Eclipse at Noon by James Axler

“Wasn’t no river here before the Russkie nukes fucked the land. So they say. Land jumped and rolled, and water flowed up the hill and down the hill. Lakes turned dry and mountains sprung up. Now the Big White runs clear through to the Sippi.”

“There a ville down there?” Ryan asked. “Generally is where big rivers meet.”

“Yeah. Riverboat crossing there. Fancy ville. Get fucked every which way but clean. Gamblin’ and whorin’ and a contract killer for a handful of small jack. Place is called Twin Forks.” He cackled and rubbed at his permanently sore eyes. “‘Course, the trash calls it ‘Twin Fucks.'”

Ryan stretched. “Reckon that’s where I’ll make for. Soon as I got a mite more strength back.”

Paddy stood up from his chair, shaking his head in a nervous tic that got worse when he’d been drinking. “You ain’t fit to shovel goose shit out the pen, Ryan.”

The one-eyed man laughed. “Can’t stay here forever. Got friends I should be going after. Be worried sick about me. Likely think I’ve gone west on that last train.”

Over the week since he’d finally recovered full consciousness, Ryan had come to be oddly fond of his rescuer. Paddy Maxwell was physically filthy, foul-mouthed, violent, short-tempered, racist, murderous, parblind, most parts drunk.

And cripplingly lonely.

He hawked a sort of living from fishing and some trapping, trading for liquor and for other supplies with infrequent passengers down the Big White.

After three days Ryan was able to stand unaided and was beginning to think about moving on as soon as he could. Paddy had been vehemently opposed to that, arguing, shouting and spitting to try to stop him. He’d even threatened Ryan with a smoothbore musket, forcing him to lift the little man by the throat and pin him to the wall of his hut with one hand. He held the SIG-Sauer in his other hand, pressing the four-and-a-half-inch barrel into Paddy’s throat until the cartilage creaked and his red eyes watered with impotent terror.

Now it was eight days, and Ryan reckoned that he’d probably recovered about seventy percent of his strength.

And Paddy was drinking himself into a despondent stupor at the thought of being left alone once more.

“We could go a make of it here, Ryan,” he insisted, tangling his words. “Could clean the place up. Mebbe build another cabin. Take in travelers. Get a coupla women to cook and whore.”

Ryan shook his head. “Said the answer was no, Paddy.”

After another deep slug at the jar of liquor, Paddy changed tack again. “Mebbe I’ll come to Twin Forks with you, Ryan. Hold your fuckin’ hand, like.”

Ryan shrugged. “Hell, why not?”

“When you goin’? Next week? Week after that?”

“Sooner.” Ryan got up off the porch and stared toward the setting sun. “Day after tomorrow. Start at dawn. Welcome to come along.”

“Really?” A note of total disbelief was in his quavering voice. “Why the fuck’s that?”

“Why what?”

“Why you want a wore-out old shitter like me along with you, Ryan?”

“You saved my life, Paddy. Not for you, I’d have drowned or just rotted away out on that very mud bank. I owe you that. So come along to the ville.”

The little man clicked his heels together. “Never been to Twin Forks, ‘cept on my own. Be a real fuckin’ treat, Ryan. Yeah, it will that.”

KRYSTY WAS ALSO WATCHING the sunset, sitting out on the balcony of her bedroom of the Grits and Greetings boardinghouse, a once-white frame house that now squatted drunkenly close to the edge of the junction of the Big White and the mighty Sippi. The landlady had told them when they booked the rooms that it had been the flood of 1989 that had washed away some of the underpinnings and made the whole place lean like a Saturday-night drunk on a friend’s shoulder.

The house dated back to predark times, when Twin Forks had been a small, nameless settlement, twenty miles or more from the Sippi. Then the earth had moved, and now it was perched right on the edge of the great waterway. In another year or so, the way it looked, it would be floating off toward Norleans.