LITMIR.BIZ

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the end to get it apart. I cleaned and oiled it. Salvaged parts. I got one barrel working. It’s a one-shooter. Which is a little scary, having only one bullet between life and death. But it’s better than nothing.

      Overhead, the moon glows like a second sun, casting silver light and long shadows down Main Street. In Sand, Main Street is little more than a dirt track that runs between the ramshackle rows of storefronts. Potholes. Horse dung. Unspent bullets glittering like pennies in the gutters. Out here, where every little thing is precious, where water is a luxury, bullets are cheap. I pull my coat close against the cold desert night.

      Just outside the town limits a rusted old sign, swinging on its hinges, reads:

      WELCOME TO SAND: POPULATION 500

      Maybe once upon a time. Half those people must be buried in that mound of dirt we call a cemetery. Little more than rotten wood crosses surrounded by chicken wire to keep out the coyotes.

      I walk into the desert that goes on forever, golden and featureless, so that if you look in the right direction, away from the mountains in the south, you can see the curvature of the earth. That grand openness can be terrifying, more dangerous than a man with a gun. They both promise the infinite. But the gun will send you there faster.

      The only things that manage to grow all the way out here are cacti and scrub brush, brown and thorny. I make my way to the outskirts most nights to practice my aim on the cacti, which in the half-light of the moon can resemble a person—skinny, bent, and water-starved, like everyone else out here.

      When we were young, Nikko and I would play gunslingers and bullet catchers. I would pretend to chase Nikko around, firing make-believe bullets from the tip of my finger. Nikko always played the bullet catcher. He’d pantomime snatching the bullets from thin air. He’d catch an invisible bullet in his teeth. He’d take my imaginary bullets and bend them back at me, like a real bullet catcher would. And for my part, I’d always make sure he got me, right in the gut. I’d stagger and moan and collapse. Dead.

      These nights, when I practice my aim, I always imagine the reedy figures of the cacti as a pack of menacing gunslingers come to get me. I draw a bead on one and fire. There’s the bang of the gun, the sulfur smell of smoke, the ping of the shell, the dry sound like wind through brush as the bullet takes a chunk out of the cactus. I have to reload after every shot, and I miss a few times, but in the end, I get them all. I only stop when my pockets are empty of bullets. My hand buzzes with the spent energy of the pistol. The moon hangs low on the far side of night.

      Sand is an old mining town, and those who live here are the fevered few still clinging to the dream of striking it rich. We have every kind here: silver and gold miners, coal, metal ore. But the only ones who seem to turn any kind of profit are the water miners. Glorified well diggers, really. But then again, way out here, they have to dig deeper than anyone else. And water is the rarest and most essential of all the things hidden beneath our feet.

      Walking home, I pass the miners heading out to their claims. Many of them are on foot, dragging the toes of their boots in the soft sand. But some have horses and wagons to carry their gear. There’s even a motorized buggy or two, coughing dark exhaust in the colorless dusk. I lower my eyes and pull my coat tight around me. It’s no good being a girl in a place like this, all by yourself, but I’m small and in the early morning there is just enough darkness to sneak back unnoticed.

      In town the streets are waking to life. I hurry along the boardwalk, duck down the alley beside Dmitri’s, and slip in through the back door. In my room I undress and collapse onto my cot. There are still a couple hours before I need to be up. I close my eyes and drift into a short and empty sleep.

      2.

      The day breaks like a fever over the low rooftops. Dmitri wakes me with a slap, points to the dishes already stacked in the washbasin from the breakfast shift, and says, “Get your ass in gear.”

      I pull on my clothes, go outside, and fill a bucket with sand from the alley. At the washbasin, I scoop up some of the sand with a cloth and start scratching the flecks of food from the plates. What people don’t know is that sand is hard, unbreakable. It’s already been broken down as much as it can be. Sand will grind you down and bury you. So, yes, sand is good for washing dishes. Good thing, because clean water that doesn’t taste and smell like lead or snakebite or piss is hard to come by in this town. Water that hasn’t been recycled a hundred times over is a luxury.

      And so the day goes. I clean and stack the dishes. They pile up again. There are days when you just can’t get out from under all the dirty glasses and plates. Sand is light on people but heavy on drunks. And snakebite is the drink of choice. They distill it from the green slime of the nightsnake succulent, which has no problem growing all over the Southland. The green alcohol smells like the stuff the old drunken doctor at the edge of town uses to clean gunshot wounds, and it doesn’t taste much better. The destitute arrive in the morning and don’t leave until Dmitri kicks them out at closing time. They buy their snakebite on credit and pay it off by collecting rewards on bounties or doing odd jobs they pick up in the saloon.

      In the afternoon, before the miners return, there’s a lull. I drop the rag in the basin and go out back, into the narrow alley between the saloon and the sundry shop that sells dried jerky and pathetic strips of dried fruit that grew who-knows-where. There’s not a single tree of any kind in Sand. At the end of the alley, I hug the wall and peer out down both ends of the street. This time of day, when the sun is just starting to sink, no one is outside unless they have to be. It’s hottest in the afternoon, when the sun is orange and purple, like an angry wound. There’s not much to venture outside for anyway. Besides the sundry and general store, there’s the dead-broke bank, the jail that only houses drunks sleeping one off, and the stables with their spindly, useless horses. If you aren’t a miner, odds are you wait out the heat of day in Dmitri’s or the cathouse at the outskirts of town.

      The sun never shines into the narrow alley, so it’s always a few degrees cooler than everywhere else. Pressing my back against the wall, I sit in the soft sand and rest my eyes. Dmitri’s is hot and stifling, thick with sweat and cigar smoke. The alley is an icebox by comparison. I like to come out here when I have a break or if there’s a tussle in the bar. But drunks take to stumbling down here after Dmitri’s kicked them out, and since the drunks are easy marks, the alley is sure to hold at least one villain: at best a pickpocket, at worst someone feeling murderous. So I rest in the coolness of the alley with my eyes half open.

      There’s a commotion from the street. Popping to my feet, I wrap my fingers around the handle of my little gun, tucked into my waistband. It’s hot and cold at the same time. It makes me feel brave. A few men have emerged from the saloon, swaying back and forth. They sing off-key, and can’t quite agree on the song. Despite their good humor, I don’t trust them, not in a place like Sand. Ducking back into the shadow of the alley, I hold my breath and wait for them to pass. They walk by and don’t notice me. I let out my breath.

      “Imma, you scoundrel! Where the devil are you?” Dmitri yells from the back door of the saloon. Cursing, I skulk back to the washroom to tackle another stack of dishes, reeking of bad cooking and stale snakebite.

      • • •

      The rhythm of washing can be hypnotizing. It has the power to grind down your thoughts the way time grinds down a mountain. My mind empties. Only when the sun sinks low in the sky and the light slants into my eyes do I rouse from my stupor. By then the glasses, spider-webbed with scratches, are clean and stacked chin-high.

      Stretching my back, I step away from the washbasin. Rest against the doorframe between the bar and my room and watch the barflies, the men in big hats playing cards for pennies, the lonely gunslingers passing through town on their way to someplace else, spinning their guns on their fingers for the girls turning tricks. That’s when the stranger appears. He pushes through the batwing doors, looking like a tornado the way the sand spins around him, the way his brown, threadbare coat billows around his thin body.

      All eyes turn on the stranger. The saloon goes dead silent. Not for long, just enough for the old hinges on the swinging doors to creak twice. Then the noise starts up again, each voice louder than the next, the clack

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