Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  “How do you mean?”

  “The Tonkawa scouts are gone.”

  Rachel looked around the camp with alarm. She gave a minute shudder. “I hate that one.”

  “Who?”

  “Little Shreve. He’s always pawing himself like some scratchy ape. I think there’s something wrong in his head. Well, I hate him, that’s all.” She found Marwood’s eyes. “Sometimes I think I should up and quit this place and go back to Auraria.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She shook her head. “I told you I ain’t got no place else to go. Besides, them things are easier for a man to do.”

  They watched the horses graze, side by side.

  “What if I did up and leave him,” Rachel said out of the blue. “Are you going to take care of me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, stop all your talk of leaving.” Her face flushed red. “You don’t think much of me, so go to hell.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to. All you sons of bitches are the same after you get pussy. You don’t think high of me because I stay with him. But a man can leave when he has to in this country. A man can make where he needs to go. A woman can’t. Not always, she can’t.”

  She hugged her knees tight and lowered her head. Another man rose from his bedroll and went off to make water. One by one the encampment started to wake and move about.

  Rachel watched the men. “We could do it,” she said quietly. “We could run. We could go north. So far north they could never track us.”

  She faced Marwood. “You could kill them.” She nodded at his Sharps. “I know you could kill them with that.”

  “I guess, but I’m not going to do that.”

  She mulled it over. “So, why don’t you leave?” she asked him plain.

  “Because I don’t have any place else to go, either,” he told her truthfully.

  She picked at her ragged nails. “I heard them talk about you the other night.”

  “All right.”

  “They said you used to be a range detective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’re going to kill you some night.”

  Marwood smiled. “What makes you think that?”

  “You think these men are going to let a detective live long? You’re as cracked as Little Shreve.”

  He laughed at her. “Do you know what a range detective is?”

  “I know a detective is with the law.”

  Marwood shook his head. “A range detective works for someone who operates outside the law. I used to ride down rustlers and such. We’d either hang or shoot them. That’s all I ever done.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Are you for certain you ain’t no lawman?”

  “I think I would know,” he said. He thought about Laredo, Judge Creighton, the men he had killed, and whom he might kill tomorrow.

  He thought about lines he didn’t want to cross.

  Rachel rose to her feet and brushed herself off. She adjusted her chalina and stared down at him. “My name ain’t Rachel,” she told him. “That’s what he calls me, but that ain’t my real name. The other men, they call me it, too, because they want to do like him. Well, I guess you’ve noticed that much.”

  She turned and walked through the camp and went out of sight. Marwood got up and went among the horses. He walked up to Acheron and inspected the animal. The horse had corn marks on its flanks—old scarring from ancient battles. He came closer, talking soft, and stroked the animal’s muscled withers. He walked around the horse. From fetlock to withers to quarter, a winding blue-black colouration like a long river with tributaries and rills flowed over the animal, winding a dark and ancient magic throughout. Marwood fancied he could feel a hidden power emanating from the horse. A pulsing connection to his own past, perhaps, and the thing he carried inside. A key that might unlock the unknowable of his life. Like Cibola.

  But such a thing, he thought, could not be true. If it was true then he was crazy. Marwood stepped back from the horse. He was breathing hard. “Acheron,” he said out loud.

  The horse flicked an ear forward.

  A single gunshot sounded, toward camp. Marwood walked back. The men were gathered around something lying on the ground.

  “I saw it jump and tag her in the neck,” Spaw said.

  “What was she doing out there?” Rota asked.

  Marwood edged between them. Rachel lay on the ground, her face bone-white and her hands composed over her breasts. Her neck was mottled red and swollen to twice the size. There were puncture wounds in her throat with slight bruising around them.

  “What happened,” the Cajun asked, tucking his loose shirt inside his pants. “Did somebody find Spooner?”

  “Naw, it’s Rachel.”

  “Hell happened?”

  “She went off yonder to make water and this here bull rattler popped up and bit her in the neck. Killed her stone dead.”

  “Weren’t there nothing you could do?” the Cajun asked.

  “Well, shit, I killed the snake,” Rota said. “Hell else do you want?”

  “Where is that goddamn snake?”

  Someone kicked its limp body. “Right here it is.”

  “Goddamn hell. It’s big enough to wrap a wagon wheel. Look. Them rattles are big as a bull’s pizzle.”

  Silence fell upon them like a winter’s cloud.

  “If Spooner was here he could cut that snake up for stew meat.”

  “You do it, frogpecker,” Rota said. “I got to dig a grave for this whore even though I’m the one who killed the snake. Where’s the shovel?”

  “Botis has it. Hey, Captain, the camp slut got killed. We need the shovel to bury her.”

  Botis came forward, stripped down to the waist. “What happened to her?”

  “She went to piss and this rattler jumped her. Oh, hell no, Quillen, you stay away from her. Captain, tell that ghoul to stay away from her.”

  Botis cut the rattles off the viper with his knife. They were longer than his hand.

  “Best bury her quick before she spoils,” he said. “I will say a few words when you are ready.” He left to tie the rattles to the latigo of his saddle.

  “Hey, where are the cabrón Tonks?” Calvin Zapata asked.

  “They lit out last night after Spooner.”

  “Oh, shit. Poor Spooner. I done forgot about him.”

  Lovich laughed at their solemn faces. “If this don’t beat a crooked stick up the ass,” he said.

  The men looked at him.

  “We should’ve kept that little Mex gal alive after all,” he explained.

  They buried Rachel and piled stones atop the earthen mound. Then they gathered around the grave and removed their hats.

  Botis presided at the head of the grave. “There are people who travel between clouds of what was, and what should be,” he said. “So have we gathered around one fallen to the hunger of the earth. One day, we, too, shall dip into its maw. It is ever thus where the devil strides unopposed, and men fight for recognition.” He put his hat back on his head. “May Rachel find her place to rest. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the men said in a ragged chorus. They retired to the campfire. They ate but little. Few had any appetite, including Marwood. Some packed their pipes or rolled paper and smoked, or cleaned their boots with their knives. Marwood repaired a buckle on his saddlebag while Jubal Stone and Lovich ran more lead balls and piled them in a hat.

  “Captain,” Spaw said, “what are these things? I mean, really.” He laid the implements he had discovered earlier around the fire pit.

  Botis picked them up one at a time. “They are the tools and descriptors of a primitive man,” he said. “First, the plate of life, and the grinding stone that makes bread. Into how many throats did the grain pounded upon this sto
ne find its way? How long did yon stone lie under the earth until stumbled upon by our band?”

  He laid them aside and picked up the stone atlatl. He turned it over in his hands.

  “But it is this implement of war that acts as the binding mechanism,” he said. “Man defined. The mano and metate cannot exist without the atlatl. But the atlatl can, and does, exist separate from all other things. I tell you this weapon is the true measure of man. What’s more, it is the measure of him who created man.”

  The next morning, Red Thunder and Little Shreve returned on their unshod ponies. Their half-naked, tattooed bodies glistened with grease in the broad sunlight.

  They led Spooner’s empty horse between them by the reins.

  When the band broke camp they cantered single-file past the stone grave. A sheet of brown man skin with empty arms and legs hung on long mesquite thorns. It billowed and stirred in the moderate breeze as if invested with the spirit of the man it once contained.

  On top of the lone grave were the mano and metate. The atlatl was nowhere seen.

  CHAPTER 8

  They regrouped and rode back into Texas, ready for war.

  Fifteen miles outside Las Moras they ran into a pack of surprised Rangers and fought their way clear. It was a fortuitous engagement for both sides: no man was wounded, but Marwood lost a heel on his boot and came away with a bruised calf muscle. Balls whizzed through the air with their peculiar buzz. Toward the end of the day they lost contact with one another in the mingling brush. Both sides took the opportunity to disengage, honour intact.

  A week later they rounded up stolen stock and used the money to buy new supplies in Uvalde. Marwood had his boot repaired and sought out a farrier’s. He walked into the open shop. The air smelled of strong acid. There were powder kegs in back, and sawdust and shavings covered the wooden floor. A workbench with a vise contained blocks of pecan and walnut wood, waiting to be lathed, along with scattered brass tools, saws, and moulds.

  “Yes, sir, help you?” the farrier said.

  “I need someone to tighten the stock on this here Sharps.”

  The farrier took the gun, looked it over, and went to work. The other men in the company scattered throughout town, but kept their helling to a minimum. Spaw found a group of Texicans willing to purchase his scalps so they could bump the price and send them to another buyer in London. Lovich bought himself a new Mexican saddle. Jubal Stone had a knife handle repaired while Calvin Zapata bought a new pair of boots and a tooled leather belt.

  They met up later that afternoon and pressed on.

  They killed when the mood took them, and it took them often. Their torn clothes soon reeked of blood and powderblack again. As their rancid clothes rotted they dressed in barbaric skins and rank leather sewn with raw thews. Spaw took to wearing a necklace of teeth. Bands of coyotes followed them on the trail, snuffling their collective stink and moving from bush to cactus like liquid smoke.

  They were on the deep trail when one day Jubal Stone looked behind them and chucked his tongue at the stalking coyotes, with their yellow eyes and red, lolling tongues. He turned back around.

  “When I ran niggers across the Atlantic,” he began, “we always had sharks follow the slaver ships. Hundreds of the devils, all kinds and sizes, too. They waited for us to toss the dead overboard, you see, and there were always new dead to cull from the holds. God, you never smelled such a stink in your life. It would permeate the wood. Union ships found us at night from the smell alone. You had to draw a knife to cut your way from taffrail to mainmast.”

  He rode on, marshalling his thoughts. “Yes, sirrah,” he told them all, “ebony gold. All gone now, though. The sea, the sea. You malandered sons of bitches will never understand what that was like.” He raised his voice, “What say you, Bill?”

  “Aye, scrimshander,” the ex-Quaker replied from up-column. “There ain’t nothing to make a man feel as alive as a rising sea and a canted deck under his feet. I have never seen the like before, and I fear I never shall again.”

  Rota clucked his tongue and took in his dry surroundings. “It ain’t right men like us who saw the sea should have to die in Texas,” he said.

  That night they found a lone buffalo in a wallow about to give birth. Her belly was swollen, and she was mired shoulder deep in thick mud. The Cajun thumped her belly. “She’s a ripe melon,” he said. He used a mesquite stump to crush her head in. Jubal Stone and Dan Lovich cut her open and pulled a half-formed calf from her gaping belly. It was encased in a thin membranous sheath, its legs jerking. The calf lifted its blind and feeble head, and bawed pitifully. They spitted the calf and hung it on heavy palo verde poles to smoke over a fire. As the black skin crisped they pulled it off and ate the succulent flesh beneath. Grease dripped into the fire, flared at Marwood’s feet. Spaw gathered the blood-milk from the dam’s bursting udders and apportioned it out in bowls.

  The men stood about the edge of the fire, drinking the milk laced with hot blood. Marwood drank when the bowl came his way. The milk was warm and had a not unpleasant tang. Sparks from the fire spiralled upward. The stars overhead were thick as sugar.

  Before Spooner died, the two black men and the Tonkawas always kept separate fires. Water, ammunition, and food were divided equally in that company, but little else in the way of physical comfort.

  But on this night, while the Tonkawas stood apart, silent as shadows, Ed Gratton took his place beside the main fire. Men shuffled aside to make room for him. Nothing was said, in welcome or dismissal.

  Lovich watched Red Thunder and Little Shreve strip handfuls of mesquite beans from the stunted trees and chew them.

  “Goddamn, they’ll eat anything, won’t they?” he said.

  “They ate Spooner right enough,” Jubal Stone put in.

  Lovich’s face hardened. “Blast your eyes, that ain’t funny.”

  Jubal threw a bone he had been gnawing into the fire. His black hair hung on either side of his face. “Who’s funnin’?”

  They rode through Zavala County and into Carrizo Springs with Botis in the lead. The town looked deserted until they spied a mass of people assembled in the town square. Some of the townsfolk were holding torches and candles.

  Botis dismounted and pressed through the crowded sea of humanity. It seemed every person born was present.

  “What are you hammerheads gawking at?” Lovich brawled.

  One of the men in the crowd answered back. “There was the most godawful thunderstorm last night. Washed everything out. Fred Glick lost his new barn. The city graveyard collapsed into the creek after it overflowed its banks. Some of the coffins were turned up at all angles like wagon spokes. You never saw such a dreadful sight. They found this here coffin with a girl in it and dug it out.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “See for yersel’, if’n you don’t believe me.”

  “I expect I will,” Botis said, and proceeded to do exactly that. He pushed to the head of the crowd and there spied a coffin propped across two barrels. Set into the coffin’s lid was a rectangular pane of glass, thick, rimmed with lead. There was a hairline crack in one corner. Reposed inside was a twenty-year-old blonde girl with a white shroud over her face.

  “It’s like the angel was buried only yesterday,” sighed an old woman in the crowd. “But there is not man one in town who can remember the day it happened, or who she ever was.”

  “The glass is cracked,” Botis said. “Air is seeping inside. She is beginning to decompose. You can see it plain.”

  “We’ve been watching it happen all day,” a bank clerk affirmed. “She’s turning to dust before our eyes. Yet she was pure as snow all these long years buried.”

  “The ways of God are mysterious,” another woman stated. She crossed herself and kissed her rosary.

  An eighty-year-old man with a beaked nose and close-set ears shuffled forward. “I think that the
re girl might be my mother,” he said.

  Everyone turned to see who had spoken such strange and outlandish words. The old man had a long, stubbled jaw and wild hair that stuck out from under his hat like twists of paper. He lurched into the crowd and stood before them, opened his mouth to speak again.

  “I remember my Daddy, he said we buried Momma in a coffin with a glass window.” The people standing around him started. They leaned forward. “Daddy said when the day of Resurrection came God could look into her eyes and lift her straight into heaven.”

  The old man touched the corner of the coffin with trembling fingers. “She died of the fever, you see. I was but a baby myself when it happened.”

  One of the younger men in the crowd threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, hell, Harvey, the only thing you remember is the gutter you slept in last night.”

  “That, and the vomit he swamped off my floor for a bucket of chock,” said another man, owner of one of the saloons in town.

  “Mister,” a thin reedy cowboy with red hair and a rash of pimples on his neck and forehead addressed Marwood. “Don’t you believe a word Harvey Spivey says. He is the lyingest sumbitch in Dimmit County.”

  “I can prove it,” said Harvey, who by this time had become positively emotional, either from the moment or from being called a liar in front of the entire town.

  “Well, go on, Harvey,” another man called. “Show us your cards.”

  Harvey swallowed hard. His entire body trembled. “My Daddy, he told me my oldest brother Jim was buried in the same coffin Momma was. Jim was one and a half years old. Daddy did that to save money to the undertaker. That’s what my Daddy told to me before he died and it was true.”

  “He’s full of shit.”

  “Somebody get a crowbar.”

  “Aw, hell, just bust the glass.”

  Eventually, a boy was charged to run to the livery and fetch a hammer, pritchel, and maul. Men worked the lid off the coffin with no little trouble; it had been cemented and puttied until every nick and crack was sealed for eternity. Final nails screeching, they at last removed the top and set it aside.

  “I will be goddamned,” one of the workmen whispered. A soft sigh went up from the crowd. They gave way like a tide as Harvey approached the coffin. Torches spat and guttered. No one spoke a word. There were heavy tears in Harvey’s red-rimmed eyes. He reached into the box and drew forth a small, bundled form. He picked the paper wrapping from its tiny, crumpled face.