A Man Called Bone (Patreon)

The stranger rode out of the heat haze like a mirage that had decided to be real. He had a horse under him and three more hitched to it, each with a body slumped across the saddle, backs bent sideways from left to right and roped onto the saddle.

There was a pack mule as well, though it wasn’t hitched. It just trailed after the stranger like a faithful dog, its pack roped, the rope leading back to a fourth body that trailed after the plodding mule in the desert dirt. And that was how four dead men came to the town of Nowhere.

Nowhere itself wasn’t doing much better than the five men who had just come to it. A boomtown, the vein of gold that’d led to a settlement being made in such an inhospitable stretch of desert had petered out. But not gone altogether. It clung to life with the tenacity of the people who dug for it; a fool’s hope for real gold.

It seemed every month, a few strangers came in to stake their claims. They’d nearly spend themselves before one—only ever one—made it big, with enough dust or nuggets to spend big at the saloon, the brothel, the tent that served as casino. A tributary of the Rio Grande gave enough water to make living there bearable, but it was those suckers, lucky or unlucky, who pumped life into Nowhere.

Just enough to keep the whole town in a purgatory of thinking maybe the old days would come back, the vein would bleed rich again with a little more blasting or a little digging. Or maybe, someone who’d struck enough of a motherlode would stay and really share the wealth instead of letting it be fleeced from him by broads and bartenders.

Sofia Vergara, of course, didn’t mind having first claim on the money of anyone who struck it rich. She would proudly say she was the town whore—even with two other girls, Janey and Maud, working the brothel, she was the town whore. For no more and no less a reason than she possessed a decadent body—an enthusiastic body—a God-given gift of a body to a woman who wished to live passionately, wildly, or not be alive at all.

For Sofia was exactly as she appeared and made herself out to appear: a woman with no timidity, no hesitance. She wanted what she wanted with all the desire she could summon and she hated the same way, no coldness, no calculation, but with a white-hot flame that might simmer for a time, but could flare into a forest fire with only a drop of lantern oil to its credit.

So it was, perhaps, no wonder that this woman of extremes seemed to sense the coming of the stranger like an Indian with his ear to a railroad. She was the first one to see him ride into town and she observed the bodies in his care without rancor, for a boomtown saw as much blood as it did money, the two coming in equal proportions like gold traded for cash.

But even for Nowhere—which could claim no virtue, only a lack of energy—four bodies were excessive. And one dragged through the dirt like he’d been lynched rather than simply killed; Dios mio.

Sofia crossed herself, though the gesture seemed blasphemous with only her dressing gown preserving her modesty. The corset and bloomers and stockings underneath seeming to do more to throw off that modesty than if she’d been naked. Amplifying all that was sinful in her body until it seemed she simply had no capacity for anything else.

With her mestizo blood, Sofia was as suited to the desert as a woman could be. The shade that the brothel offered, with a certain dankness generated in its airy environs to flutter at the girls like a passing blessing, further cooled her.

But she also held a fan in her hand, flapping it at her sweaty face. As she watched the stranger haul his morbid cargo through Nowhere’s main street, the fan quickened. Chilling the sudden sweat that made her already glowing face seem to burst with light.

Janey and Maud were the two women who worked under Sofia, although she was no madam. She did more business than the pair of them put together. They were cute girls, but their youth was most of what recommended them. Driven out of the South by bushwhacking and kept out by the marauders, they’d ended up with nothing more to sell than their bodies, which they did so diffidently, as if there were no difference in surrendering their virtue to dowried husbands and doing so to loose-pursed strangers. Though Sofia’d had to do similar calculus and allowed that the difference was most apparent with a hot meal in the belly and more in the offing.

At any rate, there was so little to draw attention in Nowhere that something as small as the hoof-beats of an unfamiliar cayuse called to them. They crowded the second window of the upstairs parlor that was the brothel proper, built on top of the saloon and across from the hotel, as if to best compete on which would go out of business first.

“Who is that?” Maud asked, her own fan fluttering under her chin.

Janey pressed up close to Maud, aiming for what she could get of the cool provided by the other woman’s fan—too lazy to wave her own or too scatterbrained to find where she’d last placed it. “Looks like a stranger,” she said helpfully.

Sofia groaned. The two Southerners were like some temperance preacher, for they seemed to take her own internal monologue, split it between themselves, and regurgitate it with the speed and wit that still whiskey would reduce her to. It was enough to make her swear off alcohol. And maybe if she left Nowhere, she would keep to that sobriety. Another day in the dying and undying town could always drive her back to drink.

Janey thrust her hips to the side, knocking Maud away and then all but hanging out the window for a better look. Now the view was getting interesting. Sheriff Barton, the old graybeard with whiskers down to his clavicle, was coming out of the jail to confront the stranger.

“He’s got dead folks with him,” Janey said. “That must be rotten luck—finding so many dead people. Nice of him to take them into town for a proper Christian burial, though.”

Sofia could not hold her tongue any longer. “He killed them, idiota!”

Janey reared her head back. “You think so?”

“He must be a bounty killer,” Maud said, poking her head out the window to get a view herself, but carefully—as though worried the stranger might see and mark her face.

Sofia snorted. Even Maud was right about that much. She could see the stranger leaning off his saddle to hand the Sheriff a sheaf of wanted posters. Barton looked from them to the bodies laid out on the horses.

Finally, he made his way back to the one that had been pulled behind the pack mule. The stranger had wrapped a sackcloth around his head, presumably so his face would be fresh enough to be recognizable. Barton pulled the sackcloth off and compared it to the last poster. Then he neatly folded up the posters to go in his pocket.

“Emmett!” he yelled into the jail, bringing his deputy scurrying out. “Go get Kelly—“ The bank manager. “—and get this man paid. Louis too—“ The undertaker. “Let’s get these people in the ground before it gets any hotter.”

The stranger dismounted. Roughly, he went to the horses he’d been leading—one by one dislodged the bodies from the saddles. With his pack mule, he was even more callous. He simply cut the rope that’d been pulling the body along. Then he led the horses and the mule to the livery.

“Four men,” Maud tsked, shaking her head at the bloodshed.

Janey was slightly more practical. “He must be coming into a lot of money.” She looked at Sofia. “You think he’ll come here?”

“What else is there to do in this hellhole?” Maud asked. She looked Janey over. “Don’t get too excited.”

Sofia clicked her tongue at both of them. “Get some water heated. I want a hot bath run.”

“Then you’re going to take him?” Janey asked.

“You want him?” Maud asked her. “He’s a killer. A stone-cold killer.”

“You have to be sure of yourself to be a killer,” Janey reasoned.

“You also have to be a brutal son of a gun… four men, my goodness.” Maud picked up a crucifix from between her breasts and kissed it. “You think he might want more than one of us?” she asked, a trace of excitement in her voice and it was hard to tell whether it led to Janey or the stranger.

Sofia stomped on her toes. “I told jou to do something! Go do it!” As always when she lost her temper, her accent heated into an even thicker stew.

Murmuring curses and favoring her hurt foot, Maud took off, Janey following after her, mumbling both apologies for Maud and insistences that Sofia didn’t have to be so mean.

If the two weren’t lovers, they were far more fond of sharing a man than Sofia could figure out. She’d met too few good man to want to give half of one to another woman. After all, most good men were too good for her. She could only hope for one that wasn’t too bad.