“So you’re done here?” said the man.
Brooke could not picture his face.
“I think so,” he said, or something equally plain.
And that was that. The man Brooke could not remember went to the water to fill his canteen like every other man, and Brooke rode on. He had no interest at all in digging in the dirt, but it was time to get away. Going off on your own was enough like greed to be made sense of and not resented. These men understood greed. They even liked it, provided it did not interfere with a plan. Some of the most pleasurable exchanges they had over the campfire were about all the rotten things they’d done, or all that had gone wrong, in pursuit of a dollar or two, or a woman, or both.
Brooke had been full of stories then, full of the lives of all those men. He’d felt as if he’d lived one hundred lives. Walking up and down along this desert creek now, it was hard to distinguish this from that, or to remember who said what or how any story ended or began. There was a lot of middle. A lot of in between. The edges of each tale were worn and indistinguishable.
He remembered that one man was able to escape a hanging because the sheriff who had captured him left the cell unlocked. How such a thing could have happened, or what the man had done after, Brooke had no sense of. He remembered picturing the man’s hand as it came down upon the cell door to rest, and the door just squeaking open then, and all the joy and surprise the man must have felt realizing that he had back his freedom.
Many of the men at his side had lost their families. Most to violence, a few to disease. Some to their own bad habits of drinking or gambling. Brooke’s head was filled with images of outfits, gangs, marauders, riding right up to a ranch’s front door and taking everything they pleased then destroying the rest. That was just the way of things. They themselves weren’t so different. Between each of the towns was pure wilderness, and what came bearing down upon civilization was beyond imagination, for most. He’d seen plenty, but he was still capable of surprise. He was not hardened to a measure of awe and respect for what the wilderness was capable of producing. Snow was bearing down upon him. Snow was obscuring the rocks and shrubs and horizon. The stream was still undeniably at his side, but if the snow kept up it would freeze and get buried with the rest. Brooke was now of the mind that once a thing began there was no use in expecting it to end any place short of total devastation. The first few flakes of snow signaled an impending snowstorm, regardless of how the sky looked. He was to be severed from and discarded by the world. Here and now, he would meet his quiet end.
Or so he’d expected. And then she’d appeared, on the horizon, moving slowly toward him. He hadn’t even realized that he was collapsed until she was at his side and encouraging him to sit up, to drink and open his eyes. She was weeping as if it moved her to see him like this. As if she’d known him. She had something sick within her. Her eyes were not warm, but nearly white, like those of a fish. She twisted water from the ends of her sleeves and the tail of her shirt and washed his face and the inside of his mouth. Her touch was not loving, not yet, but was confident and familiar, as if she’d made a life of rescuing half-dead men from the wilderness.
“Are you lost?” she said.
She held him in her lap. The snow fell steadily.
He nodded.
“I am lost too,” she said.
He nodded. When he woke, she had his back propped against her front. His legs were in the snow, sunk to the bottom and greeting the sand down below them. She had spread out a blanket beneath her. It dipped toward the center where she sat, and was slowly filling with snow. You could not see the sky. Only the sun and the thick, broken snow, as if it were falling directly from heaven. The wind picked up and moved the snow around and then it seemed to be coming directly from the earth, spiraling up and around and holding them there.
“You fell asleep,” she said.
He nodded.
It was more than likely that he had died. That this woman was an angel or some creature made entirely of death. He could hardly feel how cold it looked. He could not make sense of where he’d been and where he was now.
“It wasn’t snowing only a few days before,” he said.
“It was not snowing when I set out,” she said.
“What were you after?” he said.
“A baby,” she said.
“Whose baby?” he said.
“I do not know,” she said.
He did not press her anymore. He wanted her to continue, but was not sure when her sickness would expose itself. There was something wrong in her, and he did not want to face it. He had no defenses and was enjoying her warmth and company.
“Are you married?” he said.
“I was,” she said.
She leaned into him, to warm or to quiet him. Her hair smelled rotten, like death and sweat. Her fingernails were stained through with crud. She had dirt in the cracks of her knuckles. Scratches on her face and neck. Something about her was incredibly beautiful to him.
“You’ve been through hell,” he said, and she did not respond.
When the windows were fully covered, there was no clear way to determine the weather. They knew it was cold, so they knew that the snow had not melted and was not melting. They knew they were running low on logs and chairs and tables for the fire. They were not running low on food, and water could be made from the snow easily enough. They had a small pouch of bullets that Bird had acquired from the homes he’d broken into when retrieving the bodies. So he did not fire the gun when he practiced his aim. He merely practiced keeping the pistol steady. His single arm extended, he would shut an eye and attach the barrel of his gun to some small item on the room’s far wall. He would hold steady, count to see how long he held, and begin again every time the barrel shifted or his breath drew him out of alignment. Mary did not much like the game, and told him so repeatedly. But he did not stop.
He explored the second floor and found magazines and adventure books in a trunk beneath one of the beds. He brought them down with the thread from before. He taught himself to thread a needle with a single hand, using his knees and wetting the string with his mouth to keep it stable and pointed. He believed this would help him with his aim, in the long run. He asked Mary to read the magazines and adventure books aloud to him.
“Men are not like that,” said Bird.
“You do not know all the men in the world,” said Mary.
“Women are not like that,” said Bird.
“With that,” said Mary, “I can agree.”
Bird began to work on his speed. He tucked the pistol into a pocket and withdrew it as quickly as possible. Often, it fell. Once, it went off. Snow came in through the fresh hole in the window. Mary took the gun and unloaded it. She demanded the bullets from his pouch. They were getting along as well as they ever had.
Mary did not like the books at first. She said they lacked the right kind of description, and they did not conclude in a high-minded way. But while Bird was practicing with his pistol, she had little else to do other than read and reread them. She was not interested in pistols. She was not willing to cook any more than he was, and so they prepared nothing more than they had to. She did not like to explore upstairs. She tinkered at the piano, but produced no sounds that pleased her. It needed tuning. She had never been a pianist, and now it made her think too much of Martha, and of how long they had been there, and of how long they could be stuck. But they were not stuck, it was important to remember. They could tunnel out. They would tunnel out. Or the snow would melt. We will not die like this, she told herself.