On the Good, Red Road

Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of his mind.
When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through the opaque membrane of the canvas.
“I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this unending misery.”
McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin. His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.
“You awake, Marion?” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Ask you something…you believe in God?”
“Don’t reckon. You?”
“Sometimes.”
“How you figure you’ll come out if in fact he’s runnin this show?”
“Don’t know. Ain’t been particularly good or bad. Just sort a plodded my way along. I was friends with a Navajo when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Man named Sik’is. He was always talking about walking on the good, red road.”
“Ain’t heard of it. Where’s it at?”
“Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you know? Way a living. Balance and harmony—”
“This some spiritual bullshit?”
“It’s like walking the path where you’re the best version of yourself. I don’t know. Always sounded nice to me. Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out. Start living right, you know?”
“Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of a injun. You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”
“Me and my brothers fought against the Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”
“I kilt five, two in fair fights. Three was plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles City. Young man. We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit kickin.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”
“You ashamed of it?”
Marion seemed to reflect on the question, then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon. But it’s a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the one you’re starin at. Figure it was that young man’s time, and if it hadn’t been me, it’d a been—”
A shotgun blast exploded in the forest, trailed by a shout of unabashed joy.
Marion struggled up off the ground. “Son of a bitch hit somethin.”
Oatha felt the excitement bloom in his gut, Marion already on his feet, lumbering out of the shelter.
Nathan hollering, “Boys, come look at this! Shot us a elk!”
It required immense effort for Oatha to sit up, and he had to employ a spruce branch to leverage himself out of the dirt onto his feet.
Marion yelling, “I could kiss you, Nathan, tongue and all!”
Oatha limped out of the shelter as fast as he could manage into sunlight that passed blindingly sharp through the dead trees, Marion twenty yards away, moving with considerable speed though the spruce, Oatha following as fast as he could, shoots of pain riding up his legs, the muscle atrophied, already wearing away.
There was Nathan in the distance, standing with the shotgun beside a scrawny aspen, its bark chewed up, near cut in two by buckshot, Oatha scanning the woods for the fallen elk as Nathan raised his shotgun.
Marion’s head disappeared in a red mist and the rest of his body collided into a tree and pitched back as Oatha ducked behind a spruce, the trunk too small to shield him from a spray of buckshot, figuring if it came, he’d catch a pellet or two at the least.
“The hell you doin, Nathan?”
“Livin, brother. Livin.”
“You mean to kill me, too?”
“I mean for us to eat this fat son of a bitch, get back to civilization.”
Oatha peered through the branches, saw that Nathan was still standing above Marion’s headless frame, the breech of the shotgun broken over his forearm.
“Why you reloadin then?” Oatha shouted. He didn’t own a gun anymore, hadn’t in three decades, but Marion’s was sitting next to the snowbank inside the shelter—a Navy—and he had to bet it was loaded.
“‘Cause I don’t know if you the type a man to go along with somethin like this.”
Nathan was fishing in the pocket of his oilskin slicker, pulled out a pair of shells, Oatha thinking if there was ever a time to make a break for it, this was it.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nathan said. “I kilt him out a pure necessity. Was you the fat fuck, I’d a cut your throat long ago.”
“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat the flesh of another man.”
“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.
Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.
He heard the report before he registered the blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through him.
By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight distraction.
He fell through under the canvas as the crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.
The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down even as his hands trembled.
Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.
Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse vibrating his ear drums.
“They’s still time,” Nathan said. He was close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable to pinpoint his exact location.
“For what?” Oatha asked.
“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little Marion. You wanna live, don’t you?”
“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”
“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you dead.”
“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some the other way entire.”
“Guess we know which way you went, tramping through country like this without so much as a revolver.”
Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him, a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know about any of it?”
“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till now in your voice.”
Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.
“What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”
“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”