Robert James Russell

Full text below.  Enjoy.

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Blood Quantum

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Bob Antrim felt a cold steeled barrel matt his thick hair down and wedge into the back of his skull.  He heard the hammer click back metallically and in that moment recalled his wife dying of consumption, spittles of blood curtained along the contours of her sunken face and chest, and then he mulled on his boy who had died in infancy.  His hands gripped the splintered haft of the pick and for a minute further he dreamt of spinning in place and lodging the wedged spade into his attacker but amid the hallucinated escapades a shot thundered out like drums.  The bullet churned down the barrel of the spunked and dusty revolver and it crushed through Bob’s skull and out his right eye socket as fluids sprayed like some geyser and his body fell to the ground sharp like stone.

Everett Root rolled the dented .44 caliber Dance revolver around his index finger and holstered it as if he were some dashing and wily roughrider that had been wrangled into a Wild West Show.  He coughed a bit and waved the smoke away from his face with his hands and then set his eyes on the heaped body, smiling crookedly and scratching his chin. The ache in his leg gathered up again like a fist and he snorted out a dollop of snot from his nostrils and lowered himself carefully to the floor of the gritty mine.  He set his feet up on the twin timber planks that bridged across mud and wet recessed puddles in the rock.  The air smelled like sulfur.

He unwound a piece of stained-red cloth from around the upper part of his left thigh and he dropped the saturated tourniquet into a soaked pile beside him.  Then he took two fingers and peeled an opening in his gray trousers that sat dark like cotton flesh and beneath the opening laid a bullet wound that fizzled deep, the opening lipped out as if it had been disturbed by some plated tremor deep below.  A glossy covering of black-red blood formed at the surface and he thumbed at it curiously as if he had previous familiarities with human anatomy, then recoiled from the shocks of pain that shot back.  He coughed deeply and squinted his eyes at the gaping hole, imagining he could see the top of the stunted round poking out and he wished he had dug the thing out in San Augustine.

He scooted himself along the ground to alleviate the pressure on his hurt leg and kept at it until he reached the miner’s boots and he stopped.  He sized them up mechanically and concluded they were too small and then he wormed his way along the body further, grimacing with hurt at every length he moved.  He stopped again at the miner’s waist and breathed hard and squinted his eyes again into the dark and smiled at the smoking wound lodged in his pale face.  Then Everett took a smudged hand and turned the man’s head from side to side, gripping it along the jaw with the charm of a grandfather admiring a boy.

“Sunnuvabitch!”

He guffawed and looked around for encouragement as if he had hallucinated an audience that likewise enjoyed his clowning and then let the head flop back with a heavy bump.

“From the right angle, boy, you look like my brother Jesse.”

He coughed again and rummaged through the large denim pockets of the man’s overalls and pulled out a small pocketknife with a pewter handle that it folded back into.  He unfurled the blade and it was dinged around most of the edge but the tip still pricked hard into the whorl of his thumb.  He collapsed the knife and slipped it into his shirt pocket and kept digging.  He pulled out a piece of folded paper that had browned along the edges.  He placed it into his teeth and bit down to keep it in place and the prospect of something other than his tongue taking up room in there caused him to slobber a bit around the corners and wet the edge of the note.  He then pulled out another folded and waxed piece of paper and he unfolded it.  He examined it and it appeared to be a map of the area with hashes penciled in and around the mountains he was currently in, possibly marking failed claims and there was a longer scratch that portended to what might be a homestead a few miles off.  He laid the map down and then dug through the remaining pockets, pulling out a length of twine and he pushed it aside.  He noticed the claw hammer slung along a leather belt askew along the miner’s hips and he fingered the splintered handle and the iron cheek felt cool against his skin.

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Finally! The conclusion of my Western short story “Blood Quantum”!

If you missed any of the previous Parts, catch up here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Enjoy!

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Everett peeled a blackred paste from his lips as he sped through the trail.  His groin excruciated in waves and he knew it was lead poisoning.  He pushed through the hurt further and eventually slowed his pace, confident that his attacker took to rummaging through his belongings back at the cabin in an attempt to look for the silver, still tucked away safely in his shirt.  He ran a hand through his hair and coughed a bit and the path eventually opened up into the flood plain, dotted with lone cottonwoods and sweeps of greenbrown desert grasses.  He stood briefly to navigate and spied the Rio Grande about a mile out, gray and loud.  Mesilla was still further south but he noticed a road on the far side of the river that would take him there and he smiled crookedly.

He trotted down the steep slope and across the range, passing monuments of salt cedar and sagebrush and croppings of bouldered limestone and sandstone.  Everett marched on, glancing back to the pass like clockwork.  His vision began to blur and he mistook shadows of dashing clouds overhead as armies of villains bent on doing him harm.  He crept on as his headache worsened and soon he forgot his sentried errand.  He kept low to the ground and stopped himself twice from collapsing completely, bracing himself on passing man-made edifices of rock and earth.  His limp had worsened and he stumbled upon wreckage of some wrecked wagonette and used a long timber from the wagon-bed as a crutch until it snapped in half ten minutes later.  The sun was hot and without his hat or coat he felt the full effects of it on the nape of his neck.

Everett had been walking for three quarters of an hour in an unintentional crisscross route through the plains and had been stopping every few minutes to realign himself amid his worsening condition, finally stopping at a large and rounded granite stone at the bank of the river.  He gently lowered himself into the damp mud and his body throbbed all over as he arched his back along the boulder, the bullet buried in his shoulder shouting in pain.  The rock gave him significant cover and a cool draft washed over him.  He began another succession of coughing fits and spit up blood at the conclusion of each.  His hands were shaking from his wounds and the hunger that plagued him and he took out the last acorns and chewed them skins and all.  They were rubbery and sour and he felt puke come up in his throat but he managed to keep them down.  He untwisted the canteen from his torso and drank the rest of the water.  Some of it spilled down his chin and felt cool against his skin.

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Part 2 of my Western short story “Blood Quantum.”  Check out Part 1 here.

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The next morning Everett walked down a hillside from the mountains leading his horse by the reins.  He had run a zigzag path the night before until he exhausted his equine and then took a position against a sheered cliff-face that looked out into a small valley surrounded by a grove of tlacocote that tangled thick.  The small valley had only one entrance that he had guarded like some stern despot and he had only slept for thirty minutes, shivering under his thinned coat and caught beneath stray and howling gusts that wound in looping patterns.

He pressed on further from the hillside, stopping at a small creek that snaked down through the parched ground that was more mud than water and he let his horse drink while he inspected the map again.  His detour had ousted him too far north and on the west side of the Organs and now he’d have to cross back through.  Everett clicked his teeth for amusement as he computed his new trajectory south and east and he looked for any mention of a trail or road through the mountains.  He found none but felt optimistic that he was about a day’s ride from Mesilla and he folded the map again along the worn creases and placed it back in his shirt pocket.  He took out the miner’s stolen pistol and broke open the cylinder again and blew into the empty chambers and tucked it back into his belt.  He ran his fingers over his own large holster and stalled on the basket-weave pattern and then onto the walnut stock of the gun as if he was anticipating the arrival of a duel.

He yawned wildly and scratched the back of his head where it met the neck and bent down to the stream.  He lifted a handful of the gray water to his head and spooned it over and slicked his hair back.  Then he took another cupping of water and slurped it greedily and then sat along the bank and watched his horse which had taken to grazing on a sweep of hoary feather-grass.  He unwound the bandage from his leg and dipped it in the creek and rung it out.  Watery red sifted from the dressing and he scraped it along his forehead which revealed a deep and festering gash that had begun to scab over.  He reapplied the covering to his leg and it was cold against his torn skin and he sucked in air through his teeth as if it deterred the stinging sensation.

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