by James Wade
The pain sent me to one knee and he flew toward me and I rolled away and behind him Sophia still lay motionless on the ground. Again Tom advanced and again I rolled away. I scrambled backward, moving in a fit of kicks and tumbles. He looked down at the knife in his hand and flipped it handle up and I tried to move again but couldn’t avoid the spinning blade completely and it burrowed into the back of my thigh. I cried out and reached for the wound but couldn’t grip the handle and my blood flowed into the pine needles and the grass and mixed with rain to feed the trees and the earth. I lay dying with my face in the wet ground and with much effort I pushed onto my back, my leg careful to not drive the knife in further and there I looked up at the sky and found the rain gone and in its place was only a dreary fog. I could hear Tom walking toward me but he stopped short and then yelled something which was drowned out by my rifle firing in Sophia’s hands. Tom staggered backward and looked at the hole in his stomach and felt behind him for a tree that was not there. He dropped, almost graceful, into a sitting position and hunched forward over his wound. Sophia walked toward him, another hollow point in the chamber, and fired and his entire body jerked and his arms flew up as if in surrender but he was already dead and we left him there, his empty eyes staring up at blackness.
“Caleb,” my brother said, and I drug myself across the earth and by his side.
“You look awful,” he said, and I coughed up a laugh and it hurt something fierce.
I pulled open his shirt where it was stained red near his heart and I looked at the wound and knew he should already be gone. His face was pale and covered in sweat and his head was laid off to the side and he was staring at something in a world I couldn’t see.
“Does this mean we’re still brothers?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure we ever was,” he said, and in his voice was a calmness I’d never known from him or me or the rest of the wide world we’d been born into.
“I’m not sure you’re wrong. Shelby, they send anyone else?”
He shook his head.
“You sure?”
He shook it again.
“You gonna watch me die?” he asked.
“I suspect so, but I ain’t happy about it.”
“Figured you would.”
“Watch you?”
“Be happy about it.”
“Well, I ain’t.”
“Alright then,” he said and my brother began to cry and who could say if his tears were falling because his life was ending or because it had never begun and I felt a sadness not just for my brother or me but for the nature of the world and the people in it, all those come before and the ones coming after. The sadness told me every man sets forth with questions in his heart and no matter his ways or his wanderings he dies without answers and the questions pass on to the next first heartbeat, and for thousands of years these unmet longings of man have covered the world in a morose mask and behind it any answers stay hidden and the secrets of the soul are no closer to my revealing them than they were to my father and his father before him and all the fathers back to a time unknown.
“Tom told me,” he said, his eyes fading, “there’s some tribes who dress up in bright colors for funerals.”
“Alright,” I told him. “You don’t need to talk.”
“So maybe they ain’t all scared like you thought. Maybe dying ain’t all that bad.”
“Just hush now.”
“I’m still scared, though.”
He whimpered and breathed in hard and then out and then in hard and then out and then nothing and whatever he was looking at I hoped it was pretty.
Sophia knelt beside us, the notorious Bentley brothers, dead and dying. She looked over my wounds.
“I have to pull it out,” she said, and I nodded and she grasped the knife handle and yanked and I hollered to hell and somewhere a thousand miles away in the Mexican mountains a lone wolf turned his yellow eyes to the daylight moon and howled.
36
The two men sat their horses and looked down into the valley and watched the road and pulled their coat collars up over the back of their necks. They crossed their gloved hands over the pommels of their saddles and waited, their eyes looking south for any sign. The sun was bright and the day cold and dry and they looked to one another and then back to the road and each nudged his horse and the animals stepped forward across the plain.
They dismounted and one of the men knelt and picked up a stick and stayed kneeling. He used the stick to move dirt and mud and he made note of each spent cartridge and poked at the dried blood and nodded his head.
“I ain’t never seen such a mess in all my life. I truly have not.”
“Well, what do you reckon?”
“What do I reckon? It’s a goddamn flat-out mess, that’s what. You had the rancher come in, according to him, with his nigger woman, and they was setting the road about here, facing south. Grimes and his outfit was moving up from down near the border. Seems it was at least twenty of ’em. The rancher says our boys come in from the east and that’s when all hell broke loose.”
“You think he’s telling it true?”
“I can’t see no advantage he’d have in lying.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s with the woman up in Sutton County. She took some bullets.”
“And Sanford’s his brother?”
“Cousin, I believe.”
“But he didn’t know the rancher was down here?”
“Not so far as I can tell. Way I understand it, Sanford got word from some doctor who’d been riding with the Lobos for a spell. I believe that’s what he and the rest of our boys were doing down here. ’Course we can’t exactly ask him.”
“Or any of our other boys.”
“Or any of ’em.”
“What about the outlaws? You reckon any got away?”
“Rancher says he ain’t sure. I ain’t seen no blood trails leading off.”
“What about the doctor?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Want we should ride around them foothills a little more.”
“Yeah, we’d better.”
The two men set off from the road. “Hell, I thought we weren’t supposed to mess with the Lobos. On account of Guerrero?”
“You ain’t heard? The old man’s dead. We won’t be seeing any more money coming in from him. That’s the only reason the captain let Sanford come down here in the first place. No Guerrero, no protection for the Lobos.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“So will he, if there’s any sort of God a’tall.”
“And the rancher didn’t catch any bullets?”
“Not so far as I could see. Luckiest sumbuck there ever was, I’d say.”
“Why the hell was he here in the first place?”
“Looking for some men who killed his son back in the territories.”
“His son?”
“Yessir.”
“That’s awful business.”
“It ain’t no good, that’s for certain.”
“These outlaws the ones that done it?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“What’s the rancher say?”
“Says he don’t know. Says it don’t matter. He’s headed home once the woman heals.”
“Will she heal?”
“Can’t say that neither.”
“What about the boy the rancher had with him—one called Tadpole—that another son?”
“Well, he says it is.”
“But you say it ain’t?”
“I got word back to his people in Longpine. They say the rancher only had one son to begin with. The one that got killed.”
“This one got killed too. Son or not.”
“Yessir.”
“And now the rancher’s headed home.”
>
“Yessir.”
“Probably for the best.”
“Would’ve been best if he never left in the first place.”
“Think we still would’ve had this mess?”
“Maybe. A man can’t think about things like that. A choice here, a choice there, maybe things would’ve been different—that ain’t how it works.”
“How does it work?”
“Some other way.”
37
The sun finally shone and the river waned and gave back the lands it had swallowed and Sophia put us and the horses into it and I held onto her waist and my life as the water rose up around us. East of the Pecos we rode hard and switched horses and rode hard again. Our clothes were wet with river and blood and we shivered in the cold morning and recited the names of shrubs and trees in English and Spanish.
We rode away from Terrell County and into Crockett. We rode past rancheros and llanuras desérticas and estanques poco profundos. As the sun climbed higher and the earth warmed we passed cattle shaded up under alder and cottonwoods and willows and they lifted their heads to watch us and flicked their tails and then we were gone and perhaps they wondered if we were ever there and perhaps I wondered the same.
We switched horses again and it was all I could do to stay in the saddle and Sophia had to ride behind me and get her arms around me lest I lean too far in one direction. One of the horses broke loose and she let him go and he trotted into a winter pasture and turned to look at us and I thought maybe he’d wanted us to follow or to call out or to care.
We rode alongside barbed-wire ranches and passed by men and women mending fences and they stood when they saw us coming and made a cross over their hearts when we were gone. Somewhere in the great swath of Texas cattle country a rider came blistering up the trail behind us and Sophia turned the horse and pointed the pistol toward the man from under my armpit.
“No dispare! No dispare!” the man called. “Agua! No dispare!”
He pulled up in the middle of the dusted road and reined his horse so hard it came up on its back legs and holding on with one hand he used the other to toss a canteen at us and Sophia reached around to snatch it from the air and then the man set off back the way he came and at the same fevered pace.
I drank the water and the drinking hurt more than the thirst. I teetered on the edge of consciousness and sanity and from the ride itself I can recall only moments, as if they happened all in a single day, but surely they did not.
My mother told me that with pain comes learning and by the time we reached the many small tributaries of the Concho River I could take no more lessons in language or hurting and I begged Sophia to find a spot of sun near the water and let this be the end.
“Please,” I begged, but she would not stop and when my eyes fought to close she grabbed my face and shook it and urged the horse onward.
We rode into the sunset and then through it and into the world of night and if the days ran together then so too did the darkness. And in the long night there were stars born and stars that died, and the rest of the sky was somewhere in between and the burning wood before us whistled and popped and sent red-orange sparks winking into air.
Sophia cleaned my wounds as best she could and allowed herself only a grimace and then we were back in the saddle and moving on and the horses around us were ridden by ghosts.
In the dead of night we rode into a small town in Sutton County. My head sagged about on her back and the world beyond seemed not but a vision into some place I had come from long ago. We rode down the main street and in the alleyways there were dark shapes and shadows of shapes and if they were real or not I couldn’t say. Lanterns hung from rafting overtop the wooden planks of the drag and each flame blurred to a dancing orb in the night as we passed.
A man drunk and still drinking staggered out of a saloon and took stock of us, then turned and stuck his hand out to steady himself against the air and disappeared back through the doors.
There was a wooden sign hanging by two thin chains and it swung and creaked even in the calm night. In navy letters with a white backing was painted Arnold Cobb—Doctor. The building behind the sign was two stories and there was no light in the windows and the door was latched. Sophia all but drug me up the front steps and laid me against the wall and pounded the door with the side of her fist. The doctor was a long time answering and when he did he was heavy with sleep, but he ushered us in and helped her carry me through the parlor and into a room where he quickly lit a multitude of lanterns which gave birth to flickering shadows across every wall.
“Save him,” Sophia demanded, and the doctor did not pause to answer her. He cut away the cloth around my wounds and then cut more and by the end I may have been near naked and he asked that Sophia light a fire in the stove and she did and the room warmed quickly and the doctor still in his nightwear pressed against my stomach and my chest and looked into my eyes and asked me questions I can’t remember answering.
“Much blood has been lost,” he said finally, and Sophia snapped that it did not take a doctor to know such a thing.
“The bullet passed through clean and the wound does not appear infected. He will not need to lose the arm. However, the cuts are much worse.”
“Save him,” she said again.
“I will try,” he replied. “But I cannot guarantee his life. Or his leg.”
* * *
My father put his finger to his lips to hush us, though we were already silent. The three of us were crouched and motionless in a thicket of palmetto, which grew in the river bottoms below the rim country. Two deer, a doe and her lanky offspring, moved quietly across the first fallen leaves of autumn.
“Let’s shoot ’em,” Shelby whispered.
“Wait,” our father replied.
Shelby fidgeted impatiently, and my father scowled him into submission.
The deer stepped lightly and the doe was uneasy, twisting her neck and looking behind them more often than she picked at the acorns on the ground.
“Just wait.”
Within minutes both the doe and her baby were at full alert and staring toward a creek bed in the distance. The bigger deer bolted and the small one followed and Shelby was on the verge of complaint when a buck stepped out from the opposite direction and stood, staring after his own kind.
My father slowly turned his head and nodded at Shelby and my brother raised the rifle to his shoulder.
“Hey, big fella!” my father yelled and the buck lifted his head and turned broadside and Shelby fired and there was blood and fur and the deer leapt into the air and landed on the run, crashing through the underbrush back toward the creek.
“Goddamnit,” my father said, rising from his crouch and reaching for his flask.
“I hit him,” Shelby said.
“You hit him, alright,” my father shook his head and slapped his son in the back of the skull. “Looked like you gutshot the sumbitch.”
Shelby’s shoulders sagged. He rubbed his head and looked at the ground.
“Might as well go see,” I said and pulled my brother away from our father who found a dead stump upon which to sit and drink.
There were tears in Shelby’s eyes and I told him it was okay and he told me to shut up. We found the blood and it stank of rot and Shelby cussed and threw the gun down. I looked back out at our father who sat shaking his head and holding the flask to the sky as if in offering.
“We can track him,” I told Shelby, but he just walked away and walked past our father who said something to him I could not hear and I waited there a while and finally followed them both home.
The next morning I woke before my brother and crept into the kitchen and began to pack a lunch of fruit and leftover sweet rolls. It was only after I was finished and on my way out that I noticed the coffeepot on the stove. I felt it with my hand and yanked it back quickly. The front door was ope
n and the morning air seeped in through the screen. I stepped out onto the porch and my mother sat rocking in her chair and when she smiled at me it was as if she’d been waiting for my arrival.
I stood in the doorway.
“Momma.”
“Mornin’, baby,” she said.
“Mornin’.”
“You headed somewhere?”
“Down in the bottoms.”
“By yourself ?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Track that old buck Shelby shot yesterday evening.”
“Shelby know?”
I shook my head.
“Your daddy?”
“I ain’t seen him since he went into town last night.”
“That makes two of us.”
“What are you doing up?”
My mother stared wistful at the tall pines and the junipers squatting beneath them and the rolling forest of the rim country in the early light and waved her hand about her in response.
“Just watching the morning.”
“What’s it doing?”
She laughed and motioned me over and I went and stood awkwardly at her side. Once she had been the strength upon which I’d built my trust for the world and now she was some small, sad thing and I hated to be around her. I hated to feel the frailty with which she held me, the limpness. I hated her for lying to me with her kindness and good nature when the world was neither. And most of all I hated her for not being as angry as I was. She was leaving, and no one cared as much as me. She should have cared. If not for herself, then for me. She should have cared about leaving me.
She wrapped her wire arm around my waist and softly leaned her head into my side.
“You’ll have to take care of them,” she told me. “But I suspect you already know that.”
I stayed silent.
“You’re too much like me, and your brother is too much like your father, and I don’t know why but that’s the way of it. And that means you’re the one it’ll all fall on.”
“What if I can’t do it?”
“Look after them?”
“Live without you,” I said and fought back the embarrassing tears of a little boy unwilling to let go of his mother.