Ain't Talkin'

Whatever the reason the dreams came. The drink usually kept the dreams out, kept the memories from his head. The dreams might have been lamps on the prows of the fishing boats where the boy was raised, but the drink. . .well the drink was a heavy morning fog, and those boats couldn’t go nowhere with that much fog. Kept ’em down it did. That it did.

But then nothing works all the time.

That night in the saddle, with his mare beneath him following the convoy of soldiers bound for their last days on earth, Roche dreamt of Patrick Wilkes.

Growing up they’d called him ‘Patchy’, on account of his name and the plumb terrible haircuts he always gave himself.

Growing up, Walter hadn’t known Patchy well. It wasn’t until they’d been older working boys that Walter had ever had cause to know Patchy.

Patchy liked Mollie Groux, but Mollie Groux wasn’t the kinda girl who liked to go with boys, and that’s what made Roche love her all the more. What she and he had, well it weren’t about goin’ together and romps in old man McMullin’s hay loft. It was about kindred spirits. Two kids that loved each other more than anything else.

That night after the harvest dance. Patchy and two other good ol’ boys had beaten and raped Mollie Groux and let the poor girl die out there in the cold.

When Walter had taken that girl’s body to the white he’d gotten himself lost. When he found his way back out he found that same little town where he grew up. The library was a memory now, but the copper’s still had themselves a little station. A few threats and hittin’ the copper on duty with the butt of his gun and Roche had found the old records. He found the three boys who’d been brought in for questioning when Mollie Groux went missing.

Patrick Wilkes.

William Dunham.

Andrew Vickers.

Patchy Wilkes was the first on the list. When Walter Roche found Patchy he was an old man, sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a big fireplace with the gout in his legs and cataracts in one eye, all the problems that come with drinking bad water and drinking too much booze in the wastelands. Bad booze, bad water, bad livin’ all the way down.

Old man or no, he’d been the one. Roche dragged him out of bed with a rope tied around his wrists. Roche dragged old Patchy Wilkes to a tree and hung him up by his wrists. Big gouty feet dangling all helpless, Patchy cried and said he was innocent. Lying filth. Roche stuffed a rag into his mouth to shut him up. And a good thing too, because Patchy Wilkes screamed like a stuck swine when Roche cut his balls off with his bootknife and hung them around Patchy’s neck on a length of baling twine.

He didn’t scream so much, the rapist, when Roche cut his belly open, all rubber stinking snakes fallin’ to the earth below the tree. That was where Walter Roche left him.

Balls around his neck.

Guts on the ground.

A scream on his lips that froze in rigor for the coppers to find the next day.

Roche had made that mistake of letting the copper live. He’d been soft then, and that had meant records of him, that had meant he hadn’t been forgotten.

That had meant that the good Doctor John Weaving could find him, could find out about him.

Even a hundred and fifty plus years later, Roche’s mistake was costing him.

Wasn’t that just a trip.

The walker’s eyes snapped open and he lurched forward in the saddle.

The convoy was still on the move and it was still night, the light pollution from Sacramento so, so far behind. He drank deeply and kept his heels down, feeling the asphalt shudder up through Lucky’s hooves and into his hips. The road was ahead, and there was so much ahead. He drank some more.