Angels of North County

by T. Owen O'Connor

  “Should we find out what he knows?” Caleb asked.

  “Nah, he’s a tough one, and he knows he’s dying, so he’ll be tough to break. We need Gabriel; Raif; they’ll have a trick or two. We wait, you did a good shot. He’s got plenty of life. I’m gonna put a flame on the wall so they know it’s safe.”

  Six hours later, the party rode up hard, and the sound of their hooves thundered into the mission reverberating off the walls. They dismounted. The bound warrior didn’t look up.

  “How bad is he?” the colonel asked.

  Joe responded, “Caleb hit him in the knee, all bone; he’s been tied off since. He’s sick from something else. He’s dying slowly.”

  Gabriel looked over the warrior and grabbed him by the hair, lifting his head to look into his eyes, and said, “Jaundice, poisoned blood, but he still has a lot of strength. Bring me some of that fire from the wall, Joe, and keep it hot about ten feet there or so. Seth, there’s a black satchel with metals in it in my saddlebag; bring it to me.”

  Raif said, “I got the ear thing; it need to stoke in the fire a good bit.”

  Gabriel rose to his full height and looked down at the warrior. The warrior raised his head as if he knew Gabriel would be staring and returned the same stone gaze. Without taking his eyes off of the warrior, Gabriel said, “I reckon I’m gonna need that. This one thinks he’s up for it.”

  Wesley said, “What’s going on here, Colonel?”

  “We need to know how they’re moving, what path into the wastelands, and this savage knows it and he’s going to tell us,” the colonel said.

  Wesley watched as Gabriel rolled out the black leather satchel revealing what looked like a doctor’s instruments. The colonel ordered Seth and Toby to mount up and ride south for three miles and scout for any stragglers. He told them not to kill them but to wound them like Caleb had dropped the warrior. The colonel was sure this would be the only scout.

  Wesley turned to the colonel. “Colonel, torture under your command?’

  “What choice do we have? We need to know the route his war chief is using to get past the fort to the wastelands. If they get too far ahead we can’t follow, sixty miles south of the fort, there’s nothing but a thousand like this hard son-of-a-bitch—you’d need a brigade. We can’t delay; we have to catch him before he reaches the lakes.”

  The warrior groaned as Gabriel applied fire to his feet. Wesley turned and saw the blackening of flesh and spun toward his father. “Colonel, torture wasn’t on the curriculum at the academy.”

  “Not everybody’s got the stomach for it, Lieutenant. I suggest you ride south and assist Seth and Toby.”

  “To the contrary, Colonel, I see no other option. My expectation was that you wouldn’t choose such a . . . practical approach,” Wesley said.

  “Wesley, if those were your sisters we were chasing, I would be the one pulling that heathen apart a piece at a time.”

  The colonel spun and walked toward the interrogation. As the colonel neared, he could hear Gabriel say, “This is going to take some of Luther’s ways.”

  The colonel turned and walked out of the mission. He saddled his horse and ordered Wesley to follow him on patrol.

  “If it’s all the same, Colonel, I’d rather watch. You never know when certain military tactics will come in handy again.”

  Less than an hour later the party emerged from the mission. Gabriel and the colonel discussed the information.

  Gabriel said, “They’re cross’n the Ash Run River twenty miles east of the fort, taking the big valley of the five hands to the lake country. He said they hailed from the western lake, and before he died he said his chief is the White Lion.”

  The colonel pulled his glove tighter on his hand, “They’re running the flats to save from losing too many head. This warlord is one brazen son of a bitch. He ain’t worried about the cavalry or us catching him.”

  “Well, if he’s trying to save heads, he can’t go south from the east ford. It’s all a desert stretch south from there,” Gabriel said.

  “That heathen gave it to us straight, he’s got to cut west again if he wants to feed and water that herd; he’ll need one of the five canyons lead’n to the great lake,” the colonel said. He eyed the southern mountains. “We need to ride to Tin City and see if we can buy a safe passage through the Stone tribe. From there we fortify a position in front of ’em in the canyons and lay for him. He’ll slow too once he gets across the Ash Run, think he’s in the lake country already, he’ll let ’em water and feed on down and we’ll be lay’n for him in the canyon.”

  Gabriel responded, “I reckon that’s the way to carve that son of a bitch up.”

  “Did he say anything more?” the colonel asked.

  “That he hopes we catch up with the White Lion so that his daughters can wear our skins this winter.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  TIN CITY

  * * *

  They rode hard for the southern mountain and crossed up the ridgebacks as darkness fell, making the last stretch in total darkness, trusting the horses to keep from paying the price for recklessness. By midmorning next, the company reached the druids and picked a defensive position to rest the horses.

  Raif took Toby and Seth and walked east across the pass to a squat-looking druid. They searched the side until they found a climbing path of jagged stone with good handholds, and they ascended the rock. The boys followed Raif atop the druid as he swung out over and dropped into a chiseled channel that cut through the stone. As Raif landed he drew his pistol and moved slowly; the boys mimicked his actions. Raif didn’t think there’d be renegades about, but the years had taught him to be wary of hides, even old ones. He reached the crow’s nest, but there was no sign of the woman, her body having disappeared years ago, taken by the band of warriors without a name that still wandered these cliffs. The only thing that stood where the scout had been silenced were two stone cairns, one of them three feet high; the other a foot. The ladder had since worn out, and a few pieces of hemp and old dried wood lay strewn about the stone floor. Luther had said a nest once found is never used again. It was their law. Raif boosted Seth and Toby up the rock wall, and the two boys climbed into the crow’s nest and looked down the path of the Crossing to the top of the south ridgebacks.

  Raif told them the story of his night on the Crossing. The boys looked down at him in silent rapture. They had heard only the rumors, and now they sat motionless as Raif told them how he was born anew that cold night. He told Seth and Toby of the black pawn trail along the abyss, and the camps in the cuts of the cliffs. He schooled them on hides, how they’d never find one by searching for it, you needed for them to move, the need for patience. As they dropped from the window, Raif showed them how to kill a scout from the front and back with the knife so he dies swiftly, silently. Raif drew the black antler from its hide scabbard and told of the warrior of scars that had bested him and how it was Jed and Abner that had come for him as he was set to be scalped. As Raif stood there looking at the two boys, he saw they were near his age when he crossed that first time. He never told anyone the scout was a woman and kept the secret buried within him.

  Toby looked at Raif and envied his scars, the way he carried himself, and his knowledge of the killing arts.

  As if reading his mind, Raif said, “You two will learn our ways on this trip. I can see it in you. Don’t worry, you’ll know what to do when the time comes. And don’t do the mistake I did back then; Jed and Abner done proved how wrong my ways were that night. We ride and war together. Ya’ll took Bibbs; the ancients had their notions of war—the first of their kind were warriors like Achilles, the hero nonsense, but as Greeks started fighting savages, courage came to be the fighter in the ranks, the one who could keep his feelings in check and stand with his brothers in battle. You’ll see when we catch these sons-of-bitches, they fight each to his own, there’ll be lots of ’em all scream’n gibberish but watch ’em, they’re fighting one at a time—each trying to earn his
place in whatever belief in a next world they cling to. You’ll know what to do when we catch ’em and don’t be feared by the first time you hear the crush of it.

  “Ya’ll shot a lot, but when someone’s shoot’n at you it’s different. The sound of slugs is like the ripping of a bedsheet, tearing the very sky—it sets the air alive. The ripp’n of that sheet in the air gonna cause near every hair on your body to stand like a cat’s whisker, each one pumping fire to your blood. You think at first there ain’t no stand’n it; and someth’n inside will be tell’n you not to fire. You’ll think don’t fire and they won’t see me, won’t come at me, you’ll be think’n like you can hide right in the middle of it all. It’s fool’s stuff you’re thinking, they get to you soon enough. You got to pull that first trigger, that’s the bitch—after the first pull, the rest ain’t nothing but a thing, and ain’t that the way of most things.”

  Raif paused and looked at them hard. “There’s something more important than even the fight—you heed me now—any man that asks from another what he could do for himself on this ride is gonna give rise to a provocation. You got to dig down and hold your own—you’re not sons or nephews no more, you’re part of the company. The grit you need to face them devils when the time comes is one thing; another grit is to deal with what’s go’n on inside you on the long ride. The ancients called it the ironness of heart: to carry on when you think you ain’t got noth’n left. The first time you think you can’t go a foot more, I’m telling you now you got a thousand miles left in you—remember your mind quits before your heart. These good men you’ve known your entire life will take on death masks—dark shadows of the eye from lack of sleep, and fear—you’ll be wear’n that same mask so each got to keep his own iron heart. All right now, let’s get back before the colonel thinks we’re in trouble.”

  As they stood to move out, Seth asked, “Raif, why you suppose they put two piles like that, when it were but one watch?”

  Raif responded, “They didn’t put ’em up, I did. Let’s get back ’fore dark or we gonna get the colonel agitated.”

  Raif led them to the wall and watched as they descended the rook to the trail. He told the two to hold, said he was going back to check the lookout one more time and look down the Crossing to see if he could spot any warriors lay’n for them. He plodded his way down the cut until he reached the cairns; muttering “ironness of heart, bunch of shit,” he kicked the cairns and sent the rocks scuttling like billiard balls across the channel’s stone floor. He gazed down at the scattered rocks and muttered, “Bibbs is a goddamn schoolmaster, wannabe poet. What the hell did he know of anything about war? He’s back there giv’n the ruler to saplings ’cause fools like me out here do his kill’n.”

  His mind went to the two boys about to have the world forever shaped by the killing to come, and he slumped down, putting his back to the wall with his knees slightly crooked due to the narrowness of the channel. He thought, them two boys either be dead and scalped or com’n back like me and the colonel put’n on me to feed ’em nonsense. He recalled the scarred warrior stripped to the waist chanting in the hard cold of that night long ago. He stood and looked over the scattered rocks. It must have been the third time he’d kicked the cairns down and he vowed it would be the last time he’d knock ’em down. He’d let it stand; hell, he thought, it’s the only statue ever gonna be built for me, anyhow. It’d stand until the tribe of this mountain was dust and all they ever built perished in the wind, as do all the trophies men leave for the dead. He reckoned that Toby and Seth, if they lived, were bound to become like him and he knew it was a sin, the same wickedness he had visited upon Jed and Abner. Preacher and Colonel sinning by bringing these boys, and them two knew it too.

  He stood in the channel and put his hand to the wall and ran his fingers along the chisel marks in the stone and whispered, “If the renegades had let me pass that night, I’d be tending littl’uns and watch’n ’em crawl by the fire on cold winter nights. I’d of been tender to Edda and raised sons proper, even have ’em kneeling in the pews obedient to the silent invisible power. I keep pining for it, heck I even prayed once for it. Shit, I been trying to live some other life, be a man that ain’t ever coming. I reckon I got more in common with that stitched-up sumbitch I ran into on top of this heap of shit ten years ago than any of them in that world below. So be it; they coulda let me pass but they didn’t; they tried for my scalp and missed. White Lion wants a piece of my soul—here I come again, you son-of a-bitch; Raphael, the angel come to kill your mothers with the twisted horn of a beast and eat the sons that I rip from their wombs.”

  Three days later as twilight settled, Toby witnessed Tin City glistening on the horizon, a glowing flame upon the field, the backdrop of the southern mountains magnifying its radiance. The company reined up outside a large hotel that doubled as the whorehouse. The horses were spent and Seth and Toby went with Joe to acquire feed and shelter for the animals. The Hansons and Wesley and Caleb entered the whorehouse for a drink. The horses would need at least four hours of rest, maybe more. The colonel and Gabriel went to parlay with the administrator for a passage over the Ash Run River and through the Stone tribe to the five canyons where the White Lion was descending on his southern passage.

  Seth and Toby held the horses at the front of the hotel while Joe went looking to find room at a barn.

  Joe returned, and said, “Take ’em around back. There’s a livery; tend to the horses, I’ll be there in a few with grub.”

  The boys led the horses past the back of the whorehouse and across their passage was a cone of golden gaslight that flowed from a missing knot in a sideboard of the hotel’s wall. The light danced upon the dust mites in the thickening darkness.

  Seth went to the hole and looked into the light and beheld Wesley with a young whore; he was behind her and had his hand over the back of her head forcing her face sideways into a pillow. He wore upon his face a countenance of awful pain.

  Seth motioned Toby and as he looked through the fissure, Toby beheld his brother in an aura of gaslight in an oval room the shape of an egg, the golden glow vibrating about his shunting.

  The boys took the horses on. In the cool of the stable, the flesh of the animals steamed great wisps, the vapors rising in elongated signs of infinity. To the rest of the company, the horses were nothing more than a steer to a butcher; an animal to ride to its death and then eat if chance called for it. Toby looked at Ulysses and wished he had left him in the stable and that he too rode a nameless beast. He feared he would have to shoot him at some point or ride him until he dropped, his heart bursting in the dust. Ulysses would ride until his heart gave out, Toby knew it. He looked at the thinning of the steed already, the leanness sharpening the once inflated muscles, giving their former magnificence a hard sinewy look.

  He stroked Ulysses’s muzzle. “I know, boy, it’s gonna be a few more days, we’ll catch ’em and you can rest, just a few more days,” but he feared how it would end.

  Joe returned with bread, hard cheese, and venison jerky. They ate in the stable using a hay bale as a makeshift table. After tending the mounts and eating, Joe sent the boys to the hayloft to sleep and stood the first watch. There was a hatch to the roof in the loft and the boys ascended into the night, sitting in the darkness on the slanted roof to cool some before sleep. The roof canted toward the whorehouse and they could gaze into the hotel’s second floor, which housed the bar. The bar was raised to the second floor so the patrons could use the enormous raised porch that wrapped itself around the four sides of the hotel. The porch’s circumnavigation was checked in one area near the back where an earthquake had cracked a piling, causing a jagged angle in the floorboards. The whores and men ignored the cracked spine of the flooring and sailed over it looping the porch, mixing and mingling, laughing. Their high-pitched laughter pierced the night air, ringing out as more drink and guarantees of fornication floated over the stream of revelers.

  Toby could see Wesley tied up in talk with a fat whore until
his eyes steered from her and traced the passage of a skinny whore with a busting cleavage. The skinny slut flowed past with rhythmic thrusts of her hips as she sauntered. The fat one kept prodding until Wesley hailed the bartender and yelled for him to “heel this fat bitch.” The bartender spoke in a voice without inflection, but its sound cut through the fog and din of the bar to the stable’s roof. The boys saw the terrified eyes on the fat whore as she sank into the darkness of the cigar smoke, signaling a single sneer in her wake at the skinny whore before dematerializing into the smoky bar. Wesley and the slight one nuzzled their lips to each other’s necks below the ear and began whispering as schemers do in a stage play. They broke out in a shrill laugh that pierced the night, both looking after the path the fat whore had taken. She was in the middle of another whisper, her nose edged to Wesley’s ear, her breath tainted with cinnamon and whiskey, when Raif reached across and tendered him a double whiskey. Wesley shoved the skinny whore off in the same direction as the fat one with the flat of his hand to her ass and took the whiskey, raising it to acknowledge gratitude to Raif.

  The bartender stood behind the barrier of the bar’s rich mahogany. He stood upon a slat floor purposely raised a foot higher than the patrons’ floor, so he could command a view over the multitude. He held court like a sultan, the rows of multicolored bottles making a prism of the light that bounced off the great mirror. He intertwined his fingers and folded his hands knuckle down, a prayer position he kept to protect his loins from a sudden assault. He was moored directly beneath the bull, the great bust mounted high on the wall ruling over the liquor bottles. The bull was carved out of a single piece of dark wood; the deepness of its black cherry gave the silent beast its voice. Scores of mirrors about the bar angled to capture its image, and it reflected out again a hundred-fold upon the panes of the windows. The points of the horns twisted to the ceiling, and its black eyes floated above the bartender’s in such synchronicity that they appeared to survey the inhabitants of the public house together as one. The bartender’s red vest and buttons reflected in the lantern lights, and Toby could see through the flickering, smoky illumination that he was smiling, his grin ebbing and flowing with the tide of revelry that reeled about the bull’s compass.