The Hangman
A dust-soaked overcoat slapped against the stranger’s pants as he plodded across the outskirts of some unremarkable town. The lazy tan of loose dirt and rock that speckled the landscape matched the man’s clothes and sandpaper skin. His face looked worn away, weathered by more than sun and wind. His gray hair hung in wet strings over eyes the same color that saw but never really looked. Two boys, one at the bottom of a rocky slope, the other at the top, paused only for a moment at the passing of the stranger before resuming their play.
A small creaking noise slipped from the slope as a fallen dead tree overlooking child and man perilously swayed. The boy at the top of the hill, who now held a stone that acted as a wedge to the great log, watched as the giant thing slowly lurched out of place. Exercising stiff limbs, the dry log started to roll. It picked up speed, scattering rocks and sending splinters flying. The boy at the bottom calmly watched the trunk carve a path in his direction, unaware of its intent. Still it rampaged forth, and laughed with dead leaves, and reached out with bony claws. The boy, finally comprehending, stumbled back, tripping over some stones. He was barely aware of the stranger that scooped him up and raised him above the rolling log’s reach.
The man held the child high and faced the stampeding leviathan with those gray eyes that almost didn’t care.
*****
Richard Mazzer was to be hung that day. Friends and family of the men he killed gathered to witness a justice that would never quell their hatred. They led the young man to the gallows. A mop of jet-black hair didn’t quite hide his piercing gray-blue eyes. He wore a ratty plaid shirt and worn jeans. And frankly, he looked like he had been to Hell and back. These exterior features the gathered crowd may or may not have noticed, but they all would always remember what they saw behind that face and those clothes for the rest of their lives. His face was a study of tormented confusion to an animalic degree. His slim, yet muscular arms hung limp like two noodles at his side, not caring ever to rise again. And those eyes--so lively, so fierce and intense only two days ago--had faded to an achingly tragic dullness.
Something had recently been stripped of this man, the crowd would have thought, and it had nothing at all to with the hanging; a piece of his spirit was destroyed and he simply could not yet come to grips with it. He didn’t even notice the wooden steps he ascended or the rough noose they pulled over his head. He accepted the fact obliviously, as if he had more important things to think of at the time.
They threw a switch and the panel under his feet swung open. At that moment, some wash of realization came to him; his eyes widened in shock, he panicked at the situation he had just then understood, right as his feet had nothing to stand on. The noose was tied and he had nowhere to go but down, first to his suffocated death, then to his grave that would mark him as a criminal. Maybe that was the thought that woke him. Such a grave that would label him as nothing but a blister to the world…that would be intolerable. He found his senses while in the midst of a carefully planned execution that was wholeheartedly intent on taking his life; yet, somehow, he did not die that day.
In the following years, the rumors of what really happened became more and more unlikely, evolving from an extraordinary event into a contemporary legend. Some say they saw him pull a blade out of his sleeves, others swear he simply snapped the rope in two with a yank of his neck. What everyone knows for sure is that he escaped the gallows and guns and sent a few more men to their coffins doing so. That was the day he became known as the Hangman, and the bounty on his head grew into the dream of any fool with a trigger finger.
The Hangman lived the life of any respectable outlaw: he ran constantly and left a trail of bodies when he felt threatened. His legend swelled and faded. The years passed, and people stopped talked about the elusive legend, stopped looking for the great bounty, and eventually forgot about the Hangman entirely. Richard Mazzer had finally outrun man’s law. His hair would be gray before he found a gun pointed in his direction again.
*****
It was almost midnight before he left the bar, a little more sober than he had planned. He picked his way to the inn, his head bowed to shield his eyes from the glaring half moon; it wasn’t especially bright, exactly, but more and more he found himself drawn to the twilight and repulsed by those that defied it. As if the moon and stars’ firm resolution to remain bright among the all-enfolding black sky was somehow an insult to mankind. Maybe he was jealous; it was the simplest thing in the world for them.
The innkeeper only glanced at the strange man’s scarred coat and wide hat as he shuffled up the staircase. His room was already unlocked, something an old wanderer traveling from inn to inn should have noticed. Maybe the lazy years and tall drinks chipped away at his alertness, maybe he even knew what waited for him inside, or maybe he just didn’t care. He opened the door and nearly collided with a pistol held by a young woman. She might have been pretty in a certain light, with her vivid green eyes and soft, round face, but they were spoiled with an odd expression that hovered somewhere between extreme anger and despair. Without even being told, the Hangman closed the door and took off his wide hat…except he wasn’t the Hangman at all anymore, just some old man with strange gray eyes that shrugged off the rest of the world. The gun jittered in her hand, the trigger twitched back and forth. At first she didn’t say anything. She stood there with her gun aimed right between the man’s eyes, as if she was content to do so for the rest of her life.
“You killed him,” she muttered, as if to herself. She whispered, but each syllable filled the room and rebounded into his leathery ear. The force of her words grew until, in a frenzy, she practically shouted at the unwavering man before her, probably stopping short of a scream only for fear of the neighbors hearing. “Eight years ago you killed him. You killed my father, and now I’ll kill you! I will, I’ll shoot you, I’ll kill you…so don’t stand there looking at me like you don’t even give a damn!”
As she said it she realized it wasn’t quite true. That air of apathy--it felt so measured. His body seemed to lean in toward the gun, ever so slightly. His head was craned forward in anticipation. He cared, all right. He awaited that bullet like a child awaits Christmas morning.
“You’re a murderer,” she said, more for her sake than anything else.
And now he remembered. He remembered those green eyes.
*****
The five men who managed to corner him in the alley that one day a long time ago, back when the world still uttered the Hangman’s name with a mix of loathing and admiration. They were all too young, far too young to be pointing those guns at him and smiling like prevailing conquerors. Not young in age, perhaps, but innocent to the darker life outside their own, to the life that the Hangman was exiled to.
Like brilliant stars in the night sky. Those damned incessant moon and stars.
“The bounty is dead or alive,” the one in the middle, the one with bright green eyes said with a pompous flare, “and it makes no difference to us, either. So put your hands to the sky, or we’ll put your face to the dust.”
Mazzer hated the kind of man to prepare little speeches when he should be doing his business.
“Don’t think we’re doing this just for the money,” the green-eyed man went on in a rehearsed tone. “We’re just a few guys that want to see—“
“Shut up and let your guns do the talking.” And before Mazzer had spoken that last syllable, his own irons were singing an all-too familiar cacophony of gunpowder and desperation.
*****
The old man said nothing, but his hand imperceptibly crept under his coat. Her body quaked as she squeezed the trigger. In an instant, her bullet harmlessly punched the wall and her revolver clattered to the floor across the room, her hands tingling, nearly numb. The Hangman’s own gun stared down at the shocked woman. He had blasted the firearm out of her hands just as she was pulling the trigger. Her knees dropped to the ground, accompanied by her tears and hopes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to herself, “I couldn’t. I’m so sorry, Daddy.”
One enormous moment shuddered by until finally she opened her eyes to see the butt of his gun extended to her. The tears cleared and she saw in the man’s eyes something that wasn’t there before, something that she wouldn’t have imagined could have existed there between this murderer’s iris and pupil unless she had seen it for herself. Sorrow? No. But something that understood sorrow. Searching, maybe, a hopeless seeking. She took the offered gun with only a small hesitation and still the Hangman said nothing.
The wind whistled outside, kicking up dust that made the stars wink.
Evidently nobody heard the gunshot. Or nobody cared enough to inspect a dangerous situation.
The woman’s face lost its flame and her eyes fell from his.
“You—you’re a killer. You’re not a man at all, you murder without thinking. That’s who you are! That’s who you’re supposed to be.”
For the first time, he spoke.
“It’s the only thing I have left to offer. It’s all I can give you, or anyone.” His voice was rough and scratchy, but tried its best to be soothing. It must have lost that ability many years ago.
Her hands whipped up, and for the second time tonight, the old Hangman faced the barrel of a gun.
Let your guns do the talking.
It was the same situation as before, only now the man was unarmed. Was that what he wanted? She saw how he never flinched at the sight of the object she held, and she saw that strange look of longing return to his stance.
“Why? Why would you let me kill you?”
That thing the woman saw in his eyes inflated like a balloon until she couldn’t stand to look at his face anymore…it made him the victim in all this. His eyes became lost in something that wasn’t in that hotel room. They saw something that no longer existed outside his own mind.
*****
That memory of her. The one he just couldn’t kill no matter how much drinking and gunplay. He was lying belly-down on the bed, propped up on his elbows, reading some book. He didn’t even know she was in the room until the mattress tilted with her weight. She squirmed her head through the triangle formed by his arms and chest and wrapped her own arms around him, blocking the book from view. Then, with her dark hair splayed on the pale pages, she mercilessly did what haunted the man for the rest of his life. She smiled. Oh God, how beautiful that smile was, how happy she was…how happy they both were.
A year or more later, he had sold his farmland because of her. He could no longer suffer the merciless reminders of a happiness he had once known, a happiness that depended entirely on his beloved. When she died, so did his will to continue the life he took up with her. He wandered until every remnant of that past life was driven from his heart. That was the start of it all. And then he found himself standing in the bank of a small town, for the first time in his life aiming a gun at a human being (ANOTHER human being), pretending like murder was nothing to him (and was that so far from the truth?). He came for the money to support his own life, and, in a panic, took the lives of others.
He was nervous. A man slipped a knife from his coat while Mazzer’s attention was on the bank clerk. He moved forward slowly, unnoticed until just in arm’s reach of the robber. Then Mazzer turned, his gun swaying dumbly in his tense hand, and he spied the man’s knife.
That first time…it was a moment that lasted less than a second, and yet it never even ended, really. Spurred on by the loner's act of bravery, a few others approached with small hidden weapons or bare fists. There was no time. In that moment Richard Mazzer aimed that awful, pointless weapon at another man, a soul that had a life with real joy. The man that held death in his hand did not think of these things when he pulled the fatal trigger; he thought only of his own life. Was it the bullet or the selfish thought that exiled him from Paradise? In the end, he would realize the two were one and the same.
*****
He watched his gun in the woman’s hand.
The same one he had pointed at so many others. Is she really making the same decision he once did? The decision that placed so much sin on his back, so heavy that he could no longer stand upright?
Its black pit gaped soullessly back at him and he saw again all the lives he took, all the pain he dealt. There, in that dark well, he wandered and he killed and he forgot--or maybe he gave up on--his humanity. He bundled up his crimes into a bullet laced with gunpowder that was only capable of killing, and here it was, staring him in the face.
In painful slowness, she lowered her hand. He continued to walk a lonely path. He ran from everything he ever knew and suddenly he was no longer young. The piece hung loosely at her side. Then it slipped from her fingers. For years the thing dropped, and the Hangman continued to wander, living in a distant fog. His hair completely grayed, people no longer saw him or he them. He met a green-eyed woman in an inn who meant to kill him. He passed two boys playing on a rocky hillside one morning and the revolver crashed to the floor, sending echoes throughout the inn, the town, the world. And, somehow, before the gun lay still on the ground, Richard Mazzer found what he didn’t even know he was searching for.
He looked through the window and watched the dazzling moon and stars. For the first time in a very long time, he recalled that ancient memory and again saw her smile. Beautiful.
*****
Only the two boys and their families attended the stranger’s funeral. His grave is marked with a tombstone that reads “Here rests a nameless hero.”
