Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead Page B

broad-brimmed black sombrero, a red blanket serape against the cold night and striped pants worn tight. His face was pitted with pox scars. He had one good eye and the other was sealed behind a closed lid. The man moved with the ease of a predator and as if he possessed an ability to see in the dark, his movements subterranean. He threw back his serape. Underneath he wore a brown suede jacket with silver embroidery and in his hand was a knife, thin bladed with a white jigged-bone handle and nickel silver bolsters. Napoleon watched the man sidle up to Preston, who was naked and shivering in the cold, his hands tied behind his back with twisted rawhide. The man held the knife loosely in his hand. Napoleon could feel his crotch shrinking as the man took Preston by his long hair, pulled back his head, and raised the knife.
    When the knife descended Preston’s body convulsed. His limbs flapped. He let back his head as if complicit in his own maiming and then he moaned.
    The work of a knife is quiet. The moment was suspended as if a universal suspiration of all encompassed time and then his screams rose up and split the darkness and were piercing to hear as if unloosed was a bright dramatic and horrible pageantry. As sound after sound was torn from Preston’s lungs something like the taste of copper pennies filled Napoleon’s mouth and his eyes rolled up in his head. There was nothing he could do to help Preston. He surged against his bindings, quaking rigid in every joint, and then his body went slack. It was useless. The one with the lost eye stepped away from the bent figure and he watched as Preston’s eye blood watered the sand.
    “I’m dying,” Preston said. “I’m dying.”
    He could only imagine the desperate terror in Preston’s heart, or had he passed through the terror and now he was on the other side where he was being cared for, the long-standing promise made to the suffering by the loving Christian god?
    “Not yet, god dammit. Not yet,” Napoleon said.
    “I am going to live.”
    “You can make it,” he said, but he didn’t think it.
    Preston bent up painfully into a sitting position and then he stood. There was only blood where his eyes used to be.
    “How bad is it,” he asked before he could stop himself.
    “I can still see you,” Preston whispered, his nerves sending false signals to his brain, and it made Napoleon regret even more asking the question. “I can still see you,” Preston cried.
    Napoleon closed his own eyes and on the inside of his eyelids there was a dancing light, liquid red at first, as if seeing blood through water and then yellow and then white.
    “I can see you,” Preston said more loudly, and Napoleon told him to shut up, but he wouldn’t. He kept saying it until the one with the lost eye came up behind him and kicked out his legs, knocking him to his knees. Then he held the barrel of the pistol to the temple of his head and without pause pulled the trigger and fired a bullet across Preston’s face. When Preston fell forward he thought him dead, but he wasn’t. The aimed bullet had not entered his skull but crossed his face in front of his brain, shattering the bones that rimmed his eye sockets, the fragile bones contained within his eye sockets, and destroying his nose bridge and his blue eyes.
    The side of Preston’s face was blackened where the muzzle flash burned his skin. There were shards of bones and pulverized bone floating in his head. He started bleeding again from the holes where his eyes used to be, as if the blood of a man was infinite.
    Preston went silent for a long time. He lay on the ground and did not move. He thought him perhaps dead and gone, whatever light left inside him cold and extinguished. Then he could hear a whimpering sound and then words.
    “I can still see you,” he said.
    “No,” he said softly. “It’s time for you to go.”
    The one who carried the knife with a white jigged-bone handle and nickel silver bolsters came again from