The Bitter Draw: From the Front Porch - Chapter 2
October 14, 2025 Stories
Brogo blew on his coffee, eyes on the horizon. “You ever notice,” he said, “how quiet can be louder than gunfire?”
Thorne Wilder: “Yeah. Reminds me of the Draw, right after it went still…”
When the canyon finally remembered how to be quiet, the quiet didn’t feel right. Quiet should be soft, like a creek under willow. This quiet felt like a church after the fire.
Thorne rose first, careful, rifle loose in his hands, eyes picking the small motions that still meant danger: a boot twitch, a hat brim that hadn’t fallen the way a hat brim falls when a man lets go of all his troubles at once. Brogo came up like the ground had decided to speak, big and calm and already scanning the farther ridges with a squint that did arithmetic.
“Water?” Thorne said.
Brogo nodded. “If it ain’t a cruel joke.”
They went down to the dry wash that had given the place its name and found a pocket under angel hair roots that had collected what the last storm had dropped, and the sun hadn’t yet stolen. It tasted like leaf rot and salvation. They took turns without speaking and then spoke because the world had insisted on not ending.
“You hired?” Thorne said.
Brogo shook his head. “Was. Not anymore.”
“Same,” Thorne said, which was true enough. He took the satisfied breath of a man not dead. Then he pointed with his chin toward the ridge to the west where the light went thin and orange. “Ride or walk?”
“Walk,” Brogo said. “Horses are loud when you need quiet.”
“Did you see the fella in the red bandanna?” Thorne said. “Up on the shelf?”
“He’s restin’ now,” Brogo said.
Thorne nodded. “How many you figure on Pike’s side? Twelve? Fifteen?”
“Fewer than there was,” Brogo said. “Vance had more. Fewer now.”
Thorne almost smiled. “You always talk like that?”
“What way’s that?”
“Measured. Like numbers do you favors.”
Brogo shrugged. “I count what keeps me alive. Never found much need for the rest.”
They moved as the canyon cooled, as the heat lowered its hands and the bats came out to measure the air. They stepped around men, and the things men had dropped and they didn’t … they didn’t do the prayers. There are men who can kneel in the middle of aftermath and say the right words over strangers; both Thorne Wilder and Brogo Mann were not those men. They had the decency to look away when they could and the sense to look long enough when they couldn’t, so that if anyone asked later where a boy’s father had gone missing, they could point right and tell the truth.
At the west rim they paused. Thorne felt the way out in his bones, like a drawn line. Brogo stood a step back from the edge, watching the world the way a carpenter watches a level quietly and with never-ending small corrections.
“They’ll circle down after dark,” Brogo said. “Men can’t stand to leave their own. Even in a war they didn’t start. And they’ll want revenge whose size fits their pride, not their sense.”
“So, we give ‘em nothing to find,” Thorne said.
“Or we give ‘em something they don’t like finding.”
Thorne looked at him. “You any good at choices?”
“I’m good at leavin’ the wrong ones undone.”
Thorne liked the sound of that without trusting it. He pointed his mouth north. “There’s a little notch in the ridge comes out to a stand of pinon that hides a trail looks like it’s goin’ nowhere. It does go nowhere if you don’t know where somewhere is. I do.”
Brogo looked at Thorne the way a man looks at a map someone else found. He nodded once. “Let’s go nowhere.”
They went.
Brew what we brew on the porch
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