1873

The steady stream of settlers has meant some hasty additions to Rubio City.   A cemetery at one edge of town and a birthing tent at the other.

Waring has his hands deep in the Jennings woman when Cooper makes his drunken entrance.

“Holy shit!  Stafford wasn’t pulling my leg at all!  It’s Jeff Waring in the flesh.”

He offers a bottle.  Waring shows him his bloody hands.

“Go on and finish her up and I’ll buy ya a drink across the street.  The whole gang is over there – Stafford, Nichols and Dakota.  That’s what Martin’s going by these days.”

“Not the Dakota Kid?”

Cooper laughs his familiar open-mouthed laugh.  Waring peers into it, seeing every drunken night with this gang, every filthy saloon, every imagined offense, every unwarranted brawl and knife-fight.  He tastes the liquor, smells the sawdust, feels the horror of waking to a snoring whore and an aching pecker.

“Sheriff Waring! Who would have thought it?!”

He pictures a tree with four nooses.  Better yet, he sees a sturdy gallows that can handle four.  He can imagine just how he’ll build it.  The design appears in his mind, fully conceived.

With a wail, the child enters this rotten world.  It’s a boy.

The Story So Far

1873

They straggle into town from time to time.  Angry men, weary of traveling, weary of being driven by their anger.  And they all want to kill him.

Waring found this one behind Stabler’s barn, passing a bottle with a couple of tough-looking hombres from Mex Town.

“I have a message for Arango.  He ain’t gonna like it.”

The vaquero wears two guns.  He rests his palms on them.  “English not so good, senor.”

“In that case, I’ll just give you the gist of it.  It’s mainly contempt.  Contempt and scorn.  We’ve been playing a game, him and me, and I’m winning.  Arango took my woman and he took my child.  But the woman died and I took the child back.  He followed me and killed everyone in the wagon train I was traveling with.  But I doubled-back and killed everyone in his damn village.  I killed the women.  I killed the children.  Maybe I killed your woman?  Maybe I killed your children?”

Now they both have their palms on their guns.  “So run along now.  Tell your boss what I told you.”

The man is smiling and his English is a lot better.  “Senor, I am not going anywhere.”

“You won’t give him my message in this world?  Go on and give it to him in the next.”

And now it gets loud.

Over the years, Waring has learned to rock from side to side as he fires.  So far, this has worked well for him.  He gets hit less and the movement doesn’t affect his shooting all that much.

This time is no different.  He’s unhurt and the other guy is dead.  And since he has his gun out, he keeps shifting left and right and firing and takes out the rest of the fuckers.

——————————–

It was shortly after this that the good town people of Rubio City, New Mexico made Jeff Waring their Sheriff.

The Story So Far

1923

Lightening flashes,  illuminating the cages.  The animals thrash wildly.  The air smells of wet fur and mange.

Clay carries his daughter down the muddy hill and through the zoo.  He’s crying and moaning but the baby is quiet.

He can see the lights of Los Angeles down the canyon.  He and the baby begin the long trek, leaving behind Griffith Park and their home of two weeks.

——————————————————

One of her girls left the shed door open again.  Minnie runs from the house through the pouring rain and there she finds the monster.

He beckons in his filthy rags. He twists his broken frame and points.  His mouth contorts and he moans and he points.

“…she’s no orphan…she has a mother…a father…she needs more than I can give her…needs to stay here…”

He’s pointing at the sign mounted near the roof.  Minnie Barton Home for Girls.

“…Richard said my wife would kill the baby…that’s why I did these things…am I a villain? …am I a sucker? …a patsy?”

She steps inside the shed.  She’s glad he keeps talking.  It gives her time to open the locked box she keeps there.

“I am not those things.  I am her father.  I am her dad!”

He’s raising the baby in his arms when she shoots him.

“Shame!” she cries.  “Shame on you!  Shame!  Shame!”

The Story So Far

1970

Josey is jumping rope with some kids outside the Saratoga Market.  The place is packed with hippies, goofing on the locals and loading up on supplies.

I close the door to the phone-booth.

“So what happens if she’s there?  What do you do then?”

“I don’t know.”  I’ve been looking for her for three years, and I still don’t know.

“I’m going to be candid, Jay.  A lot has changed since we last talked.  I quit the University and became a cop.  Brooklyn Academy.  A year on the beat.  A few more in a squad car.  I just got my star.  Call it penance, call it what you will.”

A mini-bus scoots past.  I scan the windows.

“What I do all day is ask difficult questions.  So let me ask you a few.  What do you expect to happen when you find Phoebe?  That she’ll be well again?  That she’ll want to be with her daughter?  That she’ll want to be with you?  Do you want to hold her?  Do you want to hit her?  What?”

I can’t say “save her” so I don’t say anything.

Some jokesters are performing impromptu street theater.  They parade around with a battered trunk.  A bearded fool puts on a police hat and goose-steps.  Girls in face-paint kneel in worship before a runt dressed as an A-bomb.

“One thing is for sure.  If you find her, then you gotta ask Josey what she wants.  You gotta do that.”

I hang up, imagining that conversation.  Suddenly, I hope I never find my wife.

And that’s when I see her with the Magic Man.

The Story So Far

1923

Despite the beatings, Clay can still see through one eye.  He stares at the hobos by the fire.  It took everything he had to drag himself here.  And now he’s going to die.  Under a dead tree.  In a pile of dead branches.  A few feet from the only thing he ever wanted.

Richard told him to take the baby and run.  Richard said that Dora was sick with grief over the other twin.  He said that she would kill the girl.  He said that Clay had to act quickly.  He said Clay had to act now.

He feels a chill on his neck which surprises him.  He thought he’d lost all feeling back there.

What if his brother was lying?

“I’m not for hurting her, Jeb.  She might be worth some money.”

“What I have in mind won’t hurt much.  Give her here.”

The old man doesn’t want to see it.  He turns away from the fire, and right into the hard end of a swinging branch.  It rips his face off.

Clay lumbers from the brush, top-heavy, his head swollen.  The bigger hobo drops the baby and grabs a flaming log.  He breaks Clay’s arm.  He breaks Clay’s shoulder.

Clay lunges and they both end up in the fire.  Clay feels the flames on his hands, on his legs.  They both scream.  They both burn.

The hobo panics first, a ball of flame bobbing through the dark woods.

Clay rolls from the fire.  And there she is.

His daughter.

The Story So Far

1873

The old woman chokes it out between sobs.  She tells him what he already knows.  There are no men in Los Rios.  They are with Arango.  They are searching for the baby.

Waring waits as the women and children gather their things.  He doesn’t dismount.  They don’t have much.

He tries to remember the baby names.  Martina had one for a boy and one for a girl.  Then Arango saw her in the window of the farmhouse.  By the time Waring found her, she was dead and he’d forgotten the names.

For a kick, he balances the baby on the horse’s neck.  She bounces up and down as he leads the people of Los Rios into the desert.

When they stumble, he drives them on.  When they collapse, he leaves them to die.

Riding back towards the border, he shows her an apple and a knife.  She wheezes.  He cuts the apple and presses a slice to her lips.  The wheeze becomes a laugh.

She tugs at his mask.  He tosses it over her.  She luxuriates in the black silk.

The Story So Far

1970

“Which one’s your favorite?”

“My favorite what, sweetie?”

“Your favorite gas station, of course.”

“The Shell station in Wichita.”

“Why?”

“You remember the guy who tried to sell me the transistor radio?”

“Yeah.”

“His teeth were the color of your hair.”

“Oh daddy, you say the nicest things.”

—————————

“Your turn, Josey.”

“Your favorite car we’ve seen today.”

“Today?  Just today?”

“That’s the rules, daddy.”

“Then…the tan Rambler we passed at Lake Tahoe. No, it was the orange VW van.”

“That’s two, daddy.”

“Which is your favorite?”

“The orange one.  But I’m lying.”

“The truth then! Out with it!”

“This one, daddy, cuz I’m here with you.”

This Ends the First Cycle of  BURNT

The Story So Far

1923

Clay wakes in the cave and tries to remember his dream.  He’d been on a sailboat with his brother.  Richard had slipped and grabbed his arm.

The baby stirs.  He wraps the blanket tighter.  The blanket just appeared.  As did the food and the milk.  Someone left these things outside.  He guesses it was the film crew.

They’re all gone now.  How long?  He doesn’t know that.  What does he know?  That he’s sick.

That he’s dying?

Yes, Richard had slipped but somehow it was him that ended up in the water.  Somehow it was Clay.  He sank and he sank.  But he didn’t drown.

Instead, he saw a whole city down there.  A city of beautiful new buildings and streets made entirely of little specks of gold.  An architectural wonder.  But in the windows and on the boulevard were dead men.  Sitting behind desks and riding in cars – all of them corpses.

He’s sick alright, but somehow he thinks that taking the baby was Richard’s idea.

“Shall we kill a man?”

“Let us kill a baby.”

Are there men outside the cave?  Can they see him?  Is this real?

It is.  The pain as they beat him makes that clear.

They leave with the baby.  They leave him alone to despair and to die.

The Story So Far

1873

There is a cleft in the rocky bluff.  It’s a natural fit for a baby and Waring slides her in there.  He leans over the edge for a better look.

The wagon train has given up on the circle.  Arango stands in what’s left of its center.

Vaqueros prod, they push and in this way a child is ushered forth.  This is Eirik’s son.  Eirik helped Waring build a little hammock for the baby and his wife nursed her over fifty miles of dirt and rocks.  Arango rests his pistol on the boy’s forehead and fires.

The shot and the scream bounce around the canyon, around the wailing pioneers, around Waring and the baby.

Next up are Jokkum and Nina’s twins.

Arango is turning in circles now, shouting at the surrounding hills.  He’s too far away to hear but Waring assumes he’s repeating his threat — he’ll kill all the children if the baby is not returned.

The twins hold hands.  Waring swaddles the baby in Nina’s knit blanket as Arango fires twice.

The vaqueros are burning the wagons.  Arango starts in on the older children.

“Do you see?  The devil determines their order.”

Waring lifts the baby high above his head.  “Do you see?  Do you see what this world is?”

He holds her face close to his.  Her lids flutter.  Her eyes focus.  He starts to say, “Do you see what I am?”

No.  That’s for when she’s older.

The Story So Far

1970

The loons are laughing it up.  They’ve got an old projector running off a car battery, throwing a black and white flick at a sheet hung up in the trees.  It’s “Tarzan” and the heroine is drowning in a flickering mass of crazy apes.

And here comes the hoots.  “Give it to the monkey man, baby!”  and “Animal love forever!” and, somehow, “Have a nice day, LBJ!”

It doesn’t matter what you say, funny or not, this crowd is high and everything gets a laugh.  The triumph of equality, I guess.

I’ve been waiting for a long time, but even groovy guys have gotta shit sooner or later.  This one finally makes his move to the woods.  I follow.  I have the photo of my wife in my hand and it trembles.  Once I show it to him, he has to die.

His reactions follow a familiar pattern — the jokes, the lame protestations, a pathetic attempt at bravado.  The sharp cry of pain when I break his arm is nothing new.  But he surprises me with his expression when he sees the knife – he knows he’s going to die.

So I show him the photo.

The second surprise.  “I seen her!  Saratoga, man, I seen her with Mackey.  They call him Doctor Mackey.  The Magic Man.  In Saratoga!”

My grip loosens on his throat.  This is new.  The guy is cooperating and he has some real information.  A sudden flood of doubt about the sanctity of my mission.  Questions of ethics, they crowd my mind…

He shakes loose and gets one, two, three steps before my resolve returns.

Josey.

I drop him and I go to work with the knife.  It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t easy, but I keep in mind that this guy willfully shrugged off any meaningful masculinity years ago.

I’m just making it manifest.

The Story So Far