#mag7weekend

It’s you or them, Vasquez tells himself when his fingers quiver to reload his gun, you or them. Sam or them.

It’s the last part that steadies his hand. In all honesty, he’s so goddamn tired of running that, if he didn’t know Sam was counting on him to have his back, he wonders if he might stray from his cover with his hands raised in the güero’s “don’t-shoot” style. Dead he would live up to his family’s expectations. But there’s still that same flame to live that had sent him careening out of Texas that licks at his insides and keeps him ducked out of sight.

One more shot fires and clips the rock above Sam’s head. Just which party did the sneaking is unclear, but which party had been up to no good is not; one mention of Sam’s “duly-sworn warrant officer” spiel had them drawing their guns, and even after walking out of Rose Creek, neither Sam nor Vasquez liked the odds of seven-to-one unaware. Now, five men down, they’re covered behind the rocky Arizona outcropping, waiting for their chance to pick off a few more or the chance to explain that they didn’t mean to find them. Although at this point, Vasquez assumes Sam doesn’t care much about negotiating. Not that he would blame him or trust the others to pass honorably.

One particularly brave, stupid soul sticks his head around their rock, perhaps trying to get the drop on them, but Vasquez fires two shots into his forehead before the other man can raise his gun. It’s a waste. Next to him, Sam pops off three more fanned rounds in rapid succession, and Vasquez hopes that’s three more down. He reloads both his guns once more, then glances to Sam before breaking his cover.

When he shoots, he isn’t quite aware he’s doing so, and later he might wonder about the safety in that, but there’s only a twitch of his fingers that doesn’t quite feel like it’s coming from him. Mi dulce, María Marquez used to say with her warm smile pressing a kiss to his forehead; mi dulce, she would say now with tears rolling down her cheeks, and it wouldn’t sound nearly as sweet.

Oh, mi dulce, Vasquez can hear her saying when the silence settles around them. It bounces and echoes off the cliffs more than any gunfire ever could.

Vasquez looks to the pool of blood and the brave, stupid man floating in what hasn’t been soaked into the earth, at the sharp nose, the dark eyes, even the scruff of his beard, though longer than his own. For what it’s worth, he could be looking at a picture of himself gunned down in a bar, and it feels entirely too close, entirely too lucky. For the first time in a long time—in too long—his stomach churns at the sight of the dead man he possibly killed, and that alone makes him feel even worse. When did killing become such a habit that he doesn’t balk at a body?

He scrubs his face with his hands and leans into it as a wave of sickness washes through him. Good, he thinks, and wishes it were worse.

“Vasquez.” Sam’s voice pulls him from his self-damning thoughts, and he shakily turns, where he finds Sam standing over the familiar body and studying Vasquez as though meeting for the first time. “Look at him.”

Reluctantly, Vasquez turns his attention back to the dead, and all he can see is himself lying on the ground. No identification, no one to tell his mother that her only son was dead, truly dead now, so she could either stop worrying or have a reason to continue her mourning. No one to tell her how much he’d loved her, she and his father and sisters, and that he hadn’t gone a day without thinking of them on their ranch in Texas. He sees a decade of running made fruitless, years he’ll never get back and with nothing to show for them. He looks, but he doesn’t want to. “Looks like me.”

“Yeah. He does,” Sam says, and then there’s a rustling that draws Vasquez’s attention away from the body once more—draws his attention to the same paper Sam had held up when they met.

And then Vasquez understands without Sam having to say a word. When he looks at the body again, all he sees is five hundred dollars pocketed, plenty to split if Sam is willing, and a death sentence that disappears forever. One life for two. He could start over and have a life again. The comfort of Rose Creek, the familiarity and companionship, the dry bed and soft pillow, he could have it all if they did this. He could stop running and just be still.

He doesn’t have to say a word for Sam to know.

Once, on a ranch in Texas, there had been a man and his wife and their three daughters and son.

The ranch had been in the family for more than a hundred years, and as the oldest child and only male heir, the son had been set to take over, and he hadn’t minded, had looked forward to the day when he could make his family proud, take on their name and wear it well because he had loved his family. He loved his parents who had only given him love; he had loved his sisters, the stern and serious Hildebranda, vibrant Noemí with not enough time in the day to laugh as much as she wanted, and sweet little María, who took after their mother more than just her namesake. Looking back, he sometimes wonders if he’d loved them too much, or too poorly; if he only had loved them just right, perhaps he could still be with them. If only so many things had been different, perhaps he wouldn’t have lived the last ten years with a noose around his neck.

It should feel freeing now that the noose is gone. Alejandro Vasquez is dead. His life was worth five hundred dollars, half of which jingles in the bottom of the saddle bag next to his right foot. It should feel freeing, but it doesn’t. Instead, it feels instead like he’s wandering through a desert in the dead of winter: no destination, no reason to run, nothing holding him in place.

Even with his warrant gone, Vasquez knows there’s no going back; or rather, he won’t go back and put them in danger—won’t have their safety on his conscience too. And so still it’s forward, farther down the trail, away from a home that feels no closer now than it has in years.

When the ground has thawed, or at least thawed some, they stop wandering the desert and find themselves just west of the Rockies in Colorado, in a railroad town called Pine River. It’s still entirely too cold for Vasquez’s preferences, but he knows there’s little use in trying to sway Sam’s opinion.

All saloons are the same, Vasquez thinks, as they hitch their horses to the post outside into this new one. Some have clean girls and dirty glasses, some have a piano that plays in tune, some offer lodgings upstairs, but they all give a drink that burns, and he can’t think of anything better.

This saloon, though, has an amiable barman who’s more than happy make small talk and who tops off their glasses generously. He’d squinted once when they’d walked in and immediately waved them over to the bar, introducing himself as Alfred Tolliver and asking how they were with enough welcoming that both Vasquez and Sam took it to be sincere.

“Name’s Chisolm. Sam Chisolm, peace officer from Wichita, Kansas,” Sam says now, easy in the other man’s easy company, and it makes Vasquez feel easy too. “Just passing through town with my friend here. We’d like to stop for a night or two and have a warm bed for a change.”

“Well,” Tolliver says in a drawl that sounds gray-suit familiar, “iffen it’s lodgings you want, you’re best to check with the Widow Barber at the hotel.”

“Widow Barber, huh? How’d her last husband die,” Vasquez asks, running a finger across his throat.

The barman’s friendly smile turns more unsettling than amused, and Vasquez, like usual, regrets his joke. “Sliced to pieces, that’s for sure, but not by her. Can’t say she was too disappointed to see his great ass in the dirt. Can’t say any of us were. But their place is right at the fork, can’t miss it.”

When they’ve had their rest, they part with a tip of their hats, Sam taking the horses to the stable while Vasquez follows the man’s instructions down the thoroughfare, where, turning right at the fork, a yellow building with brown trim looms the span of half the block, its only real decorations being the sign that reads “Barber House: Finest Rooms and Baths.” The front door opens to a rich, oaken lobby, with two halls on either side of a staircase that splits at the landing. It’s empty inside, save for a lone woman at the counter holding a tiny baby in one arm and a cigarette to her lips with the other, her battered bodice unbuttoned to her corset, revealing milk-white breasts. The moment he realizes he’s staring, Vasquez hurries to turn his gaze to her face, thin and mean in both senses, only to find her already scrutinizing him with a pair of harsh blue eyes. Liar, her face reads.

If this is the widow, Vasquez wonders exactly who the lucky party was. “Señora Barber?”

Halting her drag on the cigarette, a cloud of smoke puffs from between her lips as she snaps, “Do I look like a fucking widow? If you want her, you’ll have to wait a goddamn moment.”

Look like una puta, Vasquez wants to say, but common sense tells him this is the kind of girl with a gun in her garter. He hasn’t made it this far just to have an irritable prostitute off him. She brushes back a strand of stringy coppery hair to better squint at him, raking small eyes up and down his being, and then takes a drag from her cigarette, smoke blowing in his direction. “I’m Beatrice. The whore. You need something?”

“Name’s Marquez, Salvador Marquez. Just came into town with my friend,” Vasquez says, after a beat when he can think of a passable name. He ignores her implication. “I was told Señora Barber could give us a room. Need one room with two beds or two rooms with one bed. And a bath, por favor.”

“Jesus, do you always run around shoving your stick up everyone’s ass?” Beatrice stubs out her cigarette on the counter and gives him her most impressive scowl yet. “You know what I fucking meant. You want the widow, or just the room?”

“Room is fine,” Vasquez says. She reaches beneath the counter to withdraw a ledger that she slides across to him. A thin, boney finger taps at a line, and Vasquez signs his name—Salvador Marquez—on it, then Sam’s, and fishes out a few coins from his pocket.

“Number fourteen, right at the top of the stairs. Two beds. It’s cheaper that way,” Beatrice says without much heat, passing him a key. “I’ll get the bath brought up.”

“Gracias.” Vasquez offers her a smile, and though she doesn’t return it, she doesn’t frown either, merely watches him from under her lashes, shifting the baby in her arms just enough that Vasquez catches a glimpse of tiny lips and round cheeks.

“Nice place,” Sam says when he comes into the room.

Vasquez raises his head off his bed just enough to watch Sam drop his hat onto the room’s free chair. For a fleeting moment, he hopes he hadn’t looked as rough as Sam, but he can’t find the energy to care all that much now that he’s bathed and tested the bed—and madre de Dios, what a bed it is. It’s so comfortable that he wonders if he’s already died, except where he’s going would never be this comfortable. Maybe he’ll never get up. His stomach rumbles in opposition of the thought, but it takes little effort to ignore it, even after too long of having a routine again, too long of having proper meals at regular, proper times.

“Restaurant down the street seems popular.” There’s a hint of amusement in Sam’s voice, which Vasquez snorts at. Everything is working against him to get him out of this bed, and frankly he wants nothing to do with it. It’s the only thing he wants for the rest of his life: a soft bed and the goddamned peace and quiet that comes with it. Not that he wouldn’t take anything else that comes with beds either. “The widow suggested it too.”

“You meet the widow,” Vasquez asks, only out of a salacious sort of curiosity, still not budging. The hotel is by far the nicest he’s ever stayed in, with or without Sam, richly built and decorated, which only serves to contrast even more sharply with the woman who’d checked them in. Perhaps Beatrice was the dead man’s mistress, put into the hotel as a favor even after death. Perhaps she and the widow hate each other. Or perhaps the widow has figured out how to make a bit of extra money.

“Quiet. Reckon she’s nice enough,” Sam says, and then comes a clanking of metal beating its way up the stairs. Vasquez hears Sam cross the room to answer the knock, and he doesn’t have to look to know it’s Beatrice clanking her way into the room with another tub. Just as loudly and unceremoniously, she’ll be back with pails of water half-sloshed up the stairs and through the hall. Vasquez closes his eyes. No need to add to her ill-feelings towards him.

When Sam finishes bathing, he wakes Vasquez with a kick at his foot dangling on the floor. Vasquez growls, but his stomach growls back, and with a great reluctance, he heaves himself out of the soft, perfect bed. It’s growing dark out now, the room dimmed into shadow and lit only by the dusk from the window and the single lamp Sam had lit. Shifting through his bags, Vasquez finds a clean—or cleaner—pair of pants and tugs them on.

Sam is out of the room before he can finish tucking his shirt into his pants, and he’s focused on buttoning his vest while not falling down the stairs when out of the corner of his mouth, Sam mutters, “She’s talking to you.”

Snapping to attention, Vasquez expects Beatrice, but instead he finds another woman waiting as if she expects him to accost her; not that he ever would, or even could, especially with the way she watches him with such round, frightened eyes. Everything about her seems round, her eyes, her face, everything round and soft, and if she wasn’t dressed to her neck in black, he’d think she’d never known a hard day in her life. In a voice equally as soft and more modulated than even Billy’s had been, she says, “Mr. Marquez?”

For a stupid moment, he stares at her, uncomprehending, and then he remembers who Mr. Marquez is. He offers what he can of a smile that goes unreturned, though he doesn’t know if that’s from nerves or being put off. When he starts to come over and she sees that she has his attention, she asks, “How do you do, Mr. Marquez? I’m Mrs. Anna Barber, proprietor. Please forgive me for not seeing you in this afternoon, but I had an errand to run. I trust that everything was to your liking and there were no…misunderstandings?”

“Misunderstandings,” Vasquez asks. He hopes it’s not misunderstood that he knows the word, but nothing had gone wrong like she seems to think.

Señora Barber had been twisting a handkerchief in her hands, and now Vasquez thinks that if it was made of paper, she’d have it torn into shreds. “Checking in wasn’t too unpleasant? Everyone was polite?”

Realization peels back the corners of his lips. So her guard dog—if that’s what Beatrice can be described as—got loose. “No worries, Señora Barber. Your security, she doesn’t bite too hard. Still have all my fingers.”

“Are you sure—”

“It’s all right, señora,” he insists, holding up both hands and wiggling his fingers. “No harm, see?”

“Yes, I see,” she says, and when the traces of a grin ghost across her face, she ducks her head as if to keep from being caught. He wonders for a moment just what she would look like smiling, if she’s just as soft and somber, but she raises her head as composed as ever. “Well, Mr. Marquez. I have no certainty for how long you intend to stay, but we do serve meals here if you’re ever so inclined, and on Mondays, we launder the linens and anything else you might like. If there’s anything we can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask. And again, Mr. Marquez, I do apologize for anything that may have conspired earlier.”

“Grac—thank you, señora. And no apologies needed.” With a tip of his head, he offers one last parting smile and rejoins Sam. Somewhere deep inside, he half hopes they do stay long enough to see laundry day.

In the town of Pine River, the Colorado Central Railway stops three times a day, morning, afternoon, evening, and if anyone gets off, they go to Banjo Joe’s Saloon, Bergman’s Kitchen, or the Barber House, where there’s warmth to go around: a hot meal at Bergman’s, off for a decent conversation with Al Tolliver next, then to one of the Widow Barber’s soft beds.

Vasquez wants to think it’s these three things that draw him in, but in reality, it’s not quite true. For a railroad town, there isn’t much excitement except for the train’s three stops a day. Everyone knows everyone else, from the miller’s new baby to the reverend’s grandfather-in-law, and moreover, they take a moment to speak to him so that by the end of the three days spent in town, there are rounds of, “How do you do, Marquez,” whenever he walks through the thoroughfare.

Even better is the shop at the end of the thoroughfare, right where the street forks for the railroad and hotel. Without any notice, the previous owner had up and left one night, and when the town had awoken in the morning, they’d found his few personals gone from the back room and his shop completely intact, all his equipment, his saws and nails and enough lumber to last for months, waiting for another day of work that wouldn’t come. The bank had waited without any sign of him for three months before seizing the shop and leaving the town in need of a carpenter.

But it’s the beyond that really draws him in. Surrounding mountains cradle the town in a rich valley, with hills that roll emerald when the snow melts and trees that disappear into the sky, the land cut only by the railroad’s single line. It’s cool in the mornings and evenings, and even during the day, it’s cooler than what Vasquez is used to, and it’s certainly no Texas, but he thinks he could make it work. Stop lassoing rocks and get back to the cattle he grew up with. Stop blazing a trail and carve out a homestead.

If there’s anywhere he could stay, it’s here. He assumes Sam likes the town too, considering he makes no mention of leaving after three days, but by Saturday—at least, it’s Saturday as far as Vasquez can tell, and Señora Barber hasn’t asked for the laundry—Sam is again ready to go.

“I’ve got a warrant for a Mickey McCrae,” he says over dinner at Bergman’s, and the fork halfway to Vasquez’s lips pauses in its journey. “Three hundred dollars for stealing from Huntington and the CP, and word is, he’s a three-day ride just north of here.”

His stomach decidedly not interested in eating anymore, Vasquez lowers his fork and raises his eyes. “Jefe,” he begins slowly, “I am grateful you didn’t kill me and let me come with you, but this town…it’s nice.”

For a long moment, Sam doesn’t say anything, just keeps chewing his cornbread and watching his plate, and Vasquez waits for his anger that never comes. “You thought about this?”

“Sí. Everyone knows Salvador Marquez. They need a carpenter, I need…” A roof, a rest, a reason; he needs so many things that only come if he just stops running.

Vasquez waits for his anger, but Sam only nods.

Sam sets out the next morning.

Not long after they’d struck out together, Vasquez had recognized in Sam the fire burning for something he couldn’t have, and he knew the feeling well. What Vasquez wanted was to leave behind Vasquez the outlaw and the chance once more to be Alejandro Vasquez, the man with the ranch and days of hard work made easy by family and friends. If he’d ever had a desire for adventure, that burned out years ago when for even more years, he’d been without a familiar face, anyone to assure him that he was right, to just keep going, it would be fine one day. It’s not the same thing that makes Sam’s fire burn, that’s for sure. In Sam, there’s a restless sort of energy, a need to be always on the move, always reaching for that want—an angry sort of energy with which Vasquez can identify, but they’re worlds apart in how they want to react.

Which is the problem, Vasquez thinks; Sam wants to move, and Vasquez wants to dig his heels in the ground.

When the morning comes and Sam is packed and Vasquez isn’t, he waits for Sam to make some comment about their separating, to tell him he’s out of his mind and this is dangerous, or to ask him if he remembers this and that, make him nostalgic and sick for something he hasn’t yet lost. But of course, Sam doesn’t. He takes his bags to his horse with the same stoicism as ever, determined to leave Vasquez with one single image.

“Won’t be hard to find me, you know,” he says when he fixes his bags to the saddle, and more words than he’ll ever say are on his face. Won’t be hard to find me if this doesn’t work out, but I won’t come find you.

“I know, jefe. Just ask for the warrant officer from Wichita, Kansas,” Vasquez answers, and Sam reads his real reply in his face. Stubborn assholes, the both of them; they won’t be finding each other without just reason besides missing companionship.

It’s with a jerk of his head that Sam mounts his horse. “Take care now,” he says, and then he’s digging his heels into his horse’s flanks, rocking into motion, into an easy sway now part of both their bloods. He’s slipping the thoroughfare’s traffic, mingling among them, disappearing—and then he’s out of sight. First friends in a decade, a whole six all at once, and less than a year later, they’re all gone again, just as suddenly as they’d come.

Immediately, there’s a gaping hole where one shouldn’t be. All the conversation, terse as it might have been, all the protection, all the comfort of just having someone, it’s gone in an instant, and Vasquez curses himself for letting it happen. But if this is to work, he’ll have to let it happen again.