by James Wade
“You ever have any run-ins with Indians up in the Arizona territory? They’re a fierce bunch. Brave. ’Course, courage don’t mean all that much against rifles and cannons and a well-supplied army. We rode with the army for a spell. Our job was to hunt down the natives then call in the cavalry. Turned out I was good at that too. Wasn’t long before the ghosts started getting mighty crowded. Then a miracle happened. You believe in miracles, Caleb?”
“I can’t say, sir. I been doing some thinking on ’em lately, if that’s what you mean.”
“I didn’t believe either. Not in God, not in miracles. I’d seen too much of the opposite, to tell you the truth. But one day, a few of us Rangers came across a camp of Apache. Small camp, mostly older folks, a few children. We were just north of Mexico, where the river dips down and bends for days before starting up again. The army was camped about a half day’s ride, and I knew that if we went on and did our jobs, by morning that little group of Indians would be dead or rounded up and sent somewheres else to die. There was five of us that day. Men I knew, men I cared about—respected even. I told them right then and there I was done with it. Said I didn’t have the stomach to fight for freedom in one war and fight for slavery in the next. I said a few other things, but in the end my companions disagreed with me and started talking pretty loose about a court marshal and a hanging and whatnot. One decided it would be a good idea to draw his gun. I killed that man, and one other before he could clear leather. A third fella had the drop on me, but he hadn’t counted on Marcus. My little speech had made sense to Marcus, no doubt on account of his being a Negro. Marcus blew the majority of that gentleman’s brain matter out through the side of his skull. So the two of us stood there not saying a word, and I don’t know how long the standing would’ve went on, but out of that sad little camp come one of the biggest Indians I’d ever seen. He’d heard the shooting and found us there with a pile of dead Rangers, and I guess he figured out the score without our help. He grabbed one of the bodies and started to drag it off. We followed suit and before we knew it, we were burning the dead in the camp we had scouted. The Indian spoke a little English; said his name was Tom. No idea where he learned that name, but he insisted on it, so we obliged. I knew the Rangers would come looking, so me and Marcus took Tom and his people high up into the mountains. We killed every man they sent until they stopped sending them. And with every soul I collected, my ghosts started to leave. That was my miracle. I’d found my purpose in this life.”
“As an outlaw.”
Grimes looked annoyed but continued anyway. “As a savior of the downtrodden. We rode out, raiding supply wagons, spreading our message, and recruiting like-minded guns. We picked some bad apples, but they ripened up after a while. These may be hard men, Caleb, but they’re men of principle. Like you. Let me help you the way I helped them. I can give you something you’ve never had.”
“What’s that?”
“Power. The power to shape things the way you want them to be shaped. The power to create a new world, where all men are free and equal. You believe in that, don’t you?”
“Yessir, I reckon I do. But I ain’t sure robbing and killing folks is the best way to go about it.”
“We rob the army and the government, not the people. We kill who we have to.”
“Like that cowboy in Marathon?”
Grimes laughed.
“You mean Frank? Hell, he’s back at our border camp right now. We recruited him, we didn’t kill him.”
“Everybody thinks you did,” I told him.
“Of course they do. That’s because the US government is doing what they do best. Propaganda. They’re painting the Lobos as the scariest thing since the Plague, making sure it’s hard as hell for folks to trust us. Control the people, Caleb, and you control the world. You break a horse because you want it to be yours, bend to your needs, listen to your directions. You break a horse because you believe it needs to be broke. What purpose can that horse serve if unbroken? What use is it to you unless you can control it?
“It’s the same with men. These leaders of ours—from preachers to politicians, ranchers, and Rangers—they want to break you. They want to break you like a horse because they need you. They need you to never question. They need you to fight their wars, kill their enemies, and be part of the world they’re building—not the one that already exists, the one that existed long before them.
“They break as many men as they can and then the greedy bastards start breaking the land. You understand what I’m saying, son? This is the last of it. The last of the American frontier. They’ll make states out of the whole lot and they’ll break the people and the country and they’ll use it all for the next great cause, the next big war to kill boys and line pockets. I swear to you I’ve seen the very nature of these men and it’s soulless and dark. You think I’m a murderer. Maybe that’s true enough. But it’s them who made me this way. I pranced and trotted and ran at their every command. I was broke, sure enough. They made the mistake of letting me see the other side and the freedom that thrived here.
“When I got here, to the West, everything was different than what I’d seen back home. This place was untamed. The horses, the cactus, hell, the goddamn weather. It was all wild and unbroken and uninterested in the rest of the world. It was the freest country I’d ever seen.”
“And you think now it ain’t?”
“Yessir, Caleb, I think now it ain’t. It’s already overrun with government and churches and drunkards mining gold or cutting timber and soon enough, thanks to the railroads, folks will start poking holes in the ground looking for oil and nothing will be left wild.”
“Wild don’t always mean good, Mr. Grimes. Some things are better left alone, I’ll give you that. But I imagine there’s some things better off being broke.”
Grimes smiled and leaned back, patting his hands on his knees.
“And you, Caleb? Are you better off wild or would you fall in line with all the others as they bleed this world dry?”
I tried to choose my words carefully, the way my mother had taught, but I couldn’t quite turn ’em the way I wanted, and before I knew it, my thoughts were out loud and unprotected.
“I can’t say that it’s that simple,” I told him. “It ain’t free or slave, not no more. And it ain’t wild or broke, neither. I imagine it’s somewheres in between that a man can find his place. That’s what I’d aim for, if it come down to it. A place to call mine, sure enough, but also a place where folks are pulling together. I guess what I mean is a place where there’s some sort of balance.”
“Between what?” Grimes asked.
“Between everything.”
He stood and I with him and he moved close and put his hand on my face in the way a man might caress his lover, but there was no smile or tenderness and his words grew more urgent the more he spoke.
“I like you, Caleb. There’s something about you, and it draws me in and I want to know more. But hear this now: the people in this world, all of them, they aren’t like you. They can’t abide by balance, by nuance, by circumstance. They must be all or nothing, one or the other, and they will slit their brother’s throat without hesitating if it feeds their narrative of destiny or desire. They don’t want harmony, you understand? They actively work against it.”
“And so you work against them.”
“Like I said, you’re a smart boy. Now, as for this situation with your own brother, is this going to be a problem?”
“Sir?”
“I know you didn’t come sneaking in here tonight to join up with us. The way I figure it, your brother sold you down the river and you let him feel it. I know you don’t want any part of this.”
“Then why—?”
“Because I want you to ride with me, Caleb. Not just with my men, but with me. I don’t want your brother. I don’t want him, because of all the things you already know to be true. I was
willing to take him if it got me you. I was willing to help him. But now I find for the second time in as many days you may mean to kill him yourself. Is this so? If it is, say the word and we’ll take care of it. Or if you’d rather, you can finish things yourself and I doubt anyone here would blame you. Hell, I doubt anyone who has ever met Shelby would take too great an offense. The choice is yours but whatever you decide, it sticks. If you both ride out with us, you both become part of a family that’s even greater than blood. And I won’t have my family quarreling. So make your choice, then live with it.”
“Yessir.”
“And one more thing: I can appreciate your wanting to protect a young lady in danger. But as I hope you can see now, my daughter is not in any danger here. Take my meaning?”
“Yessir.”
* * *
Tom walked a few steps ahead of me through the camp. He was as imposing a man as I’d ever seen—and not just physically. He had the air of man who would not die quietly.
“How come Grimes’s daughter hates him so much?” I asked him.
“Enough talk,” he said, continuing forward with long, effortless strides.
“I reckon that’s not the first time she run off.”
He stopped and turned to me. He hesitated, searching for the words.
“Sophia misses her mother. Very much.”
“Where’s her mother?”
“Enough talk,” he said again.
18
They made camp a half day’s ride from the trailhead at Guadalupe Pass, tucking themselves in a mesquite grove near the base of the first mountain and overlooking the floodplains and salt flats to the west. The young boy took the horses without being asked and began to brush them and press his ear to their sides and no one told him different. Randall gathered wood and Tad took to some of the brush with a hatchet and soon they had a fire and were heating tortillas and beans and rabbit meat and when they had finished, Charlotte gave the boys fruit tins and motioned for Randall to follow her and he did. She grabbed his hand and he fought against the shiver snaking through his spine as they touched and by the dying light she led him through the ocotillo and tall-stalked agave and above to where the roots gave way to fallen boulders and lava rock, and though he would have followed her anywhere she stopped and pointed to an overhang and when he looked he saw nothing but the face of the cliffs overhead.
“See the drawings?” she asked and he shook his head to say no but stopped short of speaking as the images began to appear.
“Indians,” she said, “but not Apache or Comanche or even Mescalero. They call themselves the Strassi. In their language it means ‘those who emerge.’ Like other tribes, they believe their people originated from inside the earth. ’Course, unlike the others, they haven’t exactly come out yet.”
“They live in the mountains?”
“They live underneath.”
Randall studied the pictures. There were suns and spirals and great horned beasts. There were humanlike figures who floated above jagged lines and horses who stood in rows.
“I’ve never heard of these people,” Randall said, touching the drawings and feeling the cool stone on his fingertips.
“Not many have,” Charlotte replied. “It’s how they survive. How they hid from the Comanche all those years. How they hide from the whites now.”
“How is it you came to know this?”
“I lived with them,” she said. “For more than a year, after my brother was killed.”
“You lived with Indians? Doing what?”
“Just living. Training as a warrior, farming in their underground fields.”
Randall laughed, “What is an underground field?”
“In the caverns, there are great rooms with light from sinkholes and tunnels. The sun warms the room, and with enough soil from above, many things can grow.”
“Underground fields,” Randall repeated. “Well, is that where you learned how to handle those guns?”
“The Strassi don’t use guns. The guns were my brother’s. He wanted me to be safe. But I wasn’t. Instead, I was foolish. I thought guns made you powerful just because you had one. I ran into some trouble with some men who were too young for the Civil War and figured roughing up a nigger woman would be the next best thing. They left me for dead, but a Strassi boy found me, nursed me back to health. We were going to be married, and I was to become a Strassi woman.”
“What happened?” Randall asked.
“I didn’t want to live in a cave.”
“Makes sense; seems a bit claustrophobic.”
It was Charlotte’s turn to laugh.
“Not like that,” she said. “I didn’t want to live a life hiding. I wanted to see the world, and to help people.”
“Like you’re helping me?”
“Something like that, yeah.” She smiled.
“Why are you here?” he pressed. “And don’t say the boy.”
She sighed.
“I found that kid in a bar, where some degenerate had decided to let him drink. He was talking loud about how his friend had been killed by a couple of cutthroats. He kept saying there was a man chasing them too, but that man wasn’t no Wild Bill Hickok.”
“I’ll have to thank him for that.”
“When I asked him about the man, he said it was his friend’s father. An educated man from back east. A man out of place in a cruel world. A heart too good for such violent delights as those that are commonplace in an untamed land. A handsome man, with a kind disposition, who does right because he should, not because he has to.”
“He said all that, did he?”
“He said enough.”
She looked away into the night sky and grinned and turned back toward him with a mischievous look.
“I still have the scars,” she said.
“From the relationship?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes.
“From the men who almost killed me.”
She lifted her shirt almost to her breasts and Randall could see the tissued marks across her skin.
“My God.”
She loosened her belt and began to slide her pants downward. He looked away.
“It’s okay,” she said, stepping toward him. More scars ran the length of her thigh. She took his hand and pressed it against them. He shuddered.
“I see the way you look at me,” she said, her voice soft and yearning. She moved his hand.
Randall’s words caught in his throat.
“I . . . we shouldn’t leave the boys alone at night,” he said, and her face became twisted and confused and then hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I . . .”
“Don’t be sorry,” she told him, fastening her belt. “Let’s just get back.”
“No, it’s not what you think—”
“Please stop talking,” she said, and hurried away.
That night she slept alone, away from the fire.
19
I barely recognized my brother. His face was swollen and colored with purple and yellow and his skin was mangled near his missing ear and there was a pathetic look to it all that gave me guilt and might have made me hate him even more.
The man looking after him was young. He wore spectacles and a bowler and was in the midst of growing an orangish beard to cover his freckles. He reached out a pale hand and I took it and his grip was stronger than I expected.
He walked me through Shelby’s condition and injuries. The man’s knowledge of the body and how it healed further cemented the out-of-place nature of his presence and when he was done I nodded and thanked him and understood little of what he’d said.
“Can I have a minute with him?” I asked, and the young doctor looked uncomfortable so I promised I wasn’t gonna kill Shelby and he didn’t laugh but left the tent anyway.
I sat near my brot
her’s bedroll and his body stank. I reached out and touched his hand.
“I guess if you could help it, you would,” I told him.
Shelby’s body rolled toward me and he groaned and the eye that could open did so at half mast. He gripped my hand and held it and there we stayed, Shelby and me, until the sun brought with it the dawn of a new day.
I woke sitting, my back jammed against the tent post. The fog of sleep and dreams and uncertainty hung about my eyes and I could not be sure where I was or how I’d gotten there. My hands throbbed.
“Caleb,” my brother said, and his voice was soft and weak and a hundred miles away.
I looked at him. He stared at me through swollen eyes.
“You reckon I’m evil?” he asked. “The real kind, what comes from Satan.”
I blinked my eyes and looked around the tent.
“I don’t reckon much in the way of Satan,” I told him.
“That’s ignorant,” he said and winced at what pain there was and there was plenty.
“How come?”
“All that’s wrong with things—Momma dying, Daddy, the way we had to grow up—them ain’t good things.”
“Lotta folks worse off.”
“That’s what I mean. So much is wrong with so many,” he said. “And wrong with me.”
He motioned for the steel flask propped against his satchel and I shook my head and fetched it for him.
“I can’t help it, you know,” he told me, taking a pull and choking it down. “I get these thoughts, and they make sense to me even though I know they ain’t supposed to. You ever think things like that?”
“I think about killing that boy.”
“What about it?”
I took the flask from his hands and drank deeply.
“It weren’t no goddamned devil killed him,” I said. “It was me. You understand? And whatever unnatural thoughts you got, there ain’t nobody put ’em there but you.”
Shelby groaned. “So that’s it then, you think I’m evil.”
“I didn’t say that.”