by James Wade
I looked across the valley and saw each man bent before a carcass and each working diligently to save the meat and no one man was paying attention to another. I knelt again, quickly, and cut from the big doe several chunks of backstrap and shoved them into my satchel and packed it tight with snow and went back out to repeat the process. The others were finished around me and Marcus had stopped to count our bounty and I heard from within the forest the bawl of a wounded animal. The others looked up and paused and then turned back to their work. I walked out across the snow and found a blood trail. It was dark and mixed with green and brown and led into the woods. I followed it past the tree line and found the small fawn, its tongue lolling from its mouth, having collapsed into a pool of its own gutshot blood.
It was small, likely born late into the summer and thus not much chance to survive even without being hunted. Its eyes were closed and its chest heaved in unsteady breaths. Its ears twitched at my approach and its eyes opened and rolled forward and the pupil shrunk at the white light of the snow or perhaps some other white light unknown to all but the dead and dying. The fawn tried to rise but could not and instead raised only its head and again bawled and I stood watching. After a while I moved forward slowly and it let me and I put my hand on its side and felt it rise and fall as do the fortunes of all species and all worlds and all galaxies. I slipped my knife again from my boot and pressed it to the throat of the innocent and did what many had done before and will surely do again and I wondered if intention was heavy enough to outweigh all other causes and so too their effects. I emerged from the woods bloodied and the men watched me walk to my horse and I looked somehow changed to them and perhaps they would later recall this or perhaps they would let it drift by and be buried in the snow with the lives of the deer and the bears and the ancient men.
We drained and cleaned the last of the animals and loaded them onto the pack mules and they hung stacked and splayed atop one another bound by rope and we put our horses into the canyon draw and moved on from the valley. I counted almost one hour, then called to Marcus.
“I left my knife in the woods.”
“We’ll find you another one back at camp.”
“Grimes gave it to me. For saving his life. It means a lot.”
Marcus stopped our procession in the last of the snow and it fell silent around us as the winds had moved on with the bulk of the storm.
“Okay, go on and look for it but take G.W. with you.”
“Yessir,” I said. “We’ll catch up.”
“You better.”
G.W. wore a homburg hat rather than the Stetson Boss worn by most of the men and rode a small horse that looked to be of Indian stock. He asked me as we rode if I had picked a girl yet from the captives, and I told him I had not.
“I can’t wait to get me one,” he said. “I reckon Grimes’ll get the first pick, then Marcus and Tom, but I’ll cut a man he tries get ahead of me after that. There’s a purty redhead I got my eye on so don’t go getting attached.”
“You have my word,” I told him.
“Cut a man good,” he said again.
“So you don’t mind that them girls are here against their own will?”
“What?” His face was one of genuine confusion.
“It ain’t like they chose to come up here and have you put a baby in them,” I said. “Just don’t seem right.”
“Oh, I see, you’re one of Grimes’s thinking boys.”
Now it was my turn to be confused.
“Grimes likes to think about all kinds of stuff and whether he’ll admit it or not, most of us are just hard cases looking to fight and fuck and not get arrested. He gets bored with that, goes and finds him a thinking boy or two so he can have somebody to talk with. You must be the latest.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, but G.W. continued anyway.
“I don’t much care for learned men, or what they may believe is right and wrong,” he said, and turned to stare at me with menacing eyes. “Nossir, I’m gonna get me what’s between that little redhead’s legs whether she wants to give it to me or not.”
We crossed over the valley and into the woods and I dismounted near the dead fawn and began to search the ground, using my gloves to clear away snow and pine needles. G.W. sat his horse and picked at the tattered edges of his coat and when that held no further appeal he sighed and climbed down.
“It’s either here or it ain’t,” he said, hands on his hips.
“Go a little faster with you helping me look,” I said, and he rolled his eyes and crouched down and swept his hand haphazardly over the ground.
“Your redhead—she got freckles?” I asked, inching closer to him.
“Never known one not to,” he said.
“I knew one back in Longpine who didn’t.”
“Well, this one does.”
“That’s good,” I said and shoved the blade into his throat and out the other side and there it stuck with him clawing at it and staggering about on his hands and knees. I left him, sputtering and choking on his own blood, and took both the horses deeper into the forest.
32
Randall and Charlotte rode through the pastures and dry grasslands beneath the mountains. Their horses moved across the empty plains heading south, crossing over thawed snow turned mud and blue-green desert ferns sprouting from the earth. They spotted a lone bobcat perched in a tract of beargrass, watching them through animal eyes oscillating from predator to prey as if unsure of its place in the world.
They passed through the upper regions of northeast Presidio County and circumvented the sharp plateaus and broad cuestas of the Trans-Pecos highlands. Eventually the land arched and sloped into the Marathon Basin of Brewster County and they followed ephemeral streams southward, toward the border.
They made camp on the third night in a rock canyon which provided shelter from the wind as it pushed the twilight clouds across the sky, dressing and then undressing the stars. The two of them lay on opposite sides of the fire. The only sounds were the occasional popping of the wood as it burned or the far-off cry of coyotes as they pursued the movements of shadows in the moonlight.
“Are you sure you want to do this,” she asked, and he could see her face through the flames as they quivered and leapt from the dry post oak.
“No,” he replied.
“But we’re going anyway.”
“It doesn’t seem right to turn back now.”
“I miss them boys.”
“I do too,” he said. “But it’s best this way.”
“I know.”
“Come here,” he told her, and she did.
* * *
The night’s clouds turned into the day’s rain and the two riders found the going both slow and cold. They put the horses toward the elevated tablelands to the east and took shelter under a bedrock overhang and held each other and didn’t speak. Below them a herd of pronghorn antelope passed by on the far-reaching plains, unimpeded by the wet weather.
The storm passed, but Randall still saw the weary and burdensome look on Charlotte’s face.
“We’ll be okay,” he assured her.
“Spoken like a true jackass,” she replied.
“We aren’t going to fight them over the brothers,” he continued. “We’re going to buy them.”
“Buy them?”
“For a group like the Lobos, if what we heard in Fort Davis is to be believed, money is more valuable than a couple of men. We’ll buy the brothers, then we’ll take them back to Longpine to hang.”
“Back to Longpine,” Charlotte repeated.
“That’s right.”
“Back to your wife.”
* * *
The rains left the desert foothills ripe with the smell of creosote and ocotillo. The plants drank in the morning sunlight, releasing their compounds into the air, and Randall wondered how a w
orld so magnificent in its nature could also be devoid of empathy and awareness.
Even the creosote itself, in its survival, killed those once-living plants around it, stealing from them the life-giving water when it fell. If awareness came to such flora, he thought, what then would the process of nature look to for guidance? Awareness, he thought, is meant to promote righteousness and civility. To do evil or violence is to cast aside such awareness, such evolved cognizance as man has been given, and revert to a nature not our own. There are but two natures, one is man’s—human nature—and the other is nature itself from which we have separated ourselves. And though he believed these things, Randall began to pity himself, and his naivety of the world.
33
The storm moved on, the snow melting, and the atmosphere seemed covered in a gray haze. No sun, no clouds, and the only thing left was a cold wind. Sophia rode my Missouri, and I rode the dead man’s horse.
She’d found me in a rock quarry north of the Chisos. She held her pistol to her breast and when she saw me she noted the blood on my hands and nodded, and we set out to the north at hard ride with hopes of outpacing those who were sure to follow.
We rode up through the desert toward the Horse Head Hills and past the frozen agrito berries, which fell as they thawed and dotted the ground with red. We rode through the night, twice spelling the horses at stock tanks near the roadway. The sky was dark and starless. The hills before us were embellished by the blackness and we rode through each pass expecting always the next until the dawn cowed away the night, unraveling its hold on the earth and bringing forth an end to our slow stumblings.
Sophia led us into a canyon and under an overcast sky she picked up an all-but-hidden game trail twisting out of a draw and finding the road again five miles north. At midday we rode through the forgotten dreams of a long-deserted township. Two rows of rotted wood and broken adobe structures ran perpendicular and crossed near an old well with neither rope nor bucket. Most of the buildings were in the throes of collapse and had been for some time. The entire town seemed to be leaning, as if it were too exhausted to stand but too proud to fall, and in the grayscale of the day it appeared even more unsure of its place among the living.
Three dogs came out from one of the abandoned clay houses and trotted alongside us for a while and then stopped, all three of them, and stood in the middle of the road as if they’d been stayed by some invisible command. I twisted in the saddle and looked back and they matched my stare for a while and then turned and plodded back off the street, their ribs pressing into their skin with each breath.
“What is this place?” I asked her.
“Nothing, now.”
“Well, what’d it used to be?”
“A Mexican village.”
“This ain’t Mexico.”
“Not anymore.”
The sun appeared just in time to set and we watched it and then rode on. The stars shone for a while but were replaced by the moon and in the absence of clouds, the new light helped outline the mesas and horizontal strata. We rode toward the dark shapes and found a path up and took it and the horses shied and stamped and we urged them on up traprock switchbacks and false summits until finally the trail spilled out onto the tableland.
Coyotes unhappy with our being there yelled out and the horses didn’t much care for that either and I threw a handful of rocks into the night and told the predators to move on and I told them they could have it all back tomorrow.
We sat together and held one another and looked out over the low plain we’d crossed and watched for movement but all we saw was the still silence of the world. We slept on and off and rose before the sun and Sophia made a fire just big enough to boil coffee and I fed the horses and went through the supplies she’d stolen and matched a day to each scoop of oats, and I marked lines on the sack of beans and I didn’t bother looking at the dried meat.
From the nothingness of night came the false shapes of the dawn and every bush in the lowlands became a man or beast and only once the sun had topped the plateau did they turn back to their true form.
The Mexican village was ten miles to the west and we could see the shadow being lifted as the sun moved higher still and from where we sat drinking coffee the buildings did not look broken and the town was not filled with ghosts.
I thought I saw movement on the plain and reasoned it was one of the dogs from the village, but when I looked again there was nothing there save whatever lay hidden in the brush.
I took my coffee cup and tapped it against Sophia’s in a celebratory gesture, and she shook her head and smiled and stood to saddle her horse. I shrugged, looked once more for the dog, then tossed the grounds from my cup over the ridge and watched them fall.
We rode into a creek and followed it north against the soft current, and the horses weren’t pleased with the cold water. They turned their heads and walked sideways and tried to come out onto either bank but we kept them to the middle until we were satisfied our tracks had been gone long enough.
“Tom will still track us,” she said.
“I know.”
We doubled back and out a different side and split up and came back together and the whole time leaving some tracks while covering others. It was a practice in patience, and a frightful one at that, to stay closer to those hunting you rather than to ride wide open in one direction.
We slept little and less and drank cold coffee and the more we rode the more this thing began to chew on me.
I thought of the boy and my brother and all the others. If I didn’t stop the thought it would go back forever to the beginning of time and take me with it over the graveyards of old. Death hung in the air around me and I had begun to believe it always would. I thought of Grimes and his ghosts and how only the innocent ones haunted him. And so it chewed on me until we came upon familiar country and I looked to the west and then at Sophia.
“Do you believe bad men deserve to die?” I asked her, and she looked at me concerned.
“Some men are worse than others,” she said.
I nodded.
“That old Mexican’s ranch is yonder, up against them sierras.”
“Guerrero?” she asked, then nodded in confirmation.
“Well.”
“You mean to kill him?”
“He’s your grandfather.”
She nodded.
I looked again toward the darkening mountains. The sun flagged below the horizon but its luster remained as a memory upon the land and turned the sky all manner of violet and red. And there, under the day’s amaranthine recollection, I pressed my lips to Sophia’s and hoped that in her kiss I would find some answer. When we pulled free from one another, each seemingly unwilling to let the other go, she told me of the agua escondida above the ranch and said she would wait there with the horses.
My worry over my soul, which I couldn’t say if I believed in or not, was a worry fettered to my own destiny. After my conversation with Señor Guerrero I had decided I had no authority to judge or intervene and yet I found myself now changed in heart, believing myself some servant of the world, believing that if I were to kill an evil man, then the world might be a better place upon my doing so.
We take these liberties, as Grimes had warned again, as if they were given by God and of course they are not. But Grimes and I differed in our supposition of God, to the point where my own judgment was my own judgment and if my soul were to face a tribunal it would be only what I myself could conjure in the way of morality.
All of this, and still the Dawson boy remained. My crime, for which moral acuity was unnecessary, layered the far reaches of my mind and thus could not help but affect and even direct my future actions. Grimes, Guerrero, and every evil man in a world full of them, might die by my hand and yet never could I heal the scar of guilt and culpability from my life or any I might thereafter seek to lead. I thought these things, and more, as I c
rept slowly into the big house with my hunting knife at my side.
34
Thunder came up from beneath the ground, unsettling the earth and the things upon it, stirring a mixed flock of redpolls and warblers from a copse of palo verdes. Mara stamped and blew, nervous below him.
“We best get off the road,” Charlie said, turning Storm toward a honey mesquite thicket.
Randall followed and they both dismounted and watched the road. Carved through the foothills from the gravel and sand the road snaked in and out of the brush and disappeared over a low rise. From over the rise dust began to swell up into the air and the rumbling of the ground intensified. Randall and Charlie looked at one another and back to the road as the riders began topping the hill and then descending toward them.
Randall counted at least twenty and he watched the column of mounted men as it turned in unison off the road, fanning out and encircling the low-growing mesquite. He patted Mara’s neck to calm her and squinted up into the eastern morning, which shone through from the backs of the riders and gave them a shadowlike appearance.
“Hello, there,” he said, addressing the nearest man.
“Howdy.” The answer came from a different direction and Randall and Charlie turned as the man who’d spoken put his horse forward in front of them.