Free The Night Listener and Others by Chet Williamson

his paintings could exist in total reality.
    Eustace stood, sipped another few drops of sherry, and climbed the steps to his studio, where he turned on the lights, illuminating a number of paintings and other works sitting neatly on easels or drawing tables. He walked to the closed door at the end of the long room, withdrew a key from the pocket of his lounging jacket, and unlocked the door. Inside was a small chamber ten feet by eight, with paintings and drawings both framed and unframed leaning against the walls. Eustace drew a white sheet from half a dozen large, unframed canvases, wrapped his spindly arms about them, and carried them into the studio, where he leaned them against a table, drew up a chair, and sat down.
    The effort had made him a trifle breathless, but he grew more breathless still when he looked at the first painting. There he was, Eustace P. Saunders, seated next to Jack Binns, who was holding his hand and gazing lovingly into his eyes, which gleamed orange in the firelight. He could almost hear the words, spoken in a soft, gentle drawl—”Yore skin’s jes’s soft ‘n purty…”
    Eustace looked for a long time, until he could hear not only his lover’s voice, but the crackle of logs burning in the fire, smell the biscuits and coffee he had cooked for Jack and himself, feel the soft wind blowing across the Badlands.
    After a time, the vision faded, as it always did, and he turned to the next picture, and the next, and the next, until at length he arrived at the end of the book, in which Maria, at first held for ransom, eventually wins the love of the wild outlaw, reforms him, marries him, and stays with him in his vast and honest land. In the final illustration, she stands outside their modest cabin, built with their own toil, and waves to her husband and lover as he rides off to begin his day’s work on the range—
    “He turned his face toward her as his horse galloped into the dawn.”
    But now instead of Maria, a plain white blouse, a long leather skirt, and a bandanna replacing her Eastern finery, this painting, like all the others, bore the image of Eustace P. Saunders, dressed in Western garb, waving goodbye to Jack.
    “Why can’t it be that way?” said Eustace, tears forming in his eyes for his lost love, his love never found. “Why?”
    Then it came to him. It could. In the West, land of promise and dreams, anything was possible. He didn’t have to go on painting his desires, for in the West he could live them. The Desperado had told him that, and he believed it as he had never believed the tales of the Christ he had learned at his mother’s knees. With all his heart, he believed in this primitive kingdom where none would say him nay.
     
    He did not go into the West, however, with the stated nor even the conscious intention of seeking love. He went, as he put it to Arthur Hampton and others, in order to breathe in the heart of the West, to immerse himself therein in the hopes that his art could faithfully portray the country’s sights and sounds and spirit. To this end, Eustace took along a great many supplies: innumerable sketch books, rolls of canvas, oils, watercolors, and more. His baggage totalled a dozen large trunks, for, since he did not truly intend to return east, he thought it prudent to bring as many of his possessions as possible, all the fewer that would need to be sent for later.
    His destination, chosen after only brief deliberation, was Deadwood, South Dakota, the same area in which The Desperado was set. Eustace traveled alone, beginning on a bright April day a series of train rides that brought him to Deadwood four days later than had been scheduled, an hiatus that, rather than discouraging him, only further whetted his appetite for his final destination. A transfer from the St. Paul Railway to the Northwestern in Rapid City proved to be the final stumbling block, but, after receiving assurances from the conductor that all his trunks were safely aboard the