Friday, November 12, 2004

Chapter 12: "Disjointed"

He traversed the city. It was an old joke here, traversing Traverse. For most people, that was what Traverse was, a means to an end. It was the first city where the only real reason anyone came was to move on to other, bigger cities. That’s how the ordinary citizens did it. That’s how the heroes did it. The story of Sidewinder went much the same way. Legend had it that he’d begun in Traverse and moved on to fulfill his ambitions. That was how Traverse had built its reputation, trading on the old stories, trading up from missionary town to Indian reservation to a destination to reach other destinations. It was like high school. Eventually everyone graduated.

Sidewinder found his way there one day, the legend went, because someone else first had set up shop in Traverse, looking to build a reputation. That someone was Mustache Baird, a frustrated plantation master cast aside after the Civil War, change leaving him behind in the ever-pressing effort of time to try and improve man. Trouble was, the more change tried to improve, the more ways man found to go in the opposite direction. Baird was looking for a testing ground. He wasn’t a shootist, and he wasn’t much of an outlaw. No, the worst of them were never that obvious. The worst of them found places like Traverse and planted seeds in society itself, working within the system to transform it, shape it to their own benefit. The needs of the one were what always weighed the most in their pockets.

Baird had Traverse wrapped up nicely by the time Sidewinder appeared. The gunslinger was going to have his work cut out, especially when he realized his best skills were not going to serve him here, against this foe. He was going to have to reprogram himself, and in the process of deconstruction lose a bit of himself as well. He would find out later just how much. But he built himself back up, recreated himself for the challenge Baird presented. He was not going to back down, was not going to let Baird carry on. This process took ten years.

A lot could happen in that time. Sidewinder started a family. He had a wife, three kids, and the wife’s entire extended family counting on him. These were people who had seen wrong in their lifetime, had seen it throughout previous generations. Something had grown inside them that did not believe Sidewinder could prevail, not in the long run. They told him he would fail. He told them he wouldn’t. He told himself he couldn’t. He waited. He waited ten years. He was building himself up, preparing. The world, he noticed, was changing around him. Baird was not going to stay for much longer. The time was fast approaching where Sidewinder would either make him pay the sins already committed or wait again and see Baird start all over again, sow more seeds. Sidewinder could not imagine being able to live with himself if he allowed that to happen, to the town of Traverse, to the next victims, to his family.

He struck out one night. He had grown impatient. Baird was no longer going to just get away with it. Sidewinder infiltrated his home and found all of Baird’s men sleeping. There was a simple solution. Why couldn’t Sidewinder bring himself to it? He agonized throughout the night, but finally decided to leave his pistol at Baird’s bed and depart. He must have been seen.

It was not long after. Sidewinder found his family slaughtered, his wife, his three children, and his wife’s entire extended family. All of them dead, his anchor wiped from the face of the earth as if it had never existed. He raged, oh he raged. He brought his fury then upon Baird’s men, hesitating no longer in bringing his guns back. One by one they fell, until there was only Sidewinder standing, and Baird. Baird handed the pistol back, and effect handed Traverse to the gunslinger, signaling his defeat at the hands, the guns, of the better man.

Sidewinder’s next action would haunt him the rest of his days. He shot Baird through the heart, the blackened pit that had transformed him as well, a man born in light and cast into darkness, still knowing the light yet never again able to touch its sweet embrace. Baird did not die instantly. He lingered. He taunted the gunslinger, made him realize the price for winning Traverse from the clutches of evil. It was if he no longer needed his heart to live, as though he had never needed it. Yet Sidewinder knew differently. In a final vengeance, when Baird had collapsed into nothingness, the gunslinger sought out the last vestiges of that name. He drove the Baird widow, her children, and her entire extended family to the scene, and made them wallow in its travesty.

He had done it. The story of Baird’s downfall drew Traverse a population such as Baird had always craved, seekers of an emerging legend that told of a bloody reckoning and a whisper of a man called Sidewinder, who had moved on since. Other stories carried his name back to the town, which quickly grew into a city, a word of mouth waltz that continued to cycle people to and from Traverse, marvelers of a triumph that brought about ruin.

To his dying breath, Sidewinder was a champion of the oppressed. He slung his mighty guns against the wicked, fought in causes championed as righteous. He answered calls to rally, and always insisted in his modesty to not be glorified. He was just doing his job. He was just trying to live down his legacy. He was just atoning for his own sins.

He was dying a little more every day. The change he had brought about within himself to defeat Baird had taken its toll. It had not been natural, and he did not take it naturally. He had fooled himself, confused the fiber of his being, and extended himself so far beyond possibility that when he snapped, he would bring everything he had denied himself hurtling back toward the surface. He was a gunslinger. He had been raised a gunslinger, and he was always destined to die one. There was never going to be another way. He had tried and failed to prove otherwise. His only choice had ever been to decide how he would apply it.

There had never been any question. So when he returned to himself, there was going to be no more denying, no more hiding from himself. He had to put his wife, his three children, and his wife’s entire extended family to rest, because he could no longer hide behind them. He had tried to make them make him better. Instead, they had only made him worse. They had decided his path. There was no forgiving. They were not responsible. Baird was not responsible. It was Sidewinder’s responsibility alone. He lived fifty more years with that knowledge.

Fifty long years. They were bitter ones. Twenty-five of them were spent in retirement. He finally put down his guns. By that time, his legend had outgrown him. He was fortunate to be alive to see that, but he didn’t appreciate it. He was humbled by it, not in the way a good man is humbled, but in the way a bad man realizing his worst fears was. Sidewinder was no longer a man, but the man saw this and finally decided he could no longer continue. The change he had sought, that had ruined him, that had never truly come, finally did, twenty-five years too late. He could no longer appreciate it, no longer had a reason or a way to. He wrote his memoirs then, and spent the rest of his life locked away in an institution, the man left behind by his enduring legacy, no longer able to pretend he could live up to it.

He had crumbled. The pages he had written, however, told a different story. In this imagining, Sidewinder had stood up to the forces Baird represented, like a man stands against the wind. He struggled; he pushed himself forward. The wind was not something he was making progress against, but rather he was making progress over himself, his own inadequacy. The Sidewinder retired, pulled himself away from the struggle, having realized, finally, what the struggle had really always been about.

The book was an object of ridicule for years. No one understood its message. They saw a man again. The legacy had shrunk back down to life. The wind was seen as having finally taught the man his place, and the fault in this defeat lay not in the might of the wind but in the weak will of the man. The man had just given up. Sidewinder became forgotten. Other heroes, his contemporaries and successors, found themselves benefactors of the glory the seeds of which lay in Traverse, in graves dug by men of equal guilt who would never be allowed to learn the lesson Sidewinder eventually paid for with his life.

He spent a good long time thinking about it. He went to his grave never having made peace with it, and the world he left behind left him behind, too. The story of this hero ended in tragedy.

Colinaude tread the same path. He was following it all the way to Cad, to a destination that was not really there, that never had been, that never would be. He knew the story of Sidewinder, knew even the parts the book had left out. It had become his mantra. He had no greater motivation than to finally avenge Sidewinder’s legacy, even if it killed him trying. He had no other choice. He had chosen to see himself as the man against the wind who realized the struggle was within him and not against the wind. And it was that struggle that would become, if there was to be one, his downfall. He was fast accepting that.

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