The horse Austin nuzzled the lapel of Carson's oilcloth. His eyelashes shone. It had been over a day since Carson had fed his horse, and the animal's characteristic stoicism was cracking. Carson looked at Austin apologetically. The handful of oats he'd been keeping in his breast pocket had depleted, though he'd attempted to dole it out slowly, enough at a time barely to fill the creases in his hands. Now, under the afternoon sun of the San Jacinto desert, Carson Bates was able to feed his horse only a few strands of chaff.

"How much time would we lose going back?" Carson glanced at Albert. Albert squatted on the ground, deciphering.

"Too much," the man replied without moving. "Past halfway. Closer to just finish."

Albert's real name was Alberto Cervantes, but he introduced himself to travelers in the desert with a white name. Many of those going west came from places where there were no Mexicans, so they were suspicious. His tongue was unable to bend around the unrolled r - he was Allberr. He hoped that strangers would assume his accent was a regional quirk: often, they did. "Horses go a long time. He will be fine."

Carson's family had horses in Louisiana. They lived close enough to the gulf so that the stables rotted from the salt. However those horses had never gone a day without feed, and the interval between having left San Jacinto and now was uncomfortable. People out west - particularly the hired guides - treated the animals as though they were throwaways. Carson had purchased his animal for a steal from a stable on the edge of town offering animal legwork for the journey west. Gradually it dawned on Carson that Albert prioritized the animal's safety only as far as it would get them through the desert. It would do its job, and the humans would suffuse it just enough to maintain its momentum. What happened after the journey was of little concern. Carson no longer wondered why his guide had given him a strange look when he'd named the horse Austin.

Alberto took the reins on his own horse. A chestnut with knobby knees which regarded everything, it seemed, with the kind of apathy a king might affect with a dishwasher. The guide sensed the gringo's perplexion with his attitude toward the horses, but he also supposed from the fellow's smooth hands that he had never been forced to subsist on the contents of a horse's bladder. Alberto had, once, trudging over the edge of Death Valley. In that case, his clients - a young couple convinced the climate could not hurt them - succumbed, and so Alberto had found his way home barely alive. This was the risk one always ran when guiding unfamiliar people through this terrain. Alberto fancied himself less a guide than a babysitter.

The sun set and flared behind the mountains to the East. It slowed as though it intended to skate along the ridge rather than sink. Carson imagined the San Bernardino forest on the other side igniting, and in his mind it would burn silently each dusk and regenerate before morning. It seemed that in this place anything was possible. Less so for the opportunity people saw when they settled in California, more in the way one is helpless against the peculiar movement of an earthquake. Without a word Alberto led his horse to the edge of camp and started to build a fire.

Carson would always remember Anne's smell. This remembrance was only partly the kind one would save for a long-gone lover. The love, Carson knew now as well as then, was for the idea of her, or rather, the potential she represented. Of creating a family. Of loving a woman.

Each morning she wore plumeria oil behind her ears and on her neck. She did this for him. She parted her hair in the center and smiled for him. When I smile it's because of you, she would say, and touch him. And this made him happy, mostly. These gestures appealed to the part of him which desired companionship rather than intimacy. He courted her awkwardly: men in their twenties were expected to court. More accurately, men in their late teens were expected to court; men in their twenties were expected to begin families. Carson allowed those close to him to use his shyness as an excuse for this discrepancy, though he knew that sometime in the next decade he would have to either stop pretending, or, conversely, commit to pretending for a lifetime. The decision - rather, the acknowledgment - was a long time coming, and came abruptly when, after months of tension, Anne offered herself by bending over a writing desk and Carson noticed that she'd padded the shoulders of her dress. To make herself more broad. I do this for you. Is this what you want?

Then the tears.

When he was young, Carson spent his summers fishing the river behind the house with his brother. John taught him how to use lures and how to cast. Cut an arc next to your hip - let the momentum do the work. Let the water do the work. The fish will tire itself out. Let the fish do the work. And after Anne left, John did the work rebuilding her.

Soon after that, the plumeria oil was for John, as was the parted hair. This did not hurt Carson, since he'd internalized these as gestures of friendship when they were directed at him. What hurt was losing the potential. He supposed he could have been happy pretending as long as it would have allowed him to have a family. He could pretend for a chance to do, make, something that mattered. The peculiar loneliness he always felt with Anne would have evaporated when confronted with the warmth of having a real life.

Sometime later, after John married her, after she bore his children, after he struck out alone to the San Jacinto desert to build a home on gold country for his family, he confided via mail to Carson that when the home was finished and ready he would preface his return with a love letter. He would tell her that this was their new world. That the earth was for them, their family. They would grow old under a sky that was theirs. This would solidify them as a unit: five decades out, he could draw this letter out and say, this is where it started and this is the proof that it really happened.

Alberto built the fire in a clearing low to the ground. Each time he added more tinder, the pile released dust as though breathing.

This was new land. Carson's brother had chosen a largely unexplored place to settle, in the valley where the Cahuilla Indians lived. Alberto himself had never traveled there. He navigated with a letter Carson carried detailing where the house was, which he pulled from his oilcloth and examined once every few hours. "In the shadow of the San Jacinto mountain," it read, in John's characteristically prolix hand. "I see the sky and the clouds in the shape of a heart for my wife." This hurt Carson, a little.

Alberto kept his distance from the fire. It was June. Here, the heat persisted well into nightfall. Carson sat closer and continued to examine his brother's letter. His oilcloth had made the paper translucent. The letters floated, backlit by the fire.

The arrow struck Carson in the elbow. At first it was painless, as though someone had slapped him with the fleshy part of a hand. The worst part was that the head stuck in the joint and he could not straighten his arm.

Immediately Alberto rolled. He got to his feet gracefully and bolted for a clump of chaparral nearby. The plant hissed dryly when he dove in, and Carson could make out the black of his hair between the paper leaves.

"Albert!--"

Whoever fired the arrow was inexperienced: certainly they had not been aiming for the elbow. A dusk attack was also foolish. Alberto hoped that they were distracted by striking the gringo and had not noticed him making for the chaparral. Fumbling, he pulled the six-gun from its holster. He scraped his knuckles on the earth. Far away, the horizon darkened like a bruise. Alberto found two shapes, seemingly at its center, striding, close. So close he marveled bitterly that neither he nor Carson had noticed them sooner.

Carson lay in the dust like an infant, hesitating, hand open near the arrow. He debated whether to pull it out. He opted instead to scoot backwards on his rump. He collided with a thick cluster of sage which would not provide adequate cover. In his mind, things like this no longer mattered. He imagined giving himself to death. He tried, but he could not prepare himself.

The Indians were young. One had the broadening chest of a teenager, around which was slung a sad-looking quiver; the other slouched in the same way Carson had at the end of prepubescence. Carson could see in the dusk that the paint on their faces still shone. It was fresh, probably applied just before the attack. The older one gritted his teeth. They were surprisingly large and white. He said something which Carson did not understand. The sloucher started to circle, peering into the brush. The teenager drew another arrow.

"You're a coward," Carson said. He meant for his voice to be deep; instead it was desperate. Indeed, the boys were stalling. Carson imagined this would be their first human kill. Part of him, no longer in touch with reality, sympathized with this.

The teenager fell silently after his head snapped back. When one was shot in the back of the head, the skull, paradoxically, recoiled into the bullet. A few seconds later the smell of blood ruined the dusk, but by then the sloucher was already sprinting for the horizon. Alberto emerged from the chaparral on fast legs. He knew the consequences if the boy found an adult; he caught the boy easily and carried him over his shoulder back to camp.

"I had to," he said, finding Carson in the sage. The sloucher struggled weakly. Everything had happened so quickly the fire had only now finished building itself. Embers shuttled into the sky like the trace of fingertips, and the sun receded over the brush. Carson finally mustered the courage to pull the arrow from his elbow, but he still could not straighten his arm. "There was nothing else to do. Do you understand?"

Carson did not reply. He thought that the boys might have been brothers. That they had ventured together looking for rabbits, or, hopefully, a deer. That they watched the sun drop together behind the mountains, perhaps imagining that the forest on the other side burned. This was the way a child might simplify perspective. Carson wept.

"We must leave," Alberto said. He had never killed before. "Do you understand? Carson. More of them will come. He was a child. He may have been out late: they may be looking for him now."

The sloucher cried. He heaved into Alberto's shoulder. His face was buried in Alberto's back. The tears and his face paint made a pattern in the cloth, graceful but sloppy, as a child might produce by fingerpainting.

When John arrived in San Jacinto he wrote a letter everyday and posted seven at a time to a horseman who made weekly rounds beneath the mountain. People settled there miles apart. Their houses came up within view of the river, where men spent the day panning. A depot several miles away purchased gold nuggets and sold food and liquor. But John spent most of his time building.

Anne kept abreast of the house's progress. In one week, John laid a foundation. In two days he found friends to construct the frame. Windows. Walls. While John was building a fence long enough to surround twenty acres, the letters stopped coming.

When Anne pleaded with Carson to find his brother, he was reminded of the time before. The plumerias. But now, her shoulders were not padded. This was real need. Desperation.

Carson boarded a train and rode it as far as it would take him into the California desert. The engines ran hot and Carson knew he would find nothing in his brother's house, or, worse, a woman who was not Anne, who was convenient in a place where women were scarce. Part of him hoped for the latter. He was ashamed to know that if one of these fragments of possibility destroyed Anne he would have the opportunity back.

From the ridge, Alberto saw what appeared to be a half-completed house. It was in a clearing that was man made but neglected.

The horse Austin was dead. He'd collapsed some miles back and refused to get back up. For hours they coaxed him. Carson was even moved to violence, kicking the animal in the knees. He'd created a sling from his oilcloth for his arm, which was now red and firm, too firm, and it shot pain each time he kicked. Eventually Austin's eyes became blank and he settled in and would not move. Foam bubbled out of the coarseness of his fur and his ribs rose and fell, tightening against his skin. Finally Alberto finished him off. The sky was so open that the gunshot did not echo.

The sloucher was gone too. Not dead, simply gone. He had slipped away at night when Carson and Alberto each thought the other was awake. The morning after, Carson awoke to find that John's letter was missing. Alberto expressed gratitude that their throats had not been cut. They had traveled some miles since killing the teenager, so it was doubtful the sloucher would make it home.

"Nobody lives here," Alberto said. "It was probably the Cahuilla. I'm sorry."

The fence, half-constructed, ended in a ragged mess. The wood showed signs of aging. At one end Carson found a mallet hidden in overgrown grass. Alberto stood back with his horse and watched Carson enter the house. He kept his eyes on the horizon, bright, clear.

John had ventilated his home well. Wind ran through the windows. John himself, or what remained of him, sat on the dirt floor propped against the east wall. Between the ribs, Carson made out the fading grey of quail's feathers, still attached to an arrow.

The shock of this was minimal. Carson looked through the belongings, finding three letters. Because the house was not finished, none of the letters were the final one John had proposed to write before. There was a bed large enough only for one person, a writing desk with paper, and no gold.

And this was the opportunity. The potential. After a time Alberto entered the house to find Carson in front of the writing desk. His good arm was crippled by the teenager's arrow, but with his other hand he held a pen. Whether he intended to replicate the letter the sloucher had stolen or do something else was beyond his reckoning. He saw only that Carson's purpose was the kind which circumvents pain and grief.

Title is from lyrics to Pearl Jam's song Black - "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life / I know you'll be a sun / in somebody else's sky."