Guns of the Waste Land: Departure: Volumes 1-2 Page 2

  After three days of camping in the same site, I figured it was time for me to do something different. I rose up in the morning and went the opposite way of the sun. Every time I stopped for vittles’ or a nap or to relieve myself, I’d check the sun and go off in the other direction. The scenery was different at least, but I be damned if I still didn’t wind up right where I had set off from that morning or near enough as to make no difference.

  It must of been some Indian sorcerer or something had put a spell on me. It was the only thing what made sense. I bet I’d done tramped all in some redskin’s holy land or burial ground that night when I’d left Ma’s and a medicine man or something had fixed it so’s I’d get turned around and wander the Waste Land for the rest of forever. Yeah, I bet that the sun wasn’t even where I saw it. The Indians can do stuff like that. Well, I may of fell off the covered wagon, but it wasn’t yesterday I done it. If it looked like the sun was in one place, in front of me, say, it must really be catty-cornered to there. All I had to do then was put the sun on my side and walk that away.

  So that’s just what I done. When I woke up the next morning, I took a bearing on where the sun was, turned right, and set off. By mid-afternoon or so, I noticed the sun had moved clear over to my other shoulder. I knowed then that there really was some kind of Indian witchcraft afoot, and I done outsmarted ’em. I kept on moving, paying the sun no mind. I was finally on my way.

  The first few days of wandering, I felt like I was really making headway. I hadn’t seen the same scenery over and over, so I figured I was well on the way to Bretton. But the farther I got with no Bretton in sight, the more I began to miss the familiar scenery of a few days ago. I wasn’t where I wanted to be, sure, but at least I knew where I was.

  As the days wore on, food got scarcer, and it got harder and harder to find water, too. I only passed one cabin in all my rambling around that country, but when I went up to it, wasn’t nobody there. The door was wide open, though, so I took that as a sign to come on in. It was dark inside, darker than it had any right to be so close to the middle of the day, and I hollered for whoever lived there, but didn’t nobody answer. I moved a little bit further in when my nose caught a scent from the back.

  Whoever lived here must of left pretty quick because there was near bouts a whole skillet of bacon on the cook stove. Well, I just stood there a minute and looked at it, taking in that sweet hickory smell and savoring, for just a minute the way it made my belly squeeze up just a little in anticipation. I remembered Ma tellin’ me to steal what I needed on the road, so I started to reach out for the bacon and stow it in my haversack, but my conscience started bothering me something awful. It didn’t seem right, Ma tellin’ me to steal when she’d done gone to all the trouble of teaching me my Bible and the Ten Commandments, and my hand froze just over the greasy slab cooling in the pan.

  But then I remembered her also telling me not to question things didn’t make no sense to me, so I grabbed the bacon, shoved in my canvas bag, and left the cabin.

  It had gotten so I couldn’t ride Lippy no more on account of his getting so thin and weak, and he wouldn’t have nothing to do with the bacon. I wished I had thought to grab some oats or something from the cabin, but I couldn’t turn around and go back in that cabin again. It was just too creepy. I had to just lead him, and that slowed us down even more. I started to wish I hadn’t ever started on this trip, and I couldn’t understand how Ma could just let me go like she did without even trying to keep me there. I had a good mind to turn right around and go back and tell her so to her face. Except I didn’t know which direction to go to get back any more than I knew which direction to go to town. I was in a fix sure enough. Following the sun, either way hadn’t helped me, going against the sun hadn’t done no better, and wandering whichever way my intuition told me to wasn’t no good either.

  Then Gramps showed up for breakfast one morning and set me straight.

  III.

  I woke up to the smell of bacon, and that didn’t strike me as strange. My feet were unusually warm for the morning, too, because they was right up next to the fire, and that didn’t strike me a strange neither. I could hear the bacon sizzling in the pan and the sound of a fork turning it every minute or so, again, not strange to me at all. What was strange, though, strange enough for me to sit up and take all the rest of this in, was the sound of my grandfather’s hacking cough?

  Now that’s weird, I thought. You’d figure being dead, he’d not have that cough no more.

  “Well, boy,” Gramps eyed me from under the brim of his slouch hat and waved his cooking fork in my direction. “It ain’t quite noon yet, you sure you wanna be getting up this early?”

  “I thought you was dead.” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stood up, stretching my back.

  “See there?” he plopped two strips of bacon on a plate and handed to me. “I always said you wasn’t half the fool folks take you for.”

  I took the plate and began eating my breakfast. Gramps poured me some coffee from the percolator on the fire.

  “Well, thank you,” I said and took a sip. I never did care for the stuff, but I figured it’d be impolite of me to refuse the old man since he’d come so far. I was a little surprised to find that this cup tasted pretty good. Like drinking a campfire.

  We sat there in silence for a bit while I ate my breakfast. After I finished the first few strips of bacon, Gramps plopped the rest on my plate.

  “You gonna eat any?” I asked.

  “What the hell I need to eat for?” Gramps asked as he began rubbing sand into the frying pan.

  I shrugged and finished the plate.

  “So that’s it?” Gramps sounded kind of put out. “That’s the biggest question you got for me? Am I gonna eat?”

  I just looked at him while I took another sip of coffee.

  “You ain’t even a little curious about what I’m doing here? I only been dead for the last two years.”

  I kind of shrugged my shoulders. “Mama told me not to be asking questions about things I didn’t understand. She said it was a good way to get myself in trouble.”

  “Smart woman.”

  “Besides, I figured if you wanted me to know what you was here for, you’d let me know soon enough.”

  Gramps reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his pipe. From the hip pocket of his jeans, he took his tobacco pouch, and he began packing the pipe, tamping the tobacco down with his thumb. When he finished that, he pulled an ember out of the fire, held it to the bowl and sucked on the stem until the pipe lit. He took a few satisfied tugs before handing me the pipe. I shook my head and took another sip of coffee.

  “Your mother’s a smart girl,” Gramps said, “and ordinarily I wouldn’t think of contradicting any advice she gave, but you’re gonna need to ask a question or two before it’s all over. Pay attention to the folks around you, and you’ll know when it’s okay to ask questions.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You lost ain’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” I explained. “First, I went one way, then I went another. Next, I went whichever way seemed to suit me, and I wound up here. Wherever here is.” I waved a hand to take in all the scenery.

  “Well, it’s all that wandering that got you in this fix, boy,” Gramps chuckled. “What you want is to sit still for a bit and let the world come to you. It’s the first rule of being lost: sit your ass still so folks can find their way to you.”

  “Ain’t nobody looking for me,” I reasoned. “How they gonna find me?”

  “You weren’t looking for me, but you found me easily enough.”

  Well, I couldn’t argue with that, so I just finished the last of my coffee. Gramps stood up, patted the dust off his legs, and considered the campfire a bit. He stared at the smoke rising off it and followed it all the way to the sky.

  “Too white,” he muttered, gathered up some brush, and threw it on the flam
es. The flames died down a bit, but the smoke turned dark. “Better,” he nodded then looked at me.

  “Why’d you…” I started to ask, but then I realized he wasn’t nowhere. The cook stuff was all gone, my tin cup, too. The only things left was Gramps’ flint and tinder box and a little hatchet lying next to the smoldering fire and the black smoke rising lazily into the morning sky.

  Chapter Two - Gary Wayne & Boris

  I.

  Two men dressed in denim and chambray, one hunched on his heels, the other reclining against a boulder with a black slouch hat pulled over his eyes, contemplated the coals of their own smoldering campfire as the first sipped coffee out of a tin cup. After a few minutes of silence, he set his cup on a nearby rock, rose off his heels, and raising his hands over his head and facing the rising sun, stretched his back until he was almost doubled backward. As he returned to a more natural posture, he ran a hand through his ginger hair, yawned loudly, and released a long and satisfying fart.

  “We will get him today,” he affirmed as if answering an unasked question from his partner.

  His partner merely raised the brim of his hat enough to peer at him and wrinkled his nose with a snort, whether in response to his friend’s assertion or for more aromatic reasons was unclear. His companion clearly assumed the former.

  “We will, Boris. The bastard can’t run forever. A fellow can’t do what he done and expect to get away Scott-free.”

  Boris did not overtly respond to this. He merely rose from his position, dusted his pants legs off, and began to clean up the campsite.

  “We’ve chased the son of a bitch across this damned desert for days. We have to be getting closer to him.”

  Boris shrugged and took a final pull from his coffee cup before pouring the dregs from both cups over the coals. He walked to edge of their campsite and put a handful of desert sand into both cups. He pulled a black and red checked bandana from his hip pocket, wrapped it around his hand before rubbing the grit into each cup in turn.

  His companion seemed oblivious to his silence, talking on as if engaged in an in-depth conversation with himself.

  “He hasn’t even tried to cover his back trail that much. I mean it’s like he wants to get caught. Probably a guilty conscience. I reckon a murdering traitor can feel guilt just like regular folks. Don’t seem natural, but I guess it’s possible. We’ll catch him alright, it ain’t nothing but God’s own will that we do. Justice will prevail. I trust that it’s so.”

  “Pfft,” Boris spat at the ground as if he were spitting on the devil’s own face. “Justice,” he muttered with a grin that was more sneer than smile, “Jesus wept on the cross, Gary Wayne. Get a grip on yourself before you start sounding like Merle.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Gary Wayne looked incredulously at Boris and fought the urge to cross himself against his friend’s blasphemy. “You don’t think we oughta be chasing after him?”

  “I believe,” Boris said slowly as to a small child struggling to understand a difficult scripture, “that we are acting according to the wishes of our sheriff and friend. Justice has nothing to do with it.”

  “So you don’t think the bastard needs to hang.”

  “What I think and what we are doing are two entirely different things. I think if Ardiss’d wanted Lank brought to ‘justice,’ he’d a sent us out when it first happened and not let the poncey son of bitch get more than a day’s lead on us.”

  Gary Wayne turned on Boris, his mouth agape in astonishment. “You think it’s all a sham.” He accused. “I suppose next you’ll tell me that Ardiss encouraged the rat bastard to take liberties with his wife.”

  “If Lank’d taken the liberties with his wife, we’d never had to be out here in the first place,” Boris muttered.

  “Ardiss’s wife, shitwit. You know what I meant.” Gary Wayne turned back to the fire pit and began furiously kicking sand over the coals, muttering to himself. Boris continued packing their gear into saddle bags, shaking his head and smiling grimly at his partner’s unfocused wrath.

  II.

  Gary Wayne Orkney had always let his guts get the better of his common sense. When he was seventeen years old, he became the youngest of Drake’s Riders. His mother, it’s true, was Ardiss Drake’s half-sister, but this happenstance of nature had little to do with his appointment. Gary Wayne’s parentage might have been enough to get him an audience with the regal sheriff, but if so, it could do that and no more. While Ardiss believed fully in the thickness of his blood, he saw duty and justice as rock solid: neither blood nor water could alter or influence it.

  Before setting out on his journey to Bretton, Gary Wayne’s father had counseled his son to be patient.

  “If you’re set on this path, boy,” Elliott Orkney glared at his son from the head of the dinner table and tried to look fatherly and wise as he spoke around a shank of mutton and accented each word by pointing the business end of his fork in Gary Wayne’s general direction, “wait for your moment like a cat waits on a mouse. Con your vantage, and make yourself indispensable without actually putting yourself into real danger. After all, you’ll be more useful to Ardiss alive than dead, will you not?”

  Elliott Orkney had himself been unable to ride with Ardiss due to an unspecified wound received as youth during the War of Northern Aggression. While few had ever actually seen this wound, few doubted his words. Indeed until the arrival of Reverend Merle Tallison, Elliott Orkney had been considered by many to be Ardiss Drake’s chief advisor and de facto member of Drake’s Inner Circle.

  For once, Gary Wayne stood quietly, allowing his father to finish his parting advice. When the old man paused long enough to spear another bit of mutton with his fork and shove it into his mouth, Gary Wayne bowed slightly, taking his leave. “I thank you for the advice, Father,” he said turning to go, then over his shoulder, “I’ll telegraph when I get there.”

  He never did.

  It was All Saint’s Day when he arrived in Bretton, and the town had gathered in the Commons for the midday meal. Gary Wayne spied Ardiss on a dais at one end of the field, his wife, Guernica, to his left and Rev. Tallison to his right asking grace, and he made straight for the sheriff. As he drew within ten feet of Drake, he found his way blocked by a tall and slender man, of about forty.

  “And where you think you’re going, cully?” the man said from beneath a gray and tobacco stained Walrus mustache. Gary Wayne found himself eye-level with the tin star on his leather vest.

  “I’m here to see Ardiss,” Gary Wayne replied with, to his credit, only a hint of irritation.

  “Well, then, you must be the Son o’God himself then, to be prancing up here like you own the place.”

  “I aim to see Ardiss,” Gary Wayne repeated.

  “You can see Mister Drake just fine from you are, Sonny,” the man reached out to Gary Wayne’s shoulder, probably to turn him about and maybe to help him find a seat amongst the townspeople, but this was too much for Gary Wayne, who delivered a quick jab to the taller man’s kidney before he could touch him.

  “I aim to see Ardiss,” Gary Wayne repeated, this time, loud enough to draw the attention of those nearby.

  The older man doubled over for only a second, and when he rose again, it was with his pistol drawn and aimed directly at Gary Wayne’s temple. “You little puke,” he screamed, surprisingly loud given his injury, “They’ll be cleaning your worthless shit brains outta the trees for a week!”

  Before things could progress much further, though, a weather-beaten hand reached from behind the gunman and forced his gun arm down.

  “Who’s our guest, Caleb?” While the voice was subdued and even, there was no question of its authority. The man behind Caleb, though clearly in his mid-thirties, seemed the elder of the two with his sleepy eyes, graying hair, and full beard.

  His voice seemed to take the wind right out of Caleb, who re-holstered his gun with a sigh. “I got no idea, Ardiss. He just come up here, pretty as you please and demanded
to see you. When I tried to find him a place at the table here, the son-uva-bitch gut-punched me.” Caleb raised his shirt and pointed at his kidney as if to prove his story.

  Ardiss swung his attention to the newcomer. “Well, is that a fact?” Ardiss chuckled a little and patted Caleb on the shoulder. “And who might you be, Little Cockspur?”

  “My name is Gary Wayne Orkney, Sir,” Gary Wayne stood straight and nervously brushed imaginary dirt from his shirt front, “and I’m here to join your Riders.”

  Caleb let out a guffaw, then immediately doubled over again. “That’s rich,” he wheezed through clenched teeth, “and him twelve years old and never killed more’n a squirrel, I reckon.”

  “Peace, Caleb,” Ardiss waved Caleb away, “Go fix your plate.” Then turning again to the younger man. “Orkney, huh? You Margie’s boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, you coulda said so to begin with and spared my deputy the bruised kidney. My kin is welcome to break bread with me, especially on a holiday, but I’m afraid Caleb’s right. I can’t deputize just anybody for the asking. You ever done any hard riding, son?”

  “I rode two weeks all the way here.” Gary Wayne couldn’t help throwing his chest out a little. “I reckon that was pretty hard ridin’.”

  Ardiss smiled and shook his head gently. “Polishing your pants on saddle leather for two weeks don’t make you a Rider, son. There’s a whole lot more to it than sitting in the saddle and lettin’ your feet hang down. Now you’re blood kin, and I’m glad to have you in my home here. You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, but kin don’t mean nothing when it comes to the Law. A man ain’t born a Rider; he becomes one. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, son?”

  “You’re telling me I can’t be a Rider until I prove myself.”