Till your shadow sets you free

The country was empty in the way a dead man is empty. It ran west beneath a white and pitiless sky and the grass stood in the wind like the stiff fur of a small drowned animal. Here and there a road passed through it, two pale ruts winding among the weeds, and along those roads men went with their possessions tied in sacks behind the saddle. They went toward the towns and away from them and sometimes they did not know which direction they were travelling until the town was gone behind them.

There were towns every 40 miles or so. Like graveyards filled with tombstones, waiting for the names. One of them was Coffeyville.

They were small places of plank and mudbrick and sunburnt tin where the dust lay ankle deep in the street. At evening the lamps came on behind the windows and the doors opened and closed and men sat drinking in rooms that smelled of sweat and tobacco and whisky. In the morning the streets belonged to horses and children and hangovers and dogs.

The towns kept records. Births. Deeds. Debts. Arrests. Marriages. Murders. Names written down in black ink by men who believed the writing of a thing gave it permanence. The prairie did not keep records. The prairie forgot everything. Bill Doolin had worked there once. Working cheap, just biding time.

He was not yet a wanted man. He was simply another young buck with a horse and a pair of hands and a hunger he had not learned to name. He hired himself out where he could. He dug postholes in hard ground. He drove cattle. He repaired fences after storms. He worked for men who paid him little and men who paid him less, and he learned that there was no justice in either arrangement.

At night he sat against the wall of the bunkhouse and cleaned the dirt from beneath his fingernails with the blade of a knife. Sometimes he thought of going somewhere else. Sometimes he thought of staying. The difference between those two thoughts was small. High or low, it was the same.

Bob Dalton came riding into camp. He arrived at sunset with dust on his coat and blood dried along one sleeve. His horse was a rangy bay with a white blaze and eyes that seemed always to be looking for some road other than the one beneath its feet. Doolin knew him. The man, not the horse. They had ridden together before, years earlier, when both were younger and believed the world contained some hidden arrangement by which a man who was clever enough might prosper.

Dalton swung down from the saddle. He looked at the men around the fire. Then at Doolin. Dalton poured whisky into a tin cup and passed it across. Doolin drank. The liquor was raw and hot and seemed to burn a passage straight through him. For a while neither spoke. Beyond the camp the prairie darkened and the first stars appeared.

“I’ve got a notion,” Dalton said.

Doolin waited.

“A man could use his back or use his brains. Only one will make money.”

“How’s that?”

“Same way anybody gets rich.”

The flames moved between them.

“How’s that?”

“You take it.”

Doolin looked at his hands. He thought of the fences. The cattle. The wages folded into a pocket. The little room he had rented in town. The bed he would return to when the season ended. He thought of a life stretching ahead of him in which every day resembled the day before. Then he laughed and said, “I’m goin.’ ”

By morning they were gone. Rode for weeks. Learned the country from horseback. Learned which towns had weak safes and which had strong ones. Which sheriffs drank after dark. Which deputies slept with their boots on. Which banks kept their money in iron and which trusted thick walls of stone.

They learned that every town had a man who knew everything and another man who knew nothing, and that both could be dangerous. They learned that women remembered a man’s eyes more often than his name. They learned that whisky could make an evening pass quickly and a morning last forever.

There were women in hotel rooms and women in saloons and women who came to the door after midnight and asked if the men inside wanted company. There were horses stolen and horses bought and horses left dead beside the road when they could travel no farther. Easy money and faithless women.

There were guns. There were always guns. The men carried them beneath their coats or tied them to their saddles. They slept with them near their hands. A pistol was sometimes a man’s only argument and sometimes the last argument he ever made. Doolin became good with one. Too good.

He could draw before a man had finished reaching for his own weapon. He could fire from horseback. He could put a bullet through a bottle at 30 paces.

Dalton admired this.

“You’ll live a long time.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re fast.”

“No.”

“Why then?”

“Because I’m lucky.”

Neither man said what they both knew. That luck was merely a word men used for the interval between one disaster and the next. But if you’re fast, and if you’re lucky, you will never see that hanging tree.

The law followed them. At first it was only a rumour. Then a poster. Then a photograph. Then a man with a rifle waiting outside a stable. The photographs were poor things. Faces blurred by the wet plate. Names printed beneath them in hard black letters.

WANTED.

The word began appearing everywhere. On courthouse walls. On saloon doors. At post offices. In newspapers carried beneath the arms of travellers.

Doolin began to understand that a man could become a story while still alive. His name travelled ahead of him. He would enter a town and men would look up from their drinks. He would leave a room and hear voices behind him. Sometimes children knew who he was before their fathers did. And still he rode. The plains were wide. The law was wide. The world was wider.

Then came Coffeyville.

Dalton had a plan. There was always a plan. They would go into town in daylight. They would take the money. They would be gone before the town understood what had happened.

The morning was clear. That was what Doolin remembered afterward. A clear morning. Blue sky. Sun on the roofs. The ordinary sounds of a town beginning its day. Men sweeping storefronts. A horse stamping at flies. A woman shaking a rug from an upstairs window. Somewhere a hammer struck iron. The world had not received the news yet.

Dalton and his brothers rode in. The others followed. Then the guns began. The street erupted. Men ran from buildings carrying rifles. Horses reared. Glass burst outward from windows. Smoke rolled between the buildings and hung there. Someone screamed. Someone laughed. Someone fell. Then another. And another and another.

Doolin was not there when it happened. He heard later how it ended. Two brothers lying dead in Coffeyville. The town standing. The money untouched. The dead laid out beneath the sun. Two voices called to him from where they stood.

There are moments when a man hears that another man has died and the world seems to pause in order to receive the news. This was not such a moment. The world did not pause. The wind continued. The trains continued. Women continued hanging washing from lines behind their houses. The dead had no authority over the living. This was perhaps the hardest thing to understand. Red-eye whisky for the pain.

Doolin sat beside a fire that night with the newspaper open across his knees. He read the names. He folded the paper. He put it into his coat. He stared into the flames. After a while he said, to no one: “Well.”

The horse behind him moved in the dark. Doolin looked up. There was no answer.

After Coffeyville the country seemed different. Not changed. Only revealed. He began to see the gallows in every town before he saw the courthouse. He saw the rope hanging in the wind. He saw the men gathered beneath it, some solemn and some eager, each man bringing his own reason for being there. The law called such things justice. The dead did not object.

Doolin rode north. He rode south. He crossed rivers in winter when the ice cracked beneath his horse. He slept beneath wagons. He slept in barns. He slept inside a church with his pistol beneath his head.

There were times when he believed God had abandoned the country. There were other times when he believed God had never been there. But he never said either thing aloud. Men were listening. Maybe God, too.

The towns became tombstones. He would see one ahead through the shimmering heat, its church steeple and water tower rising from the plain, and he would think of a graveyard. Waiting for the names.

Every town had its dead. Every town had its names. Every town believed its laws were permanent. Yet the wind blew dust beneath the courthouse door. The paper notices peeled from the walls. The names faded. Men who had once seemed powerful became old men sitting in chairs outside stores, telling stories nobody was interested in.

Doolin understood then that permanence belonged to no one. Not the marshal. Not the outlaw. Not the clerk who recorded their names. Lay down your lawbooks now. They’re no damn good.

He kept moving. Years passed. His face changed. The boy who had left the work camp with Bill Dalton was gone. His eyes had become hard and narrow. His hair had begun to show grey. There was a scar along his jaw that he no longer remembered receiving. He had money now. He had horses. He had enemies. He had a price on his head. He had everything the young man had once imagined. And none of it was enough.

One evening he rode alone across a plain beneath a red sunset. There was no town in sight. No house. No fence. Only grass and stone and the long blue wall of distant mountains. His horse walked slowly. Doolin looked down. His shadow moved beside him across the burdock and the golden rod and the thistles.

It was long and thin and distorted by the setting sun.