O Sweet Price

Roland brushes off his blistered hands, and straightens up.

“Thought I buried you a month ago. Back at Bartlett.”

The man in front of him has dozen names on a dozen sheriff’s’ bills – he set himself up like a petty tyrant, terrorizing the farmhouses and burning the homesteads that wouldn’t capitulate to the ground, drafting concubines and doing business out of the town courthouse like his own personal sanctuary – the widow couldn’t tell half of it without shuddering with disgust, and Roland had seen the shambles with his own eyes before putting a bullet in the man’s heart. Roland had put the man in the ground himself, he’d dug the grave – even in Bartlett a black man with a gun wears out his welcome quickly.

The rest of the gang had had beaten a fast retreat without any real displays of loyalty to the man who’d given them free rein to raid and burn. Roland knows he’ll be hunting them down for the bounty in the next few months before winding his way back home to Gilead. There’ll be plenty of stories to tell.

(They say he’s a witch, the widow woman had said, he knows alchemy, he can make gunpowder out of nothing, he eats raw meat and he never sleeps, he never dies–)

Here in a lonesome place, one of the sunburned open places between settlements with the sun a queer sliver on the horizon.The man in black has deep creases under his eyes, but his eyes are bright. A handsome man in a dusty black coat. “What’s happened to your hospitality, my friend? I’ve come a long way, and seen plenty.”

The night’s cold. Roland puts the coffee pot back on the fire, and keeps a hand on his gun.

*

Roland dryly considers potential points of origin. Being as he isn’t much of a believer in hell, the options are few. By the time the coffee’s good and hot, the man in black is dressing a black-eared rabbit and laying it out over the fire. There’s precious little game to be found in this stretch of land. He must’ve brought it with him from wherever it was he came from, somewhere in the depths of that all-concealing coat.

A quake rises up in him at the sight and smell of meat, even half-raw still. Roland can’t turn away – starving, interested.

“You aren’t hungry?”

“Neither are you, dead man.” Roland brushes his palms off against his knees and ignores the biting of his empty belly.

The man in black proceeds a little spitefully. He looks sleek and handsome, worn from the road, but in the smoky light Roland can make out the graveyard dirt in the seams of his coat, in the collar edge of his shirt, the scuffs on his red leather boots.The dead man might have a brother, but Roland draws the line at identical boots.

He cocks his head when he catches Roland staring. “Come on now, you’re insulting me now. Are you afraid to eat what I’ve cooked for you?” Little slivers of red-black meat on sticks, crackling with fat and smelling sweeter than any sit-down dinner Roland has ever had. “Being dead isn’t catching. Go on and help yourself.”

Roland looks into the fire and says nothing. One killing begets another. And another after that – an unbroken chain in red. The dead man sucks soot from a charred fingertip.

“Well, then. I’ll just make myself at home.”

*

They bed down together, side by side. Roland acquiesces to the the graze of those cold hands on his neck – on a warm night it might even be pleasant, but there are no warm nights out here in the open. Two men and one blanket isn’t easy wrangling and the two of them tangle until they’re face to face in the dust.

There’s a sharp scrape on the back of Roland’s neck – Roland shudders and reaches back, but there’s nothing there, no bead of blood on his fingers when he holds up his hand between them.

Roland had dug the grave good and deep, out in a lonely place. The borrowed shovel had slipped and struck the dead man’s forehead square in the middle, left a deep white valley of a mark – when Roland reaches to run his thumb over where he expects such a mark to be, there’s only a smooth thread. The man in black grins at him from close range, stubble-cheeked and white-toothed, full of ironic good cheer. Back in Bartlett he was always smiling, even at the very end. He smiles with a mouth full of teeth.

“One good turn deserves another. I was getting sick of that little cowtown back there. You came and helped me out of it. And then off you went – if it weren’t for that handsome face of yours, I’d never have tracked you down. Not even on foot. Folks remember a gunslinger.”

“My mule died a ways back. Good animal.” Roland doesn’t mind proceeding on foot – he’s hardier than most – but the thought of being tracked despite his efforts makes the back of his neck prickle. He shrugs deeper into his coat.

The man in black cocks his head, popping the bones in his neck. “Well, death ain’t exactly what it could be, is it.”

Roland shifts his arm and his pistol grazes the man’s belly. It raises a crackle of laughter from low in the man’s throat, like the rattle from an open grave. His hand closes over it with a shivery unwarranted intimacy.

The man in black’s other hand moves to his fly; Roland watches him proceed with some curiosity. Whether it’s more satisfying than his own left hand remains to be seen.

When he’s finished, the man in black is cinched up closer to him than ever; his mouth beside Roland’s ear, his dark swept-back hair falling out of place and tickling.

“You’ll see me again. We can’t escape each other.” A silver coin flickers over the backs of his fingers; Roland watches it turn over, end over end. “I was never born. I’ll never die. I know you, Roland, intimately.”

Roland glances back at his face, sidelong – there’s a red weal in his forehead, and he smells not unpleasantly like wet earth. The silver coin quits flashing, right on the edge of Roland’s vision.

“Is that so.”

He’s had enemies before – men and women with a grudge against a free town like Gilead – and he’s put plenty of them in the ground one way or another. None of them have ever taken it so personally that they came back.

The man in black sits up, crossing his arms across his knees. The coin has disappeared up his sleeve or into some unknown pocket.

Desert ghosts. Alone out here, a man gets to be strange. Roland rests with one arm crooked behind his head, the other on his gun – the man in black retrieves a cigarette wrapped in a twist of red paper and smokes away companionably, wreathing the two of them in sweet smoke. He offers Roland a drag, which he declines. The smell of spices is like a suggestion of some distant place.

There’s plenty to dream about, out in the wide-open. If he drops off all the way to sleep he’ll wake to the bite of metal against his throat. This much he knows. Bundled up alongside a dead man’s ghost – he’ll wake up and find himself in a worse fix than before. They lie together a long time like that – one of them stirring occasionally to stoke the fire, Roland watching the little red tip of ash at the end of that cigar shiver with each draw but never burn out or dwindle. Before long his eyelids are sinking heavy – Roland grudgingly succumbs to drowsiness, a kind of half-sleep

When he wakes, the fire is dead and the dead man’s cigar is stubbed out in the sand beside him. In the distance is the man in his black coat, setting off with the moonlight on him. By the time he’s on his feet, the distance between them seems impossibly great. Roland watches until the figure dwindles down to a shape in the dark, a sliver, a thread.