I've been working on a western anthology series. I've just completed a story I'm particularly proud of and I'm curious if people actually enjoy it. The anthology takes place in a fictional town in the southwest in the late 1800's with overlapping characters, similar to pulp fiction. Let me know what you think and don't hold back on negative opinions, I'm trying to improve or make this more entertaining.
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DAWN
Patrick heard about it before he was even awake, Daniel shaking his shoulder in the dark, breathless, the word duel said like it was Christmas morning.
"Cantina, last night," Daniel said. "Some fella called another fella out. Sunrise, Main Street. Everybody's saying it."
Patrick sat up on his elbows. Around them the cottage held the sound of James still asleep, snoring faintly through his nose. "Says who."
"Everybody." Daniel was already pulling his boots on, one hand still on Patrick's shoulder like he might vanish if he let go. "C'mon. C'mon, Patrick."
He didn't put much stock in it. Cantina talk ran to duels the way it ran to buried silver and Comanche raids and missing horses, a story got told, got better in the telling, and by the time it reached the Kelly home it was usually not much more than talk. But he pulled his boots on anyway. He was seventeen, and the sky outside the cottage door was still the color of ash. He decided there was no better place to be than where the excitement was.
He left James sleeping. Found Daniel again, since the boy had wandered off toward the horses. By the time Patrick had them both moving toward town, walking fast, not quite running, the anticipation had gotten into him despite himself, a tightness behind his sternum, something that felt almost like the hour before a hunt, when the light's still bad and you don't know what the day is going to bring.
Main Street was already thick with people when they came around the blacksmith's corner. More than Patrick expected. He saw Karl Wagner standing outside his shop with his arms crossed, saying something to a man Patrick didn't recognize. He saw two of the Cruz siblings, and a knot of ranch hands he didn't know by name, and Titus Jackson in his doorway, not out on the street but watching from it, arms folded, saying nothing to anybody.
Nobody was cheering. That surprised him a little. He'd pictured it (without meaning to) as something almost festive, and instead the street had the hushed, close quality of a church before the service starts. People talking in low voices. People not quite looking at each other.
He'd made it maybe halfway down the row, Daniel still grabbing onto the back of his shirt, when a hand landed on Daniel's shoulder instead.
Clayton Parker. Patrick hadn't even seen him come up alongside them. "Daniel," he said, easy, like there was nothing else going on in the street at all. "Come on in the post with me a minute. Got something in from some soldiers passed through yesterday you'll want to see."
Daniel's grip loosened on Patrick's shirt.Â
"What is it?"
"Come see."
Daniel went, the way kids went with Clayton, no argument, no second thought, already asking what kind of candy it was before they'd gone three steps. Patrick watched them go a moment, Clayton's hand resting light on the boy's shoulder, steering him toward the trading post door and away from the street, and then he turned back around, and that was when he saw him.
The vaquero stood near the middle of the street, boots planted in the dust, a good twenty feet from the other man. Patrick had seen him around town before, never knew his name, never spoken two words to him, but he knew the face. He rode through every month or six weeks, sold horses or traded them, always seemed to be laughing about something, usually at his own expense. Patrick had watched him once outside the livery, doing an impression of a spooked colt for a crowd of children, rearing back with his hands up like hooves, and the children had shrieked and loved it. He couldn't have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three.
He wasn't laughing now. He stood very still, hands loose at his sides, watching the other man the way Patrick watched a deer trail, total attention, nothing wasted.
Patrick never got a clear look at the other man's face. Never would remember, later, what he was wearing, or how old he was, or what he looked like at all. He would remember the vaquero's face with total clarity for the rest of his life, and he would never once learn what any of it had been about.
The street held its breath. Somewhere behind Patrick a horse shifted and blew air through its nose, and the sound seemed enormous.
Then the shot came, and there was no ceremony to it at all.
Patrick didn't see a signal. Didn't see hands move toward guns, didn't see the draw, didn't see any of the things twenty feet of tense silence should have telegraphed. There was just the shot. Flat and short, swallowed almost instantly by the open air. The vaquero's body twisted sideways as if someone had shoved him hard from the left.
He didn't go down right away. That was the thing Patrick hadn't expected, hadn't known to expect. He staggered two steps sideways, one hand coming up toward his chest, and for a second, one absurd, terrible second, Patrick thought he might simply keep standing there, the way a gut-shot buck sometimes stood for longer than seemed possible before its legs finally understood what had happened to it.
Then his knees folded and he sat down hard in the street dust, not falling so much as collapsing into a sitting position, like a puppet with its strings cut halfway.
Nobody moved for a moment. Patrick didn't either.
He would understand, later, replaying it, that the whole thing, the draw, the shot, the fall, had taken perhaps two seconds. At the time it did not feel like two seconds. It felt like time didn't have a length at all.
The vaquero made a sound. Not a scream, not words. A wet, effortful sound, like a man trying to clear his throat of something that would not clear. Patrick found he had come forward without deciding to, was standing near the front of the crowd now, close enough to see.
The blood didn't come the way he'd have guessed. He'd gutted deer, dressed hogs, seen his father's ventures go bad enough that violence of one kind or another had crossed his path more than once. He knew what blood looked like when it left a body. This was… different, a dark stain spreading fast across the front of the man's shirt, high on the chest, and with every one of those wet, clotted breaths a fresh welling at the corner of his mouth, thin and bright, running down over his chin.
He was still upright, sitting in the dirt, one hand pressed flat over the wound as if he could hold something in that had already gotten out. His eyes were open. They moved, found Patrick's, for just a moment, out of the whole crowd, and there was no fear in them yet, only a kind of confusion, like a man trying to work out a math problem.
Then the confusion went somewhere else. His breathing turned to a thick, bubbling rattle, worse with each attempted breath, his chest working harder and harder to move air through what Patrick understood was no longer only air. The hand at his chest slid down. He tipped sideways, slow, almost gentle, until his shoulder met the dust, and his legs drew up once, an animal reflex, and went still.
It took perhaps a minute. Patrick would think, many times afterward, about how long a minute actually was, when a man was using every second of it to die.
Nobody in the crowd spoke for a while after the sound of him finally stopped. Then the ordinary noise of a street came back in pieces, a gasp, someone's horse, someone's low voice asking someone else if that was it.Â
The men who'd stood across from each other were both gone from where they'd stood, the vaquero there in the dirt, on his side, one hand still curled loosely against his own chest, his eyes half open and fixed on nothing, the other disappeared into the crowd.
Patrick didn't remember deciding to walk closer. He stood over the body for a while. He kept expecting to feel the thing he felt after a clean kill in the woods. Some resolved feeling, an ending. It didn't come. The man on the ground looked like he might sit up and finish the joke he'd been telling the last time Patrick saw him laughing outside the livery. He looked like sleep. He did not look like anything Patrick had a word for yet.
Otto Wagner's dead wagon came up the street maybe twenty minutes later, unhurried, the way Otto did everything. He climbed down without a word to anyone, looked at the body for a moment with an expression Patrick couldn't read at all, not surprise, not grief, just a kind of professional appraisal, the way Titus might look at a busted axle before deciding how to fix it. Then he glanced up, found Patrick still standing there, and said, "Give me a hand."
Patrick didn't ask why him. He just did it.
They lifted the body between them, Otto at the shoulders, Patrick at the legs, and it was heavier than Patrick expected, and looser, the way nothing alive is ever loose. Otto handled it without flinching, arranged the arms with a kind of care that struck Patrick as strange and then didn't. The same care he used when he and his brother Karl worked together at the wheelwright before their falling out.
They laid him in the bed of the wagon on a length of canvas. Otto pulled the edges over him without ceremony, tucking the corners the way a man might fold a tarp over lumber before the rain came.
"You knew him?" Otto asked, not looking up.
"No," Patrick said. "Not really."
Otto nodded, like that was an answer he'd heard plenty of times before, and maybe it was. He climbed back up onto the seat, took the reins, and looked down at Patrick for a moment before he said anything else.
"Go home," he said. Not unkind. Just practical, the way he said everything. "Nothing left here for you to do."
Patrick stood in the street and watched the wagon roll off toward Otto's shop, the wheels leaving two shallow lines in the dust that would be gone by noon. Behind him, Main Street was already returning to itself. Karl Wagner's voice somewhere, ordinary again, a dog barking near the trading post, the particular clatter of the blacksmith's morning starting up like any other day.
He was still standing over the dark patch in the dirt, already starting to dull and dry at the edges in the growing heat, when Daniel came out of the trading post with a fistful of peppermint sticks and a look on his face like he'd been handed the deed to the territory.
"Patrick. Patrick, look." He held one out, already talking before Patrick could answer. "Clayton says the soldiers traded a whole crate of these for two nights' feed on their horses, and there's a red kind he says tastes like cinnamon, only I think this one's better, you want to try it?"
Patrick took the candy. He didn't say anything.
Daniel kept talking the whole walk back home, about the candy, about the soldiers, about nothing at all. Patrick just listened.
