Night had come, soft and thin with cold. There were drums somewhere in the hills making a low, steady, menacing beat. They were faster than a heartbeat and seemed to be part of the rocks and the earth as much as the wind that moved the dust and the animals that crept behind stands of grass.
Ned sat huddled against the wheel of the stagecoach, his arms about his knees, waiting. He wasn’t sure what it was he was waiting for – for time to slip past, for the Indians to come out of the hills and attack, for the dawn to come with chill dew and quiet. Ben had said that the dark was starred with fires, like beacons, in the hills. There were hundreds of Navajo out there, striking their drums and letting the folks by the stagecoach know that they were gathering. Ned felt small and defenceless. All he could do to stay alive was keep down and pray hard.
The men were talking, but Ned had no part in that. They were talking about the best places to shoot from and where the Indians might come from and how many bullets they had left. All Ned could do when the time came was load rifles and pass them on. There were Ben and Johnny and three others. The rough-voiced man with his bottle of nearly empty liquor was the coach driver. There was another man – a hired gun – and a boy with a voice not-long broken and a nervous impatience that made him never sit still for more than five minutes. That made five folks that could shoot, but with the amount of Indians gathering it would be like trying to shelter from the rainfall under a single leaf.
The woman was beside him, sitting on the dirt like him. She was as close as she could be without touching him. She smelt clean and fresh, unlike the men clustered about. Tobacco scent drifted through the air from the men, but she smelt of nothing but her clothes and cleanness.
It took him a long time to gather the nerve to speak to her. She seemed closed in on herself, afraid of more than just the Indians. She stayed close to him for warmth, because it would not do for her to stride about and see to the horses and smoke like the men were, but she said nothing.
He turned toward her, opened his mouth, and shut it again. He adjusted his hat and stretched one leg at a time, and then turned to her again. Finally he said to her, ‘My name’s Edward, ma’am. Ned, that is.’
‘Oh,’ she said softly, as if he had startled her from a dream. ‘Julie. I’m Julie.’
‘I’m real pleased to meet you,’ Ned said with a quick smile. Those words were easy, but he didn’t know what to say next.
‘Yeah,’ she said, as if she were caught up in that dream again. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Er – Have you come far, ma’am?’ Ned asked, fiddling with the brim of his hat.
‘Just from Willerton,’ she said. ‘My – er – my folks had a ranch outside of Willerton,’ she said in a sudden rush.
Ned nodded, suddenly self-conscious with the memory of the coach driver saying how the town committee had bought her a ticket. He couldn’t think why they would spend all that money on a ticket just to send her away. Her accent was Arizona, like his, but she didn’t sound like she had been brought up rough and unfinished like him. She sounded like a lady from town, not like a girl that had grown up away from other folks and living half wild on a ranch.
‘It’s – Well, I heard it’s good grazing land outside of Willerton,’ Ned said.
‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘Where are you heading, ma’am?’ Ned asked.
‘Well, I was hoping to – ’
She broke off as the sound of the drums intensified. Ned turned his head, listening, his entire attention caught up in that rhythm. He seemed to be transported to the hills, imagining the fires burning and the men standing round, maybe dancing, maybe just beating those drums. The fire would flicker over their faces and show them in bronzed glimpses. Those men owned the hills. They owned the land. They knew how to live out here.
He drew himself back to the cold and the feel of the coachwheel against his back and the great emptiness before him. His hands were chilled and he rubbed them together and thrust them into the armpits of his coat.
‘Er – you – you were saying, ma’am?’ he asked, turning back towards the woman.
‘Yeah, well…’ she said, as distracted by the drums as he was. ‘I’m on my way to San Francisco.’
‘Mmm,’ he nodded. ‘You got folks there?’
‘No, I – I’m hoping to start a business,’ she said awkwardly. Her dress rustled as she shuffled on the ground and Ned wondered for a fleeting moment what that fabric looked like, and if it were pretty.
‘Business?’ he asked curiously. ‘What kind of business?’
She moved again awkwardly. He could hear the soft noise of skin slipping over skin as she stroked her hand up her arm, rubbing warmth into her flesh.
‘Well, I’m – I’m not really sure.’
‘Well, what kind of business were you in before, ma’am?’ he prompted her.
‘Umm… Well, I’m hoping to start a new business,’ she said quickly. ‘Maybe sewing.’
She was growing more awkward the more he pressed her. He thought again about what the coach driver had said, and wondered again what she was leaving behind her.
‘Did you – you say your name was Julie, ma’am?’ he asked her, as the only way he could think of to change the subject.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Julie Morse.’
‘Julie,’ Ned repeated, feeling the shape of it on his tongue. ‘That’s a real pretty name.’
The coach shook as someone jumped down suddenly from the back, and Ned’s head jerked up.
‘I’m gettin’ tired of that same old song.’
It was the boy, his impatience and fear finally overcoming him.
‘I’m gettin’ out of here,’ he said, pacing up and down on the ground. Ned could hear the rifle he carried as he passed and passed again.
‘Now, look, sonny,’ the coach driver reasoned. ‘Don’t get smart just cause you’ve killed your first Indian. You ain’t got a chance out there.’
‘Well there ain’t no chance waitin’ for the dawn, either,’ the boy said, desperation threading into his voice. He was only a moment away from breaking. ‘Anyone else want to try with me? You?’
There was silence. Ned sat still and waited. He heard the boy mount a horse and canter away. His first thought was, I hope he didn’t take Doggone…
‘He’s gonna be dead before he knows what’s happened, the darn fool,’ Ben said in a low voice.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said concisely.
Ned closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wagon wheel. He thought of the Lord up in heaven and tried to ask Him to spare the boy. But he couldn’t believe in what he was asking. He wanted the Lord to spare them all. He wanted Him to spare the Indians from the troubles that were being laid upon them. He wanted Him to take Johnny aside and make him lead a good, quiet life somewhere else. He wanted Him to let him and Ben and Ben’s wife live in peace and quiet, with the sound of cattle lowing somewhere in the bluffs and invisible condors passing over with their wide, spreading wings and their guttural cawing calls, and the fire burning in the stove when it was winter and cold water in the well when it was summer. That boy was a fool. He hadn’t a chance of making it out of the canyon.
The drums kept on beating. They were so constant that sometimes they caught him and he almost tapped his foot to their rhythm. And then he remembered what they meant and held his foot still before it could move on the dirt. He sat still then for a long time. He might have drifted into sleep but he couldn’t be sure. If he did, the drums were in his dreams too.
‘Ned?’ Julie said from beside him.
Ned turned his head in surprise. It was the first time she had used his name.
‘What is it, Miss Julie?’ he asked, then caught himself. ‘You ain’t married, ma’am?’ he asked carefully.
‘No,’ she said simply. ‘That boy’s going to die. Isn’t he?’
Ned bit his lip into his mouth and then nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, I guess he is.’
‘He’s sixteen,’ she said in a hollow, half-desperate voice. ‘I heard him say he was just sixteen a few weeks back. Isn’t that too young to die?’
Ned swallowed. His throat felt curiously full and hard.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It is.’
The dark felt close and solid around him even though he could not see it. He could hear it in the way the drumbeats travelled and feel it in the stillness of the air. It was as if a blanket had been laid down over the world.
‘Those fires must be warm,’ Julie said into the stillness after a while.
‘Are there many of ’em?’ Ned asked, imagining how the hot wellings of light must look against the velvet darkness.
‘Too many.’ Julie said. ‘I sure wish there was brush about here to burn.’
‘There ain’t nothing, huh?’ Ned asked.
‘Nothing worth burning,’ she said.
There was a long pause of the kind Ned was used to, when someone was looking at him and knowing he could not see them looking. He knew she was working up the courage to ask him about his eyes.
‘I can’t see nothing,’ he said, forestalling her question. ‘Least, nothing worth mentioning.’
‘How long have you been blind?’ she asked, then said quickly, ‘You mind me asking that?’
He shook his head. ‘Been close on four years now. I was going on twenty-one when I lost my sight.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice thick with awkwardness.
‘Ain’t nothing can be done about it,’ Ned said, moving his foot in the dust. ‘Johnny – that is, my brother Johnny – thinks there’s doctors in San Francisco could help me, but I don’t put no store in that. I don’t want to go there…’
‘Supposed to be all sorts of good things in San Francisco,’ Julie said.
‘I don’t want to find out about them,’ Ned said stubbornly.
‘No,’ she said after a long moment of silence. ‘I don’t think I do either.’
She stood up suddenly and walked away. Ned sat for a while, listening to her skirts swinging as she walked. She was as restless as the rest of them. She was full of something that she didn’t want to let loose, something that she needed to let loose. Ned had a sudden thought that he would not be surprised if she leapt onto a horse and rode out to certain death too.
Someone came over with slow, easy steps. It was Ben. Ned could pick out the sounds of him by now.
‘Ben?’ he called out quietly.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said from beside the wheel.
Ned stood up, running his hands over the cold iron tyre of the coach wheel to the top. His legs were stiff as he straightened them. He had been sitting down for too long.
‘Are you cold, Ned?’ Ben asked him.
Ned nodded, drawing his coat more tightly across his chest. He had been cold for so long that it had started to feel like a natural state.
‘Well, there’s a couple more hours til daylight,’ Ben told him in a quiet, reflective voice.
Ned leaned back against the solid panels of the coach. He touched his hand back to the cold of the iron tyre, moving his fingers over the metal nervously. He had the woman’s voice in his mind and the sound of her skirts brushing against themselves as she moved.
‘Ben?’ he asked. ‘Is she pretty?’
‘I reckon you’d say that,’ Ben said slowly, shifting his gun in his arms.
‘She’s nice,’ Ned said quietly, with a carefully restrained eagerness. ‘How old is she?’
‘Bout the same age you are,’ Ben told him in a level voice. He sounded as if he were concentrating on something deep inside or far away.
‘Found out she ain’t married.’
‘No, I reckon not.’
Ned wondered about the darkness in his voice, but abruptly the coach driver called out, ‘Somebody’s coming!’
The men set off running. Ned started forward but didn’t move away from the coach wheel. He could hear a horse walking at a slow pace, but it sounded like a riderless horse. It had the half-aimless tread of a horse that was being led with a load rather than ridden by a man.
‘Go get him,’ the coach driver said, and someone ran to meet that horse.
Ned leaned forward, listening, one hand on the coach wheel.
‘We’d better take it behind the ledge,’ the driver said in a sober voice.
Ned leaned back again, an odd sick feeling settling in his core. It was the boy. It must be. He had known that he would be killed, but he hadn’t expected him to be sent back, slung across the horse like a warning.
There was a sudden shriek and a whoop from far away, and chanting started up, loud and strong. Perhaps the Indians had been watching and waiting for that horse to come back to the others, to deliver their message. The chanting was in a wide arc somewhere behind the coach. It sounded like the hills were full of Indians just waiting for the moment to attack again. Ned turned his head, listening, fear and sick anticipation sparking through his body.
‘Well, Mr Only Survivor,’ he heard Johnny say to Ben somewhere in front of the coach. ‘I guess you won’t have that distinction by the time the sun’s high.’
‘No, I reckon everything’s gonna be taken care of for us,’ Ben replied flatly.
One of them walked back to the coach. Julie was there – Ned could hear her standing by the side of the coach, small noises like suppressed sobs coming from her.
‘Pretty music, huh?’ Johnny asked. ‘Can I have the next dance?’
Ned tensed. Julie’s almost inaudible sobs had turned into something louder and more real. Ned moved to Johnny and grabbed him by the shoulder, yanking him away from the woman.
‘Let her alone, will you, Johnny?’ he growled.
Johnny sighed and began to move away. Ned moved his hand from Johnny’s coat with a last shake, and stepped forward towards Julie. His hand touched the softness of her shawl first, feeling a loose-knit wool that covered her shoulders. He moved his hand cautiously towards where he thought hers might be, and felt her fingers slip into his. Her hand almost disappeared under his.
‘What is it, Miss Julie?’ he asked.
‘I’m all right,’ she said shakily, taking deep gasps of air to calm herself.
Ned patted her hand softly and then gripped it tight. He wanted to do more than that. He wanted to be prowling about the coach with a gun – but this was all he could do.
He could feel the warmth between the lengths of their bodies, standing this close. Her hands were cold but her breath was warm when it brushed his face and he could smell the clean scent of her hair very near to him. Her heartbeat pulsed through her fingertips where they were pressed against his hands. There was a strength in her hands. She wasn’t gripping on to him, but he could feel her strength.
A great fear overcame him, not of the Indians in the hills or the guns that they carried, but of dying as he was about to without ever once saying exactly what he wanted to to a woman like this.
‘Miss Julie,’ he said, keeping the fear closed inside.
‘Yeah?’ she asked. She was so scared her voice sounded choked and sick. The singing of the Indians was rising and falling, filling the air all around them and pressing out everything else.
‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,’ he said, trying to tune out that singing and hear only her breathing.
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘You being a girl, maybe you could tell me,’ he continued. He was prevaricating, but what he was getting to scared him more than the Indians.
‘W-what is it?’
‘Well – well, if a girl’d get to know me, and if she – ’ He faltered, his breath catching, trying to work out the right words and to get them to come to his tongue. ‘Well – do you think it’s possible that a pretty young girl could ever consider a man like me?’ he asked, finally managing to put words to the thought.
‘Well, if she loved him, sure,’ she said without hesitation, her face turned up towards his.
‘Could she love a fella with my kind of handicap?’
‘Why not?’ she said softly.
He swallowed. His heart was racing beneath his ribs. The Indians were just a background noise behind the rushing in his ears.
‘The thing that scares a fella like me is maybe he ain’t wanted,’ he said quickly.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That scares a lot of people.’
‘And – being scared that way – well – you figure m-maybe it’s better never to find out,’ he carried on in a rush. ‘You sorta feel maybe it’s better to go on being scared, instead of finding out for sure that you’re not wanted.’
A whooping scream rose above the chanting and Julie threw herself forward at his chest, burying her face against him. She did not allow herself to cry out loud, but he could feel the shaking of noiseless sobs inside her. This cold dawn was going to be their last. The vital, red, blood-filled reality of him and of her against him was going to be ended and left in something still and cold and drained on the dirt.
He closed his mind again to the Indian singing and concentrated on the reality of this narrow space where they stood. Her hair was against his chin. He could smell the clean scent of it every time he breathed. He raised his hand to the back of her head and laid it on her hair, feeling the smoothness of its mass and the warmth of her scalp beneath it. He wondered what colour her hair was – but that didn’t matter. Ben had said she was pretty, but that didn’t matter either. The reality of her and her head against his chest and the fluttering feel of her terrified heartbeat through every place he touched was beautiful enough in itself. He let his head sink down against hers, her hair against his cheek, and he stood there, waiting.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Fashion spasm! Mission: Impossible - Crack-Up
Crack-Up is a pretty good Season 7 episode. The premise is interesting – Peter Cordel is a contract killer, and a particularly good one. The IMF are contracted to gain evidence of his killings, and also to discover the identity of his Syndicate boss. Cordel is not only a killer, but also a genius, and a member of a chess club, where Jim, in the guise of a psychiatrist and with the help of Barney’s chess-computer (a device we’ve seen before), challenges him to a match. Jim doses Cordel with a drug which will make him susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, and the team proceed to convince Cordel that his urge to kill has got out of control, leading him to murder on the spur of the moment for no real reason.
The purpose of this blog entry, however, is fashion! Season six and seven bring us some pretty groovy 70s fashions, and Jim’s jacket at the pickup deserves internet recognition.
Apparently large checks were in in ’72. How Jim thinks he can pull off an apparent knowledge of the necessary fuel mix for a rather lovely motorbike in that jacket and purple-tinted rectangular shades is a mystery. We can only believe that Jim isn’t so good at choosing his clothes at the early hours he’s required to go and pick up the tape, or wasn’t told that he’d have to talk to a hairy biker about fuel mixtures.
Later, fully awake and in ingenious-genius mode, Jim pulls it all back in a slick grey suit reminiscent of the earlier days of Mission. Willy’s looking pretty good too in a heavy suit jacket that looks as if it may be wool.
During the mission, as a crack chess player and psychiatrist he is equally sensible, even down to the thick-rimmed glasses through which he hears his cues from Barney and his chess-computer. The later suit here particularly sets off his eyes.
This concludes our fashion lesson for today… I won’t pretend this has been an incisive episode critique. It hasn’t.
The purpose of this blog entry, however, is fashion! Season six and seven bring us some pretty groovy 70s fashions, and Jim’s jacket at the pickup deserves internet recognition.
 |
| Jim attempts to look studious while wearing sofa upholstery. Well done, Jim! |
Apparently large checks were in in ’72. How Jim thinks he can pull off an apparent knowledge of the necessary fuel mix for a rather lovely motorbike in that jacket and purple-tinted rectangular shades is a mystery. We can only believe that Jim isn’t so good at choosing his clothes at the early hours he’s required to go and pick up the tape, or wasn’t told that he’d have to talk to a hairy biker about fuel mixtures.
Later, fully awake and in ingenious-genius mode, Jim pulls it all back in a slick grey suit reminiscent of the earlier days of Mission. Willy’s looking pretty good too in a heavy suit jacket that looks as if it may be wool.
 |
| In his apartment, Jim cannot look anything but chique. It's such a cool-ass apartment anyone would look chique, and no bad suits are allowed through the door. |
During the mission, as a crack chess player and psychiatrist he is equally sensible, even down to the thick-rimmed glasses through which he hears his cues from Barney and his chess-computer. The later suit here particularly sets off his eyes.
 |
| This photos don't exactly focus on the suits, but they do focus on the dreamy, dreamy eyes. |
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
Fort Defiance - Chapter 11
Ned felt like the last few days were split from the rest of his life like a broken bough that had fallen from a tree. This time had been an endless circle of hunger, riding, stumbling over loose ground, and hiding from a nation of people who wanted to kill him for someone else’s sin. He was sore with riding and walking and the side of his face ached where Johnny had hit him. If someone had offered him a bed he would have lain down in it and slept without even taking his boots off, no matter who owned that bed.
They were walking up a hill, trying to make the climb out of the north side of the canyon towards the pass that Johnny knew of. There were rocks like chevaux de frise all up the slope, hard and unyielding every time Ned’s boots slipped on them. He could hear Johnny leading his horse up ahead, Ben behind Johnny with his own horse. Ned was holding on to Doggone’s tail, walking in the wake of the scent of leather tack and the horses and the dung they dropped. He was so tired he didn’t care about that when he felt it soft underfoot.
The ground flattened out and Doggone stopped walking as the other horses halted in front of him. Ned stumbled over a rock and caught up with the horse, thankful at last to be on level ground.
‘You tired, Ned?’ Ben asked from just ahead.
‘No more tired than anybody else,’ Ned said quickly, stumbling forward as the horse shifted position. He patted Doggone’s flank gently with one hand, keeping hold of the tail with the other.
‘Well, we’ll rest up on top here for a while,’ Johnny said. ‘But we gotta get out of these canyons.’
Johnny didn’t sound tired at all, but he was able to see through Ned’s bravado. Ned was exhausted. The horses moved on and Ned followed, his legs moving like wood, the ground a layer of soft over hardness beneath the soles of his boots. There seemed to be no more rocks now the ground was flat, thank the Lord – nothing but the occasional stubborn hump of plants with dust driven into their roots. But there was a wind up here that hadn’t been so strong on the canyon floor. The air was colder and dust scudded over the ground with a soft sound.
The horses stopped again and Ben tied them off. Ned stood holding onto Doggone’s tail stupidly for a moment, and then he dropped his hand and took a step forward, away from the horse.
‘Come on, Ned,’ Johnny said, closing a hand around his arm with a firm gentleness. ‘I’ll find somewhere for you to set down.’
Ned followed him. It was odd to be so close to Johnny after he had been gone for so long. He felt strange and familiar all at once. His coat felt different to Ben’s, and different to the coat he remembered Johnny having all that time ago. It was a finer weave, softer and more slick with the grease of wear than Ben’s. But his smell was the same – the smell of his tobacco thick in the fabric of his clothes and the smell of his sweat a family smell, not that of a stranger. He smelt something like Uncle Charlie – they had always smoked the same blend. Ned felt a rising of sorrow for Uncle Charlie, and sorrow for what Johnny wasn’t. He wanted his family.
‘Ned, you don’t know what it’s like, being at war,’ Johnny said abruptly, breaking the thick silence.
‘You gonna give me more excuses, Johnny?’ Ned asked, turning his face away.
‘I ain’t giving you excuses. I don’t have to excuse myself to you, Ned,’ Johnny retorted quickly. ‘I’m your brother. It’s my duty to take care of you, and I’m going to. I’ve seen men split apart by cannon, nothing left but blood and brains and splintered bone. There ain’t no glory in that. There ain’t no immortal soul. There’s just meat, trodden into the mud under other men’s boots. I wasn’t going to be one of those men. I needed to be alive so I could come home and take care of you.’
‘They why d’you stay away?’ Ned asked fiercely. ‘It’s been five months nearly since the war ended. It don’t take five months to get from Tennessee to Arizona.’
‘It don’t take two weeks, neither.’
‘I guess it takes longer when you stop to rob a bank or murder some folks,’ Ned said darkly.
Johnny stopped abruptly, jerking at Ned’s coat angrily to turn him about.
‘Now look here, Ned. I didn’t go robbing no banks for the fun of it. How am I gonna take care of you without money? How am I gonna get your eyes fixed? You think a charitable surgeon’s gonna offer to fix you for nothing?’
‘I ain’t going to San Francisco and I ain’t seeing no doctors with that dirty money,’ Ned growled, pulling his arm away from Johnny’s hand. ‘Doc Walters told me when it happened that there weren’t no fixing could be done. Said that blow had clean ripped the insides of my eyes apart.’
‘Doc Walters,’ Johnny said scornfully. ‘He ain’t no eye doctor. He ain’t no city surgeon. It’s my fault you’ve got this handicap, Ned. I’m going to see you right, and I don’t care how many men I have to knock out of the way to do it.’
Ned pressed his mouth closed. He didn’t want Johnny to knock anyone else out of the way on his account, but he knew there was no use in talking. Johnny had never listened to anyone else. He had always gone his own way, trailing fire and thunder in his wake.
‘We at a place we can rest yet?’ he asked. He had the feeling they had been walking in circles, just so that Johnny could talk. The horses didn’t sound far away and he could hear Ben walking across the dry dirt to them.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said shortly. ‘Yeah, we are.’
‘There any cover? It’s cold.’
‘No,’ said Johnny, ‘but it’s a good vantage point. We’ll be able to see any of those red devils before they see us.’
‘Bunk down, Ned,’ Ben said, coming to stand on his other side and putting a hand on his arm. ‘Get some rest.’
‘You gonna get some rest too, Ben?’ Ned asked him. He was concerned for Ben to rest himself, but he was also worried about what might happen to Ben if he slept. He couldn’t trust Johnny.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said slowly, but there was doubt thick in his voice.
‘Sure he is,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ll keep watch.’
‘I just bet you will,’ Ben murmured.
‘Well, I ain’t going to let you kill me in my sleep,’ Johnny retorted. ‘Ned, get some rest,’ he said, striking Ned’s arm softly. ‘We ain’t got too much time to waste.’
Ned lay down on the ground right where he was, brushing his hand over the dust and then settling on his side. The ground was cold underneath him and the air was cold above him and the wind cut past him quietly, blowing right through his clothes, it seemed, and reaching straight to his skin. He could feel the movement of Doggone’s back under him, as if he were still riding. He was so tired that the cold and the dizzy feeling of riding didn’t matter. He tipped his hat down over his face and slept.
******
He dreamt he was lying on a bed made of stone, the cold creeping through beneath him and falling down above him in tiny crystals of frost. Johnny was watching him, his guns held loosely in relaxed hands. Ned knew he couldn’t move without Johnny. He knew that if he tried to walk away those hands would tighten and the guns would point at him. Johnny was like a snake in the sun, waiting to strike. Johnny hated himself for holding the guns on Ned, but he wouldn’t let them drop…
The cold was cutting through everything. Ned wasn’t tired enough to sleep through it any more. He moved restlessly, clutching at covers in his sleep that didn’t exist. And then he dreamed that Uncle Charlie was tucking a blanket over his shoulders and some of the cold was softened, and he slept on.
Time folded and stretched inside his mind, dreams threading through his sleep. He heard noises. There were noises of fighting, of scuffling on the dirt. There were the grunts of men locked together and fighting like dogs, quiet and intense. Ned woke abruptly and twisted towards the noises, calling out, ‘Ben? Ben?’
The sound cut off instantly and Johnny shouted from a distance away, ‘Nothing, Ned. Horses stirring. They’re cold too.’
He sounded out of breath. Johnny and Ben walked back towards him making sounds of brushing dust from their clothes and catching their breath. The horses were making no noise at all.
Ned touched his hand to his hat to straighten it, then made to lie back down. He felt something heavy on his body and brushed his fingers over what had been laid over him. It was Ben’s coat.
‘Thanks, Ben,’ he said gratefully. That explained the dream of Uncle Charlie and the blanket. That warmth had allowed him to stay asleep. Ben must be freezing in nothing but his shirt.
He laid his head back on the ground, holding his hat down with his hand. As he did a second coat was laid over his legs, and Johnny said, ‘Here y’are, Ned.’
‘Thanks,’ Ned said uncertainly.
He rested his head back down, but there was little chance of slipping back into sleep now. He could hear horses moving in the canyon bottom. It sounded like a multitude moving, the voices of men rising up indistinct and blown by the wind. Ben whispered something from somewhere near the edge of the plateau and Johnny walked over to him quickly. Ned lay still, gathering warmth under the coats, listening but catching no clear words. Ben and Johnny were talking low and turned away from him. And then after a while Johnny rose up and his voice was louder.
‘…trying to figure out how to fix Dave Parker and get Ned out of Fort Defiance,’ he said, his feet moving about on the ground and his voice moving closer and further away. ‘Now I’ve gotta figure out how to try to keep you from coming up against me so I won’t have to kill you, and if that wasn’t enough of a puzzlement, on top of that I’ve got the whole darn Indian nation to contend with, and on top of that it’s colder than a tinhorn gambler’s heart.’
Ned couldn’t help but smile quietly under his hat. For just a moment he felt sorry for Johnny. He felt sorry for Johnny, and he felt a tiny, uncharitable spear of gladness too. If Johnny hadn’t stayed away so long and done so much wrong he wouldn’t be coming up against these difficulties now.
There was quiet, and then Johnny said, ‘Well. Let’s get started. If we keep moving we’ll be out of here by sundown.’
Both men moved then, coming over to Ned. The coats were lifted from him, letting the cold in again.
‘Ned,’ Johnny said shortly, taking hold of his elbow and hauling him up.
Ned stood, shaking off sleep, and followed Johnny’s pull back to the horses. Somewhere below he could still hear the sound as of hundreds of hooves moving on the earth.
‘What is that, Ben?’ he asked. ‘Indians?’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘Must be close on a hundred of them down in the bottoms. They’re making a move out of the canyon.’
‘Sure am glad we’re up here,’ Ned smiled.
The horses walked on, and in the valley below the sound of the Indians swelled and faded with the wind and the terrain. For a while they were almost inaudible as their paths diverged, and then Ned could hear them again, louder than ever.
‘We’ll be out on the plains before the sun’s gone,’ Johnny said, bringing his horse to a halt for a moment.
Ned sat on Doggone, flanked by Ben and Johnny, listening to the world about him. He could smell the dust that was being raised into the air by all of those moving feet down below. As he listened he realised that he could hear horses running now, and rising above that the whooping of the Indians. They didn’t sound like they were just travelling steadily any more. Shots began to sound, echoing like swift thunderbolts. And then Ben said urgently, ‘Hey, look there!’
‘I can hear a wagon,’ Ned said, turning his head.
‘It’s not a wagon, it’s a stagecoach,’ Johnny snapped. ‘And the Indians got them running hell for leather. Come on!’
Ned spurred his horse on as he heard Johnny taking off. They were riding back down that hill, back down into the canyon bottoms that they had spent so long climbing out of. The sounds of whooping and shooting and horses running grew louder. They were riding straight towards that creaking, rattling noise of the stagecoach being driven at speed over rough land.
The stage had stopped as they drew up to it, but the noise of the Indians was still whirling and gathering about, shots still snapping through the air. And then a strange silence fell. They were still there – Ned was sure of that – but the Indians had stopped chasing.
‘They’re lining up, getting ready for an attack,’ Ben called across to him as the horses skewed to a standstill. ‘Come on, Ned. Hunker down behind the coach here,’
Ned swung to the ground and ran with Ben gripping at his arm. His outstretched hand hit the arc of the coach wheel with a slap and he dropped to his knees, ducking his head and cursing himself for his uselessness. He could have been another gun to fend off the Indians, and instead he was kneeling here, hiding like a jackrabbit in a scrape in the ground.
‘Any spare guns?’ Johnny was shouting as he ran.
A stranger, a man with a rough voice, called, ‘Yeah, there’s guns and shells in the coach.’
Ned sat back on his heels. A hand touched his back for a moment. Someone was crouching beside him. Then there was the thud as something was dumped onto the ground in front of him and he reached out and felt the thin wood of an ammunition box.
‘Load those guns – make yourself useful,’ Johnny shouted.
The Indians were starting their whooping again. Someone thrust a rifle into Ned’s hands and he slipped his fingers over it. It was a long time since he had loaded a rifle but he could remember well enough how to do it. He slipped cartridge after cartridge into the chamber. When it was full someone snatched it from him and pushed another into his hands.
‘Now, hold your fire until I tell you,’ Johnny shouted.
The Indians were rushing closer, closer, the horses’ hooves thudding onto the ground, their cries rising high above every other noise. Johnny waited until the first shot was fired by the attackers, and then shouted, ‘Now!’
Ned kept on loading the guns. The Indians charged and retreated in waves. He kept plunging his hand into the box of cartridges and slipping them into the weapons he was given.
The person beside him was a woman, he realised. The small sounds she made as she worked at loading guns beside him were a woman’s sounds, and when their hands clashed in the ammunition box he could feel the smallness of her fingers. Once something soft brushed against his face as if she had flung a shawl impatiently back over her shoulder and it had blown out and touched him. He had never expected to run across a woman in circumstances like this.
He listened keenly as he worked, noting the occasional thuds as one of the Indians fell from his horse and hit the ground. He didn’t hear any sounds of injury or death in his own party. He kept listening for Johnny’s voice and for Ben’s voice and he kept hearing them, snapping out orders or muttering quick curses. They must, slowly, be evening the odds. And then, eventually, the noise of the Indians receded and kept receding. They were riding away.
Ned held his breath, waiting to hear what would happen.
‘Wonder what they’re going to do now,’ Johnny said nervously.
‘Gone to get others,’ one of the strangers said – the man Ned had heard before. ‘Sun’ll be gone in a couple of minutes, and I don’t believe they’ll attack at night.’
‘If they don’t, there’ll be a swarm of them when day breaks,’ Johnny said grimly.
‘I knew this would happen when we left Willerton,’ the man said fatalistically.
‘Willerton?
‘Yup. We’re the first stage out in a week.’
‘That’s where my wife’s coming from,’ Ben said in concern, starting forward.
‘Well, there was a couple of passengers, but they decided not to buy tickets with this Indian showdown coming on,’ the man told him. ‘Now, if your wife happened to be one of those she can probably get out on the next stage. That is, if it’s possible.’
‘How come she bought a ticket?’ Johnny asked in a low voice.
Ned listened closely. The woman who had been beside him had barely spoken to him. She had just carried on loading and passing on the rifles as fast and efficient as any man. Now she had moved away and was standing somewhere near the horses.
‘She didn’t buy no ticket,’ the man said, his voice equally quiet. ‘A committee in the town bought one for her. She wasn’t bothering no one. They shouldn’t’ve done it to her – leastways, not this time.’
Ned frowned. He couldn’t imagine what would make a town of people send a woman out on a stage at a time like this.
‘What made you go?’ Johnny asked.
‘Mail contracts,’ the man said with resigned fatality. ‘Gotta show good deliveries or you lose ’em, and you can’t operate a stage on just passengers.’
The man unscrewed a lid and drank from a bottle that sounded near empty. The scent of cheap liquor drifted to Ned on the wind.
‘Sure wished I could’ve had a drink of that real Eastern whiskey they was going to have at the Fort for Christmas,’ the man lamented quietly.
Ned huddled down by the wagon wheel. All thought of Christmas had been driven from his mind until now. He had forgotten that Christmas tree waiting for Ben’s wife and the thought of settling down and eating well and being thankful for one long, quiet day. And that man thought they were going to die here. After all these hours riding and running they were going to die by this stagecoach out in the bottom of the canyon, shot down by Indians. But they had Johnny and Ben here. Johnny had been the best rifleman in his unit. Ned didn’t know what to believe about Johnny any more, but he did believe that.
They were walking up a hill, trying to make the climb out of the north side of the canyon towards the pass that Johnny knew of. There were rocks like chevaux de frise all up the slope, hard and unyielding every time Ned’s boots slipped on them. He could hear Johnny leading his horse up ahead, Ben behind Johnny with his own horse. Ned was holding on to Doggone’s tail, walking in the wake of the scent of leather tack and the horses and the dung they dropped. He was so tired he didn’t care about that when he felt it soft underfoot.
The ground flattened out and Doggone stopped walking as the other horses halted in front of him. Ned stumbled over a rock and caught up with the horse, thankful at last to be on level ground.
‘You tired, Ned?’ Ben asked from just ahead.
‘No more tired than anybody else,’ Ned said quickly, stumbling forward as the horse shifted position. He patted Doggone’s flank gently with one hand, keeping hold of the tail with the other.
‘Well, we’ll rest up on top here for a while,’ Johnny said. ‘But we gotta get out of these canyons.’
Johnny didn’t sound tired at all, but he was able to see through Ned’s bravado. Ned was exhausted. The horses moved on and Ned followed, his legs moving like wood, the ground a layer of soft over hardness beneath the soles of his boots. There seemed to be no more rocks now the ground was flat, thank the Lord – nothing but the occasional stubborn hump of plants with dust driven into their roots. But there was a wind up here that hadn’t been so strong on the canyon floor. The air was colder and dust scudded over the ground with a soft sound.
The horses stopped again and Ben tied them off. Ned stood holding onto Doggone’s tail stupidly for a moment, and then he dropped his hand and took a step forward, away from the horse.
‘Come on, Ned,’ Johnny said, closing a hand around his arm with a firm gentleness. ‘I’ll find somewhere for you to set down.’
Ned followed him. It was odd to be so close to Johnny after he had been gone for so long. He felt strange and familiar all at once. His coat felt different to Ben’s, and different to the coat he remembered Johnny having all that time ago. It was a finer weave, softer and more slick with the grease of wear than Ben’s. But his smell was the same – the smell of his tobacco thick in the fabric of his clothes and the smell of his sweat a family smell, not that of a stranger. He smelt something like Uncle Charlie – they had always smoked the same blend. Ned felt a rising of sorrow for Uncle Charlie, and sorrow for what Johnny wasn’t. He wanted his family.
‘Ned, you don’t know what it’s like, being at war,’ Johnny said abruptly, breaking the thick silence.
‘You gonna give me more excuses, Johnny?’ Ned asked, turning his face away.
‘I ain’t giving you excuses. I don’t have to excuse myself to you, Ned,’ Johnny retorted quickly. ‘I’m your brother. It’s my duty to take care of you, and I’m going to. I’ve seen men split apart by cannon, nothing left but blood and brains and splintered bone. There ain’t no glory in that. There ain’t no immortal soul. There’s just meat, trodden into the mud under other men’s boots. I wasn’t going to be one of those men. I needed to be alive so I could come home and take care of you.’
‘They why d’you stay away?’ Ned asked fiercely. ‘It’s been five months nearly since the war ended. It don’t take five months to get from Tennessee to Arizona.’
‘It don’t take two weeks, neither.’
‘I guess it takes longer when you stop to rob a bank or murder some folks,’ Ned said darkly.
Johnny stopped abruptly, jerking at Ned’s coat angrily to turn him about.
‘Now look here, Ned. I didn’t go robbing no banks for the fun of it. How am I gonna take care of you without money? How am I gonna get your eyes fixed? You think a charitable surgeon’s gonna offer to fix you for nothing?’
‘I ain’t going to San Francisco and I ain’t seeing no doctors with that dirty money,’ Ned growled, pulling his arm away from Johnny’s hand. ‘Doc Walters told me when it happened that there weren’t no fixing could be done. Said that blow had clean ripped the insides of my eyes apart.’
‘Doc Walters,’ Johnny said scornfully. ‘He ain’t no eye doctor. He ain’t no city surgeon. It’s my fault you’ve got this handicap, Ned. I’m going to see you right, and I don’t care how many men I have to knock out of the way to do it.’
Ned pressed his mouth closed. He didn’t want Johnny to knock anyone else out of the way on his account, but he knew there was no use in talking. Johnny had never listened to anyone else. He had always gone his own way, trailing fire and thunder in his wake.
‘We at a place we can rest yet?’ he asked. He had the feeling they had been walking in circles, just so that Johnny could talk. The horses didn’t sound far away and he could hear Ben walking across the dry dirt to them.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said shortly. ‘Yeah, we are.’
‘There any cover? It’s cold.’
‘No,’ said Johnny, ‘but it’s a good vantage point. We’ll be able to see any of those red devils before they see us.’
‘Bunk down, Ned,’ Ben said, coming to stand on his other side and putting a hand on his arm. ‘Get some rest.’
‘You gonna get some rest too, Ben?’ Ned asked him. He was concerned for Ben to rest himself, but he was also worried about what might happen to Ben if he slept. He couldn’t trust Johnny.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said slowly, but there was doubt thick in his voice.
‘Sure he is,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ll keep watch.’
‘I just bet you will,’ Ben murmured.
‘Well, I ain’t going to let you kill me in my sleep,’ Johnny retorted. ‘Ned, get some rest,’ he said, striking Ned’s arm softly. ‘We ain’t got too much time to waste.’
Ned lay down on the ground right where he was, brushing his hand over the dust and then settling on his side. The ground was cold underneath him and the air was cold above him and the wind cut past him quietly, blowing right through his clothes, it seemed, and reaching straight to his skin. He could feel the movement of Doggone’s back under him, as if he were still riding. He was so tired that the cold and the dizzy feeling of riding didn’t matter. He tipped his hat down over his face and slept.
******
He dreamt he was lying on a bed made of stone, the cold creeping through beneath him and falling down above him in tiny crystals of frost. Johnny was watching him, his guns held loosely in relaxed hands. Ned knew he couldn’t move without Johnny. He knew that if he tried to walk away those hands would tighten and the guns would point at him. Johnny was like a snake in the sun, waiting to strike. Johnny hated himself for holding the guns on Ned, but he wouldn’t let them drop…
The cold was cutting through everything. Ned wasn’t tired enough to sleep through it any more. He moved restlessly, clutching at covers in his sleep that didn’t exist. And then he dreamed that Uncle Charlie was tucking a blanket over his shoulders and some of the cold was softened, and he slept on.
Time folded and stretched inside his mind, dreams threading through his sleep. He heard noises. There were noises of fighting, of scuffling on the dirt. There were the grunts of men locked together and fighting like dogs, quiet and intense. Ned woke abruptly and twisted towards the noises, calling out, ‘Ben? Ben?’
The sound cut off instantly and Johnny shouted from a distance away, ‘Nothing, Ned. Horses stirring. They’re cold too.’
He sounded out of breath. Johnny and Ben walked back towards him making sounds of brushing dust from their clothes and catching their breath. The horses were making no noise at all.
Ned touched his hand to his hat to straighten it, then made to lie back down. He felt something heavy on his body and brushed his fingers over what had been laid over him. It was Ben’s coat.
‘Thanks, Ben,’ he said gratefully. That explained the dream of Uncle Charlie and the blanket. That warmth had allowed him to stay asleep. Ben must be freezing in nothing but his shirt.
He laid his head back on the ground, holding his hat down with his hand. As he did a second coat was laid over his legs, and Johnny said, ‘Here y’are, Ned.’
‘Thanks,’ Ned said uncertainly.
He rested his head back down, but there was little chance of slipping back into sleep now. He could hear horses moving in the canyon bottom. It sounded like a multitude moving, the voices of men rising up indistinct and blown by the wind. Ben whispered something from somewhere near the edge of the plateau and Johnny walked over to him quickly. Ned lay still, gathering warmth under the coats, listening but catching no clear words. Ben and Johnny were talking low and turned away from him. And then after a while Johnny rose up and his voice was louder.
‘…trying to figure out how to fix Dave Parker and get Ned out of Fort Defiance,’ he said, his feet moving about on the ground and his voice moving closer and further away. ‘Now I’ve gotta figure out how to try to keep you from coming up against me so I won’t have to kill you, and if that wasn’t enough of a puzzlement, on top of that I’ve got the whole darn Indian nation to contend with, and on top of that it’s colder than a tinhorn gambler’s heart.’
Ned couldn’t help but smile quietly under his hat. For just a moment he felt sorry for Johnny. He felt sorry for Johnny, and he felt a tiny, uncharitable spear of gladness too. If Johnny hadn’t stayed away so long and done so much wrong he wouldn’t be coming up against these difficulties now.
There was quiet, and then Johnny said, ‘Well. Let’s get started. If we keep moving we’ll be out of here by sundown.’
Both men moved then, coming over to Ned. The coats were lifted from him, letting the cold in again.
‘Ned,’ Johnny said shortly, taking hold of his elbow and hauling him up.
Ned stood, shaking off sleep, and followed Johnny’s pull back to the horses. Somewhere below he could still hear the sound as of hundreds of hooves moving on the earth.
‘What is that, Ben?’ he asked. ‘Indians?’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘Must be close on a hundred of them down in the bottoms. They’re making a move out of the canyon.’
‘Sure am glad we’re up here,’ Ned smiled.
The horses walked on, and in the valley below the sound of the Indians swelled and faded with the wind and the terrain. For a while they were almost inaudible as their paths diverged, and then Ned could hear them again, louder than ever.
‘We’ll be out on the plains before the sun’s gone,’ Johnny said, bringing his horse to a halt for a moment.
Ned sat on Doggone, flanked by Ben and Johnny, listening to the world about him. He could smell the dust that was being raised into the air by all of those moving feet down below. As he listened he realised that he could hear horses running now, and rising above that the whooping of the Indians. They didn’t sound like they were just travelling steadily any more. Shots began to sound, echoing like swift thunderbolts. And then Ben said urgently, ‘Hey, look there!’
‘I can hear a wagon,’ Ned said, turning his head.
‘It’s not a wagon, it’s a stagecoach,’ Johnny snapped. ‘And the Indians got them running hell for leather. Come on!’
Ned spurred his horse on as he heard Johnny taking off. They were riding back down that hill, back down into the canyon bottoms that they had spent so long climbing out of. The sounds of whooping and shooting and horses running grew louder. They were riding straight towards that creaking, rattling noise of the stagecoach being driven at speed over rough land.
The stage had stopped as they drew up to it, but the noise of the Indians was still whirling and gathering about, shots still snapping through the air. And then a strange silence fell. They were still there – Ned was sure of that – but the Indians had stopped chasing.
‘They’re lining up, getting ready for an attack,’ Ben called across to him as the horses skewed to a standstill. ‘Come on, Ned. Hunker down behind the coach here,’
Ned swung to the ground and ran with Ben gripping at his arm. His outstretched hand hit the arc of the coach wheel with a slap and he dropped to his knees, ducking his head and cursing himself for his uselessness. He could have been another gun to fend off the Indians, and instead he was kneeling here, hiding like a jackrabbit in a scrape in the ground.
‘Any spare guns?’ Johnny was shouting as he ran.
A stranger, a man with a rough voice, called, ‘Yeah, there’s guns and shells in the coach.’
Ned sat back on his heels. A hand touched his back for a moment. Someone was crouching beside him. Then there was the thud as something was dumped onto the ground in front of him and he reached out and felt the thin wood of an ammunition box.
‘Load those guns – make yourself useful,’ Johnny shouted.
The Indians were starting their whooping again. Someone thrust a rifle into Ned’s hands and he slipped his fingers over it. It was a long time since he had loaded a rifle but he could remember well enough how to do it. He slipped cartridge after cartridge into the chamber. When it was full someone snatched it from him and pushed another into his hands.
‘Now, hold your fire until I tell you,’ Johnny shouted.
The Indians were rushing closer, closer, the horses’ hooves thudding onto the ground, their cries rising high above every other noise. Johnny waited until the first shot was fired by the attackers, and then shouted, ‘Now!’
Ned kept on loading the guns. The Indians charged and retreated in waves. He kept plunging his hand into the box of cartridges and slipping them into the weapons he was given.
The person beside him was a woman, he realised. The small sounds she made as she worked at loading guns beside him were a woman’s sounds, and when their hands clashed in the ammunition box he could feel the smallness of her fingers. Once something soft brushed against his face as if she had flung a shawl impatiently back over her shoulder and it had blown out and touched him. He had never expected to run across a woman in circumstances like this.
He listened keenly as he worked, noting the occasional thuds as one of the Indians fell from his horse and hit the ground. He didn’t hear any sounds of injury or death in his own party. He kept listening for Johnny’s voice and for Ben’s voice and he kept hearing them, snapping out orders or muttering quick curses. They must, slowly, be evening the odds. And then, eventually, the noise of the Indians receded and kept receding. They were riding away.
Ned held his breath, waiting to hear what would happen.
‘Wonder what they’re going to do now,’ Johnny said nervously.
‘Gone to get others,’ one of the strangers said – the man Ned had heard before. ‘Sun’ll be gone in a couple of minutes, and I don’t believe they’ll attack at night.’
‘If they don’t, there’ll be a swarm of them when day breaks,’ Johnny said grimly.
‘I knew this would happen when we left Willerton,’ the man said fatalistically.
‘Willerton?
‘Yup. We’re the first stage out in a week.’
‘That’s where my wife’s coming from,’ Ben said in concern, starting forward.
‘Well, there was a couple of passengers, but they decided not to buy tickets with this Indian showdown coming on,’ the man told him. ‘Now, if your wife happened to be one of those she can probably get out on the next stage. That is, if it’s possible.’
‘How come she bought a ticket?’ Johnny asked in a low voice.
Ned listened closely. The woman who had been beside him had barely spoken to him. She had just carried on loading and passing on the rifles as fast and efficient as any man. Now she had moved away and was standing somewhere near the horses.
‘She didn’t buy no ticket,’ the man said, his voice equally quiet. ‘A committee in the town bought one for her. She wasn’t bothering no one. They shouldn’t’ve done it to her – leastways, not this time.’
Ned frowned. He couldn’t imagine what would make a town of people send a woman out on a stage at a time like this.
‘What made you go?’ Johnny asked.
‘Mail contracts,’ the man said with resigned fatality. ‘Gotta show good deliveries or you lose ’em, and you can’t operate a stage on just passengers.’
The man unscrewed a lid and drank from a bottle that sounded near empty. The scent of cheap liquor drifted to Ned on the wind.
‘Sure wished I could’ve had a drink of that real Eastern whiskey they was going to have at the Fort for Christmas,’ the man lamented quietly.
Ned huddled down by the wagon wheel. All thought of Christmas had been driven from his mind until now. He had forgotten that Christmas tree waiting for Ben’s wife and the thought of settling down and eating well and being thankful for one long, quiet day. And that man thought they were going to die here. After all these hours riding and running they were going to die by this stagecoach out in the bottom of the canyon, shot down by Indians. But they had Johnny and Ben here. Johnny had been the best rifleman in his unit. Ned didn’t know what to believe about Johnny any more, but he did believe that.
Fort Defiance - Chapter 10
He came to with his face in the dirt, breathing dry dust into his mouth and nose. The horses were stirring nearby, the trees rustling above his head. He pressed a hand slowly to his bruised cheek. Johnny had hit him. Johnny…
Shots were firing somewhere, echoing like thunder from the canyon walls. Panic clenched at him as a realisation crept into his head. Ben wanted to kill Johnny. That meant that Johnny would mean to kill Ben first. That fist fighting he had heard when Johnny first arrived made sense now. It would be so easy for Johnny to shoot Ben and say that the Indians got him.
‘Ben?’ he called out, staggering to his feet.
There was no answer. Nothing but the sound of gunshots cracking and echoing somewhere away in front of him.
‘Ben?’ he called again, his voice cracking with fear. ‘Ben!’
He ran towards the noise and tripped as the ground rose up, falling face forward again onto the ground. He was running and falling, running and falling, calling out for Ben, but Ben didn’t answer. The dust billowed up around him every time he fell and filled the inside of his mouth and his lungs. There was nothing under his hands but dry, sandy earth that slipped through his fingers. With all the echoing from the cliffs he couldn’t work out where the shots were coming from and he was running across a wilderness with bullets flying, no idea if Ben were dead or alive. He had been stupid to even move, but it was too late now. He was caught in the open and had no clue which way to go.
Footsteps thudded behind him and someone barrelled onto him and pushed him to the ground, half dragging him over the dirt until he hit against the shelter of tree roots exposed and roughened by the wind. The smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke was strong around him, coming from that man who had hold of him. He didn’t want it to be Johnny.
‘Ben?’ he asked, something close to a sob in his voice now. ‘That you, Ben?’
‘It’s me, Ned,’ Ben said, his voice tense but reassuring. ‘Keep down!’
Ned huddled down, waves of relief pouring through his body. Ben’s arm was solid over his back, holding him pressed down to the ground. The shooting was right overhead. There was an Indian so close to him he could hear his breathing. He could smell sweat mixed up with his deerskin clothes. He heard running again and Johnny giving a kind of war cry, and then both Johnny’s guns fired simultaneously and Ned heard bodies thud to the ground just a few feet away from where he was.
Quiet settled around them. It was still and silent for a long few seconds. Then Johnny moved, his footsteps muffled in the dust. Ben sat up and let go of Ned with a rough parting shake.
‘You fool! You darn crazy fool!’ he told Ned, his voice strained with anger and spent fear.
Ned sat up, still breathing hard from the running and the fear. He pressed his hands onto the dry dirt, feeling the angle of the slope beneath him.
‘Don’t be in such a rush to get killed,’ Johnny said tersely nearby. ‘It might come to you soon enough.’
Ned had to keep himself from lurching at Johnny. He knew that Johnny had just saved his life with those two simultaneous shots over his head, but he was still so mad at him that he could have hit him.
‘Why d’you give yourself up on the ridge, Johnny?’ Ned asked him. He wanted Johnny to say something that would redeem him for all he had done, that would give Ned a reason to forgive him. ‘You ain’t a coward. Why?’
‘Because I wasn’t going to get my head blowed off knowing the war was ending,’ Johnny said sharply. ‘Some general sitting on his big fat headquarters trying to make a show for himself. Besides, the Parker boys was in that outfit. I didn’t bleed none for them.’
‘There was my brother and me,’ Ben reminded him in a level voice, ‘and other men.’
‘Ain’t that funny?’ Johnny said, his voice rich with sarcasm. ‘I was thinking about my brother, and me.’
‘It was your duty,’ Ned snapped.
It hurt to have Johnny mention him like that, as if he were trying to draw Ned into what he’d done. He didn’t want to think that any consideration of him had been pulling at Johnny’s thoughts when he made the decision to bail out and give himself up, and leave Ben’s brother and all those other men to certain death. The thought of that made his chest tighten.
‘A man that gets killed doing his duty ain’t any more alive than a man that just gets plain killed,’ Johnny retorted. ‘Course, I ain’t never had an opinion from anyone it’s ever happened to,’ he added acerbically.
‘Don’t make me your excuse, Johnny,’ Ned said in disgust.
‘I ain’t,’ Johnny said, striding towards Ned in his anger. ‘You asked me – I’m telling you why. Three years of fighting, wounded five times. I saw the end in sight. I wasn’t going to get killed for nothing.’
Johnny fell silent, but Ned could feel the anger still in him. He was pacing about as if things were moving in his mind, his footsteps thickening the air with dust. Ned barely moved. He was pinned to the dirt with tiredness and a misery so deep it was about to break him apart. He tried to think of what it had been like for Johnny in the middle of all that fighting, seeing so much death – but he couldn’t imagine allowing all those men to die just to save his own hide.
‘We’re going to take that coach out of Fort Defiance for San Francisco,’ Johnny said finally, turning back to him.
Ned sat still, speechless. He never had been able to fight against Johnny, least of all now when he couldn’t see and Johnny was his only family left. But the idea of going away with Johnny made him sick with fear. He didn’t want to live with him, to be reliant on him for everything. He wanted to stay here, where he belonged, in the house and the land that he knew. He would rather stay sitting right here, out in the canyon in the dirt, than go with Johnny to San Francisco.
‘You ain’t going to get on that coach if I can help it,’ Ben said with a threat in his voice, starting forward towards Johnny.
‘Don’t do it, Ben,’ Ned said brokenly. ‘He’s fast. He’s too fast.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Ben said. ‘Like a snake.’
‘And twice as nasty,’ Johnny completed as if reciting a trademark. ‘So stop making a pest out of yourself, Mister Only Survivor. I’m already more than beholden to you for what you’ve done for Ned.’ He turned away from Ben and moved back to Ned, leaning forward to put himself level with his brother. ‘Now, look. Let’s be practical. I got five thousand dollars to get your eyes fixed.’
Ned shook his head. Five thousand dollars was an amount of money he couldn’t imagine. It was the kind of money that came in dreams – but he didn’t even have to think his reply through.
‘I don’t want any of it.’
‘Where’d that rotten money come from?’ Ben asked derisively.
‘Listen, mister, you’re talking about the stuff I love,’ Johnny drawled in reply. ‘Where does anyone go for money? To a bank.’
‘Look out!’
Ned had almost forgotten about Johnny’s companion, the quiet man that he hadn’t yet spoken to or even heard speak. But at the stranger’s shout he threw himself to the dirt, hearing slow, creeping footsteps somewhere nearby. A shot rang out from behind him, and then another in the other direction, and bodies fell.
‘Ben?’ he called quickly, no idea who had been shot or how bad they were hurt. ‘Ben?’
‘Uhuh, I’m all right,’ Ben said calmly from nearby.
‘Appears to me you’re more worried about him than your own brother,’ Johnny said tightly.
Ned didn’t reply. He didn’t have it in him to tell Johnny, Yes, Ben’s been more of a brother to me than you have in a long time. Yes, I’d rather lose you than him. He let those thoughts run in his head and kept his mouth tight shut. But if it wasn’t Ben or Johnny who had fallen then it must have been the other man, and it must have been one last Indian who had taken that first shot.
‘Hankey was a good man,’ Johnny said slowly. ‘He didn’t have any feelings about anything. All he had was loyalty.’
Ned pressed his lips together hard, feeling sick. He hadn’t even learnt the man’s name until now. He sat very still, knowing that less than a few yards away was the dead body of a man who would not have been dead if Johnny had not rode out here after his brother. All around them were the dead bodies of Indians who were mad at having their land taken away from them. Maybe there was even Brave Bear, who had been something of a friend to Ned.
Johnny seemed to leave trails of death behind him, and all in the name of helping his brother. Perhaps Ned had more feelings than Johnny thought he ought. Perhaps Ned was not loyal enough to him any more – but he did not want any more blood let out on his account.
‘It’s still daylight, but we’d better get out of here,’ Johnny said, unstrapping the dead man’s gun belt. ‘There’ll be other Indians looking after these. Now, we can’t get out of the east or the west end of the canyon. There’s Indians growing out of the rocks at those passes.’
‘Then where?’ Ben asked.
‘Well, there’s a pass to the north that few knows about.’
‘And now will you give me a gun?’ Ben asked.
Ned stiffened. He hadn’t realised that all this time Johnny had left Ben defenceless. All that time it had just been Johnny and his friend shooting, and Ben had run out after Ned with no weapon in his hand.
‘We might need all the shooting can be done to get out of here,’ Ben persisted. ‘I ain’t never shot a man in the back. Don’t reckon I could. Not even you.’
There was silence. And then Ned heard Ben catching the gun and holster that Johnny tossed it to him. He felt a whole degree safer with Ben armed.
Ben buckled the belt on, then asked easily, ‘Do you mind if I heft it?’
‘Go ahead,’ Johnny said, but as he spoke there was the slick sound of him snapping his own guns out and levelling them on Ben. ‘Please. Don’t do nothing that’ll make me have to kill you,’ Johnny added in deadly earnest.
Ned sat and waited. He heard Ben throwing the gun up and catching it as if to test its weight in his hand. Johnny’s guns made no sound at all. And then Ben slid his weapon back into its holster, and a moment later Johnny did the same. Ned’s shoulders relaxed slowly. He felt as if he were sitting on dynamite, but he was almost certain he could trust Ben not to set it off.
‘Guess we should get a move on,’ Johnny said after a moment. ‘Come on, Ned.’
‘What about him?’ Ben asked, and Ned lifted his head, wondering if Ben was referring to him.
‘We haven’t got time for Christian burials,’ Johnny said crisply, and Ned realised that Ben was thinking of the body of Hankey, lying unburied on the dirt. ‘He’d understand that as well as I do.’
‘Well, I’d as soon not leave him for the coyotes,’ Ben said firmly.
Ned stood up, dusting off his pants and jacket and hitching up his belt. ‘Ben’s right. We can’t leave him out on the ground. It ain’t right.’
‘Ned, are you going to spend this whole time fighting with me?’ Johnny began in a warning voice, taking a few steps closer to him.
Ned moved backwards instinctively and a tree branch caught at his hat, reminding him of what was behind him.
‘I ain’t a kid any more, Johnny,’ he said, straightening his hat again.
‘No, you ain’t,’ Johnny said. ‘But I’m all the family you got left in this world, Neddy boy, and it’s my job to take care of you. You ain’t a kid, but you’re blind on my account.’
‘Then Uncle Charlie is dead,’ Ned said slowly, pushing his hands into his pockets and turning away.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said economically. ‘Came across three of Dave Parker’s lot putting him in the ground. I sent two of them after him, only I didn’t stick around to put them in the ground too. I’m happy to let the coyotes get ’em.’
‘That’s as may be, but Hankey was your man,’ Ben reminded him.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said. ‘And I ain’t going to get Ned killed by staying around here burying him.’ He caught at Ned’s coat arm and pulled. ‘Come on, Ned. We need to make that pass before all them Indians’ pals try to join the party.’
Ned stood still. It didn’t seem right to leave Hankey. Even the Parker gang had the decency to bury poor Uncle Charlie. But he knew that Johnny was right. They didn’t have the equipment to dig a hole for Hankey and they didn’t have time even to cover him in stones.
He pulled his sleeve away from Johnny’s hand and turned deliberately towards Ben.
‘Ben?’ he asked. ‘Would you give me a hand back to the horses?’
A difficult silence fell. Ned could feel the unspoken tension moving between Ben and Johnny. And then Ben moved over to him and said, ‘Sure, Ned. I’m here.’
Ned slipped his fingers about Ben’s arm. Perhaps he did have to go with Johnny, but he didn’t have to be in tow to Johnny. He didn’t want to touch Johnny right now. He wanted to have everyone be silent and to pretend that Johnny’s footfalls were just the echoes of Ben’s.
Poor Uncle Charlie… Ned had been sure that he was dead, but now he knew, and the knowing was far worse than the supposition. He felt as if something had fallen from his chest, just under his lungs, making every breath a long and hard fight against gravity. Uncle Charlie had been there forever, and had taken care of Ned in his blindness for four years. Sure he had been overprotective at times, but he had never let Ned down, never left him without help. Ned didn’t know which way to turn at the thought of there being no Uncle Charlie left in the world.
‘Y’all right, Ned?’ Ben asked in a low voice as Ned stumbled over a rough piece of ground. Johnny was walking ahead, impatient to get out of here, kicking up dust in his wake.
‘Yeah,’ Ned said shortly. He knew that Ben could tell he was not all right, and why. There was no need to say anything else.
‘You want to go to San Francisco with your brother?’
Ned stiffened. ‘I ain’t going to San Francisco,’ he said. ‘I don’t reckon even five thousand dollars could fix my eyes. They’re too far gone. Johnny always thinks he can fix things. He can’t fix this.’
‘No, I don’t reckon he can,’ Ben said slowly.
‘You ain’t going to leave me with Johnny, Ben?’ Ned asked uncertainly.
‘Why’d I leave you with a man I intend to kill first chance I get?’ Ben said with deadly seriousness. ‘Besides. You know we’re partners.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Ned said.
He had never felt such a gulf between him and Johnny as he did now, especially with Ben standing there as a kind of yardstick to hold Johnny up against. Even when he thought Johnny was dead he hadn’t felt such a distance between them. When he had heard how Johnny had lived by robbing and murdering after the war ended it seemed like a painted, smiling, china Johnny had been smashed in his mind. That Johnny had been gilt and perfect, and had never really existed. He had put those shards to rest and moved on. But now Johnny was here again, solid and real, trying to take the money he had stolen and press it on to Ned, to tarnish him too. He didn’t know Johnny any more and he didn’t know what to do with him. He kept hold of Ben’s arm and prayed that what Uncle Charlie had said was true, that God had given him Ben as a brother in place of Johnny. It was a trade that he would stick to any day.
Shots were firing somewhere, echoing like thunder from the canyon walls. Panic clenched at him as a realisation crept into his head. Ben wanted to kill Johnny. That meant that Johnny would mean to kill Ben first. That fist fighting he had heard when Johnny first arrived made sense now. It would be so easy for Johnny to shoot Ben and say that the Indians got him.
‘Ben?’ he called out, staggering to his feet.
There was no answer. Nothing but the sound of gunshots cracking and echoing somewhere away in front of him.
‘Ben?’ he called again, his voice cracking with fear. ‘Ben!’
He ran towards the noise and tripped as the ground rose up, falling face forward again onto the ground. He was running and falling, running and falling, calling out for Ben, but Ben didn’t answer. The dust billowed up around him every time he fell and filled the inside of his mouth and his lungs. There was nothing under his hands but dry, sandy earth that slipped through his fingers. With all the echoing from the cliffs he couldn’t work out where the shots were coming from and he was running across a wilderness with bullets flying, no idea if Ben were dead or alive. He had been stupid to even move, but it was too late now. He was caught in the open and had no clue which way to go.
Footsteps thudded behind him and someone barrelled onto him and pushed him to the ground, half dragging him over the dirt until he hit against the shelter of tree roots exposed and roughened by the wind. The smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke was strong around him, coming from that man who had hold of him. He didn’t want it to be Johnny.
‘Ben?’ he asked, something close to a sob in his voice now. ‘That you, Ben?’
‘It’s me, Ned,’ Ben said, his voice tense but reassuring. ‘Keep down!’
Ned huddled down, waves of relief pouring through his body. Ben’s arm was solid over his back, holding him pressed down to the ground. The shooting was right overhead. There was an Indian so close to him he could hear his breathing. He could smell sweat mixed up with his deerskin clothes. He heard running again and Johnny giving a kind of war cry, and then both Johnny’s guns fired simultaneously and Ned heard bodies thud to the ground just a few feet away from where he was.
Quiet settled around them. It was still and silent for a long few seconds. Then Johnny moved, his footsteps muffled in the dust. Ben sat up and let go of Ned with a rough parting shake.
‘You fool! You darn crazy fool!’ he told Ned, his voice strained with anger and spent fear.
Ned sat up, still breathing hard from the running and the fear. He pressed his hands onto the dry dirt, feeling the angle of the slope beneath him.
‘Don’t be in such a rush to get killed,’ Johnny said tersely nearby. ‘It might come to you soon enough.’
Ned had to keep himself from lurching at Johnny. He knew that Johnny had just saved his life with those two simultaneous shots over his head, but he was still so mad at him that he could have hit him.
‘Why d’you give yourself up on the ridge, Johnny?’ Ned asked him. He wanted Johnny to say something that would redeem him for all he had done, that would give Ned a reason to forgive him. ‘You ain’t a coward. Why?’
‘Because I wasn’t going to get my head blowed off knowing the war was ending,’ Johnny said sharply. ‘Some general sitting on his big fat headquarters trying to make a show for himself. Besides, the Parker boys was in that outfit. I didn’t bleed none for them.’
‘There was my brother and me,’ Ben reminded him in a level voice, ‘and other men.’
‘Ain’t that funny?’ Johnny said, his voice rich with sarcasm. ‘I was thinking about my brother, and me.’
‘It was your duty,’ Ned snapped.
It hurt to have Johnny mention him like that, as if he were trying to draw Ned into what he’d done. He didn’t want to think that any consideration of him had been pulling at Johnny’s thoughts when he made the decision to bail out and give himself up, and leave Ben’s brother and all those other men to certain death. The thought of that made his chest tighten.
‘A man that gets killed doing his duty ain’t any more alive than a man that just gets plain killed,’ Johnny retorted. ‘Course, I ain’t never had an opinion from anyone it’s ever happened to,’ he added acerbically.
‘Don’t make me your excuse, Johnny,’ Ned said in disgust.
‘I ain’t,’ Johnny said, striding towards Ned in his anger. ‘You asked me – I’m telling you why. Three years of fighting, wounded five times. I saw the end in sight. I wasn’t going to get killed for nothing.’
Johnny fell silent, but Ned could feel the anger still in him. He was pacing about as if things were moving in his mind, his footsteps thickening the air with dust. Ned barely moved. He was pinned to the dirt with tiredness and a misery so deep it was about to break him apart. He tried to think of what it had been like for Johnny in the middle of all that fighting, seeing so much death – but he couldn’t imagine allowing all those men to die just to save his own hide.
‘We’re going to take that coach out of Fort Defiance for San Francisco,’ Johnny said finally, turning back to him.
Ned sat still, speechless. He never had been able to fight against Johnny, least of all now when he couldn’t see and Johnny was his only family left. But the idea of going away with Johnny made him sick with fear. He didn’t want to live with him, to be reliant on him for everything. He wanted to stay here, where he belonged, in the house and the land that he knew. He would rather stay sitting right here, out in the canyon in the dirt, than go with Johnny to San Francisco.
‘You ain’t going to get on that coach if I can help it,’ Ben said with a threat in his voice, starting forward towards Johnny.
‘Don’t do it, Ben,’ Ned said brokenly. ‘He’s fast. He’s too fast.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Ben said. ‘Like a snake.’
‘And twice as nasty,’ Johnny completed as if reciting a trademark. ‘So stop making a pest out of yourself, Mister Only Survivor. I’m already more than beholden to you for what you’ve done for Ned.’ He turned away from Ben and moved back to Ned, leaning forward to put himself level with his brother. ‘Now, look. Let’s be practical. I got five thousand dollars to get your eyes fixed.’
Ned shook his head. Five thousand dollars was an amount of money he couldn’t imagine. It was the kind of money that came in dreams – but he didn’t even have to think his reply through.
‘I don’t want any of it.’
‘Where’d that rotten money come from?’ Ben asked derisively.
‘Listen, mister, you’re talking about the stuff I love,’ Johnny drawled in reply. ‘Where does anyone go for money? To a bank.’
‘Look out!’
Ned had almost forgotten about Johnny’s companion, the quiet man that he hadn’t yet spoken to or even heard speak. But at the stranger’s shout he threw himself to the dirt, hearing slow, creeping footsteps somewhere nearby. A shot rang out from behind him, and then another in the other direction, and bodies fell.
‘Ben?’ he called quickly, no idea who had been shot or how bad they were hurt. ‘Ben?’
‘Uhuh, I’m all right,’ Ben said calmly from nearby.
‘Appears to me you’re more worried about him than your own brother,’ Johnny said tightly.
Ned didn’t reply. He didn’t have it in him to tell Johnny, Yes, Ben’s been more of a brother to me than you have in a long time. Yes, I’d rather lose you than him. He let those thoughts run in his head and kept his mouth tight shut. But if it wasn’t Ben or Johnny who had fallen then it must have been the other man, and it must have been one last Indian who had taken that first shot.
‘Hankey was a good man,’ Johnny said slowly. ‘He didn’t have any feelings about anything. All he had was loyalty.’
Ned pressed his lips together hard, feeling sick. He hadn’t even learnt the man’s name until now. He sat very still, knowing that less than a few yards away was the dead body of a man who would not have been dead if Johnny had not rode out here after his brother. All around them were the dead bodies of Indians who were mad at having their land taken away from them. Maybe there was even Brave Bear, who had been something of a friend to Ned.
Johnny seemed to leave trails of death behind him, and all in the name of helping his brother. Perhaps Ned had more feelings than Johnny thought he ought. Perhaps Ned was not loyal enough to him any more – but he did not want any more blood let out on his account.
‘It’s still daylight, but we’d better get out of here,’ Johnny said, unstrapping the dead man’s gun belt. ‘There’ll be other Indians looking after these. Now, we can’t get out of the east or the west end of the canyon. There’s Indians growing out of the rocks at those passes.’
‘Then where?’ Ben asked.
‘Well, there’s a pass to the north that few knows about.’
‘And now will you give me a gun?’ Ben asked.
Ned stiffened. He hadn’t realised that all this time Johnny had left Ben defenceless. All that time it had just been Johnny and his friend shooting, and Ben had run out after Ned with no weapon in his hand.
‘We might need all the shooting can be done to get out of here,’ Ben persisted. ‘I ain’t never shot a man in the back. Don’t reckon I could. Not even you.’
There was silence. And then Ned heard Ben catching the gun and holster that Johnny tossed it to him. He felt a whole degree safer with Ben armed.
Ben buckled the belt on, then asked easily, ‘Do you mind if I heft it?’
‘Go ahead,’ Johnny said, but as he spoke there was the slick sound of him snapping his own guns out and levelling them on Ben. ‘Please. Don’t do nothing that’ll make me have to kill you,’ Johnny added in deadly earnest.
Ned sat and waited. He heard Ben throwing the gun up and catching it as if to test its weight in his hand. Johnny’s guns made no sound at all. And then Ben slid his weapon back into its holster, and a moment later Johnny did the same. Ned’s shoulders relaxed slowly. He felt as if he were sitting on dynamite, but he was almost certain he could trust Ben not to set it off.
‘Guess we should get a move on,’ Johnny said after a moment. ‘Come on, Ned.’
‘What about him?’ Ben asked, and Ned lifted his head, wondering if Ben was referring to him.
‘We haven’t got time for Christian burials,’ Johnny said crisply, and Ned realised that Ben was thinking of the body of Hankey, lying unburied on the dirt. ‘He’d understand that as well as I do.’
‘Well, I’d as soon not leave him for the coyotes,’ Ben said firmly.
Ned stood up, dusting off his pants and jacket and hitching up his belt. ‘Ben’s right. We can’t leave him out on the ground. It ain’t right.’
‘Ned, are you going to spend this whole time fighting with me?’ Johnny began in a warning voice, taking a few steps closer to him.
Ned moved backwards instinctively and a tree branch caught at his hat, reminding him of what was behind him.
‘I ain’t a kid any more, Johnny,’ he said, straightening his hat again.
‘No, you ain’t,’ Johnny said. ‘But I’m all the family you got left in this world, Neddy boy, and it’s my job to take care of you. You ain’t a kid, but you’re blind on my account.’
‘Then Uncle Charlie is dead,’ Ned said slowly, pushing his hands into his pockets and turning away.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said economically. ‘Came across three of Dave Parker’s lot putting him in the ground. I sent two of them after him, only I didn’t stick around to put them in the ground too. I’m happy to let the coyotes get ’em.’
‘That’s as may be, but Hankey was your man,’ Ben reminded him.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said. ‘And I ain’t going to get Ned killed by staying around here burying him.’ He caught at Ned’s coat arm and pulled. ‘Come on, Ned. We need to make that pass before all them Indians’ pals try to join the party.’
Ned stood still. It didn’t seem right to leave Hankey. Even the Parker gang had the decency to bury poor Uncle Charlie. But he knew that Johnny was right. They didn’t have the equipment to dig a hole for Hankey and they didn’t have time even to cover him in stones.
He pulled his sleeve away from Johnny’s hand and turned deliberately towards Ben.
‘Ben?’ he asked. ‘Would you give me a hand back to the horses?’
A difficult silence fell. Ned could feel the unspoken tension moving between Ben and Johnny. And then Ben moved over to him and said, ‘Sure, Ned. I’m here.’
Ned slipped his fingers about Ben’s arm. Perhaps he did have to go with Johnny, but he didn’t have to be in tow to Johnny. He didn’t want to touch Johnny right now. He wanted to have everyone be silent and to pretend that Johnny’s footfalls were just the echoes of Ben’s.
Poor Uncle Charlie… Ned had been sure that he was dead, but now he knew, and the knowing was far worse than the supposition. He felt as if something had fallen from his chest, just under his lungs, making every breath a long and hard fight against gravity. Uncle Charlie had been there forever, and had taken care of Ned in his blindness for four years. Sure he had been overprotective at times, but he had never let Ned down, never left him without help. Ned didn’t know which way to turn at the thought of there being no Uncle Charlie left in the world.
‘Y’all right, Ned?’ Ben asked in a low voice as Ned stumbled over a rough piece of ground. Johnny was walking ahead, impatient to get out of here, kicking up dust in his wake.
‘Yeah,’ Ned said shortly. He knew that Ben could tell he was not all right, and why. There was no need to say anything else.
‘You want to go to San Francisco with your brother?’
Ned stiffened. ‘I ain’t going to San Francisco,’ he said. ‘I don’t reckon even five thousand dollars could fix my eyes. They’re too far gone. Johnny always thinks he can fix things. He can’t fix this.’
‘No, I don’t reckon he can,’ Ben said slowly.
‘You ain’t going to leave me with Johnny, Ben?’ Ned asked uncertainly.
‘Why’d I leave you with a man I intend to kill first chance I get?’ Ben said with deadly seriousness. ‘Besides. You know we’re partners.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Ned said.
He had never felt such a gulf between him and Johnny as he did now, especially with Ben standing there as a kind of yardstick to hold Johnny up against. Even when he thought Johnny was dead he hadn’t felt such a distance between them. When he had heard how Johnny had lived by robbing and murdering after the war ended it seemed like a painted, smiling, china Johnny had been smashed in his mind. That Johnny had been gilt and perfect, and had never really existed. He had put those shards to rest and moved on. But now Johnny was here again, solid and real, trying to take the money he had stolen and press it on to Ned, to tarnish him too. He didn’t know Johnny any more and he didn’t know what to do with him. He kept hold of Ben’s arm and prayed that what Uncle Charlie had said was true, that God had given him Ben as a brother in place of Johnny. It was a trade that he would stick to any day.
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Graves on Grey Hair, Sex and his Early Career
Because I spend too much time browsing on Google... Here's a Peter Graves interview from the Sarasota Journal, from 1st March, 1971. It covers a lot of topics. Reading the adverts is fun too!
Friday, 30 September 2011
Fort Defiance - Chapter 9
The air was thin and cold. Ned could taste the light touch of dew in each breath and feel it settling on his hands and face. He was tireder than he’d ever been, but the horses kept on walking and Ben kept on picking out a path through the canyons, mile after mile. He had felt the night grow and wane around him and now his eyes were hot and his throat was dry and the need to sleep hung through every part of his body. Once he found himself slipping unawares into a soft, warm place with enticing thoughts and drifting softness – and then he jerked upright, shock rippling through him as he realised he’d fell asleep and almost fell right off the back of the horse.
‘It dawn yet, Ben?’ he asked, trying to keep the need to yawn from his voice. His hands were stiff on the reins and he flexed his fingers. They didn’t feel too different to the senseless leather they were holding.
‘Plumb on,’ Ben said, reining his horse in to a slower pace. ‘You tired, Ned?’
‘Yeah,’ he said honestly. ‘Too tired to sleep maybe, but I’m tired enough to drop.’
‘Can you feel that sun behind us?’
Ned shook his head. He couldn’t feel anything but damp and cold and exhaustion.
‘Well, it’s coming up dead behind us at the east end of the canyon. Might start to warm up our backs a little.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Ned smiled. It seemed like wishful thinking that it would get warmer, but the thought of the sun there, molten and awake on the horizon, was a warming thought.
‘It’s gonna get real bright soon,’ Ben said. ‘There’s a good spot for us to bed down during the day. We’ll start again as soon as it gets dark.’
The horses wound their way down a small slope, hooves slipping in the loose dirt. Ned could hear trees rustling softly in the light wind.
‘We’ll hitch the horses here,’ Ben said, getting down from his horse with a light thud.
Ned slipped onto the ground and stood holding on to Doggone’s reins, his legs straight and stiff under him. Leaves were moving overhead, and he could feel the sun now in a patch on the side of his face when there was a lull in the breeze. Ben took the reins from him and secured the horse with his own, and then took hold of Ned’s arm.
‘Come on. Let’s get us some rest.’
Ned looped his arm through Ben’s, too tired to do more than stumble behind him as Ben led him to the spot he had chosen. He slipped down a little dip in the ground and Ben said, ‘There y’are, Ned. Settle down.’
It was a narrow space like a dried up gully. The wind cut overhead but didn’t reach down into the sheltered space. Ned sat with a rock at his back and his legs stretched out over the soft dirt, and waited for sleep to overcome him like it had on Doggone’s back.
He closed his eyes and rested his head back on the rock, but his mind wouldn’t stop working. He saw Johnny standing there, cutting a swell, dressed for impressing the girls and showing the men that he was the best in town. He saw him with his gun belt buckled around his lean middle, a revolver snug in each holster, and his hat pushed back on his head. He had always felt safe when Johnny was around.
He remembered sitting at a table in Dave Parker’s saloon, drinking whiskey that Johnny had bought, drinking it down and drinking more down, getting drunker than Johnny was. Johnny could drink all night and hardly show any difference for it, but Ned got silly and laughed and lay back in his chair and wanted to welcome the whole world into his arms.
He could barely remember what it was Johnny had said any more – something about the Parkers, about Billy or John, in a too-loud voice – and Ned had laughed, and then suddenly everything had changed. There was a smash as Billy Parker struck a bottle into the hard edge of the bar and then he was coming at him, fast and ugly, the bottle held out before him like a knife – and then Johnny’s hand cutting across in front of him, taking the impact of that bottle before it hit Ned, and the blood suddenly welling and dripping down onto the table in big, spreading drops like an unexpected rain. Even through that pain and that welling of blood Johnny had drawn his guns, steady as ever, and everything had gone quiet. No one wanted to set Johnny off when he had his guns in his hands, least of all the Parker boys.
Ned frowned, trying to picture what had happened next. Johnny sitting at the table with his hand dripping blood and someone – Ned couldn’t remember who – tying a cloth around the wound while Johnny kept his guns steadily on the Parkers and ready to turn on anyone else who tried anything.
‘You don’t set on my brother,’ he had said, as steady as if he had been drinking nothing but water. ‘No one sets on my brother.’
Dave Parker’s mouth had been closed in a tight line. He had stayed behind the bar while his brothers had come at Ned and Johnny, and he was still there, polishing the fingermarks off a glass and watching Johnny like a snake. Sobriety had come over Ned like a cold drench and he remembered saying to Johnny, ‘Let’s go home. No sense in hanging around here.’ But Johnny had shook his head and said, ‘I paid for these drinks. We’re going to sit here and drink them, Ned.’ When Ned had shook his head and made as if to get up Johnny’s voice changed and he said, ‘Sit down, Ned,’ as if he were ordering a dog to stay. That had been a long, long night…
‘We gotta get some rest, Ned,’ Ben said, cutting into his memory and bringing him back to this dry, cold gully in the ground. ‘We’ve got another tough move ahead of us tonight.’
‘Ahh, can’t sleep,’ Ned said tiredly, sitting up away from the rock. ‘Thinking about Johnny.’
‘Forget it,’ Ben said instantly, shifting round to sit beside him. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Yeah,’ Ned said, resting back again. ‘Better he is. But he was my brother, Ben. Keep thinking about the time in that saloon when the Parker boys come at me, one of ’em with a broken bottle in his hand. Johnny stuck out his bare fist, took that big scar across the back of it.’
He rubbed his fingers over the back of his own hand, thinking of the feel of that ragged scar on Johnny.
‘Is that when you lost your sight?’ Ben asked quietly.
He nodded. ‘Later that night. Got dry gulched. Never did know who it was for sure.’
That memory was short and brutal – walking back toward the horses, none too steady on his feet, and Johnny saying something about taking a piss and disappearing behind the feed store. Ned reaching to loosen the reins from the hitch rail. And then a crack about the back of his head and pain exploding through his body, and falling hard and helpless onto the ground. Very little noise but the strange dampened thuds of fists and boots on his flesh as he lay on the dirt, and the grunts forced from his mouth. He couldn’t remember how it had gone from then, or how long he had lain before Johnny had come back. He couldn’t remember anything from that time until he had woken in his bed at home, immobile with pain, and blind.
‘Oh, I was sick for months from that beating,’ he said. Just the memory of it brought a knot into his stomach. But a noise caught his ears and took him away from those thoughts. ‘Hey. Someone’s coming,’ he said, sitting up again. He could hear a horse picking slowly over the soft ground.
Ben darted up and jogged away from him, quiet on quick feet.
‘Who is it?’ Ned called, rising to his knees and then hovering there, caught between standing up and huddling low, out of sight.
‘Stranger,’ Ben said shortly. ‘Stay here, Ned, and don’t move. I’m going out there.’
Ned sat back on his heels and waited, listening hard. He heard Ben move away, but it was hard to make sense of the sounds after that. There were footsteps on the dirt and talking, and then another horse and a new voice. He could hear them shuffling about. There was quiet and then voices again for a good while. And then the sound of fighting, tumbling about and fists hitting bone. Ned sat up straight, fighting with himself to stay where he was. He knew that if he lost Ben he would have no chance out here, but if it were one of the Parker gang out there he would have no chance anyway.
He heard coughing like someone had caught a fist to the stomach, and then more blows. Then someone shouted and the fighting stopped and everyone moved together. There were Indian ponies somewhere in the distance, and much closer than them there were people walking towards him, their boots striking the dirt and the horses walking alongside them.
‘Ben?’ he asked nervously as they came down into the gully.
‘It’s me, Ned,’ Ben said quickly. ‘I’m all right.’
He exhaled a long breath of relief. ‘I heard Indian ponies.’
‘They didn’t spot us,’ Ben assured him.
Ned sat still and listened. It was obvious Ben wasn’t alone but he couldn’t tell how many men were there.
‘Who’s with you?’ he asked.
‘Couple of strangers travelling the same way we are,’ Ben told him easily.
Ned relaxed a little. Anyone who wasn’t out to kill him could only be a help. It didn’t explain the fight he had heard, but if Ben didn’t want to mention it then Ned had the sense to stay quiet about it too.
‘My name’s Ned,’ he said. ‘Howdy, strangers.’
He waited for a moment for a response, but there was none. He was used to that. Some folks were struck strange when they noticed he was blind, as if they didn’t know what to say. But then he heard the ponies again, closer and coming in their direction.
‘Riders coming this way,’ he said quickly. ‘Ain’t white men. Them horses got no shoes.’
One of the strangers was running before he’d even finished speaking.
‘Come on, Ned,’ Ben said urgently, grabbing him under the arm and hauling him to his feet.
One of the horses set up a whinnying under the trees. The two strangers were running and calling out in short, sharp sentences as Ned followed Ben out of the gully, stumbling up the dusty slope.
‘Get hold of that horse’s muzzle, Ned,’ Ben said, thrusting him towards the hindquarters of the whinnying horse and then pounding off in another direction.
Ned felt along the horse to its head, glad to be holding the animal if only so that he could mount it and ride away if need be. He hated himself for it, but he had no other defence but running or hiding. The horse lifted its head and neighed again and he tried to pull it down to put his hands about its soft nose.
‘Keep that horse quiet!’ someone shouted, running over to him and jerking the horse’s head down roughly a moment before Ned could get his own hands around it. ‘That ought to hold the sound in you.’
The man’s voice was eerily familiar. Ned moved his hands down the horse’s head to replace that man’s grip on its muzzle with his own. His fingers moved over the back of the man’s hands, and over a thick scar that snaked across his skin. It was a scar he had never seen, but only felt.
‘Johnny?’ he asked in amazement. ‘It’s you, ain’t it?’
‘Yeah, I’m back, Neddy boy,’ Johnny said dryly.
Anger welled up in him suddenly like boiling water. All that time waiting for Johnny to come back, the ranch falling apart around them, and then the grief of hearing Johnny was dead, and poor Uncle Charlie giving up his life for what Johnny had done. If Johnny had been alive all that time he should have been there, there to draw his guns quick as lightning and see to Dave Parker and send him to his grave. Ned was too mad to think, almost too mad to speak, at all that pain and hardship that had come just through Johnny.
‘Why?’ he grated in fury. ‘Why d’you come back?’
‘For you,’ Johnny said, as if he were surprised that Ned would ask.
Three shots rang out one after the other and Johnny pulled away from him urgently.
‘We’ll talk about it later.’
Ned grabbed at his cuff and followed him, taking hold of him by his arm and yanking him to a standstill.
‘Did you give yourself up on the ridge, Johnny?’ he snapped. ‘Did you? Did you?’
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said, beginning to move away again. ‘Now let me go, will you?’
Ned pulled him back viciously and grabbed him harder. ‘You’re supposed to be dead. You shoulda stayed dead.’
Ben was shouting from a distance, desperation in his voice, but Ned kept hold of Johnny, stopping him from running off. If he let go of him now he might never see him again, never get a chance to hear those answers he desperately needed.
‘Why did you give yourself up on the ridge, Johnny?’ Ned persisted.
He took hold of Johnny by his coat lapels and shook him, the anger hazing out his awareness of anything else around them. He wanted to punch Johnny, to beat him for what he had done. He wanted to be fifteen and able to see, and to roll about on the dirt fighting him until all the fight had left him. Johnny would beat him, he knew that, but he would feel better for it all the same.
‘Why?’ he snapped, his hands tight on the cloth of Johnny’s coat.
‘Look, Ned, this ain’t the time to talk!’
Ned shook him again. ‘I want to know why – now tell me!’
Johnny kept trying to pull away, trying to knock Ned’s hands from his coat. ‘Ned, would you let go of me – ’
‘Tell me!’
‘Ned, you’re making – ’
The gunshots were thickening. Johnny gave up arguing abruptly and the shock of his fist slammed into the side of Ned’s face. Ned staggered backwards, falling onto the ground, half senseless from the blow. Dimly he heard Johnny running, but his ears were ringing, the blood pulsing in his temples. He rolled over, and lay still.
‘It dawn yet, Ben?’ he asked, trying to keep the need to yawn from his voice. His hands were stiff on the reins and he flexed his fingers. They didn’t feel too different to the senseless leather they were holding.
‘Plumb on,’ Ben said, reining his horse in to a slower pace. ‘You tired, Ned?’
‘Yeah,’ he said honestly. ‘Too tired to sleep maybe, but I’m tired enough to drop.’
‘Can you feel that sun behind us?’
Ned shook his head. He couldn’t feel anything but damp and cold and exhaustion.
‘Well, it’s coming up dead behind us at the east end of the canyon. Might start to warm up our backs a little.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Ned smiled. It seemed like wishful thinking that it would get warmer, but the thought of the sun there, molten and awake on the horizon, was a warming thought.
‘It’s gonna get real bright soon,’ Ben said. ‘There’s a good spot for us to bed down during the day. We’ll start again as soon as it gets dark.’
The horses wound their way down a small slope, hooves slipping in the loose dirt. Ned could hear trees rustling softly in the light wind.
‘We’ll hitch the horses here,’ Ben said, getting down from his horse with a light thud.
Ned slipped onto the ground and stood holding on to Doggone’s reins, his legs straight and stiff under him. Leaves were moving overhead, and he could feel the sun now in a patch on the side of his face when there was a lull in the breeze. Ben took the reins from him and secured the horse with his own, and then took hold of Ned’s arm.
‘Come on. Let’s get us some rest.’
Ned looped his arm through Ben’s, too tired to do more than stumble behind him as Ben led him to the spot he had chosen. He slipped down a little dip in the ground and Ben said, ‘There y’are, Ned. Settle down.’
It was a narrow space like a dried up gully. The wind cut overhead but didn’t reach down into the sheltered space. Ned sat with a rock at his back and his legs stretched out over the soft dirt, and waited for sleep to overcome him like it had on Doggone’s back.
He closed his eyes and rested his head back on the rock, but his mind wouldn’t stop working. He saw Johnny standing there, cutting a swell, dressed for impressing the girls and showing the men that he was the best in town. He saw him with his gun belt buckled around his lean middle, a revolver snug in each holster, and his hat pushed back on his head. He had always felt safe when Johnny was around.
He remembered sitting at a table in Dave Parker’s saloon, drinking whiskey that Johnny had bought, drinking it down and drinking more down, getting drunker than Johnny was. Johnny could drink all night and hardly show any difference for it, but Ned got silly and laughed and lay back in his chair and wanted to welcome the whole world into his arms.
He could barely remember what it was Johnny had said any more – something about the Parkers, about Billy or John, in a too-loud voice – and Ned had laughed, and then suddenly everything had changed. There was a smash as Billy Parker struck a bottle into the hard edge of the bar and then he was coming at him, fast and ugly, the bottle held out before him like a knife – and then Johnny’s hand cutting across in front of him, taking the impact of that bottle before it hit Ned, and the blood suddenly welling and dripping down onto the table in big, spreading drops like an unexpected rain. Even through that pain and that welling of blood Johnny had drawn his guns, steady as ever, and everything had gone quiet. No one wanted to set Johnny off when he had his guns in his hands, least of all the Parker boys.
Ned frowned, trying to picture what had happened next. Johnny sitting at the table with his hand dripping blood and someone – Ned couldn’t remember who – tying a cloth around the wound while Johnny kept his guns steadily on the Parkers and ready to turn on anyone else who tried anything.
‘You don’t set on my brother,’ he had said, as steady as if he had been drinking nothing but water. ‘No one sets on my brother.’
Dave Parker’s mouth had been closed in a tight line. He had stayed behind the bar while his brothers had come at Ned and Johnny, and he was still there, polishing the fingermarks off a glass and watching Johnny like a snake. Sobriety had come over Ned like a cold drench and he remembered saying to Johnny, ‘Let’s go home. No sense in hanging around here.’ But Johnny had shook his head and said, ‘I paid for these drinks. We’re going to sit here and drink them, Ned.’ When Ned had shook his head and made as if to get up Johnny’s voice changed and he said, ‘Sit down, Ned,’ as if he were ordering a dog to stay. That had been a long, long night…
‘We gotta get some rest, Ned,’ Ben said, cutting into his memory and bringing him back to this dry, cold gully in the ground. ‘We’ve got another tough move ahead of us tonight.’
‘Ahh, can’t sleep,’ Ned said tiredly, sitting up away from the rock. ‘Thinking about Johnny.’
‘Forget it,’ Ben said instantly, shifting round to sit beside him. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Yeah,’ Ned said, resting back again. ‘Better he is. But he was my brother, Ben. Keep thinking about the time in that saloon when the Parker boys come at me, one of ’em with a broken bottle in his hand. Johnny stuck out his bare fist, took that big scar across the back of it.’
He rubbed his fingers over the back of his own hand, thinking of the feel of that ragged scar on Johnny.
‘Is that when you lost your sight?’ Ben asked quietly.
He nodded. ‘Later that night. Got dry gulched. Never did know who it was for sure.’
That memory was short and brutal – walking back toward the horses, none too steady on his feet, and Johnny saying something about taking a piss and disappearing behind the feed store. Ned reaching to loosen the reins from the hitch rail. And then a crack about the back of his head and pain exploding through his body, and falling hard and helpless onto the ground. Very little noise but the strange dampened thuds of fists and boots on his flesh as he lay on the dirt, and the grunts forced from his mouth. He couldn’t remember how it had gone from then, or how long he had lain before Johnny had come back. He couldn’t remember anything from that time until he had woken in his bed at home, immobile with pain, and blind.
‘Oh, I was sick for months from that beating,’ he said. Just the memory of it brought a knot into his stomach. But a noise caught his ears and took him away from those thoughts. ‘Hey. Someone’s coming,’ he said, sitting up again. He could hear a horse picking slowly over the soft ground.
Ben darted up and jogged away from him, quiet on quick feet.
‘Who is it?’ Ned called, rising to his knees and then hovering there, caught between standing up and huddling low, out of sight.
‘Stranger,’ Ben said shortly. ‘Stay here, Ned, and don’t move. I’m going out there.’
Ned sat back on his heels and waited, listening hard. He heard Ben move away, but it was hard to make sense of the sounds after that. There were footsteps on the dirt and talking, and then another horse and a new voice. He could hear them shuffling about. There was quiet and then voices again for a good while. And then the sound of fighting, tumbling about and fists hitting bone. Ned sat up straight, fighting with himself to stay where he was. He knew that if he lost Ben he would have no chance out here, but if it were one of the Parker gang out there he would have no chance anyway.
He heard coughing like someone had caught a fist to the stomach, and then more blows. Then someone shouted and the fighting stopped and everyone moved together. There were Indian ponies somewhere in the distance, and much closer than them there were people walking towards him, their boots striking the dirt and the horses walking alongside them.
‘Ben?’ he asked nervously as they came down into the gully.
‘It’s me, Ned,’ Ben said quickly. ‘I’m all right.’
He exhaled a long breath of relief. ‘I heard Indian ponies.’
‘They didn’t spot us,’ Ben assured him.
Ned sat still and listened. It was obvious Ben wasn’t alone but he couldn’t tell how many men were there.
‘Who’s with you?’ he asked.
‘Couple of strangers travelling the same way we are,’ Ben told him easily.
Ned relaxed a little. Anyone who wasn’t out to kill him could only be a help. It didn’t explain the fight he had heard, but if Ben didn’t want to mention it then Ned had the sense to stay quiet about it too.
‘My name’s Ned,’ he said. ‘Howdy, strangers.’
He waited for a moment for a response, but there was none. He was used to that. Some folks were struck strange when they noticed he was blind, as if they didn’t know what to say. But then he heard the ponies again, closer and coming in their direction.
‘Riders coming this way,’ he said quickly. ‘Ain’t white men. Them horses got no shoes.’
One of the strangers was running before he’d even finished speaking.
‘Come on, Ned,’ Ben said urgently, grabbing him under the arm and hauling him to his feet.
One of the horses set up a whinnying under the trees. The two strangers were running and calling out in short, sharp sentences as Ned followed Ben out of the gully, stumbling up the dusty slope.
‘Get hold of that horse’s muzzle, Ned,’ Ben said, thrusting him towards the hindquarters of the whinnying horse and then pounding off in another direction.
Ned felt along the horse to its head, glad to be holding the animal if only so that he could mount it and ride away if need be. He hated himself for it, but he had no other defence but running or hiding. The horse lifted its head and neighed again and he tried to pull it down to put his hands about its soft nose.
‘Keep that horse quiet!’ someone shouted, running over to him and jerking the horse’s head down roughly a moment before Ned could get his own hands around it. ‘That ought to hold the sound in you.’
The man’s voice was eerily familiar. Ned moved his hands down the horse’s head to replace that man’s grip on its muzzle with his own. His fingers moved over the back of the man’s hands, and over a thick scar that snaked across his skin. It was a scar he had never seen, but only felt.
‘Johnny?’ he asked in amazement. ‘It’s you, ain’t it?’
‘Yeah, I’m back, Neddy boy,’ Johnny said dryly.
Anger welled up in him suddenly like boiling water. All that time waiting for Johnny to come back, the ranch falling apart around them, and then the grief of hearing Johnny was dead, and poor Uncle Charlie giving up his life for what Johnny had done. If Johnny had been alive all that time he should have been there, there to draw his guns quick as lightning and see to Dave Parker and send him to his grave. Ned was too mad to think, almost too mad to speak, at all that pain and hardship that had come just through Johnny.
‘Why?’ he grated in fury. ‘Why d’you come back?’
‘For you,’ Johnny said, as if he were surprised that Ned would ask.
Three shots rang out one after the other and Johnny pulled away from him urgently.
‘We’ll talk about it later.’
Ned grabbed at his cuff and followed him, taking hold of him by his arm and yanking him to a standstill.
‘Did you give yourself up on the ridge, Johnny?’ he snapped. ‘Did you? Did you?’
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said, beginning to move away again. ‘Now let me go, will you?’
Ned pulled him back viciously and grabbed him harder. ‘You’re supposed to be dead. You shoulda stayed dead.’
Ben was shouting from a distance, desperation in his voice, but Ned kept hold of Johnny, stopping him from running off. If he let go of him now he might never see him again, never get a chance to hear those answers he desperately needed.
‘Why did you give yourself up on the ridge, Johnny?’ Ned persisted.
He took hold of Johnny by his coat lapels and shook him, the anger hazing out his awareness of anything else around them. He wanted to punch Johnny, to beat him for what he had done. He wanted to be fifteen and able to see, and to roll about on the dirt fighting him until all the fight had left him. Johnny would beat him, he knew that, but he would feel better for it all the same.
‘Why?’ he snapped, his hands tight on the cloth of Johnny’s coat.
‘Look, Ned, this ain’t the time to talk!’
Ned shook him again. ‘I want to know why – now tell me!’
Johnny kept trying to pull away, trying to knock Ned’s hands from his coat. ‘Ned, would you let go of me – ’
‘Tell me!’
‘Ned, you’re making – ’
The gunshots were thickening. Johnny gave up arguing abruptly and the shock of his fist slammed into the side of Ned’s face. Ned staggered backwards, falling onto the ground, half senseless from the blow. Dimly he heard Johnny running, but his ears were ringing, the blood pulsing in his temples. He rolled over, and lay still.
Sighing Laments
Seeing as this is a forum for venting fannish angst, I thought I could vent about the gorgeousness and beauty of Peter Graves, and the fact that I know no one who shares my appreciation of him. I have a friend who is reminded by him of Captain Kirk. I have a husband who admires Peter Graves as an actor but understandably doesn't harbour a burning desire for him. I have a sister who doesn't even know who Peter Graves is. In that case I'll vent to the empty sounding board of the internet.
In case you don't know who Peter Graves is, let me encapsulate him. Long, lean legs, taut thighs. Strong arms, broad shoulders. Hair that ranged from gold to silver through his life. Eyes so blue you could fall into them and float forever. The kind of man who would walk into a room and make you go weak at the knees. The unattainably perfect man that you could never aspire to. Left-handed, clarinet playing, with the kind of voice you would follow blindly into hell.
Nope. I can't do it. SpockJones does it so much better here - http://spockjones.blogspot.com/2009/10/mission-impossible.html
I'll just leave you with a few more images...(I'd like to add in some Whiplash - the best series ever - and some more Mission: Impossible, but I'm on the wrong computer...)
 |
| Fort Yuma (1955) |
In case you don't know who Peter Graves is, let me encapsulate him. Long, lean legs, taut thighs. Strong arms, broad shoulders. Hair that ranged from gold to silver through his life. Eyes so blue you could fall into them and float forever. The kind of man who would walk into a room and make you go weak at the knees. The unattainably perfect man that you could never aspire to. Left-handed, clarinet playing, with the kind of voice you would follow blindly into hell.
 |
| The Naked Street (1955), I believe |
Nope. I can't do it. SpockJones does it so much better here - http://spockjones.blogspot.com/2009/10/mission-impossible.html
I'll just leave you with a few more images...(I'd like to add in some Whiplash - the best series ever - and some more Mission: Impossible, but I'm on the wrong computer...)
 |
| Bayou (1957) |
 |
| Directing Gunsmoke |
 |
| Wolf Larsen (1958) |
 |
| Mission: Impossible, I believe |
 |
| Fort Defiance (1951) |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)