He said, “It’s you.”
I held out the bottle. I didn’t say anything.
Preacher raised his hand. I unscrewed the cap, helped him drink.
“I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“A couple times.”
The man swallowed. He grunted when he tried to hand the bottle back to me. “Thank you.”
There were three red dots, like planets, on the bottle. Preacher’s fingerprints in blood.
He kept a gun lying across his groin. It looked like a .45. I could see that the hammer had been pulled back; it was cocked.
“It’s been a good show you put on, boy. Heaven must be amused.”
I sat down with my legs folded. I made sure I was far enough away that he couldn’t reach me. But I wasn’t afraid of him trying to shoot me. Maybe I should have been.
“I’m not anyone you think.”
“You’re him,” he said. “It’s you. The Jumping Man.”
“You’re a crazy old man.”
I turned my head, looked around us.
I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Maybe a sign with an arrow, pointing This way, Jack. But I felt like there was something else, someone else, nearby.
Maybe I was supposed to follow the arrow sticking out of the old man’s back.
Preacher lifted a finger, crusted with blood and ash, pointed up. “What’s the sky look like now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “I’d think a boy would know what the sky looks like.”
“It looks like nothing.”
“And the ground?”
He was fucking with me.
“It looks like endless fields of grass and clover.”
Preacher grimaced, a smile. His teeth were black, and he hadn’t shaved in days. The white stubble of his beard looked like spines on a cactus.
“In another world, we could have a long talk, I think.”
“Do you want me to help pull that arrow out or something?”
He shook his head. “The horse is dead now.”
I looked at the horse’s side. The arrows had stopped twitching.
“I keep coming back to this place. And every time it’s different.”
“This is how the world has always been. It will continue to be this way after we’re gone.” The old man’s voice was a raspy croak. “But I do suspect a new broom sweeps clean.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe.”
“I was in Pope Valley, California, in 1888.”
“You think I don’t recognize you?”
“I knew who you were, old man, the first time I saw you.”
The old man shut his mouth. He swallowed.
I said, “Do you know what this place is?”
“I only know what it isn’t, boy.”
“You could start with that, if you want.”
“It isn’t Pope Valley. It isn’t the tree you and your father were hung from.”
I spit down into the ash between my legs.
“You were with Anamore Fent’s team, weren’t you?” I said.
Preacher’s chin dropped. I thought he was looking at his legs, or he was falling asleep. I counted my breaths—five of them—before the old man answered.
“Captain Fent is dead.”
I didn’t see any of the others on the train. I might have remembered who they were, if they were the ones from Fent’s team. Probably.
Then Preacher said, “It’s just you and me here, boy.”
Brian Fields would be the only one left.
“There was one of them. A kid named Conner Kirk. Do you know what might have happened to him?”
I looked down. I drew a circle in the white salt. Another circle enclosing it.
Preacher said, “Kirk. I know him. The sergeant. Good-looking boy. He was quiet and mean. Always got what he wanted.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
Preacher started to laugh, but it came out as a cough. He spit blood. His eyes squinted at me, like he was sizing me up, waiting for me to say something. He shook his head. “We went looking for him. Fent made us go after him. He was her boy, you know. Favored, at least. What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“After that morning he and Pittman took you out of the station. Kirk took you out. He was going to shoot you. I imagine he failed at that, judging by our current engagement in this conversation. He never came back.”
“He is a friend of mine.”
“We did find Pittman, though. Well. Pieces of him.”
I tracked the tip of my finger in a line through the ash. I drew an arrow that pierced the center of my circles.
The old man said, “Bad magic. That’s what Pittman feared most. He brought it on himself. He was a dark man.”
“You believe that? About bringing things on?”
“What’s in the sky, boy?”
I put my hands flat on the ground, pushed myself up, and stood. My legs ached. If I didn’t start moving, I’d die here, right alongside the old man and his horse. I felt like I could sleep, but I had things that still needed to be done.
“Is that it? Are you going to kill me now, son?”
“No.”
“I believe I’d prefer it if you did.”
Preacher’s hand slid over his lap. He grasped the gun, but it seemed like it was too heavy for the old man to lift. He tried aiming it at me.
I felt something, a warm wind, like a breath, and with it came a sighing sound, a low whisper.
Shhhhhh …
As I turned away from the old man, I saw the ghost of a boy standing ten feet from me, floating up like steam from the burned ground.
Every time I’d seen Seth before, he looked small, frail, like a little kid. But here, this time, he was older. At first, he just stood there watching me with his arms flat to his body, palms pressed against his thighs as though posing for a portrait. He didn’t say anything to me.
I could clearly see the deep marks that coiled around his neck.
The old man coughed, his voice creaking. “Devils.”
When I looked at him, Preacher had the butt of the gun resting on his leg, and his trembling hand held the barrel pointed directly at me.
“I guess all things are not accomplished, old man.”
* * *
In the wind, smoke clears behind the preacher.
But the sky is still white, empty.
He is shaking so bad I can see the point of the arrow behind him as it nods up and down, up and down; a seesaw.
That’s how we play in Marbury.
There is a horizon now, formed by the rising light that establishes all the things in front of me: a crooked shell of a plane, a wing, a black centipede miles back that is a train filled with the dead.
This pathetic dying man, serving out his mission.
Against the wind, the gray shadow of Seth floats between us.
Me.
Seth.
The man with the gun.
There is a white explosion around the old man’s hand. It burns my eyes, but I can clearly see it through Seth’s back. A shell ejects, it tumbles in the air, a circle, an eye, opening, closing.
Forever.
The flash hangs around the muzzle of the gun, splashes outward, dances, curls.
Fireworks.
It is a clear yellow-white, brilliant, and I realize I have never seen a color this pure, this beautiful. Through Seth, the blast from Preacher’s gun resembles swaying tentacles, an anemone fanned by the tide.
The light gets bigger.
Until all I can see is just the light.
Nothing else.
I am staring at a sun.
It must be the center of the universe.
twenty-three
A ball of yellow light.
That was all.
I thought the old man shot me.
When my eyes focused, I realized I was lying on my side.
My mouth was open and I could feel the clay grit, taste the dirt that gathered in pasty clumps on the inside of my lips and stuck to my tongue.
But I could see only a blob of yellow light.
The old man must have shot me.
I moved my arm. I ran my hand over my face, felt down along my neck, my chest. I rubbed across my belly, the waist of my pants, my legs. I could feel the straps of a backpack looped over my shoulders.