Sterling Penrose had been working the front-range back then. As a marshal without a permanent post, he oversaw the prompt delivery of many corpses. His badge was that which distinguished him from the bounty-killers. Theirs was the same business: trading cold, stiff felons for purses.

“But the poster on Junior Darby was a mite different,” the Sheriff explained. “They wanted him alive – and they’d pay fifteen grand in Red Junction to see that stipulation met. Word out back behind the saloon was that Junior Darby’s lone kin was a sister named Sara, and she called Albuquerque her home.”

So that was where Sterling Penrose rode first.

Sara Darby worked on her back in a tired brothel called the Pearl Lode. Sterling Penrose knew where to find her, but before he could interrogate the girl he had to see the town quack. The doctor prescribed mica-flecked ointments to slather on his sores. He refilled Penrose's ether bottle. Then it was time to mete justice at the whorehouse.

Inside the Pearl Lode the mood was swaying. Two patrons leaned against bored whores and drunk-waltzed, though there was no piano. Behind the bar a topless, immensely pregnant woman washed glasses in a basin. Her enormous breasts swung hither and thither and her nipples skimmed suds. There was a long, padded bench against the rear wall and two blond-wigged prostitutes slumped together upon it. They were barely breathing lumps of laudanum. Penrose confabbed with the bar-mistress and she advised him that none of the girls he saw were Sara Darby.

“We call her Ivory 'round here because the girl is pale like a china-doll,” she said. “Right now she's under a feller in the third room down. You have a cider and wait yer turn.”

“Many thanks.” Sterling tipped his brim and left the bar. He took a seat in the empty parlor and rolled a cigarette. He shifted in his chair. A few nights back a rock-hard boil had risen on the underside of his scrotum. He had attempted to break its surface and relieve the unsettling pressure but had in fact only intensified the discomfort. His sac was too tight to bear. The only release was manual, and he was forced to open the valve by hand several times a day. Else, he might burst in the saddle.

One man climbed off Sara Darby and then it was the lawman's turn.

She posed in the doorway – silhouette etched against a sheer, piss-colored sleeping-gown. From where he sat he could taste the scent of her body. He licked his lips and inhaled the curves of her breasts, the protrusion of her nipples – the dark, furry nebula of her twat. He estimated he would likely force intercourse upon her post-interrogation. That was, if he could wait.

“Ivory,” Sud-Tits bellowed from behind the bar. “That handsome marshal would like to inquire of ye.”

“What is left to inquire, Marshal?” She pulled the hem of her gown up till he could take no more. She looked him in the prick and said, “I fuck for eighty cents.”

“I have a dollar.” Penrose smiled and rose.

Her chamber was little more than a closet with a window. A cot was jammed into every inch of floor space. There was no way for two to occupy the room except stacked. She laid back and spread, hiked her gown up and up till it was over her head and she was bare. Penrose crawled on top and pinned her wrists. It was standard fare.

“Just my cunt,” Ivory said. “And shallow or you'll rupture mine fistula.”

“Had I known the depths of my affection were to be artificially limited,” Sterling answered, “I'd have better negotiated the exchange rate.”

“Shoot your stuff in the piss-pot over there,” she said. “I do not want it on me.”

He took both her wrists in one hand and used the other to frantically drop trow. His mouth watered rancidly. He went in her and sighed. The girl was unresponsive. He pushed further inside and asked, “Am I near your threshold?”

“Close,” she whispered. He pushed further, with sudden force – and she did shriek.

“Quiet your fucking tongue or I will bite it out!” Sterling whispered in her ear. “And with the law on my side I will ride away cock-emptied but full of impunity.” He maintained his painful depth inside of her and snarled, “Your delicate, damaged cunt does not alone compel my visit, Sara – I am after a bounty.”

“Junior...”

“That's the feller,” Sterling Penrose confirmed.

“Retract your prod,” she whined. “And I can take you to him.”

“When you’ve earned your dollar,” the lawman thrust and said.

By the time he finished up she was done crying. She offered again to lead him to Junior, but Penrose refused. Instead, he told her he would be back every morning to see her until Junior turned himself in. If her brother wasn't waiting in the brothel tomorrow morning, the marshal would show her again just how deeply his affections ran.

“I understand,” she nodded and closed her eyes.

Sterling Penrose slapped a coin in her palm. He closed her fingers around it and whispered close to her ear, “Should the need arise, put that toward your abortive procedure.”

Come the next morning, Junior Darby was waiting at the bar. The marshal had his man, and soon he'd have his money.

“Penrose!” Yule Sherwin had heard enough. “Just stop! No more of this twisted shit!”

“It will be less offensive if you allow me to finish,” the Sheriff assured him. “I cannot stress enough how important it is that you should reserve judgment till you’ve heard the whole story.”

He had been leading Yule on a round-about path back toward Red Junction. The day was getting on and instead of taking them directly home while spinning his tale, the Sheriff had brought them to the creek.

“Do you have faith in Jesus?” the Sheriff asked. Yule just huffed and made a face. The Sheriff stooped beside the creek and asked again, “Do you know the Divine Redeemer?”

“I'm ready to get back to town,” Yule said.

“What about baptism?” The Sheriff cupped a handful of water and let it pour back into the creek. “Do you believe a man's sins can be washed downstream and he can be born again?”

For some reason, Yule thought of the sick Meeks brother back in the lock-up. He remembered the neglected sluice, clogged with the wash of so many baptisms from upstream. From upstream – where way up, at the top of the ravine, the farmer from Baltimore kept his cold-storage half-sunk in the creek. If sins could be washed downstream, where would they finally pool?

“I've seen a man cleansed of his sins in a river once.” Sheriff Penrose kept talking. “It was the Cimarron River – and the sky had poured the whole night prior.”

“Enough,” Yule said. “I’ve no want to hear any more about the criminal means by which you pursue justice.”

“Let me finish telling you about Junior Darby,” the Sheriff explained, “and Yule I swear it will make better sense.”

He picked up the story right where he’d left off. The marshal had taken his prisoner a few days north when they came to the Cimarron. Along the way, the side of the trail was speckled with gristly wads of blood-flecked phlegm – custard spotted with cruel jelly. During the ride the boil beneath the lawman's scrotum had finally ruptured. Worse than pain, it itched and stuck to the inside of his trousers. Toward sundown the night before crossing the Cimarron he'd begun to experience tingling tendrils from about the perimeter of his anus, and he feared some fresh protrusion malingered. His itchy orifices ached for fingering but he held fast and left all his crusty scabs unscratched.

Come morning, Penrose stripped off his clothes and stashed them in his saddle bag. He looked out across the river.

“I'll go naked,” he said to his bounty. “In a river crossing, wet trousers are more hindrance than anything.”

“Would you be offended if I practice modesty?” Junior had asked.

“Less than one fuck can I muster – but don't get any ideas. I've still got my gun.”

Nude save his boots, Penrose waded off-bank into the knee-deep water. He stooped briefly and dunked his nethers – barely breaking stride. The lawman pawed at himself and Junior tried not to gawk. Purple and green bruises mottled the lawman's ribs and armpits. His skin had a spectral sheen, pale and iridescent as a trout's underbelly. The water deepened to waist-high and his hands dashed below its surface to scrub and pinch. A rancid porridge spooled out from his loins and meandered along the river's current.

“You'll poison the Mexicans!” Junior Darby laughed. “Gadzooks!”

Near the bank, the water's surface was unblemished but for Penrose's oily discharge. Red sediment was stirred up with every step. Junior Darby's black-maned bay pranced and splashed while the marshal's palomino drank from the river. Sterling Penrose arched his back against the flow and dug his heels in. The Cimarron River lapped at his ragged genitals, whisking away his virulent rind. He straddled an invisible pony and the river slid through the archway of his legs. It was a sanctified enema, purifying him by its pristine gush. Junior saw the back of the lawman's eyeballs as they rolled up in his skull. Most men never knew such ecstasy outside an ether binge.

“Marshal?” Junior said from his saddle. “If it's just as well I'll get on across now and wait for ye there.”

Penrose grunted like a rutting elk. He groaned, “Go! I'll come in a minute.”

“Thus my desire to depart at once,” Junior joked. He turned his bay and began forging across the river, angling for a sandbar at mid-crossing.

The marshal called after him, “Don't run Darby! You know you can't hide from the long arm of the law.”

Junior continued the crossing. The river swallowed his mount up to its shoulder and his boots filled with water. Fishes slapped against the horse's broadside. The water was too deep for him to survey the bed, and Junior had to trust his horse not to stumble over any unseen obstacles. The bay pressed forward in spurts. Finally they reached the mid-point and lurched up onto the sandbar. Looking out, Junior estimated it was another three hundred feet to the far bank. He urged the bay ahead but it refused. The horse thrashed its head and whinnied. The Cimarron rushed past all about the sandbar.

“Hyah!” He jerked the rains and hollered, “Move it!”

The bay took a single, reticent step off the sandbar and sunk instantly to its muzzle. Junior crashed against its neck and held on. The river slammed him, threatening to drag him from his mount and wash him away. He clung to the horse but it was going down head-first. Its neighs became a bouquet of bubbles. The Cimarron was sucking it into the abyss. Suddenly his horse became an anchor – dragging him down, too.

Junior scrambled to eject himself off the bay and shouted, “Quicksand!”

He thudded onto the edge of the sandbar and, in the next breath, the horse was vanished. Junior hoped to get back on his feet but the earth melted beneath his palms. The quicksand latched onto him before he could react and he was entombed up to the elbows. He craned his neck to keep from going under. Then he felt the stirrup – still twisted around his ankle and dragging him backward to drown alongside his horse.

“Quicksand!” he screamed to the marshal with his last breath.

Blackness expanded around him and it was impossible to tell the river from the quicksand and up from down. Terror's mechanism is such that it defies reason. Terror drew the Cimarron into Junior's lungs as he thrashed and screamed underwater. Finally he kicked off his boot and tried to swim toward the surface but his limbs would not obey. He was cold all over, adrift in numbness. Eternity and then some was spent in that purgatory.