Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch Page B

you
dead.”
    “I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War
does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some
the other way entire.”
    “Guess we know which way you went, tramping
through country like this without so much as a revolver.”
    Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh
conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that
had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him,
a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that
moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he
said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and
think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the
Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood
like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know
about any of it?”
    “I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till
now in your voice.”
    Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.
    “What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call
ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”
    “Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll
know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”
    Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken
through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into
a snowbank.
    Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the
same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”
     
    “Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.
    The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump
sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be
called unpleasant. His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of
its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones
was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached
Abandon.
    “I’ve smelt this before,” he said. “Or
somethin like it.”
    “You’ve et man?”
    “No, in a San Francisco nosebag.” He thought
on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal. Smells like veal.”
    “Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about
to—”
    “If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe. But I
think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical
conversation about what we’re about to do.”
    They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless
and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the
black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.
    Nathan flipped the ribcage. “I believe this
is ready.”
     
    The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of
knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three
tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.
    Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when
the door opened.
    “You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,”
she called out. “Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”
    The man paused in the doorway, as if to
appraise the vacant saloon.
    “Not for nothin, but it’s twenty degrees out
there, and the fire’s low.” The barkeep motioned to the potbellied
stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at
this closing hour.
    The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn
noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot,
limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle
to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.
    As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it,
she saw that his face was deeply sunburnt, the tips of his ears and
nose blackened with frostbite.
    “You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she
said.
    The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the
bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches,
then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.
    “One a these has money in it,” he said at
barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey
bottle, setting up his first shot.
    “The hell happened to you?” she asked.
    The man removed his slouch hat and set it on
the barstool next to him. He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How
much for the bottle?”
    The barkeep leaned