Shelby leaves when they get back to Bulletville, telling Raylan heâll let the Guard know where to go. Raylan tells Boyd to point his daddyâs spare shotgun at his head and shoot Raylan before Raylan can shoot him.
They draw down ten thousand times, until Raylan can pull his gun faster than thought. These deaths are quick to come and quick to pass, and stop when they put the guns away.
Raylan never gets close enough to see the holes he puts in Boydâs head.
When itâs him, he thinks Boyd makes himself look. He wakes up time and again to Boydâs face hovering over his, grinning like a deathâs head, the tips of his hair on fire in the fading light.
The light here is always fading. Theyâre so deep in the hills that theyâre stuck in perennial twilight, the sunset dogging the heels of the dawn. The nights are long and press in on them, like theyâre still in the mine. Boyd takes it into himself, somehow, here and gone all at once. Liminal, somehow. Raylan thinks that even when Boydâs dead, heâs waiting.
Boyd shoots Raylan, again and again and again. Even then, he doesnât look away. This is what the mountain taught himâeven killing Raylan Givens wonât get him to stay.
They stay in Bulletville for nearly a month, waiting on the Guard Shelby promised. In between killing each other out in the yard, Raylan is restless. The gun in his hand rises easy nowâeasy as pointing his finger, that old pantomime of childhood, where everyone you shoot stands back up once the game is over. He feels like heâs playing at it, still. Like heâs only a child, and this is just another game. The killing never sticks.
Raylan watches the horizon while Boyd goes inside to sit in that same chair at the table, head bowed as if in mourning. He holds his pocket watch in both hands, the edge pressed against his forehead, like heâs praying to it. Raylan comes inside with his heels itching, spinning up dust under his boots as he paces the floor and starts to think maybe Shelbyâs a goddamn liar.
Boyd watches from his chair, gaze on Raylan but head still down. His eyes are so hard to see.
âIt ever enter your mind, Raylan, that maybe they got a long goddamn way to travel?â he suggests one day, while Raylanâs boots scratch out a map of his frustration on the floor. âSurely America ainât the only place in need of guarding.â
That night, Raylan fucks him like theyâre both about to die, like theyâre not dead already, something inside him still stuck in that moment right before the roof caved in. Boyd lets Raylan collapse on top of him afterward, like a re-enactment, where Boyd is Raylan and Raylan is the mountain.
When Boyd fucks Raylan, he presses down against him like the rocks Raylan died under. Like heâs trying to bury them both.
Thank you so much for sending this, Iâm very proud of the excerpt that you chose, and Iâm excited to talk about it! Thereâs a lot going on under the surface in these sections. While Raylan claims that this exercise in repeatedly killing one another is intended to improve his quickdraw, I think itâs also an attempt to inoculate and desensitize himself to death, both his own and Boydâs (and just in general). Itâs also a way of, once again, wresting control over an uncontrollable situation; when they died in the mines, that was a traumatic death outside their control, and in Raylanâs case, he went down into the mines in the first place because he had no other choice. He never wanted to be down there at all. So I think he has the belief that each subsequent death, out in the sunshine on his own terms, sets him just a little bit further removed from that first horrifying experience of death. In this, as in everything, he is running. If he can just put a little more ground between himself and the things he fears, maybe the fear wonât catch him.
However, he doesnât want to see the aftermath. He doesnât approach Boyd until heâs already healing. Boyd canât and wonât stay dead, so why linger in that moment of death? Itâll be over in a moment, so why let it touch you? What does it matter? Of course, Boyd does die, he does experience that, even if he comes out the other side of that experience. Meanwhile, Boyd almost revels in these moments. He knows Raylan wonât leave until he wakes up, so as long as Boydâs dead, Raylan hasnât left him yet. And when Raylanâs dead, heâs here, too; so, in some ways, Boyd is at his happiest with Raylan suspended in death, because heâs also suspended in space and time. Theyâre both in a twilight state, SchrĂśdingerâs catâhere and gone, alive and dead. Boyd is waiting for Raylan to leave, yes, but heâs also waiting for Raylan to come back: because he has to believe that, eventually, he will. Their deathlessness has, in a way, put them outside time, in that while they still experience it in a linear fashion, it canât really touch them. But, as Boyd learned from the mine, even killing Raylan wonât get him to stay. Maybe for a moment, but not for good.
By the time the Guard comes, Raylan believes that his attempt to immunize himself to death has worked. But here, with Boyd, death has no consequences, or at least no permanent ones. That wonât always be the case, and a part of him knows it, and itâs why he thinks about being a kid again. In the grand scheme of thingsâin the grand scheme of his own lifeâhe is a child. Heâs playing at something that isnât quite real to him yet. He knows this isnât always what it will be like; he listened closely enough to Shelby to figure out that much.
Plus, he now has proof that Boyd will get up no matter how many times heâs killed. Raylan can leave him, and heâll survive. Heâll be okay. (The former, or course, holds true. On the latter, Iâll let you come to your own conclusions.)
Raylan is right; Boyd is already in a state of preemptive mourning, because Raylan already has one foot out the door. And heâs not too far off base when he says Boyd is praying to time, either. Heâs counting on the eventuality of Raylan coming back to him one day.
Much is made of how well Raylan can see Boydâs eyes in any given moment in this first chapter; this is intentional. Raylan tells himself their inscrutability comes down to the fact that Boyd is hard to read, which he can be, but itâs equally true that Raylan isnât trying too hard to read him, because he doesnât want to know. If eyes are windows to the soul, there are things Raylan is afraid to see in Boydâs. He needs to leave, and he doesnât want to acknowledge how this will affect Boyd. Meanwhile, not only does Boyd look unflinchingly into Raylanâs eyesâhis soul, if the metaphor holdsâhe literally saw the inside of Raylanâs skull, the thing physically behind his eyes. He knows exactly what Raylan means to him, and he doesnât flinch from it. Boyd leans into their understanding of each other, where Raylan runs away from it. How could he acknowledge what they are to each other and still leave?
In my timeline, the rest of the guard came to get Raylan from India, where the anti-colonialist movement is steadily picking up steam.
And then you have this last section, where theyâre both thinking about the mine as they sleep together for what they believe might be the last time before theyâre separated. They conceptualize their lovemaking as a reenactment of the collapse, not because they want to be literally back there, but because they want to do toâor forâeach other what the mine did to them. While they know they canât literally trap each other, they want to recreate one specific condition of their trapped state: to take away the pain of the choice, or at least one specific consequence of having that choice. Despite the horror and pain and helplessness of that time, while they were down there, their entire world was comprised of what they were to each other. They were not just the only ones like them down there, but the only ones at all. And there were no hard questions that might divide them with their answers. But as soon as they got out, they were presented with a choice: whether to stay or leave. As soon as that choice existed, their separation became inevitable, because they were always going to choose differently. So when they have sex, theyâre trying to let each other live in that moment again, and forget, just for the night, whatâs going to happen when the day comes. They want to create a moment for each other where they donât have to feel the pain of the imminent divergence of their paths.
