The winds spilled into the dry, rocky arroyo, where even our shadows were covered in dust. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose, and Shelby fussed with tying his bedroll and in it the sand and sentiment of the storm.
We put our stolen horses and our backs against the bank of the ditch and pieces of dead cholla and cactus came down with the dust and peppered our hats like a mutant rain. The horses sneezed and stomped, and I loosened the bridle bits and talked to them and made promises I planned to keep but we’d seen, the horses and me, what happens to plans.
“This ain’t good cover,” Shelby said, and it wasn’t.
He pulled his shirt over his face, and we turned the horses up the draw and out into the mess. Shelby pointed and I saw the canyon and nodded. We led the animals across the plain and the wind seemed to blow harder, as if it had seen us.
We pressed forward over the cracked earth with the wind at our back, sweeping past us and flattening our clothes to our skin on its way east into the San Rafael Valley. We circled the ravine until we found a passable trail. There was a creek bed without much water but the horses drank anyway, and we waited until the winds died with the sun before moving on.
Things were different at night, cold and still and dark, and when the clouds burned off, the stars were still there as they’d been since before we began shining lights back at them. They scalded the night sky in their dying, and when they fell we whispered wishes to ourselves for things only the stars might understand.
We bore south and east and followed a path beaten by cattle, letting the horses decide their steps. They knew better than us, the horses, in the dark and in general. When the ride was too long we ate fruit from a tin and Shelby made the fire while I tied and tended the animals. I loosened the straps of the saddles and ran my hand along the sides of their bellies, and their breathing was strong and slow. I told them they had done well and I touched their faces and said I was sorry for everything that happened. I fed them without rationing, as if extra oats could right the world’s wrongs. I carried both saddles, one atop the other, and along with them the blankets from the horses’ backs, and the stirrups drug in the dirt as I came upon the fire.
I looked at my brother and wondered what he was thinking, now and always, and this time I asked him. He looked at me with the load of gear in my arms and laughed and said he was thinking about how much money I could make as a pack mule.
“Keep laughing,” I told him. “Maybe you can joke your way out of that noose they’re getting ready for us.”
After things had gone sideways at the Dawson Ranch, we’d made south through the territory, expecting someone to follow, but no one did. We had no plan save what Shelby would decide each morning and mostly it was the same.
“Let’s keep heading south,” he’d say, and we’d bury the fire while our stomachs grumbled.
We followed the earth’s shelf down from the rim country and into the desert valley below. We passed Phoenix, staying to the east, and chanced a stop in Tucson for supplies. We had only the money we’d set out with before the robbery. And for the boy’s life we had only the two horses we rode. Things had not gone in accordance with Shelby’s plan.
We left Tucson with a sack full of tinned fruit and some dried beef and headed further into the desert.
* * *
“You sure ain’t said much,” Shelby told me, our horses trotting through the waxy candelilla of the lowlands the day after the windstorm.
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Hell, I don’t know, anything. Something about the weather, maybe.”
“It’s hot.”
“Yessir, it is that.”
We rode on, but silence was not much of a strength for Shelby, no matter the circumstance.
“You reckon Philadelphia stands a chance against Chicago in the World Series?” he asked. “I saw in the paper in Tucson where they’ll be matching up.”
“I don’t care.”
“It ought to be a good one.”
“Alright.”
“What are you so sore at, little brother?”
I pulled up on the horse and Shelby made a circle and did the same and there we set in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day, sweat pouring from our bodies and with it any righteousness we’d ever known.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Who’s dead?”
“That boy is dead, and you want to talk about baseball?”
“Well it ain’t gotta be baseball. We could talk about boxing, but I didn’t really want to get started on that nigger Johnson. I promise you if they give ol’ Jeffries a rematch—”
“Stop. Just quit opening your mouth.” I spit into the dirt and put the horse forward and Shelby scowled and followed.
“You better watch how you talk to me, son,” he said. “Outlaws turn on their partners all the time. That’s a fact.”
“We ain’t outlaws.”
“Sure we are,” he said. “We’re the Bentley Brothers, known far and wide as the most dangerous guns west of the Mississippi. Hell-bent on living a life full of adventure, stealing horses and the hearts of women, and riding them both as long as it suits us.”
“And you’d like that life?” I asked.
“I might even steal me one of them Ford motor buggies.”
“You wouldn’t even know how to go about it.”
“I bet I could I figure it out.”
“You realize Dawson probably has every marshal in the territory hunting us? We’re gonna hang. You understand that, don’t you?”
Shelby shrugged.
“I ain’t got no problem killing a marshal,” he said. “But if it makes you feel better, how ’bout we just make it into Mexico, find us a little ranch to work on. Piquito ranchero, I believe they call it. Then we can be real vaqueros instead of outlaws. How ’bout that?”
“Look yonder,” I said, pointing.
Dust drifted up from an old wagon road crossing east to west below us. Men on horses moved past like miniature figurines, the dust trailing them as they rode. There was no sound.
“What?” Shelby asked.
“Might be a posse. Might be hunting us.”
Shelby laughed.
“You read one too many of them dime novels, little brother.”
We set and watched the riders as they dismounted and moved into the brush along the road and then were back on the horses and moving down the trail and dismounting again, searching for something.