Serenity

7. Friends

Bill Lawson growled and picked up the pace. Sheriff Bailey had finally given up his crusade to keep him alive and taken off for the sanctuary of his own bed.

About Goddamn time.

Crows called each other names over the tops of the buildings along Serenity High-Street. Bill's feet shuffled up blooms of dust while he kept his watery eyes on the prize.

At the end of the street. Stuck back a few feet from the main thoroughfare, there waited his only other love.

Home.

Sure, others sniggered and called him a fool for spending his hard earned money on the shack, but he owned it. That was the whole point. He owned it. No matter what happened in the shit-heel world of gold, power and bad, bad men, Bill had a place to call home.

Hickey had understood. He'd appreciated the place.

After finding the man facedown in the mud of a night's worth of rain, Hickey Harrison had been oh so grateful for Bill's ramshackled property.

They'd sat together in silence, watching the sparks of woodchips flicker in the small fireplace.

Fall brought the rain in Serenity. Sixteen years of seasons for Bill. The last two without work. He'd sold his lease on his Claim and put his nose permanently in the bottom of a glass. Although nothing could drown out the sound of the coal miners singing back in Wales.

He'd been sent there to learn more about new mining technology by his previous employer. A faceless conglomerate of wealthy mine owners. However, the trip of a lifetime proved to be far more than an experience for work.

Strangers had become friends. Those friends had died.

Upon his return to America, his exaggerated alcohol consumption caused bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea took their toll on Bill's ailing liver. The shock of it made him lighten up the drinking for a spell. Not quite ready to give up the ghost of his life at that point.

Hickey had been a blessing. And a curse.

Bill kicked at the ground and swore under his breath. The reassuring odours of horse and hay wafted over him as he got closer to the stables on the left side of the road. To the right the town died. A broken down line of cheap wire fencing gave up its credibility and left the open wasteland of the parched valley to blow its way in.

How did he get here? At what stupid moment in his dumb young youth had he actually thought that coming here would be a good idea? He'd long since lost the reason.

Hickey had made all that fade away. Having a friend out here really was the true treasure. Gold be hanged.

He still spoke to him sometimes. Good old Hickey had a habit of showing up at the strangest of times. Middle of the night even. Laying passed out on his own doorway, Bill had met him again. Four weeks and two days after his disappearance and supposed death, Hickey Harrison's apparition came.

Crouching down, his brown, faded leather chaps had creaked with the strain. Hickey snapped back the tip of his stained hat and grinned through his ginger stubble.
"Oh, shit, Billy Boy. You look like you had a real turd of a day."

Bill's head throbbed to a far-off drum beat. His swollen tongue and rebel limbs refused to cooperate with the tiny section of his inebriated brain that could remember.

He had loved that man. With every inch of his worn-out soul.

Bill's eyes misted over as hot tears threatened their way free on his final steps home. The image that Miss Molly had described, that morning after Hickey's apparent murder, seared a hot branding iron line straight into Bill's memories.