Ghost Town: A Novel Read Online Free

taunt him, and blood bubbles out. His eyes roll up and he topples over on his back. Blood continues to trickle from his mouth. Then his lips part and the knife handle slowly emerges like a stiff tongue. The men in the saloon gather round to watch it come squeezing out, bending close as though trying to decipher a message in the rivulets of blood coursing through the staghorn grooves. Offered up to him is how it seems, a kind of gift, or challenge, which he accepts, taking hold of it and midwifing it out from the man’s lips. Not easy. Like drawing out a knife buried deep in wood, as if the man were sucking on it or biting down. A fountain of blood follows upon the blade’s withdrawal, making those crowded around gasp and fall back. He wipes the blood off on the dead man’s flannel shirt, tucks it back in his belt, and turns again to the barkeep, who hands him a shiny brass key strung on a black velvet ribbon. He nods up the stairs. No thanks, he says, and hands the key back. Jest gimme a goddam drink. But the barkeep is gone, the bar as well, and the key he is poking forward is sliding into a door lock.
    Awaiting him on a brocade-laid table inside the room is a tall mug of cold beer and a plate of eggs and beans on fried cornbread. He has such an extravagant need, these things, consumed afoot, go down like air, but they ease somewhat, if not his wants, at least his apprehensions—where such feasts appear, more may follow—and he feels his saddle-hammered spine loosen like an unstrung fiddle bow. The room is filled with heavy carved furniture, not from this place, the high-headboarded bed heaped with quilts and fancy coverlets, satiny paper hiding the rough walls, lace curtains aflutter in the open windows like hovering butterflies. Butterflies! He rubs his bristly sunburnt jaw. Damn. Hasn’t reflected upon those peculiar creatures since he entered upon the desert. Which has been a bit like getting sick. For an interminable long time.
    Behind a hand-painted dressing screen is a wooden tub full of sudsy hot water, meant, must be, for him. As all else here, that bed in time, with its inviting headboard like a saloon’s false front. He unknots the braided scalp from his gunbelt, sets it, belt, gun, and knife on the table, against which his rifle already leans, then sits down on the plush seat of a high-backed chair to work his boots off, breathing through his mouth against the prodigious reek. In front of an oak-framed mirror there, he stands to peel away the rest, his shredded vest and old gray shirt, chaps and denims, and the foul blighted rags that were once a suit of underwear, seeing in the glass beneath the shadowing hat the scrawny ulcerated thing he is, scabbed and scarred, in general a most unwholesome sight, but one he shares with the pale dark-haired widow woman he has seen before, standing now behind him in the reflection and gazing with quiet awe and pity upon his stark condition.
    He turns to face her but there is no one there. The room is empty as before. As, somehow, he had surmised.
    He unties the red rag, sweat-blackened, from around his neck and, dressed only in his wide-brimmed hat, steps into the tub, his feet, so recently liberated, reveling in the emollient power of the steaming water, seasoned with bath salts whose aroma bespeaks a distant land, one where flowers grow, or grew. What brought those butterflies peculiarly to mind, may be. He stands there for a moment, letting his feet swell out, soaking up this newfound bliss, then squats to accustom his beat-up backside and privates to the heat, finally sinks in whole up to his chin, his eyelids dropping like iron shutters over his eyes, forcing their hard gaze inward toward the softer sensations that, like sudden family, embrace him all about.
    The fragrant water is not completely still but, stirred perhaps by his own entry, seems to eddy around him as if he were being bathed in a rippling brook fed by hot springs, one that cleanses itself even as it