Peacemaker

John Price ‘08

The boots crushed the dying vestiges of plant life to the gravel. Those hardy bits of greenery, grown squat and small from the intense sun and the lack of rainwater, were no match for the sharp rocks. The sun was high in the sky.

It was the color orange, and it was the color red. It was a blazing shimmering thing in the sky, and the tall man stopped to stare.

He was thirsty, but he did not make any move to drink the canteen at his belt. There were spurs on his boots, but there was no sign of a horse. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his face was haggard. The beard upon his face was well-grown, but it still was only whiskers. It had not yet made the move between unshaven and beard.

His eyes, next to all of the red, were green. His hair was a faded no-color, something like grey and brown, a mixture of the two, like earth and steel. His shirt was the same color, covered with dust, and it clung to the back of his neck and made mud. It caked the trousers, and it covered the boots.

His mouth was very dry, and it hurt.

He did not drink from the canteen.

The sky was faded and blue, like an old pair of jeans. The clouds were gunmetal.

The man walked, and as he walked, the wind grew stronger. It whipped, and it stung. The wind carried rocks with all of the dust. They bit against his skin, but he did not stop walking.

He took a bandana to his mouth and held it to keep the dust from getting inside of mouth. That was all. His eyes squinted, and every now and then, a cough would manage to get through the man’s throat, and his prominent Adam’s apple would slide up and down.

His hat threatened to fly off from his head, but the other hand held it there. There was a slowness to his pace that suggested weariness. It was impossible to tell how long he had been walking. By the look of his clothing, it suggested years, but his beard suggested maybe a month or two. His eyes, however, held something older.

Looking in those eyes, it would have been easy to believe he had been walking forever, and would continue walking for eternity.

The stetson was brown and beaten up, but he held onto it as the wind kicked up the trails of dust and the bits of broken up vegetation that had roots too shallow for their own good. There was undeniable slowness, but there was deliberateness to the way he walked.

He did not stop walking until he saw a trace of smoke coming from the horizon. He squinted, and it was then that he realized the sun had fallen to show a luminous, white-faced moon. It was then that he realized how cold it was, so he stopped walking.

The wind did not stop. It would just devour any fire he made.

So instead of stopping to rest, he began to walk again.

The guns that rested heavily on each hip, sagging down the band of leather he used as a belt, jangled with every step. The vest he wore was made out of the same material as his belt, only a little softer.

It took him a few hours to reach the town. By then, the night was at its darkest, and the wind had calmed down only a bit. The cold of the night dug deep and cut from flesh to his bones as much as the heat sizzled his skin and burnt the air on his arms.

The town was desolate, besides the sound of a honky-tonk piano pouring from a saloon. The paint on it was peeling. It was once a cheery shade of red, but it looked, with all of the dust and the wind, like a bit of dried, clotted blood. The music was jangly and yells thundered from the doorway as though a fight was brewing, but it was welcoming somehow. Most importantly, he could smell a fire.

So he stepped inside. The floor was covered in sawdust, and the walls were bare. There were tables strewn about with no real rhyme or reason, and they all looked quite a bit different from one another. There was a man on a little upraised stage, and he seemed to be quite drunk. One side of his moustache was neatly waxed, but the other side was coming rapidly undone. His button-up vest was showing wear, and a few of them had come off.

The bartender had a scar above his left eye and had biceps that bulged through his shirt. The man who sat at the stool in front of him, covered in so much dust, ordered three fingers of whiskey.

The bartender poured it. The man drank it.

The man ordered another shot and another. Each one, he drank like water. He stared at the wall in front of him, and he ducked any invitation to speak.

“You travel far, sir?” And then the man would just nod.

“You come from up north?” And then he would shake his head.

It did not take long for the bartender to stop talking to him. The whores just stared at him. They did not know what to make of him. They were a bit afraid.

The guns were still shining. There did not seem to be any dust on the wooden, well-worn handles.

It did not take long for another man to enter.

He was dressed in grey, and his eyes were blue and wide. There was not a spot of dirt on his boots, but there was on his vest and his trousers. His moustache was blonde, and it was waxed. The skin on his face was pink and stretched looking, like someone had just scrubbed it thoroughly under a hot stream of water. His eyes were tired, but there was a smile on his ruddy face.

He sat next to the man covered in dust.

He took a sip of the whiskey the bartender had gotten him a moment before, and he turned his head to the red-faced man. “I get ahead of you?” And his voice was gravel. It was a tobacco-stained voice.

“No. You got behind me. I came back to find you.” And the man with the red face had a voice that was impossible to decipher. It sounded deep one moment and high the next. It was kind and laughing one moment and low and growling the other. It slid in and out. When the tone changed, it was hard to imagine any of the other tones having been attributed to the man.

His teeth were large and white.

“Why?”

“I guess I think you’re kinda amusin’.”

Behind them, a fight had gotten worse. Someone had cheated in a card game. The other had the dead man’s hand. A few guns had been drawn, and an off-duty sheriff with one hand underneath the skirt of a long-legged dancer did not look up from his stupor. The bartender jumped up from behind the counter and knocked the well-dusted man’s glass off the counter.

“I always seem to find you.”

“That’s because I’m not too hard to find.”

The man looked at the broken glass and sighed.

A shot had been fired. A man lay on the ground, holding his arm and sweating. There were tears, and blood kept on coming,

“Shit, how long’s it been?”

“Since when?” The man with the red face stared at the injured man, and the other three that were still fighting. The piano player had stopped, not out of fear, but because he collapsed onto the piano. There was a low thrum in the air, as he was leaning still on some keys. “Since that? Seems like years, don’t it? Hundreds of ‘em.”

“Probably has been.”

“Reckon so.” And then he turned, focusing his full attention on the man with the shining guns. “Never got this close, have you?”

“No.”

“Still wanna shoot me?”

And he nodded. The man with the red face sighed.

“I don’t suppose you want some sorta stand-off, do you?”

And he shook his head. “No. I wanted one years ago, but I figure honor’s not somethin’ too important to you.” The man reached to his right holster and took out the heavy silver revolver.

A Peacemaker.

“You think ya gonna kill me?”

“Don’t care if it don’t.”

The barrel pressed against the sweaty, red forehead.

The dust-covered man pulled the trigger. The bullet shot out from the chamber. It poked a hole in the forehead and shot out from the hat, taking a chunk of skull and brain with it, splattered on the wall.

No one even turned from their respective fights.

The man in red shook what was left of his head.

“Not dead.”

“Nope.”

“Still gonna follow me?”

“Yep.”

“You know it won’t bring ‘em back, right?”

And the man nodded. The brown stetson in that moment could have been the helmet of a centurion, a Viking, a knight. It covered his eyes. And it only showed the grim look, the clenching of his teeth.

“You better start walking.”

And he took off his hat, covered in blood, and set it on the table. His head was back, but the blonde hair was black, and his skin had turned pale, with small dashes of freckles about the nose and cheeks.

“You better start walking and be prepared to walk for a while.” And then he left the bar. The fight had stopped, as most of the men, including the bartender, lay wounded on the ground.

The man put the gun back in his holster, took the hat from the counter and looked at it. It did not take long for him to drop it, get off the stool, and leave the saloon.

He began to walk. His spurs rattled uselessly in the wind.

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