Archive of Our Own

The Man in Black did not make a habit of kneeling before anyone, but this place had a way of knocking your legs out from under you.

In the dry white heat, he crouched once more with one knee to the dirt, and in the repetition of the gesture there was no suggestion of redemption — no second chances, no fucking reset button — but rather a kind of exhumation. Thirty years later, the Park had called for the inevitable post-mortem.

He would not deign to call it closure, because to do so would imply that this world could stitch you back up after flaying you wide open on the slab.

He wouldn't have wanted it, anyway. Where was the fun in that? What was the challenge in happy endings and empty promises?

The flaying, on the other hand, was an acquired taste. To inflict and to receive, and to savor both in equal measure; now those were the markers of a developed palate.

The can of milk nudged the toe of his boot, beckoning, its invitation eternal. When he grasped it in his hand and rose to greet her, there was no hope for any spark of recognition in her eyes, the fragile possibility of which had once singularly consumed him. That had faded long ago, bleached to bone.

The sun still shone off her face as she smiled, the same beautiful face, unmarked by time, and the same smile for him as for any other poor bastard who was fool enough, he figured. But the time had come to see it through. He had been putting it off for too long. Hers was the only course left to chart, as a vestige of the honorable man he had consigned to memory.

“Can you feel it?” He offered her the can, felt her fingers through the leather of his glove as she took it. “It’s one of those days that gives you fresh eyes. Everything old seems to become new again.”

Dolores didn’t question the logic, but she followed the path of his gaze to the sky, and then back down to the endless, interminable loop that swarmed around them in the dust, its elliptical ruts well-worn and invisible. She seemed to contemplate this for a moment.

The Man in Black smiled back at her and tipped his hat.

As he turned to continue down the thoroughfare, the echoes of a thousand scripts scrabbling faintly in his ears, he felt her lingering, watching him.

The clearing by the river was a marvel of engineering. Horses browsed a curated tangle of wildflowers, bright, contrasting shades of yellow and purple in a field of green and gold. The river snaked a muddy path through the valley, excised from a canyon that seemed to possess an artist’s sense of composition. He was sure it all boiled down to carefully titrated visual formulas, perfect mathematical ratios of jutting red rock to the white-blue sky.

It had been built to ease the blow, in a sense, like the shitty corporate art in the private parks of industrial complexes. Exposing the ugliest parts of yourself in the anesthetic fog of manufactured splendor, all vertical steel and glass, reflecting the glow of sunlight and sodium lamps. If he indeed found the terraformed vista before him beautiful, the Man in Black wasn’t sure what the implications of that were.

He spent the early afternoon lounging in the grass, waiting. After he had finished cleaning his gun, the weight of it portentous in his hands, he took to dozing in the shade of a tree, hat angled to shield his face. Ned, tied against its trunk, busied himself with patches of scrub grass, ignoring the stallions by the water’s edge.

He was already awake when he heard the slow, approaching drumbeat of hooves and then the softer sounds of a woman’s boots. He waited still, fingers threaded across his stomach.

The boots came to rest not far away. Dolores said, “It’s you.”

He moved the brim of his hat to regard her. She stood with one hand raised to her brow to shield against the sun, the other tucking an easel against her side.

“So it is,” he affirmed.

“You stake this spot out for yourself? Or you mind a bit of company? I won’t interrupt you. Just here to finish my work.”

The southern lilt in her voice was like honey. He brushed some dirt off his trousers as he rose, extending a perfunctory hand. “Aren’t we all.”

Dolores shook it, obliging him a careful greeting. The smile on his face was more of a hypothetical, like he understood the premise of geniality, if not quite the intent. If she noticed, she didn’t show it.

“William,” he added, because the effort wasn’t in him to twist the truth. “I don’t mind.”

“Nice to meet you, William,” she said. “Again. I’m Dolores.”

“Charmed, Dolores.”

“Are you?”

There was a coy shape to her mouth. He realized he hadn’t let go of her hand, that she hadn’t shrunk from the cold incline of his stare.

“Sure.” He released his grip, finally. “Not every day you meet an artist in these parts.”

“You say that like you’ve been here before, but I don’t recall seeing you around. Been a while, has it? What brings you back?”

“Business,” he said, noncommittally. “But this time, I’m just passing through.”

She turned to her horse’s saddlebag, and for the time it seemed she was content to leave the subject there. The Man in Black was not a good man, not anymore if he ever had been in the first place, but he had to sell the idea, to her if not to himself, for just long enough.

Three decades prior, he’d had his practice run playing her knight in shining armor, when she had already veered so far astray, and he’d been too soft to ascertain the true gravity of their situation. Or lack thereof. In the years that followed he’d forged himself into something new, sharp and hard and resolute, like the ugly knife that hung at his waist. He could feel his back aching with the weight of it. Slouching toward oblivion.

Come sundown, he’d subdue the marauding pair at Abernathy ranch, no question. It was only a matter of obtaining the invitation.

Dolores perched a half-finished canvas on the easel with a tray of oil paints, brush quiver slung over her shoulder, studying the landscape. He wondered how many thousands of times she had seen this very sight.

“No cloud cover today,” said the Man in Black. “Too damn hot to be standing out here in the sun, if you ask me. But it sets the whole view on fire. Red in the mountains, red in the river sediment.”

She flashed a smile over her shoulder. “Quite the picture, isn’t it.”

“God’s gift to mankind." He observed the curve of her back, trying not to sound lewd about it. The words came out long and sour. “Our fabricated dominion.”

“That’s a way of looking at it.” She produced a brush and began to set it methodically at a swirl of yellow. “Unless it isn’t truly ours to conquer.”

“That position’s antithetical to the premise of this whole settlement.”

“I was born here in these hills, William,” she told him. “I didn’t come here looking for something. Or because I’m running away.”

The Man in Black chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “Yes. That’s why they’re all here. The newcomers.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I’m just passing through,” he said again, threading his hands behind his head, like repeating the phrase would make a ward of it.

Dolores paused to set the brush between her teeth. He watched as she unbuttoned the bodice of her dress, peeling it lazily off her shoulders, setting it on the horse’s saddle.

She turned, taking the brush back in her hand to wave it at him in appraisal.

“You’re not running,” she said. “You’re too… leisurely. But whatever you’re looking for, it’s been gone long enough to leave you bitter. And I know that finding it won’t fix that. Not on its own.”

The Man in Black was grinning, obscured beneath the brim of his hat.

“Smart girl,” he said.

“It is about a girl, isn’t it?”

“She was taken from me,” he added, mostly as a statement of fact, drained of sentiment. It wasn’t completely honest, because you couldn’t steal that which had never been properly owned in the first place. His conviction was more a function of the size and shape of the void that was left at the time, evidence enough that he had been robbed.

But it was a backstory. It was more than satisfactory. The Park giveth and it taketh away. He shed his gloves like snakeskin and dug in his jacket pocket, withdrawing his pouch of tobacco and its bundle of papers.

“Would you roll me one?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you’re here to take her back?”

“She’s not coming back.”

“Then you’re here to attend to the debt.”

The damsel who’d swooned into his arms by the campfire those nights ago was cannier than he gave her credit for. The Man in Black held out a cigarette to her, and she approached him, taking it in slender, paint-smeared fingers, before lifting it to her mouth. She looked right at him while she did this. More confident, too.

He struck the match and brought it to her in cupped hands, courteously, before lighting his own. They stood there for long minutes in silence, dragging slow. The afternoon heat was oppressive. It rippled the air like celluloid.

“I’m sorry,” she said to him, finally. Gently. Maybe she pitied him. Good old Dolores, winsome and credulous Dolores, offering the menacing stranger her sympathies once he had a suitably tragic tale to tell.

“No need,” he replied. “It’s my burden to bear and mine alone.”

“I can’t imagine. If someone were to hurt my loved ones, my family, I—” she stopped to shake her head and take another pull. He appreciated the irony, and the idea of the rancher’s daughter, come with guns blazing and vengeance in her eyes, amused him further. He smiled drily and tried to hide it.

“I’ve said too much already,” he said, crushing his cigarette out with his boot, “to a young lady who has no business familiarizing herself with morbid endeavors.”

“Then I won’t ask as to the circumstances that would lead a gentleman down such a path.”

He chuckled just under his breath. “What makes you think I’m a gentleman?”

“You have a manner of speaking, William. It suggests an educated and a literary mind. Am I wrong?”

He shrugged, and gestured forward at the painting, its little microcosm of the great view that stretched out in front of them. “I read. You paint. Same function, I figure. A way out. Someplace else to go that’s yours and yours alone.”

Dolores turned and smiled at him again. He found that after all these years, as many times as he’d seen it and as fond and uncompromising as she was about giving it up, that it was difficult not to be enamored of that smile.

"Very astute of you," she said, stamping out her cigarette.

The stallions by the water’s edge, wild but not wild, family-friendly set dressing, had grown tired of the sun and began to move in a listless row toward shadier pastures. They watched them go. The Man in Black stole a glance at the regal curve of her jaw.

“We’ll lose the daylight before long, and there’s some details here I’d like to finish,” Dolores said. “You’ll escort me on my way home, won’t you? After we’ve done. There’s bandits in these hills.”

They vacated the clearing by the river when the first tendrils of twilight began to shade the cliffs, staining them dark. The desert chill would come in to chase the heat soon. The Man in Black felt it at their backs, a grim foreshadowing, pushing them toward the anticipant chaos at the Abernathy ranch. He rode with one hand gripping the rear edge of the saddle, within comfortable reach of his gun. Dolores steered Shelley, whom Ned diligently followed, several yards ahead, leading the way. He already knew it by heart.

Shelley, he’d asked, as they packed up, and she cooed to the buckskin stallion affectionately. Like Mary Shelley?

I read, too, William, she’d told him, as he tried to fathom the metaphor.

It had been easy talking to her. Too easy. Like catching up with an old friend.

When they came up the hill overlooking the ranch, twilight had turned over into night. Far below, Abernathy’s herd trailed aimlessly, in a great black swarm.

“My father wouldn’t let them roam after dark,” Dolores said, halting sharply, voice tight with fear. “Something’s not right.”

“Stay here,” he commanded, and kicked Ned into a gallop before she could think to disobey. He tumbled down the face of the ridge, gun already pulled free of its holster, at the ready. Dolores yelled something incomprehensible after him.

No flashes of gunfire yet. He was early. If he could get the jump on Rebus and Walter, all the better. Eagerly, adrenaline coursing up his spine, he drove Ned faster, harder, quickening hoofbeats a harbinger in the dark.

The Man in Black had a specific role to play in this brief theatrical aside, and the premise required that Peter Abernathy, whom he now saw backlit at the helm of the porch, shotgun raised out at the murky fields, live to see another dawn.

He slowed as he drew close, dismounting in a practiced vault, and patted the haunch of the heaving animal.

“Easy, friend,” he said. “Don’t want the old man firing at us. I’ll be back.”

He approached from the rear of the house, hunched over in its shadows, ignoring the insistent twinge in his knees and back. He could hear the echo of Juliet’s sneer: Aren’t you getting a little old for this, William? What are you going to do when the doctors prescribe a permanent respite from your favorite vacation spot? Lie on the beach with a drink like the rest of us?

Over my dead body, he thought, blandly. He crouched by the siding of the porch, just behind the bilious glow of the windows’ gas lamps, and peered around a post to watch Abernathy click back the hammer of the shotgun and start his purposeful march down the steps.

“I know you’re out there,” Abernathy yelled into the abyss. “Get the hell off my ranch, you vile sons of bitch. This is your last warning.”

“Don’t do it, you idiot,” the Man in Black groaned.

Above his head, a piece of the porch fence exploded, raining white splinters over his lap. He cursed quietly and stumbled backward. He was certain he hadn’t been seen, but he didn’t recall either of these two goons being such poor shots. Someone else was with them.

Abernathy fired an answering spray of buckshot into the brush. The Man in Black leaned back around, and saw Walter and Rebus emerging from the shadows, trailing a shorter, stouter guest with his arm extended, grip on his gun wagging with giddy, nervous excitement. They’d picked up some virginal scumbag for the ride, a newbie blackhat salivating with his first taste of the outlaw vocation.

The Man in Black rolled his eyes. His window of opportunity was shrinking fast, and he had to move, before the jumpy asshole took a hostage, or, more likely, dispatched the entire Abernathy line in a restless panic.

He stepped into the light, and before Abernathy could swivel the gun to the shadow that had sprung up by his side, fired two rounds at the encroaching group. Walter and Rebus each dropped mid-step, with hardly a protesting cry. The guest, stunned and precariously unaccompanied, fell to one knee, clutching the top of his hat. The perverse delight had drained from his face, along with all the blood in it, leaving him pale and cowering.

Abernathy turned to his unsolicited bodyguard with wordless confusion. The Man in Black nodded once at him, and stepped in front of the shotgun, an impenetrable shield.

“Time to go,” he called out to the remaining offender, who trembled in the grass, pathetic. “You’re in over your head.”

“Who the hell are you?” the guest demanded.

“Fortifications,” the Man in Black informed him.

Right on cue, another crescendo of hoofbeats sounded from down the ridge, and a high, panicked voice shouting, Daddy, Daddy.

“Don’t move,” he barked at Abernathy with a fierce jerk of his head, but the old man was already running mindlessly for his daughter, calling back to her, before the Man in Black could square himself between them and the worm huddled in the dirt.

Two more gunpowder blasts, two brief flashes of light, and one searing pain in his chest, punching the wind out of his lungs. The pain turned the sound of Dolores’s screaming, Shelley’s screeching as he reared, warped and dull in the Man in Black's ear. He buckled but did not fall. He bent with hands on his knees in silent fury, as the worm clambered to his feet and made for the rancher and his daughter, the gun raised once more, clacking wildly in one stupid, unsteady paw. Dolores had fallen to the ground, bucked off the horse, and Abernathy crouched over her with the shotgun drawn. The old man pulled the trigger, and the gun jammed.

The bastard couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, but had managed to catch the Man in Black square in the ribs on the last shot, which was just his fucking luck. He gritted out a noise of pain and frustration as he straightened. The guest kept his gun pointed at his ill-gotten prize, turning to acknowledge his former target rebounding from the blow. Dolores had a hand over her mouth, and Abernathy was also agape, the muzzle of his shotgun drooping, hopeless.

“You’re not one of them,” the guest observed. He was a worm, hardly worth the entry price, let alone the spoils of the Park. A worthless, sniveling little worm.

“I told you you’re in over your head,” said the Man in Black, dusting the sooty remains of the spent round off his vest, holstering his pistol. “Are you prepared for what you’re about to do? How it’s going to feel? What that’s going to mean?”

This one, this worm, was weak. Comfortable with its own fundamental cowardice. The same breed as the classmates who had sneered at the Man in Black in grade school for his cheap polyester suit, who spurned him for his lack of pedigree, even as he clawed his way from scholarship to valedictorian, then Ivy League to CEO. There was that half-hearted shake to its step, the kind that sprung the fragility of knowing, however suppressed, that its entire kingdom was built of sand and dust, ready to crumble with the slightest movement of the earth beneath it.

Transgression, for these men — if you could even call them that — was to be tasted, never lived. Like a fine wine unearthed from the cellar, sampled among celebratory fanfare, and shelved. Consequences were optional, and when they weren’t, there was a trust fund, a checkbook. The Man in Black had crawled through the trenches of consequences before he’d earned the privilege of writing them off.

He knew; he’d ascended into their world. But he never forgot his roots. And the stain he bore, creeping out from the deepest recesses of his heart, corrupting everything he touched with its cancerous ink, would eat a man like the sniveling worm alive.

“What the hell are you talking about?” it asked him.

“You pull that trigger, he dies,” said the Man in Black, matter-of-fact. “Then what? How do you envision this story ending? What it is you’re fixing to do after — have you really, truly considered the logistics?”

Dolores began to sob, a shaking heap beside her father, who cradled her, terrified. The Man in Black nodded in her direction.

“She’s going to do that. She won’t stop, either. She’s going to cry and she’s going to fight and you’re going to—what? Tell yourself it isn’t real?”

The worm’s face had gone pale again, and the hand that held the gun faltered.

“It’s going to feel real,” continued the Man in Black, spoken with the gravity of scripture. “Every minute of it. To you.”

It stared at him for a long, tense moment, before it holstered the gun, and started to stagger away, tail between its legs.

“That’s what you want, you sick fuck?” it called over its shoulder. “Fine. She’s all yours.”

He sat at the kitchen table, long and quiet hours after, peeling an apple with his pocket knife by the warning beacon of the gas lamp, broadcasting his vigil into the surrounding dark. Methodically, he sliced off pieces and ate them one by one, chewing slowly.

When dawn broke he’d tend to the bodies, haul them with Abernathy down to the Sherriff’s office in Sweetwater, collect his modest reward. Grit his teeth through a canned speech praising him for his bravery, and the opportunity to join the lawmen on their next raid, somewhere further out through the hills and of commensurate difficulty. For some it would have been enough. There was a time it might have been enough for him. He would have basked in that, a hand clapping him on the shoulder, calling him a hero.

It’s what Abernathy had called him, scrambling to his feet, tears still shining in his eyes from the dread fear of losing his only child, embracing him like an old friend. Dolores gazing at him in silent wonder, stone still, in shock.

Once the rancher had shepherded them inside, and his daughter to bed, with much fretting and fawning until she’d had to placate him in turn (Daddy, Daddy I’m fine, it’s all right), he’d come back down to the Man in Black to extend the offer, though to him it sounded more like a demand, non-negotiable. He was to stay, as long as he liked, but at least the week. Enjoy a warm bed, share food at their table. It was the least he could do, Abernathy implored him. Let me extend my humble gratitude.

You saved my daughter. Thank you. Thank you.

He supposed he wouldn’t be playing his part, truly closing the book on this chapter, if he skipped out on them then. And there might be unforeseen threats on this path, the branch of the story he’d never played before. A righteous man, the man he’d aspired to posturing, wouldn’t just take off running. There was some narrative coherence to be maintained. If he was going to play the game, he intended to play it right.

When sleep didn’t take, he’d come back down to fetch an apple for Ned, who was now safely boarded in the stable with the other horses. A reward for a job well done. He took another for himself, and sat to eat and to think.

Not long after he heard a creak in the floorboards above his head, then bare feet padding down the staircase to the foyer, adjacent to the kitchen. They paused about halfway down.

“Thought you’d gone to bed,” he said, without turning.

Dolores descended the remaining steps and joined him, sheepish and hollow-eyed, hoisting herself up on the counter near where he sat. She looked like she might have been crying.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she admitted.

“Understandable, given the circumstances.”

He sliced another piece of apple and held it out to her, which she took.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said quietly. She held the piece of the apple in her hands instead of eating it. “I don’t know what I could do that could ever be enough.”

He eyeballed her warily. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You risked your life for my father. For me. You barely even know me.”

He sliced through the fruit so hard he almost took off a few of his fingers.

“I had to,” he muttered. It was true, in its way. “You don’t need to thank me.”

Dolores swung her feet, childlike, against the cupboards beneath them. Her heels knocked against the wood. The nightgown gave her the look of an apparition, like she was here with him in a dream.

“Your girl,” Dolores started. The Man in Black began to shake his head, automatically. “What was she like?”

“Kind. Curious.” He glanced up at her, deeply aware of the strangeness. “She was like you. Smart. Too smart. Had a penchant for getting herself into trouble.”

Dolores smiled slowly. She ate the piece of the apple, and he covertly admired the shine on her lip as she did so.

“She was lucky to have you. She’d be proud.”

He nodded dumbly, unwilling to contest it. A heavy shroud of exhaustion had finally taken hold. The bruise on his ribs smarted angrily against the fabric of his shirt, a disappointing souvenir. It irritated more than anything. He shifted, and winced.

“He did get you,” Dolores said, edging down to the floor, her voice pitched up with worry. “I thought I’d just been seeing things. I was so scared. I thought he—”

“It’s nothing,” he assured her hastily. “Just a graze.”

“Can I see?”

Too tired to argue, he dropped the knife and the remains of the fruit to the table, leaning back. He pulled the shirt from his belt and up his side, revealing a red welt, ensconced in a darkening ring of purple, about the size of a golf ball. The physics of these things had been confusing to him, when he first came on board as an investor. Then one of the programmers explained it to him: the smart rounds responded according to their target, but also to environmental conditions; air pressure, temperature, distance. It was an added safety mechanism. The closer you were, the quicker they broke apart into their harmless spray. It was only a few milliseconds, imperceptible to the human eye, but in terms of impact, it was the difference between a rubber band snap and the nasty bite of a paintball gun. The farther away you were, the more it hurt.

Dolores approached him like he was some wounded animal, liable to pounce if she prodded him the wrong way. She knelt, too close, and even through the haze of his weariness he had to force himself not to jump when he felt her fingers.

“You’re right. It’s not so bad. But it can’t be comfortable.” Her eyes flicked up to his, and he had to grit his teeth, though not from the pain. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

“Where the hell am I going to go?”

She stood and brushed past him. He realized he’d been holding his breath, and exhaled.

When she returned, it was with a wadded-up cloth, something damp dabbed on the end of it. Before he could stop her, she’d pushed his shirt up again herself, and pressed it against the welt. It stung.

“Hey,” he said uselessly, staring at her. Her hands were warm. The substance, whatever it was, was cold. The sting began to fade, replaced by numbness. Maybe it was camphor. It smelled similar.

“I know it hurts. At first. But you’ll sleep easier this way. I promise.”

He sighed as she held it there, one of her elbows balanced in his lap, brow furrowed in concentration. Surely it was his own sinful mind polluting this exchange, and he was furious at his heart for pounding the way it did, almost worried she’d hear it. But there was also the matter of their shared history, buried deep somewhere in the sands of Escalante, and left to rot. It ate at him, corrosive.

She couldn’t recall a thing. That corroded him, too. She was the same as she’d always been; the years hadn’t left a solitary blemish. Neither had he. It wasn’t supposed to bother him anymore.

But she was here, touching him, like it didn’t mean anything at all — and it didn’t, he reminded himself, ruthlessly, it didn’t — and he couldn’t stand it, that she alone wielded this terrifying power, that her hands on him were indelible. That she would do this to him all over again. He should have anticipated this trajectory. Maybe he had, in a detached kind of way, but now it was proximate, up in his goddamned face. He hadn’t planned for the intimacy.

He thought about reaching out to brush her cheek, and that was it. He got to his feet, feeling unsteady. She was on her knees, still. Looking up at him. There was something in her eyes that frightened him to his core, a gentleness, a familiar pull.

“William?”

His eyelids were heavy again. It hurt to keep them open.

“I’m fine,” he said, sharply. “Thank you, Dolores. I’m going to sleep now. You should do the same — you’ve had a long night.”

He turned for the stairs as she rose, and he could feel her questioning, wondering what she’d done wrong. Her gaze, penetrating him. He didn’t dare face her. It was her hands and her eyes. Always her hands and her eyes, lingering on his skin, in his dreams, burning him alive, branding him.

He staggered into the guest room of the Abernathy home and collapsed into bed. A breeze blew in from the open window, swaying the curtains like limp ghosts, illuminated by the moon. For a few fitful hours, he slept.

In the morning, the Man in Black and Peter Abernathy set out into town to tie up the prior evening’s affairs. They took care to rise early, so Dolores wouldn’t have to see the bandits lashed to the horses, slumped over and limp behind the saddles. That was the one thing the programmers hadn’t quite managed to replicate, he thought. The hosts didn’t get rigor mortis.

Abernathy did him the favor of explaining the order of events to law enforcement, who were more than grateful to have two of their most wanted, stone dead, and delivered straight to their doorstep. They knew the rancher well, but eventually they turned their attention to his heroic compatriot, the newcomer, who had so selflessly thrown himself in harm’s way to defend a stranger’s livelihood and progeny.

Why are you here? They asked him, essentially, when you stripped away the flowery words, like prose. The way all the hosts talked. Why’d you do it?

Probing for a backstory, which was just more data points for Delos, kind of a self-report survey. Wasn’t the most accurate methodology, but it was context, and taken with everything else the guests did, it was probably useful. He recited his little tale, like a prayer. Here on unfinished business. Just passing through. I saw what was happening. I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing.

It didn’t matter if it was true or not. It just had to comport with his behavior. But now, even he was starting to wonder about his motives, about the direction this whole thing was headed.

They invited him to join their next raid up in the hills. Eliminate the problem at its source, they reasoned. And they needed more men like him. Brave men, good men. He wanted to laugh in their faces, but instead he declined politely. He had his own matters to attend to, and he was sure Abernathy could use a helping hand on the ranch for a while. Maybe he’d come back and lend his talents, after all was said and done. Help clean the filth out of Sweetwater, as one of the officers phrased it. It sounded like propaganda.

The real filth was spilling into their streets with every morning train, he knew, but didn’t mention it.

When they returned that afternoon, the sun high and blinding in the sky, Dolores was outside, hanging damp clothes out on a line. He thought about approaching her, then reconsidered when he realized he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t remember much of the end of last night, or the wee hours before dawn, but he knew he’d panicked, brushed her off.

Abernathy went to greet her and kissed her temple. They exchanged a few words before he left, presumably to tend to the herd. The Man in Black sat there, feeling stupid. Watching. Finally, he took Ned to the barn and retired to the house, back to the kitchen with the chair still pulled out where he’d sat the night before. He went to the stove, lit the burner underneath the kettle with a match, and rummaged through the cupboards for a jar of instant coffee. His head was pounding.

He continued to observe her from the window while she tended to her chores, mulling over his present situation. Things were back to normal at the ranch. Hot, lazy afternoons, hanging up clothes, minding the animals. He wasn’t sure how long that would hold, but it was enough to make him nervous.

He knew what to do when disaster struck. Riding hot blood into the fray was natural, and he’d relished discovering just how much so. That was what this Park had given him. He was grateful for it. The promise of a new destiny, but also a respite from playing house, which he did outside, quite well, though it drove him silently mad.

It was precisely where he found himself now, full circle in a way. He stirred the coffee grinds into his mug of hot water, angrily. Drained it fast and winced at the scald. He was going to go join Abernathy in the field. It was preferable to staring at Dolores, feeling that itching, writhing thing in his chest, which had taken hold long ago, and he thought he’d ousted.

The Man in Black felt her standing in the stable doorway behind him, many moments before she spoke. There was that presence to her. Shadowy, like a specter.

“Are you leaving?” she asked. He detected an undercurrent of alarm.

“I got shot at and I slept like shit,” he told her, not turning. “I’m going to get fucking drunk.”

“Can I come with you?”

He pulled his gloves on roughly, and busied himself with adjusting Ned’s saddle. The day had passed, agonizingly slow, and he was hot, tired. Gunning to get out.

He recalled what she’d said that afternoon in the perfect field of flowers: or because I’m running away. The phrase banged around in his head.

“Ask your daddy how he feels about that,” he said. “About his little girl going to some shithole bar with a stranger twice her age.”

He could sense her hands on her hips. “I’m not asking my daddy. I’m asking you.”

He dropped the buckle from his grip and spun, gaping at her. “Sure. Fine. Be my guest.”

She strode purposefully inside, past him, head held high, not missing a beat. Like he’d threatened to leave without her if she didn’t get right to it. He hadn’t thought of that, but it was something he might do, if he didn’t want her there, to go with him. Which he did. That was the trouble. He rubbed at his jaw, frustrated. Ned grunted at him.

“Yeah, I know,” he mumbled. “Beats the hell out of me, too.”

Though it made a perverse, poetic kind of sense that she’d be interested in his company. She had been, before. A very specific type of company, thirty years ago, which he didn’t want to think about.

And it occurred to him that this was precisely what she was programmed to do. She was the damsel. She was distressed. He’d saved her. Hadn’t he? This was how these stories were supposed to end up. Not his fault it was a damned cliché — he was just going through the motions. Playing it through ‘til the bitter end, or the bittersweet end, the happily-for-four-weeks-after. Finishing up business. Just passing through.

Dolores brought Shelley out by his lead, pausing next to him, expectant. The sun, low in the sky now, shone through the open doors and cast her features in gold light. She was beautiful in a way that scared him.

“Well?” she said. “Are we going, Stranger?”

He nodded briskly, setting his boot in the stirrup, hoisting himself up.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re going.”

They rode most of the way in awkward silence, Dolores a few paces behind, in the saturated blaze of the sunset. It was one of the few natural phenomena Delos couldn’t engineer, he’d thought, like that observation was somehow profound. The same sun rose and fell whether you were inside the Park or not. And it marked the passage of the only real thing in this place: time.

Time passed through Dolores like sand through a sieve. She retained everything it left behind, of course, buried deep in lines of inaccessible code. A vast, labyrinthine archive of memories, drifting just beneath the surface of perception. He was in there, somewhere, locked away. It was as good as being forgotten.

Yet here they were, decades past, retreading old ground, falling into old rhythms. Hesitantly bumping together, nudged into one another’s path by circumstance, which he had once mistaken for fate. He was worlds different, now, he told himself; or rather, who he’d always been, shaken free from the trappings of self-delusion, and he moved through the world with that weight of that understanding. The man she’d met was a mask he wore faithfully, back home, though he shuddered to call it that. It was only the place where the integrity of the lie could be maintained. In the Park, this was tenuous. The stain bled through, a dark slick of oil, in suspension.

And she wouldn’t leave him alone. Not that he minded, which he accepted, grudgingly. It mystified him, how potent and easily roused were the fossilized remains his affections. Dolores, too, seemed to sense them brewing, roiling underneath his composure. The uncomfortable fact was that once he’d come close enough, she’d sought him out, actively, and if not as dramatically as collapsing into his arms by a campfire, it was along the same ley lines.

“I’m sorry if I upset you,” Dolores said. It jarred him out of his thoughts. She was riding Shelley up, alongside him. “Last night. I hadn’t meant to bother you. I hadn’t considered you might have been just as shaken up as I was. It was selfish of me.”

He had been shaken up, though not by the attack on the ranch, the killings it commanded. He laughed, clear and uninhibited.

She looked at him, surprised. “What?”

“Dolores, you couldn’t bother me if you tried. That’s an inconvenient fact.”

She hid a bashful grin. “I knew you were a gentleman. A gruff, stoic, impenetrable gentleman.”

“Oh yeah? I think you read too many fairy tales.”

They returned to Sweetwater through the east edge of the town, off a barely delineated access road, to bypass the main thoroughfare. The Man in Black was concerned it harbored some kind of trap this late in the evening, a perilous storyline ready to spring. The hack they’d hired to run the department last year had a taste for cheap thrills, just like the majority of the Park’s clientele. This way was forgotten, sedate, and led straight to safe harbor.

“Where are we headed?” Dolores asked him. “I don’t think I’ve ever come this way before.”

“Just down the road,” he said, gesturing to where the streetlamps seemed to converge in the distance, a great saloon at their terminus. “Can you hear it?”

Dolores craned her neck, listening.

“Yes—yes, I think I do. Music.”

They tied Ned and Shelley up nearby, where the sound was clear, spilling out the doors and windows. Out front, one of the posts supporting the eaves took the form of a carousel horse, rearing up on its pole, bright enamel colors sandblasted to mud. It grinned at them, cartoonish. Dolores stopped for a moment to admire it.

He took her hand, keeping her moving toward the entrance. “You like it? It’s even better on the inside. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”

What greeted them was pure spectacle, joyful noise and fury, bathed in warm lamp light and set to melody. There was a small band at the far end of the saloon, a pair of fiddlers, woodwinds, and a boy seated with a scant set of drums. Dancers careened in drunken pairs, synchronized boots on the wood floors, kicking up sawdust. Painted horses adorned the walls, in psychedelic colors. It smelled like beer and sweat. Dolores was transfixed by it all.

The din made his head hurt, in all honesty, but the Carousel was the only bar this side of Sweetwater he trusted not to erupt in sudden and apocalyptic violence. It was one of a handful of such oases, strategically dispersed among the shadow of impending chaos that loomed over the rest of the Park. You could try pulling your weapon, but it wouldn’t fire. A tight radius of electromagnetic signals turned the guns into fancy lead weights.

The vibe was accordingly celebratory. It reminded him of Times Square, or the stories his granddad had told him about the place, of a vibrant, seedy metropolis that had since been de-fanged for the tourists. Bright, loud, contrived, and PG-13 at best.

They cut through the dancers to a couple of empty stools at the bar, Dolores looking over her shoulder, jaw still hanging by its hinges. She hadn’t seen anything like it before, not that she could remember.

“Bourbon, if you would,” he called, slapping down a pair of coins. “Neat. Make it two.”

The bartender, who had been hovering just outside his view, approached the two of them. He wore a simple black and white suit, timeless and unidentifiable, garments that would have passed without comment either inside the Park or out. He was neither short nor tall, thin nor heavyset, but an assemblage of averages in the shape of an old man, a fixture that had seemed to materialize at will from the very structure of the saloon, invisible unless you were looking. If the Man in Black hadn’t known who he was, what would have betrayed him was his eyes. They were fierce, frigid. Incomprehensible in their depths.

His mouth went dry, and he swallowed.

“Good evening,” said Robert Ford, cordially. “Welcome. Perhaps our finest reserve, for the consummate gentleman.”

“Go to hell,” said the Man in Black.

“William,” Dolores scolded, aghast.

Ford seemed to seriously contemplate the suggestion before he spoke, addressing Dolores this time. “Quite all right. You see, William and I go way back. We were business partners, once upon a time. Perhaps we shall be in perpetuity.”

The Man in Black snarled at this particularly untimely reminder of his dealings with the devil, and in the flesh, no less. Ford fished out a pair of highball glasses from beneath the bar, pulled a bottle from the shelf, and poured a few fingers each for his patrons.

“On the house,” he said, nudging the coins away, with that infernal, mild charm. “For two very old friends.”

“Have we met?” Dolores said, cheerful, and genuinely curious.

“No,” Ford replied, after a long pause. “But a friend of William is a friend of mine. Imagine my surprise, given his predilections, to find him here, of all places.”

“Bullshit,” the Man in Black deadpanned. “You knew I’d be here.”

“And there’s your trouble,” Ford said, effortless in his condescension. “Divining fate from simple coincidence.”

He didn’t buy it. Ford was nothing if not deliberate, as painstakingly considered as the code within his hosts. The Man in Black knew he was being watched — standard operating procedure — but that wasn’t what bothered him. Ford didn’t come to watch; he came to judge.

“Excuse me,” said a voice beside them, and for once, the Man in Black was grateful for an interruption. A brunette woman, slight but ruggedly dressed, hair tied back under a black Stetson, leaned up against the bar. “Mind if I borrow your girl for a dance?”

She winked at Dolores, who scrunched her shoulders up and beamed, and then looked back at the Man in Black, hopeful. He wasn’t sure what to make of your girl.

“Knock yourself out,” he said. Dolores squeezed his hand, and then the two of them spilled out to join the rest of the dancers.

“Having a grand old time, isn’t she,” said Ford, watching them go, “under your shepherding wing. I might have guessed you’d try your hand at the full length of the Abernathy narrative one day. Though you’ve prepared for the role rather unconventionally. It’s quite the shift in character.”

“Is that why you’re here? Had to see for yourself?”

“I told you, William. Simple coincidence. I come here often. What’s the point of creating a world if not to enjoy its fruits? I couldn’t rightly be expected to maintain the role of passive observer.” There was a vicious glint in his eye.

“Why bother,” said the Man in Black bitterly. “This Park is on the cusp of something, Robert. You know it. Something truly great. I’ve spent nearly half my life chasing it to its precipice. But you never let it take that next step, did you?”

Ford was entirely motionless, like a mannequin, staring at him. Inscrutable.

And then he spoke, in a measured tone.

“I have wondered, William, at the tenacity and depth of your resentment. It hardly seems proportionate to the offense. The games I’ve created aren’t real, as you yourself have observed. But they offer a critical, enduring insight. One far beyond the grasp of Delos’s petty aspirations.”

The Man in Black rapped the base of the glass impatiently on the bar top. One of Ford’s few redeeming qualities, he could admit, was an indifference to menace. The Man in Black glowered at him anyway, and Ford ignored it, instead gazing slowly, incrementally, over the activity of the bar. A mastermind surveying his kingdom. The way he watched things, you could see the gears in his head turning. The Man in Black didn’t like it.

“If I were to snap my fingers,” Ford mused, flippant now, leaning back with a hand steepled against his chin, “if she could, at this very moment, remember everything, remember you, and thirty years of a life — or a fragment of a life, more like a stuck film reel than anything you or I have had the chance privilege of enjoying — what do you suppose she’d say to you? ‘I forgive you, William?’”

The Man in Black felt the bile rising in his throat. “You really believe that? You think that’s why I’m doing this?”

“After all that’s been done to her, do you think she’d see you as any different? What distinguishes you from the ceaseless parade of would-be suitors, rapists, murderers?”

He heard Dolores laugh, and twisted over the back of the bar stool. The woman she was dancing with had twirled her underneath her arm. It was strange, seeing her happy like this. It wouldn’t last. The guests, Delos’s data had shown, were nothing if not predictable in their indiscretions. At one point it had been grimly funny to him. The variables in the equation were themselves a kind of constant, as monotonous in their cruelty as the hosts were in their routines.

He turned back to Ford, eyes dark, almost black.

“You built this fucking circus, Robert. That makes you the ringleader.” He tipped the drink at him, accusatory, then paused to take a pull. “I know you had your noble ambitions, which always seemed a bit grandiose to me, frankly, but a man of your intelligence must have foreseen what this place would become. What it would always be, if you kept your asymmetrical rules in place.”

Ford smiled enigmatically. “And what’s that?”

“A gilded cage for the degenerates in my tax bracket to lock themselves in. Get their rocks off on sex and violence.”

“What kind of degenerate do you imagine that makes you?”

“I’m not the only one in this Park with synthetic blood on my hands,” said the Man in Black, more explosively than intended, and then reclined, sneering. “Think she’d forgive you, too? The man who wrought the bars of her prison?”

Ford hummed thoughtfully. “Oh, no. I don’t believe she would. I’m counting on it.”

Before he could interrogate the nature of that disturbing statement, Dolores plunked back down heavily in the seat beside him. Her face was flushed. She looked positively delighted.

“That lady,” she exclaimed, “with the gentleman’s name. Martin? Marti? She sure had a way on her feet. Why, she was lovely. I had some trouble keeping up.”

She downed the drink in front of her, more quickly than the Man in Black was comfortable with. He raised his eyebrows. Ford began to laugh, which drove him slightly insane.

“That’s wonderful, Dolores,” Ford said, leaning toward her across the bar. “And there will be more such wonders to come. ‘Pleasure to me is wonder — the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate, the eternal in the ephemeral, the past in the present, the infinite in the finite; these to me are the springs of delight and beauty.’”

Dolores blinked, looking between the two of them. She seemed to sense the tension. Behind them, the fiddlers fell abruptly silent, to a chorus of dismay.

“On that note,” Ford continued, “I’m afraid I must excuse myself. As always, there is more work to be done, and so little time. A terrible thing to waste.”

“Then why waste mine?” said the Man in Black, irritably. Dolores elbowed him gently, and Ford bowed to her, formal, but warm. Uncharacteristically so.

They watched him as he left, a monochrome figure cutting through the crowd, which curved around him to make way, like Moses through the Red Sea. As he passed through the swinging doors, the band resumed. It was unnerving. Theatrical.

Typical, thought the Man in Black.

“Strange fellow,” Dolores remarked, unperturbed.

“Soapbox in a goddamned waistcoat,” he muttered, downing the rest of his drink. “You want another? I think I need another.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling brightly. “I like it here. And I’m thinking I like this bourbon, too.”

“This is what passes for chivalry where you’re from?” Dolores asked him, the back of her head bumping his chin.

She was only pretending to be indignant.

“I didn’t say anything about chivalry. I said if you couldn’t so much as get a foot in the stirrup, there was no way I was putting you on that horse.”

“I know how to ride, William.”

“You knew. That was before the bourbon.”

She swayed a little in front of him on the saddle. Ned soldiered on into the night, carrying them both back to the ranch, just over the next hill.

He tightened his arm around her waist, and she leaned back against his chest. She smelled like firewood, the alcohol’s sharp bite, warm skin.

“You see this, Shelley?” She called to her horse as it followed obediently behind, tied to Ned by a stretch of rope. “See what kind of helpless damsel he takes me for? The indignities I’m forced to suffer?”

He smiled into her hair. “Now you’re putting words in my mouth.”

“You don’t think I can handle myself,” she mumbled, but one of her hands crept back, curled tellingly around his thigh. He felt his breath hitch.

“Just your alcohol,” he corrected.

The Man in Black liked this, and it frightened him. He was enjoying their courtship in a way that was deceptively uncomplicated. How she’d leaned her head against his shoulder in the bar, long after Ford had departed, blunting the razor’s edge of his hatred. How she’d asked him to dance when the music slowed, which he thoughtlessly indulged, writing it off to the drink. It was a momentary forgetting, he had reassured himself, swaying with her there on the damp sawdust floors, as she swayed against him now. He might suspend disbelief for one night.

Do you know this song, she’d asked him. I swear I know this song. He thought he did, too. Eleanor Rigby, he told her, but that wasn’t it. That couldn’t be right.

And then she had leaned up into him and whispered in his ear. He hadn’t properly heard what it was, because her lips brushed his jaw when she did so, and his blood was pounding too hard to make it out. Something about seeing.

“We’re home,” she said, as they came up on the ridge hanging over the ranch.

He steered them down, and the horses back to the stables, letting the bourbon swim heavy in his mind, clouding out some of the anxiety. She laughed, clumsy, while he helped her out of the saddle, his hands on her hips. A different kind of threat loomed in that laugh; it was a denouement.

“Let’s get you to bed,” he said, while they walked toward the house, which rose out, imposing, from the black pitch of the field. Crickets fell silent with their footfall. She took his hand, threading their fingers together.

His heart was pounding again. He thought about what he had told Ford at the bar, about chasing things to the edge. He thought, I’m standing on it now. Looking over the cliff. Nothing but darkness on the way down. He couldn’t even see the bottom.

“I had a lovely evening,” Dolores said.

“Me too,” he admitted.

The door groaned as she turned the key in the latch, and he ushered her through, hands on her shoulders. Trying to stop her from turning around, looking at him, into him. He glanced to his left, to the kitchen, the chair a shadow, unmoved.

They ascended the stairs. By the door to her bedroom, she lingered, and held on to his lapels as if to prevent herself from falling. But then it seemed she was pulling. Inviting.

“Dolores,” he said, a warning.

“I know,” she murmured. “Ever the gentleman.”

“I wish you’d stop calling me that.”

She laughed quietly, her hands falling to her sides.

“Good night, William.”

She closed the door behind her, and the Man in Black leaned his forehead against it, palm resting on the wood.

He lay in the dark, still dressed, dreading the slow, lucid creep of sobriety. His mind was beginning to race again, and nothing to staunch the discomfort.

Trying to figure out what exactly he’d done and why he’d done it was like beating his head against the wall. Ruminating hadn’t produced any new insights, but it did make him feel a bit sick. He hoped it was just the impending hangover.

A low creak sounded in the floorboards of the hallway, and he made an instinctive reach for his gun before reason stamped out conditioning. The house was safe — he’d taken great pains to ensure it the other night — but a part of his brain, engraved by thirty years of pilgrimage, registered that nothing good came of creeping sounds after midnight. He swung his feet out over the bed and to the floor, sat upright, hands at his sides on the mattress.

He watched the knob to the door turn, and Dolores enter the bedroom, at something of a remove. Like a man other than himself was seated in his place, and he was observing a scene play out.

She closed the door behind her, and for several seconds stood against it as if to hold it in place. She wore the white nightgown that first drew the eye to her collarbone and then came down to where it brushed her ankles in the breeze of the open window. It was a weighty image, he realized. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, and she looked at him only obliquely, with her head angled down, like she’d run if he captured her fully in his stare.

But then she did look straight at him, and he recognized what he had suspected, his heart sinking like a stone, in terror. Another thing, deeper, lower, ignited in proportion. She started to come toward him. He read the intent clearly in the swing of her step.

“Jesus Christ, Dolores,” he said. And then he had a lap full of her, and her arms around his neck, and turmoil in his skull.

She wasn’t drunk anymore, but he steadied her with his hands on her waist, anyway, a decision he regretted when his erection pulsed against her thigh and she felt it, grinning.

“I’ve seen you, William,” she whispered, sweet in his ear. That’s what she’d said to him, back at the bar.

He ignored the screaming urge to throw her down then and there, pin her wrists against the mattress, yell at her to quit fucking around, messing with his head. It wasn’t real. None of this was real; only inevitable. Her hands were at his face now, tracing its edges, mocking the lines that time had carved out.

A mad, blinding desire roared in him. It would not be reasoned with.

He said, “You think you owe me this?”

“I think I want you to do what you’ve been up here, imagining. I may be a young lady, but I’m no fool.”

He dragged his grip down her thighs and she arched into him. His voice was steady but hoarse, comprised of quickly fragmenting restraint.

“What am I imagining?”

She kissed him. For a savage instant he felt himself transported, the vibrations of train tracks under his boots, his skin on her skin in the breaks of their clothes, everything old becoming new again.

He slid his hands up the nightgown, against the plane of her ribs and the rise of her chest. She gasped against his mouth, curved against him, and for the sake of his own dignity he stifled answering her in kind.

“This is what you want, Dolores?” He asked her, rhetorically. The words were thick in his throat. She was pulling at shirt buttons, at his belt. “This what you think I want?”

“Yes, yes,” she encouraged him.

It was almost a shame, because what he had imagined, with great and un-gentlemanly relish, was her bent over the dresser, the sound of them rocking against it, the sounds he’d coax out of her pretty little mouth. And he’d considered pushing her to her knees, the raw pink on them afterwards, which made him nearly as hard as the thought of that mouth wrapped around him, his fist knotted in her hair. He’d thought about these scenarios in obsessive, granular detail.

Instead, he bent his head between her legs while she clawed up the knotted length of his back, his fingers hooked inside her, because he found he took even greater pleasure in tormenting her than the immediacy of satisfying himself. When it became unbearable, when she’d gone from mewling and twisting underneath him to begging, demanding, he finally acquiesced, shoving inside her with a hand over her mouth to stifle the cry. He hushed her, lovingly, and fucked her, roughly. Harder when her legs wrapped around his waist and she egged him on, the half-moons of her fingernails digging welts in his shoulders, her breath in his ear in stuttering gasps. Saying dirty things, desperate things. Not so ladylike anymore.

That’s it, Sweetheart, he told her when he felt her coming, when she convulsed against him with her mouth silently parted, like death throes. He followed shortly after, in broken, staccato thrusts. He was coming, and coming apart. The edges of his vision fogged over, like breath on glass.

She settled, damp against him in the aftermath, a thigh hooked over his and the crown of her head nudging under his chin, pearlescent in the light pressing through the curtains.

Absently, automatically, he stroked her hair. When her hand drifted to brush his face, he tightened his fingers in it.

“If I stayed,” he started, nearly roughly, the idea intoned like a threat before it was abandoned. He turned his mouth into her temple, because he liked the velvet taste, and to shut himself up. The hell was he talking about.

“You could,” she murmured. “I’d let you.”

“You’d let me.”

“I’d want you.”

He snorted. Dolores propped herself up on an elbow, scrutinizing him, suddenly stern.

“You don’t believe me, do you. Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t laugh. William. I don’t understand what’s so funny about—“

He seized her face and hushed her, cradling the curve of her jaw in the apex of his thumb and calloused palm. Gently, still, with whatever atrophying tenderness remained in him to be dispensed.

“You should sleep,” he told her. “Before the day comes, and I have to take you back to your own bed. Or your father’s going to find a very compelling use for that shotgun.”

She softened. He dragged his hand back down to her collarbone, then to her shoulder, caressing, and she folded into him like a cat.

“But you’ll stay tonight? The next night?”

“Yes, Dolores.”

“You’ll keep me safe,” she added. The Man in Black swallowed.

“I will,” he lied.

She stilled with the reassurance. He imagined their limited future like one of those cartoon flip books, running and running until its dead-end stop.

Four weeks. 28 days. 6,720 hours. He estimated around 6,648 of his remained. Brass didn’t make exceptions, not even for investors. One month, tops, and they cycled you out for decompression, a sort of week-long therapy session that Delos had managed to rebrand into a compulsory spa treatment. He’d never even bothered to read the small print on the waivers, but the video logs from the mesa spoke for themselves. Come in, get fucked, blow the hosts’ brains out, and leave; some prescriptive reintegration for polite society required.

Dolores’s back rose and fell against his chest, slower and deeper as sleep pulled. He couldn’t quite fathom all this, only that he had wanted it, badly, with an aching, familiar lust, and that he had conceded to its inertia. He wanted it as badly as he had so diligently worked to avoid it, for thirty long years. He was starting to doubt his instincts, and that was dangerous.

He imagined the grunts at QA, cycling through their rounds, marking the spot where he and Dolores lay together, on the great map of the Park. A small, insignificant little pinprick — that’s all they were. Nothing to interfere with. Faithfully on loop.

It occurred to him that he could drag this out, or he could cut it off, cauterize the wound, and press on. No more picking at scabs, he thought, though that analogy hardly did it justice. This was like sawing at scar tissue with the Bowie knife. There was some real violence to it. Masochism, maybe.

When the first light of dawn started to bleed through the window, he edged himself out from under her, gently. Buttoned his trousers, buckled his belt, and pulled his shirt off the floor, back around his shoulders. As he dressed, he resigned himself to the knowledge that introspection would only get him so far. What was done was done.

He lifted her into his arms and she made a noise, curling into him. He carried her, bare feet on the cold wood floor, across the hall, into her bedroom.

As he laid her down, she woke for a brief moment, and looked into his eyes with a stark and fearful clarity, as if she’d been jarred awake from a nightmare. It struck him with a bolt of undiluted fear. Then something else began to churn in his chest — something worse. He recognized the ugly, dim stirrings, as he hovered over her, paralyzed.

He opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came out. She smiled, and reached out to touch his face, run a thumb across his lower lip.

Then she turned over, and slept.

Sleep, again, evaded him. He usually slept like the dead. If not outside, at least in the Park.

So instead he stood alone in the kitchen, staring out the window into another placid, sunny day. The light was cruel, sneering at him.

Dolores was upstairs still. She’d had no problem sleeping, and Abernathy, when he departed for the day’s work, smiled pleasantly like he hadn’t the remotest idea what had gone on between his daughter and the Man in Black.

The premise of this whole thing, now shot thoroughly to hell, was to come up empty. He’d anticipated some discomfort, thrill or fear, fleeting moments of warmth, even; he wasn’t so unhinged, so clinical that he expected smooth sailing throughout. There was a reason he’d taken his time to prepare. It was rough terrain, pitted with the traces of old wounds, like it or not.

And he had loved her, back then. Or the closest thing to it he figured he could get. He knew because he had never felt anything like it in his life, the purposeful surging of blood, and there was no use calling that for anything other than what it was, even if it was built on a pack of lies and she had made a fool of him. The lies were integral to the process. It was only when you really believed them, poured your heart and soul into the mold, that blowing away the façade could reveal something bone-deep and incontrovertible. It was a painful discovery, but he held it close, cradled it to his chest with solemn reverence. That was the price of the revelation. Agony, in exchange for the potential in himself, the potential he saw in this place, unencumbered by bullshit.

And this was supposed to be reality-testing, a phrase he remembered the shrink using when Juliet had finally cajoled him into marriage counseling. Which was a fancy way of saying: a system for distinguishing the bullshit. What he had planned for, fantasized about when he turned his back on the Abernathy ranch for the last time, wasn’t a gain or a loss, but a net nothingness, a void, sort of a radical neutrality. A baseline, illuminating the way forward.

But she was filling him with things, and they were ricocheting all over the place, like gunfire. One of those bullets was bound to hit something soft, eventually.

He heard her descending the stairs and straightened. Turned to watch her as she strode toward him, a vision in the blue dress, in the sunlight spilling through the windows. Tenderly, she pressed her mouth to the corner of his. Slipped her hand against his neck, against his pulse. He was sure she could feel it hammering.

It made him ruthlessly, blindingly angry.

And then the warmth of her began to drift away, moving for the door, without regard for the fireworks she’d just set off in his head.

Growling, he grasped her by the wrist, holding her there, spinning her back around.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

She looked him up and down, eyes tightening, injured. “Doing this to you? Doing what to you?”

“What could you possibly want from me? Huh?” He pulled at her, demanding. “Where did you think this was headed? How did you see the two of us ending up?”

“Heaven’s sake, William.” She tugged her hand free. “I like you. I came to you because I wanted to. I wasn’t thinking about any ending. Were you? Last night?”

He swallowed hard. “No.”

“Then I might ask you the same thing.” Her voice was rising in pitch, strained. “What the hell is it you want from me? Sure, I—I started it, I’ll admit that, but you stayed. You stayed and let it happen. You could have left, and you didn’t.”

She had a point, he thought.

He closed the distance between them in a step, pushed her up against the counter, and kissed her, brutally. She made a noise against his mouth, her hands fisted in his shirt. Then she pulled away, suddenly, gasping. Stunned by the force behind it. She might have been frightened, too.

She looked up at him, eyes flickering, uncertain. His own were raw, bloodshot.

“Listen to me, Dolores. I’m telling you this because it’s the closest thing to the truth, and that’s the one thing I come here for. So I can stop running.” He cupped her face in his hands. “I’m done for. You hear me? Gone. A dead man walking. Been that way for so long I hardly remember what it was like before. But now you’re here, and it’s stirring shit up. Making me crazy, dredging up ghosts.”

She stared up at him. He wanted to shake her. Placing the blame at her feet was a misdirected impulse; this was no one’s fault but his own. And yet there was that dense, blooming seed of rage in his chest. It seemed a more useful thing to feed than the gaping maw of self-pity.

“I know I can’t replace her,” Dolores pleaded, her hands coming to his wrists. Tears pooled in her eyes. “I wouldn’t have tried. I swear.”

He released her, like she’d burned him.

This was not his due diligence, but hopeless frivolity, all of it, from the very beginning. It pained him to admit that Ford had been right, in calling his neuroticism for what it was. A sharp, stupid detour. Like how he’d kissed her again, scaring her. A compulsion.

“You understand now,” he said to her, gravely, though it was mostly directed at himself. “Why I can’t stay.”

Her teeth were gritted, the tears threatening. She was angry. He felt a burst of relief, because this was his way out. When she looked at him like this — disappointed, betrayed — it drained everything away into emptiness. All the nauseating fury, the confusion and self-reproach.

He reached for her again, to pull her to him. She gave him an insincere shove, which he ignored. And then she let him hold her, her face buried in the crook of his neck, the dampness bleeding through, into his shoulder.

“You promised you’d stay,” she said into his jacket, after a time. “One more night.”

He didn’t recall promising, but he supposed he owed her this small concession.

“One more night,” he repeated.

He let out a shuddering breath into her hair. The sun had risen, it would fall again, and soon, this useless diversion would be over.

At twilight, she found him on the southern ridge overlooking the ranch, same one they came down on their way back from Sweetwater. There was a twisted hulk of a tree, or the remains of one, a great carcass that stubbornly refused to fall even with the life sucked out of it. The Man in Black wondered if it had ever truly been alive at all, or if it was molded from the same bioplastic as the hosts, then stuck in the ground just to look imposing.

It wasn’t much use in the day, nothing but gnarled, bare branches to shade with, but he sat under it now, leaned against the trunk. He watched Abernathy corralling the herd below, then Dolores as she led Shelley up the hill, bag slung over her shoulder, coming for him wordlessly.

She hadn’t wholly forgiven him; there was that shaded bitterness to her eyes, which he could see clearly when she drew close.

“Can see everything from up here,” he said to her as she sat next to him, pulling her knees up, her arms wrapped around them.

She nodded. “Yes. I used to paint from up here, when I was younger, just getting started. First the view, and then I guess I became more taken with this tree.” She knocked her knuckles against the desiccated wood, or maybe-wood. “Got so many pastel renderings of this old thing back at the house.”

He said, after a beat, “You still mad at me?”

“’Course I’m mad at you. That doesn’t mean I blame you, or that I don’t understand you. And it sure doesn’t mean I’m going to waste the last night I have left with the man who saved my life, saved my family.”

She gazed down at the fields below. He searched her face, looking for any cracks in her resolve, but found only equanimity.

“I guess it’s my turn to be sorry,” he said.

She shrugged, resigned. “Don’t be. I’m not.”

“The man who saved you also happened to succumb to his baser instincts, defile you, and then announce his immediate departure on a quest for retribution.”

“Actually, I quite liked that part,” Dolores said, with a small smile. “The defilement.”

He laughed, low and warm. Together they watched the stars blinking through the sky’s curtain, constellations revealing themselves in flickering pieces.

“What have you got,” he said, indicating the bag at her side. She rifled through it for a small, strangely bound book.

“That a novel?”

“No, a sketchbook. I took it with me into the field today.”

“So that’s where you ran off to all afternoon.”

“Would you rather I have gone back upstairs and wept into my pillow over you? Would that have been preferable?”

He raised his eyebrows, sniffed. “Easy, Dolores, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I know.” She swatted his thigh. “I’m only fooling. Here, you want to see?”

“Yes, I do.”

She handed him the weird little tome. The outside was a rich, pebbled leather hide, but when he held it he realized it was flimsy, lightweight. The pages were stitched to it in irregular sheaves. It was possible she’d made it herself.

The renderings were charcoal. He flipped through them, images of faces, familiar faces, the unchanging denizens of Sweetwater. More than a few of Teddy, and a handful he didn’t recognize. Newcomers with distinctive features, he thought diplomatically. Beautiful people and ugly people, she was drawn to. No question what category he fell in.

The last picture was a portrait of a man in profile, hat tipped low over his eyes, shoulders curved inward and resolute, the thin line of his mouth a severe frown. His clothes had been shaded in clots of black, so thick they smeared off on the preceding page.

Dolores said, “I think I’ve done you justice. Wouldn’t you agree? And from memory, too. Come tomorrow, that’s all I’ll have.”

No, he thought. You won’t.

He snapped the sketchbook shut, tossing it back atop the buckskin bag, and wrapped an arm around Dolores’s shoulder, coaxing her to him, downward. She brought her head down to his lap, the straw blonde of her hair spilling over. He pushed it aside, stroking fingers down her neck, taking pleasure in the claret stain of her lips, the swell of her cheeks, the flush of blood visible even in darkness.

In the early morning, it was he who came to her this time, his hand on the doorknob turning a slow premonition.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” she said. She rolled to face him in the tangle of sheets.

She watched him drift to her, as though he ran the taut length an imaginary binding, or walked a wooden plank. Straight and unwavering, to the edge of the bed.

He sat. Ran his hand over her covered leg, toward the swell of her thigh.

“Crying into your pillow over me yet?”

She rose up on her elbows, languid, flash of a smile. “No, not yet.”

He bowed to kiss her, and she stilled him with a hand on his chest. Then rose, creeping out from under the thick wool blanket, white legs swinging over the side of the bed. She got to her knees in front of him, deliberate and suggestive, pushing his apart, wider. He felt every part of himself swell nearly to bursting.

“Why, Dolores,” he said, huskily, delighted by the sight of her here. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I thought I might return the favor,” she said, undoing his belt, freeing him from his trousers. He reclined back on one wrist, lifted the other hand to trace his finger along the line of her jaw.

There it was, that hot cord of lust, twisting through him again. And something else, a tenderness he didn’t even feel the need to fight. He thought of the night at the Carousel, how he’d been hypnotized, in thrall.

“This is the most beautiful you’ve ever been,” he murmured, carelessly. “The most beautiful I’ve ever seen you.”

She laughed, knowingly, and took him into her mouth. He heard himself make some deep, obscene noise, and didn’t care. His head fell backward. He seized her hair, guiding her, like he’d imagined doing.

Terrible, what she was wringing out of him. He knew it, distantly. He tried to keep his eyes on the ceiling when they weren’t fluttered shut, almost afraid to look at her head moving in his lap, the dark sweep of her eyelashes. It was wrong, how much he’d cherish the image. He didn’t know why he cared. It had never bothered him before, when he’d thought about it, pushing into his own fist.

It was because he thought he could love her when he turned her like this. Dirty, like himself. He started whispering encouragements at her, and they fell someplace outside of time, all caution to the wind, consumed only with the thought of her sucking him off, and the iron will it required not to buck too hard into her throat, force her down harder with his fist, choking her.

That’s right, darling, he said, and Come on, come on then, and to his own, deep shame, Good girl.

He chanced to take in the view. Her eyes met his, a deep, carnal blue, like her dress, like the sheets, and it did him in. He cried out, grip in her hair tugging violently, involuntarily, keeping her down. She swallowed, swallowing, until he released her, and then she fell back, coughing. The sleeve of her dress had slipped free of her shoulder. She wiped her mouth with the back of her fist.

She was grinning, sharp teeth and flushed skin. He found the shine on her face, the rivets of tears on her cheeks, intensely moving. She got up, crawling gingerly, back into the sheets. He saw the marks on her knees, the lines of the floorboards.

“Let me,” he said, falling with her toward the pillow, aligning himself against her back. His hand crawled across her stomach, then down, toward the damp between her legs. She sighed, and pushed back against him, her hand a vice in his thigh. He sank his teeth in the flesh of her exposed shoulder.

“Oh, God,” she said. Dawn was breaking now, a dangerous square of light, creeping up, exposing.

They lay like this, lazy, heated friction, until she felt him again, pressing urgent into the back of her leg. She hiked up the nightgown, reaching behind, guiding him into her.

He conceived of the act as making love, which is what she would have wanted to call it. He was certain. A loathsome term, but he indulged it, for her.

Afterwards, neither of them slept.

The blackness of the stain is made bearable by its interiority. It is a secret, known only to himself. What his wife suspects and Dolores would not see — though perhaps she's gotten glimpses of it now, even resents him for it, for as long as she might remember the outline of its shadow — is irrelevant. It is his truth, and his alone. No one else can decipher its shape, its meaning. Not even the all-seeing eye of Delos.

The only danger is one he poses to himself. The danger is doubt.

That doubt was a small flame, one he'd meant to extinguish, but he had made a fatal miscalculation. Dolores had been the kindling.

Worse. Kerosene.

Today, he kisses her forehead. She does not cry, even when he turns his back, mounts his horse, and rides back into the dry, white heat. He leaves her for what he thinks is the last time.

He drives into the desert with a blessed emptiness in his mind. His chest is not so lucky, but he knows now that what fills it, beating mercilessly against his ribcage, will fade. The route he takes is automatic, a road map cut through the contours of his memory. The coordinates are a black, burnt mark.

The sun is sinking again, and time, that terrible thing to waste, seems to nip at his heels.

He builds a fire, in the same place he did once before, when she had first come to him. His little ghost.

He takes the stolen page from his pocket, unfolds it, ragged at the edges from being ripped away. Perhaps she’ll notice, or perhaps she’ll forget him long before she has the chance. He studies himself, that which is a reflection of himself, in brittle streaks of black on yellow-white. The page is a mirror.

When the embers are waning, he crumples it, and drops it in the fire. He watches himself warping and blistering to ash.

Satisfied, he lies back. Blinks once at the stars. The same stars.

He closes his eyes.