Prologue
The Man Beside the Road
The first thing Calder Wynn noticed was the horse.
It stood beside the Pioche road with its reins dragging in the dust, black enough to look like a hole cut through the afternoon. There was no saddle on its back. No brand Calder could see. It watched his wagon approach without moving, though the flies worked its eyes and the wind kept lifting loose strands of its mane. Calder drew his mule to a stop.
“Well,” he said. “You lose somebody?”
The horse turned its head toward the ditch.
A boot protruded from the rabbit-brush.
Calder stayed on the wagon a moment longer, one hand resting on the brake. He had lived in the Las Vegas Valley long enough to understand that a body beside a road could be the beginning of several kinds of trouble. Sometimes the trouble had already finished its work and ridden away. Sometimes it waited behind a rise with a rifle across its knees.
He looked at the hills. Nothing moved except a dust devil turning slowly across the flats.
Then he saw the hand beside the boot.
It lay palm upward, fingers curled around a little spill of earth.
Calder climbed down.
The man had fallen half beneath a grease-wood bush. He wore dark trousers, a torn shirt, and a coat too heavy for the season. His hair was thick with dirt. More dirt filled one ear and made a dry brown crust along his jaw. There was a small hole in the front of his shirt, just below the breastbone, surrounded by a stain that had dried nearly black.
Calder took off his hat.
“Lord help you.”
He crouched carefully, his knees complaining, and reached for the man’s wrist.
The fingers closed around his arm.
Calder fell backward hard enough to drive a stone through the seat of his trousers.
The man beneath the bush opened his eyes.
For a few seconds neither spoke. Calder sat in the road dust with his mouth open, staring at a face the color of old candle wax. The stranger stared back as if Calder were the thing that ought not to be there.
Then the man tried to breathe.
It came badly. His chest jerked once, stopped, and dragged in a shallow mouthful of air. He rolled onto his side and coughed dirt onto the ground.
Calder scrambled to his feet.
“Easy. Easy, now.”
The stranger coughed again. There was so much earth in his mouth that Calder looked behind him, searching for the collapsed bank or overturned wagon that might explain it. There was only the shallow ditch, the scrub, and the open country rising toward the mountains.
He fetched his canteen.
The man had pushed himself onto one elbow by the time Calder returned. His other hand pressed against the dark stain on his shirt. He looked down at it with an expression Calder could not read.
“Small sips,” Calder told him. “You hear me?”
The stranger took the canteen in both hands. His nails were broken. Two had torn away entirely, leaving the fingertips raw and packed with dirt.
He drank, choked, and spat water through his teeth.
Calder knelt beside him.
“What happened?”
The man’s eyes traveled past him to the road.
“Don’t know.”
His voice sounded scraped thin.
“Were you thrown?”
No answer.
“That your horse?”
The stranger looked toward the black animal. It had come closer without Calder hearing it. Now it stood at the edge of the ditch, head lowered.
Something changed in the man’s face.
“Jack,” he whispered.
The horse stepped down into the brush and pressed its muzzle against his shoulder.
“Well, that’s something,” Calder said. “Somebody knows you.”
The stranger lifted a shaking hand to the horse’s cheek. He kept it there a long time.
Calder examined the country again. A man could lose his memory after a blow to the head. Calder had seen that happen to a freighter kicked by a mule outside Mesquite Springs. The fellow had forgotten his own wife for three days and his debts for considerably longer.
But there was no swelling on this man’s skull. No fresh blood in his hair.
Only dirt.
“What’s your name?”
The stranger shut his eyes.
Calder waited.
A wagon wheel creaked behind him as the mule shifted in its traces. Somewhere in the brush, a grasshopper began its dry clicking song.
“Eddie.”
“Eddie what?”
The man opened his eyes again.
“Bones.”
Calder glanced at the ruined fingertips, then back at his face.
“Calder Wynn. I have a place south of here. We’ll get you under a roof and find somebody to look at that wound.”
Eddie’s hand tightened on the canteen.
“What wound?”
Calder pointed.
For the first time, Eddie pulled his shirt away from his body.
The cloth had stuck to his skin. It came free with a faint tearing sound, and Calder braced himself for the blood.
There was none.
Beneath the hole in the shirt lay a small round scar.
It was pale and smooth, with a shallow depression at its center. An old scar, by any reasonable judgment. The sort a man carried for years.
Calder looked at the shirt again.
The blood on it had dried in thick folds. There was enough to have soaked the waistband of Eddie’s trousers.
“Somebody shoot you?”
Eddie touched the scar.
His face emptied.
For a moment he was somewhere else. Calder saw it happen: the eyes fixing on a distance that had nothing to do with the hills, the mouth drawing slightly open. Eddie’s fingers moved against his chest as though searching for something beneath the skin.
There had been a light.
That much returned to him.
A small yellow light swinging overhead. Timber beams beyond it. The smell of machine oil, hot metal, a man’s sour breath.
Someone speaking close to his ear.
He tried to catch the words, but the memory broke apart. In its place came pressure against his face, against his lips and eyelids. A weight over his chest. His right hand trapped beside his hip.
Eddie jerked away from Calder.
“Don’t.”
Calder raised both hands.
“All right.”
Eddie stared at him. His breath came fast now, though there was something wrong with the rhythm. He seemed to remember each breath only after he had gone too long without one.
“Don’t put me back.”
The words were so quiet Calder almost missed them.
“Back where?”
Eddie looked down at his hands.
For a while the only sound was the horse breathing beside him.
Calder followed his gaze. There were dark splinters beneath the torn nails.
He stopped looking.
“We ought to get moving,” he said.
He brought the wagon closer and helped Eddie stand. The young man was heavier than he looked, and cold through the sleeve despite the heat. Once on his feet, he swayed so violently Calder thought he would go straight back into the ditch.
But he stayed upright.
They made their way to the wagon one careful step at a time. Jack followed close enough that Calder could feel the horse’s breath against his neck.
At the wheel, Eddie stopped.
Beyond the road, a low ridge lay brown and bare beneath the afternoon sun. There was nothing unusual about it. Calder had passed it dozens of times. A little scrub along the crest, a scatter of pale stones.
Eddie watched it as though someone had called his name.
“What is it?” Calder asked.
Eddie did not answer.
He could remember a shovel now.
Not using one.
Hearing it.
The scrape of its edge against stone. A pause. Then the soft, heavy fall of earth onto wood.
Calder put a hand beneath his elbow.
“Come on, son.”
Eddie let himself be helped onto the wagon.
They started south with the black horse following behind. Calder kept the mule at a walk. Once, he offered Eddie a piece of bread from the sack beneath the seat, but Eddie only held it in his lap.
After a mile, Calder began talking about the weather. He talked about the failed well on his neighbor’s place, about a fence that would not stay upright, about the price of feed. He gave the stranger small, ordinary things to listen to while the wheels turned beneath them.
Eddie sat with one hand over the scar in his chest.
Behind them, the ridge diminished in the dusty light.
Near its crest stood a narrow board driven into the earth. It had been overlooked by the men who filled the grave, or left because they thought it a sufficient kindness. The lettering had been cut with a knife and darkened with the end of a burned stick.
EDWARD BONE
Beneath the name was yesterday’s date.
At the foot of the marker, the grave lay open.
The earth around it bore the marks of two hands.