Shotgun Rider

[wpaudio url=”/audio/9_2/Fogarty.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

You ride shotgun for Wells Fargo and you’re feeling pretty important. They named a seat for you up on the stage with your long leather duster and your sawed-off side-by-side. This is serious business. It’s just you and the driver and the horses and a wagon of gold out under the stars, of which you can see every last one, here in the vast plain of some new territory. California still, probably, though it doesn’t really matter. The whole landscape is just possibility — for trouble, for fame. There’s nothing else to distinguish one territory from the next. It’s just fort-to-fort at this point with the occasional town, some towns friendlier than others. There was that town a week’s ride back where you stepped into the bar only to be told they don’t serve guys who guard other people’s gold.

Some days it’s all you can do not to turn to your left and pull the trigger, ride off with the gold all to yourself. No one but the horses would hear the shot and they’d probably ride off with you. All that’s really between that life and this one is the right-and-wrong question of fire or don’t and every time you choose not to shoot, the right grows that much stronger in you, each choice like a new fiber of muscle. The further you are along the ride, the less likely you are to do it absent some grand philosophical shift, some tearing of the muscle.

You’ve heard about it happening, the sudden snap, the gunshot, the crack of the reins, shotgun rider hauling off with the loot toward Mexico or some other foreign place where the bank’s bounty hunters won’t find him. There’s a lot of time for thinking out here in the desert and it’s an awful big sky and it’s hard to think that anything you could do would ever matter at all in comparison to the big things of history — the parting of seas, say, or the explosion of a star. You might even wonder what claim any one man could rightfully stake to owning a wagonfull of a mine’s ore. Probably already a rich man, too. Wouldn’t miss it.

But there are bigger things than money at stake. You’re here to watch for outlaws, especially famous outlaws like Black Bart. Wasn’t more than five years ago he got you the first time. Out from the bushes in a black derby hat, his face obscured by an upturned flour sack with holes cut for eyes. It was almost exciting. You saw nothing of his gang other than their rifles poking through the bushes. You were outnumbered then and you gave it up easy, not realizing the rifles were just sticks painted black. He marched you off toward the river all the same, made you and the driver lay with your faces in the dirt, took your leather duster. The humiliation of it all. Made you count to a thousand. Celebrities are never what you want them to be.

Still, there was something intriguing about him that first time, his mystique. There was a softness in his bag-framed eyes, a hand on your back more tender than not. And there was the scrap of paper he’d left on your seat, a poem you still carry, something about how still the night gets and the improbability that in all the frontier, all the universe, two people might for a moment simply be with each other.

And now here he is this night, rising out of a dry creek bed, his two-man gang real now. Three black derbys with guns. When you first see them, there’s a half-second in which you wonder who these other guys are. The other times had seemed so intimate, so personal. Could it be they were drawn to this by — what? — something other than gold-greed? Like Black Bart’s charm. Or the natural human desire not to be alone on this empty frontier that seems to stretch through the clouds and into space. Or maybe it’s some primal need to take one’s fate into one’s own hands, to reject this life of waiting, like waiting here at the heights of the shotgun seat, waiting for the actions of others to determine the course of your life. There’s a pinch in your chest, a contraction.

In the next instant, it’s decision time. You press the butt of the gun into the flesh of your shoulder. You’ve got two barrels, two shells loaded, four pellets a piece that’ll be flung in a patter that expands as it flies, quickly loses momentum. They’re knock-down shots at best. The killshots are in the bag of shells at your feet and against three guys you’d almost surely lose the race to reload. Your finger feels for the trigger.

Bart calls out to you. “This isn’t the life you wanted,” he says. He sets his gun on the dirt, raises his arms, pulls off the flour sack and you can see his face now and it’s not the outlaw you expected. Older than the pictures you’ve seen. Long gray mustache and chin beard. Thin tanned face. Wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He’s a man that smiles, you think, laughs. There’s a sweetness to his cracked lips. He walks toward the coach, each step hitting dirt like a quake. “You want revenge on me, go ahead. But you know it won’t do anything to calm your soul. We have so little time left here on this frontier. Wagons’re closing in. City’s closing in. Is this how you want to live?”

It’s quiet then. There’s the occasional buck of a horse, but otherwise the scene is still, the scene waits for action to unfold, waits for you to make a choice, the scene itself like a shotgun rider.

Except: You hear the driver behind you reach under the bench seat for his gun. His breath has quickened and you can sense the sweat in his palms, the wild rapids of thought rushing between shoot and run. He wasn’t trained for this.

At this moment, probably you don’t think but if you do your thought is of the explosion of a star, the new galaxy that’s created, the worlds birthed into existence, the mountains formed, the gold buried in them. And the tear feels more like a strain and you turn to your left and pull and the driver is propelled backward like a sack of flour, upturned, what’s left of his face striking dirt first, his eyes suddenly soft and blank, his body limp, lifeless.

Maybe then there’s regret, the shot seeming to echo and echo. Or maybe once it’s torn it doesn’t immediately repair and you swing back the other way and Bart is three steps closer to the gold, this gold now your gold, and you can smell the tobacco in his jacket pocket. There’s that sweet smell of tobacco and sweat and the broken smell of gunpowder.