Breath Plumes in the Frost

Winter came in like the roaring of a bear. Gray sky and cold air, distant smell of embers. Snow packed on top of snow, one half-foot high off the earth.

Josey Amos rode in horseback from 370 miles south on a Tennessee bred stallion. Colt revolver at his hip, silver barrel seven inches long and ancient wood stock handle--an instrument of led shining like the iron fist of God.

In Mystic, California the townsfolk whispered upon his arrival, saying that he was an outlaw and a wanted man and a former Rebel on the run, that he's a dangerous man.

In Mystic, California there already hid during six months out of the year a well known criminal and killer. They called him Cattle Zeus, god of the plains and many men he shot and buried out there in the vast desert. His head was worth $30,000 but nobody dared try to earn it, and Amos didn't come for the cash either.

Amos opened up his buffalo coat and pulled out a silver badge from just on top of his heart and placed it on the table and it made a heavy knocking noise. Inside the circular frame were burning leaves stenciled on the sides of a star and in plain lettering it read U.S. Marshal. "I come here on accounta the law," he said.

Eventually word reached members of the Cattle Zeus Gang that the name Josey Amos dwelled amongst them and the outlaw Mitchell heard it while he was lying naked in bed with a working woman. Mitchell was notorious for his courage and meanness and was well known to be the first to come on board a train during robberies and kill every man in sight that challenged him. When he found out Amos was in town he struck his body out the bed and ran squirrely without even getting himself dressed, holding his belt and strapping the holster around his waist, pulling out his pistols and firing both of them, fully nude, as he passed by Amos and then ran with a shouting panic out the doors. The bullets screamed like eagle-calls right beside the head of Amos and cracked the windows behind him and nailed deep into the pine walls, and he drew his own pistol and fired and shot the outlaw in the back as he stumbled down the stairs outside.

Amos stood over the man who had fled where he shot him in the snow and spat with flurries spiraling across his face and the winds ripping against his skin and he spoke to the dying man. "You act like you ain't got no mama."

Cattle Zeus stood on the front porch of the saloon, in his pajamas, smoking a cigar and began clapping his hands.

"Look at you Marshal," he said, "coming through town like the word of God."

"I ain't no prophet."

"Well goddamn I know that. I'm having fun with you."

"Zeus," the Marshal said, "I know you won't permit for me to bring you in alive."

"You're gonna make me kill you ain't you Marshal."

"I'll fight you fair. That's the best I can do."

"You wanna die, then."

He nodded his head and said that he does.

"Marshal, after I shoot you dead I’mma skin your ass and wear you like a coat."

"Son," Amos said, with buzzards clawing their talons on top the rafters of the roof of the saloon. "You kill me you'd best eat me too."

"Alright then I will. I'll have the whole town drunk off your blood."

"Alright then let's do it if we're gonna do it."

"Alright then."

They stood thirty feet across each other. A sea of haze and fog and flurries floating down to earth, the silent white snow and the wolf-tongued winds. Amos considered briefly his entire life. Four years in the Confederacy, the hundreds of men he's killed and his wife and three sons that he's buried.

Zeus was fully dressed now, in cow-skinned pants and a bear coat and on the oak handle of his pistol he had the carved etchings which represented the lives of twenty-nine souls he's taken from life during duels.

Roasted red fire blazed like a train through a tunnel, as the bullet roared out the silver barrel, pluming out smoke in the shape of a feather, as it were holy burning breath. Zeus dropped down dead laying in the snow where blood trickled out from his mind and painted the freezing earth.

Amos tied the body to his horse and when asked where he was going he said that he promised the man's mother a proper burial and he picked himself up over the saddle. The townsfolk celebrated his name in glory, shouting halleluiah and Alas, Alas and claimed he was an agent of peace and justice and he looked away and rode on, toward coming night and the darkness fulfilled and before he did he said that there ain't no justice on earth. He kicked his horse gently with his heels and led it through the snow, beginning to melt, across the earth, underneath the black sky and when he passed underneath the stars they lit gold and silver and blue as though he had lit a match for them where they burned.