At first he was no more than a plume of dust in the western sky. He could have been an excited mule dear or a stubborn Comanche, but something told me to keep watching the horizon. Out here you learn the virtue of patience the hard way. You wait for the mail wagon and the whisky peddler and then you wait cowboys and prospectors to come in flush with cash and half mad from long horizons and solitude. They shake off the prairie dust and wash down the loneliness and then murderously hung over and dead broke they head back out.

Patience, with patience the plume became a dot on the horizon, made indistinct by the heat shimmers lifting off the desert sand. That dot knew patience as well; it had neither the mad limping gait of a prospector dragging his mule nor the jubilant last kick of a cowboy near tasting his liquor. It came on slow and deliberate like a man for whom all things waited. The pace seemed to time the setting of the sun, and it was near anyone’s guess as to which would happen first, the arrival of the dot or the departure of the sun.

Soon the dot was no longer a dot; it had taken the shape of a man on horseback. I could see his hat, low and flat in the Spanish style, but I couldn’t see his face. It seemed important somehow. The sun fell further, turning the sky pink and the man black, his silhouette seemed to grow as he drew on, till it felt as though he might blot out the sun entire.

“Dance rummy.” The words jarred me from my watch and for a moment I forgot that it was me he was talking to. The voice was cracked by sun and dry tobacco and it belonged to a lean sun scorched cowboy just drunk enough to be mean. He leered out at me from inside the bar, his yellow smile hanging rakishly over the swinging doors. I put on a lopsided grin and shuffled over to him from my perch on boardwalk. For just a moment I pushed the booze out of my brain and looked at him. His face was belt leather and stubble under a slick of sweat and oil. A part of me, the old buried part, wanted to split that face in two, wanted to see the blood, bubbles, and teeth come running out his mouth. But I’m not that man anymore.

Rummy they call me and rummy I am. Just another creature broken by too much freedom. Freedom to take, freedom to kill, and freedom to leave the world of men law for something past the horizon. Thing is, the world doesn’t end in the big empty. It just gets quieter and less comfortable. The discomfort I could take, it was the quiet that pushed me here.

When all you hear is your own breath and the howl of the wind, you start to hear other things. A man you killed to impress a dancing girl, a dead card cheat, a kid standing in the wrong place. They all started jawing at me from the sticky crevices in my mind. Got so I couldn’t hear my own thoughts, so I couldn’t sleep at night.

It’s strange, when I first started killing men I figured dead meant gone from this world. I’ve come to understand that the dead don’t leave; they take up residence in you. They become you. A man can outrun or outgun the law, but you can’t lose yourself on horseback. Those dead voices talked to me everywhere and always until I found the one thing that would quiet them for time. Booze, and for that dignity isn’t on the menu. I started dancing.

“Ha! Ya ain’t half crippled old man. Now gives us a song and I’ll buy you a drink.”

That buried part of me got real quiet, not like it had left, but like it was planning something sudden and bloody. I pushed it down further.

“The Camptown ladies sing this song…” the words came out thick and off key, but my cowboy didn’t care. He invited me in and I let the song die a merciful death. Watching that sunset left me blind to the interior darkness and for a moment I made my way on memory. Gradually the room came into focus, low ceiling, sawdust floor and long raw wood bar down the side. What little light there was came from a few Smokey oil lamps. In the corner under a cloud of smoke sat some yahoos at a wobbly table. They played cards and glared at each other with drunken caution. Everyone else stood at the bar. It was a slow night.

The cowboy signaled for a round and I felt my mouth start to water. Ike, that fat bastard bartender rolled his eyes when he saw me, but he still poured the whiskey. Tin cups of course, glass doesn’t live long in a place like this.

“Say old man, I heard you used to be somebody, used to be a name in these parts.” There was no curiosity in his tone, just mean glee.

I downed the whiskey in a single go. The fire in my gullet was reassuring, but there was something wrong that night. I was feeling too much myself when I should have been feeling nothing. “I am what I am.” I told him, but he was bored already. I watched him walk over to the card game. Watched him show his back to me, all the while that buried bit of me looked for the shooting iron that should have been on my hip. It would have to look in the pawnshop to find anything.

I looked past the swinging doors for my dot on the horizon but the sun was gone and so was he. Nothing important anyway. Except it’s always something.