The Stranger by Suzy

The birds soar, people stop eating their morning mealtime, and horses neighed from the lots and from the livery when an unexpected squeal came out of the soon-to-be wedded gunslinger.

Buck couldn’t control himself. He had to shout, bawl, jump up and down, and do anything humanly doable to get the wedding jitters out. And he let all and sundry know just how joyful he was.

“I’m getting married!” he raised his arms high, shouting with no end that he was getting married and will no longer be a free man after the night’s celebrations.

He took a woman he never saw before and swung her around several times before turning green in the face. He released the woman and her husband took her before Buck decided to inflict anything else to a total stranger.

That was until he saw Ezra walking toward him. “Must I remind you, groom, that these people aren’t any happier to be here than you or I.”

“What are you talking about, Ezra? I’m getting’ married!”

“So you’ve screamed for the past three extensive minutes.” The fancy talker led the jovial groom to the jailhouse.

“It’s my weddin’ day, why does everyone have to be in such a gloom mood as if I just died?” Buck asked after taking back his body control, pulling out of Ezra’s hold.

“Because it’s hardly past six in the morning, must I remind you, Mr. Wilmington.”

“In that case, Ezra, what are you doin’ awake?”

“I’m awake because I was forced to give you this.” Ezra slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a crisp, brand new black tie. “This is for you.”

“A weddin’ present, Ezra, already? And from you?” Buck laughed with question then snatched the tie from his hands.

“Not from me, I assure you. From my mother.”

Buck looked up at Ezra with now a composed expression across his face. “Your mother?”

“Don’t take it to heart now, Buck. She found it at the bottom of one of her travel bags.”

Buck shook his head, “No, it’s the thought that counts. Nice of her to even think I needed it.”

Recollecting last evening’s dinner date with Maude when she talked everything over with Buck about the wedding bemused Ezra with the confusion in Buck’s eyes. That he didn’t remember their long conversation. “Yes, given the fact she talked with you last night about the entire suit itself.” He laughed then disposed the laugh after realizing it was too early for him to be awake.

He’d spent the previous night in the saloon gambling his money away on a cheap skate gold ring that wouldn’t be able to pay much except for a later occasion. He was drunk and took the deal and the ring and now here he was trying to sleep it off and Maude comes banging on his hotel door for him to get out of bed, shouting through that she found something she thought Buck might need.

And from the look of Buck’s surprised expression, his mother was right, Ezra dejectedly had to confess.

“Well, thank my mother. Giving out charitable belongings is not one of my true natures.” Ezra said and patted his friend’s shoulder and left, leaving Buck with the black crisp tie in his hands.

“Don’t matter what you say, Ezra, because I’m gettin’ married.”

Oh yeah, it was going to be a glorious day.

JD stepped out of Virginia’s hotel in a fresh, crisp trouser suit that outlined his young man figure right down to his newly waxed boots. His heels clicked on the stilted floorboards as he made his approach into the intense sun. He tugged down on the white lapel and tried to take a breath to ease tension when the realism that Buck was getting married today.

Could there be anything else better in the world, JD thought.

Then a wagon stopped before him. Recognizing the driver, Nettie Wells, JD’s innards did a twist when he knew his girl waited good-naturedly inside the stagecoach. Nettie tipped her hat at JD with a generous smile and before the young man knew it, Casey’s hand came out of the shade of the stagecoach window and she opened the door from the outside. Too slow in reaction, JD didn’t think to open the stagecoach door and lend a hand. Instead, like Casey would have liked, he waited for her to make her presence.

Taking off his hat, JD put it to his chest, and tried to keep his pounding heart in. One step out of the stagecoach, he took a bottomless gasp when Casey graced him with a girly grin. An expression JD would never guess to come from her, the tomboy. The soft, gentle complexion he knew when he first saw her in front of the jailhouse. The edge in her eyes, the worried sweat on her forehead, in her hands, her body and today JD saw none of that.

Slowly he stepped off the floorboards into the dirt and met her.

“Can you believe this is happening, JD?” she asked in the voice he knew.

The young gunfighter skimmed the length of her dress, the lavender beads around her neck, and the scent of honeydew in her curls. She was beautiful, but he couldn’t bring himself to say so.

“JD?” Casey said uncomfortably with his gauche stare. “Well, say something. You’re making me itch.”

JD shook his head, trying to come up with the right word to describe her prettiness other than just beautiful. That word alone was awkward, even for him. “You look nice, Casey.” Nice one, JD. He never understood why he couldn’t say what he meant. Why he didn’t have the animal magnetism Buck had… his free spirit?

But that compliment was enough for their young relationship, JD decided and gave her another smile and he stuck his arm out and she looped her hand inside and grabbed hold.

This was it. This is what Buck’s been waiting all his life for…or not, Chris thought as he galloped to the livery. Today Buck was getting married. Knowing his good friend would have hooted and hollered in every way feasible at first wake, Chris wasn’t there to share that happiness with him.

Later he would be. It didn’t matter if Chris didn’t see fit with the proposal of already settling down with a woman. It mattered if it was the right woman and knowing Buck for more than a decade, he never thought that’d be possible.

And when Chris didn’t want to, he couldn’t stop thinking of the woman, the stranger who snuck on him twice without warning. If he had expected her he would have ignored the vigorous woman with the spice in her tone, the glare in her eyes. He would have ignored her stranger’s beauty, and the vanished glow only a woman held.

Chris would have ignored her completely after that night in the saloon, but he didn’t and he couldn’t now. This woman, her beauty, was as enticing as a full bottle of vodka. He couldn’t let it go, he wouldn’t walk away, and he needed to drink it all down. Taste it… taste her.

And that sudden thought, the mental image of the woman beneath his moving body knocked Chris right back into reality when he noticed he hadn’t unsaddled his horse yet.

The wedding…oh, yeah.

He needed to get rid of this woman who lit his blood to floundering blue, cold and rigid. He decided this was enough. Enough thinking about a woman he didn’t know, didn’t want, and couldn’t have. A woman he needed to lose and concentrate on the day’s events and what mattered most now was Buck and that this was his day. And like everything else in Chris’s life, he had to let this mystery go and focus on not what but who.

Buck. The wedding.

Unsaddling his horse, Chris smiled and remembered how he wasn’t keen for this wedding from the start, and where he was when the news went public…alone in the saloon. And he remembered slamming his beer glass down on the table spilling what was left of the alcohol, bothered with the heart-stopping news.

It wasn’t that he was displeased with the actual wedding. It was the after story, the life of a marriage, children, the everlasting love between man and wife. None of that fancied Chris…only that it wasn’t happening to him. Call it envy, he remembered thinking. He was jealous. Buck was going to have everything he lost. The love of a family, the comfort of a decent home, the loss of guns and the joy of raising horses. And he didn’t know how to be glad for him, or commemorate the news with his old comrade. It was too hard.

Chris walked out of the livery, his black duster blowing behind him as he walked against the wind. Yes, this wedding was indeed happening as he strutted past the wedding guests in decorated suits and gowns. All the pearls, the beads, and the richest fabric he’d ever seen on these sides of the tracks. He stopped in the focus of the town lot and he hooked his eyes on the display of the seating, the lily arch, the ashen and azure ribbons gusting with the blustery weather.

This was really happening…

He looked around a bit longer before he began his walk toward the jailhouse. That was until Josiah walked by him, lost in a book. And the book didn’t transpire to Chris, until the ex-preacher stopped his walk, that it was a bible he held.

Josiah took a notice in the corner of his eye at a sinister outline. “Chris?” he turned to face him. Chris put his focus on the preacher. Josiah shifted his weight, catching a foretaste of vast hurting in the gunslinger’s eyes. “You okay?”

Chris narrowed his eyebrows, not liking the question. “Why?”

“No reason. It’s just that—“ Shifting his weight once more, Josiah fumbled with the bible in his hands, then crept it up to rest it against his chest, over his heart. “Buck’s been needin’ to see you is all.”

Tension eased in Chris’s eyes with now question. “What’s this about?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

Chris gave a soft snicker, “That’s a first.”

“He’s in the church waiting.”

He couldn’t get it to tie. Well, he could but not the way he wanted it to look. Not the way it was meant to. Fumbling with anxious, shaky fingers, Buck tried to make this black tie Maude gave him work.

But it wasn’t.

He swore softly, fumbled some more until a knock at the half opened door interrupted him. Buck turned midway and watched Chris walk in quietly.

Chris didn’t exactly look directly at Buck; he more searched the tiny room in the back of the church. When the searching ended, Chris landed his eyes on the core of the room: the mirror, the lone silhouette standing in front of it but now with his back to it.

“You wanted to see me?” Chris asked low and controlled.

“Just the man I wanted to see.” Buck said, too wound up to fake any manly force. He swallowed. Cleared his throat. Tried to think of something to say, an excuse to be standing here in this suit he never imagined wearing. In silence they both considered this look of the married man to be. In his suit, clean, not one trace of dust on him. And Buck let out a relaxed breath appreciating Chris’s cool approach. “What’d you think?”

Chris mapped out the sketch of the man before him. And then he thought to add some more comments about the un-like Buck suit. He started with the boots; too shiny for even his liking… they weren’t dirty enough. The straight legged black pants outlining his lengthy gunfighter legs up to his hips then following a pallid, ruffled fabric narrowed his manly build. His brand new cufflinks, the crisp shirt clasped under the fitted black suit.

For a moment—a moment too long—Chris couldn’t look away and before the awkward silence and the uncomfortable stare took hold he said, “Think you’ve mastered the look of a banker, Mr. Wilmington.”

A laugh escaped from Buck’s nervous, tight expression, “No, this is a man’s suit. Not a fancy talkin’ banker or businessman one.”

“And this is your suit.”

“Yeah…” This was his suit. Buck turned around to face the mirror, admiring. “My weddin’ suit.” He shook his head still amazed with overpowering bliss, and his face glowed Chris saw watching his mirror image. Then Buck’s luminous eyes narrowed to look right back at Chris’s reflection. “I admire the time you spent to yourself a suit.”

Okay, this he could play with. The rigidity in his body and the frame of his nearing emotions about this wedding, he frowned and pretended to inspect himself. “I’m clean, ain’t I? My clothes, my boots. Even brushed the dirt off my hat.”

But Buck was right. Chris hadn’t taken the time to get himself properly dressed. He wore the same attire he wore day after day: black boots, black duster, his pick of the week… a royal cobalt chemise, and those fitted black pants.

“Well, yeah, that is somethin’,” Buck chuckled. “ But I guess I’ll take what I can. I known you for fourteen years to know this is as far as you go.”

“Now I thought we’ve known each other for twelve years.” And he gave a grunt of laughter remembering how neither he nor Buck would ever get the number of years straight of knowing the other.

And the smile that came so willingly on Buck’s lips, it was difficult for Chris to contain even a small one. But he managed and the look Buck held gave into the gunslinger’s quiet envy.

Chris knew there was no need to be jealous of Buck, and he tried everything possible in that split second to be happy for his friend. To be okay with this, knowing things were changing again, and will continue to change from here on out.

“Damn this thing,” Buck gave up with the tie, throwing his hands down at his sides in frustration. “I knew I shouldn’t have accepted this thing from Maude.”

Chris shook thoughts from his head, and walked the few feet toward Buck and gathered the ends of the black tie, adjusted it from behind his neck, folding down the flipped collar, and began to tie it for him.

Buck felt a bubble of laughter spring from his empty stomach when Chris had to take the initiative with the tie himself. Then silence crept between the two friends and Buck’s sudden belly laugh turned still, then to repentance. When the world stilled in his head, when his eyes stopped blinking from being so damn nervous, he looked right at Chris’s concentrated eyes. Those sad eyes he could no longer hide.

“I’m sorry, Chris.” Buck spoke gently; making sure those simple words didn’t hit a sore spot.

“Because you can’t tie it yourself?” And obviously Chris didn’t get Buck’s outward confession.

“Because I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you.”

Chris tightened his grip on the tie, gritted his teeth and went straight back to the tight expression he carried when he entered the room. “Don’t.”

“Today's my weddin' day and it’s supposed to be the happiest day of my life, but I can't stop thinkin' about yours.” Oh, Buck used that infamous soft spoken tone that’d melt women’s hearts in a split second.

But Chris wasn’t a lady he needed to womanize. He knew what was what, and he hated how Buck always reminded him of the past with his family. “It was a long time ago.”

“Chris, you once said that if I found someone to spend the rest of my life with, loving that woman forever till the day I die then there's still hope for the rest of us. Even you.”

“You know me well enough, Buck, it’ll never happen. I won't let it.” Chris managed. His throat was tight, his mouth dry. He dropped his hands from his friend’s neck, finishing with the tie.

“Yeah, I know you, Chris. And I remember you that day. With the same dumb smile, the butterflies in the stomach.” Buck laughed to relive tension in his throat, the tremble in his jaw. “You were so dizzy you couldn’t walk or see straight.”

Jaw set tight, hard, Chris glared at him, “That feeling only comes so often, Buck. Don’t waste it thinking about me.”

“I won't if you’ll acknowledge my guilt about that night. Let me have what's rightfully mine when you know I had a part in your stay in Mexico!” To his surprise, Buck raised his voice.

“I told you that it wasn't your fault. I could have left when I wanted to but I didn't. That was my choice! You have no guilt, Buck! Let it go!”

“I can’t just let it go, Chris!”

“Gonna have to,” Chris settled with a calm reply.

“There’s no point of one man dealing with the guilt of two.”

“And there’s no point in two of us being miserable.” Cooling off, Chris edged back and turned away from Buck’s seething eyes. He didn’t want to fight, not now, not today. If only Buck would just drop that the death of his wife and son was not his fault. He’d told Buck time and time again that he had nothing to do with the murders and how he must let it go. He told him that evenly, protecting him from thinking the worse about that night when he and Buck saw the fire from a distance. Riding as fast as their horses could take, losing personal belongings on the way. The reins to the horses they bought. Just to get to the house in time before it downed in inevitable flames.

Whenever Buck brought up his wife and son, Chris always remembered that night and he remembered how scared he was. The frantic tears he cried the strained voice screaming for them. And how he willed to dash through the door right into the fiery fire, but Buck grabbed him before it’d kill him.

He couldn’t think about that night anymore.

“Chris, you're my friend and a good one at that. I won't let you suffer. Not anymore,” Buck said.

Chris let his hands slump from his gun belt and he turned around to face him. “Why do you want the guilt, Buck? Why? There's no guilt on a weddin' day. Why are you doin' this?”

“Because I'm gonna leave this town, these people tomorrow and you. I need to know you'll be okay and I want to take the pain off your shoulders while I can.”

Chris shook his head and he tried to swallow, tried to moisten his throat. “Bring back Sarah and Adam then. You bring 'em back and then the pain will go away. Can you do that for me, Buck?”

Perhaps that was a way to ease Buck’s guilt. To let him really have it with how it was with him now and will always be. His family was gone and Chris had to accept that, the truth. And that’s what Buck needed to do now.

“No way in God's name is that possible but I can reverse the past to now if you'll be by my side at the altar. Just like I did for you on your weddin' day.”

His best man. Chris glanced down at the floor, disturbed, bowled over, bothered, and ticked. He placed his hands on his hips then and looked Buck right in the eyes giving no indication he was poking amusement to this offer.

“If I do this, will you leave all this crazy talk about guilt be?”

Then out of the blue in the most unrespectable situation ever, Buck planted a smirk on his lips from ear to ear. “I don’t think so, stud.”