Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  “He looks like me,” Harvey said. His voice cracked. “I am holding my older brother, Jim, dead these seventy-odd years.”

  He began to bawl outright.

  The women pressed around Harvey and spirited him away. Some began to sing and chant psalms. A collection was taken up for transit and reburial of Harvey’s mother and older brother in a double grave. The plot was to be kept in perpetuity until the Rapture. Even though it was Sunday, stores opened their doors for business. Drinks and food were sold in the square, and then given away outright. Marwood ate a huge plate of machaca and stewed corn, and drank colonche from a ceramic ewer. Some of the men took out their guns, howled, and shot at the moon. There was a general, festive air. Someone found a guitar and an impromptu band formed. Three men carried a piano outside. Not to be outdone, the owner of the local saloon had his employees bring out a player piano. But the scroll jammed and the player piano was scrapped and added to the central bonfire.

  People slept and danced and drank in the square, and not a few bastards were conceived that night. Daybreak—women in their underclothes baked buttermilk biscuits, pans of jalapeno cornbread, and boiled gallons of black Arbuckle coffee. When no one was looking they threw in an extra handful of coffee beans until it turned this side of syrup. Marwood drank several hot cups with lots of sugar. Botis and his men stuffed themselves on platters of cornbread and goat cheese, bacon, and fried potatoes.

  Botis had been drinking all night long. He lurched into one of the land agents, a man whose dubious claim to fame was in having his father shot by Roy Bean in Sonora.

  Botis took the man aside. “We are looking for a ranch,” he said.

  “There are some good plats up to the Leona River.”

  “No, this would be a larger place.”

  “Uncut land larger than for you and your men to work?”

  “No. This would be established and proved up.”

  “You mean a tract of land moved out and prime.”

  “No. A large ranch owned. I know there’s one in this area.”

  “You must be talking about the Lancaster outfit. That’s the only big place I know hereabouts. Run near a million and a half acres. That sound right?”

  “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  “Lancaster joined up with the Stackpoles and bought out Old Man Twillinger,” the land agent said. “Bob Lancaster, he runs it now. Well, they say he runs it, but everyone gets a share of that pie. He married into Molly Frierson’s family up down Reynosa way. It’s her twin brother, August Frierson, who’s the real brains of that outfit. He owns the house, anyway. Lives there now.”

  “Are there any larger?”

  “You mean in Texas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in Texas.”

  “Where I can find Mr. Frierson?”

  “At his ranch like I said.”

  “Yes. Do you know where that might be?”

  The county clerk sketched a map in the dirt with a hickory cane. “Go out to LaSalle County. This here bend in the Nueces River? Got a real nice place there. Can’t miss it. Close your eyes and throw a rock and you’d hit it. The Double-barred V is their brand. When you get there tell them Ol’ Victor remembers the time Bob Grat let that skunk loose in the milking room. He’ll remember. You just tell him.”

  “I will tell him,” Botis said. He rejoined his men and handed Spaw three separate slips of paper with printing on one side. “Send one telegram in the morning, noon, and at nightfall,” he instructed. “Do not wait for a reply. They won’t come.”

  “Where you going, Cap?” Spaw asked.

  “To balance the books. I will take two men. Lovich and Mar, get your horses. We will meet up with you other boys later.”

  Marwood and Spaw went to exercise their horses. When they brought them back to the stable Spaw said, “It ain’t going to be easy with Rangers and God all looking for you.”

  “It’s not Rangers I’m worried about,” Marwood said.

  Spaw rubbed his horse down with a sugar sack. “I guess you noticed the captain is a little touched.” Spaw stood with his arms draped over the back of his horse. “I know you ain’t happy about that Mexican village, Mar. I ain’t saying I liked it, either. But Botis is a good man to ride for. We wouldn’t stick if the pay wasn’t right.”

  Marwood watered and curried his mare. “I’m not complaining.”

  “No, you’re not the kind.”

  Spaw tossed the wet sacking in a corner and took a deep breath. “Look here, it’s naught but trail talk, Mar. I don’t set store in it. I take it when Botis killed that abbot over to the Old Country he thought they were trying to hide the existence of this city he’s looking for. He’s had a strong hate on for them ever since.”

  “How so?”

  “Like I said, I think he killed somebody and had to run.” Spaw lifted the foreleg of his horse and cleaned out the frog with a paddle knife. “Anyway, he once’t saw a vision of a golden city. He says it’s somewhere in the west. He wants to find it again, open up its gates and go home. He prays for it daily. Doc Quillen was with him at the time. So was Dan Lovich.”

  Marwood stopped currying his mare and stared at Spaw. Shafts of sunlight spilled from open chinks in the roof, highlighting ragged spider webs and drifting dust motes.

  “The hell,” Marwood said.

  “That’s true. I heard them talk and they weren’t spinning.” Spaw stared through the open door of the stable. It was as if he were looking thousands of miles away. “They was out there alone and they saw it lift from the desert with towers and spires of spun glass.” He shook his head and came back to himself. “I don’t think such a thing exists. But if it does, it needs to be stopped. Thing like that, it don’t belong in the world of men.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Marwood said.

  “Listen, Mar, I want for you to take my dun.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “No, you listen,” said Spaw. “Your mare, she can’t go all day, but this dun, he can. You are liable to get yourself in a jackpot out there. If you do, you’ll need a fast horse.”

  “You give me your saddle, too?”

  “I ain’t giving you my saddle, you son of a bitch.”

  “How about your blanket?”

  “I hope you get shot and skun like Spooner.”

  “Well,” Marwood said. “I thank you, anyway.”

  “Be careful out there, Mar.”

  “See you down the trail.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, too.”

  Marwood led his horse from the stable and met Botis and Lovich already sitting their saddles. Marwood swung into leather and the three rode abreast into the high cane grass.

  The men who stayed behind watched them leave with various looks of envy and muted disappointment.

  The Cajun hooked his thumbs through his belt and shook his head. “Well, if this ain’t the drizzlin’ shits on a Sunday afternoon.” He looked around at the men. “They done gone and left us high and dry.”

  CHAPTER 9

  They rode out of a roiling cauldron to the east and came upon a lone ranch house. They hid their horses in the bottom of a dry streambed. Botis chewed hardtack, lying on a grassy hummock on one thick elbow. He surveyed the layout with his turtle shell binoculars.

  The house was a ten-room, two-storey clapboard affair. It had a wide colonnaded porch and a pair of white stars painted on its slanted red roof.

  Groups of mounted and armed men came and went from the structure at varying intervals throughout the day. Botis remarked it was telling enough since pickets had been pulled from their posts. The house and grounds, for all purposes, were unprotected. Eventually, a large group of men gathered on the front porch, checked their guns and rifles, and, with packed saddlebags, rode off to the north. They did not return.

&nb
sp; The day wore on. A black-tailed hawk razored through the cobalt sky. Nothing else moved. Marwood held his loaded Sharps rifle at the ready. He could hear naught but the beating of his heart.

  “I reckon it’s our turn to balance this ledger, like you say, Cap,” Lovich said low.

  Botis agreed. “Let us go down into Canaan together.”

  They retrieved their horses and rode through an open Hampshire gate. They paused on the veranda and went inside the closed-up house, guns drawn.

  The interior was furnished in dark Spanish style with beaded board and expensive floor rugs. An elderly woman wearing blue spectacles met them at the bottom of the stairs. She carried a wicker basket of dirty wash sheets. She dropped the basket and, with a scream caught in her throat, turned to run. Lovich caught her in a wallpapered dining room furnished with a long table and wood-burning stove. He rapped the stock of his sawed-off .10-gauge on the back of her head and she went down.

  They tied her up with clothesline, gagged and threw a horse blanket over her, and folded her into a root closet. She kicked the wall. They dragged her out, tied her feet together, and shoved her back inside. Lovich locked the door and braced a Morris chair underneath the glass knob.

  The three killers mounted the stairs. The hickory steps creaked under their combined weight. They found the dying man in the third upstairs room. The windows were thrown open for a breeze. A johnny-pot in the corner was filled to the brim with yellow mucous and brown slime.

  August Frierson was in bed with a red silk counterpane up to his shoulders. His skeletal hands lay outside the counterpane, holding two six-guns. He was too weak to lift them.

  Gentle as milk, Botis took the guns from August Frierson’s hands and placed them on a polished dressing table. He stared at the dying man with something akin to pity, like a man might feel for a dog with a broken back.

  “We are just going to kill you a little,” he said.

  Lovich tore the covers away and hauled the living skeleton out of bed. The sick old man was dressed in soiled bedclothes, and he stank. His arms and legs were thin from the wasting disease that cindered his bones, but his paunch was large as a water keg and wobbled on his frame. His feet were bony with long, spider-like toes. The slack skin on his face hung like loose gutta-percha rubber.

  Lovich steadfastly uncoiled a long rope. He slung one end over a ceiling beam and slipped the noose over the old man’s head. Marwood got on the other end and caught up the slack.

  “Grrk.” It was the first sound Frierson had made. He sat on the floor, thin rooster neck stretched so the cords and muscles bulged; one shiny white leg extended, the other crooked beneath him.

  Botis sat on his haunches, beside the old man. He folded his hands and stared Frierson square in the face.

  “I am the only friend you have in this room,” Botis said. “That man on the other end of the rope will never let out slack once he starts to haul in. Never have I seen a man so taken to killing for the sake of vengeance. He is my Hotspur.”

  Frierson tried to turn his head and look at Marwood, but he could not find the right angle. His breath sawed in short, choking rasps.

  “The other Texas families have abandoned you,” Botis continued. His voice turned mellow. “Now that the truth is out, they will not risk public shame and imprisonment to save your hide. They will not risk their worthwhile lives to save your worthless one. You are the dross and dunnage of their existence. To save themselves they have thrown you to the wolves. They have thrown you to me.”

  “I . . . I,” Frierson gargled.

  “It is man’s right to kill what comes before him,” Botis said. He lifted a finger.

  Marwood set his legs and hauled on the rope, and the old man rose thrashing into the air. Legs like knobbed sticks kicked with furious impotence; hands flailed at the noose, trying to find purchase.

  The struggle lessened. The hands dropped and his body spun as the hemp plies untwisted. Botis lowered his finger and Frierson crashed to the floor so hard the walls shook.

  The old man lay beside Botis, weeping like a damaged and humbled child.

  “I entered our contract in good faith,” Botis said. He loosened the noose around Frierson’s throat to let him breathe and smoothed back Frierson’s wiry hair. “I did as I was charged. I upheld my end of the bargain. Yet you betrayed my service, and now you find yourself bereft of friends and hope.”

  “I will give you ten thousand dollars if you let me live.”

  It was a markedly apparent statement, delivered from this frail creature with such conviction. It was both indication of intent and desperation.

  Botis frowned and shook his head slowly. “We are beyond crass monetary weights. We have moved into a dark realm, you and I. Here do we walk together, hand in hand, through a shadowed valley. We are between the rope and the gun. It is ever thus for men like you and me.”

  “I don’t want to die,” the man said.

  “I do not blame you. A narrow life is a wasted life.”

  The old man rose into the air. He kicked and spun and gurgled. Face blue, he soiled himself. The pale yellow urine dripped off his toes onto the floor; his movements turned feeble and spasmodic.

  “Let him down, Mar. Mar, let him down.”

  Marwood lowered the man. Botis put his face close to Frierson’s. There was very little life left in this thing. Very little air. “A man can afford the luxury to love his enemy only after he kills him,” Botis said. “This is the Great Truth. If you cannot understand this, you cannot understand anything about me.”

  They bundled August Frierson up and carried him outside, arms and legs dangling like limp cordage. Botis went into the barn and came out with a roll of French barbed wire. They tied him up. Lovich straddled the supine body, thumbed back the hammers on his shotgun, and cut loose with both barrels. The sound of the blast echoed between the two-storey house and the cottonwood trees ranked along the riverbank.

  They brought the horses around and climbed into saddle and rode away, leaving their offal sacrifice in the road for the turkey buzzards, and the other nameless things that did crawl and slink upon the ground.

  CHAPTER 10

  They rode into Bexar past the Spanish Governor’s Palace, with its Hapsburg coat of arms carved in stone. They hitched their horses on the Plaza de Armas and passed through a dark courtyard with a central water fountain and lush, green foliage.

  Marwood followed Botis and Lovich into a public house across the divide. Inside, a huge pecan tree grew out of the hardwood floor at a thirty-degree angle, right through the centre of the saloon and out the rooftop. The huge trunk was half again the circumference of a wagon wheel. Canvas louvers were set in the ceiling, operated by long tipi-like poles. These were used to let smoke out or rain in, or redirect circulating breezes into the stifling miasma of cigar smoke, perfume, sweat, and the general stink of the saloon.

  Hanging on the walls were gilded mirrors and fantastic oil paintings from dead Dutchmen in Paris. Tattered Texas flags were prevalent, including relics like the Gonzales Banner, the blood-torn Goliad Flag, and the 1819 First Texas Lone Star Flag from when Texas was nothing more than an outflung province of the Spanish Empire.

  Across the length of the room stood a mahogany bar with a tiled countertop, polished brass rail, and ivory-carved corners. Spittoons ringed the bar. Glasses and bottles of every shape and size imaginable filled open shelves from floor to ceiling. Tables, chairs, hard-backed settees, all manner of furniture took up every possible square foot of flooring.

  Two sweeping staircases supported by white marble colonnades curled like cattle horns from the second-storey landing. Arrayed along the upper storey walls was door after door of polished oak. Each door had a number, and each number had a brass key assigned to it and protected by an armed man with green leather ledger and black inkwell.

  Painted women, with exquisite hair and subtle perf
umes, moved through the hall. They dressed in hoops, whalebone, and lace, and sailed to and from the ports of men. There were ladders of every description and colour placed around the giant pecan tree. Laughing women sat atop them with their knees open, smoking machine-rolled cigarettes. They fielded lewd calls and eager hands with obscene sallies of their own.

  Adjoining the main room were private alcoves with tightly drawn curtains. Occasionally, here and there through a vertical chink of light, Marwood saw a man riding a wild-haired Creole on a green leather couch. Or a woman unclothed and drinking raw gin from a cut glass tumbler while men warred with cards for her favour.

  There was much noise and music and speech, and the saloon proper was a hot press of pink flesh, wanton lust, bribery, greed run riot, and suppressed sexual violence.

  Botis walked up to the bar with Marwood and Lovich on either side. He laid his big hands flat. “What do you have that you don’t apportion out to the rabble?” he asked.

  The bartender, a man with Macassar-oiled hair and red cuffs around his sleeves, replied, “Well, sir, for a man of . . . refined taste and judgement, I always suggest Glenlivet. It’s the best single malt whiskey from the Speyside distilleries in Ballindalloch.”

  “I’ll take a gill of that horse piss. And again for these men.”

  “Yes, sir. Happy to oblige.” The bartender’s eyes took in their rank clothes and rundown appearance. He hesitated a fraction too long.

  “You want to see my colour,” Botis said. “Is that it?” He started to open his wallet.

  “Well, sir, this is a special shipment we receive only once a year. Few men are as elevated in their palate”—the bartender swallowed painfully—“as you are. Most customers are happy with the more economical purchase of aged busthead, or chock out of a tin pail. It’s easier on their wallet.”