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It’s when he’s reading the Bible that he remembers. It’s been a long three days, and he’s very nearly done (he pauses after 1 Peter 4:8; above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins), but now he isn’t so sure he’ll finish after all, because everything hits him at once, and not one second of it is pretty.
Here’s what he remembers: childhood, his first memories from any life, in a jail cell. Coming into his own as a miserable young man under a strict moral system devoid of kindness and leaving no room for interpretation, believing that he is kept from returning to the hell he crawled out of only by virtue of the rigid structure of those rules: God's rules, men's rules, rules that came from neither but rather spawned from his own head and haunted him, and all of them the same. The stench of Toulon; the wrath of the inmates. Promotion. Prestige. The rivers of the Seine. Death.
Jean Valjean.
Lord, above all else, he remembers Jean Valjean. As a convict, as the mayor, as a sinner, as a saint. As his savior, in a sense he thinks at first is less of religion than of literal experience--delivered as he was from the barricades by a man who had no reason whatsoever to deliver him--but it’s funny, the religious spin feels right, too. As his damnation, without any of that confusion. His damnation, played straight.
He’d hated Jean Valjean. Hunted him. Opposed him.
It was only at the very end, he realizes (recalls?), that he saw what Valjean had been the whole time: a man, a fundamentally good man, who saved him even when letting him die would have solved all of his problems. As an unhappy misanthrope in what should have been the latter middle half of his life, standing on the edge of a bridge and wanting nothing more but to jump, he had no chance, no chance at all of figuring out the intricacies of his perception of Jean Valjean, couldn’t look inwardly and figure out who, or what, that man was to him if not an enemy.
As an unhappy eight year old boy sitting on a wooden bench at the train station, it all seems pretty clear. He’d been crazy, but it was no general madness; his unhappiness and unwillingness to compromise were undeniable, but what damned him, what had truly damned him, was far more monomaniacal than that. Jean Valjean, or rather, his own obsession with him. And in that obsession, there was something like love. Sure, there was--he knew there were men who were crazy for his mama, men who came after his daddy died and thought they loved her when they in turn mostly hurt her. If all that he remembers was real, or even if it wasn’t, what does he care, he had probably been a little in love with Jean Valjean.
It isn’t then as earth-shattering a revelation as it might have been in the past. Jean Valjean meant a whole hell of a lot to Javert (that was his name back then, he remembers, just one word, like he wasn’t human enough for two), but he isn’t shit in the way of Ben Wade’s life, and knowing that he might have loved a convict in France doesn’t change the fact that his daddy is six feet under and his mama isn’t coming back. That he doesn’t know what he’s gonna eat for dinner tonight. That he is, for the first time in this life, if not for the first time he can remember, completely and utterly on his own.
It seems to him then that he is on the precipice of everything that is to come, standing between two roads and not knowing which to go down. He’ll move on, because he has to, can’t stay in this train station for much longer until the police start sniffing him out and moving him along anyway, but then… what?
The first option, as he sees it, is that he goes back and finds a way, somehow, to strike out an honest living, returning to the town and getting a spot in the orphanage if he’s lucky or just living out on the streets if he isn’t. He’s no stranger to the thought of swallowing his pride and asking for work, any work, and perhaps he could run errands for the local lawmen (after all this time, and across all these lives, he’s still a creature of habit at his core) until they recognize what a hard worker he is and give him more responsibility. He’ll follow once again the harsh rule of God and man to keep from falling back into the gutter, living in circles, lifetime after lifetime erasing what he’d learned and starting back where he’d started before. Maybe he’ll be more understanding this time. Maybe if he meets a man he recognizes from years ago (years and years and years and what does it matter?), he’ll let him go about his merry way.
Then again, maybe not.
The other option is to strike out the other way--there was never any middle ground for a man like him. He’s born to be either a man of the law or a man in opposition of it; he’ll never be let into polite society, not as he was then, the son of a criminal with Romani blood that marked him out as other before he even opened his mouth, not as he is now, an orphan son of a whore abandoned by his mother with just about jack and shit to his name. Before he died, Jean Valjean had shown him, whether he’d meant to or not, that the world was not as black and white as it seemed, that he was wrong about his strict perceptions in life, that a convict could still turn out to be the mayor and though both faces of the man were true, the first did not make the second a mask. Perhaps he too could have broken his mold, been neither lawman nor criminal for a little while, or at least figured out how to blur the lines he saw when when he was reborn afresh.
The Seine took that lesson from him. In this life, the lines remain hard and solid--lines like prison bars. At eight, at the tender fucking age of eight years old, Ben Wade has to make a choice.
Remembering the suffering he went through trying to uphold the law that did not protect him, eternally striving to win the respect of men who would never, ever give it no matter how well he did, bested time and again by a man who had learned long ago all the lessons he’d never take to, it isn’t a hard coin toss. He’d been a lawman before. He’ll be a criminal now.
First, though, he has to sit down and finish the Good Book. If he’s gonna spend the rest of his life disappointing his mama, he has to do right by her now; even after what she’s done to him, he owes her that much.
Though he has theoretically done it at least once before, growing up is the hardest thing that Ben Wade ever does. He’s many things in life, but he ain’t lucky, not when he’s young, anyhow, and he ends up on those streets just as surely as he figured he would. The daily struggle he faces for his life makes it easier for him to hate the world, or more accurately, to decide to rob the whole of it blind. The haunting memories his brain swims with, memories that aren’t his but are, or are his but aren’t, make it all the worse. Those memories make his hard life even harder because, though they act as a sort of guide on what not to do (how not to get caught, sometimes, because he remembers his own tricks as a lawman and he’s smart enough that it’s a snap to rework them for his current ambitions), they weigh on him. He knows things no kid should ever know, sees death in all the forms it can take when he closes his eyes, and yet only has the mind of a child to work with when he tries to make sense of it all. It’s not right, but nobody’s there to tell him he shouldn’t have to deal with it, so little Ben Wade goes to sleep at night uneasy and, when he wakes up screaming with the taste of river water on his tongue, there’s no one to hold him until the pain goes away.
When he gets older, Ben will take these inconsistencies and horrible recollections and make a conscious decision to be everything now that he wasn’t then; he remembers how lonely his first life had been and makes it an effort to fall in love quickly and deeply everywhere he goes. He remembers how stoic he’d striven to be and adopts an unconcerned, easy going demeanor (trial through fire, with this one, but he pushes through and fakes it until it’s permanent). He remembers how meager the salary he lived on had been, how Spartan his habits, and swears to God and himself that he’ll indulge in luxury. Someday, he promises, prophecies, hopes, he’s gonna be living in homemade sin. For now, he’s nothing more than a small boy wishing that he could be who he was because he remembers that people then were scared of him, and if they would cross the street when they saw him coming like that now, he wouldn’t get tossed around half as often.
It takes a year for him to work up the determination to actually start in on being a criminal, and the first time he takes something that isn’t his (he robs a bakery, and though he’s not really old enough to understand irony that well, a certain part of him delights in this, or delights in his hatred of himself for it) he feels bad, yeah, guilt sets in his gut like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pond, but he’s not hungry that night, either, and hell, that’s more than he can say for all the nights proceeding. All in all, theft sets itself up to be pretty good.
It takes eight more years after that for Ben to graduate from petty thievery (more than half of his haul just accounting for things he needs to survive) to joining a real outfit. During that time, he spends six months in jail, though not consecutively, and begins to grow himself a little reputation in his home town. He learns that this time around he has a smooth tongue, and that, when he’s not trying to be good, it’s exactly as easy as he’d always thought to be bad. By the second year of his operation, he’s never getting caught when he slips his hand into a stranger’s waistcoat pocket. He has his first woman, in the Biblical sense, when he’s 15 and half drunk, a barmaid some twenty years his senior who he charms with a few passing compliments and a few more coins passed over for the drink than he strictly owes her. It’s sloppy and quick (as quick as falling in love, and exactly as hard, ha, ha), but she pets him when it’s over, and at the end of the day, he figures he understands what all the fuss is about.
(Alone that night, his mind fixes bizarrely on Hebrews 13:4, and God will judge the adulterer and the sexually immoral, and he has to wonder at it a bit, because out of all the things he’s done, this doesn’t feel half as rotten as the rest, but he supposes what does it matter, he’s damned all the same.)
The outfit that picks him up is a mostly unorganized conglomeration of cowards and drunks with no reputation to speak of--even as inexperienced as he is with all this, he can see that. Their leader’s a bum; that’s the problem. He doesn’t command respect except with his gun, and that only works so long as he’s the only man in the room who has any arms to speak of. Sooner or later, Ben can see (he’s told he’s perceptive beyond his years, though he never lets people in on exactly how right they are when they tell him), he’s gonna get shot--he’s seen men like that get shot so many times before that he stopped keeping count even back then--and everything’s gonna go to hell when he does. For half a year, Ben holds his tongue, goes along on insignificant heists, holdups, and robberies (all for paltry funds that he doesn’t even get his rightful share of), holds up carriages, takes a purse or two. And practices. He practices his draw, his aim. He practices his way around a gun in every way he can figure to practice, which is easy enough, and he practices being a man, too (and still, though he reminds himself every day that he’s theoretically done it all before, that’s harder, that’s so much harder), because if he hasn’t already done all his growing, it’ll show on his face in a hurry when it counts and then he won’t ever get the chance to finish up.
When he’s established himself as the best gunman in the crew (not as significant a feat as one might expect it to be in a band of outlaws, considering all of his compatriots are often so drunk they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but he’s proud of it nonetheless), he takes his stand. In the middle of dinner one night before a planned robbery too big for their tiny outfit, Ben stands on the table and blows the leader’s brains out. It’s the first man he’s ever killed, but he shoves that from his mind, doesn’t let himself consider how he feels, because by the time it’s over he’s telling the others that they can come along with him, any who want more than what they have, or they can die. About half think to challenge him; killing six more men doesn’t feel any different than killing that first.
Ben Wade sets off with the rest.
From that day on, that name means something. There’s a deep part of him that remembers the underlying satisfaction he’d experienced when the name Javert terrified criminal rats across Paris (the longing he’d felt before he’d even turned ten years old for that old reputation); that same part of him preens when he sees men’s eyes go wide at the sound of his shiny new name. He’s a natural authority, is what does it for him. Even before he’d been himself, people would follow him. They’d been, and are now, too intimidated to do otherwise.
And it’s good.
As he grows into his role, becomes the Ben Wade, not just another man on the town looking for trouble, he travels. California, Arizona, Texas, everywhere in between. Chicago, when the occasion strikes him. Mexico, when it’s necessary. He kills men until it became second nature, until he stops thinking about his soul burning in hell as he goes to sleep at night. He has women at every stop he makes, loves every one of them for the handful of minutes he knows them, and hell, he has men, too; picks up Charlie Prince he suspects more through his looks than his quick draw and the threat of his gun.
All through these years, he doesn’t think once about who he’d been, what he was. He sure as hell never thinks the name Jean Valjean, never lets himself wonder what that man would think of him now, the inspector fallen low, the convicter turn convicted. He doesn’t think of any of that anymore, not one time, and so his first slipup knocks him down, totally unprepared, when he’s feeling just a little too sorry for himself. He’s in chains on his way down to Yuma for the first time (it's a day for firsts, seems like); the stench of the place brings him right back to Toulon. He’s 25, then, but the smell and the men and the hard eyed guards erase the years in a second, and he’s a 17 year old in a man’s uniform all over again, and his head spins with it, with that same old misery, only this time it’s worse, because damn it, he isn’t even on the right side of the bars.
He’s become everything he’d despised back then. Vindictively, Ben gives this thought a bark of laughter. Good. He doesn’t owe anything to that version of himself or the man who’d plagued him. He only owes anything at all to the men he’s responsible for and to himself, this Ben Wade version of himself in the here and now, and nothing else he ever was or ever will be. When he digs down into it, Ben even thinks that this is the better version of himself, that by some cosmic joke he’s able to feel and care much deeper now as a murderer and a gangster than he had when he was an upstanding man of the law. In a way, it makes sense; he’s known enough lawmen in both lives to understand that the profession itself is an irresistible siren’s song for the scum of the earth. Through the whole overlong stretch of his existence, he’s hated those men, brutes and cons, all, who took up the title of the Law not to protect or uphold anything, but rather to abuse the position and to dominate those they arrested and those they stood watch over.
Sitting on that bench (and is it just a coincidence, he wonders, that all these revelations come to him when he’s miserable and has nothing more than unforgiving wood to rest on?), Ben pulls himself from his introspection for long enough to assess his surroundings. A renewed abhorrence of these prison guards encouraging him on, Ben smiles horribly to himself and knows that, hate or not, he’s soon going to be very, very close to the one lawman with the misfortune of guarding his cell.
He’s a free man again before the sun starts its descent.
Nothing can force Ben to think of what he’d known once, and so for a very long time after Yuma, he doesn’t. He doesn’t think of morals or France or Jean Valjean for an additional 13 years after that one unpleasant flash (all the times he finds himself remembering faces that have never seen this side of the Atlantic when he’s drifting into or out of sleep, all the times he’s able to produce a Bible verse that he’d memorized back when it meant something very different to him, all the times he sees a man and has to double take because he’s seen that look, but no, no, it’s not him, it couldn’t be, being tactically overlooked in this calculation), and when it comes back to him in a way that he can’t ignore, he has to laugh, because he’s on his way back to that very same prison. This time, though, it isn’t the place that does it, not the place at all (no part of him really believes by now that he’s going to see Yuma a third time, as the second had been rather unexciting and had concluded with a disappointingly simple escape), but rather, a man.
Dan Evans has the very same look on his face that Ben remembers from Jean Valjean. During their first meeting, it throws him off very slightly.
As they continue their acquaintance, it starts to throw him off a lot.
Ben tries to pay the man to stay away; a few coins is more than worth the peace of mind that they’ll buy. But no, damn it, he’s not greedy for change after all, it’s a ruse, no shit it’s a ruse, and that kind of blatant trap hasn’t worked on him since he was 16, but then, in the intervening years, he never saw Dan Evans.
Maybe part of him wants to be caught.
The first day is the worst--between their holdover at Evans' ranch (Ben’s acquaintance with his family, most specifically his pretty wife and his unpleasant son, both of whom, he suspects, develop an infatuation with him quick enough to do him proud) and their talk around the fire that night, it doesn’t take Ben long at all to feel intimately close to Dan Evans, and in that uncomfortable closeness, he finds memories, more new and vivid memories than he’d uncovered since that first day at the train station a lifetime ago, and just like then, none of them are pleasant.
Because he wants to distance himself from every intrusive memory plaguing his waking thoughts, to get away from whoever or whatever he might have been, and because, truth be told, the man just annoys the hell out of him, Ben feels no regret whatsoever in doing what he does to Tucker, and takes the beating for it gladly. It’s a reminder to Dan (why does he care?) and his posse, and over all of that, it’s a reminder to himself of exactly who and what he is. He’s Ben Wade. He’s a remorseless killer. Hell, he’ll do it again if given the chance.
That’s all good enough to say, of course. While he’s doing it, no part of him asks if the charred structure he’d seen which must have once been Dan’s barn has anything to do with the target he picked (if the purpose had been just to take out an adversary, McElroy would have been the obvious choice, strictly speaking), or asks why it feels so familiar when Evans cuts the beating a little shorter than his other captors thought it right to go.
In the dirt, he pants, feeling the ghost of a noose around his neck and rope around his wrists, and can do nothing but laugh.
“They’ll hang me in the morning,” he sings and, thinking of that noose again, he almost wishes they had.
Wade keeps making bad decisions after that. Saving them in Apache country, for one. Toying with Dan’s son (and why is it, that whenever he looks at the boy, he sees a different child entirely, that well-to-do blonde girl that William doesn’t resemble at all, except in temperament and proximity to--) long enough to see that hero-worshipping look set in. Cooperating in their escape from the construction camp and not slipping away in the confusion, even when he could have. Not telling Charlie to just kill them all, Dan included, when he calls to him through the window. Not setting off without looking back or feeling a hint of remorse.
Helping Dan get him all the way to the train. This whole thing with Dan--he’s been treating it like a game, but it isn’t, and he knows it. It’s a little like fate, and (he recognizes it this time, no use in saying he doesn’t), maybe he’s a little in love. Javert went his whole life without loving once, or without knowing he did, and that had always bugged Ben--that pact he’d made in his teenage years to fall in love quick as he pleased still governed him. The barmaid (Eliza? Emma? only two days gone and already the encounter is going fuzzy, even as memories from the turn of the century remain vivid and clear) back in Bisbee had only been the latest in a long line, but none of those little infatuations hit him as quickly or as totally as this one does. Dan Evans is in a league of his own; a man like no other Ben’s ever met (but that isn’t true, is it? rather, the problem all along has been that Dan is so fucking familiar).
As they run over rooftops, one word plays through his mind, threatens to overwhelm him even as he tries to swallow it. He wonders, then, sitting, panting, and listening to that headstrong man tell him he’s not stubborn, wonders whether he’s alone in this regenerative cycle, whether his adversary learned all the lessons he’d needed to learn in his first life and therefore didn’t need to be given seconds, or whether he hadn’t, or maybe this wasn’t about lessons at all, but rather, just a circular procession of lives that could be hell if he made it that, but in reality meant absolutely nothing at all.
“Why are you telling me this?” Ben asks, and it’s right then and there that he knows everything that’s going to happen next. What he’s going to do.
What Dan is.
The train comes, and Ben gets on it. Back to Yuma, back to prison, back to the gutter he crawled out of two lifetimes ago. If he were a better man, maybe he would see it through, ride the rails the whole way, take his punishment as it’s given. End his second life right where he’d started his first and hope for redemption the third time around. Javert, he knows, would have done it, and perhaps that means once upon a time, he would have, too.
These days, he’s gotten too fond of pleasure and living to throw it all away for high faulting morals that never did him a lick of good. His aims are selfish, and even if he is doing this for Dan (no one else, ever, could have got him on that train without the fight of their lives, but he does it without a second thought for this man he’s known for all of two days and understood for under an hour, if that), well, he’s sure there’s something selfish in that, too. Dangling his cuffed hands out the barred window and looking down fondly, Ben is already thinking about how, once he’s busted himself out, he might pay a visit down to Bisbee, back to Evans' ranch under happier circumstances, to see what he’s done with the kind of money Butterfield will throw at him, see if he regrets not taking more, which of course he won't. Dan is proud, he needs to earn what he gets and follow through with what he starts, and that’s admirable and tinglingly familiar in more ways than one, even if it isn’t strictly how Ben runs things now. Ben feels a surge of warmth for the man and his mind wanders further to how he might best take Dan back to his bed at the ranch, pondering what the rancher would feel like in a more intimate context. His mind is consumed with the question of whether sleeping with Dan would be a fight, like everything is with him, or if he would take on a less high strung disposition as soon as he’d gotten his rocks off for the first time in who knew how long, and this question is so tantalizing that he’s immersed in it, totally immersed, and he doesn’t see Charlie raise the pistol until it’s too late to do anything but shout.
“NO!” doesn’t stop a bullet.
Dan’s shot through with more than one.
The world freezes for a second while Ben hauls out of the train. There’s no movement, no talk, and maybe if he doesn’t break it with his own words, his own actions, then the moment will last, and Dan won’t die, but that’s crazy, he’s thinking crazy. Ben tries to pull himself together; everybody dies.
It’s just never affected him personally like this before.
Feeling as lost as he was the day his mama left him at that train station (and it’s funny, isn’t it, that his story starts and ends the same way?), Ben can do nothing but look down at Dan, a different sight entirely from the one he’d been soaking in just seconds ago, and from the ground, coughing blood and pressing ineffectually at his bullet wounds, Dan looks back up at him. At first, his eyes are glassy--unseeing. Then, though, right before Ben turns away, something flashes in Dan’s eye, something like recognition, and Ben catches it, and when he does he knows, he knows Dan knows, and that his gut feeling had been right all along, that he’d chased Jean Valjean, in a twisted and thoroughly backward way, into another life entirely, and that he will continue to do so until they both run out of chances. Maybe that means today, maybe not.
Everything after is a blur; he’s hazy and impulsive in a way he’d only been once before, and that was in his past life (and how well had that ended for him then?). He kills his whole crew but Charlie first, last, and most passionately, Charlie, who shot Dan, Dan, who’s bleeding out by his son, his son who isn’t his daughter, not the waif daughter of the whore (had he been born where he was in this life as retribution for that girl in the first?), not at all, but he’s holding Dan as he dies all the same. All the while, he’s not thinking, or rather, he is, but only one word, over and over.
Valjean, Valjean, Valjean.
He thinks to go to Dan one more time, to get some sort of closure, but William isn’t bluffing when he aims his gun now, and what’s closure, anyway.
For the boy, and his mother (Alice had been in his fantasy for the ranch, too--she’s a beautiful woman and probably hospitable enough to share, but it’s hard to take turns when there’s nothing to pass around), and for Dan’s fucking memory, he gets on the train, makes sure it’s not for naught that they came all this way. What a waste--all this trouble, only for the one man who it truly mattered for (to McElroy and Butterfield and even Ben himself it wasn’t nothing more than a game, but it had been Dan’s last hope--Ben had seen that in his eyes when he was choking him, and that was what had finally made up his mind) to end up dead in the dust.
A moment goes by where Ben Wade considers going full down to Yuma and taking his noose after all, but he pushes it away. For Dan? For a man he’d hardly known for a grand total of less than three days? No; his teenage oath to avoid repeating a single one of the traits that had defined the good inspector extended, even then, to his death. He won’t die by suicide, even suicide by the law's proxy.
Not again.
Instead he escapes--he goes down to Mexico like he’d planned, and when he’s shot three years later and dies bleeding on the dirt (very similar to Dan’s passing in all but circumstance), it’s not self slaughter, even if he has been unduly reckless in these past few years, running around with no crew and only his reputation (alone and feared, so maybe he hasn’t changed one bit after all, because nothing is different) to protect him. The bullet comes as a punch in the gut and maybe as a bit of a relief. He lies there, his lifeblood seeping out of him, and laughs a just little, at himself. At life. At the whole situation.
Dying takes longer than he’d figured it would. It gives him just enough time to consider what he’s facing: the hell he once concerned himself with? Another life? Total oblivion? If this second life was meant to teach him any lessons, he doesn’t think he learned them, unless the lesson was how to have fun before the end came (and why not? that sounds like a solid enough lesson to him). Maybe he’ll figure out the great answer next time around. Maybe he’ll figure out how to live as neither lawman nor bandit, supposing this bullet doesn’t take everything he’s learned away from him the way the Seine had. Maybe--and the sound of water is rushing in his ears now, odd thing, isn’t it, considering he’s dying in the desert with none running for miles in any direction--if he’s given his third shot, he’ll find that elusive man and catch up to him before they’re both at the very end of their races, him back around for a third time, too, dancing reincarnations with each other, only this go round, it won’t be decades of pursuit without understanding, and it won’t be three days of understanding without resolution, either.
Maybe all of that--maybe none.
For now, it doesn’t matter. No inevitability of fate or life will put the blood back in his body or take the bullet out, so Ben Wade contents himself to drifting through his last few moments of lucidity, just taking it all in.
It’s funny--he’s reminded of a song.