Chapter Text
By the time the sun burned clear of the low hills Dean Winchester had learned three things about the country south of the Red River, and he had learned them the way a man learns anything out here, which is to say by nearly dying of not knowing them first.
The first was that the ground did not rise up to meet a rider so much as it simply went on, caliche and chalked stone and the black volcanic rock the Mexicans called malpais, or bad country, unspooling toward a distant thin line of blue mountains that never seemed to draw nearer no matter how many days a man spent riding toward them, as if the whole of it had been made deliberately too large for the men who would have to cross it. The distance worked steadily, reducing those foolish enough to attempt the crossing to what they could carry entirely within the limits of their own flesh and thoughts, everything else worried loose and shed behind like chaff shaken loose from grain.
The second was that the heat had a mind toward killing. It settled on the shoulders like a hand that did not mean to lift, soaking through cloth and leather and skin until horse and rider and tack shared the same earthen smell. The sun simply made no distinction of man or animal, nor did it trouble to distinguish between Union or Confederate or a boy who had crossed half a country outrunning the war. It pressed down impartially, with a blank and incurious persistence.
The third rule was the simplest and the oldest and the one that needed no learning because it was already in the blood of those who had come this far: if you meant to survive, you did not stop.
Dean was nineteen and the boyish freckles that had once dusted his face like spilled stars were nearly gone now, erased beneath a dark even tan earned since he’d left Kansas behind, and he did not tell his age to strangers because a boy's age bought him nothing out here but an occasion for some other man's mischief. His hat was pulled low, shadowing his eyes, the brim broken soft by sweat and weather, creased where his fingers worried it in the long late hours when sleep would not come and his thoughts ran loose over ground he could not corral.
He rode with the sun at his back, through country the color of old bone, mesquite and chaparral standing stunted against ground that looked to have been left over from some earlier and less finished making of the world, some trial which God had abandoned and moved on from. It had been Mexico not so long past, and then it was not, and depending upon who a man asked it might yet be Mexico again. The Confederacy claimed it, the Union wanted it, and the land itself took no notice of the argument.
Dean had no taste for either side of that quarrel. The war seemed to him no more than the same coin shown two faces, poor men killing other poor men so that richer men might go on prospering regardless. He had seen enough of Kansas to know the shape that quarrel took close up, and had wanted no further education in it.
The horse beneath him was a young Spanish mustang, barrel-chested and short-coupled and possessed of a stubbornness that Dean had initially found aggravating, won off a man who drank more than he watched his cards, and Dean had not named her though the better part of a year had passed in her company, some superstition in him holding that a thing unnamed could not so easily be taken. Her hooves struck the hardpan with a dull rhythm, picking her way through the scrub with the intelligence of an animal bred for bad terrain. He rode her loose-reined, bowlegged in the saddle that was not his by right of purchase. He had taken the saddle off a dead man's horse at a river crossing some weeks back, the horse and rider both laying bloated in the reeds.
Dean had stood over the corpse for a long moment, rifle balanced across his forearms, looking at the face gone waxy in the heat, the blackened tip of a tongue pushed between his teeth. The boy — for really he had only been a boy, likely younger than Sam — had once ridden on a fine Mexican tree, tooled with flowers and scrollwork some father or master craftsman had done with great care, and Dean had cut the cinch from the dead animal and scoured the worst of the blood and river-stink from the leather and ridden on, because that is what you do: you take what you need and you ride on.
He did not trouble himself to think on the dead boy again.
Behind the cantle he carried a bedroll lashed tight, a large canteen already lighter than he liked, and a satchel holding the whole remaining sum of what he owned that could not be worn upon his body or fired from a gun or eaten. He carried also his name, which weighed more than the rest combined whether he owned to it or not.
Winchester.
It rode with him like a second shadow, lengthening and distorting with the hour but never once letting go its hold on him. He did not speak it unless a man's asking left him no other road, and even then he watched the listener's face for that particular recognition, which meant the name had gone before him and left its account for him to settle.
Dean did not dwell on what remained of the name in Kansas. He would, in fact, simply not think of Kansas. It was a resolution made when he had been chased north into Missouri first, keeping shy of the towns where he could manage it. He'd kept to the freight roads when they served and cut into the brush when they did not, crossing through the Indian Territory which had long ago learnt what Federal promises meant. A season's work droving cattle fattened for contracts that fed armies he wanted no part of had put enough coin in his pocket to ford the Red at last, the water running cold and the color of tea around the mustang's knees, and south of it lay the Lone Star State, raw and sun-struck.
No, he did not linger on memories of Kansas. Rather, he told himself he was riding for more work. There was always someone willing to pay a young man who could ride, shoot straight, and keep his mouth shut, and work was the only reason that sounded, said aloud to his own ear, like a reason a sane man might give for the life he was presently living — for lying down each night sore and gritty, the skin aching with a dull worked-over pain, and rising each morning to find the sun waiting on him, having picked up exactly where it had left off the evening previous. The other reason he carried buried under that one, the way a man carries a splinter gone too deep and healed over: felt with every step, and touched by no one, least of all himself.
John Winchester had gone south of the river, perhaps in search of a country where a man's debts did not follow him past the customshouse at Matamoros. Both blue and gray had cause to want him and both, as far as Dean could learn, hated him about equally. He had run contraband for Union paymasters one season and delivered runaways back into chains and the lash the next, and what principle steered him through it, if principle there was, could not be read from outside the man, only endured from within his orbit, as Dean and his brother had once endured it. He drank, and drank hard, but was never so far gone in it that he could not put a ball through a man's chest at fifty yards, which spoke, Dean supposed, to what the man had been before the drink got the better share of him.
He was a liar and a cheat and by every secondhand account Dean had gathered, a murderer besides. But a boy has only the one father the Lord saw fit to give him, and John Winchester, whatever else could rightly be said of him, was the man who had taught Dean to survive, to fight for every mile and every breath the same.
And that was the whole of what Dean knew, and it was months old and secondhand throughout, and the not-knowing had given his own anger time enough to coalesce into something heavier and harder to reckon with.
Dean did not know, riding, whether he meant to find the man from any wanting to, or only to prove to some stubborn corner of himself that the finding could be done.
The mustang came up onto a rise and stood, ears working.
Dean shaded his eyes and looked out over what lay ahead. The land only read flat from a distance; up close it broke into shallow draws and dry washes where water had run once, arroyos cut deep enough to swallow a rider whole before he knew the ground had failed beneath him. The country dealt in such deceptions habitually, and one learned early that what showed itself to the eye was rarely the whole of what was there.
Somewhere beyond the shimmer and the standing heat, towns held to the earth by nothing more than stubbornness. Somewhere further still, his father moved beneath this same indifferent sun, laying down a trail Dean might ride the balance of his life and never once close the distance upon.
He put his heels to the mustang, and she went on.