Donny clicked his tongue, felt something angular beneath his boot, and bent to retrieve it. A pair of scissors. He held it out to her.
“It’s your lucky day, darlin’. I’ve come to relieve you of him.”
“Don!” called Gunner, a hand reaching forward and fisting his shirt, bending him nearly in two. “Don, they won’t give me nothin’ for the pain. I’m dyin’!”
He could hear the titanic breaths of Gunner’s lungs, smell the sweat coating him. The wound in his side had been stitched and bandaged. The pain he spoke of was more in his mind than outside it.
Their mother called it withdrawal.
“Ain’t nothin’ left, brother,” Donny told him, prying Gunner’s fingers free. “The swank’s dogs took it all.”
“I’m dyin’,” Gunner whimpered, pulling at the clothes on his own body as though they were strangling him. “I’ll be dead by mornin’.”
“Well,” Otto said thoughtfully. “It’d save us draggin’ your sorry arse back.”
“Doctor says you’re fit as a fiddle,” Donny told Gunner, already reefingthe big man off his back. “Come on, brother,” he grunted, swinging one of Gunner’s arms over his shoulder. “And you’d better sharpen up ’fore Ma sees you.”
“Ma,” Gunner said, as though just now remembering her. “Fuck it, Donny. We need Pat.”
“Well,” Donny said. “We ain’t got him. There’s you and there’s me.”And we hardly make up a whole man between us.
“But there ain’t any bluff,” Gunner whined, allowing Otto to take his weight on his other side. “What’ll we do?”
“Business as usual,” Donny said with far more confidence than he felt. “Just business as usual, brother. I need you back on your feet.”
They half carried him from the infirmary. He howled and bucked and shivered. He threatened Donny, then apologized in quick course. “If I ever see that fuckin’ Charmer again,” he said, as though his hands were already throttled around her throat, “or that Scribbler,I’ll rip their fuckin’ heads off!”
Donny was of much the same sentiment. All of Kenton’s light stolen.
But they’d get it back. He’d make sure of it.
And Patty would return… He had to. Containing him would be like lassoing a storm.
Right. Patty would return at any moment, and all Kenton’s problems would feel lighter.
They dumped Gunner unceremoniously in his childhood bed on the second floor of the house behind Colson & Sons. He groaned soundly, then sobbed. A man the size of a giant reduced to the whimpers of a boy.
Their mother was pacing about the kitchen. Donny could hear her prayers from where he stood on the landing. When he passed her again, she snatched his fingers up and squeezed them, not saying a word.
“He’ll be all right, Ma,” Donny told her, kissing the crown of her head. Every year she seemed shorter. “Let him clean himself up.”
She said nothing, her breath hitching as though she might cry. She patted his cheek.
Donny and Otto left to the sound of Gunner’s shouted pleas.
They walked to Kenton’s edge in silence. They let the panic and anguish rise and fall between them but did not speak of it. Tomorrow would be better, Donny thought.
It was nightfall when at long last, Scottie and Briggs returned down the eastern tunnel. He and Otto were waiting on a wooden horse fence, just outside of town, the fillies behind them nuzzling their pockets for food.
Otto climbed down to his feet when the lantern lights finally came over the hill, Kenton’s residents returning. “Looks like stars,” he told Donny in a voice that cracked: a dam punched with leaks, emotion toppling through. “Like a hundred stars running over the ground.”
Donny felt their feet pound over the earth like a drum, an ensemble welcoming them home.
He laughed. Rockets of light detonated behind his eyes.
They convened in the pub—Donny, Otto, Scottie, Briggs, and Tess—where Gunner’s wails couldn’t reach them. A sorry collection of crates meant for the kitchen sat instead atop the bar: vegetables, kerosene, machine oil, flour, and salt. Tess picked through each, her voice shot through with exhaustion. “It ain’t half the agreed amount,” she said. “Not a quarter of it.”
Scottie grunted. “Dunnitch bluff stores are low. They’re demandin’ more before they trade anythin’ else.”
