Most he didn't have to look for. They littered the battlefield in a haphazard patchwork of Confederate grey and Union blue and caked, muddy brown and twisted, arabesque splashes of bright red. Some he found by mistake, bloated and pulpy flesh he stepped on as he crossed a ditch. His shoe sunk down with a squelch and a crack into a tangle of dead leaves and hair and bone and he stared down at what remained of a young man's face. The stench that rose into his nostrils was physical enough to push him back. He didn't gag, but his footsteps stumbled—for a moment, just a moment—and the officer coming up behind him held out a hand.
"Steady, doctor. This ain't the worse you'll be seeing."
He ran his hand over his mouth, pushing aside the ripe aftertaste of the corpse. "I know what the worst looks like. And I'm all right." He shifted his grip on his medical case and pointed forward with his chin. "This stretch on down to the river?"
The officer's eyes were miles away. He no longer saw the dead and the wounded. It was easier that way. "The river's stuffed with them, and the horses. The captain's set some men to clearing out the bodies. There's like as none alive down there, Dr. Cochran."
"No. They likely drowned."
Voices crawled out to him from behind and to the left the right ahead and some voices seemed to crawl right out of the ground, from mouths and faces and throats no longer attached to a living body.
It was a goddamned marvel, gunpowder.
"A fist," he said, "can shatter a man's jaw, if delivered with enough force." He looked back at the clump of flesh that had once been a man. A boy. "A giant's fist, made out of solid iron. That's a cannonball. Propelled forward by gunpowder—nitric and sulphuric acids—and ejected with such force and such speed that that," he pointed back at the ruined head, "that is what remains when the cannonball and its unfortunate yet entirely voluntary target finally connect."
The officer stared straight ahead. He stood still. He waited for the doctor to lower his finger and push his hat further down over his eyes and move on.
"You can go back to your captain," Cochran said. "I know my way around a battlefield."
"The war will soon be over, sir."
"Yes." He pulled off his glasses and drew his thumb over a speck of dried blood. He cleaned it off, then pushed the glasses back on. "Yes, that's what I was told last year."
Voices followed him as he made his way among the trampled grass and the trampled soldiers. He barely heard the officer as he saluted for no good reason and turned on his heel and made his way back to the things he understood. Yes, sir. No, sir. I serve my country. We're fighting for freedom and justice and oh, God, I can't feel my legs for pride's sake have pity on me Emily I can hear you help me just gotta keep crawlin' on forward captain jest give the word my boots I need my boots I can't recall what I was what I was what I said.
"I cain't feel my feet, doc. But somethin' hurts mighty fierce. Doc, can ya help me, doc?"
The young man's eyes were old, decayed bark, almost black now as they clouded over in shocked disbelief. Blood matted his beard and a gash down the side of his face where his ear had been sliced clean off.
He had no legs.
"Son?" The boy searched out the sound of Cochran's voice. He could see, but he couldn't focus, couldn't turn his head properly. Without his ear, his balance was shot. Cochran wondered if the boy even knew he had lost his ear. "Son, you've got a family we can write to?"
The boy licked parched, cracked lips.
"You got a sweetheart?"
A lopsided smile tugged at the boy's lips. "Yes'r. Yes. Yes, I do. Bianca an' she's waitin' on me. Yes'r. She's mighty pretty. Bianca."
"Well you keep right on thinking about Bianca. Picture her in your mind and picture you going back to her."
The words meant nothing. The boy began to nod, slowly at first, then faster as tears began to fill his eyes and spill down his cheeks. He looked at the doctor and then down at the bloodied stumps below his hips at the shards of gore splattered bone that tore through the skin where his knees had once been and he just nodded and cried and he knew, goddamn it, he knew.
"You're not dead," Cochran said. He patted the soldier's shoulder. "I can save you. I'll take you back to the tent and you'll see Bianca again."
The soldier choked on his own saliva, bubbles of it bursting over his lips. He coughed through his sobs as he doubled over and spat on the ground. Cochran couldn't tell if he could even hear him anymore. His body shivered and convulsed as he cried, the stumps of his legs rising off the ground and coming back down with weak thuds. The soldier's face contorted into dirty folds of flesh and red eyes and tears, mingling with the blood that still oozed down his cheek and into his beard.
He was dead before the nurses arrived with the stretcher.
"Is she gonna die? 'Cause I don't want the other whores fuckin' seein' it if she does."
Methodical, slow, ignoring the sound of Al Swearengen's voice as best as he could, Cochran dug his index finger into the thigh of a young woman he preferred to think of as Lillian rather than whore and felt as fluid-slick muscle parted for him, warm blood seeping in through his pores. The bullet was right there, right beyond his reach. The pad of his finger brushed against it, cold and alien and lodged firmly into the muscle.
Goddamned miners and their goddamned trigger happy tempers.
"You'll have a limp for some time," he said. Lillian's face was pinched and waxy and drenched in sweat. Her eyes trembled for fear of moving and of knowing, her eyebrows knotted together. "Don't let that scare you. If you follow my directions, you'll be fine in no time. It didn't shatter the bone."
"I don't wanna limp, doc."
"Only for a little while."
Lillian's eyes shifted toward the door. The despair in her eyes made his heart contract. "I don't wanna limp."
Goddamn that Al Swearengen.
Cochran pulled a pair of iron tongs from his case and set them down next to a bottle of laudanum. He uncorked the laudanum and poured a small amount into a glass. "Drink that," he said to Lillian. To Al's presence, large and bulky as it filled not only the doorway but the entire room, he said, "Don't you dare toss her out."
"What was that, doc?"
"I said don't you dare toss her out."
"Oh. Dare, is it?" Al's presence widened, carried forward by his voice now. It settled between Cochran's shoulder blades and pushed down as effectively as a boot or a hand or the butt end of a gun. "Last I checked, this was my fuckin' joint. My fuckin' whores. My fuckin' right to toss out whoever the fuck I want."
The butt of a gun. The blade of a knife against his throat. Cochran had never felt either. Not from Al. Not physically. Al held him down with words. It made no difference that they sounded light and friendly. The menace was there, slicing in through the sides. It worked its way in slowly, like an infection, taking its time before it had consumed his entire body as he was hunching forward even as he strained to straighten up and look Al square in the eye.
He could look Al square in the eye.
He had seen death. He wasn't scared of dying.
"She'll limp only for a little while."
"Like the gimp?" Al's hands were in his pockets. He rocked on the balls of his feet, a smile working its way across his face. It never reached his heart, but it crept into his eyes at the chance to drive his boot down harder between Cochran's shoulder blades. "The one you so mercifully cured of havin' to drag her foot around?"
"Damn it, Al."
Al's smile dropped away. He pointed at Lillian, eyes firmly on Cochran. "Only for a little while? She'll walk again? She'll be back to fuckin' soon?"
"She'll be fucking the whole damn camp and dancing a jig to boot."
"Then dig into her thigh and get it over with."
The living are not the dead. Simple enough. The living walk and talk and push him out of the way and chew on fried Chinese rice and curse as they step into rancid puddles of mud and urine and shit and they give off a stench of days-old sweat and river silt and wet clothes that dry on the body overnight and whisky belched into fuck, doc, I got this itch that won't go away and the living had warm flesh that smoothed right back out after you poked at it.
No matter how hard you dug your finger in, it still smoothed itself right on out.
He found himself pressing his thumb into the side of the corpse of an army nurse. With every jab, the filthy main thoroughfare of Deadwood was improved upon by the addition of a crude operation table and a few chairs and three or four lamps set in loose circumference around the tent and now it was 1865 and the imprints left by his finger on the woman's flesh would not smooth out.
"She was pretty." There were precious few surgeons in the Army Medical Department. A lot of them were fresh out of university. Thomas Langley was fresh out of university. He was gazing into the dead woman's eyes, his thumbs pressed into her brow ridges where he held the eyelids in place. He had the crooked, self-satisfied smile of a fool. One hand rose to settle over the corpse's left breast.
Cochran snatched up Langley's wrist. "If that's what you're looking for, you're in the wrong goddamned business." He twisted Langley's arm back, then pushed him away.
"Christ, Cochran." Langley rubbed at his wrist. "It was a joke."
"Joke somewhere else."
He didn't mind it when they stormed out. The head surgeon kept pushing aides on him, and he kept pushing them right back out of the tent. He had no idea where they dug them up from, but too many of them seemed to have their minds in the wrong place. Science. This was about science and medicine and knowledge and compassion, damn it. He had no patience for jokes or breast groping or endless talks about the money to be made or what doctor's secret society did what or where or whom.
Useless, all of it.
"They're just coping," the head surgeon said. "It's no different than what you do when you drink."
"I don't drink while I work. I drink afterwards. And if Langley wants to grope a nurse's breast, he can very well take his pick—from among the living. He can leave the dead in peace."
"So you can slice into them."
"So that I may learn from them." He pulled out his flask of whisky and took a quick pull. "God knows there's no more similarity between a dead breast and a living one than there is between a—a goddamned penis and a vagina."
He didn't mind it when the head surgeon stormed out either. They weren't going to fire him.
Al wasn't going to fire him.
He stopped in his tracks along the streets of Deadwood. He cleared his throat, once. Then twice. He balled his hand into a loose fist and struck at his chest. Come on, he urged himself, just cough it out. He waited, his heart swelling into tension as pressure built up along his lungs and his throat. At long last, he coughed. He coughed several times until he felt the tightness in his chest clear away. The underlying obstruction remained, lodged somewhere in his trachea and down into his lungs and he could even feel it in his heart. He rubbed his palm over it.
Deep breath.
He set his case down, straightened, and pressed one palm against his chest and the other behind his back.
Another deep breath.
Air wheezed past his nostrils and he began to cough again. He patted his own back, hunched forward. His hair got in his eyes. He pushed it aside with some irritation, clearing his throat loudly. The sound of it was wet and thick, like the packed gravel along a riverbank. He was sifting gravel through his teeth, rattling rocks within his throat as the water seeped into his lungs. He spat out a wad of saliva and mucus.
A few people stopped to stare at him. He waved them on.
"Goddamned dust," he rasped. "Gets everywhere. Gets into everything."
He didn't particularly mind if they thought he was insane.
As the day turned into the next day and then into next week and he coughed himself clear into morning and then into the second and then the third week, he finally put a word to use within his mind: Tuberculosis. He rolled the word around the confines of his brain and felt every letter take on a weight of its own. He coughed them out onto his palm and they were wrapped in saliva and mucus and now blood. He tossed it to the floor and wiped his hand over his pants.
He locked the door and wondered if Lillian had finally stopped limping. He hoped to God she had.
Tuberculosis. The word sounded scientific. Clean. Better than consumption, which threatened to drop him into the pages of a dime store novel. He coughed his way toward his bed and dropped down on it. He pressed his palm against his forehead.
Symptoms: Prolonged cough, chest pain, haemoptysis.
He coughed out a violent, bloodied gunk and he placed the word haemoptysis up next to tuberculosis in his brain. Clean. Scientific. He envisioned one of Al's whores standing by his bedside—Trixie, he liked Trixie—and he envisioned himself telling her what it meant. He couldn't talk. Every second word came out with a cough now and with pain, God, the pain so that everything was bleached white while it lasted and his jaw hung open wide and he couldn't hear only feel the cough as it raked all the way down into his lungs and it seemed as if his heart were being crushed right into his rib cage.
"Haemoptysis, Trixie, is the coughing up of blood. Blood and all the things that are being ripped right out of my lungs, Trixie."
She thought it was her cigarette smoke.
More symptoms: Chills, shivers, fever. The goddamn inability to sleep. Fatigue. The sudden spaces that multiplied between him and everything within his house—his shack. Everything was so far away. It took minutes and hours to reach one corner and then the next, till time had no meaning and he couldn't tell if it had been an hour or a day before he reached one end or another. Everything splintered into sparks of illuminated colour and danced before his eyes in bursts of white and black as another coughing fit seized him.
He banged on his chest, cursing.
Al wanted to believe it wasn't contagious.
Al had dropped a bundle of fabric scraps down at him. He stood above Cochran, on the second floor of The Gem Saloon, and he was framed, for one brief, unreal moment, by scraps of silk and velvet and chenille and paisley patterns. Then the moment passed and it was simply heavy, cumbersome fabrics raining down around him as patrons pretended not to stare.
"I ain't learning a new doc's quirks," Al said.
"Well," Cochran told the Al he conjured by the foot of his bed. "A dead doc ain't got no quirks. All the better for you." He convulsed through a shiver that settled right into his bones. "All the better for me."
It was hard to get rid of Al once he settled by his bedside. He sat on his chair and by the edge of the bed and over by the kitchen and the apothecary and pretty soon the entire place was stocked to the rafters with the ghosts of Al.
"Damn you. Just leave me alone."
"So you can fuckin' die?" he said from the bedside chair. "Not fuckin' gonna happen," he called out from the kitchen. His eyes were boring into Cochran's and he wondered if Al realized that he barely blinked. People simply didn't stare at other people like that. "You're gonna fuckin' live, doc." He wiped his hands over his vest—caked with so much dirt and grime that the stains had formed a pattern—and tossed a glance around the room. "Where do you keep the liquor? Where do you keep anythin' in this place? Wu's pigs live in better conditions than this miserable sty."
"I can't—" He stopped to cough for a good long while, head thrown back till he thought he would fall clean out of bed. "Can't. Drink. Throat." He coughed once, always with the fool's hope that if he could just clear his throat loud enough or hard enough, something ugly and black would dislodge itself and splatter to the floor.
"You'll cough a whole lung out if ya ain't careful."
Cochran dropped his head back on his pillow and scraped out a breath. In his mind, he could speak. Aloud, he could barely make a sound. If he needed words, he had to gather them up slowly, pile them up onto his tongue and then push them out as quickly as possible, before they degenerated into another fit. But in his mind, he could speak.
"Al, it's very unlikely that I'll live. There are no TB sanatoriums anywhere near Deadwood. There are no TB sanatoriums anywhere in the Union."
"The Union was a long time ago. These are the United Fuckin' States of America. Catchy name, easy to say. Not like Spain or Greece or some other hooplehead country that was once big an' mighty and now licks the prick of any cocksucker that comes along."
Cochran stared at Al. After a while, he drew in a deep, careful breath. "If you insist on standing by my bedside, fever dream or apparition or possible insanity that you are, could you make it so that you say things that make some sense?"
"The fever's obviously burned out your ability to joke, doc."
"I don't think as I ever had one."
Al poured himself a drink. The bottle was not the small whisky flask Cochran kept locked in his desk, but a large, red tinted one. The bottle Al kept at his desk at The Gem. Al was not real, then. Not at all.
A fit of coughing made its way up his lungs.
"Why—why are you—Why—" He spat out blood. He closed his fist over it, the slick, infected quality of the liquid rubbing against his palm. He closed his eyes. "Damn you. Why are you here? Why you?"
Al poured whisky into a shot glass. He placed the bottle on the floor and then raised the shot glass in the air. "You're feverish, doc." He drained the whisky in one gulp and set the shot glass on the floor. "Your defences are down."
Something was knocking in the next room. It rapped away at a steady pace, pausing for a few minutes before it picked right up again.
"Somebody should fix that," Cochran said.
He was at the operating theatre at New York. It was 1871 and he knew that, any day now, Dr. Cooke would summon him to his office. He would fold his hands over the desk and look pained and stern and professional all at once.
"Amos," he would say. "The nightshift staff has told me some… some things about you that concern me." He would pause then, gathering the words for whatever speech he had prepared. "They tell me you've… taken bodies from graves."
And if he could, he would say, "Ah, yes. The grave robbing. You know, that's a lot of fun. Not as much fun as necrophilia or smoking bones or eating dead flesh, but, well, when it comes right down to it I just enjoy pulling dead, rotted, stinking corpses from the worm-ridden ground. I imagine myself to be Leonardo DaVinci then. Famous grave robber, that feller. Made all these drawings about what's really inside a human body? The drawings we study now as opposed to real human bodies?"
Then, with a smile (a logically deranged smile, he hoped), he would lean back, calm as you please, and add, "Of course, I could just kill people on the street, but that's just… messy."
Get yourself fired right quick, he mused. He increased the pressure on the scalpel in his hand, slicing deeper into the chest of the corpse he had set out on the operating table. He had locked the doors. It was 3.00 AM in the morning on a Saturday. Everybody was in bed that wasn't busy getting drunk or copulating or both. So he worked in silence and in comfort, unrushed.
Perhaps he should leave, so as not to be fired.
The knocking intensified for a few seconds, then dropped back down to its normal pattern.
Bang bang bangbang bang.
"We'll sure miss you, Dr. Cochran. Have a cigar, old fellow. Tell me, tell me, where are you headed?"
"Out West."
"Not many hospitals out there. What would you do?"
"Well, it turns out a lot people keep killing a lot of other people out there. From what I've heard, some don't even get buried. So what I was thinking was that if I got myself out to a place like that, with the knowledge I possess and the temperament that I've been given, then it wouldn't be so hard for me to steal a few corpses right off the street."
Yes, get yourself fired right quick.
Only I'll be leaving, not getting fired.
And why doesn't anyone answer the goddamn door already?
Bang bang bangbangbang bang.
He dipped his fingers beneath the flaps he had cut out on the corpse's chest and peeled them back, nice and gentle. He took three pins for each flap and held them in place. He washed his hands and wiped them on the apron he had tied on. Arranged below him were the man's ribcage and his lungs and heart within. He slipped one finger between two ribs. The lungs were black and collapsed and sad.
"What did you do to yourself?"
The rest of the work he completed in silence. The banging almost fooled him into a state of urgency, but he forced himself to take several deep breaths and keep working. Cut away the lungs, place them in jars of formaldehyde. Cut away the heart and the arteries and try not to get any of the fluids in your mouth try not to wipe your hand below your nose for pride's sake. That's good. Very good. Now close him up yes sew him shut and return him to the bag you carried him in. You can remove more parts tomorrow.
Try not to get fired tomorrow.
And still the banging continued until it was no longer just in the next room but right next to right inside his ears. He cursed and flung open the operating theatre's door.
A man stood outside. Not exactly tall, but wide and personable in such a way that you could've sworn he was taller. He had greased black hair and crags in his cheeks and clean, blue eyes that seemed out of place in such a broad, dirty face. He held up a bottle and grinned.
"About fuckin' time, doc. I nearly banged the door down."
"Al," he said. "No visitors. I don't want—"
"Fuck what you want. I'm comin' in whether you stand aside or not."
"You're not—" He doubled over coughing, the sounds and heaves so deep that they left him gasping. And still he tried to speak. He could speak inside his mind, and Al was inside his mind. "I don't wa—" But he was unable to speak. His words were rasps that he hacked forward along with the phlegm and the mucus and the spit and everything coated in red like the crest of a cock like the sky as the sun is crushed under darkness like goddamned posies.
"Fuck, doc."
He gazed up at Al through a curtain of hair weighed down by grease and dirt and coated along the ends with the gunk coming out of his mouth. Sweat stood out over his skin, digging tiny teeth into his scalp. God, when had it gotten so bad?
"Go away," he whispered. "I don't want— This—this isn't then, Al. You—"
He couldn't finish. Not even whispering.
Whatever happened next, he couldn't put into the right order. His head was against Al's chest and then he was in bed in darkness dreaming but he was still next to Al, his head still against his chest. His heart was beating slower and faster now and Al's heart beat out like blessed relief, constant and strong. His own heart slammed against his temples.
Bang bang bang.
Somebody was knocking to put a fist clean through the door and it was Al and Cochran knew then, he knew it was 1874 and he had arrived in Deadwood not two weeks ago and Al was banging on his door.
There was no door. Al simply pulled back the tent flaps so that a few strings snapped off.
"You stood there looking as if you wanted to murder me," he said to Al in his mind. Al who was now really in the room with him.
"What the fuck kind of operation are you settin' up here, you big-city cocksucker?"
Cochran could only stare. The man at the entrance to his tent filled it to capacity. He had matted curly black hair and mud-caked miner's boots and eyes so blue they were almost transparent. Nothing about him was clean and Cochran's tent was still spotless and organized in those days, his hair tidy and cut short so that a few tendrils curled up around his ears and his moustache was trimmed and, God, he must've looked like an idiot to Al.
"W-what are you talking about?"
Al strode into his tent as if he were measuring it, eyes flicking to every corner and every jar and to his cot (made and with the sheets recently laundered in river water he had boiled). He turned his eyes on Cochran, eyebrows cocked.
"Operations. What d'you plan on offerin' here?"
"I, ah, any kind."
"Any kind, huh? Women?"
"Well… well, yes. Women too."
"The fuck if I'll let you. Women are to be i my /i business."
With that, he grasped Cochran's arm and marched him outside the tent. He pointed down the row of miner's tents all along what would one day become the main thoroughfare. At the end, Cochran could just make out a crude, wooden half-building. It was several boards shy of being completed, but a painted sign had already been nailed up: Women, whisky and faro.
"Oh," he said.
"Oh is right, cocksucker. i No /i women. Don't think I don't know what you're fuckin' up to. You come up from some dude-infested city with your medicines—and don't think I ain't aware that you've got cases of laudanum in there, you fuckin' hooplehead—and before long you've got a mighty fine set up: The Good Time Emporium! Hard drugs, harder women. 'Fore long you've got alcohol and I can't fuckin' have that."
He listened with patience, head cocked to one side as he stroked his moustache. When Al had finished, Cochran opened his mouth, then shut it. He breathed in quickly and exhaled through his nose.
"Sir? My name is Amos Cochran, Dr. Amos Cochran. I served as an Army Surgeon during the Civil War and have been a doctor for many years. Whatever laudanum I may have, I can assure you it is meant only for those purposes as it was medically intended, that being its administration to future patients so as to cause the least amount of suffering possible during operations."
"Fuck me, it speaks in hooplehead."
"I don't know how much more clearly I could tell you that—"
"Will you be supplyin' these minin' cocksuckers drugs and women?"
His mouth opened, then snapped closed. He shook his head no, once.
"No laudanum or opium or anythin' to get these fuckers in a fuckin' blissful mental state?"
He shook his head no.
"No pussy?"
He shook his head no.
"Get the fuck outta my sight and go back to doing whatever it is that you actually do."
"Al?"
"Don't bother fuckin' tellin' me to leave again, 'cause I ain't leavin'."
"TB is airborne."
Al shifted on the bed, one arm behind his head. His eyes studied the ceiling, and Cochran turned his neck—God only knows how long it took him, time had congealed to the thickness of a tar pit—to follow his line of sight. Nothing. Just the ceiling. A patch of moisture from where the rain seeped in.
"Al?"
"You saved my life once. You saved this camp from the plague."
He drew in several gulps of air. If he whispered, he could speak in more than three words at a time. "I only did what I could. You are as much to—" He pulled a handkerchief over his mouth and face, covering them entirely, his cheeks and nose red from holding back the coughs till he could let them out. He kept his mouth covered once he was done. "You. You would i not /i die."
"I near as fuckin' did."
"You. Shouldn't." He waved his hand at the bed, at Al beside him while Cochran kept the covers pulled up to his chin. "Here. Shouldn't. Al."
Al drew away from him as another fit seized him. "Jesus. Are you ever gonna fuckin' stop coughin'?"
"There is… a treatment. Send to, Cheyenne." He wiped his mouth and cleared his throat. He swallowed. Whispering left him hoarse and thirsty. The roof of his mouth throbbed from lack of moisture. "Tell Charlie Utter, he can bring it back, if you—if you still want me to—"
"Fuckin' hilarious, doc. The whole bed shakes when you cough."
He pressed the handkerchief to his mouth and closed his eyes. Al's arm lowered once more. It came to rest on his shoulder. He squeezed, then let go. Cochran wanted to reach out and hold his hand in place, to wrap his fingers around it and feel the network of veins and bones and scars and warmth in it. He clenched and unclenched his fingers under the covers and felt it in his bones as Al moved away and stood up from the bed.
"You're not gonna fuckin' die."
"Al…"
"And you're gonna speak in fuckin' whole sentences again. And then you'll blow me."
It hurt to shake his head. Everything hurt. "That was a long time ago."
"Not so long ago that you ain't forgotten about it."
No.
Al stood in Cochran's newly constructed shack and grinned like a bastard. "Is it true? The fuckin' hooplehead doctor got kicked out for fuckin' dead bodies? Goddamn, doc, and I thought I was depraved. I'm a goddamned model citizen up next to you."
Cochran's hands hovered over the dried herbs he had been separating into bunches. The pause was only momentary, but he knew that Al, that Swearengen had seen it. He picked up a fresh packet and began to sort through it.
"Who told you that?"
"Some dude come up from New York. Apparently he knew some other dude that knew you. Amos Cochran, right? What in fuck did they say? Grave digger. Likes to stick his prick into dead things." He paused. Cochran could almost taste the smile on his face. "And here I was gonna offer you free pussy on account of not bein' in the opium den business."
"I wouldn't have been interested anyway."
"And do you? Fuck dead women? It is women, ain't it, doc?"
"I imagine it would be, if it were true." He stood from his desk, herbs now divided into satchels and each satchel within a brown paper bundle. He set them on a table and hunted out some twine. "As it happens, I don't copulate with corpses." He paused in his search, tilting back his head in order to study Al's face through his glasses. "I don't fuck corpses."
"Or anything else?"
Al was moving closer by degrees, one foot, one floorboard at a time. Cochran looked behind him. If Al kept advancing, he'd be trapped between the desk and a wall. His eyes made a quick inventory of everything on the desk: Herbs, papers, anatomy book, knife, a flask of whisky hidden on a top drawer. His shotgun was right above Al's head, hanging from a ceiling post.
"Why doc, you look concerned."
"I don't know what you think you're doing, or why you think you have to do it, but I've never once given you any provocation to—"
"Kiss me."
The words were like a blow to the head, unexpected, coming up from the side and blinding him. His palms bumped up against the edge of the desk.
"Are you drunk?"
"I operate a fuckin' saloon. After a few years, you develop a fuckin' immunity to liquor. But not to pussy. Never to pussy."
"Then what in God's name are you doing?"
Al reached out and brought his hand close to Cochran's face. It hovered by his cheek. Cochran could feel its warmth radiating into his skin, could smell the ingrained alcohol and the knotted, smoked hickory of the wood of the saloon countertops and the way flesh slid past his fingers so smooth and elastic and it tasted like the hide of something pure and untouched, even at its filthiest. His face half-turned toward Al's palm. Cells. Skin cells. Squares of cream coloured leather. Hundreds and thousands and millions of them. Not flesh, not warm, not alive. Skin cells. And beneath them, muscle and sinew, veins and arteries. If he peeled back the flesh it was all the same. Down to the criss-crossing networks of fine nerves and bones and cartilage and the blood that flowed through everything.
He took a deep breath.
"Hold fuckin' still," Al said. His hand shot out and closed around the base of Cochran's skull. His fingers dug into his skin, wrapped around his curls until he had pulled their faces closer.
"I don't know what the Hell you think you're doing…"
Al tightened his grip. "Shut the fuck up and kiss me. I want to see you do it."
"And when I do?"
The pain that pulsed up his neck was fantastic. It spread out all the way from the base of his skull to the top of his head and behind his eyes and down through his spine. It spilled out across his nerve ends and he could see them all in his mind's eye, connected to his lungs stomach heart intestines penis spleen every living organ and tissue in his body. Sensation throbbed out across his veins, blossoming out into numbness that was almost pleasure. Blood beat out a growing rhythm beneath Al's hand. He was squeezing harder, fingernails pushing into his flesh so that it burned and itched and built pressure that radiated up his throat in spasms.
"You don't give the fuckin' orders, doc."
He could try to pull away. He could give him what he wanted. He searched out a third choice, found it, and set his entire body in motion.
He bit down on Al's neck.
The pressure at the back of his neck broke off abruptly as Al cursed. He pulled back his hand, instincts and nerve ends directing his arm toward the spot where Cochran could see teeth marks. Tiny red welts rose along Al's skin, visible only for a second before Al covered them and pulled his lips back over his teeth.
Cochran didn't wait for him to move again. He kicked him back with one foot. It caught Al along his knee and sent him into a backwards stumble. Cochran reached up and pulled down the shotgun. It was loaded. It was always loaded. He cocked his finger over the trigger and aimed at Al's head.
Al stood still.
"You won't fuckin' do it. Ya ain't got the guts."
"Don't fucking tell me what I can or cannot do."
Al never moved, never blinked. He held Cochran's eyes and waited. The shotgun hovered between them. In the space of an instant, the world within Cochran grew still and terrible. All of the noises outside fell away, all of the smells. His vision swam with the silver barrel of the shotgun and, at its end, the clean, sharp blue of Al's eyes. He suppressed fear so well, like the senior officers he had tended to on the battlefield.
He could see the bodies again. It's like broken toys one soldier said but no, he said, it was just meat. Ruined masses of meat. They covered the entire field and he knew that, at this close a range, he would blast Al's head clean apart.
He would tear right through his eyes, so still and quiet. They waited and there was fear in them, buried under layers and years and the sheer human will of bravado.
Cochran shuddered where he stood. He went down on his knees, slow, shotgun still aimed at Al's head. He ran his index finger over the trigger. He stroked it once twice and held Al's eyes.
"Go ahead, cocksucker," Al said. "Blow my fuckin' head off."
The shotgun lowered and Al stood still and he never said a word as Cochran undid the flaps of Al's pants and reached in to pull out his cock. Al's hand came to rest over Cochran's head, knuckles digging into his skull as Cochran set down the shotgun and wrapped both hands around Al's hardening cock. Neither said a word. Cochran took Al into his mouth and closed his eyes and tasted the warmth and the life he could feel there, the pulse of a single artery beating out in time with his heart.
"You're going to fuckin' live, doc."
"So you say."
"And you'll blow my head off again, just like you did all those fucked up years back."
Cochran took a deep breath.
"Al, if I'm right about the illness you are so emphatically optimistic about, but proceed with that which you always seem to need to demand…" He paused for breath, his life rasping out at the back of his throat. "If I do, then you'll wish soon enough that I had blown off the head between your shoulders."
"The one grinning like a fucking bastard?"
Cochran leaned back against the headboard. He shook his head, mouth closed as he coughed. His shoulders shook and he couldn't tell if it was as close as he would ever come to laughter.
"You just keep right on grinning like a fucking bastard."
© 3-5 October 2006.