Page 14 of Remmen

The easy thing was to say troublemakers again and stop there. That was the answer I handed the brides so they could sleep. It kept the ranch a story that happened somewhere else.

But she wasn’t a bride. And she’d been on her knees in the grass with her hands inside one of them, and she hadn’t flinched once.

“When we got free,” I said, “we didn’t all want the same thing. Most of us did. Most of us had spent years picturing exactly this. A patch of dirt nobody owned. A door that locked from the inside.” My throat caught on the word door. I ignored it. “But some had been in the sand too long. By the end they were more animal than man, and they knew it. They fought with us anyway, because the only other choice was dying in the cage they were bred for. They came because I made room for them.” I shrugged. “And then we got here, and there wasn’t any room. Not in a town people were trying to live in.”

“So they made a place of their own,” she said.

I let that go by. It was close enough to true, and the true version was worse.

“We stay off them; they stay off us. Every so often Otho patches one up and doesn’t ask how. It’s the best anyone’s come up with.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“We’re all dangerous, Anne.” Her name came out of me before I decided to say it, lower than the rest. “You’ve been smiling at a whole town of us all week. Every one of those men killed for a living once. The Butchers are just the ones who never pretended that it washed off.”

She didn’t get up. She didn’t even change her face. I’d just handed her the ugliest thing in my town, the thing I dressed up in a tidy word so nobody had to look at it, and she sat there in another man’s blood and took it like I’d passed her the salt.

“What about you?” she said.

“I already told you. All of us.”

“No.” She turned toward me, tucked a foot up under her. “The door, the patch of dirt. What was that like? Being one it didn’t finish off?”

Nobody had ever asked me that. Six years among men I’d bled next to, and not one of them had turned it around and pointed it at me. They’d all been there. There was nothing to say to a man who’d been in the next cage. She hadn’t been there. She got to ask.

“It finished me too,” I said. “Just quieter. I still wake up in the sand about once a week. I’ve got a good house and a real bed and I still lose part of most nights sure that all of this is the dream and the cage is the true part.”

I should have stopped there. I kept going.

“The difference is I had somewhere to put it. There was a town to run and nobody else stupid enough to take it, so I get up every day and build fences and settle fights, and it gave the thing in me a shape that wasn’t teeth. The Butchers never got that. They got a ranch and each other and too many empty hours.”

She didn’t jump in to fix it. She didn’t tell me it must have been hard or reach over or make one of those soft noises people make so you’ll know they’re moved.

And I wanted to keep going. I wanted to tell her about Zarcal, and the night that built this whole program, and the brother whose face I couldn’t hold onto in the dream anymore. It was all crowded up behind my teeth. All she’d done to earn it was sit still and look at me like the listening cost her nothing.

I shut my mouth. I was the mayor. She was under contract. There was a man dying on the other side of that door. Whatever this was, it wasn’t mine to have.

“You’re good at this,” I said instead. It came out like I was accusing her of something.

“I’m very good at this.” She smiled, small and worn out. “Shame nobody in this town will let me do it where it counts.”

Time went by. Anne watched the door, then the floor, then nothing at all.

The fear finally drained out of her. Her chin dropped. Her breathing went slow. She tipped sideways, caught herself, tipped again, and that time she didn’t catch it, and her head came down against the wall at an angle that would wreck her neck by morning.

I watched her sleep longer than I should have.

Then the light under Otho’s door stopped moving and stayed stopped, and I understood he wasn’t coming out tonight. The worst was behind us. All that was left was the slow wait to see if Mestyn’s body would keep the work. Nothing either of us could do by sitting up.

I could have woken her. I meant to.

Instead I got an arm behind her shoulders and one under her knees and lifted her off the bench. She weighed nothing.

She came up against my chest with a small sound and turned her face into my throat, and one of her hands closed loose in the front of my coat, and I stood there in the middle of Otho’s waiting room holding her and could not make my legs do a single thing.

Outside the night was cold and clean and the street was empty and silver. I carried her up through the middle of my sleeping town. Nobody saw.

I told myself I was minding her neck. I minded everything. Every rut in the road I’d been meaning to fix for two years. I carried her like the whole settlement depended on her not waking up.