The Oracle on the Hill

The bounty hunter rode through the valley, an empty canteen and loaded gun banging at his thigh. The sun beat down on him, causing his open-throated shirt to be soaked with sweat. He wanted a beer. Whether it be unexcitingly flat or painfully bubbly, he wanted one. But first, shade. Something that couldn’t be found in this winding valley at high noon. The mule underneath him seemed to be tired of the heat as well, but what did he care? It had been free, after all. Stolen from the last man he hunted down. He had already forgotten the man’s name, but he remembered the price: twelve dollars even. A weak price, sure, but the boy had been a weak fight.

He followed the rocky cliffside to his left around a bend that granted him a surprise. At the top of a small hill, shortly to his right, sat a shack. Many a storm had caused it to look worse for wear; but, again, what did he care? He tightened his legs around the mule’s sides, guiding steering it off of the path and into yellow grass. The hill was steeper than it looked, and he had to dismount halfway up the hill and lead the braying bastard the rest of the way. He didn’t bother to hitch it—it wouldn’t make it far if it were dumb enough to leave him. The shack looked big enough to accommodate two small rooms, but no voices came from inside. Figures, he thought, no one has lived here since maybe the late fifties.

He placed his left hand on the doorknob, prepared to pull iron with his right. As he turned the blackened steel knob, an overwhelming smell of dust wafted out. His eyes adjusted to the light immediately, and he had to stop himself from grabbing his gun when he saw the old woman sitting at the table in the middle of the room. She was sitting side profile to him, but her face became slowly more visible as she turned her neck.

She was ugly and worn. Wrinkles covered her face, converging on places such as her eyes and mouth. Her left eye was glazed over by a cataract, while her right eye was just starting to go blind itself. Her thin, gray hair was done up in a tight bun at the back of her head. Her liverspotted hands were folded in the lap of her dirty purple dress. Her face was plain and somewhat criticizing.

It took several seconds for the bounty hunter to throw out the first word. “Hello,” he said.

The old woman nodded. “Greetinsh, mishtur,” she responded, her toothless mouth turning the words to mush. “Why do ye break into my housh like sho?”

“I thought it was empty.”

The old woman nodded again. “Obvioushly not, eh? What do you deshire, sar?”

“Drink and shade,” the man said directly. “Beer, more specifically.”

Now the lady grunted. “I can’t provide liquor, but I can give ye shade.”

“Thank ya’ kindly,” the gunslinger said and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

“Mm-hm,” the old woman grunted as she turned back to where she had been facing. “Now ye have shade.”

Now it was the bounty hunter’s turn to nod and grunt, although she couldn’t see him.

She motioned to the chair across from her. “Come. Shit.”

Although he found the unfortunate slur on “sit” funny, he didn’t laugh. He only walked across the creaky floorboards and sat down in the chair. Across the dark, rectangular table the old woman looked at him with her better eye. Her eye seemed to dart all over—from his hat to his eyes to his neck to his mouth and back to his eyes again. “You a gunshlinger?” she asked.

The man looked through the small window just to the left of the front door. Blazing light bore through the pane, and he squinted his eyes at the rough country. “I suppose,” he said. “For money.”

“A’course ye are. Who would sling guns for fun? What matters is . . . well, how ye earn t’ money.”

“Bounties.”

“Ah,” she nodded. “I had another bounty hunter come through here once. Died in a church in Mexico.”

“How do you know that?” he looked back at her and raised an eyebrow.

The old woman’s straight-line mouth arched into a small smile. “Sar, would you close those blinds on the window?”

Curious, the bounty hunter got up and shuttered the dirty window, getting one last look at his mule as it shat onto the dead grass. He became dimly aware that he didn’t recognize the woman’s impediment anymore, which was a blessing. He might have shot her if it had bothered him for longer than it did. He turned back around to the grunts at the table and saw the old crow had set a cloudy glass ball on it. He started to step towards the table with caution when the woman surprised him by exclaiming, “Feh!” and beckoning him over with her bony hand.

He took two long strides towards the chair, but didn’t sit down. “This certainly ain’t drink,” he told her.

The lady mumbled something and spoke up, “I see that, boy. Now siddown and shut yer trap. Old Crina o’ t’Dim will tell ye a story. Of where yer goin’ and where ye been.”

Cautiously, the gunslinger sat down and heard the chair creak under him. Crina “o’ t’Dim” looked up at him for the last time and then cast her eyes down to her crystal ball. She lifted her skinny arms and put her hands to the side of it, causing the clouds inside to shift and circulate. Her cataracts cleared entirely, and her eyes went from a slate gray to a magnificent purple.

“Now,” she said, “let me tell you the plan of all the gods that were or ever will be.”

The bounty hunter shifted uneasily in his seat and said, “Now, whatever you think you’re doing, I don’t—”

But it was too late. Before he could put his hand on the butt of his gun, he saw a murky image flicker in the ball.

“Aye,” Crina sighed, licking her nonexistent lips, “sorry for the unsteadiness, lad, it’s been a while. Years. Decades, even.”

“What did you just—”

The image appeared again, more steady this time. It was him, in the war. A younger him, sure, but it was him in living color. He was in his dark blue Union uniform looking up at the one and only General Sherman as he rode through camp on his stallion. This had been on the march to the sea, towards the end of the war. There had been so much fire then—

“Ye were a soldier, eh? A warrior, yes, a good one at that. Killed many a man then. Killed many since. Interestin’, for sure. That’s when you first held a revolver.”

Yes it had. It had been a plantation owner’s who tried to defend his slaves from the yankees. The man looked at it in its nickel-plated glory. He had shot the man in the belly, but the old bastard hadn’t suffered long. Those musket-balls did a bang-up job when it came to complete and utter destruction.

But he had found the revolver both more fun and convenient.

The first one he held, and killed two men with, had been a far cry from the one at his hip—the blackened steel was coated in dust and worn from years of use—had decided his destiny, it seemed.

“Ye learned to like killin’,” she told him. “It became sport for ye. It led ye to here.”

He looked into the sheriff’s office of Rojo Casa, Florida, where he had become an official bounty hunter of the United States. God, how long had that been after they burned all of those towns? A year? Not even? All he knew was that he had been in his early twenties then, and he was getting close to thirty now.

“Ye became a killer for your country, just like you swore to be. Ye signed a paper with yer name, which nobody has uttered for the better part of ten years. Tell me, what is it? I only know you by yer initials—R.F.”

R.F. only sat there, a shaking hand on the left side of his chest feeling his heart race at an astronomical speed. The last time he remembered it beating this hard was at Bull Run, his first battle and where he took his first life.

“Strong silent type, eh? Okie, then, let’s move on. Just as ye moved west. Racked up bodies. Handed ’em in. Earned money. Got it stole a couple times, but got it back and then some.”

R.F. watched all of these scenes appear in front of his eyes, all under a thin layer of clouds. Him walking in swamps, fields, mountains, and deserts. Dead men and the occasional women strewn on the ground in their own blood. Their worth came dimly to his mind—fifteen, nineteen-fifty, thirty, !seventy-five!—when he caught glimpses of their faces. He saw sometimes faceless sheriffs handing him thin and thick stacks of cash, sometimes a box of ammo. He saw his satchel get nabbed off of him and looked at himself waking up to find it wasn’t there. He watched stills of men bleeding to death as he stood over them.

“All that . . . and never enough,” she told him.

“Excuse me?” he asked, breathless.

“Oh, ye know,” she explained, “it just doesn’t feel like ye’r . . . whole.”

“I don’t understand your meaning.”

“Ye wish ye didn’t. Ye just simply wish you could just kill. Not one man, but many. Not a gang, but a town. Not a criminal, but a man just walkin’ down the street.”

R.F. nearly jumped out of his seat. “How dare you insult me, bitch?” he growled. He steadied his wavering right hand on his revolver’s grip.

Crina let out a short series of cackles, her shining purple eyes unblinking or unwavering from the fortune-ball. “Oh, ye’r scared o’ yeself! Oh, how rich! Gods! A man who’s feared from Austin to Sacramento can’t even remain stoic against himself!” Drool fell from her mouth as she cackled again. “Oh, R.F., my friend, look and see! Look and see! Watch what the future holds for ye!”

Although furious with anger and unwilling to do anything she told him, he couldn’t keep his eyes away from the colorful image in the oracle’s instrument. To him, it looked to be the inside of a whorehouse bedroom. A young girl, by the looks of it, was missing almost the entire top of her head. She was slumped against the side of the bed, and a barrel of blackened steel could barely be seen, but it was there. R.F. jolted to his feet and his chair fell behind him, the entire back splitting off and tumbling another three feet. Crina o’ t’Dim began to drool more and cackle louder.

“Oh, ye murderer! The very thing ye’ve been huntin’ for ten years! Hee-hee! Killin’ a poor workin’ girl because she wouldn’t letcha’ poke for another thirty minutes! The-then ye kill four more as you walk out the door! Oh, Lord! Ye’ve got a thousand dollars to yer name, yet you won’t spare another fifteen for thirty minutes more? Gods, ye’r an animal!”

“SILENCE, you bitch!” he roared, but never made a move to draw his gun.

“Y-Ye kill her, then three other people on yer way out! Tha-that’s utterly hilarious! And ye say the want isn’t in ye, ye bullshitter! You crave it! Bein’ righteous just won’t cut it anymore! They’ll write n’ sing songs about’cha! It’s gonna happen, and it’ll happen sooner than ye think! It’ll—it—it—”

Suddenly, the purple light blinked out of Crina’s eyes. The drool became foam. Her arms dropped into her lap. The cataracts didn’t return, but the glazed-over look of death came into her eyes. It took the bounty hunter longer than it should have to realize what had happened, but he was able to explain it to himself in the silent shack: “She died.”

This was followed by a grunt and the sound of footfalls as he walked himself to the door. He looked at the thin spaces in the doorframe and saw they were filled with the kind of light only a windless evening can bring. He threw the door opened and began to march outside, but not without feeling a tiny gust of wind at his back as it left the shack with him, along with his aching thirst. He turned around briefly to investigate the disturbance, but only found a dead crazy witch. She had seen the past accurately enough, but what did she know of the future?

Hardly anything, as did anyone.

She had only gotten the body count and the fact that the girl had been a young working girl right. She had been a brunette, and had caught a bullet in the chest instead of the head. The four other victims had been three men and one woman, and each one had touched something in him that he didn’t know he had. It was a sick pleasure, preying on the weak and helpless, but it was there.

He had made it halfway across the country and into Mississippi when the bounty hunters had forced him to turn back west. He had never heard a song about him, and he was sure he never would, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be sung long after he met his end. He knew he was going to die by the gun, he was only biding time, and sometimes stories like that made for the best songs.

Now the former bounty hunter rode through the valley, a full canteen and an empty gun banging at his thigh. He guided the Floyd County sheriff’s horse around the rocky side of a cliff towards the north; towards Oklahoma. He looked to his right and found a small hill, shortly to his right.

At the top of that hill was a shack, worn and weary from years of storms and lack of upkeep. He stopped to swig from his canteen and thought to himself, with a touch of humor, how she couldn’t have foreseen this? Right back where his downward spiral started.

Maybe, he thought, Crina o’ t’Dim had wanted to keep some things to herself. A small gust of wind, sounding more like laughter than howls, drifted down from the shack and into the outlaw known only as R.F. With it came the smell of dust.