A ten page story about cowboys in the mythic west. It was written while I was reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and while i was watching a lot of Clint Eastwood movies, particularly unforgiven.

See the silhouettes along the ridge, two faint outlines of men against the red dusk, calculating their next move.

“Are you sure he’s down there?”

“Sure as the dead don’t breath.”

“And he killed Samuel?”

“Aye, that’s the word goin’ round.”
The young man and the old man stood high above the small encampment below, the two windswept and dust-blown. The two had come to level a score.

“Just the two of us?”

“Why not? Two of us, three of us – hell fourteen of us. Don’t matter how many of us, we’ll kill the sonabitch.”

They left the ridge’s edge and went back to their fire. It matched the skies harsh glow of deep crimson, dancing along their faces.

“Tomorrow,” said the old man. “We go down at dawn tomorrow.”

The young man studied the hard lines and faded scars on the old man’s face. He looked like a man who was apt to kill, born to play the part with a six shooter in his hand.

“All those stories that Samuel said about you true?”

The old man said nothing. He produced a bottle of whiskey, the cool amber liquid glowing against the brilliant fire.

“Told me you killed everything you could” said the young man. “Young, old, men, women, children – hell, even infants.”

The old man took a deep swig, tilting his head back. He had a scar so deep in the crevice of his face that the young man swore a hungry lobo had laid eyes upon him, snarling and full of howl.

“Aye, I did” said the old man. “Used to. Used to kill everything I could point my gun at. Didn’t matter what it was to me as long as it was alive. Sure as hell wasn’t alive after I was done with it.”

The young peered down past the ridge where the small encampment now slept. Tomorrow they would tear the place apart. All because a killer had killed a killer.

When the young man looked back across the fire, the old man was looking straight at him with eyes that did not see. They had a milky dreamlessness to them, trapped in savage reverie.

The dead kill the dead though the young man, reaching for the bottle.

“What about you?” asked the old man, eyes still far away. “What’s a youngin’ like you doin’ followin’ damned souls like me and Samuel?”

The young man took a deep swig. It burned his throat and made him cough.

“I’m a killer” he said in between coughs.

“You ain’t no killer. You didn’t kill anyone back there and you ain’t killed anyone before that.”

The young man took a small sip from the bottle this time. He whipped the spit from his mouth and said, “Hell, there was a time you ain’t killed no one. Gotta start sometime.

Tomorrow seems as good as any day.”

The old man grunted and took the bottle back.

“Aye, and tomorrow is a good as any day for dyin’.”

The old man took one final swig, deep and long. Then he poured the rest of it into the fire, muttering a prayer for Samuel. The fire flared high. Neither man moved, forsaking their safety for the fire’s warmth.

The wind howled hot gusts of wind across their faces. The throats of coyotes wailed in the night. Now it was dark and stars lit up the sky with their ancient glow that was far beyond the reach of any hand. It would be the final period of peace before the slaughter tomorrow.

And the young man dreamed of Samuel and the last bounty. Along with the old man, the three had trekked along a desolate wasteland, hunting their bounty.

***************************

“He’s a cold one” Samuel had told the young man. They rode side by side, bodies jostling up and down on top the horses as they rode. The old man stayed ahead, scouting the flat land for anything that dared to move.

“That son of a bitch will kill you just for blinking at him.”

“Huh” said the young man. “He don’t look that mean. I mean – he looks like a killer ought to look but that just seems how nature made him.”

“Aye, he’s a mean one” Samuel said. “Ain’t any good side to him. All that can be done is you pray to God he don’t cross your path.”

The three rode on for what seemed like countless days, chasing old remains of dead fires and old animal bones. They were always so close to their prey, the sweet tantalizing taste of death always on their lips.

“Tomorrow,” informed the old man as the three of them lay down for the final night before the kill. “Tomorrow we get Durango and his men and get our ransom.

And that was all that was said. They young man lay there in the twilight wondering indeed why he was out here at the edge of the world, at the brim of its end with two heartless killers, aged and scarred by a rough life, a life the young man was now thrusting upon himself.

There were no answers, just the crackling of their fire, and creatures under cover of the night trying to cull the men away from the fire with their howling.

****************************************

“Get up.” The old man stood above the young man. “Today we get drunk off the sweet taste of revenge.”

The young man rose. The dark hue of crimson still hung in the sky, and the expansive land was still as lonely as it had been when he had closed his eyes. He wondered if he had slept at all.

Whiskey still flowed inside of him.

“Durango. We get Durango within the hour.”

******************************************

The first time they had descended upon Durango, the old man boasted with unparalleled confidence.

“This’ll be easy. He’s just waiting it out down there in that hallowed out cave, a big pike in the smallest of ponds.”

“How many men down there with him?” asked Samuel.

“Dunno. Sixteen? Sixty? Hell, it don’t matter. We’ll get our bounty and it’ll be our last.”

The young man saw nothing as they sat on their horses high above the dark cave in the ground. He knew the old man was lying – there would be more bounties. Such pristine engines of death did not quit nor fade away. They combusted, meeting their end in magnificent violence that would ignore age or sickness.

“Boy. I said boy.”
The young man turned to the old man who stared him down and barked at him from his white horse.

“You apt to kill?”

“Imagine so.”

“there ain’t no imaginin’. Either you can or-“

“Give him a break” said Samuel. “he done rode with us this far, has he not? Come, he will kill when the time is ready.”

The old man grunted. “Fine. Let’s go.”

They descended down, the old man leading the hunters with a gun in each of his leathery hands. Men gaunt from malnutrition sprang from all over, jumping from the shadows. Their lives were blasted out of their very frames with each disintegrating bullet. The dead littered the ground as they stormed through the cave, the young man both awed and horrified by the old man’s skill.

The old man did not stop, never slowing in his pace. He never missed. He was an unfair force of nature upon dying men waiting out a terrible fate.

At length, they came upon Durango. He was a man very much like the earth their horses stampeded upon, brown and red and calloused. He was gigantic by any man’s standards, sitting cross legged and silent. There was a fire beside him, emitting horrible smells and lighting in the cave walls in wild streaks, without purpose, without compassion.

They halted at the sight of his presence.

“It’s the end for ye” said the old man, drawing on the white horse’s reins. “Come quietly or come dead; either way, it’s the end.”

The ultimatum stirred no motion from the hunted, his stoic state maintained in the face of annihilation. Durango’s eyes shifted from one bounty hunter to the other in a slow and calculating sweep. The horses cried out, spooked by the darkness and echoes ricocheting off the cave walls. Then closed his eyes, grinning at the ground.

“Ye bastard!” screamed the old man, drawing out his gun. “Ye chose death.”

Durango sprung as the gun went off, the bullet piercing through his right shoulder and traveling on into the darkness. He tackled down the old man from his high horse to the coarse ground, the echo of shattered bones lost amongst sputtering hooves. Blood shot from his mouth.

Samuel raced to his side only to be torn down from his horse as well, the two men now writhing beneath a behemoth. There were more echoes of gunshots, howling of pain and men forced into primal states of being.

The brutal fighting would ensure the victor a deep and tender love for whatever little life he had left.

At long last, the fighting came to a pause, Durango’s knife around Samuel’s throat, and the old man pointing a gun at the two.

“Let him go.”

“Join him in hell” spat Durango.

And the young man could only watch, paralyzed by a fear that held him violently, just as his hands held the reigns of his bucking horse.

The entirety of the barbaric dance. Two worn out men struggling with a beast. The pale fire illuminating sporadically upon the blood-soaked cave walls. And now Samuel’s throat was spurting crimson.

The old man shot and cursed, his rage beyond his frame and teetering off into madness.
A pot bellied laugh escaped from Durango as the wild bullet dissipated into the nothingness. It shattered along the cave walls. The earth began to shift.

Dust rose and rock walls fell. Durango’s laugh over shrouded everything. Everything moved with haste.

*******************

The young man grabbed the old man by his collar and dragged him along, the old man cursing and fighting to be freed.

“Let go! Samuel! We must get Samuel!”

But the young man did not let go. He rode on, moving with unvanquished grace and precision. Light became more vibrant at each stomping of his horse’s hooves, the young man traveling upward out of the collapsing cave.

At length they shot out of the cave, flaked in dust. A plume of sand shot up as the earth continued to shake. When the dust was still once more, the cave was gone, a myth in the bounty hunters’ minds.

“Samuel. Samuel.” The man said the name over and over again. The young man wasn’t sure if he was screaming it or merely whispering it. There wide open stretch of the desert wouldn’t tell how much weight a human voice could carry. “Samuel. Samuel. Poor dead, majestic Samuel.”

What wild things the young man had learned from the cave and the cave’s fire.

********************************

At first the old man wanted nothing to with the young man. “You let him die” he would say. “Your inexperience. Your cowardice.” And then he would blame God, shooting his six gun in the sky crying “If Samuel must die, then so shall you!” Then he cursed the air that replenished his breath, the ground that gave him footsteps. All of existence went on to be blamed but nothing could satisfy his rage.

Then they heard word of Durango. That he had lived, continuing on as if nothing had happened.

It was all the old man needed to know. The old man did not know if it was fact or myth, but hearing it was enough to satisfy his wrath.

************************

“You ready?” The two were overlooking the ridge once again, this time in the early dawn.

“Aye, ready as I’ll ever be.”

The descent was slow, unlike that of the first descend in the cave. They rode down at an ease and much tenderness, like a mother rousing an infant.

They were nurturing a slaughter.

Nothing moved when they came upon the encampment. There was no life. Barren.

The deeper they bore into the town, the more paranoid the young man became. Each step led to more scorched earth. The two stopped in front of an inn, and the old man leapt from his horse.

“Get out here! Come and met yer end!” the old man’s hollering and rage had left him red.

“Come out here and meet yer death!”

At first, nothing. A gang of twenty or so encircled the two as the man hollered on. Some held guns, others picks and crude hand weapons. Then Durango emerged, scared and right shoulder bandaged. He leaned against one of the inn’s posts and smiled as if it had never left his face, even after escaping from the cave.

The old man produced a gun. All around, men lurched forward and the old man’s gun whipped around in eerie precision. Men died in quick succession. The young man began to shoot as well, surprised that his paralysis no longer followed him into battle. A few of the men ran away, discarding their weapons and throwing screaming, foreign curses.

There was nothing left but bodies and heavy haze of gun smoke and dust.

“Now,” said the old man, “your death.” He pointed his gun at Durango. An empty clicking came when he pulled the trigger. Durango pummeled him down to the ground and the two toiled in the dust. The young man tried to get a bead of Durango but could not get a clear shot. The battle would have to be won with fists.

They stood, Durango connecting his fist to the old man’s face. The old man took them until he was forced to his knees, sputtering blood into the dust.

“Weakness” said Durango. “You are full of nothing but weakness old man. Just like Samuel.”

The young man shot and missed. And the old man was once again engulfed in Durango’s shadow. Then blood exploded from Durango’s back as the old man dug a discarded pick into his back. The old man swung and swung until Durango had to back off, falling stupidly unto his back.

“Now,” said the old man, “your death. Die ye bastard.”

He struck down with the pick, Durango’s weak hands unable to grab it. His eyes were walled white and quickly lifeless. Silence again. This time louder than any gunshot.

“It’s over” the old man heaved, blood still spiting from his mouth. He was hunched over, losing more life than he gained in his revenge. “Samuel is avenged.”

For a while, the old man just sat next to the body, trying to recapture his breath.

“All right,” he heaved in between breaths. “Let’s go.”

And then his chest disintegrated and he fell upon the earth in a ghastly heap. The young man went to his side, turning him over. Up ahead, the old man’s assassin rode off, out of the encampment and into the sheltering desert.

The young man clasped the old man’s hand. The old man once again had eyes that did not see. Lost again in savage reverie. The old man uttered a few more words before life fluttered from his dying frame.

“It’s a… fine day to die.”

The young man, who barely heard the words, said “It’s a fine day to kill.”

The old man smiled. Then he died.

The young man stood above the deceased. All around laid dead men slaughtered by unforeseen forces of nature. Nothing could save these damned souls – they were spurred on to their demise by greed and a godless world.

Women came to mourn their dead. They all spoke in a foreign tongue. The young man left everything – the old man, Durango, the bounty for Durango’s head. He may come back to claim the bounty, he may not.

All he could taste was the sweet tang of revenge. He climbed upon his horse and rode into the expansive desert, after the old man’s killer.

A poem I wrote last winter while reading a lot of Ginsberg.Click on the title to read it.
I was born-

Between two countries, one far East and the other not so far West.

They flirted, loved, married, moved, hated, cheated, divorced. The West paid they East back with a shrill laugh and dropping all responsibility.

I was born – Between Europe? Who Knows? and Graphic Winces. I hate poetry in all forms but I love you.You Howl and told America to go Fuck Yourself. Thank God.

I was born -

In a decade of decadence, selfish parents with selfish motives. Material Girl, Thriller, Hungry Like the Wolf, all that music that isn’t jazz.

I was born-

Between two languages. I forgot the mother toungue when the West dropped all responsibility to the East. It’s a broken tongue of mish-mash-proportions that I can’t understand over the static of the telephone.

I was born-

with that umbilical cord fastened to my belly button and feet first out of the Birthing Canal of the West.. That noosy necktie of a nuisance smug around my throat. Blue in the face and living life with wire tap scars and oscillating whirring machines to inform of my vitals.

I was born-

……………………………………………………………………………………………dead