Matt's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Matt took a room above the saloon and came back down for a plate of food. He picked a table by the window instead of the bar. From here he could still see the feed store across the street, dark now, the porch swept clean. A diner sat two doors down from the feed store, its lit sign bright against the dusk, people coming and going through the chrome-framed door. The street had the easy traffic of a town at supper. He would not stand out here. He ate slow and watched the door she had locked with her own key. A deputy came in around eight. He hung his hat on a peg and took the stool at the near end of the bar, where a full cup of coffee and a fresh cigar waited for him without asking. The saloon keeper set them down like a nightly habit. The deputy lit the cigar and settled in. He was not drinking. He was working, in the slow way small-town law worked, by sitting where people talked and listening. Matt kept his head down over his plate. He heard the saloon keeper laugh at something the deputy said. Then he heard his own description. Tall man. Coffee at the far stool this afternoon. Watched the street more than he drank. The deputy asked if the man had given a name. The saloon keeper said no. The deputy said he would like a word when the man came back down. Matt's right sleeve was buttoned at the wrist. Under it, on the inside of his forearm, was a wolf's head in black and red ink he had carried since he was seventeen. The girl had drawn the first sketch of it on a scrap of butcher paper by the river. Anyone in Malpais who had known him as a boy could name him from that mark alone. If the deputy asked him to roll up his sleeve, or if word traveled the twenty miles back up the road, she would hear his name spoken by a stranger before he ever reached her door. He would lose the goodbye he had come for. He left coins on the table for the food. He did not go up the stairs to his room. He walked out the front like a man stepping to the outhouse and kept walking. Two streets over he stopped in the shadow of a shuttered porch and took the hawk feather from inside his coat. He tucked it into the band of his hat where it would show. Then he circled back through the alleys to the feed store and sat down on the porch steps with his back to the door. He would not sleep here. He would wait for first light and knock before the deputy started his rounds. Her terms had been tomorrow at her door. He had only moved the hour.