“Then send her in here and I’ll give it a whirl. She needs to promise to be careful with me though. I’m in kind of a fragile state.”
Anna and Jem walked together toward the Proud Lady. Men standing on the porch saw him coming and called out to the people inside, “Jem’s back!”
People flooded onto the street and surrounded him. Someone passed a bottle of whiskey through the crowd until it landed in Jem’s hand.
“Nothing like a sip of whiskey after killing a fifty foot space monster,” he said, nodding his head at Bart Masters. He uncorked the bottle and lifted it to his lips when Bart Masters said, “Wait a second, Jem.”
Bart raised a glass and said, “Welcome home, we missed you. Bout time you showed up.”
They came to Anna’s front door and Jem stopped, scraping his foot on the porch. “What is it?” Anna said.
He laughed to himself and said, “McParlan told me to take you home and make ‘sweet love’ to you. Sounds kind of creepy to hear him say it.”
Anna put her hand against her face and feigned blushing. “Would that be such a terrible thing to have to do?”
He looked at her in the twin moonlight. “No. In fact, I aim to do exactly that. But maybe not tonight, if that’s okay.”
“Tell you what,” Anna said. “Let me draw you a hot bath and get you out of those godforsaken clothes. When you get out, my bedroom door will be open. You can do whatever you want after that.”
Anna walked into the house and headed toward the wash room. The pipes clanged as she cranked the handles and jets of warm water opened up to fill the copper basin. Jem went inside and shut the door. He stood in the doorway as Anna unbuckled his gun belt. She bent to grab his boots, telling him, “Lift your foot.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“You might as well get used to it. In this house we leave our boots on the porch. If you’re going to stay here, you need to learn the rules.”
“Actually, I was thinking about taking up in the Halladay house. I thought you might go over there with me and take a look at it tomorrow.”
She yanked on the toe and heel of his first boot and slid it off. There was a hint of disappointment when she said, “If that’s what you want to do.” She held the boots away from her like they were filled with sewage. “Get out of those clothes so I can boil them. You smell worse than an outhouse.”
Jem stripped and climbed into the copper basin. He settled down into the hot water and let it soak into his muscles. Anna came back into the washroom and pressed a sponge against his neck and started to scrub him. Jem closed his eyes and rested.
Old Man Willow’s map was not easy to follow, with its stick figures and pyramid mountains. Jem stood on the place that he thought resembled the map’s “X” and looked around the road, not far from where Walt Junger had died.
Any evidence of that night was gone. The bodies of both Junger and Elliot were gone. It was hard country in the wasteland, and Jem kicked a rock into the ditch that ran alongside the road. There were piles of rocks and dirt scattered by two decades of violent dust storms and the occasional flood.
Jem walked along the ditch inspecting the rocks. He dug out a few with the shovel he borrowed from Claire and after a few minutes, became frustrated and moved on. He came to a large pile of rocks buried on top of one another, cemented together with dried mud. He shattered the pile with his pickax and started to pry up a round stone from the ground when he realized it was the ball joint of a human femur.
He bent down and dug out the rest of the bone with his hands and starting searching for more. There were various pieces of a skeleton within feet of each other and soon, Jem had enough to assemble large portions of the legs and spine. He dug deeper and the ground started to cave in over an animal’s hole. He stuck his hand into the dirt and his fingers went through what felt like large holes in a bowling ball and he yanked a human skull out of the ground. He sat by the side of the road, turning the skull over in his hands and brushing the dirt away.
He found tattered fabrics and as he cleaned them off, recognized them as pieces of the shirt Sam Clayton was wearing the morning he left from the Willow house.
Jem set everything aside and sat on the road for a long while. After some time, he folded all of the bones inside a blanket and placed it on the back of his wagon. He went back to re-check the area and kept digging until his shovel hit something metal in the dirt.
Sam’s leather gun belt was stiff as a rock and both Colt Defenders were still in the holsters. He had to force the guns out of the holsters and smack them against the ground to break open the cylinders. The guns were still loaded, but the bullets were corroded to the point that Jem had to dig the rounds out of the chambers with his knife.
He cocked one of the hammers back and dry fired the gun. The action still worked.
Jimmy McParlan was standing hunched over on a set of crutches at the security gate to Seneca 6. Pain was etched across his face and sweat ran down his forehead. “What the hell are you doing out here?” Jem said. “Anna will kill you if she catches you out of bed.”
The Marshal rested on one of the crutches and took his hat off. He turned to face the casket and nodded, “I came to pay my respects. Heard a lawman was coming home.”
“It’s just a pile of bones, Marshal.”
McParlan squinted at Jem and said, “Seems like all the elected officials in this town have run off. Got any ideas about what happened to them?”
“Only what I already said about the subject.”
“Is that right? Well, being that I’m the closest thing to the government left in this town, it’s my responsibility to appoint emergency persons who can keep everything from going to hell. What do you think of that Bart Masters fella? He seems like the even-minded sort.”
“I couldn’t think of a more decent person, Marshal.” Jem fished in his pocket for the Sheriff’s badge and held it out, “My father would be proud to know Bart was wearing his badge.”
McParlan looked at the worn badge without reaching for it and said, “You really are dense, boy. I meant as the Mayor, not the Sheriff. You’re going to be the damn Sheriff.”
Jem laughed and said, “I don’t think so. I’m not exactly a law-abiding enough citizen to enforce it.”
“I’ve seen a lot of men with badges in my day, Jem. Most weren’t worth a squirt of piss when it came down to the important parts of the job. I think you’ve got the stuff.”
“Can I have some time to think it over?”
“Hell no. The way you people treat visitors, I might not be around much longer. Besides, who are you kidding? We both know what you’ll say. Now get going and take that man home. He earned some rest.” McParlan propped himself against the security gate to stand upright and saluted Sam’s remains. “Hurry up, damn it, before I pass out.”
Jem headed toward Claire and Frank’s home. He thought about what he would say to Claire, and whether she would want to see what was inside the blanket before Jem dug a hole beside their mother’s grave and laid the blanket inside of it. He wondered if she’d say no and be angry at him for asking. He wondered if she’d say yes and regret it.
The badge stayed in his hand while he rode, and he ran his thumb over the letters spelling Sheriff over and over. He could still picture Sam leaning back in the rocking chair on Old Man Willow’s porch saying, “Someday when you’re an attorney out on some big Metropolis-Class planet, you’ll look back on all this with amazement, I bet. All this fighting and killing over what? A barren bunch of land with the misfortune of having some of the rarest stones in the galaxy buried underneath it.”