by Hayley Stone
Almena took care never to make eye contact with the corpse near my feet as she came and stood beside me. She hooked an arm through mine, the warm press of her body utterly familiar against my shoulder. I tried not to think of all the times my wife had pulled a similar move, usually when she wanted something, a stylish hat or material for a new dress, trading on my weakness for her.
Almena, on the other hand, didn’t seem motivated by what she wanted from me so much as what she wanted for me. Her presence felt like a shield against the hostile gazes of the other men. More were gathering every moment. Some seemed attracted to Almena’s fame, while others drifted in from the street now that the posse—at least those who’d survived—had ridden off. What I couldn’t understand was why. Why was she protecting me?
“You’re saying he’s with you?” Mole asked.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
I watched Almena’s finger rolling wrinkles into my sleeve. Nerves, maybe?
“Prove it,” Lizard said, looking ever paler. I nearly suggested he get himself to a doctor but thought better of it. Wouldn’t help Almena’s play to look too concerned.
“She don’t got to prove nothing,” Mole said to Lizard. Then to Guillory, “You don’t got to prove nothing, ma’am.” And back to Lizard in a low, threatening voice, “She’s the Grizzly fucking Queen, you moron.” He swatted him in the shoulder with his hat. “Haven’t you heard what she did in Abilene?”
“I think you mean Topeka,” someone else said.
“I heard it was Ellsworth.” Another man. “It was definitely Ellsworth, with the clawing and—and the gun—thing…”
Yet another fella, defended by the bodies in the crowd, remarked in no uncertain terms how much he’d enjoy seeing what a grizzly she was in bed. A few wheezed with laughter. For some reason, it bothered me: them exchanging crude words about Almena, like they knew the first thing about her.
“Not her,” Lizard hastened to clarify. “Him. He shot me. And he sounded an awful lot like a lawman when he did it. Maybe he’s lying to you, trying to get you to drop your guard, Miss Guillory. Planning on catching you with your drawers down.”
Almena let go of my arm. “You think so?”
What’s she up to now?
Mole shifted his gaze around, searching. “Actually… you might have a point there. Wasn’t he with another fellow earlier? Tall, fancy sort…”
“Could’ve been another marshal!” Lizard jumped onto this idea like a drowning man reaching for a rope.
“Hey! Isn’t that him there?”
Dempsey must’ve read my frown as a call for help because he pushed toward the front of the crowd, gun brandished. With their blood up from fighting off the posse, the crowd had no trouble redirecting their anger toward the newcomer. If Dempsey noticed his fresh peril, he wasn’t taking a whole lot of precaution against getting a knife in the back.
Almena angled her body toward me, just enough to hide her face from the crowd. She ran a finger along the edge of my jaw, real casual-like. But she whispered, “Shoot him.”
“What?”
“They need to know he’s not with you.” There was urgency in her voice. “You have to shoot him.”
I gave a hard shake of my head. “Not going to happen.”
“Shoot him,” she repeated, taking a moment to smile back at the crowd, “to save him.”
I had my teeth pressed so tightly together, felt like I was going to break my jaw.
“I’ll kill him.”
“Not if it’s a clean shot. But you have to make it look good, and you have to do it right now.” Almena squeezed my arm, enough to hurt. “They’ll kill him, if you don’t. I know you don’t want that boy’s blood on your conscience. I certainly don’t need more blood on mine.”
Someone grabbed Dempsey. As he shook their hands off, another man shoved him from behind, making him stagger forward. They berated him with questions: how’s it feel playing second fiddle to a dirty lawman? Who did he think he was? Did he have a death wish coming to Coffeyville? Dempsey held his fire, but I didn’t know how much longer his restraint would last; all it’d taken back on the road was the sound of thunder, and it was thundering now. Or maybe that was just the blood pounding in my head.
Assuming Guillory had every intention of following through with her threat as she drew my Colt from her holster—same one that’d killed Gil, and whoever else since she’d taken it off me in Asher—I caught her wrist, and lowered her hand, taking back my gun. Her eyes stayed with mine the whole time, and there was no doubt in my mind that Almena allowed me the liberty of disarming her. She wasn’t the type to let a man command her, unless he was doing what she wanted done. I tried not to dwell on the implications of that.
Before I lost my nerve, I shoved through the crowd, crossing the short distance to reach Dempsey. My stomach turned at the relief I saw in his face as he caught sight of me, believing I was coming to his rescue. The men around him paused, though they still clutched fistfuls of his shirt in their hands, the skin of their knuckles stretched tight over bone.
They need to know he’s not with you.
She was right. Didn’t make what I had to do any easier.
Dempsey’s lips had just begun to reflex in a smile when I cracked him across the face with my gun. His head snapped back from the force of the blow, but he recovered more quickly than I’d hoped, and gaped at me. He looked confused and hurt and—
I hit him again, this time using my fist.
Then I collared him and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “For the last time, you go back and tell your boss, whoever he is, I’m not for sale.” I held Dempsey’s lopsided gaze, his right eye already swelling like a grapefruit in June. Find Wade, I was trying to tell him, Explain I haven’t sold out to Guillory. “What I gotta do now, it’s just business.” I don’t have a choice.
He opened his mouth to say something, and I threw hard into his gut. His legs nearly gave out, and as he buckled forward with a groan, I leaned down to whisper in his ear, “next time I hit you, stay down.”
But soon as I let him go, he came at me with a half-growl, half-cry, using his shoulder as a battering ram against my chest. Knocked the wind right out of me. We went sprawling into the mud, locked in a brief struggle, until the men, without being asked, rallied on either side of us and pulled Dempsey off of me. He was still swinging madly.
My new “allies” held Dempsey, inviting me to attack him. If I was going to make this look real, I’d have to go harder at him than I’d planned. I had no option for gentleness. All eyes were on us, and too many hands were still where I couldn’t see them, hidden inside coats. Waiting, I suspected, for any sign of conspiracy. Any excuse to shoot us both and have done with it.
I couldn’t give them that excuse.
The men pinned Dempsey’s arms to his sides for the first few punches, but let go as I really started to lay into him, sensing their assistance was no longer required. Once freed, Dempsey put his arms up like we were engaged in friendly fisticuffs, clearly unaccustomed to real fighting. He kept his hands high, in front of his face, though his nose was already split open in a meaty gash and his mouth was all bloody. His one good eye shined red.
It was hard, not wincing each time I landed a hit. Fearing the crowd would catch on to my reluctance, I arranged my features into a more appropriate expression, one from my childhood. When I was younger, people always remarked with smiles how much I took after my mother, with my blond hair and angular cheeks; but I had my daddy’s eyes. They liked to say that, too. And what is it people always say about the eyes being the windows to the soul?
I shuttered my feelings behind my father’s glare. My name, after all, wasn’t really Apostle, it was Nathaniel, same as his. I let the devil do for me as he’d done for my father.
Wasn’t so hard.
Eventually, Dempsey ended up on the ground, curled around himself while I kicked. I finally caught him beneath his ribs with the toe of my boot, flipping him onto his b
ack where he lay panting like a wounded creature, holding up a hand at me filled with broken fingers.
“P-please,” he said, dribbling blood from his mouth.
I snapped back into myself so suddenly, I reckoned I’d be sick. I managed to hold it together long enough to say, “Remember what I told you before.” Any gentleness in my voice could have been explained by exhaustion, which was good because I wasn’t in the mood for pretending any longer. The storm overhead was passing, sun was coming out, and everything seemed garish in the light. I had a headache. “You just go on and take that message back to your boss, when you’re feeling better.”
“To hell with you,” Dempsey said in a low, pained voice.
“Well, there you have it,” Almena said, rejoining me while the rest of the men exchanged theories on who Dempsey was working for, and what madness had made him think he could take on Guillory’s marshal all by his lonesome.
Guillory’s marshal, I thought incredibly, but tried not to worry about my new reputation; be plenty of time for that later. As well as time to correct the record and make amends. I hoped.
“I hope that’s sufficient evidence for your inquiries, gentlemen,” Almena said. “Now someone go fetch the doctor before that boy bleeds to death on the street.”
Among The Willows
Chapter Thirteen
It was Almena’s idea to ford the Verdigris river on horseback, insisting it would be faster. I was less than enthusiastic about the idea for a multitude of reasons, chief among them being the risk of drowning—or, more specifically, being drowned. Not that I counted myself among the overly superstitious, but after everything I’d seen in the past few weeks, I was starting to wonder how many other frontier myths had some truth to them. If magic was real, then maybe the ghost woman of the river was real, too. La Llorona, the Mexicans called her. The weeping woman.
I’d heard various tales about her, the story mostly coming up whenever a child drowned or went missing along the shores of a river. The ghostly legend must have made its way up from the border, attaching to every body of water along the way, so that it seemed every river in the West had its own ghost or two. While the Verdigris wasn’t known specifically for a weeping woman, it was all too easy for me to imagine her at home in its waters or standing on its banks, shrouded by early morning mist.
“Did you hear that?” I asked at one point, swearing I heard crying through the reeds. “Sounds like a woman.”
“Don’t tell me you believe those old stories about La Llorona,” Almena said.
“Not sure what I believe these days.”
“And here I took you for a strict man of faith.”
“Faith’s a funny thing,” I said, still watching the river. I was seeing figures in every gnarled tree and overgrown shrub, my tired mind inventing faces in the shadows. “Easy to lose, hard to get back. Kind of like trust.”
“Good thing I’m not asking you to trust me then.” Almena laid a Winchester rifle across her lap, and I took it for the warning it was.
Back when I first asked Almena where we were going, she told me to wait and see. Not ominous at all. If she was worried about me getting a message off to one of my partners or other law enforcement persons and staging an ambush for her along the way, she was right to worry. That’s precisely what I would’ve done, except she made sure I wasn’t given the opportunity.
Almena eventually led us off the beaten path toward a trailhead obscured by a mountain of dry brush. She ordered me down to clear the way, and I set about the task, eager to stretch my legs. I forgot all about the open cuts on my hands until I met thistle. I yanked my arm back like I’d encountered the fangs of a snake, suppressing a curse. Blood welled from my careless contact with the bush, red lines spreading into the valleys of my knuckles.
“What’s the holdup?” Almena strained to see over my shoulder, where I held my hands in front of me, waiting for the sting to die down. I wondered how Dempsey was faring with his injuries but quickly shook off the thought. Best not go there.
“Marshal?”
“Nothing,” I answered, shaking out my hand. “Just being stupid is all.”
“Well, don’t be stupid for too long.” Her lips curved in a thin smirk.
I was so busy dwelling on my guilt over Coffeyville and hiding my infirmity, I didn’t notice how uncomfortable Almena looked: her waxy complexion, or the way she sat hunched forward in her saddle, like she might go to sleep against the horse’s head. Only later would I recall these details, as you do with dreams, the fog burning off after a while.
I sucked on the back of my knuckles, nursing them as I mounted up. Almena led the way, urging her animal into the nighttime quagmire. Ordinarily, the Verdigris was a thick color any copper prospector would recognize on sight, hence its name. Sometimes it was more green than grey, other times a barren brown, depending on where you were seeing it and what time of day. But it wasn’t a changeable river, as far as rivers in Kansas went. Even under the best conditions, staring into its depths wasn’t likely to return much, certainly no insight into what lay beneath. On a clear day, might be you got back a shivery reflection looking in, a wobbly version of yourself, but that was it. The river kept its secrets.
I waded in less confidently than Almena, taking it slow, unsure of either the river or my mount. I spoke in a gentle manner to my partner—the horse, not Guillory—as she navigated the moving current, and allowed the animal time to pick her steps. The water was just high enough to wet the tops of my boots. I kept my eye on natural debris, logs and branches mostly, bits of shadow floating downriver. Any serpentine shapes what might spook the horse. Thankfully, the river crossing proved uneventful apart from a couple close calls with some uneven mud. I didn’t hear the crying woman again.
As we climbed the opposite bank, pushing over the nose of the hill, I looked back. It was doubtful anyone from Coffeyville—or Baxter, for that matter—would be able to follow us now. If the hidden path didn’t throw them, then our fording the river would. Made sense now why it’d been so damn hard to find Almena the first time around, and so easy to lose her afterward. The outlaw knew her geography and Kansas provided ample space to disappear, never mind the surrounding Territories. She’d already proven her good relations with the Osage.
It was the sort of thing made a man—a marshal—wonder what he was doing out here, being led into the wilderness by a killer. Even an old dog had the sense not to follow his owner out back when he held a gun in his hands and already smelled of blood.
I reined up suddenly. Took Almena a few extra seconds to notice. She frowned, looking none too happy to be stopping.
“What?” she said.
“I think we need to have some words, Miss Guillory,” I told her, polite as I could manage under the circumstances. My knuckles chafed in the cool air, and my hands ached from holding the reins for so many hours. We’d left in such a hurry, I hadn’t had time to pick up some riding gloves to replace the ones I’d left with Wade and the coach.
I flexed my fingers, feeling blood rushing back into them. That hurt, too. A fuzzy sort of pain. But it was still preferable to the stiffness, and that sense of holding still for too long.
“Ride and talk, marshal.”
“No, ma’am.” She looked back at me, eyebrow cocked. “I’m not going another step with you. Not until we’ve settled some things.”
I swung my leg over the rump of my horse, climbing down from the saddle. I took some pleasure in the look on Almena’s face, frozen in surprise. She’d let me keep my gun, thinking we might need my talent against any stragglers from Coffeyville or vandals on the road. Imagine she regretted that decision just now, though I was careful not to make any indication of going for my piece. I didn’t intend on using it, anyway.
“Get back on your horse, Apostle,” Almena said, raising the Winchester between us as I came closer. Twin bores stared me down, each one as large and mean as a buffalo’s eye.
I felt tired and reckless. I reached up and grabbed the
Winchester by the barrel. Shoved it out of my face. “Come on. Enough of that.”
Instead of shooting me, Almena leaned back appreciatively, eyebrows raised. “You’ve got some balls on you, Marshal!” She let the gun stay where I’d pushed it aside, the barrel resting against her saddlebag.
“Let’s get something straight,” I said to her, trying to keep my temper. “Only reason I’m here is on account of you helping rescue me back at Coffeyville. I’m grateful for that. I’m less grateful for the way you did it, but that’s splitting hairs. I’m not fool enough to think you did what you did out of the goodness of your heart, or because you fancy having a marshal for a friend. You want something from me. Fair enough. But unless you intend on knocking me out and tying me to my horse, you’re going to tell me where we’re headed right now.”
“Don’t tempt me.” Her breath misted in the cool air, reminding me of slow-curling smoke from a cigarette. I wondered if she smoked. “Fine. I guess it can’t hurt. Not like you’ll be talking to anyone anytime soon. We’re going to my house, if you must know.”
“Your house?”
“What? You thought I lived on my horse? Yes, my house. I own some property, some miles from here. That’s where we’re headed.”
“For what purpose?”
“I need some…things.”
“What things?”
“Personal things. I told you where we were going. Now get back on your horse.” I stood my ground, wanting to know more, until she added a resentful, “Please.”
After another moment, I climbed back into my saddle. “All right. Just know this conversation ain’t finished.”
Almena made a small noise of acknowledgment, and on we went.
I thought back to this conversation several times afterward, while we traveled in darkness and silence. I noticed she’d only referred to her house. Her property. Never once calling it home. There was a difference; I think she knew that. After the things she’d done, the man she’d lost, and the man who’d lost her, Almena Guillory no longer had a home to come back to.