Sundance: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Fuller is a screenwriter and the author of Sweetsmoke. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and twin sons.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 David Fuller

1

RAWLINS, WYOMING

1913—Late Spring

He stepped through the arched grillwork gate and into free sunlight for the first time in twelve years. The sun was a shock against his pale skin and his eyes watered against the brightness. He adjusted his saddle against his hip, then slowly crossed the small yard with the raked dirt and stooped saplings. When he reached the road, he stopped. The air carried smells of baked earth, sagebrush, horse manure. Crested wheatgrass at the roadside bent under a breeze that a moment later raised the hair on his arms.

He looked around, pretending to take in his surroundings. The town was much as it had been back in ’01, when he had gone in. A few more sun-warped, low-slung homes, a few more tall buildings in the downtown business area near the railway station. But through the dust and heat, he scanned the road with a different purpose. He was looking for her. It was that time of morning when people were at their jobs, and the road, which ran directly through town to the railroad tracks, was not busy. He fingered the faded olive-colored bandanna tucked under his shirt collar. He had worn it every day, even while in prison, ever since she’d given it to him before he’d been arrested. Finally he quit looking and turned away. She was not there. He was alone.

He set down his saddle and noted where the guard’s fingers had made clean marks in the dust. The fool had collected it from storage and carried it upside down. How could a man in the West not know how to carry a saddle? But then, what sort of fool was he, a man with a saddle and no horse? He reminded himself that the world was no longer his, a changed place he would need to relearn.

His gun belt was coiled around the pommel. He knew at a glance that the gun in the holster was not his and had never belonged to him. He didn’t bother to draw it, as he had already guessed what had happened. His own had been stolen inside while in storage, replaced with this cheap imitation, and there was not a thing to be done about that. He wondered why they hadn’t taken the saddle.

He bent to pick it up. His fingers felt for the stitching on the saddle’s underside. He touched the hard edge of coins he had sewn there almost fifteen years before, in case of emergencies. They had missed that, which meant he was not broke. He balanced the saddle on his hip and walked the six blocks through the town.

He knew little sense of time, as his mind was preoccupied. She might have stayed in any one of the boardinghouses he passed, but he had never been there, and did not know which one. She had lived there for years, visiting him each week. That had come to an end five years before, when he had sent her away, as he could no longer stand to see her wasting her life waiting for him to get out. For three of those years they had been in constant communication through letters. Until the day her letters stopped coming, bringing on a sudden, terrible, unexplained silence. He had held on to the small hope that she would surprise him, that she would be there when he was released. That she was not there meant that he would have to find her, track her down, if need be. He did not know how to start looking, but he would find her, he would find his wife and know one way or the other if she was dead or alive.

He walked until he was surrounded by the tall two-story buildings of downtown. He stopped when he saw a vehicle that moved with no visible source of power. This was something new and impossible, and at first he failed to understand it. His eye sought invisible horses that might be pulling it. After a moment he realized it had to be a motorcar. It came toward him making a metallic sound, and the cloud that trailed it was unlike the dust off the back of a wagon. He had heard of motorcars while inside, but seeing one in person made him keenly aware of the things he had missed. He was entering the world anew. He thought he heard the jingle of harness and clop of horseshoes as the motorcar passed, clearly his imagination, then was surprised when a horse and wagon came around from behind him. Surprised, but also relieved. The old world was not quite banished, but it had certainly eroded. In that moment he thought he understood why his saddle hadn’t been stolen. In this world, there seemed to be less need for a horse.

He reached Front Street. Every sprouting town alongside the Union Pacific railroad line had a Front Street that faced the tracks, with saloons, hotels, and brothels, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. Because of the tracks, these towns grew more rapidly, and were more modern than the rest of the West. He passed a number of busy saloons until he chose one at the far end that was clean and empty. He walked into its cool, dark interior. He set saddle and gun belt on the rough wood floor and straightened to face a bar shining with varnish. He watched the saloonkeeper feign diligence, running a white cloth over an area already spotless. The saloon was unnaturally quiet, which put him on alert. Something was wrong, something not immediately evident. He listened, but rather than find something present, he discovered an absence. He concentrated on the distant whine in his ears and after a moment knew it was in his head and he was listening to silence. This was something new, as it meant the complete lack of hiss. He had lived with hiss for the last twelve years. He sniffed and there was no smell of gas. The room held still without the sporadic judder of gaslight. He looked at glass bulbs aglow with steady electricity.

He tucked the olive bandanna deeper under his shirt collar.

The saloonkeeper watched him out of the tail of his eye as if in recognition. Harry Longbaugh tightened, then shrugged it away. The saloonkeeper had almost certainly served any number of recently released convicts, probably every one of them geared up in Longbaugh’s haunted pallor and guarded eyes.

“Before you say a word,” the saloonkeeper stashed his rag behind the bar, “I seen plenty of you boys come on down here from the pen, and it’s always the same, ‘Years since my last drink,’ like it’s my job to stake you. Well, you got yourself put there and my liquor ain’t free, better to know that while you’re sober.”

Longbaugh dug out the coins the guards had returned when they brought his saddle, holster, clothes, hat, and boots. He set them on the polished bar. The saloonkeeper nodded, moved a glass under his nose, and poured. Longbaugh marveled at it—not the liquor but the glass. A real glass. Not a tomato can. A real glass in his hand.

“Guess you ain’t had it in a while. Word to the wise, maybe you ought go easy.” The saloonkeeper put the bottle back up on the shelf as if that would keep it out of reach.

“One day someone will listen to that good advice,” said Longbaugh.

He heard laughter from a table in back. “But not today!” said an older man’s voice through a cackle. Longbaugh had not noticed anyone else there, and wondered not for the first time if he had lost his touch.

“Got a name?” said the saloonkeeper.

Without thinking, Longbaugh spoke the name he had been using for the last twelve years: “Alonzo. Harry Alonzo.”

The older man snorted “Alonzo” as if in recognition, and Longbaugh knew he should be going. He drank his drink.

But he did not leave. He turned to consider the man he had failed to notice. The man’s eyes were off, and he realized the old man had a lazy eye that drifted aside to admire the electric lights. Three...