Rash hobbled outside on exhausted legs and led Jenny toward Dandy’s barn in the dark night. Halfway there, as the wind picked up, she paused and let it blow its chill breath across her chapped face.
The skin on the back of her neck stiffened and a powerful feeling of possibility and potential overcame her, along with something else that was harder to explain. An arrival perhaps, or a sense of completion, as if she had reached a pinnacle. Or passed one.
She stood in the cold, desolate depression of Dandy’s little sink, holding on to the present moment and willing herself to remain in it forever. If only she could. If only moments weren’t fleeting, destined to recede. She knew that this one would take with it any hope of a dignified future. Tolliver awaited her. Perhaps if she gritted her teeth and forced her gnarled hands into fists against her thighs, she could stay here, alone with Jenny, independent, strong.
But her joints ached and her teeth hurt and her thoughts were muddled and slow. Life was a cocksucker, sharing its highs only as a tease to heighten its later humiliations. If her younger self had run into this old lady she’d become, she wouldn’t even have noticed. Old ladies were irrelevant, trains on a different track, weak.
So Rash left her moment behind and brought Jenny into the barn. No other animals remained, but she found a stack of fresh-smelling hay in a clean enough stall and set the old nag up for the night in it. She left the heavy saddlebags there, carrying with her only the necessities: laudanum and her powder flask and the loose cloves in her pockets.
On the way back to the house, Rash again stopped, trying to reconnect with her fleeting moment. But it was gone, replaced with bitter cold and emptiness, like a pall might find six feet down on a day of saturating rain.
The kerosene lamp was still burning in the kitchen when she returned, so she snuffed it out and made her careful way into Lila’s bedroom. After stripping down to her longjohns, she slipped under the covers beside a matted mass of black hair that wheezed softly as it slept.
She didn’t much mind sharing a bed with a Coolie like some might. Truth be told, she felt more camaraderie then contempt as she lay beside Lila. Perhaps even a burgeoning affection.
Rash frowned. As old age hardened her joints, it also seemed to be softening her heart.
The akevitt proved inadequate to induce sleep, but three drops of laudanum mixed finally put her down for the night.
Rash awoke to the stench of smoke and charred bodies. Raging flames blinded her with their searing light as she struggled to get her bearings. Her hand searched out her Colt beneath the pillow, where she always kept it, but came up empty. They would be waiting outside, whoever lit this fire, ready to shoot her down when she bumbled out. She needed to find her gun.
“Breakfast is ready,” a small, sweet voice said from the doorway.
Rash stopped, confused. When the room stopped spinning, she fought through a shaft of bright sunlight and spotted a pallid, wax-faced Coolie girl wearing an austere apron and a toothy smile stained by the tinge of fresh blood.
“I burned the bacon,” Lila said, “but that’s the way Dandy likes it.”
When Rash finally made it out to the table, dressed once again in her range clothes and holstered Colt, she felt pretty good. The wear-and-tear of yesterday’s journey had caught up to her the moment she rose out of bed, of course, but a few more drops of laudanum and a swig of akevitt had improved her disposition considerably.
Dandy, clad in a tattered silk housecoat, was already at the table and focused on cinching an apparatus of buckled leather straps capped by a metal spoon to his right stump with his teeth.
“Do you drink coffee?” Lila asked her, taking a break from filling a dented metal cup with the stuff to cough a smear of crimson into a dingy handkerchief. Carney had sure done a number on her.
“Yeah,” Rash replied, watching as the girl added four scoops of powdered milk and three of sugar to the cup and then set it in front of Dandy, who didn’t so much as nod in appreciation.
She brought Rash a similar cup of coffee, then returned with a paper straw and two aspirin for each of them. She slipped Dandy’s pills in his mouth, which he downed with the coffee, but Rash simply pocketed hers. No sense in making it any easier for her enemies to bleed her.
As Lila cut up a few burnt rashers and hot slapjacks and dumped them into a bowl under a deluge of thinned molasses, Rash took a sip of her coffee, then inspected it to make sure she wasn’t drinking out of the spittoon.
The girl prepared two more bowls of food and placed them before Dandy and Rash, keeping the first one for herself next to the cook stove, where she remained.
“Sit down with us, honey,” Dandy said to her. “Rash don’t mind.” He glanced at Rash. “Do you?”
Rash shook her head and Lila hobbled to the table, sitting down with a ruddy grin.
“Lila’s father was an Oriental, but I don’t blame her for it,” he explained, dropping to the table to scoop up a spoonful of food with his apparatus. “When people ask about her funny eyes, I just tell them it’s a birth defect and the good Lord don’t mind ’cause it ain’t really a lie.”
Rash scraped as much of the molasses as she could to one side and took a bite of her food, trying to distract her desire to punch the old man in the face. Then, as she winced from the painful sweetness, a rapping came at the front door.
Dandy froze, the color draining from his cheeks. Rash stood up and reached for her holster.
“Stay here,” Dandy told her.
He walked to the door and bent down to push on the lever with a stump to open it. Before he could do that, however, the door swung into his face amid a hail of laughter.
“Sorry,” a man said on the other side of him, blocked from Rash’s view. “Didn’t see you there. It’s almost as if you aren’t a whole man or something.”
“That’s right, Mr. Fouch,” Dandy said. “I apologize. You’re absolutely right.”
Rash stiffened, then began warming up her trigger finger.
“It’s Sheriff Fouch now. We found Carney dead in the streets this morning, his head nearly cut clean off. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“No way, no how, Sheriff Fouch. I didn’t lay a finger on him.”
“Of course you didn’t, Peasy. You don’t have any fingers to lay. But you won’t mind if I take a look inside all the same, would you my friend?”
Fouch pushed past the old cripple and stopped when he spotted Rash.
