Lou Prophet 2

by Peter Brandvold

“There?”

  “Easy!”

  Layla brushed the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, tossed her hat away, shook her hair out of her eyes, and went to work.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Prophet rasped. He stiffened and grunted as Layla poked the knife through the jellied blood, probing for the bullet.

  “Hold still,” she said distractedly, pushing the knife deeper.

  “Wait. Give me somethin’ to bite on.”

  She plucked a bullet from his cartridge belt, and gave it to him.

  “Ready?”

  “All right.”

  “Here we go.”

  “Goddamn!”

  Several minutes of concentrated effort passed before the point of the knife tapped something solid, which Layla did not think was a rib. Pressing the flesh back with the blade, she took the knife’s handle in her left hand and followed it into the wound with her right index finger. When she felt the slug, she pinched it between her finger and thumb and removed it, holding it up for inspection.

  “Got it.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Prophet exclaimed through an enormous sigh, spitting the cartridge out of his mouth. His body relaxed as though a steel rod had been removed.

  She tossed the bullet away, wiped her bloody fingers on her jeans, and splashed whiskey over the wound. Prophet winced, his body retightening, eyelids fluttering. “Sweet Jesus, girl, you’re gonna kill me yet.”

  “I got the bullet out, didn’t I?” She offered the bottle, which Prophet grabbed greedily.

  When she’d flushed the wound thoroughly with the whiskey, Layla found needle and thread in her war bag. She disinfected and threaded the needle and sewed the wound tightly closed, stemming the blood flow. She cut the thread with her teeth, cleaned up the blood with a damp cloth, bandaged the wound with strips of her brother’s new shirt, and sat back on her heels with a sigh of utter exhaustion.

  Having drunk nearly three-quarters of the whiskey, Prophet relaxed finally, his muscles unclenching, his fists opening, and slept.

  Layla stood heavily and walked outside. Looking down the canyon, she saw no one. From the sun’s angle, she could tell it was getting on past noon. Her brothers would be wondering about her. She’d been due back at the ranch last night, but the rain had waylaid her, and she’d spent the night in the barn of a small rancher not far from Little Missouri.

  She needed to get home, but she didn’t see how that was going to happen anytime soon, with Loomis and his riders scouring the country for Prophet. She had a mind to leave the man here. She’d done her duty. She’d sewn the man’s side and risked her life in the process. She could leave him here with the rest of the whiskey, a canteen, and some jerky, and he’d probably make it.

  But what if he didn’t? The wondering would drive her crazy ... wondering if she’d left a man to die alone.

  Having no choice but to take him with her, her best bet would be to wait until after the sun had gone down, and make her way to the Pretty Butte country under cover of darkness.

  With that thought in mind, she dropped to her butt and stood the rifle between her knees, steeling herself for the long, tense vigil she had ahead of her.

  The sun was sinking low over the badlands as Gerard Loomis sat his steeldust gelding and watched the seven riders approach him, their shadows long in the sage, the bluestem waving at their horses’ hocks. The riders descended a low ridge at a trot, foam glistening silver on the broad chests of the exhausted mounts.

  As the men neared, their faces swam into focus, sunburned and drawn with fatigue. Loomis drew deep on the cigarette he’d shaped while he waited for the men to arrive at the appointed time, and blew the smoke out through his nose.

  “Where’s Hack and Jordan?”

  The spare, hard-muscled foreman, Luther McConnell, frowned as he brought his snorting dun to a halt. “I thought maybe they were with you, Mr. Loomis.”

  ‘They were supposed to meet the rest of you at Stony Creek Ridge.”

  “I know that, sir, but they didn’t show.”

  Loomis turned to the others, who had congregated behind McConnell, slouching tiredly in their saddles. “None of you saw them?”

  “Not since about noon, sir,” one of the men said.

  Loomis appraised the group. In spite of all their fancy hardware and knowledge of how to use it—Loomis and McConnell had hand-picked the best gunslicks in the territory to protect the Crosshatch from nesters and rustlers— they looked as cowed as a half-assed posse of tinhorns on the trail of Wes Hardin.

  The characteristically composed McConnell gave a shrug and squinted his gray eyes at Loomis. Loomis looked away, drawing on his cigarette.

  The foreman said reasonably, “Sir, these men and horses are plumb beat.”

  Loomis turned to him sharply. “And my son is dead.”

  “I know that, sir, but I think we best start fresh in the morning. Afoot, he won’t get far. He has to be around here somewhere.”

  “What about Hack and Jordan?”

  “They know where home is.”

  “Shit!” Loomis barked, face flushing as his eyes scanned the rolling tableland. His son was dead, and the man responsible was out there somewhere, roaming free.

  He spat, cursed again, and spurred his horse up a low rise. He gazed around at the distant, cream-colored buttes brushed with late-day pink, his jaw set with frustration, dark eyes wide with bone-splitting madness and anger.

  McConnell was right. To be effective, the men needed rest and fresh horses. God damn Luther and his good horse sense, anyway!

  “All right,” Loomis called down the hill. “We head back to the ranch for shut-eye. But I want everyone mounted and ready to go again at first light!”

  He spurred his horse down the hill, aiming the steeldust toward home. He wanted neither to speak nor be spoken to. He wanted only to ride and think about what he was going to do to Lou Prophet once he found the son of a bitch.

  The canyon in which the Crosshatch headquarters sat, skirted on the west by the Little Missouri, was cloaked in purple shadows by the time Loomis reached it an hour later. The cottonwoods rustled over the log, hip-roofed ranch house sitting catty-corner to a wide bend in the river, the dining room windows shedding lamplight on the wide stone veranda.

  Loomis headed directly to the main corral, dismounted, and unsaddled his horse. He’d turned it into the corral and was swinging the gate closed behind him when the others arrived, their hangdog countenances a sharp contrast to the vibrant, determined bearing of their leader.

  “Luther, have someone rub my horse down and feed him,” Loomis ordered. “I have a body to bury.”

  “You need some help there?”

  Loomis was already heading for the house across the yard. “No,” he said flatly, not turning around or even checking his stride. “And I want the bunkhouse lights out in an hour.”

  “You got it, Mr. Loomis,” McConnell said with a single nod of his head, amazed at the old man’s endurance.

  Loomis mounted the veranda and pushed through the heavy plank door. Turning left, he walked into the dining room and beyond it to the living room. May was there, sitting in one of the leather chairs before the fireplace, though no fire popped in the grate. Instead, candles and wood crucifixes were lined up along the mantel, as though along a prayer rail in a Mexican cathedral.

  Maybelle Loomis turned to him, her gray face puffy from crying. Loomis ignored her, walking to the fainting couch, where Stuart Loomis had been laid out and where May had bathed and dressed him for burial. She’d decorated the windowsill behind him with more candles, crucifixes, prayer beads, and with tintypes of the boy in all phases of his life, from infancy to badlands cowboy complete with fringed jacket, wooly chaps, and Spencer rifle.

  Loomis stood over his dead son laid out in a charcoal suit with brushed waistcoat, pocket watch, and calfskin shoes, another crucifix clasped in his pale hands. He stared upon the body coldly, clenching and unclenching his fists, breathing heavily through his nose. It d
id not seem odd to him that what he felt was not so much bereavement but anger and a desperate need for revenge.

  “What happened, Gerard?” It was May’s brittle voice behind him. She sniffed, dabbing at her nose.

  Loomis ignored her.

  “Gerard,” May said. “I want to know what happened.”

  Loomis’s voice was flat, almost bored. “Shut up.”

  “What happened to my son!” May cried.

  Loomis turned to her. She was a small, gray woman— grayer than her fifty-three years—with a tight gray bun atop her head and liquid brown eyes that betrayed her Spanish blood. She wore a black gown with a black veil, the very outfit she’d worn to her father’s funeral down in Texas, where Loomis had met her twenty-six years ago, on a trail drive.

  Loomis did not love his wife. Once he had, at the beginning, or maybe he’d just convinced himself he had, because Maybelle’s father, for whom Loomis had worked as a drover, had been a prominent Texas cattleman who’d made a small fortune shipping cattle to the Kansas markets every fall. The old man was dead now, and Loomis had most of the Texan’s money tied up in his own beef grazing the brushy badlands river bottoms and benches.

  And the man’s once mildly appealing daughter had turned into an old Mexican crone with a penchant for talismans to ward off the loneliness of western Dakota, which had quite literally driven her crazy.

  “This is none of your concern, May,” Loomis said. “Stay out of it.”

  “None of my concern!” the woman screamed.

  Ignoring her, Loomis removed the crucifix from his son’s hand and tossed it away like so much trash. Then he leaned down, shoved his left arm under the boy’s knees, his right under his back, and lifted him off the fainting couch.

  “What are you doing!” May screamed.

  “Stay out of it, May,” Loomis ordered as he swung the body around and headed for the front door.

  He heard May run toward him across the hardwood floor. Stopping, he turned to her, his eyes black as water just before it freezes. The look stopped May in her tracks.

  Loomis’s voice was just above a whisper. “Stay out of it.”

  He turned and started again for the door, ignoring May’s sobs behind him. He’d gotten the door open and was stepping off the veranda when May’s voice rose like a witch’s shriek: “He’s my son, too, Gerard!”

  Loomis headed around the house to the cottonwoods in the back. He chose a spot under the trees, laid the body down, and went to the stables for a shovel. When he’d returned to the cottonwoods, he started digging a hole beside his son, taking the better part of an hour to dig the hole as deep and as wide as he wanted. When he was through, he dropped into the grave, then reached back up for the body, easing it down to his feet.

  When Stuart Loomis was resting face up at the bottom of the grave, Loomis climbed out of the hole and gazed at the body, barely visible now, for the sun had long since fallen and the canyon was capped in stars.

  Loomis felt no urge to say a prayer. He’d never believed in a god. To him, religion was a luxury indulged in by desperate fools and romantic imbeciles. He’d never had time for such nonsense. He was too busy making money and wielding power. When you were dead, you were dead, and such formalities as coffins and prayers did nothing to hold the worms at bay.

  Thinking of his wife’s talismans, he gave a caustic snort, picked up the spade, and began shoveling dirt into the hole. As he had with the digging, he found a sort of grim enjoyment in filling the hole, the physical labor his only current means of letting off steam.

  When he’d finished, he covered the grave with rocks he found along the river, then returned the spade to the stable. He stepped outside the stable doors and stared across the yard at the house, all the windows now lit with candles, as though it were Christmas or some goddamn Mex festival time.

  He shook his head and scowled. He’d be damned if he’d go back to that silly woman and her stone-age amulets. Turning, he walked back into the stable and saddled one of his quarter horses. Five minutes later, he cantered through the yard toward the gate, noting with vague satisfaction the bunkhouse’s dark windows.

  He didn’t see his foreman, Luther McConnell, standing by the well in his long Johns, one hand on the windlass. McConnell had been about to lower the bucket for a drink when he’d seen the horse and rider leave the stable. Now he watched bemusedly as Gerard Loomis passed through the main ranch gate.

  Loomis gave a guttural “Hyaa!” and galloped into the darkness.

  “Never want that man mad at me,” McConnell mused under his breath and dropped the bucket into the well.

  Loomis made the tiny, lawless frontier village of Little Missouri an hour and seven river crossings later. He pulled his horse up to the Pyramid Park Hotel, one of the few milled lumber dwellings in town, and threw his reins over the hitch rack.

  Tinny piano music clattered loudly as Loomis pushed through the louvre doors and raked his eyes across the room at the dozen or so cowboys, gandy dancers, and townsmen standing and sitting, happily shooting the crap with soapy beer mugs clenched in their fists.

  Seeing Loomis, whom they hadn’t seen since Little Stu was killed in this very room, the crowd quieted, the grinning, cigar-chewing piano player’s ragged rendition of “Little Brown Jug” ebbing till dead. All eyes, turning grave, fell on Loomis.

  Ignoring the stares, the rancher strode to the bar, took two fistfuls of the barman’s vest, and said through a mirthless grin, “Where’s the mulatto?”

  The string-bean bartender’s sallow face flushed. “She ... she’s upstairs, Mr. Loomis....”

  Loomis nodded and released the man. “Give me a bottle of rye.”

  “You got it, Mr. Loomis,” the barman said as he scurried for the bottle. The room was so quiet you could have heard the crickets breathing beneath the floorboards.

  ‘There you are, Mr. Loomis,” the barman said, planting the bottle before the rancher. “On the house, with my condolences.”

  “Thanks,” Loomis grunted, heading for the stairs at the back of the room.

  “Oh, Mr. Loomis,” the barman called, tentative. “The mulatto ... sh-she’s workin’. Should be down in about fifteen minutes.”

  As though he hadn’t heard the man, Loomis pushed through the curtain and climbed the stairs. He took two steps down the short hall, stopped, set his head to listen, then strode forward, spurs clinking raucously.

  He stopped at the second door on his left and turned the knob. A woman screamed as the door flew wide, banging off a dresser.

  “Hey!” a man complained.

  Loomis grabbed the left arm of the naked mulatto girl straddling the naked cowboy, jerked her off the bed, and dragged her through the door.

  “Mr. Loomis!” the girl cried. “Please ... what... what’s goin’ on!”

  Loomis threw the girl through another door, followed her into the cramped room furnished with a sagging bed and a washstand with a broken leg. There was only a shade, no curtain, over the single window.

  “Mr. Loomis!” the girl cried again. “You can’t... you can’t...”

  Loomis stood grinning at her, his black eyes lit with a canny delight. He chuckled, uncorked the bottle with his teeth, and took a long pull. The naked girl stood watching him, wide-eyed with fear and bewilderment.

  “Mr. Loomis ...” she tried again.

  Loomis brought the bottle down, turned his grin on her, and suddenly slapped her hard across the face. The girl twirled and fell on the bed with a scream.

  Laughing, Loomis set the bottle on the washstand and kicked the door closed behind him.

  Chapter Seven

  LATE AFTERNOON EDGED toward early evening, the light in the canyon turning salmon, bringing out the scoria and lignite etched in the cracked cliffs. Slowly, canted shadows crept down the walls, turning them brown, then gray, then gunmetal blue, and the sky softened as the sun sank and all the colors of the rainbow flared in the west.

  The air smelled vaguely of cinnamon, and th
e breeze was cool against Layla’s face as she sat cross-legged in the cave entrance, keeping an eye out for riders. Finally, she stood, wetted a rag from her canteen, and laid it across the gunman’s sweaty forehead.

  Restless, she picked up her rifle, went outside to check on the horse, then walked down canyon along the stream.

  When she came to the stream’s confluence with the Little Missouri—a stream itself this time of year, much too narrow for its bed—she crouched abruptly when she saw something downstream. She relaxed, exhaling. It was only a buffalo, a big male with a huge hump and horns dulled by many sparrings.

  His face was flecked with gray, and his molting coat was nearly worn bare in places, his legs slightly bowed, as if his weight had become too much for him. An old grandfather, this one, who had either been shunned by his herd or was its lone survivor. The bison had thinned considerably in the last few years, since the incursion of Eastern dandies and their sporting rifles, and running across them was becoming more and more of a novelty.

  Seeing the great beasts disappear was a sad thing for Layla, for the badlands had teemed with them only five years ago, when her family had first come here from Bismarck. They’d practically lived on buffalo meat and had used the hides for bed coverings. Watching the magnificent beasts graze a shaggy plain or river bottom, tails swishing, and hearing their soft grunts and sighs as the calves played was a bewitching, otherworldly spectacle, and the badlands seemed lonely without them. They would only get lonelier.

  She looked around at the shaded buttes rising on the other side of the river, scrutinizing the draws. Satisfied none of Loomis’s men were about looking for the two Prophet had killed—at least for now—she glanced at the buffalo again, then turned around and headed back into the canyon toward the cave.

  Prophet was shivering, and he did not stir as she approached. She knelt over him thoughtfully. It occurred to her that she’d be unable to get him into the wagon alone, which meant they’d have to spend the night here in the cave. She didn’t want to worry her brothers any more than she already had, but she didn’t see any other way. She just hoped that Prophet would be well enough by morning to stand and be guided to the wagon.