He rode in with a wind on a horse, the black creature at a trot that comported the pair at deceptive speed, the long legs in staccato on the alkaline, while his were still and straight in the stirrups, pillar like—indomitable and fierce, a vision of pointed onthrust, repose and speed quilted into riposte against the stolid environs, was marked by all of the onlookers in each his or her own fashion and none were unmoved by the apparition, though few deigned speak the fullness of their minds and it was a quiet arrival, acoustically speaking.  

He rode up through the road and tied the horse to the street itself, it seemed, locking its dark shape in place with a mere glance. This was in front of the inn, a place called, Sit a Spell or Lie Down if You Please.  He said “Stay now.  I won’t be long,” and it didn’t take a doctor to see that the creature trusted his word completely.

The horse regarded with benign dispassion all who drew up to survey him but did not budge an inch from his position or blink his eyes at all until the rider was framed once again in the wide doors of the hotel. They seemed to be at a staring impasse and whose will should break first was the whispered talk of all the town in those few moments which seemed dilated to eternity by the tension, thick upon the air.  Then the rider quivered nearly imperceptibly his clean-shaven jowls, which ceased the stallion’s attrition and saw it suddenly mounting the stairs, its hoofs clicking like the spurs on the boots of a regular gentleman, to meet his mount upon the threshold of the door and yes, to follow him inside and past belief to the second floor where they’d be staying, each in private quarters it turned out.

And weird as Bannack Montana had been before they arrived, in minutes this pair was all the town could talk of— sentences looping back upon themselves and amplifying in magnitude until the word of their arrival had become a thing full of portent both perverse and sacred.  They were outlaws, they were angels, they were death, they were God. Rumor saturated utterly their insular host society, even unto its highest echelons of power, whose home was the little law-building-cum-jailhouse on the edge of town, where Henry Plummer and his deputies were stoving donuts in a pan of thick cast iron.

“I wish the happy couple well.”

Plummer chuckled and shook his head.

“As long as he settles up and don’t piss upon the floor more than the culture or the carpet can handle, he shall have no truck with me.  Lord knows that Jereboam could use the scratch, and I’ll bet the one of ‘em eats like a horse.”

Knees were slapped. Mouths flung open. Laughs were had. Drinks drunk down. But all the while the sheriff’s face betrayed the secret wringing of his hands.  He was a man of secrets and of many shuttered interior doors.    

He saw the horse and rider not as visitors but as visitations; a force arrayed against him personally and dispatched by fate from heaven or hell as agents of a species of reconnoitering and reckoning, of serving up adjudication warranted by the sin particular to Plummer’s case, a man of stolid upbringing from so far East a wagon must outrun the mind to reach its destination. He had dirtied his hand in crumbling the bridge that led back across that wide, deep water that was his past, but these two were like the tines on some divining rod, he sensed.

Bannack had enveloped Henry like a great helical encrustation and this had suited him fine. He saw the life of thirty years he’d led before arriving as a gestation—something preconscious and primeval—a preamble only, for what would flower forth, bandy and unseemly, but not without a particular grace upon his arrival in this Western town and become manifest in the polished tin star that was pinned upon his shirt.  Pinned there by the territorial lieutenant governor at a gala in Boise some years before, when the ascetic old man had frowningly jabbed it nearly into his breast bone with his horned, copper hands. His dark hair had been gleaming in the gaslight, his coal eyes concealing themselves—and Henry wondered more often than now and then if there had been some mistake and he weren’t ordained by some Indian from out of the hills, descended to pass out bad medicine like some righteous court poisoner of yore, for all of the bad blankets of his forebears and in anticipation of the cavalry and cordite which rolled out torpidly like contract-judgment, further everyday, combing out the tangles in the minor frontiers.  Sheriff Plummer of Bannack— a bastard case in truth, because Bannack wasn’t really a town; but he’d treated it like one alright and been a damn fine sheriff, too, despite whatever he’d done back east so long ago—something he knew, something powerfully bad—though he could never entirely remember, and anyway preferred to forget.  But the doubt about his appointment mixed powerfully with his displaced guilt so that the bastard bit became essential to his entire self-conception, only, charitably he allowed himself some room for interpretation.  

This interpretation came mostly from the liberal regard with which he held the word “bastard.”  It was a strong, bad word, with a rambling spirit that ranged far beyond the borders of the claim it staked on illegitimacy.  Strong in a secret sort of way, so that a child might say it and expect no reproof if employed to a proper referent, quite unlike other curses in that the venom was sanctioned, like it had passed across the desk of the attorney general in a fine green bottle and emerged on the other side emblazoned with a state-seal.  A lawful curse, that’s what it was.

Except he could tell by the way a certain kid was using it that he meant for it to kill him, even if it was by degrees. Maybe the kid had really cursed him that day when Henry had hung his dad for robbing the concern of the silver they extracted from the holes in the hills outside of Bannack.  The kid could never have known the truth or the wider truth of the world, which in some ways Henry could see that he himself was serving, but as Henry led the kid’s father past the crowd of onlookers and toward the gallows, he had seen the hard eyes of the little face demanding the attention of his own and he had looked, fool that he was, as the kid revealed in that moment that he was the avatar of angelic witness to the subaltern geometry of the occasion and Henry’s whole being was engulfed in the subtle fire of the condemned as the kid mouthed the word at him.

“Bastard.”

So Henry knew, as the scapegoat beside him hung, that someone had been watching as he had turned into the bastard of a sheriff that deep down he truly was and destiny had ordained him to be from the start. The only law in a backwater mining concern charitably called a town and also, the boss of the gang that regularly robbed it and sent others to the gallows for its crimes, a gang he had named “The Innocents” because irony wasn’t just how he liked the smack of his water, hard man that he was.  

Ever since that day he had been certain for the first time in his life of the fact that his own were numbered and he wondered with a frantic panic that was also a kind of glee when the reckoning that would reveal him for the bastard he was might arrive. Counting his spoils in the lockup of the jailhouse that also served as the secret-in-plain-sight quarters of the criminal organization of which he was the two-faced head, he felt safe. With his deputies that doubled as his fellow riders by his side; good dependable, taciturn, evil men who shared his desire for pecuniary accumulation and didn’t mind either the laying down of the law in the pursuit of this ignoble goal, he felt safe.  He felt safe from earthly judgment in the short term and in the flattering conviction that divine recompense might impend around any old corner in the long.

The morning after the one-armed stranger and his mount arrived, he was shaken awake by his trusty friend Phlegm. On any other day he would have been happy to see Phlegm’s hideous face, but now was different.  He hadn’t realized he’d been asleep, although this realization came as something of a relief given the grave tenor of the nightmares to which he had fallen thrall.  Something to the tune of being cut in half by the vicious blade of an angel with long black hair and beautiful feminine face, a sunflower bursting out from above her ear seemed to screech righteously at him until it crossed the threshold of his hearing and cut that sense entirely while all around him, cherry blossoms blew serenely, paying his choked remonstrations and offers of precious metals no mind.

“Henry,” said Phlegm, “I wake you up, though you told me never to do so if you were sleeping, because there is a visitor here for you of an uncommon and hirsute variety.”

The sheriff looked up and to his surprise and terror here at the window was the face of the horse of the one armed man who had arrived yesterday, its elongated countenance in profile behind the pane, seeming to seek with severe concentration behind the one black eye visible, some quarry on the other side of the glass; he, Henry, realized then that this morning, a year and a day after he had hung the man for what “The Innocents” had taken, would be the occasion of his judgment and although he might have felt a kind of panic instead he felt the onrush of something else that he didn’t know how to name.

He stood and strapped on his ivory pommeled guns and rubbed shoe-black on his sheriff’s star

“They say the horse drank three hundred dollars worth of whiskey last night,” piped Phlegm, holding his battered hat over his heart and tugging at the frayed brim like a nervous child. “And that the rider drank nothing but phosphate and glowered at the whole bar.  This morning, why, all he wanted to ask about was the sheriff of the town, said he needed to talk to the man, and sent his mount to fetch him.”

Phlegm gulped and chewed his hat brim.  

“That is why the animal’s here. To take you sheriff.  To take you away.”

Henry patted Phlegm on the shoulder and pressed a wad of bank notes into his filthy hands.  Phlegm’s yellow eyes grew wide with shock. He looked at Henry and then at the specie in his palms, then he whooped and ran outside, throwing his hat in the air and kicking up his battered spurs. Trailing dust, he headed for the hills.

Henry regarded the horse and the horse regarded him back. Calculus whirred inside the equine head.  The beast was saddled and Henry climbed upon it, it’s fetlocks as wide apart as the length of a Roman divan and the animal did not buck him but rode with confidence into town; it was Henry’s black Mariah.

Noon was in the sky; he had slept in, and never felt better.  He could not quit thinking these strange words together, “Bannack, Montanack… Bannack Montanack,” not quite sensical but so very, very true.

In the distance at the end of the road, before the church stood the long shadow of the flinty, one-armed man and Henry thought; “If I should burst today from the mouth of that one’s gun and keep my wits about me, perhaps I will wake up by and by so far west of here that I am wearing robes and my hair will be in a bun and sandals upon my feet and I will not have a beard any longer, but will carry a sword into fields of tall reeds and if I lose an arm then maybe I will be redeemed and when I hear an Indian singing what they call “the sutra of the heart of understanding” then maybe I will have come back to Bannack Montanack.  But until then, goodbye, goodbye and help yourself to the silver. I cannot take it with me, where I am going.”

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This piece was written pretty quickly in 2012 in order to round out a larger collection I was working on at the time in school and so that I would have fresh material for a reading I was going to be participating in at Skylight Books in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was a fun piece to write and read aloud and I was very delighted when the boyfriend of a classmate of mine complimented me on it after the reading by telling me it reminded him of the Coen brothers. A stranger who I never encountered again also approached me after the reading to say that she liked the phrase "subaltern geometry," which I counted as a big win at the time. I don't think I ever submitted it anywhere—I looked, just never found a suitable option—and it remains unpublished, except for here. While there is a certain amount of libidinal energy in it, it is a pretty immature effort and, like The Letter, probably too influenced by the long hangover of my undergrad obsession with Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover to ever be a real favorite. The title is ripped off of a song by Jack Bruce (of Cream), more well known for a cover version by the band Mountain. Both are excellent and worth listening to.