1885. Charles Bartowski heads West on a mission from Boston to Idaho Falls. He is traveling with a purpose, with a gun and a book. A Western.

Heaven and Hell

Book One:

Bring My Coffin Along

CHAPTER ONE:

Idaho Falls

Friday, September 4, 1885,
Between Cody, Wyoming and Idaho Falls, Idaho

Charles Irving Bartowski studied the dusty-but-new hat in his lap. Its broad brim and white color contrasted with the narrow brim and dark color of the hat he wore, the bowler hat he wore, back in Boston. Looking out the window of the stagecoach, he needed only vision and not thought to remind him he was not in Boston any longer.

Out the window stretched brown earth, spindly trees, and small shrubs as far as his eyes could see. Brown dotted with green, oppressed under a sun-fired blue sky, fierce and mighty and omnipresent.

He pulled his gaze back inside and resumed the study of his hat. The leather hatband, alternating narrow strips of green and gold, seemed too artificial, too man-made to belong out here, out West. That white hat rested atop his black bowler hat, obscuring the bowler from view. Fingering the white hat's hatband, he glanced again at his fellow travelers.

Both were dusty and dozing. One he had tried not to stare at for the length of their shared journey. Willowy and redheaded, she had on a garish, bright blue dress with sequins and a white ruffle where it ended around her otherwise bare shoulders. Charles - Chuck, as his friends, well, his friend (singular) Morgan, and his sister, Ellie, called him - had never seen such or so much bare and beautiful white skin. The woman, Carina Miller (she said when she boarded the coach in Cody, Wyoming) was traveling on to Idaho Falls, as was Chuck.

She enjoyed Chuck's obvious attempts to keep his eyes from alighting on her shoulders, and, after a time, she had covered them and kept them covered with a navy wrap. The smirk she had worn above the wrap was still on her face as she slept fitfully on the other end of the hard bench they shared. Dust now browned her wrap, and her small, blue hat.

Chuck took his canteen up from the floor and opened it. He wiped the mouth of it and took one long, disciplined swallow. It was his but he had been careful to share it with Carina, and with the other passenger, a large man, several years older than Chuck. The man wore his Western gear, sweat-stained hat, threadbare vest, shiny gun and tended gunbelt, cuffed dungarees, and scuffed boots - all as if he had been born in them, all as if they were his birthright. Chuck knew how gangly and greenhorn (the man, John Casey's, term) he looked in his similar but still store-new and stiff gear. Chuck was a mail-order catalog caricature of John.

All Chuck lacked was a gun belt.

Chuck had a gun. It was an old Colt pistol an old man who lived near him in Boston had given to him. Chuck's parents died in an outbreak of fever, and he and his Ellie, a few years older than him, were abandoned and alone in the city. They owned the house, so they had a roof over their head, but circumstances forced Ellie to go to work. She had gotten a job as a waitress at a restaurant nearby and they had managed together, Chuck finding odd jobs to supplement their income. But his sister was a beauty, and the old man, Tuttle, a friend of Chuck's parents, had seen two men following Ellie home from the restaurant one night. The next day, Tuttle gave Chuck the gun, making sure he understood how to use it. Chuck had never had to use it; no one bothered Ellie, although Chuck was sure to stay awake each night with the gun in his hand, beneath his pillow, until he heard her turn the lock in the door.

Chuck had a gun. A gun he had loaded long ago and never fired.

He had it with him, in the old, heavy pillowcase he was using to carry his meager belongings. In it, along with the gun and a few extra cartridges, was a tablet, a fountain pen, a bottle of ink, an apple (bruised but edible), his best black Boston suit and shoes, and a copy of Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell.

The coach would arrive in Idaho Falls by day's end, another few hours. Chuck adjusted his sore backside on the bench and saw John open one eye in response to the movement. Chuck smiled but John closed the eye. It was as if Chuck could hear it slam, like a door. Carina was snoring softly, wedged in the corner, her head against the side of the interior.

Up top, Chuck heard the driver say something to his companion. Unable to make it out, he was sure that the man had noted a mile marker. They must be close.

Chuck's final destination was Idaho Falls. He was not sure if it was for Carina or John. Neither had been forthcoming on the trip.

Chuck had accepted a job in Idaho Falls, a job teaching elementary school, in a new-built schoolhouse, and he was to meet the representatives of the townsfolk the next day, to see the schoolhouse and make sure supplies (books and so on) were adequate. Chuck suspected that part of the reason for the meeting was so that the townsfolk could assure themselves that Chuck was appropriate for their children. He was slated to teach starting Tuesday of the next week.

He had written ahead and secured lodgings in town. His promised salary, not high, would be enough for him to live a simple, bachelor life. And none of it mattered. Chuck was going to Idaho Falls to teach. That was not his sole purpose, his real purpose in going.

Chuck was going to Idaho Falls to kill a man.

A/N: A Western, obviously.

Just call me Zettel Grey.