where water never run nor water never fell

In the dark, they’re close enough to touch – Jesse is kneeling over him with his weight of his body slung painfully against Bob’s hip, and his elbow braces against his shoulder. His four-fingered hand holds a knife.The knife presses into the soft place below his jaw, so keen Bob can’t tell if it’s cutting yet or just working a seam in the flesh. Jesse’s other hand rubs companionably at his shoulder, roughened and warm. Bob is frozen in place; he fists uselessly at the bedclothes, wheezes once with surprise, and says nothing after that. He can smell blood, and feel a man’s breath on his face, warm and sour.

The two of them are clinched there on the bed for a long time, with the moonlight running over them through the crook of Jesse’s bent arm, their bodies so close – Robert alert to his small motions like an animal, rigid with awareness both of the pain and of what might come next.

Neither of them knows how long it lasts for, the caress that pins him down against the bed as securely as the brush of metal does, the little feathery strokes with the blade of the knife – which isn’t big but is plenty big enough. He might have to hack a little to cut Bob’s throat, but it’d do the trick just the same. It’s a knife for skinning game with. Jesse could split him like an eel here from throat to belly and watch him twist. He’s going to die here at twenty, sick with love for Jesse James, or Jesse James is going to roar with laughter loud enough to wake the whole house and let him up off the mattress to join him in some new exploit.

There’s no joke forthcoming, and no threat. Jesse doesn’t shout for him to get up, or shake him awake. He is considering him in the dark, craning his head to get a better look, and Bob is frozen beneath him with parted lips and the tip of his tongue between his teeth.

Jesse James has a wife, and has been known to surprise her awake with a kiss. There will be no kisses for Bob. Zee’s asleep in some other room, and her husband is here. It’s impossible to tell if he’s angry, or frantic, or pressing a confession – he just is, heavy and scented and quiet, pressed as flush and close as the knife is. It’s impossible to think about George Shepherd’s nephew, or Zee asleep in the other room, or where Charley is and whether Jesse James cut his older brother’s throat from ear to ear not long before and is here to finish off both the Ford boys for good.

The man’s body is here, his two hands and his long legs and his fierce face, but his mind is someplace else. Jesse’s estranged from himself. All Bob can think of in the dark is the way their bodies align, the symmetry of it. He’d recognize him in the dark, half-asleep or stunned, panting with desire and half-blind with fear – anywhere.

Bob makes a humiliated sound, going slack under him, and the blade tugs upward, flicking away. Like he thought about butchering him there and found him unfit for the purpose.

Maybe this is a nightmare. Jesse is fast asleep next to his wife someplace else and the pressure on his ribs in one emphatic push is nothing but a dream, a dream of suffocating. His ears strain for the sound of Charley’s consumptive breaths, the one thing sadder than the rattle of Jesse’s ruined lung. The weight lifts, and the mattress creaks.

It couldn’t have been Jesse at all. Bob’s eyes shutter closed, and he sinks into darkness as fast as he can, like he’s being chased. Jesse would have had a remark for the occasion. He has something to say on every occasion. A superstition, a song, a passage from Scripture. He would have had words for him, and not just gestures. The red mark is still there on the skin, scratched raw.

(Years later – near the end – he’ll still wake from his dreams with the memory of that blade on his throat.)