2.

The hut was a tumbleweed of brittle wood and dried mud on the vast desert plain. In truth, it was little more than a shack, and from far away little distinguishable from a pile of driftwood, beached from some forgotten, prehistoric shore. Jack Texas rode up cautiously, as was his manner, though he had little fear for his well-being. A trickle of gray smoke reached up from the chimney and up into the blue noonday sky, questing upwards to join the thin pulled cotton clouds of the afternoon. Someone was home. Jack slid his good leg over his horse and dropped to the ground with a wince. The old injury didn't hurt so much today, and the grimace was more from habit than actual discomfort. There was no place to tie his horse, but Jack felt the two had long since come to an understanding, and left him free to roam. He fixed his hat atop his unkempt hair, dark brown strands woven with lines of silver and dust, feeling the sweat trapped just beneath the brim. It would be good to get out of the shade, at least.

Small, polished river rocks of black and white had been arrayed into a narrow path to the front door. The stones felt odd and irregular beneath the soles of Jack's worn boots. There was a wind chime made of chipped glass and bits of polished metal hung just to the side of the door. It gave off the faintest sound as the wind whistled through, and it drifted clockwise in a lazy circle, and then it turned back the other way as the wind changed direction. Jack knocked.

There was sound from inside the shack, a low mutter of someone rising. A few moments later, the door cracked open and the doorframe groaned in protest. The shack's sole occupant was a short mole of a man, narrow eyes in a pinched face of wrinkled, dark adobe skin. His teeth were yellowed like aged ivory, and his tongue licked over them like a canine's. He rubbed his hands, old and wrinkled from age, on a smock, dirty with the smears of a life unused to visitors, but no doubt cool in the oppressive heat. He wore nothing else but a leather bag, tied with a cord around his waist. Jack removed his hat and felt the sun anew. The old man took a long look at Jack, nodded, and opened the door wider.

"Been expecting you," he said, his voice a low rumble.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, padre," Jack said as he walked in. The roof was low enough that he had to duck his head to enter, and his mangled leg had no love of that.

The shack had one room inside, filled almost to burst. The old man lived in the margins of the room, his possessions and collections leaving him with narrow spaces to live, eat and sleep. Every inch was littered with odd things. A pile of blankets might have served as a bed. A crate filled with bottles of different shapes and sizes, some filled with strangely colored liquids, others with odd, murky shapes floating within. Underneath a window there was a row of pots, filled with cacti, flowers and other plants. The room smelled of tobacco, age and decay.

The old man shuffled towards the rear of the room, to where a dark brown bottle stood atop a stack of yellowed paper, flanked by a pair of chipped glass cups. He took the glasses in one hand and the bottle in the other, then put the cups down on the barrel in the center of the cramped room that served as a table, covered with a faded saddle blanket in a zigzagged blue, orange (thought it might once have been red) and white pattern. The cork made a satisfying pop as the old man pulled it out, the sound echoing through the half empty bottle. Jack pulled up a crate to squat upon.

"You knew I was coming?" Jack asked as he watched brackish liquid fill one glass then the next, two equal parts.

"The other. He told me," he said as he stoppered the bottle and placed it on the makeshift table. "The one you're following."

Jack picked up his glass, eyeing the sediment and dust that shifted in his drink. He thought the old man might take offense if he didn't drink, and he had a thirst from the ride. He poured it down. It stung his mouth and it brought tears to his eyes. The old man laughed, gave a snort, then drank his own. Jack lowered the glass, swirling the dregs at the bottom, an almost solid mass at the base.

Jack regarded the man who sat on the other side of the barrel. He sat on a wicker chair painted turquoise and white with an animal hide stretched across the seat, pinned to the legs. He was not a young man, and the sagging skin of his neck was wrapped with trinkets and necklaces, beads and feathers and animal teeth, a golden cross that hung lower than the rest. But it was the old man's eyes that Jack noticed, two spheres of onyx swimming in milky pools, defying the dim light in the room. Now that the drink had time to linger, it tasted foul on Jack's tongue, and Jack winced as the adobe man poured them both another. The old man raised his glass and looked at Jack expectantly. Jack laughed. They drank. The second time, it burned less.

"So, padre," Jack started again. "About the man I'm following."

"Not padre," the old man said. "Curandero. Olin."

"Jack."

The curandero seemed satisfied, "The other man. He had no name. He stopped here yesterday, closer than you think. He came here like you and I poured him a drink, but he would not drink. A rude man."

"That doesn't mean I'll have another."

"No?" the old man asked with that yellow grin. "He came in the night. I did not take him for a bandit."

Jack shook his head, "No, not a bandit. A Kinsman."

"A man," Olin nodded. "He sat right where you sit now, but not drinking. This is what he told me: 'There is a man following. He will come to see you, I know. He is one of the men who haunts me. You will know him by his walk and by his guns.'" The curandero looked across at Jack, at the twin revolvers sitting placidly in their holsters.

"He asked me if I could do magic. I told him it depends. He paid me then, two ounces of gold." The old man reached his worn hand into a pocket sewn to the front of his robe and withdrew two misshapen nuggets, weighed them in his hand and then returned them. "That was not what I meant, but he thought so. I did not correct him."

The curandero frowned, "There is magic in the east, all know of that, but here, in the west, magic is different. The old magic. He wanted the new, but I know only the ancient ways. The old magic is fickle." The curandero poured them both another drink, letting the bottle's neck rest upon the edge of the chipped glass like a lover's caress, his black eyes lost in the murk of the liquid, in the flecks of sediment caught in the whirlpool of his pour.

"He says you mean to kill him. He told me that you had cause." Olin's eyebrow raised a hint, rearranging the strata of his face.

"I do," Jack shrugged.

Olin's eyes went back to Jack's guns. "The desert sands wipe away the squabbles of men. The spirits care for them as little as the sun cares for the land beneath. It is not my concern, though you have drank with me, and I have taken his gold."

"He was haunted by two men, one alive one dead. You, of course, were the living one, but the dead man he finds in dreams. An angry spirit, for I could feel him even as he stepped into my home, as real as you or me. He wanted me to put the dead man at peace. He wanted to sleep again. I did what I could."

This time it was Jack who picked up the glass, turned it to move the cracked edge from his lips, and drank again. It tasted sweeter. "I did not come to you because of the man," Jack said.

"No," said the curandero as he fixed Jack with his unsettling gaze.

"A woman. I found her in my dreams, but now she does not answer. She has left me, and I do not know the cause. Her absence is to me like a river that has run dry, forgetting the caress of the mountain's spring thawing. I wander through a forest without the whisper of wind through the trees, the rustle of leaves or even the sound of my own footsteps. The sharpness that was once as clear to me as days of sundrenched youth fades and I grasp at the sands of memory as they slip through my grasp."

The curandero considered this for a time, then stood then and went to a box of bottles that sat upon a stool in the corner. He selected one, a squat earthenware jug. It had a stopper shaped like a mushroom, and the liquid that the old man poured from it was as clear as the other was cloudy. He poured a small measure for Jack, and then he stoppered it. He reached into the leather bag at his side, and without looking withdrew a small vial of yellow powder. Removing the cap, he tapped some of it into the liquid. He watched it, expectantly, and Jack sat in silence. Eventually, the curandero spoke again.

"Drink," said the old man.

Jack did, and this time, he tasted salt. His vision blurred, and his body felt heavy and slow. He looked to the black-eyed man.

"Close your eyes," said the curandero.

Jack dreamed.

The house was cold and blue when he woke. It was night, and the room had forgotten the warmth of the day. Jack saw the glasses before him, one full and one empty. His hat lay upon the ground where he had dropped it in his slumber. He rose from the overturned crate that he had made his chair. There was no sign of the curandero. Moonlight filtered in from the window, carrying the dust as it drifted on the aimless wind that slipped through cracks in the mud and wood. Jack took a last glance, rose and left through the rickety door. His horse greeted him as the door slapped shut behind him.

Jack could still find the Kinsman's trail. He had been following it for days, and it seemed the other man made no effort to hide it now. It was the deep of night as he set out from the curandero's house, lit by the glow of the full moon that hung lambent in the sky. He rode in silence and felt the cold to his bones. Jack knew the curandero was right. The man was not far, and they would meet soon. The flat plain of the desert rose to low hills as Jack's horse picked his way through scraggly brush. An hour later, he saw a pinprick of red, the dying embers of a distant fire. He rode towards it, and soon the faint smell of smoke drifted to him, and he knew that he had found him.

Jack rode towards the small camp, making little effort to hide himself. In younger days he might have checked the lie of his revolvers in their holsters, reassured himself with the cool touch of the ivory handgrips, but now he did not. The campfire had burnt out hours ago. The Kinsman sat before it, and seemed careless to Jack's approach. Jack reined in at the edge of the camp and dismounted, feeling the ground cold with night as he stepped down. He walked forward slowly, and this time his hand did go to his side.

"You saw the witch doctor," he spat the last like a curse, never taking his eyes from a fire that only he could see.

"The curandero?" asked Jack.

"He promised me sleep. I've found none." He gazed into the red and black husks that were once tinder, and Jack could almost imagine a flame reflected in lifeless eyes. A man saw things, sometimes, and sometimes they saw nothing. "I've killed many men. You are a killer, too, Jack. Do they come to you in your dreams?"

Not men, Jack thought.

Jack edged closer. The man he had followed for a week out of Jare Springs sat on the bare ground with his coat pulled tight around him against the chill. "I am going to kill you, Kinsman."

"It might be a relief," the man said, "They won't take me back, anyways. They know I failed."

Standing next to him and above him, Jack saw the man's face clearly for the first time. It was a face he remembered. The last time, it had been in a bar in Jare Springs, the face of a dead man. Jack knelt and gazed into his eyes.

A dead man looked back.

"The Kin have long memories. They sent me to find you."

"I killed you in the town," Jack said, "Now you live again."

The man laughed, "We dance with the shadows."

"I could let you live," Jack said, "It might go worse for you."

The Kinsman ignored him. "The old man said I would sleep. No more haunted dreams. He took my gold, but he gave me nothing. Now you'll take the rest."

Jack had killed before, and he was certain he would kill again. He knew this truth. But this was a dead man, and Jack might leave him here in the brush, and wait until death caught him at last. But Jack thought of an ocean that lay somewhere over the western horizon, the shores of a beach that called to him, if he was ever to see Diana again. 

"Speak now to your god," Jack said, finally. "He might listen."

The man laughed, "My words aren't for him to hear," he looked at Jack for the first time. "Kill me, but I will not be the last."

Jack needed only one bullet to end the Kinsman's life. 

The Kinsman slept, but dreamed no longer. Afterwards, he regarded the empty gaze of the dead man at his feet for the second time in weeks, but this time the last. Jack had slept and dreamed in the home of the curandero, but now he rode west with the dawn at his back.

He left the dead man for morning to find.