Chapter Text
John Marston’s deadstock brown work boots scuff the warehouse gravel once as his body is hoisted into the air.
Everything gets louder as he goes up-- his heart is a wild stampede in his chest, the thunderous noise of it making the rest of the world cringe back. The noose cuts tight into the flesh of his neck, and he can feel the rope fibers twist and burn, close to drawing blood. His face balloons with pressure, and he kicks out into brutal emptiness. He thrashes as he feels himself pulled up higher, stuttering, too fast, then stopping up short, then being jerked even higher again. Every involuntary panic reflex of his body only serves to tighten the knot, and hastens his inevitable fate.
It would be his fucking luck to die like this. To have his neck snapped here and now, just as quick and easy as a chicken for dinner. He’d deserve as much anyway, even if he still clings stubbornly to life. His hands claw helplessly at the rope, but there is nothing to hold onto. Everywhere he reaches, there’s nothing . No help will come tonight. No reprise. Surely, this is the end. It has been a very long road up until this moment, but only John knows just how much farther the road was meant to lead him.
Somewhere below, John can still hear the truck engine running, and men shuffling, and Gene Autry crackling on the radio. ‘Many months have come and gone,’ the easy melody fades into the distance, quieter with each horrible gush of blood coagulating in his head, ‘since I wandered from my home.’ Somebody slams the truck door shut, and the lyrics recede even further beneath the roaring of John’s pulse. ‘Many a page in life has turned, many lessons have I learned!’
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ , would somebody just shoot this sommbitch already? He’s harder to kill than a God damn cockroach! I can’t take this waiting around ! Joe, you do it!”
“Yeah, alright.”
It seems likely it was close to midnight when John first went up the rope. Now, he can’t tell if he’s been swinging for two minutes or two hours. There’s only emptiness and desperation closing in around him with the darkness. As oxygen leeches from his brain and his vision fuzzes over, he swings sideways with all his remaining strength against the feel of the rope. It vibrates, tense around the ceiling beam. If he could just yank it free somehow… But there’s nothing to grab onto, nothing to set a toe against-- nothing--- nothing---
The first shot goes off loud as a canon and glass shatters somewhere behind John. He chokes out what would have been a yell if he’d had the voice for it, and the men down on the ground all laugh with cruelty.
“Good shot, Joe. For a fuckin’ panty waist!” A bottle breaks. The aroma of whiskey burns the air.
“Suck a dog’s dick, it’s dark in here!”
“Next thing he’ll say is he can’t take a piss cuz he cain’t find his pecker!”
“What’d you say to me?”
“Shut up! Shut up! Why the fuck do I pay you to do this if none of you assholes can even hit a stationary fucking target? Give me the gun. Just give it to me!”
The second shot strikes John in the shoulder socket, and he makes a pathetic sound through clenched teeth like the bullet has instead gone through his gut. Tears stream down his face as he struggles to hold onto consciousness, and one final burst of energy finds him thrashing out, and this time, his boots make contact with something fleshy. Someone’s chin. He hears a grunt of pain and a body staggering back in the gravel.
“Boss! Are you alright?”
“Get off of me! Where’s my fucking knife? I’m gonna teach this piece of shit sneak thief what a knife can do, where is it?!”
A third shot fires off from a higher vantage point, and all at once the room explodes into chaos. John is fading now, too rapidly to care much about the sounds of the warehouse doors suddenly screeching open on their heavy metal chains. He can’t care anymore about the voices of yelling men, the truck doors slamming, the tires screeching, digging gulches into the dirt as the Ford tears out into the cool nighttime, or the gunshots that follow. John’s blood drips down his limp fingers, and that, somehow , is mostly what he remembers. He has already faded half out of consciousness, but just before the blackness takes him, he hears another shot. He feels the rope around his throat snap just at the beam above his head, and he draws in a raw gasp of air that burns like fire.
He falls. He falls and he falls, and there is no bottom. He falls into emptiness, and into silence, and his last thought before he sinks completely beneath the veil is that he has inexplicably failed; that he will have died alone again, and that he never even had the opportunity to stash the suitcase key in a secret place, and that a particular, strange man in a very tall black stove pipe hat is sure to have some very disappointed words for him when next they meet.
John hits the ground. And then he doesn’t think about anything.
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CHAPTER 1: THE BELLED COYOTE
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Dark is funny. Sometimes dark feels like safety, and sometimes dark isn’t dark at all-- instead, what folk call ‘dark’ is actually the silvery moon casting its bright purple gaze out over a stretch of wild mesa. John likes that kind of dark, where he is free to roam alone with his own thoughts. Other times, dark actually is dark, like when it is the fear behind his blind eyes when he is being nailed beneath the lid of a coffin. That kind of dark is less savory. But John originally hails from wild country, he might be a stupid sonnovabitch but he surely makes up for that in bravery, and so he isn’t afraid when he realizes he is alive before he can see clearly. He blinks through the dark, eyes adjusting. But then he is surprised to realize where he is. John is in a mobile trailer. And after that, he realizes that he is in someone’s bed.
No lights are on anywhere as he sits up, and a sheet that had been cast over him pools in his lap. He’s in his skivvies, and his right shoulder is stiff and difficult to move from the tight bind a stranger has set around it. Someone has actually gone through the trouble of patching him up. This in and of itself seems wildly unreal since John is the kind of creature who has never been much for pack living, but secondly because he doesn’t know even a single person in the whole state of Oklahoma, which at least is where he thought he was before going and getting himself strung up. He hopes to God he’s still in Oklahoma, anyway, and that he has not woken up three states to the east and in the hands of his enemies. But then he thinks, the kinds of men he’s fought before wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of digging the bullet out of his shoulder if they were just going to shoot him in the face. John knows he isn’t very smart, but at least he knows not too many of his rivals are clever men either. He grunts as he tests the stiff joint, then thinks better of it when his shoulder throbs in protest against even the slightest motion.
The trailer is humble. Small. Grey-streaked even in the shadows, nearly unfurnished, and apparently completely empty of people other than John. He can’t hear any human voices anywhere nearby to speak of, and eventually he cautiously edges out of bed. He finds his clothes washed and folded on the kitchen counter, and that room too is mostly empty of regular human possessions. All he finds to clue him in that anyone has ever lived there is a half-empty bottle of whiskey, a bowl of mealy apples, and a stack of recently dated ammunition catalogs.
Hopping on one foot with the effort of dressing himself one-handed, John wriggles as quickly as he can back into his shirt and pants, and he stomps his heels back into his deadstock boots. Still, nobody comes. He tries the faucet, and when it produces a dribble of clean water John falls on it with predatory desire, and bends his head sideways to suck down a few long, parched gulps. When he tests the rickety door, he is surprised again to find it unlocked. He steps outside with no trouble at all. No protest comes from anything or anyone.
It is still nighttime. Or, maybe , he supposes, it could very well be several night times later. He is hungry enough for it, he realizes, in the wake of the taste of fresh water. Either way, outside is the familiar kind of dark John likes, that purple dark that’s from the face of a full moon shining in a cloudless sky, so he can see clear enough. He can see he is surrounded on all sides by small groups of other trailers, and they are all equally shadowy and quiet. He peers around for any other clues as to where he might have found himself, and when he looks to the left he nearly jumps out of his skin. A placid brown horse is standing silently nearby. It isn't tethered to anything, and looking at him with a vacant interest.
“Jesus,” John gasps, then steps down into the dirt. “Make some goddamn noise next time, horse! Scared me half dead and gone!” The horse stares back, until it finally judges John boring and bends it’s strong neck down to nibble at a tuft of dry grass. John leaves it there, and wanders in the opposite direction.
The night is cool but not cold, and he comes face to face with a flat expanse of purple planes beyond the ring of trailers, and beyond those, the black silhouettes of low rolling hills. Silver stars prickle in a sky that hangs wide and vast. There are miles and miles of nothing in every direction around the little camp, except for one. A ways to the west, John can barely make out the curve of a road, and the black shape of a low building. There, he can barely see the orange pinprick of a single lonely street lamp.
There’s nothing for it, John realizes at once. He has not been held captive. He’s nobody’s prisoner, he thinks again, even more resolutely. It’s either that building or the great planes, and John is too hungry for that escape plan to even bear considering right now. He’s hungry, and he’s tired, and his shoulder fucking hurts . He needs humans , as much as he resents that fact. He wants an aspirin and a whiskey. Hell, maybe he wants two whiskeys. And he sure as hell wants to know why he’s not dead. Why his bullet-riddled corpse isn’t swinging from a crossbeam like he thought it would be by now. So he squares up, sucks in a breath to steel his nerves, and he begins to walk.
The walk takes longer than John expects, and by the time he’s close enough to the building to make it out a bit better, he’s already wincing at the way his own gait jars his rotator cuff. He has been hurt before, sure. Plenty of times. At the orphanage or on the road, John is familiar with wounds that take time to heal. But this one is something else. This one digs deep, and radiates heat and pain like a burning coal. It doesn’t bear thinking that his right side is his shooting arm. He grips his elbow as he limps closer, as finally, he begins to make out a strange figure by the building in the distance.
The building is some kind of commercial single-story, but John can’t tell what it’s function is as he approaches it from the rear side. There is a large man sitting on a wooden stool at the back entrance next to the dumpster, but his face is hidden by the brim of his gramblers hat. He’s puffing on the end of a cigarette, and it casts an orange glow that swells and recedes with his breath. John slows as he approaches. He is in poor condition for a fight if it comes to it, and at the sight of this large potential enemy, John wonders if he could win that brawl, even on one of his better days. But the sound of his feet shuffling to a stop has done half the job for him despite his best efforts, because the big man goes abruptly still as a deer and looks up when he hears it.
At first, the big man doesn’t say anything. He just looks at John, one hand raised to pinch his smoke. He sucks in a lungful and pulls the butt slowly from his lips, exhaling with a thoughtful tilt of the head. His eyes are shrewd, but there is something about him John hadn’t quite expected before fully seeing his face. Something more intense. He can’t quite put his thumb on it.
“Made it out alive then?” The stranger breathes out through the smoke. It isn’t a question, and John is not sure why he is hit so palpably with a pang of irritation. It’s not like he wanted to die. He shuffles in the dirt, still a few feet off.
“Where’s this?” John gravels. His voice is even more wrecked than usual, from the violence of the rope and from his long, dry sleep. It surprises even him. “Still in Oklahoma?”
“Mayhap.”
“...Well, are we or ain’t we still in Oklahoma, friend?”
“You ain’t anywhere, friend .” he emphasizes the word a little mockingly, and John bristles again. Everything about this man seems cold, and there’s a certain twang in his sound, like something from further south. Texas, possibly, though it’s vague. “Oklahoma, Nebraska, Montana, it’s all about the same. You’re in Bumfuck Middle of Nowhere, that’s where.” The big man chomps on his cigarette butt with his teeth and gestures at the building. “But this here’s the Pretty Pony . Congratulations, kid. You didn’t die.”
“You the one what cut me down?”
The big man chews on his smoke. “None of my goddamn business what you do, if you live or if you don’t. You was just in the wrong place at the right time. I’dve left you. So you can thank your lucky stars it weren’t up to me.”
The size of this burly stranger suddenly seems less relevant again as John feels his blood begin to boil in his throat. But he is in no condition to fight, he has to remind himself of this fact again like an idiot child, and someone here is surely the one who has cared for him in his moment of need. So John swallows the glob of anger back down and tries to level out his voice. “Alright then, so point my rudder towards the one I should thank, friend .”
Despite this forced civility, things go sideways anyway. Every fiber of John’s suggestion seems to disagree with the large man. John watches his face change in increments, even though it doesn’t outwardly appear to shift too much at all. It’s there, though. Right there, around the mouth and eyes. A kind of stiffening. John unconsciously draws himself up taller as the big man finally tosses his smoke into the dirt and stands up. He is enormous.
For a blazing moment, John is afraid the man will swing on him anyway, merited or not. He closes the space between them and looks John up and down with the pointed authoritarian energy of a man not used to being pressed by fools. Under the lamplight, John can see his bristles are gold, and that he’s strong and thick as the trunk of a tree. But then the moment breaks, and the man steps back. John does not feel his own nervous sweat until the big man opens the back door, and the wind of the motion buffets John’s face. He stares ahead in confused silence, until the stranger makes another sarcastic gesture for him to enter. When nothing happens, he sighs, and says with clipped anger, “Well go on now! Christ alive, you’re dumber’n a cow, ain’t you? Get inside already, it’ll all be clear in good time.”
“In there?”
“That’s right, cowboy. Go right on in.”
John’s gaze narrows. “I ain’t no cowboy, friend .” He doesn’t like the condescension in that tone. Who the hell does this asshole think he is? Just some junked up testosterone-addled shithead who thinks he’s the boss of any folk he can figure how to muscle down. John has seen his ilk a thousand times before. Men have always played wrestling games in his world, men down on their luck, salt of the earth fellers who try to hurt without ever touching one another. That is, until someone crosses a line. Then, nothing’s off the table. Often enough John prefers it that way. He hates mind games. He’d rather punch first and ask questions later, but again he forces himself to remember his current condition. Only an idiot would ask for a fight now, and John sure as hell tries his best not to be more stupid than he can manage.
The stranger only grins without humor, flinty behind his pupils. “Then what are you?” He’s casual, but he’s also anything but.
The question hangs for a pregnant beat, and the purple nighttime is near dead quiet. “...just a wanderer.”
Again the big stranger runs his eyes up and down John’s figure, calculating. But this time thankfully he doesn’t say anything else. He only spits off to the side and gestures at the door one more time.
John spits too, a final display of dislike, and he quietly goes inside.
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There is something magnetic about the man Dutch Van der Linde that John Marston finds he likes immediately. Life has taught John caution with every step, but this Dutch feller is really something special... though, maybe John only thinks this because it is quickly explained to him that Dutch is the man who had shot down the rope that had nearly strung John up by the neck until dead. There is something eerily reassuring in the man’s voice when he sits John down at the wooden bar (because the building is a vacant strip club, John is chagrined to discover,) and when Dutch gestures, a surly looking woman with a blonde braid and overalls pours him nearly a pint of whiskey. She is maybe the bartender, but there is no question about who the owner of the establishment is here. At the very least, Dutch is the owner. Though it would be just as easy to think he might be some sort of demigod. He’s got that attitude about him.
Dutch is broad of shoulder, and wearing a flashy red suit that’s just a bit too tight, and his mustache is as thick as a boar’s bristle brush. Although John finds his natural reaction is to like this interesting gentleman from the get-go, he has to remind himself to hold back. So John stays as temperate as he can manage, and he sips on his whiskey, and he watches another significantly less clothed blonde woman with large breasts bring Dutch an Old Fashioned.
“Thank you, Karen my dear.” Dutch takes the drink and turns an elbow back towards John to settle on the bar. “So, in conclusion , son, we would very much like your help! We’ve been after those boys who snatched you up a long time. A long time. Of course, only if you’re willing! Now that you’re all patched up! See, you’re the only one who was on site that night, and you could say I’ve still got a few of my own, erruh... questions . For you, of course, but also for them. Some unfinished business, as it were?”
John nods. “I ain’t seen none of them, sir. No faces. It was too dark. I just found the cookhouse six mile out towards Thurber, thought I was lucky since none of them sons of bitches were there at the time. About sunset when I went through their place. Smelled godawful.”
Interest sparks in Dutch’s eyes, vivid and bright, near to greed. “And what exactly did you find in that cookhouse, son?”
There is something calculating in Dutch’s eyes that John finds magnetic and terrifying. The real truth behind the story of his capture, even in his stupidity with tricky conversations, is something John is sure he should try to keep secret. That he should try to safeguard it, at least for now… showing all his cards too early is a fool’s move. But John is exhausted, and he really is grateful to Dutch and his people for the help they have given him. So when Dutch leans in further and grins a little, a bit fatherly, a bit conspiratorial, John takes a gulp of his whiskey and feels that charm settling on him like a warm hand on his face. He’ll be as helpful as he can… within reason.
“Methamphetamines, sir. A hell of a lot. And pornographic magazines.” And a suitcase with a cool half million in it. “Some shit dog nobody bothered to feed. Dead unfortunately, poor bastard. Chained up outside. Coyotes ripped off it’s back leg I think.”
“And that’s all?” Again Dutch presses, quieter, more intense. “You didn’t see nothin’ else?”
John sits up straighter, and wipes his face blank. He likes this Dutch feller, but he’s good at poker too. The stakes are low as far as Dutch knows, but they’re also life-or-death; John needs food , and sleep , and time to heal . “Nossir. Hate to admit it, but I was lookin’ to rob the place if it was uninhabited. Hope that don’t change your opinion of me too much, but we all got our own lives. Me? I got a pipe to the back of my head for my troubles in the end, so I suppose judgement comes for us all in one shape or another. Woke up when they was stringing me up in the dark like a jackrabbit. ‘Course, until you and your folk came along.”
For a long beat, Dutch looks directly into John’s eyes, and his cocktail clinks as the ice melts inside the heat of his hand. But apparently he judges John innocent enough, and he sits back again with an air of causality. His other hand goes out to clap John on the back a few times, and he grins and nods into a sip on his drink. “Lucky we found you when we did, then, ain’t that right, son?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Come now, Dutch is just fine, ‘sir’ makes me sound so old!”
“Alright,” John grins tentatively. He can’t recall the last time any man had spoken to him in such a fatherly fashion. Even if his time here will be temporary, John resolves to enjoy it. “Dutch, then.”
“Well, then that settles it. You’ve seen our humble trappings, of course, we are but mere traveling independent contractors , but we hope you’ll stay with us until you’re back on your feet? We are a somewhat more ethically charitable organization than our first appearances allow. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Adler?”
The surly woman behind the bar shoots John a sussing look, then she picks up a rag and starts polishing pint glasses. “Could use a new errand boy. Bill bursts the toilet pipes every three days with his massive shits. You handy with a plunger, kid? John, you said? John what?”
John’s face stays neutral. “That’d be Milton, ma’am. John Milton.”
Mrs. Adler looks at him with that same intensity that Dutch has, except longer, then finally nods. “Don’t touch the girls, unless they ask you to first.”
John glances over his shoulder at the quiet, lightless stage where three women in various states of undress are sitting and grinning when the back door opens again, and the big man from before stalks through the room. Immediately, John averts his gaze from the women and back to the bar, though he feels the unfriendly gaze on the back of his head as the stranger moves through the room and exits again out the front door. For a moment, John can only grip his glass of whiskey, and he feels every hair on the back of his neck bristle. Noticing this look, Mrs. Adler snorts, and leans down on the bar.
“It’d be in your best interest not to bother Arthur neither, if you can manage that. Better yet, don’t even look at him. It’ll go bad for you.”
“What’s he do?” John grits, and to his left Dutch laughs.
“Sadie, please, do not put the fear of God in this boy before he’s been with us even a single week! Give him a chance to appeal to Arthur’s better side first, why don’t you?”
Again John feels his body reacting physically. His eye twitches. “Better side? Wasn’t under the impression he had one of those.”
Sadie finally laughs at this too, and pushes away from the bar. “That side’s not for the likes of you , mister Milton. You just let him do his job. He’s the bouncer, that’s what he does, alright? Don’t fight the door and you’ll be just fine. So long as you don’t piss him off.”
John thinks that the man is too prickly to bother with, and that he must have been born pissed off. But then, so have many other men that John has met, and so he looks over his shoulder again when he knows Arthur has gone. The room feels unusually barren in his absence, even though he had not spoken a word, which John is not sure is good or bad. Except there are two girls on the stage now when before there had been three, and so John wonders if Arthur is the kind of man whose presence alone is enough to command women to follow him.
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It takes three weeks for the purple ring of bruises around John’s neck to completely fade. His shoulder, however, is another story. The crackly kitchen radio bursts to life when John reaches forward to twist the knob on, but he flinches back when he overextends himself. Tinny music floods the room with a lofi country radio broadcast, and sun spills out across the floor. The nearly unfurnished trailer that has been given over to John’s use by Dutch has been revealed to him to be the property of a recently deceased member of their party, a one Davey Callander. Mrs. Adler explained that Davey had died in a shootout, and his brother Mac hadn’t been seen in months. For John, who is almost always in need of some variety of help or another, Davey’s death in many ways felt almost prophetic. With no one to fill the vacant space it was deemed prudent to deposit John here, and secretly, he is more pleased by this than he can say. He can’t recall the last time he had a room of his own that wasn’t in a cheap motel, much less an entire trailer. He’s versed enough in living on the street if he has to do it, but part of his lifestyle up until this point has been in service of avoiding that situation whenever possible. Even a dirty motel room is better than a crude pup tent in the middle of a thunderstorm. If only for the money.
Life at the Pretty Pony camp is better than living on the street by many times. At first, John is not sure why he has been so readily accepted into their small community... But then, he begins to drink with his new friends. When he starts to learn their stories, things begin to grow clearer.
John figured he was among criminals the second he’d laid his eyes on Dutch’s red velvet smoking jacket, but he is surprised by how well this particular community seems to function together as a whole. Dutch is the lynch pin, the father figure and the god figure, hand-in-hand with his business partner Hosea Matthews, who John had met only the day before yesterday. Hosea stays off-site at the moment to oversee an investment at a local rodeo, where several members of the camp work. Charles Smith is a mixed native american bronco rider with a busted arm. He joined the camp after his career tanked and his last crew ousted him for the financial loss. Now, he trains new riders to compete in rigged competitions for big cash, with Hosea as his backer. That asshole bouncer Arthur is a horse and cattle rustler for Hosea too, which seems like a much better use of a man like that than parking him outside the door of a barely functioning bar.
Lenny Summers grew up poor in Shamrock before an argument his father had with a former high Klansman brought unavoidable violence into their family. With justified blood on his hands and the law on the lookout for him, Lenny now hides from arrest by working as Hosea’s right hand man. An altercation at the Mexican border brought the gang the big-hearted and passionate activist Javier Escuela, and Mrs. Sadie Adler came to them after killing her husband’s killers. Dutch’s woman, a luscious redhead by the name of Molly O’Shea, was a high class socialite with a gambling addiction so severe she was cast out of her own family, and the gang boasted two drunks also hiding from debt, the belligerent ex-Reverend Swanson and Pearson the surly army cook. Sean McGuire was a loudmouth showoff kid with too many warrants out for him, and Bill Williamson was ex-army-turned-thief, dishonorably discharged from Vietnam for undisclosed reasons four years previous.
The Pretty Pony itself was not vacant at all, like John had initially suspected. The bar, in fact, had been open the very night John had first been ushered through the back door by a sarcastic sweep of Arthur Morgan’s callused hand. It functions as a legal strip club, run by an acerbic older woman named Susan Grimshaw, and several women in the gang do functionally work there, but the Pretty Pony is so far away from regular thoroughfares that their customer base is close to nonexistent. John supposes the honeypot is still an effective trap; Mary-Beth, Abigail, Tilly and Karen are all prime cuts, and he mostly feels a little bad for the fellers who wander a bit too close. Those unfortunate souls unlucky enough to pass through the door get fleeced to within an inch of their lives, and if they dare to complain, they are met with the bad end of Arthur’s fist. A fist which John suspects is very, very, very hard.
The day is hot and blue, and in the center of the ring of trailers, a fire pit blazes with a tin percolator set on top of a rickety grill. John bangs through his trailer door and skips down the steps towards the fire, but jumps when the same strange brown horse that has been wandering the camp nips at the back of his shirt. He whips around and bats the animal in the nose, but it only sneezes once and takes a step closer.
“Get away!” John complains, and jerks his shirt back from where the horse had once again begun to lip at it, and then he stomps down the path to the fire.
The camp is alive with motion during the day, and especially in the morning John finds that he likes the traffic of the life of this place. Tilly hands him a cup of coffee and gives him a smile that lingers just a minute too long before she moves off down the path towards the back of camp. The girls don’t go into work until late afternoon, and most of the time they spend the morning sunning on the trailer roofs, or helping Dutch run his errands. Javier is sitting by the fire playing a steel guitar he hadn’t had three days ago, and Sean is sullen and quiet, obviously missing the gold pocket watch he’d been boasting about having stolen off a congressman just a few weeks before.
A voice roughly interjects, “... Old Boy.”
John looks down. Arthur is also sitting by the fire too, but he had been nearly quiet enough to miss. His shoulders are a wide expanse of worn white cloth, slashed by the brown X of crossed suspenders. John thinks he has maybe been the one to speak, but he isn’t quite sure since the big man hasn’t turned around. Arthur only sighs, and takes a sip of his coffee, slow and measured. “ Old Boy .” he says it again, even louder. As if he’s talking to a child, or someone elderly.
John’s lips go stiff. “You talkin’ to me , friend?” He still doesn’t like Arthur, and he strongly suspects the feeling is mutual.
Finally, Arthur does turn his head, and he squints up at John with a look of vague distaste. His jaw is very square, and his eyes are blue, John notices for the first time. Incredibly blue. “...the horse .”
“You’re talkin’ to the horse?”
“The horse’s name is Old Boy.”
“...Oh.” John mutters. There’s an awkward pause, and he twists around to look back at the animal. Its coat shines a healthy chocolate brown in the sun, and it arcs its strong neck down to nibble at a bit of dried thistle weed. The horse’s mane and tail are a lustrous, milky white. It seems too fine a beast to let wander around with apparently no effort whatsoever to contain it. Not that John knows anything about horses, but, what if it runs off? Or if coyotes come for it?
“That your horse, mister?” He asks Arthur, wondering if he can get away with asking Arthur any questions. He’s usually too brusk to tolerate talking to.
“Old Boy don’t belong to nobody.” Arthur huffs, and turns back to his coffee. There’s amusement in his tone, but John can’t tell if it’s a criticism of John’s stupidity or in admiration for the animal. John finally goes to sit down by the fire too. Not too close to Arthur, but not too far off either.
“Alright, but you feed it?”
“We feed you, Milton. You belong to us?”
John takes a sip of his coffee and shrugs. “...Mayhap.”
Honestly, he might not mind it too bad if he ended up belonging to the gang. He almost likes it here. He likes being fed, anyway. And he’s happy with his immediate plan to coast on free resources. He knows Dutch is keeping him out of a suspicion that he hasn’t told all, but John still needs to buy both trust and time. He can’t worry too much yet about the fact that he’s sitting on a key that unlocks a hidden suitcase he can't quite manage to get to, at the present moment... but he knows, one day soon, he’ll have to start to worry. Because inside that suitcase is a half-million dollars of what John strongly suspects is stolen drug capital. Money John had unwittingly stolen right out from underneath a turf war with those rat bastards what had strung him up. A turf war half of which is currently being orchestrated by Dutch Van Der Linde himself.
Arthur is instantly surly again. “Yeah well, don’t get too cozy. You don’t belong to us.”
John knows he doesn’t. He’s never had a pack, and doesn’t even know what it would look like if he did. But he’s not going to say it. It would be too annoying to give Arthur the satisfaction of being right.
The coffee is bitter, and John grimaces as he takes another sip. His first order of business should be to gain trust, but out of everyone he’s met in the camp, Arthur is the only one who hasn’t smiled in front of John. Neither one of them is a person who gives up easily, he figures, and an opinion once made is difficult to walk back on. John wonders what exactly it was that he did to fall so immediately out of Arthur’s good graces other than to not die , and he wonders if Arthur will ever see him as anything other than an idiot safety liability. But Arthur does seem to like something… he does like animals . And everyone in the camp seems to like Arthur, regardless of how surly his behavior is, so that’s something. If Arthur didn’t like anything and was liked by no one, then John would have given him up as a lost cause. As things are, John still finds himself a little curious. Arthur is a bastard and a grouse, but the sensation of wanting his approval is somehow still strangely needling.
“...Old Boy, then.” John eventually nods, acknowledging the name. “Next time I smack him, I’ll do it by name.”
Arthur huffs in another bout of half-amusement. His hair has fallen across his forehead, and he looks down at his cup as he spins it slowly in his hands. His fingers are heavily calloused, and his knuckles are bulbous from overuse. He’s a man who isn’t afraid of hard work. “Old Boy’s been hangin’ around your trailer for weeks.” Arthur seems genuinely curious. “He likes you, for some godawful reason I can’t figure.”
“Yeah, alright, well you tell him I don’t like him , would you? Ain’t that thing got a pen or something you can stick it in?”
“You try and stick him somewhere he don’t like and see what happens. Now, there’s a horse that's just about too clever for the lot of us…” Something crackles beneath Arthur’s hard exterior, and his hands almost seem to gentle. John stares at him agog when Arthur doesn’t smile, but his shoulders do go round, and his eyes do close for a moment of quiet appreciation. When he isn’t actively angry, Arthur doesn’t look half bad at all. In fact, wouldn’t someone be able to call him handsome? Some just might. “...But I ain’t worried. He knows where his feed bucket is, so he’ll come to and fro how he likes. Don’t you pay him any mind.”
John whistles low, and allows himself to finally let loose a tiny grin. He’s actually surprised. He doesn’t think Arthur has ever spoken this many consecutive words to him in a row that weren’t threats. “Sounds like somethin’ which’d piss you off good and proper, I’d figure! I mean, it hits all your buttons, don’t it? A layabout free-roamer? Ain’t it usually your way or the highway, cowboy? Take a crop to that thing if it won’t listen!”
Across the circle, one of Javier’s guitar strings snaps with an abrupt, menacing twang, and Sean laughs out loud. Something glazes over Arthur’s eyes, and his face goes distant again. He looks colder than maybe he ever has, and then he abruptly stands up and tosses the rest of his coffee into the fire, where it evaporates with a wild hiss.
“I’d just as soon take you out back with a crop.” Arthur growls, and then he’s off, stalking towards the Pretty Pony with a face just like a storm cloud. John is left behind dumbstruck, sitting silent in his wake and staring after him with the thought that he doesn’t know what tripwire he’s just set off. Maybe trying to talk to Arthur was a lost cause after all.
Javier laughs at John’s slack jaw expression from across the fire. “Estupido, you really know how to piss him off, don’t you?”
“...The hell?” John murmurs in confusion, and then it’s Sean’s turn to laugh again. He slides off the rock he was sitting on and scoots up to the fire to pour himself another cup of coffee. Apparently the sight of someone else more miserable than him is enough to cheer him up.
“I wouldn’t worry overly much, Artur’s just a wee bit sensitive, is all! He loves his horses, ya see... He loves em’ just like a mother and babe!”
“A horse whisperer.” Javier agrees.
Sean nods, “A regular Doctor Doolittle!”
“You should see him with dogs.”
“And cats!” Sean nods again in concession, “and Chickens! And cattle too, I’d recon? If it’s a beast, it’s likely makin’ moon eyes at our Artur, he’s just that sort of fella! Sweet, really, if you tink about it. But it’s the horses that’ve got the apple of his eye. Artur here’s been after Old Boy fer months! But the nag won’t listen! I imagine that’s a first.”
“That thing?” John gestures at the swishing tail of the lazy horse now half-hidden behind his trailer. “That thing just shits on my stairs and eats and sleeps! The hell’s so difficult about that?”
Javier has set the steel guitar down on one end in order to pry the busted string away, but Sean leans back and grins some more, settling his coffee on the pooch of his stomach. “Artur’s good at everythin’. And he’s this big man about town, see? Dutch’s best boy and all that. But he’s chapped as all get out that Old Boy don’t mind him! Nag’ll let Artur near with a brush and a pat and a bucket a’ oats, but that’s about all , feller, I’ll tell you what. But that’s a proper ridin’ horse, not one of Artur and Charles’s giddyup broncos! Artur wants him for show! Or maybe for pride, ya think? Since the beast just won’t listen?” Sean gives a sharp snort, which immediately knocks his coffee over. He hisses in pain and sits up when the hot liquid burns through his shirt, and then it's Javier’s turn to laugh again, loudly. He leans on his guitar and wipes the mirth from his eyes until Sean stands up too, even more affronted than Arthur. When the opinionated Irishman also stalks away, Javier’s chuckling peters off after they’re alone again, but his grin never entirely fades. “Pendejo.” he sighs through his smirk.
When he looks after Sean’s retreating figure, John is shocked to see almost all of the camp has also emptied out. It seems that whenever Arthur decides to get up, it is collectively deemed a good enough cue for everyone else to get to work too. Now, nearly everyone is already gone, or halfway on their way out. Only the drunk Reverend remains oblivious, snoring and sun burnt with his head thrown back in a chair outside his trailer. It is a strange, unspoken rule John is only now beginning to notice for what it is. He wonders if Arthur really is that proud, and he wonders why everyone seems to love him when he’s such a bastard. There are only so many answers to that particular riddle, but John lingers on the one he finds he likes the least; that maybe, just maybe, Arthur is not a bastard at all.
Like he had been listening in on John’s thoughts, Javier inserts himself into the quiet again as he twists a peg at the top of the neck of his instrument. “Don’t listen to Sean, he’s full of so much hot air he could power a fleet of balloons. Arthur’s not petty. He’s a good man. He takes care of us all as best he can. He’s just, uhh..!” Javier tugs on his mustache as he tilts his head in thought. “He’s... got a very sensitive side?”
“Too sensitive.” John grumbles, and he wonders.
John’s not a prime thinker, he never has been, but now? John wonders now.
“Too sensitive? Maybe!” Javier laughs, and he gently pries the broken string free from the neck of the guitar for good. “Maybe that’s so, Milton! But I’m not about to bite the hand that feeds me.”
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John has been with the Pretty Pony two months long when he graduates from plunger duty to deliveries. His shoulder is getting better every day, and this change suits John just fine, since Mrs. Adler had been correct in her assessment of the shoddy plumbing system in the bar; five days a week, John had previously found himself on his hands and knees in front of the staff toilet with a plumb line and a grimace. This duty alone, taken without complaint, was disgusting enough to grant him a small net of respect. Now, he finds his delivery duties greet him less often with vaguely disgusted fake smiles, and instead more often with curious, genuine grins.
The girls in particular have shown an invested interest in his graduation from toilet duty, and for once John is glad for the extra scrutiny. It turns out boredom rules most evenings for the dancers of the wayward strip club, and more and more often than not, John finds himself pulled by the front of his shirt through someone or another’s trailer door. John discovers the girls share their trailers, two and two, or two and three, but all of them are less than shy about sharing their men. Karen in particular is most vocal about the lack of appetizing partner options, citing the tastiest ones to either be absent, unobtainable, or already sampled to satisfaction. John is an anomaly among many, and he doesn’t mind it a whit when Abigail and Karen and Mary-Beth rub cocaine on his gums and take their shirts off to dance around him in a circle. They tell him he is handsome, and he tries to prove them right by being as vigorous in his lovemaking as possible. He is a man after all, with simple needs, and as long as he is eating Dutch’s food and sleeping under Dutch’s roof, why not sample this as well? The invitations are always clear and easy to understand, and John finds no reason not to accept, since the girls are all amenable. All love should be free , they like to say, except when they’re on the clock, and sometimes John finds them in surprising places, least of all in each other’s beds. Mrs. Adler gives him sterner looks than usual, and Susan Grimshaw is either oblivious or completely uncaring, but nobody gets hurt, and everyone seems satisfied, and so John just lets it happen whenever the mood tickles anyone’s fancy.
The first sign of trouble comes when Abigail takes to sitting in John’s lap by the fire at night, but definitely, especially when Arthur is nearby. John only notices this correlation because he is never not aware of Arthur’s proximity. Arthur is the sort of thorn one can’t just forget about, but Abigail in particular is a very fine looking woman, and John has found there is an intelligent sparkle in her eye that he likes a little more than all the other girls. He chases her a little harder than the rest, and so it is nearly always stressful and confusing to his emotional well-being when both Abigail is in his lap and Arthur is glaring in their direction. After a while he still doesn’t know exactly what is happening, but he grows surer and surer all the time that he is somehow stirring the pot.
It is Karen who clears the situation up a few weeks later, one morning when she is lying naked in John’s bed, smoking the dried out end of an old joint. Sex with Karen is easy; she’s filthy-mouthed and her hips are thick, but she doesn’t get attached. John is starting to consider her a real friend, if only she’d drink just a little bit less.
“This is all well and good, honey, but I’d watch myself if I were you.” She sighs through a cloud of smoke. Her heavy, well-shaped breasts list to the side as her head leans back.
“How’dyou figure?” John is sitting on the edge of the bed, half done with pulling his jeans back up his skinny legs.
“Come on, I know you ain’t that stupid! Don’t play dopey with me, baby, we all know you now!”
John snorts and stands, buckling his jeans. “Is that right?” One day in the future, John knows Karen and all the rest of them will have a goddamn field day when they eventually figure out who he really is, and what he’s really done.
“That’s right! You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’ if you keep this up.”
“Keep what up?” John reaches out and pinches the joint out of Karen’s hand, then sucks on the end. He passes it back, then runs his fingers through his greasy hair. He’s got a delivery to make in a half hour, and he could stay and stare at Karen’s ass until they had another go, but he’d honestly rather get paid. Delivery boy status hadn’t granted him a living wage, but Dutch had thrown in an open tab at the bar of the Pretty Pony, within reason. John figures he’s due for his weekly bottle of tequila. A bottle he won’t be sharing with Karen.
“I mean Arthur, fool! You’re pissin’ him off! Your luck’s just rotten with him, I swear.”
That stops John up short. He looks down at the naked woman, his eyebrows drawing together. “What’s that mean? I didn’t do shit to Arthur.”
“You did.” Karen laughs. Her teeth are pearly white, and much straighter than John had expected. He still wonders sometimes where she came from. “I mean Abigail , you wily coyote! Arthur’s sweet on her!”
Something about that gums up the works in John’s brain, and he just blinks at Karen in silence. Sweet on her . Arthur was sweet on Abigail? As far as John was aware, Arthur didn’t care about fucking at all. He just cared about doing his job. And, of course, he cared about ribbing John as hard as possible whenever the opportunity arose. But there was the memory of Arthur glaring in his direction with Abigail in his lap, and there was the memory of Arthur checking his shoulder too roughly as they passed through the same door, and there was Abigail’s face in the fire light, looking hopefully in Arthur’s direction, not saying a goddamn word. John’s frown starts to hurt his face, and so he coughs once and turns away, attempting to begin the hunt for his shirt. Where the fuck was his shirt?
Karen chuckles, still liquid relaxed in the bed. “Now you’re worried, ain’tcha?”
“ No.” John barks, when he actually means yes. He finds his red thermal and pulls it on, and his head pops out the other side in a static frizz. “Look, Karen, I got work. D’you mind?”
“Testy.” Karen whistles, but she sits up anyway, casual as the day is long. Women’s garb is far less complicated, so she’s in her sundress in a second, and she tweaks John’s dick in his jeans as she brushes past, and he jumps in his shoes. “See you later, coyote.”
For a while, the inside of the trailer is resonantly quiet. John stalks out to the kitchen and stands alone in the empty room with his hands on his hips, and he just breathes. Something in his stomach has snarled into knots and for the life of him he can’t figure it out. He had suspected something was wrong, but to have it served to him so plainly is something else entirely. John doesn’t regret following pleasure when it ropes him in, but for some reason he is regretful now. In fact, he regrets more than he can say. He feels as if he has sinned so monumentally that even the crime of stealing Dutch’s money at the moment seems to pale in comparison. Snakes and snails twist around in his chest cavity, and he goes to lean heavily on the counter for a moment.
Why? Why does he feel like this? John wonders and he wonders, and he keeps on wondering until he looks up at the clock on the wall. And then he curses and grabs his hat, and then he thunders out the door.
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More weeks pass, and John starts to get good at errands. He finds that he likes to be constantly working. It sets his head straight when instead he finds if he sits in camp too long, he often gets tangled up in bad thoughts. He has avoided Arthur to the best of his ability, which is fairly good since everyone has got a set schedule, everybody works, and John starts remembering how to do things, and people start remembering who he is. They start remembering that Milton is one of Dutch’s Boys , a familiar face in the wide open Oklahoma expanse. But then comes a different sort of day.
It takes twenty minutes and a map that shot out the open window that John had to backtrack to rescue before he and his delivery truck find their way to Hosea’s rodeo operation. He’s hauling four spools of twisted cotton and manila rope, and a few hollow steel barrels John has seen the likes of in timed racing events, though only on the television. He isn’t a horse man, but he doesn’t like to show his cards to anyone if he can help it, so he accepts the order and his directions without a word of complaint. The day is like most others this time of year; hot and bright and dusty. John tips his hat forward to get the sun out of his eyes and he pulls the truck up, then jumps down into the dry grass and heads for the office.
The grounds are huge here at the rodeo and at the moment they’re mostly vacant. Everything shows signs of weather and age. It doesn’t take a wise man to understand this venue is decrepit beyond reasonable safety, but then nothing much in John’s life hasn’t been. He’s used to it, and it feels almost comfortable for him in a way, especially in the poor barrenness of the open landscape. It is familiar in a way that almost aches, though John certainly couldn’t say out loud why that might be.
As he heads down a deteriorating set of concrete stairs and loops around a sawdust-treated steel pen, a thunderous sound in the distance makes John’s steps slow, until he completely stops up short. One pen over, he can see the figure of a big-shouldered man breaking in a white horse. Arthur , the realization comes quickly.
The horse is beautiful, long of limb and delicate, with a long mane knotted with brambles. It bucks hard once, twice, three times, four, then five , but Arthur still manages to keep his seat. His weight shifts in a way that seems almost natural, though John is sure this is not a task that could possibly be easy for any man. And yet, Arthur does it all the same, shifting and leaning and bending with the motion of the beast, all the while with one callused hand thrust high in the air. The horse trumpets out in defiance and bolts in a wide circle, coming close to brushing Arthur off on the fence. But John can also hear Arthur’s voice even from here, loud but somehow reassuring at once, and then the horse’s erratic gestures grow a little less violent, and then a little less, and a little less.
A hand claps down on John’s shoulder and he jumps. He’s too fucking skiddish today.
“John!” the familiar voice says.
It’s Charles. John relaxes minutely, then lets go of his vice-like grip on the bar of the pen. His fingers actually ache from the release of tension. “ Charles .” He nods back. He hadn’t even heard Charles come up on him. Dangerous, all things considered. For a second John lifts his hat up and wipes the sweat off his brow. “Got your stuff around yonder.” He nods down the path towards the truck, but Charles has already taken an easy lean on the fence to look out towards Arthur too.
“A fine animal.” He murmurs appreciatively. John has found that Charles is even keeled and reasonable, so he looks back out towards Arthur again too.
“Suppose so.” He still doesn’t know shit about horses.
“You know Arthur caught her wild? That’s the old way. They’re getting friendlier, too.”
“That’s friendly?” John scoffs.
“Yeah, it is. You should have seen her when he first brought her in. She’s wild , you know what I mean? Really something else. Arthur could sell her for a fortune once she’s broken, but I don’t think he would. That horse is fit for a king. He’ll keep her.”
John is not sure he really does know what Charles means by wild , so he frowns and studies the horse some more. Even in this short amount of time, he can tell she is beginning to heed Arthur’s directions, leaning wherever he wants when his knees push her this way or that way. Her gait steadies out, and he gives her the leeway to lead with her neck, stretching out however far she wants. They’re having a conversation in front of him without words. Give and take. With only a paltry bridle, John is not sure how Arthur managed to keep his seat even this long.
“He named her Boadicea. Arthur’s pretty sentimental sometimes, huh?”
“Who’s that?”
“A Celtic queen.” Charles dusts his hands off and stands up straight when he tires of watching Arthur ride, then he claps John on the shoulder. “Now come on, let me give you a hand with all that heavy fucking rope.”
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Charles and John are just loading the last of the delivery into a storage shed when a door above them creaks open, and up a flight of nearby stairs old Hosea Matthews walks out onto the office’s upper deck. “Is that young Milton you have there?” He waves down at Charles, who stops up short and nods.
“Yessir!”
“Why don’t you send him on up here when you fellas are all done!”
“You heard the man,” Charles smacks John in the shoulder, and they work together to push the last bolt of rope into place.
John knocks on the inside of the open office door before he enters, then respectfully removes his hat. Something about Hosea makes him want to lower his voice, though he’s not sure quite what. “You called for me, Mister Matthews?”
“Come on in, my boy. Come on in.”
Hosea is standing behind the desk, examining a pamphlet with a cartoonishly large magnifying glass. His eyes are going in his old age, and so it seems like he’s always squinting, but sometimes John thinks all that squinting just makes him look wiser. He takes a few steps into the office, then stands awkwardly in the center of the room. He likes old Hosea well enough, but he’s never quite sure where he stands with him. Dutch always tells John where he stands. It’s easier to talk to Dutch.
“Sir?”
“How d’you like your time with us so far, John?” Hosea smiles, and he sets his things back down on the surface of the desk. “Acclimating alright?”
“..sir?” John prompts again. He has no clue what that word means.
“What I mean to say is, do you feel like you’re getting along ? Fitting in? I hear you’re quite the ladies’ man.”
The question seems innocent enough, so John lets himself grin a little. “Yessir. Well, I mean, I… uh, I’m feelin ’ just fine , if you don’t mind me sayin’ it.”
“Why should I mind? Dutch tells me you’re pulling your weight well enough. A useful lad, all things considered.” Slowly, Hosea lowers his old bones back down into his seat, then folds his bony fingers in a lattice on top of his paperwork. “ If you ask me, we were blessed , the night we found you at the end of that rope.”
“I think so too.” John says, and it takes a moment for him to realize he actually believes that’s true. He lingers in silence on that revelation for a moment, before Hosea gets to his point.
“You’re a good worker, John. Your performance has been more than adequate, and we’ve a need for more strong hands around here like yours. You any good with a gun?”
John is quiet for a stunned stretch at the frankness of this question. He’s exceptionally good with a gun, but he hadn’t told that to anyone. Primarily, because he doesn’t own a gun right now. He had tried to stuff a handgun down the back of his pants on his way out of the cookhouse, but those assholes that had strung him up had taken it back, and their boss had used it to shoot Swiss cheese holes through him.
“...Yes sir.” John carefully answers. “I’m a passable shot.”
“Good. We need a security detail on a couple of our upcoming competitions. We got too many bodies in the stands and not enough to watch ‘em all. You comfortable with that assignment, son?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, ain’t that grand?” Hosea sighs, and leans back with a genuinely relieved look on his weathered face. He stares a moment at a list on his desk, his furrowed brow dipping below the navy brim of his rancher’s hat, and then he finally passes a tired hand over his eyes and leans down on one elbow. “Do me a favor, my boy. Read this list out to me, won’t you? We got a few more things to collect and these old eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
He holds out the notepad, and John hesitates a good five seconds.
“Well, come on now! It ain’t gonna bite you!” Hosea shakes the pad at him. John takes it and steps back, then he clears his throat. He squints, and his lips move silently over the vowels.
“Fir… first …. Aid.... kits” John begins, haltingly slow. He can feel his ears begin to burn as one of his personal truths is revealed without his permission. He is a terrible reader. “Sec...urity, security cameras. No…. ex, signs… no exit signs… Bole… bo, bolt , c-cutters…”
“Stop, stop ,” Hosea waves his hand, and his head comes back up from where he had been leaning. “How come nobody told me you can’t read, son?”
“I can read!” John rebuts defensively, his chest full of the heat of embarrassment. He has to swallow his attitude back down. “Just..! Not… so good. Sir .” He tacks on at the end, more subdued. He’s gotten along just fine so far, exactly how he is. Pride makes his jaw stubborn, but he feels more like a child than he has in years when Hosea gives him a parental look.
“Well, that won’t do. That won’t do at all. ” The old man says, and John feels a sinking sensation, until Hosea continues, “I’ll tell you what, John. I’m assigning you as my personal assistant for a while, alright? Now don’t you mind Mr. Summers, he’s got his own duties, you aren’t putting anybody out. But you and me? We are gonna meet right here, in this office, three times a week, and nobody’s got to know what goes on. Nobody, you hear? Of course, unless you feel inclined to share with a friend.”
“Sir?”
“Well, I taught Arthur to read too, you know. And a few of the others.” Hosea begins to rifle through the drawers of his desk, but finding nothing satisfactory stands up and goes to shuffle through a nearby bookshelf instead. “...Can’t read . Pah.” He mutters under his breath. “A waste of a good imagination, if you ask me! We clear, Mister Milton?”
John blinks. He hasn’t been given an offer to be educated since he left the orphanage, and that was so long ago by now that John can barely remember it. He’s a little dumbstruck, but nods anyway. “Eruhh... yes sir.”
“Ah-hah !” Finally, the old man lays a finger on a canvas book spine, then plucks it off the shelf. “Smoky the Cowhorse. Easy enough.” He hands it over to John, who takes the children’s tale and runs a slow hand over the cover, where a bucking bronco tries to rid itself of a determined looking rider. “We’ll read that one first. When we get you through it, I’ll give you something better. One day we’ll get to poetry, John, and I’ll tell you what, that’s the good stuff ! That’s what you’ll really want, my boy. Something to enrich the soul .”
Again, John finds himself gummed up. His lips twist over his teeth, but eventually he just gives a gruff nod and pockets the book. Hosea had not mocked him, or put him down in any way. He had been treated with respect, and asked to pay nothing in return. John is not so sure what to do with this information, but he accepts it all the same.
“So that settles it. Let’s say, I’ll see you again Monday?”
John knows that this is not a question. He knows it is a plan set in stone if he likes it or not. But the thing is, John does like it. He maybe likes it more than he can say. Again he gives a brusk nod, but then he coughs a little to find his voice, if only for reasons of respect. “ Yessir .”
“Wonderful.” Hosea declares as he settles back down at his desk, already leagues ahead in his mind over his plans for the rest of the day. He picks up another list and squints at it. “Well, off you go. And send Charles up next, can you?”
It takes an hour for John to pull the delivery truck back around the bar again, in part because he stares off into the distance so hard during the drive that for a while he completely forgets where he is. When he realizes he has been driving straight for far longer than he intended, he fumbles his way through using the map again and pulls the truck around, angry at himself for getting so distracted.
When he’s back by evening, John is greeted with friendly faces, and Bill thumps on the truck’s hood with a fist as he passes by, which is amicable enough for him. It’s nice to be known, John thinks again right then, and he pulls the little book Hosea had given him out of his pocket again. The bronco and rider on the cover are so familiar it feels like they’re old friends, and John is struck by a sudden surge of emotion. A friendly melody drifts through his cracked window, and John looks up just in time to spot Arthur walking by... John’s eyes instantly glue to his figure as he listens to the familiar sound. Arthur is whistling the first few cheerful bars of You Are My Sunshine. Going completely unscrutinized as he is in the moment, Arthur seems as handsome and contented as he’s ever been. Perhaps, more content even than John has ever seen him. John just looks at Arthur as he walks past, and then he looks at the book cover, and then he replaces the little book back in his pocket and he gets out of the truck again. Sleep won't come easy, he already knows that. So for now, John needs to see what errands are still left ahead of him for the night.
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John sits out on the steps to his trailer, and he thinks. He’s enjoying a cigarette, and the halo of smoke is a comfort when it hangs in the cool air around him. It’s late enough that most of the circle of trailers lie dark. John likes it that way. He is not used to this variety of thinking, this relentless march of questions in his head he has no answers to, and he also thinks there is a reason he has headaches more and more often these days. He thinks about the suitcase full of drug money, buried in his secret place, and he thinks about the tiny golden key to that suitcase hidden beneath the peeling sole of his right deadstock brown work boot. He thinks about Dutch’s hand, warm and parental on his shoulder, but he also thinks about that flinty flicker in his eyes John knows all too well as greed. He thinks about Hosea’s selfless kindness, and John thinks about how luxurious it is to have his own bed, and food to eat, and a job to do, and companions to drink with who aren’t actively trying to fleece him while he sleeps. He thinks about Karen’s breasts and Abigail’s smart, sexy expressions that seem to say something more profound than John can understand. He thinks of her lying half naked in a trailer lit red by a sheer, gauzy cloth cast over the bed lamp, while Tilly and Mary-Beth share lines off a pocket mirror. John thinks about the grind of the open road beneath the wheels of the delivery truck, the tinny sound of Gene Autry on the radio, and how it makes him feel good to seem like he belongs somewhere for once in his fucking life, even when he knows he really doesn’t belong.That he couldn’t belong. That he shouldn’t .
And he thinks about Arthur. About the graceful shape of him as the white mare’s gait evens out, and he moves with her like maybe they were born together. Actually, he thinks a lot about Arthur.
For a while now, John has been having strange dreams. Since even before he robbed the cookhouse, he dreamed of the man in the tall black stovepipe hat. John wonders if this is just another stupid side effect of his itinerant lifestyle, living somewhere and then moving on, living and moving, then moving, then moving. He hasn’t stayed in one place this long since his days in the orphanage, and even then he knew one day he would have to leave. But now the man in the stovepipe hat is returning again more gradually in his sleep, and every dream he has is about second chances. ‘ Don’t spoil a good second chance, mister Marston! And mark you me, that is exactly what this is!’ the man is always saying, though John doesn’t have a fucking clue who he is, or why he is, or how he is. Maybe the man is some latent figure from his childhood, some leftover nightmare dredge from darker times. But John just knows he can’t let himself get drafted, and so second chances are all he thinks of. He doesn’t want to die for no reason in some foreign war, and anyway, if he registered with any local authorities it would either yield his instant incarceration or his instant enlistment. John doesn’t want any of that bad business. But he still thinks about second chances. He is always thinking about second chances. He thinks about Arthur, and he thinks about second chances. And about how it doesn’t feel like a mere coincidence that those two things seem to be running side-aside in his life.
Something crunches and shifts in the dark, and John looks up to see Old Boy plod around the corner and wander down to huff at the cold fire pit. For a while John just sits and studies the horse, and he thinks some more about how he had seen Arthur on the wild white mare. John doesn’t know shit about horses, but ... something whispers deep down in his dark insides (his insides that are the kind of dark he likes , the purple nighttime kind of dark,) that maybe... he might want to learn .
The sky has barely lit, just a slowly rising slash of warm orange moving up the azure horizon line when John finally gathers himself enough to bang on Arthur’s trailer door. There’s a noise like something crashing, before the unmetered thumping of footfalls stumble towards the door and Arthur swings it open, obviously still half asleep. He’s naked from the waist up, and his hair is a mess, but he instantly begins to sober up when he takes in who exactly has come to see him this fucking early in the morning.
John has Old Boy in a loose lasso around the neck from a length of laundry rope he had pried off of a nearby trailer, and the horse is placidly nibbling at the back of his hair. He bats at the horse’s muzzle with distracted knuckles as Arthur takes a measured step down, his head shaking in wonderment. “Milton… what, in tarnation are you-?”
But John cuts Arthur off before he can even warm up to it. He finally knows what he wants.
“Rise n’ shine, Morgan! Now, teach me to ride.”