Angels of North County

by T. Owen O'Connor

  The scarred warrior stopped chanting and wheeled at the sound of the rifle fire. Raif could see Jed and Abner standing a short way off as the warrior raced silently at them. Jed fumbled to reload his rifle. Raif was amazed at the speed and distance the savage was covering until Abner simply raised his shotgun and emptied both barrels into the savage’s chest, sending him flying backward. He landed on his back, but his momentum carried his ankles and shins underneath him, and he died in an awkward hump.

  The pain sliced through Raif’s forehead, but the blood went syrupy as it hit the cold night air, crusting his left eye shut.

  Jed and Abner approached, and Jed asked, “Raphael, you dead?”

  Raif tried to rise, and Abner grabbed hold of his arm before he fell back over.

  Raif drawled, “I think he done cracked my skull with that contraption.”

  Abner sat Raif down on a pile of furs and picked up Gabriel’s pistol, reloading it with cartridges taken from Raif’s pocket. He walked the line of the dead, kicking each in the head. One kick produced a slight groan and Abner stepped back and fired. He returned to the fire, sat slowly, and said, “Luther told me they play possum.”

  As they sat by the fire, the first rays of light broke through, and a curtain of light began to draw down the cliffs. Abner stoked the embers of the fire with the shaft of an arrow and said, “I reckon it’s Christmas morning.” He rose and went to fetch the horses still tethered down the far switchbacks.

  Jeb stitched Raif’s face, then rustled through the war party’s possessions mostly out of curiosity. He rolled over the savage with the long rifle and freed the weapon with a struggle from the half-headed man’s grip. The barrel was the longest he’d ever seen, and he whistled softly as he raised the weapon to his shoulder. He expected the barrel to be too heavy to steady, but was impressed with its balance. He held it at arm’s length and studied the stock of dark cherry wood that was carved with what he figured was a pack of large-eared dogs chasing a lion. They were a breed he had never seen nor heard of.

  Jed said, “Got to be at least fifty caliber and look how it’s sighted, Raif. It’s got a tube on top to look through. I bet you could drop a man at a thousand yards. I reckon this is yours.”

  “No, Jed, you blew his head off. I think that means you practically inherited it. I’ll lug it for you. Buck’s holster is long enough and my rifle’s out there somewhere’s on the mountain where I left it last night. We ain’t got time to go search’n for it.”

  Jed whistled again softly as he studied the rifle. Abner returned with the horses and kicked at a clump of skins to clear a path and cursed out as the pain in cold toes rang out from hitting something solid under the skins. Abner revealed a strongbox when he pulled the skins away. The metal latch had been broken off and it was held shut by a crude leather thong. Abner cut the thong and opened the lid, exposing a chest of gold and silver eagles, colored beads, and stones and jewelry of all shapes. Abner looked up and said, “Where do you reckon they got this?”

  Jed said, “Probably robb’n Tin City shipments. Will you look at all that? We crossed this hump flat on our asses, and now we’re headed back like Solomon. Ain’t that the way of it.”

  “We best be going,” Raif said as he struggled to his feet.

  The brothers divvied up the treasure in their saddlebags and galloped past the Druids, cresting the north pass the following day and descending toward home. They rode hard in the daylight, and walked their tired horses a good part of the night but they didn’t reach the Cuchalainn until late afternoon of December 31st. Raif climbed the front steps to find tacked to the door a decree for failure to pay the property assessment. Attached to the decree was an eviction bill ordered by the magistrate and a notice that all chattel and livestock would be publicly auctioned to satisfy the debt.

  Jed sat on the front steps and said, “It ain’t right, we’re here and it’s the thirty-first.”

  “No, it ain’t right,” Abner responded.

  Jed said, “I guess it don’t matter now, we got enough to buy this place and ten more now, at auction or anywhere’s else for that matter.”

  Raif said, “The hell we will. I’ll be damned if I’m going to bid with some townie merchant for what Pa built.”

  He mounted Buck. The horse didn’t have much left, but he had some, and Raif followed the path across the back fields to the old bridge. He reckoned Tickers would take the lost trail road out to the old bridge and cut across the opens to pick up the Post Road to Walker’s, the homesteads, and on into town. Raif wanted to catch Tickers before he hit the Post Road and spurred Buck hard down the path. It wasn’t until the first sharp rise that Buck faltered. Raif dismounted, not wanting to kill his last good horse. He grabbed the dead renegade’s long rifle and three rounds and ran the last twenty yards to the top of the rise. He sighted Tickers’s green velvet coat flapping as he rode across the field five hundred yards shy of the old bridge. He put a cartridge in the breech and fired into the air.

  The report rumbled down the meadow. Tickers wheeled his horse, and Raif waved the rifle and took his hat off with his other hand, hoping his long blond hair would alert the tax assessor that it was a Hanson.

  Tickers sat there in the saddle for a long moment with his wrists crossed on the pommel, dangling the reins in his left hand. He pulled his watch from his vest pocket and held it with his right hand, and with a dramatic flourish, he pointed to the watch with his left hand. Tickers returned the watch to its pocket and stretched out both arms with palms turned skyward and pantomimed the universal sign for too late, tough shit. Tickers smiled and wheeled his horse around and started off at a slow trot.

  Raif cleared the chamber and loaded a fresh cartridge. He dropped to the ground and laid the barrel on a rock. He put the stock into his shoulder and sighted down the long tube, raising the yardage sight to a distance he figured to be five hundred yards. He’d never hit anything over three hundred in his life. He felt a slight breeze on his right cheek and gauged the wind from the way the tops of the dried grass fluttered above the snow dusting. The rifle’s windage bolt was strange to him, so he decided not to fiddle with it and factored Kentucky. The sight filled with nothing but the green coat of that fool, and he positioned the sight to the right side of Tickers’s back. He took a full, slow breath and exhaled slowly, squeezing the trigger, which had a much lighter pull than his rifle. In a half instant, Tickers was thrown over the neck of his horse. The round hit him dead center high in the back between the angel bones. Tickers’s foot caught the stirrup, and his horse dragged him twenty yards before it tired of the effort and stopped.

  Raif raced over to the dry creek bed that ran the length of the meadow. He tried as best he could to jump from rock to rock, trying not to leave tracks. He was amazed by the clarity of his mind and lack of concern at having killed Tickers. His eye was still hurting but he was fired up and determined to fix it so that it looked like renegades did the killing. He removed his boots within a hundred yards and ran in the snow-dusted grass to the tax collector’s body. Tickers lay on his back with little indication of where the round entered, but when Raif flipped him over there was a gaping hole in his upper chest. Tickers’s face was ashen with open eyes fixed in eternal amazement.

  Raif riffled through Tickers’s satchel and pulled out the tax log. He fingered the pages to the day’s date and right below the entry for McCallum he found the entry for the Cuchalainn. It was still blank. He found a grease pencil in the bottom of the saddlebag. He studied the entry for McCallum’s ranch—Gabriel McCallum, proprietor of the Criss Cross, paid $200 silver eagles, and one colt sired by Charlemagne (value agreed of $95), total: $295. He studied the stroke of the tax collector’s writing. He saw the Cuchalainn was $240, and he knew Tickers had tried to cheat him. In the entry for the Hanson ranch, Raif wrote, “Spoke with Hanson boy, claimed to be proprietor, paid $240 in silver eagles.” Raif reached into his pocket and pulled out $240 in silver eagles and put it in the dead man’s purse. He fretted for
a moment over being able to copy Tickers’s signature. It had a scripted “T” written in an elaborate flourish and he decided to not even try.

  Raif returned the logbook to the satchel the way he found it. He stood to run but thought better of it and opened the satchel again. He took out all the money. There were silver and gold eagles, pennies, foreign coins, and many small coppers, all in all he guessed about a thousand dollars’ worth. He also found a wedding ring, silver spoons, brooches, and a bronze medal from the war, and, to him, the thought that folks had to part with these because of this fool sent a warm feeling over Raif. He relished killing the son of a bitch.

  A crow’s caw startled him. The caw-caw came again, and he saw the bird circling. He scanned the horizon and knew he was taking too much time. He walked back to the river gully holding the satchel but stopped again and looked back at Tickers’s ashen face, his eyes appearing to follow Raif. He studied Tickers a moment and reflected that no renegade would leave a dead man like that. He went back and rolled Tickers over, grabbed him by his hair, placed his chin and mouth into the grass, and drew his long blade. Raif scalped him from his eyebrows to his neck and wrenched the pelt free.

  Tickers’s horse grew skittish at the smell of fresh blood, but before it could bolt, Raif grabbed it by the reins and plunged two feet of his bayonet into the big vein of the neck. Blood vomited and the horse bucked, but Raif held hard to the reins until the animal collapsed. He took the scalp and put it in the money satchel and slung it over his shoulder. He grabbed Tickers’s hat and waterskin, grabbed his boots, and headed back to Buck. He emptied the waterskin into Tickers’s hat and Buck drank feverishly from it. He feared for Buck because he was still sweating but he figured the horse’d cooled enough in the winter air. The water finished, he buried the hat in the soft sand of the riverbed. He scanned the horizon and saw nothing but the circling crow. He put his boots on and led Buck by a tether, trekking on foot toward the ranch.

  He reached the fence line of the Cuchalainn and cut the wire. He took the saddle off and slapped Buck’s ass, sending the horse into its home range, knowing that Buck would go for the stable. He hid the saddle and long renegade rifle as best he could under a hay pile a hundred yards inside the wire. He twisted the wire back and started walking east across the open fields.

  He covered five miles on foot until he reached the old Kaiser homestead. Raif knew the Kaisers had been slaughtered and the homestead burned down years ago by renegades. The chimney and one wall with a window cut in the bricks was all that was left standing. Raif remembered the older kids at school teasing the girls that the Kaiser place was haunted. He went to the fireplace and found a loose stone with a hollow space behind it. He pushed the satchel into the hole, but it snagged on something. He reached into the cavity and retrieved an old-style buck knife, the handle charred but still solid, and put it in his belt. He put the satchel in the space and replaced the stone. He turned west and headed for home. As he walked, snow began to fall, and he trusted his luck that his footprints would be covered.

  Two months later, a cavalry detachment rode up to the Cuchalainn with the new tax collector. Raif put a pistol under the flap of his jacket and walked down the front steps to the gate. Jed and Abner waited behind the curtains. Jed held the long rifle and Abner the shotgun. The cavalry officer asked if this was the Hanson ranch and introduced a Mr. Thompson as the new tax assessor. Thompson was a scrawny man with a fidgety disposition. Raif thought tax collectors must all be molded in the same government workshop. Thompson started talking about how they’d uncovered a second set of books in Tickers’s office. According to Thompson, the county board had learned Tickers had a series of oversights and handed Raif a coupon for $180. He could redeem it in town or its value could be put to next year’s assessment. If he redeemed it in town for cash there would be a $10 processing fee.

  “A hundred-eighty dollars don’t seem like an oversight,” Raif told him.

  “Well, the review of Mr. Tickers’s recordkeeping is still ongoing, son.”

  Raif said, “You can put it to next year’s assessment. I ain’t got no pressing need for the money. And you’ll refer to me as Mr. Hanson. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay my hard-earned money to some stranger crawled into North County yesterday who calls me ‘son.’ ”

  Ten years later, Raif lay stretched on the bales of hay at Walker’s barn raising. He tracked Edda as she moved among the farm families, watching her exchange smiles with womenfolk. He knew he would never know family. He knew the women whispered about him and any decent woman had a father that wanted no part of a Hanson, especially him. When Tickers was killed all those years ago, no one gave it much thought other than a party of rogue renegades did it. The thought never occurred to anyone that a polite and handsome boy shot him in the back and then carved off his scalp from his eyes to the back of his neck. But the years passed and Raif’s reputation as a wanderer in the wastelands and a killer of renegades, rustlers, outlaws, trespassers, and the half-lunatic shaman Lobo trickled into the town gossip. The gossip turned to folks conjecturing that maybe there was more to the mystery surrounding Tickers’s killing, folks knowing the last ranch Tickers visited was Raif Hanson’s.

  Edda caught him staring at her and instead of a smile, she took the look of a frightened animal that had fallen under the blank gaze of a predator. She had married a good man, Tom Burke, and had four children. Raif dreamed for a moment of the children she would have borne him. He had vowed after the Crossing to go to her, but as soon as he had healed, Gabriel had come to him, saying a gang of rustlers led by Lobo, the crazed half-breed, had targeted the Criss Cross. The colonel, Gabriel, Raif, and their men had tracked the rustlers for weeks before the butchering, followed by Raif’s lone odyssey tracking Lobo into the wastelands. Every time he thought to go to Edda there would be another reason to ride, and he had the ranch to run.

  A decade of killing and building the Cuchalainn took his youth. By the time he got around to marrying, Edda had given Burke two sons.

  It didn’t matter, he was unfit. Every night since the Crossing, it was the same dream. It started with him feeling warm and wrapped in blankets, then he would hear the warrior’s chant. It would start slow, and the cadence would build. As he was drawn deeper into its familiar rhythm, he would feel the cold seep into the folds of his blankets. The cold would crawl toward him, and he knew that he was the child in the mother’s belly clawing at the womb because its fire was dying. He could see the vision of himself kneeling over her as he had that night in the chiseled path of the Druid, the moon’s light flowing over her skin like poured milk, revealing the shapes raised by the quickening. The chant would grow louder and he knew the only way to stop the cold before it consumed him was to stab her in the heart. He never used the bayonet. In his left hand he held the scarred warrior’s long black horn and he twisted it down into her womb where he knew his soul was crying out against the cold.

  He gazed at Edda holding the small hand of her son and whispered to himself, “Ain’t that the way of it?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  GABRIEL

  * * *

  Reaching the Criss Cross ranch house after the hunt for the black, Gabriel and Caleb entered with pistols drawn. They moved swiftly through the house. The house was empty except for the dead. Seth entered and let out a gasp and backed out onto the front porch stifling an urge to vomit. He held his head in his hands, and his body swayed with sobbing.

  Gabriel and Caleb rushed on to the porch when they heard Joe approach on horseback and say: “Maybe forty warriors, pulling something heavy. Cannon maybe, looking at the door; hundred or so head cattle, plenty horse—they’ve got a full day, maybe two on us.”

  “The girls are gone. Take Caleb, don’t engage. Track ’em—meet me at the old mission tomorrow next—get close enough to know if it’s the flats or the Crossing they’re tak’n.”

  Caleb and Joe swung onto their horses and sped south.

  Gabriel watched them ride out, then
grabbed Seth by his collar. He slapped his hat off and told him to shut up. He dragged him by his hair into the ranch house and threw him down onto the bloody floorboards inside the door. Gabriel lifted him up again and dragged him to his dead grandmother still pinned to the table. He forced Seth’s head up and shook him until his eyes opened and said, “Look at your nanna, boy, she’s the only mama you ever knew. Your pa’s over there with his head cut off and he’ll be lay’n next to your ma in the dirt out back soon enough. Everything you and Caleb ever loved is dead except your sisters and they is all that matter now, so stop your sobbing. You’re going to ride to Raif, tell him straight what you seen here. Tell him not to head south; tell him there’s too many—tell him we’ll meet at Walker’s.” Gabriel dragged Seth to the door and down the front steps. “Ride to the brothers, tell them we’ll need everything they can bring. Now ride and if Raif ain’t at the main house, find him.”

  Gabriel reentered the house and moved to the fireplace past his brothers’ dried pool of blood. His mother still lay pinned to the table. He flattened her shirt and pulled the knife from her chest. He lifted her up and brought her to the porch; she was as light as a straw doll. He retrieved his brothers’ bodies and his dead brother’s son. He laid them out on the front lawn of the ranch house, placing the severed, scalped head of his one brother with his body. He covered them with blankets and then fetched wood and kindling. He poured the oil from lamps on his dead kin and set them on fire. He stood near his horse making sure the fire got burning well enough to keep the animals uninterested. He would bury his family when he returned.