Chapter Text
The world is cold and wet. His chest aches. His knees fold under him. "Naw, naw, Mr. Dillon, I can't—" A voice. He knows this man, feels his body cave beneath his own, struggling to keep him upright. "I ain't strong enough to carry you, you gotta stay on your feet—" Leaning heavily on the shoulders of his friend, he persists.
His friend is wet, too. But his skin feels warm. Warm, slick, rusty-smelling—blood. One of them is bleeding. He isn't sure who. He's too cold and tired to care.
He collapses in the bed of a wagon.
Someone is babbling. "Doc, Doc, Doc—" A puny, pathetic voice. His friend again, weaker, more sick. "Help him, Doc…" He drifts off, and then he fights back to the surface. "Busted his head…" Fabric rustles. "Naw, Doc, y'ain't gotta…" He fades out. Then he surges back to life. "Naw, I'm alright—"
"Chester, if you don't knock it off, you're liable to be just fine when you reach the pearly gates."
"Naw—Mr. Dillon, see to 'im—"
"I already have."
Matt doesn't remember this. Neither, apparently, does his friend. "I ain't seen…"
"You ain't seen because you've been passing out. Now are you going to let me get these bullets out of you, or are you going to exsanguinate telling me you don't need my help?"
He mumbles, drifting off.
A soft hand caresses Matt's cheek. "Are they gonna be alright, Doc?" A woman's voice. She's familiar. He turns his head to the inside of her wrist, inhaling her jasmine perfume. He can't place it. But he knows her.
"I don't know, Kitty. That bullet in Matt's shoulder wasn't bad. If he hadn't hit his head when he fell—" The man pauses and curses under his breath. I know him, too. "We won't know until he wakes up."
All of these people who feel like home, but none of them he can recall.
Her hand cards through his hair. "What about Chester?"
"Kitty, if Chester were any less hard-headed, he and Matt both would be at the bottom of the Arkansas." He sighs. "I can't say much else right now."
Long fingernails scratch his scalp. He shifts his head in her hand, fighting the weight in his eyelids. He wants to see her. Maybe if he sees her, he'll remember. "Doc, he's moving."
"Hit him with some more chloroform. He can't be rolling around with that busted head."
He smells something acrid.
Darkness again.
Someone is snoring.
Someone is snoring loudly. Hee-honk. Hee-honk. Like a donkey braying at a mare in heat. Hee-honk. Golden light from the windows burns his eyelids. He rolls onto his side, facing away from the sun. Hee-honk. The bed springs rattle beneath him where he sinks into the plush mattress. It's soft, comfortable. Hee-honk.
The bed jostles with movement. Leave it to the army to make us share beds. It explains why the snoring is so loud. He opens one eye into a slit, prepared to probe his partner. The blurred room comes into gradual focus.
Not army barracks. That's what he notices first. Squinting, he scans the room, taking stock of it. It's a bedroom, homey and sparsely decorated, like by a bachelor man. There's a chest of drawers and a wardrobe and a lamp on a bedside table. It looks something like his parents' bedroom. Plaid patterned sheets are drawn up to his abdomen where he lies curled on his side, facing the snoring offender.
He's familiar. Matt has seen him before, many times. Studying him, he tries to place him in his memory—a tall, lean man with boyish cheeks and handsome brunette hair, bunched up on his side facing Matt, hands folded under his chin, a string of drool on his cheek. Matt has seen him like this many times. But his name doesn't come to mind. Where the hell are we? He turns to face the window. They're on an upper level, sunlight catching the dust in the air, overlooking a busy street. His companion drags in another ragged inhale. "Would you quit?"
The only reply: Hee-honk.
Matt bumps him with his ankle. "Hey. You." In lieu of the man's name, he doesn't have many other options. The snoring breaks off into a disgruntled snort. "Knock it off, would you?"
His pale face crumples, a wrinkle appearing between his brows. Then, something registers. He bolts upright. "Mr. Dillon!" He face breaks into a broad grin. "You's awake—" All the sparse color drains from his face, clapping a hand over the bandages wrapped around his chest, clamping his teeth together to keep from crying out. He lolls where he sits for a second before he eases back down onto the bed. "M' head's a-spinning." The pain and dizziness don't stymy his excitement, smile lines around his eyes and mouth. "Boy, we been waiting for you to wake up two, three days now. Doc said he wasn't too sure how your head was gonna work out for you. Y'know he uses them big words—skull fracture. Fancy way to say you broke your head, and I told him that when I dragged us back into town."
With lips pressed together, he tries to assemble the puzzle. They were together. They got hurt—clearly. This man helped him. Like he guessed, this is a friend. Then why can't I remember his name? He has nothing but the vague sense of fondness, the pull of intimacy, the implicit trust he gives to someone when his gut tells him they're worthy.
When he doesn't get an answer to his rambling, he tilts his head. "Mr. Dillon?"
The hair on the back of his neck prickles. Mr. Dillon is his father, Alphaeus, a tall blonde man from Yuma. He has always been Private Dillon, or more recently, Marshal. "My name is Matt."
His friend pants a short laugh. "Well, yeah, I know what your name is, I ain't…" When Matt doesn't tease him in return, when the serious countenance doesn't abate, the brief humor fades, replaced by incredulity. "What are you getting at?"
"Where are we?"
"Where are we—" His mouth drops open. "You's funning me." Matt shakes his head. "Is your eyes not working? Can you not see?"
This is somewhere he knows, or somewhere he's supposed to know, much like his friend, who seems to know him much better than Matt's memory indicates. He clenches a fist. "We're not in Dakota Territory." At least nowhere near the ranges he knows, the mountains. Through the window, he sees nothing but the flat stretch of the horizon into infinity.
His disbelief fades. His throat bobs in an anxious swallow. "Mr. Dillon, I—" Matt frowns. Quieter, the man corrects himself. "Matt." He fumbles with the single syllable, like it's strange to him. "No, we ain't nowhere's around Dakota Territory. This is Kansas." He scans his face, perturbed. "You really… You really ain't thinking we're in Dakota Territory, ain't you?"
Matt averts his eyes. What am I supposed to say to that? It's unbelievable to his companion, the notion that he doesn't remember. He brings a hand to his temple, pressing against a dull throbbing pain there. "Kansas." It doesn't sound familiar. Slowly, he shakes his head. He doesn't know where he is or how he got here.
The tight hand on his bandaged chest loosens. He lets it fall beside him in the space between their bodies. "Do you…" He falters. Persevering, he brings himself to ask the question Matt fears: "Do you know who I am?"
How does he answer? His heart thrums steadily in his chest. This is someone he knows, someone he cares about, someone he doesn't want to hurt. He doesn't remember why. But why doesn't matter. His tongue trails over the front of his teeth. "I… I know you're my friend." His mouth feels tacky and dry. "I don't remember your name."
Hurt reflects in his eyes, caught somewhere between fear and concern. Wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, he clears the drool from his cheek. "Well, I—" He breaks off, reconsidering. His hand bunches up in the blankets. "I'm Chester. 'Nd you's right. I'm your friend. You got plenty of friends here in Dodge."
Dodge. That answers one question. Matt nods slowly. "Where are we?"
"Here? This here is Doc's room. He shacked us up in here, bein' you're too long for his cot, and he just ain't got space to board us in there, either, as bad off as we were." He pauses, and then before Matt can ask, he clarifies, "Doc's our friend, too. He's a doctor. But I reckon you probably got that from his name, didn't you?"
"Could've hedged a guess." Matt rolls over, kicking his feet off of the edge of the bed. His shoulder throbs, the familiar pulse of a healing bullet wound. He tests the motion—not too impaired, really. He'll favor it for awhile, but he's taken worse hits. His head rings with tinnitus, white streaking along the edges of his vision.
Chester pushes himself up again, this time with the forethought to support his chest. "Hey—Hey, where you goin'?"
"I'm gonna find out where we are."
"I just told you where we are. You ought to stay down til Doc gets back. He ain't gonna—" Matt stands up, shaky on his bare feet. "Now, Doc done told me to make sure to keep you quiet!" He tries to lean forward, but he's too sore to pursue as Matt shuffles around the foot of the bed. "What're you doing?"
He opens the door and peers into the vacant office, filled with glass cabinets and bookshelves, a roll top desk in the corner, two empty cots with crisp sheets. His eyes are heavy and tired. Too much strain, getting out of bed. He turns to crawl back under the blankets with Chester. He's safe enough here, he supposes, and that's all he needs to know.
He meets his friends one by one. First Doc, a gruff old man who acts unperturbed by his amnesia, though Matt sees him sipping a glass of whiskey slow and savory, staring out the window in the middle of the night, starlit sky reflecting in his teary eyes.
Then Kitty, the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. When she hugs him, he smells her perfume in her neck, and he remembers. He remembers a dark room, her bare skin on his, her body writhing beneath his, the scent of her wreathing around him. A stack of bills on her chest of drawers—because he buys her like a rancher buys stock.
Some part of him doesn't want her to ever let him go. Some part of him can't get away fast enough. She cries when he asks her name, though she tries to hide it, and he pretends he doesn't see to spare her pride.
They recount his life back to him. He's a marshal here. He's been here for years. Chester works for him, and his stories are the most elucidating, if they sometimes seem rather farfetched. He asks Kitty to get some of his old journals from his bunk, and when she brings them, he gives them to Matt willingly, inviting him to read them at his leisure. It's embarrassingly private, enough to tint his cheeks pink as he offers them. But, given the circumstances, Chester says, he has a free rein to read what he likes. And since he has nothing else to do stuck in Doc's office, he does.
He beats Doc at checkers (repeatedly, until Doc sputters that he must be making up his memory loss, and Chester laughs, Might've knocked the memory out, but you can't knock the smart out of a man, Doc, so you might as well give up). He stares out the windows at the street below, becoming progressively more restless, until the last day when he paces lines beside the bed where Chester is reading his Bible. Doc brings them supper.
"How long til I can spring this joint, Doc?"
He looks surprised. "Well, you're free to leave if you want, Matt, but I don't recommend it."
"What do you mean?" He has a job to do. If he's going to do it well, he needs to start remembering, and quickly. He can't do that pent up in the office.
"Chester's going to be here another week at least. Folks are gonna come gunning for you once word gets around. I think you'll be a lot safer if you wait. Don't go making yourself easy pickings."
Rolling his eyes, Matt shakes his head. "I don't need to be babysat." The first evening, he makes his way back to the jail, admittedly by getting lost and stopping a storekeeper he recognizes for directions. (The man calls himself Jonas, and he stares at Matt as he retreats to his home.) But as night falls, the jail becomes lonely, too quiet. He tosses around in his cot until he realizes the silence is disturbing him. He misses Chester's snoring.
It turns out to be an easy problem to fix. He goes back to Doc's office, slipping in silently. Doc is asleep on the cot in the corner. The door hinge squeaks, but he doesn't rouse. If he knew more, he would place his feet on the quietest boards. But he can't remember which ones make noise, so he steps out of his boots at the door before he makes his way into the bedroom.
Chester is curled up on his side facing the window. But he's not snoring. His half-lidded eyes reflect the night sky.
"Chester?" He flinches, flipping over in bed. "It's me."
"Mr. Dillon?" Matt's nose crinkles in distaste. "Sorry—I reckon you ain't the only one having issues remembering." Chester fumbles Matt's name the way a green horse plays with the bit when it's first placed across his tongue. "You alright? Doc said he sent you on home."
Matt nods. "Couldn't sleep."
"Me, neither." Matt sits on the opposite side of the bed. "You stayin' here, then?"
"If that's alright."
Chester grins. "O'course." So Matt takes off his boots and folds himself neatly under the blankets beside him.
In the still air between them, he focuses on the smells. How Kitty's perfume jarred some part of him into remembering, he thinks about Chester's scent, all tobacco and stale coffee. He closes his eyes. Coffee brewing over a campfire. Coffee brewing in the jail. Coffee flavored with cayenne. Tobacco champed between teeth. Spat into the eyes of a rattlesnake. Bits and pieces of scenes, all things he wants to capture more clearly, so in spite of his qualms, he scoots closer, bowing his head to Chester's shoulder, almost touching him with the tip of his nose.
To his credit, Chester doesn't mind. In fact, he shifts his head, opening the expanse to his neck. Experimenting, Matt slides his hand up between them, resting it on Chester's hip. Chester stiffens for a second, reaching like he intends to pull Matt's hand off of himself. But then he thinks twice, easing into the bed. For a few minutes, he clings to his bated breath, waiting for Matt to move again, until sleep catches up with him, and the familiar hee-honk of his snores fill the room.
Doc was right. He's safer where he has company.
Besides, Chester is his friend.
He's got plenty of friends in Dodge.