The girl among the legs of the other children coming back from the woods and the supple trunks of the river birch. The birch had made for good swinging and some of the older boys came back with calloused palms. She ran her hand along the bark and concluded that swinging from birches was a boy's business.

The actress had tired of struggling and she sagged in his arms. Her breathing, her black hair hanging like a mophead over her face. Joe brought her closer to him, and holding her tightly, he said directly into her ear that away from here, in that world, she was her own self. Yesterday you did not belong to anybody and tomorrow you are free again, but right now, right here, you belong to me. For this short time that we are together, you are mine. You have belonged to men before me, all of them temporary, and all of them inferior. You will belong to me to a further degree than you have ever belonged to anybody, or ever will. No man will ever bother to know your heart more than I will. Do you understand?
 Joe held her cross the middle with one hand and with the other he brought her dress to his teeth and pulled her underwear down over her ass. Her bare ass there on the river bank something bashful and tamed and pathetic. The actress broke from Joe and ran into the river. She stood knee deep in the water and turned to Joe. I'll drown myself, she said. She began to weep and dropped to her knees. She covered her face and swore, once again, that she would kill herself.
 Joe watched the actress there in the river. He dropped to one knee and waited for her. You're gonna need me to get you back to the camp, you know.
 She stopped crying. She dug her hands into the rocks at the river bottom and said into the river, need you. Need you? She stood with rocks in both hands and drove toward Joe there kneeling on the river bank and swung for his head, but her tripped her and swung her around underneath.
She finally looked up at him. She had stopped weeping and stayed crouched there in the river. I need, she asked.
 Yeah. You do.
 Joe watched her stand and, dress in hands, walk over to him and hit him. He tackles her, sees blood dripping from his head, he sees she is holding a rock from the bettom of the river. He comforts her

When the man with the mustache approached the shed, the lantern in the shed was put out and the sawing noise stopped. He raised the shotgun to where he knew the shed to be in the dark of the night and circled around to the front. By the moonlight he could see the door was ajar and he kept it between the barrels as he walked.
 The lantern set alight behind the door and the door pushed open. Behind the door, the small bald man Skrukrel holding the lantern. He said to the man with the mustache not to shoot, it was only him.
 Only you? The man with the mustache lowered the shotgun. He wore his pajamas and over the pajamas a heavy coat. He watched the bald man. He said: you coward. He raised the shotgun and centered it on the man. You violate me. Clandestine to me.
 No sir.
 You expect forgiveness. The man with the mustache had stopped, but presently his foot crept forward and he began to approach Skrunkrel. What forgiveness have you shown under such circumstances. They only send me cowards.
 Oh God. No sir, no no no. Skrunkrel blinded by the lantern. He brought his hand up to see the yellow glow of what could have been Joe's eyes over the man's shoulder. The quality of the glow something out of a sunset to him. He didn't know whether he was crazy or if Joe had after all not left him behind. He closed his eyes. He heard the man with the mustache order him on his knees. He set the lantern there beside him and knelt. Oh, God.
 The man with the mustache checked and rechecked the safety and stood there breathing loudly and deliberately. He regarded the bald man: you did place your life in my hands when you violated me. You are consented party to this.
 No sir. Oh God.
 Are you, or are you not a coward.
 No sir.
 Are you, or are you not a coward.
 Yes, sir, yes. I'm sorry. Oh God.
 The man with the mustache ceased to speak. The silence had made Skrunkrel cry and he asked why had him being a coward made him deserving of death. The man with the mustache said that only children are forgiven. The man stood directly in front of Skrunkrel with the shotgun in his hands and breathed like a diver before a decent. His breathing the only sound in the lonely night and Skrunkrel resigned to allow it to remain as such. He did not mean to think of her, but his aunt's face came to him. Her voice. His father, his step father. His mother. From some corner of his mind he had had no reason or desire to acquaint himself with came relief from what delusions had played puppet master to his creature. His body shivered in the newness of it. His posture loosened and he found his voice. He opened his eyes. The man's eyes wide, his nostrils flared. He breathed like a diver before a descent. Skrunkrel said almost laughingly, we only needed your saw. That's all. That's all we needed. He watched Joe's fingers curl around the hair atop the man's head and the bowie knife drawn across the man's neck. Joe sawed the man's neck down the to bone and stuck the knife in the ground. He grabbed the man's pajamas where a belt buckle would be from between his legs and turned him over. He held the man with the mustache upside down and shook him. His legs jerking stiffly and his blood draining in the grass, his neck flopping open like some wooden ventriloquist dummy. The pajamas tore and the man with the mustache was dropped to the ground, his pale figure resting on its stump and knees and his bare ass there like the back end of some pig bolted into stillness and his genitals hanging dark and ribald.
 Joe brought the bald man to the vise and placed the lantern on the table. He placed the saw where he had stopped and said to finish cutting the barrel. After you're done with the barrel find a metal file and take it to the end here. Make sure nothing is protruding. Be careful not to file the rifling.
 Joe placed his foot on the chest of the dead man and pried the shotgun from his hands. He checked the barrel and found more shells in the man's coat.
 Skrunkrel the painter jerking himself against the metal, alternately crying and laughing, the blood of another browned and viscous on his skin and the copper smell of it mixing with the night air into an ether that was surely a madness you can not hope to return from.
 Joe regarded the roofed back porch of the dead man's home. He shouldered the shotgun and placed the sole of his boot against the wood of the pillar. He unlaced his boots and left them there at the bottom of the pillar and climbed onto the porch roof. He crowded his fingers around his face and looked in the window. He pressed his ear against the glass and listened for a while. He wedged the knife under the window. Not much give. He chiseled away the wood of the window frame with the bowie knife until he could reach the latch.
 The smell of a house thoroughly lived in. Joe crouched in the bedroom of the man with the mustache. He listened to the creaking of the doors as they swung in the breeze of the opened window. He watched the hallway there through the opened door. The moonlight on the wall pulsing with the movement of the door of the adjacent bedroom.
 No bed in the next bedroom. The door swinging against the frame but the lock not catching. In the middle of the room a large wooden desk leaning on the corner missing a leg. Beside it an empty birdcage.
 The last bedroom locked. Joe pressed his ear against the door and then crouched and listened underneath the door. A blanket rustling but no sounds such as footsteps or breathing. Joe placed the end of the barrels between the door knob and the wall and cocked both barrels and stood there and listened. He let down both hammers and shouldered the shotgun.
 The kitchen table downstairs covered by glass jars and bottles of varying sizes and on the counter a box of lids and caps. Beside the box sections of circular copper pipe of varying diameters. The kitchen floor littered with tin cans half full of food hardened and rotten and in the sink blackened apple cores and potato peelings.
 He found a candle in the drawer, and on lighting it, became aware of the cat watching him from across the living room. The cat was large and its coat was tan and spotted and its ears were tufted. It squinted its eyes on his approach. It had mulled over his scent since he entered the window, and having deduced no threat, sat there like a statue of a bob cat as he illuminated it in candle light. Beside the table a copper still in a state of assembly or disassembly.
 Joe searched every drawer by candle light and finally found the key to the bedroom in the man's overalls in his closet.
 The girl raised herself on her elbows beneath the blanket. Joe placed the candle there beside the mattress, but she hid her face from the light, and he moved the candle and removed the blanket from her face. Her eyes a ghostly blue and her hair dread locked. She was of age to speak but she would not tell him her name or take her eyes from his when he stroked her face. Her stare neither frightened nor curious and her head wavering like a dandelion in the wind. The true stench of the girl's circumstances revealed only when Joe drew her blanket. The girl emaciated and clothed only in her underwear. She lay her head back down and stared at his boots or the floor. Her hand found the blanket and pulled it back over her.
 The pet bob cat trotted into the room and went to the girl. It squeezed her to the down of its chest. It rubbed its face and neck into her. It overpowered the girl, its purr resonating in the hollows of her body, in the air. It left the girl and came to Joe. It sniffed his hand and pulled itself along his leg. It leapt onto the window sill. It watched over the world out there that contained its exsanguined master, undisturbed as if forewarned of the night's events by some primitive wisdom, like some detached and privileged witness.
 Joe scruffed the cat and cracked its skull with the butt of his knife.

When Joe came up the stairs with the woman across his shoulders, the old man waited for him. Joe stood in front of him and looked into his face. It came to him to kill the man. The man sat in his wheelchair with his hands under a blanket, and returning Joe's stare, his lips cracked open and from his throat creaked the word yeah. What he was in agreement with not even he knew. It was something close to what a man's will whispers to him in his sleep, what bites at Joe's heels and writes the rules that men such as him operate in, like the wind that stomped the door against the frame until the men ascended from the basement and locked it against him.

 The suicide rate of the elderly is rising.
 The train passing over head. My body amid the vibrations of the train, of the people passing me in the street. I stand in the human highway.
 The girl in the cafe fidgets with the paper. She reads an article that she isn't really interested in, anyway. She looks nervous.
 I wonder if I couldn't ease her pain with my hands along her bare back. What she looks like when she is making love.
 Her friend shows up. She moves her coffee to her side and she spills some on her wrist. He does all the talking. He keeps the words coming, she keeps the kisses coming. When there is nothing left to say they sit there sipping coffee.
 There used to be an old couple who came in every day. The man still shows up. He looks the same.  He passed my gaze to the couple. The girl returned it to me there in the window.
 I do not ease her pain.

 There's a little Korean girl who comes to me in my dreams. I sleep perchance to talk to her again.
 Last night she sat beside me on a hill overlooking the city. The drones looked like bees.
 "You want to see her," she said.
 "I can't. She's gone."
 She looked at me. She said, "Yeah, but you still want to."
 "Yeah."
 A drone approached us on the hill. He hovered in front of us, his red opaque eye threatening to understand.
 "You can," she said. She showed me the prism. It looked like glass. I turned it in the sun. It didn't do what it was supposed to with the light.
 "No," she said. She took it and rotated it in front of her face. She looked through it at the city.
 The faces of the prism showed the city in different years of its past, the more you turned it the further back into the past it went.
 "When can I see her?"
 "You can see her next time. I have to find her."
 "You'll be here next time?"
 "Yeah."
 "Do they have those things in the Fukushima circle."
 "The drones? Yeah."
 "How do things look there?"
 "The same."
 "How's your mom?"
 "They come and check her every day."
 "Is it bad?"
 "Yeah."
 "Are they gonna pay you?"
 "I don't know. They didn't pay her for dad."
 "They gotta pay you something. If they pay people to live there, they gotta pay you something."
 She shrugged.
 "How is your sister?"
 "I don't know."
 "You can't count on her?"
 "No."

 The story of his life spent clutching instruments of labor.



The work hard and never ending and leading to nothing. Some men had progeny, but Jefferson never felt the need. The facts of his life untold but to those who had the misfortune to hear it from beginning to end some desperate morning.
 The last of the true sun lost to the horizon



The story of Jefferson's life spent clutching instruments of labor. The work hard and unceasing and leading to nothing. His love spent on the fields and remaining unreplenished. Some men occupied themselves with progeny, but Jefferson never felt the need. The facts of his life untold but to those who had the misfortune to hear it from beginning to end some desperate morning.
 The last of the true sun lost to the horizon and what light remained illuminated them in a shadowless haze. Their figures twisting and bobbing at the harrowed wheat's edge. Men bearded with skin like leather and women in men's clothing otherwise in frayed and clay stained dresses. Boys with skin unmarred holding what blade could be fashioned to cut wheat. Children in quickfooted pursuit of what imagined foe or bounty awaited them cloistered in the wheat. Young women whose fantasies distracted them minding the children.
 The feather wheat on the wind and the insects that hop and fly like mad ambers in the hazy orange light, like faeries to Jefferson. He watched them scatter in spirals in his hand's wake. he watched the men. They no longer gathered the strength to cut in one swing and the repeated empty whispering affected him. He charged his scythe, and twisting himself like a great cog, he laid the wheat fallow. The renewing glow of the hour without shadows threaded his days together in his memory back to when he was a filthy and wayward child.
 The night will bring scytheless men. Stone faced harbingers of light come to root out what laziness may hide in the shadows. When he does retire, it will be with men who are not like you. Men whose faces contorted with their tortured lives into something you can not even look at. Something truly ugly. They rest their flesh against the metal train car and look out at the passing Earth and curse their low birth. They walk along the railroad tracks, lanterns swinging and revealing them in pendugal turns, to what ramshackle dwellings they after all afford. Their inner world looking onto them, their regard for what they call a family, the families' regard for them. Not a moment of tenderness in their day. Nobody is grateful.

Opening

 

A pig passes in the slanted snowfall, its shape a funny pink cloud in that hazy destitute town. The huddled peasants watch it bitterly. Their eyes shifting in their sockets, their heads turning to follow its shape. Each has tried to get their hands on it before but this is one lucky piggy. Memories of chasing the pig, sliding in the snow and cursing and the pig getting away every time with hardly an effort, its breath little puffs of steam in front of its snout and its head bobbing up and down with its quick steps. The pig stopped among a group of other such lucky piggies of varying sizes and touched snouts and resumed its course. It trotted along with a dignified haste as if it had a job to go to. A personal affront to the jobless poor who aspire to eat it.

              The pig is friends with a boy who has not found a gang of thieves yet. Who lives in the churches and clandestine places that his people travel through and live among. Mud-walled tunnels that lie beneath every city and connect all the parts of it that are accessible to but the destitute and the ugly and deformed and the savvy networks of thieves and all those shunned by society. That belong to the people who are illiterate and who have no history oral or otherwise and never will. The story of how he came to live in these circumstances not even he knows and doubtless it is populated by characters who did despicable things to one another. The boy standing there among trash heaps looking at you, stark madness leering through dark and narrow eyes. The capacity for evil. The cruelty with which he will be treated and the vengeance he will exact as an unreachable prodigy of killers.

              The pig finds the boy sleeping in a pew and wakes him. It buries its snout in his shirt, pinning him in and standing on its hind legs for leverage. It searches for that which brought it here: the smell of food emanating from the boy’s rags of clothing. It finds the bread in his shirt, but he grabs it and gives half to the pig and eats the rest himself. It searches out his open shirt for crumbs and sniffs his face and licks his lips and chin. He pushed himself up and looked around for any belongings. The pig sniffing about the altar. He bundled up and tucked his rags and walked to the back of the church where there is a door. The burst of cold wind not the least bit startling. It was always winter for all he remembered. The cold froze his snot and dried his throat and burned his cheeks as he trudged to a crowd in the street.

              A gallows set up in the street. It was built for six but there were only two. A tall man nearest to the boy. A woman between two older men standing arm in arm. Three young men on horses near the gallows. The boy tugged on the man’s shirt. He asked the man if he had anything to spare. It’s the man’s sons with the rope around their necks and he watched them closely. His shoulders were wide and so was his stance, his long legs braced hard against the ground behind him as if prepared to bare a heavy load. His face bespoke a career of meanness. A fat man in a fur-collared coat and a bow tie had read aloud their crimes and now asked if the boys had any last words to speak. They declined to do so. The fat man took his time to adjust the rope and put black sacks over their heads. He did one and then the other stopped him. He could be seen to breathe heavily. The man paused beside the boy with the sack in his hand. The other boy fidgeted in the already tightening noose and the stuffy burlap sack and the man tried again and the boy didn’t object this time. The executioner made his way to the far left end of the platform and the man closed his eyes and dropped his chin against his chest. The sound of the trap doors in the gallows falling open and the ropes snapping and the counterweights hitting the ground. The wooden frame straining under the sudden weight.

              The man stayed like this for a long time. He didn’t heed nor see the boy who was tugging at his coat. He opened his eyes and lifted his head and turned to walk back to the hotel like a statue come to life to the boy, like a god compelled to awaken from a great slumber. He walked with a long gait. He did not change his course to accommodate others in the street. The pathetic inhabitants watched his pale figure through the falling snow- something wicked, something that was not like them. Their fear made them think foolish things as they scurried out of his way.

              In a back room of the hotel a young woman in labor. Her screams were horrific. Her bare legs writhed in the stained sheets in a way that excited the doctor. Sweat dripping from his beard, his tired eyes. The nurses circling about them working in shifts. They covered her breasts when they shown through her torn blouse and gave her water to drink. They moved about her like diligent workers accustomed to scenes of horror and agony. Their unflinching eyes set upon the ground or on their task at hand, on you the horrified observer. In the thick of it the doctor and his dainty fingers carefully doing his grotesque and necessary duty. She was unreachable in her agony. Inconsolable to the world as if possessed, as if put in a trance by the black magic of an old world shaman. The young woman’s voice became hoarse and it was a relief to stop screaming. She was in labor from the morning of the day before to just before sunrise. It was a long time before they let her see the baby. She knew that something was wrong. The doctor presented it laying stiffly in a blanket in his arms. The infant’s color was a deep red unlike the color of a newborn. Two prominent ridges above his brow. A tail could be seen between his legs struggling to point upward like an earthworm in the sun. His mother was hysterical. She rejected him outright and wept hoarsely into the pillow.

              The doctor stole away with the baby. The man passed the doctor in the lobby. His face did not reveal his intentions or the extent of his knowledge. He went to his horse to the bag of provisions behind the saddle with coffee in hand. He put a foot in the stirrup and drank the coffee and watched the doctor step into his carriage parked directly in front of the hotel. It was just light enough to ride. He could make out the driver’s silhouette against the bright western mountains stretching and yawning himself awake. He reached into a pocket on his saddle and took out the revolver and checked the cylinder and placed it in his belt and walked over to the carriage.

              The doctor gawked at him through wide tired eyes and backed himself away to the other side with the infant in his arms. “I think I know you,” he said.

              “We’ve never met.”

              “But what are you doing here.”

              “I’m here for the child.”

              “I know that.”

              The man stepped into the carriage and placed his knee in the doctor’s face and began to wrench the infant from his arms. The doctor struggled beneath him and made a noise like an animal being slaughtered. The man choked the doctor until he let go and took the baby up and left the doctor there exhausted and too defeated to move. He addressed the driver with baby in hand: “Are you gonna follow me?”

              The driver only sat there, his face barely visible.

              “But the doctor will.”

              “I can’t say he wont be inclined to do so.”

              The man produced a hunting knife from a sheath on his thigh. He walked to the horse farther from him and cut the reins and then walked back and did the same to the other. He glanced at the door of the carriage behind which the doctor would not make himself seen. He plunged the knife into the horse’s thigh until the wood of the handle stopped in the firm meat. It screamed and tried to rear but the left leg buckled and it fell over, tilting the carriage to that side and breaking the harness. The other horse took off with the carriage, pulling the wheels over the one that lay on the ground. It struggled to stand as if its legs and back were not completely broken. The other horse ran for a long time and broke from the carriage and left the driver sitting there. The broken horse stood there looking at the man’s back, held up by adrenalin alone before it collapsed like a statue of a horse suddenly bereft of its foundation.

              The man walked back to his horse with the chaos behind him. He mounted it with one hand and opened his jacket and cradled the infant in its warm plume and rode west. He rode away from the depraved doctor and the scene by the hotel the likes of which that town had never seen before and never would again. Of which the participants were alien to. Of which the people would gossip forever and none will in the telling of it reveal it truthfully. Because in such an insoluble story there is no such thing as fact, but only preexisting myths reaffirmed or dispelled. The notions that each possesses about the world dictating the moral derived by each. In a dreary town on a frozen morning the Devil was born to a young woman of questionable morals. He left behind him bloodshed and chaos and wreaked havoc wherever he rode.

What the hell. They road among the orange glow of the lamps of that town. As dusk came on so did the kerosene lamps and the wooden logs and the candles in the windows. The town sliding into that final contemplation by wooden fire. The illuminated faces of the men and women of the town and their conversation that Joe and Richard were not privy to. Who was trustworthy and who wasn't. Joe wondered if any of them were worth knowing. You get one true friend in this life and that's it. One is plenty.
 You gonna marry that girl?
 I don't know. No.
 She was nice enough.
 Nice enough.
 Her daddy don't like you.
 She's been raised under his wing I guess. She don't got a mother. All she's got is him and him her. It's not up to him to like me.
 There's no arguing with him.
 No, no arguin. Have to be a fool.
 No point in budding your head against it.
 No point in it.
 You have any plans on impressing him?
 There's always plans. All it takes is time. I can't say I see myself regrettin it.
 You think she's worth it.
 Don't see how she aint. Maybe this town aint.
 The lights of the towns set aglow the dust that hung in the air above them. The circumstances that each family of the plains finds itself in and the politics among the households. The smell of poorly hidden contempt. Rotting hatred. It hung above the towns like a stinking wretched halo. Blood feuds and stories of murder in the street. That in a man which convinces him to kill another man. That which deems a man deserving of death. That in the clowns that sought Richard out and what it was they knew about him.

 Richard asked Joe what he thought was the matter with the clowns.
 I think they were just looking for a fight.
 What the hell.
 I think they knew you wouldn't do anything crazy.
 Or you wouldn't let me.
 I wouldn't let you make a fool of yourself.
 God.
 I don't mean to call you a fool, you aren't one. But they had a good look at both of us. They saw the knives, they saw the shotgun. They know what town they're in. There was something in em not worth scaring up.
 They're just men.
 Joe watched Richard, he watched the towns. Out there some of the lights disappearing like ships into a storm. The remaining darkness as if reclaimed by the planes if not for the restless ambition in the hearts of the people who indeed lay claim to that land.
 Joe stopped his horse. There's gonna be rain.
 There already is. Richard held out his palm and took account of the rain. Wont last.
 No more dust over the towns and yet more lights disappearing. The evidence of their existence receding to the void and yet the people's essence remained. The hierarchy of the planes persists. Status lost and won in the economy of rumor and intrigue. Hearsay shifting the petty hearts of those who turn the soil and obey the changing tide of the seasons that looms over the story of their lives in and out of fortune on the prairie of the Southwest. That in a people that gives them the strength. What myth of themselves they are reduced to inventing.
 There's types of people out there you can't pretend to understand, Richard. Can't underestimate.
 You think they're killers?
 No. They're not killers.
 So what is it about them that can't be scared.
 Scare em with what.
 Richard lifted the closing flap of his satchel and tossed the revolver at Joe.
 Joe held the thing in his hands. Heavy and cold. Something to be found in a soldier's hand, a deputy's. Some kind of pretense about it. He gave it back. He asked if Richard knew why he never carried a gun. Because he never met any fucking killers.
 Joe turned the horse in the direction of their homes and asked joe about the girl


There's types of men out there you can't pretend to understand.
You think they were killers?
No. 

What the hell.
 In Richard's eye reflected the lights of the town. As night came on so did the lights. The town sliding into that final contemplation by wooden fire. The faces of the people half illuminated in their places of living and their conversation that Joe was not privy to. Who was trustworthy and who wasn't. You get one friend in this life and that's it. One is plenty.
 You gonna marry that girl?
 I don't know. No.
 She was nice enough.
 Nice enough.
 Her daddy don't like you.
 She's been raised under his wing I guess. She don't got a mother. All she's got is him and him her. It's not up to him to like me.
 There's no arguing with him.
 No, no arguin. Have to be a fool.
 No point in budding your head against it.
 No point in it.
 You got any plans on impressing him?
 There's always plans. All it takes is time. I can't say I see myself regrettin it.
 You think she's worth it.
 Got to be. Don't see how she aint. Maybe this town aint.
 The lights of the town set aglow the dust that hung in the air above them. The circumstances that each family finds itself in and the politics among the households. The smell of poorly hidden contempt. Rotting hatred. Stories of murder in the street.

 That in a man which convinces him to kill another man. That which deems a man deserving of death. That in the clowns that sought Richard out and what it was they knew about him.

 Richard asked Joe what he thought was the matter with the clowns.
 I think they were just looking for a fight.
 What the hell.
 I think they knew you wouldn't do anything crazy.
 Or you wouldn't let me.
 I wouldn't let you make a fool of yourself.
 God.
 I don't mean to call you a fool, you aren't one. But they had a good look at both of us. They saw the knives, they saw the guns scabbards on our horses. They knew what town they're in. There was something in em not worth scaring up.
 They're just men.

What the hell.

 As they rode the town sliding into that final contemplation by wooden fire. The people's faces aglow in orange light and their conversation that Joe and Richard were not privy to. Who was trustworthy and who wasn't. Joe wondered if any of them were worth knowing. You get one friend in this world and that's it. 

 You gonna marry that girl?

 I don't know. No.

 The lights of the towns set aglow the dust that hung in the air above them. The circumstances that each family finds itself in and the politics among the households. The smell of poorly hidden contempt. It hovered over the towns like a wretched halo. You think everything's calm and then you hear of a murder. That in a man which convinces him to kill another man, that which deems a man deserving of death. That in the clowns that sought Richard out and what it was they knew about him.

 Richard asked Joe what he thought was the matter with the clowns.

 I think they were just lookin for a fight. I think they knew you wouldn't do anything crazy.

 Or you wouldn't let me. 

 I wouldn't let you make a fool of yourself. 

 God. 

 Something about the way Richard sat, the way he held the rains. Joe watched him, he watched the towns. The lights from the towns reflected dully in Richard's eye, in the metal parts of his gear. Out there some of the lights disappearing like ships into a storm. The remaining darkness as if reclaimed by the plains but for the restless ambition in the hearts of those who indeed occupy that land. 

 It's gonna rain.

 Joe held out his palm and took account of the rain. Not much rain. Won't last. He breathed in the damp air. The halo formed above the towns by the luminous dust had gone and yet more lights disappearing. He thought hard on whether there was anything to be gained from seeing two clowns scared. He asked Richard what he thought could bring fear into their hearts. Richard lifted the flap of the leather satchel in the rear of his saddle and tossed the revolver to Joe. Joe held the thing in his hand. Heavy and cold. Something to be found in a soldier's hand or a deputy's. There was a pretense in it. He asked if Richard knew why he never carried a gun. Richard didn't know and he said because there's no killers around here.