#thorst

The sun was hot and heartless. Dirt that’d been kicked up under boots and hooves and rickety wagon wheels settled like a mist and coated Arthur’s lungs with a dusty film. Despite the gambler’s hat worn low on his brow, a stain of cherry burned the back of his neck, stinging petulantly with every turn.

A church appeared on the empty horizon. Arthur recalled the cautionary tales of men whose minds had gone so dry as to conjure glittering oases where there were only brambles and bones. Yet he rode on, the dilapidated house of worship looming ever closer until he could see shafts of its milky white paint peeling off the side, warped from summer’s heat.

Arthur had been to a wedding exactly once. He couldn’t have been more than twenty the day Hosea made Bessie his bride. He sat sweating and itching beneath the stiff collar of his new suit as he shifted impatiently in the pew. It was a purchase insisted upon by Dutch, who had said with a tight and terrible smile as he straightened Arthur’s tie, “There are times, my son, when even men so unscrupulous as us must practice decorum.”

It was not Dutch’s masked misery that stood out in Arthur’s memory, but the reverent gleam in Hosea’s eye as he watched his Bessie damn near trot down the aisle, curls bouncing gold, winsome in her Sunday best. A look that stilled Arthur in his seat with quiet awe. A look that made him want to buy a ring — not slip one off the fat finger of some still-warm body to pawn for liquor money — no, to visit a jeweler with a lady in mind and buy one. A look that made an angry, unruly, violent young man want to be honest about a few things, for a change.

For what good honesty ever did him.

Saddle leather creaked beneath his weight as he dismounted, spurs jangling like a knell as they made impact with the clay-packed earth. He rifled through his satchel, withdrawing a worn piece of parchment. It was a list given to him by Strauss — debtors desperate enough to accept their predatory terms and who were unluckier still to meet Arthur to fulfill them. Misfortune’s fools, the lot. There were five names in all, with all but one crossed out in pencil:

Laura Krass — prostitute — $50 Reginald Smith — cobbler — $75 Helen Bakersfield — laundress — $30 Timothy Cramwell — miner — $60 Delbert Davis — clerk — $100