avery Willis. Merle pokes him with a finger. “To think this son of a bitch was right under our noses the whole time.”

I give Merle, Big Jack, and Rico the whole story of what happened out there in the desert, down to the details of how I watched Genevieve disappear into the snow on her horse, pulling the two well-laden mules behind her.

Rico walks solemnly over to the tightly wrapped remains of the Pinkerton men. He gives one of them a shy poke and immediately startles back. “¡
Dios mío
!” he shouts. He looks down at his hand, dumbfounded by what he discovers there—a solid-gold dollar-piece.

Big Jack bounds over excitedly. “That must be one of them spirit things . . . you need a dollar to pay the ferryman what to take you over to the other side. Like the Pharaohs done.”

“This look like ancient Egypt to you?” Merle says, bellying up to the foot of what, by the shape of it, appears to be Delmer. He begins to unravel the sackcloth. After a few turns, the hint of a human form collapses beneath his fingers and a river of gold and silver cascades to the ground around his boots. Merle turns to me. “You son of a bitch. You glorious, fantastic son of a bitch!”

As if the plain truth of what he is seeing is still, somehow, a mystery, Big Jack draws his knife and, approaching the broad chest of the largest mummified corpse, plunges the blade into the center of it. He slices toward himself, the steel tinkling against metal and paper. Only when Big Jack thrusts his hands into the cavity and opens it wide, revealing the untapped fortune, does the new lawman allow his brain to understand. “Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.”

“¡Dios mío! Santa Maria!”

“Rico,” Merle says, “go get the bottle. The good shit, from my office!”

“Jack,” I say, “You will need to get some fellas out to the salt flats straightaway to collect the bodies. You got a few hours till the coyotes find 'em.”

“But Harlan . . .” Jack says, “if the loot is all here, then what's the girl got with her?”

“Well, one thing never in short supply around here is sand and rocks. But I would not want to try to make a fire out of them.”

Rico hustles down the steps with the bottle and a trio of foggy glasses, which Merle takes from him and lines up on the railing. Big Jack counts out a stack of paper currency and walks it over to me.

“What's that?” I ask.

“A bounty's a bounty. Dead or alive. Ten thousand for this here body,” he says, jabbing an elbow toward LaForge. “My first official act. Merle can be witness.”

“Hear, hear!” Merle says.

“You keep it, give it them what need it more.”

“You sure? You earned it.”

“I got the sale of my land. That will be enough.”

“Where you gonna go?”

“San Francisco, maybe. Look up this fella what I heard about. Maybe get work on one of them ships passing through.”

“A ship? What you know about shippin'?”

“Bout as much as you know about sheriffin'.”

“He's got you there.”

“You leaving right now?”

“Another storm coming in. Best I get a jump on it.” Merle hands me the shot. The three of us clink glasses and drink. Warm whiskey spreads through my body. I feel good, better than I have in weeks.

“How about a beer for the road?”

“No thanks.” I pat Storm on his neck. The Spencer rubs against my shoulder. “I got everything I need.”

The book you have just read exists because of the contribution of my co-conspirator, Derrick Borte. When the curtain is pulled back on the dark alchemy of collaboration, the process hardly seems any more elucidated. Certainly the craft of fiction writing has been, historically, a solitary endeavor, but in the film business, where Derrick and I learned to swim, collaboration is the name of the game. Several years ago, Derrick told me a brief story, little more than a sketch really, but at its core was a heist, a heist so ingenious, that I wished I'd thought of it. I coveted it, in fact. At the very least, it was gloriously cinematic. Crafting it into a screenplay, however, threatened to be a dubious use of time. The reality is that the shelves of Hollywood's development offices are lined with screenplays of unproduced Westerns. The thought of sentencing such a promising idea to a fate of irrelevance (not to mention the eventual recycling bin) was more than this writer could stomach. And while I have taken great pains to push the words around to the best of my ability as a prose writer, I was, at the same time, transcribing the film that I saw in my head.
3:10 to Yuma
,
Brokeback Mountain
,
Django Unchained
, and the revisionist
No Country for Old Men
are unequivocally great films of the last decade. But to say there's been a resurgence of Westerns pouring out of Hollywood would be overstatement. More often than not, the scant offerings from the genre are either curious anomalies or hard-fought passion projects that managed by attrition, luck, or a combination of both, to get made. Hollywood spits out one or two (rarely three) Westerns a year. Any film desiring to occupy one of those slots better have something new to say. I don't know if this book succeeds in that endeavor, but in trying to figure it out, I could not have asked for a more patient, supportive, and enthusiastic partner than Derrick.

I am deeply indebted to a handful of trusted friends whose advice and early readings of the book proved invaluable, notably Laura Gordon and John Rood. I readily took John's suggestion that I decimate the profanity of that earlier draft and let the remaining
cocksuckers
breathe more. And when I was sure that I had exhausted every imaginable way to describe a horse, Dr. Cindy Rhea, DVM, informed me that I had barely scratched the surface.

Were it not for the gracious support of Mark Ebner, this book would never have found an agent (and I may never have embarked on writing it). That Mark is a fine writer in his own right, makes that support all the more humbling. Mark has been a champion of my prose writing from its adolescence. It was Mark, who all those years ago, invited me into a network of blogs of which he was a part—paving the way for my very first paying, non-movie, writing gig. And it was Mark, in the spring of last year, who ushered me into his very own agency where he is, by his own admission, their smallest client (a ranking in which I have surely now undercut him) and asked Joel Gottler to take a look.

Thanks go to the two representatives who have been with me from the beginning: my film agent Doug MacLaren and my attorney, David Feldman. They have stood by me through the years, even during the lean times when their faith in my abilities was all I had to go on. Thanks to my business manager, Gary Halpert (and the incomparable Nanette), for showing the greatest faith of all. My manager, Alex Lerner, has proved a welcome addition, providing the nurturing encouragement for my ideas when they are good, as well as the insight to know when they are terrible. My television agent, Hrishi Desai, exerts his talents mainly by telling me my ideas are terrible. I will always be grateful for the guidance and support of my book agents, Joel Gottler and Doug Grad. Joel and Doug are longtime veterans of the book world who have escorted this newbie novelist through the intricacies of publication and laid me gently at the doorstep of Kensington Publishing and my editor, Gary Goldstein. Special thanks to Stephen Breimer for navigating the legalities.

My copy editor, Randy Kaplan, and I spent hours discussing everything from the errant comma to the specific color of New Mexico's crystalline dust. Randy knew when to rein me in and when to get out of the way, and had the wisdom to know the difference. I am grateful for his exacting eye and unflagging enthusiasm.

Many fine teachers deserve acknowledgment for their contribution to this writer's education, including: Drs. Brier, Bendixen, Liu, and the entire English department at California State University, Los Angeles; and from Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City: thanks go to Art Atkison, Bob Del Greco, Dr. Martin-Lester, and especially to my friend Edward Quigley, who taught me we are always students, even when we are teachers. Thank you to Robert Carnegie and Tony Savant from Playhouse West for forcing me to pay attention to what really moves me. I will always owe a debt to my old friends Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie. Those years of heated late-night arguments, fueled by coffee, pastrami sandwiches, and a shared passion for great movies were the curriculum for the finest film school on earth.

Finally, to family, especially my parents, for their love and support. I hope book club is never the same. And to Danielle, for her undying love in the trenches.

Marina del Rey, CA

January 2014

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First electronic edition: September 2014

 

ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3521-2
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