The Town

The Town

Was he dreaming? Was there a mist forming around him or was he still at home in his bed?

There was a muffled bang like a firecracker. He blinked and wondered why did he think he was in his bed? He opened his mouth, strained and looked up at the sky. It was blue. There was no mist. Brad was confused. He was standing and there in the mist that had cleared was a grove of trees and to each side of the grove were two very different streets.

To his left was his compact, neat neighbourhood with cars parked, a kid on a bicycle throwing a rolled up newspaper at a house front, a normal morning. Three women were talking, two with baby carriages and one with a briefcase. A car backed out onto the street and drove away a little too fast for his liking. There was a face in the rear window but he could not make out if it was a child or an adult.

To his right came noises. A man lay in the middle of a dusty street with people stripping his clothes off. Hatted men were staggering, some with colourfully dressed women under their arms. Horses were tied side to side blocking some of the view but he could see cowboy-style hats bobbing alongside derbies, dusty caps and angled fedoras. Musics started rising in volume and clashed into skittering harmonies of classical, rinky-tink, Mexican ballads, barbershop unisons, religious dramatics.

Brad started to walk toward the left but jerked himself upright, smiled, thought if it is a dream then, screw it, and changed course for the old Western town. He wanted some fun and kids-with-moms did not add up to much of that.

Brad heard his spurs jingle and his rough leather boots clunk on the boardwalk as he smiled looking down at his two revolvers in crisscrossed belts and holsters at his hips. As he put his hands around the brown handles of the guns he bumped into a man coming the other way.

‘Sorry,’ he looked up as the man passed.

The man stopped and turned. ‘Whad you say?’

He was rough-looking with a salt and pepper beard laying on his chest. His dark derby was too big for his head and came down to the eyebrows. His right hand was on the handle of his gun and his eyes looked dazed.

‘I said sorry for bumpin’ you. I was looking at my guns.’ Brad smiled his warmest smile.

‘Draw motherfucker!’

‘What?’

‘You heard me you wigglin’ bitch dog.’ The man began pulling his gun out of his holster but still had the strap around the hammer. He was fumbling with the strap when a bullet tore into his chest making a hole in the two shirts he wore and pushing him back a few steps. He looked up at Brad, down at the hole, then fumbled again with the strap and fell forward at Brad’s feet, showing a big hole in his back.

Brad looked up to where the sound of the shot came to see a scraggly haired blonde woman in baggy buckskin trousers and a bright red shirt levering another round into her Winchester rifle. She smiled at Brad, inclining her head for him to move over. Brad moved two steps to his right. She shot the downed man in his derby and parts of his scalp blew onto the boardwalk.

She yelled to Brad, ‘You mine now, girlie.’

Brad looked around. A crowd was spilling out onto the street heading for him.

Brad was pushed and shoved down the street by the mob toward a hangman’s scaffold of old wood. A few withered floral wreaths were being touched by a faint breeze under the framework. The crowd with Brad in tow stopped in front of it with grumblings and dull cheers. A man set up a small stand on wheels to the side of the scaffold and was selling hot wieners rolled in tortillas. Most of the men and women were looking up at the scaffold waiting Everybody seemed to be drinking from bottles and mugs. Brad could see that the hot wieners had sold out fast and the man took off his dirty apron, pulled his bowler hat down over his left eye and smiled gaping teeth to the crowd.

Shoved slightly to the side Brad saw a bearded face upside down draped on the broad shoulder of a giant of a man dressed in a dark woollen suit. Brad wondered how he had his clothes made? The upside down face draped down the man’s shoulder was half covered with blood, mixed into a stiff and uplifted salt and pepper beard. He had very yellow teeth. Somebody in front of the giant was also carrying the corpse and lifted his legs to pass two older ladies who were smiling at the body and nodding gaily.

The body was passed up to three men kneeling on the scaffolding who pulled it up and lay it prone. They stood looking down at the body and discussed something, then one turned and untied the hangman’s noose line from a metal cleat on the upright post, while another pulled the noose down to the head of the dead man. The third lifted the man’s head and helped getting the noose around and down to the neck. They both were pulling and manoeuvring the noose under the man’s long beard. Finally satisfied all three took the line and pulled the man to a more upright position. The first the dead man into a sitting position with his head bent awkwardly to make his face look toward the heavens and the beam that held the rope.

The scraggly-haired blonde woman ran up the steps on the side of the scaffold with her hands raised, rifle in her right one, a long knife in the left. She was smiling and bowing her head in short nods to a cheering crowd. They escalated their cheering and whistling when she stood lowering her weapons in a proud pose with the rifle crossed behind her buckskin trousers and the knife in front. Brad, caught up in the celebration, feeling the elation in the crowd, Brad found himself laughing at the triumph. He looked at the woman again, who was standing directly over the body in her pose and started yelling yays .

The blonde raised a long knife in the air with her left hand and the crowd quieted to silence. She knelt gently on one knee and lowered her rifle to the platform. She dramatically shifted the knife to her right hand. Brad looked around at the smiling expectancy running across the faces of those nearest. She pointed the knife out to the crowd who were now completely silenced.

The woman pushed back her hair from her face as she surveyed the prone man. A light breeze blew the hairs back over her face. Her shoulder twisted as the knife went low and was buried in the dead man’s clothing. She looked at its place and her arms moved, one holding the body steady, the other twisting and turning in short movements.

She looked up and out at the crowd, licking her lips and smiling. With one coordinated movement she pushed his body still dangling to the side and rose with a handful of material that fell away to reveal a leg from the knee down with part of a trouser drooped over an old boot. Brad’s mouth dropped open as the crowd began laughing and screaming and moving forward toward the slowly rotating body. They all seemed to have knives out, even the two older ladies held long blades up in the air.

The scraggly-haired woman held the bared leg up and moved it to her mouth and bit into the pale skin.. Brad turned away feeling as though his stomach was being pulled out. He was held in place and could not turn completely around. The crowd was steadily moving forward and he was pressured toward the scaffolding but would not look up, just down at shoes, boots and trousers.

An elbow jabbed Brad’s shoulder as one of the men holding him broke free and tried to jump into a vacated spot ahead of them. Brad twas pushed around and saw people cutting small sections of the now naked torso that flowed with blood and hung with organs. It turned, stopped, jiggled, turned, stopped, jiggled with hands reaching and holding and knives striking, sticking and sawing, slicing and gouging at chunks of him.

Brad’s stomach reacted vomiting yellow bile onto his boots. Laughter echoed around him as he retched again and again until the dry heaves left him hiccupping horrible odours, paralleling the blood, flesh, guts and excrement smells wafting into his nostrils and watering his cast down eyes. He had been moved to the corpse and was standing in a purple, black, red and fleshy pool of what was once a person. The body touched the top of his head. He wanted to faint.

The blonde woman turned him and stood in front, toe to toe. His vision roamed up her buckskin form, lingering at creases in what was curiously a sensuous woman and into her sparkling blue eyes. She was smiling and saying something. Then she screwed up her pixie face with crushed brows of worry and grabbed his arm, pulling him to the side of the scaffolding and past the stairs.

The town whirled by in bright sunlight and deep shadow, creaking stairs and a shining door knob. There were rushes of feelings, laughing, cries, wet, dry, then in soft splashes. He was being lowered somehow into water that was cloudy and smelled of sulphur. Brad’s knees were bare islets. He moved them and the water of their wakes splashed softly against the tarnished copper sides of a deep tub. He willed his hands to cap his knees and they did.

A crack of floor moved his eyes around a lamp-lit room. The ceiling lamps were double-wicked and bright just under glowing the light of the two on the wall fixed between two windows of outside night. Another lit lamp stood on a table next to a bed against another wall. A hand touched Brad’s left shoulder. Hair caressed his own hair.

Brad turned his head around and up to her smiling down at him. She was naked and pale where her clothes had covered; almost brown on hands and face. Her blonde hair wore white highlights and flickered gold from a ceiling lamp of three globes hanging behind her from a dark beam holding a white ceiling.

The words flowed through the water to him, ‘You are so wonderful. I am so lucky to have you.’

Brad suffered put thoughts into place. He wasn’t really Brad. He was Brad. He owned guns. She shot a man who wanted to shoot him. He stopped and looked around, finding his clothes neatly hanging next to her clothes on wooden clothes hooks next to a door. Their boots were strewn beneath them. Several guns in holsters, knives and a rifle lay in a pile next to the bed near the door and in shadows of the lighting.

‘You lookin’ at the bed? You want to fuck some more? Damn.’ Her words were somehow comforting, like his mother’s when he was a toddler. What memories. Was he in the Wild West with his mother? No. He looked back up at her.

‘What’s your name?’ he said to see if he could talk. He thought that he had be cautious.

‘Sirena… you don’t remember my name? I always remember names. Everybody says it’s a wonder but if a man passes through town and I meets him at the general store if he comes back three years later I remembers his name. Always been like that and lots of people are movin’ through town, I tell ya.’

He looked at her breasts, ’Sirena, what’s the name of the town?’

‘Hunh? Town don't have a name. Don’t need one, does it?’