by J. Lee Butts
“My God, but this is a right sorry mattress,” I mumbled to the empty room.
Used a fist to poke at a particularly rocklike, irritating bulge near the spot that one unthinking leg usually sought out. The entire less-than-comfortable apparatus groaned, creaked, rustled, and complained as I shifted from one spot to another.
With considerably more conviction, I growled, “Damnation.” Then set to rubbing my lower back. Yawned. Pawed at one sleep-matted eye with the back of a clenched fist. Picked at something wayward on my lower lip. Puckered and tried several times to spit the offending article away.
Pushing off the wobbly bed, I went to work getting completely erect. My saddle-abused spine creaked into place, one bony vertebrae at a time. Kind of like a carpenter’s folding, metal-jointed ruler. Felt as if I was being stabbed with heated ice picks, when all those grating bones snapped and ground their way to the spots where each belonged. ’Course that set me to wondering what daily life would be like when I actually went and got old.
I wobbled a bit on sluggish legs. And, in the manner an ancient, solitary, battle-scarred grizzly, awakening in his hidden den, I stretched, shook all over, then snarled to warn off any wayward intruders.
Swaying in the near dark of the advancing morn, I ran shaky fingertips over the thumb-sized, near-healed weal on my right side just above the belt line. Then I slipped those same fingers around to my back and gingerly checked the spot where the bullet had come out.
“Damn Irby Teal for a good shot, anyhow,” I muttered. “Guess if the evil bastard had been any better with a pistol I’d be dead, buried, and nothing but a gob of rot just like him, his brother, Boston, and their stupid friends.”
Satisfied that the matching welts of angry flesh had not somehow miraculously vanished during the previous night’s tussle with evasive sleep, I grunted my disapproval at the slowness of their healing and shuddered. Figured I might as well resign myself to the fecklessness of Irby Teal’s questionable aim and just try to forget about the angry-looking wound. Fat chance.
I hobbled across my sultry bedchamber. The shadow-filled room was ever so slowly, but very certainly, growing brighter with the unhurried rising of the sun.
Stopping at the nightstand, I snatched the ewer from its matching bowl. Poured lukewarm water into one hand and sucked it across dry lips, like a wary animal drinking from a tiny pond. Slapped some of the liquid onto my face and neck. Sure as hell felt good. I rattled the jug back into place, then lurched for the room’s open door.
“Always darkest just before the dawn,” I muttered and stared into the framed dimness of coming sunup outside.
One hand pressed against my knotted spine, I paused in the room’s entryway. The broad porch of our rented, dog-run ranch house lay at my feet. I cocked an inquisitive ear and twisted my head to get better focused on the question that plagued my sleep-fogged mind.
A hundred yards away, in the trees near the river, frogs quarreled. Whip-poor-wills called back and forth to one another. Off to the north, near a barely silhouetted, rock-strewn hill, a solitary coyote yipped. Doves, surprised by something unseen, fluttered up in a flurry of racket just a few feet from the front steps and clattered their way to raucous safety. Crickets chirped and buzzed in every direction.
“Mite noisy this morning. But it’s better than living up north around Fort Worth. Have to put up with the constant racket from all the damned locusts,” I said to the fast-approaching light. “God Almighty, but I do hate their infernal buzzing.”
Pleasant fragrance of wildflowers, carried on the approaching morning’s barely detectable breezes, wafted across the grass-poor yard. The refreshing aroma tickled the edges of my flared nostrils. Distracted, I momentarily abandoned my mission and tilted an inquisitive nose up to get a better whiff of the delicate bouquet.
Lilac. But then again, maybe not. Still hadn’t acquired the talent for telling one flower from the other just by the smelling. Hell of a failing for a man who spent most of his waking life out on the raw edges of civilization.
Maybe the perfume came from bluebonnets blooming somewhere nearby. Yeah, that made perfect sense. Bluebonnets. No women around this haven for us ole shot-to-a-pulp bachelors to tell me for sure.
Clad in nothing but a pair of cotton, calf-length, faded-red drawers, I grabbed the doorframe’s crossbeam to steady up a bit, then leaned forward, ever so slightly. Scratched an itchy belly, then tried to pick anything by way of odd, inappropriate sounds from the soon-to-be stifling south Texas air.
I knew beyond a doubt that something out of place had snapped me from my troubled slumbers. Something peculiar. An eerie oddity that didn’t belong had surely pulled me away from nightly reveries of the blood-soaked missions me and Boz had gone on.
Whatever was out there in the dark was well on the way to bringing me back to wakeful awareness. Now, I just had to ferret out whatever it was that didn’t fit. The task simply required that I be patient. Pay attention. Get my fogged-up mind right.
Near half a minute passed. And then, the world went completely and totally silent, as if the hot breezes had died and all the night animals, birds, and crickets had suddenly, inexplicably vanished from the earth. Eerie as hell. Made the skin pimple and crawl up and down my achy spine in unsettling waves.
Then, there it was, sure enough. No doubt about it. None. Could barely lay an ear to the errant, distant popping. But there it was for damned sure—off in the hazy, red-tinged, gray-black distance. The distinctive, instantly recognizable sound of gunfire crackling through the early morning air. The sound vaguely echoed along the river’s placid surface, climbed up the steps, invaded the house, and set my teeth on edge.
Pistols. Somebody was firing off their pistols out there. No mistaking that sound. Strange. Couldn’t figure for the life of me who would be blasting away like that so early of a morning. And what in hell would they be shooting at anyway? For the most part, was still darker out yonder, in the briars and brambles, than a boxful of black kittens.
A prickling sensation of the sinister and unknowable kind crept up my pain-tinged spine again. I ran fingers through sweat-dampened hair. A widening, wavelike patch of lumpy, bristling flesh crawled up my spine and settled between pinched shoulder blades. An eye blink later, the crickets came back to life.
“Who on earth?” I said to the dimness of advancing dawn, then rubbed a chin that needed serious attention from a well-stropped razor.
6
“. . . MURDERED A BOATLOAD OF INNOCENT FOLKS . . .”
I CAST A sharpened gaze into the reddish-gray gloom of rapidly fleeing darkness. Could hardly see the dog, but I knew ole Bear was there. Knew it as surely as I knew the sun would soon climb over the rugged hills and turn our Devils River patch of west Texas into an earthen, nigh on devilish oven.
Ever watchful, Bear rarely left the front stoop at night. Dog wasn’t mine, of course. He’d come along with the house. A wayward animal might draw the brute from his guardian’s perch once in a while, but not often.
The massive creature sat at attention on the creaking porch’s top-most tread and gazed into the northern distance. I knew his wet, shiny nose twitched and sifted through all the air it could take in. Brute’s inquisitive snout always snuffled and snorted for anything unfamiliar, out of place, or strange. His mottled, ragged, cocklebur-infested rope of a tail was surely wagging from side to side. I could hear the brushlike appendage sweeping a clean spot on the splinter-riddled, rickety step.
He twisted his battle-scarred head to one side and seemed to cut a questioning glance over a hunched shoulder at me. Thick-muscled and dangerous beyond most men’s understanding, the hairy brute, conceived of indeterminate wolf and canine parentage, appeared to flash a menacing, barely visible smile.
Fight-notched, pointed, ever-shifting ears flicked from side to side, gathering the minutest of inconsistent noises. The vigilant canine easily took in the most obscure of sounds for miles around his carefully guarded domain. Anything that didn’t belong
in the dog’s personal realm would bring an immediate, and dangerous, reaction.
I could hardly make out the hand-sized tongue as it lolled out one side of the dog’s mouth and dripped slobbers. Beast cast another panting gaze up at me. He flashed a wicked set of canine teeth the size of a highwayman’s trigger finger, as if to say, “You’re damn right I heard all that shooting, Dodge. Wake yourself the hell up. Get a move on, man. Let’s go have a look-see. Chase down the skunks making all that needless racket. Let’s knock ’em over. Bite ’em in the ass. Drag ’em around in the mesquite. That’ll show ’em not to roust us from our much-needed nighttime devotions.”
Boz limped up out of the darkness from his crude quarters in the barn’s cluttered tack room down the hill. He was all got up in nothing more than a pair of oft-patched drawers, a pistol belt, .45 Colt, run-down boots, and a knife-ventilated, palm-leaf sombrero. I’d tried to get him to sleep in the main house, but he steadfastly refused. Man preferred the ground to a real bed. Near as I was ever able to determine, my friend could sleep like a newborn babe atop a roll of rusted barbed wire and liked it that way.
A mist-like cloud of fine-powdered earth trailed behind him and fogged up around his near imperceptible feet. The gritty miasma gave him the bizarre appearance of somehow floating, wraithlike, above the dusty earth that swirled beneath those booted and spurred canoes at the ends of his legs.
He ran the flicking forefinger of one hand back and forth beneath his droopy moustache. The shaggy ornament completely obliterated his top lip and had the appearance of a living animal trying to invade a gap-toothed mouth. Ragged, wispy tip ends of the moustache dangled below his jawline and swayed in the morning breezes. That’s when I realized that the pair of us had gone and got pretty damned seedy, and in right quick fashion, too.
“You hearin’ all that commotion out yonder, Lucius?” Boz said, then took a seat on the edge of the rugged porch, within arm’s length of the dog. He grunted, rubbed his damaged leg, then ruffled the animal’s huge head. He patted the beast’s furry back, then leaned against one of the crude props that offered some highly questionable support for the shaky veranda’s off-kilter roof.
One shoulder lodged against my sleeping quarters’ rough-cut doorframe, I gazed in the same general direction as Boz and the dog. Didn’t need much in the way of heavenly illumination from a brain-frying sun to know exactly what lay out there in the receding darkness.
Swear ’fore Jesus, the entire earth appeared to spool away from the edge of the house’s front veranda to the farthest reaches of the known, and unknown, world. A seemingly endless sea of hilly, reddish-brown, man-killing sand and dirt marched from our crude, leased home’s front stoop to the Tinaja, Woods Hollow, and Glass Mountains, some hundred and twenty miles west and beyond.
In my personal estimation, the land, while bleak in ways hard to describe, was beautiful beyond any other place I’d ever seen. And mostly unoccupied. Few other people, if any, lived for miles around. Our nearest neighbor, as I knew of anyway, had a spread about twelve miles to the south and east, over near the Del Rio road. And that’s exactly the way me and Boz had wanted it from the beginning.
“Yeah,” I muttered, then fished makings from atop the chest of drawers just inside the bedroom door and set to rolling myself a smoke. “Yeah. I heard the shooting, Boz. Woke me from a right nice nap. Well, ’bout as good a one as I can hope to get these days, anyhow.”
“Uh-huh. Me, too.”
“Must’ve spent the entire time I did manage to doze a bit dreamin’ ’bout some of the times we’ve had in the past. Good and bad.” I stoked the roughly wrapped ciga-reet to life and took a single, lung-filling puff. Smoke cloud from the burned tobacco rolled out with my words. “Come to wakeful consciousness thinking for sure we’d just run ole Jasper Pike to ground. Hadn’t so much as entertained a single thought about that murderous brigand in at least two years. He came back to me in a dream. You remember Jasper, Boz?”
An unintelligible, guttural grumble came from my friend’s general direction. Unable to distinguish for certain whether the wordless response originated with the man or the dog, I flicked ash from the end of the hand-rolled with a little finger and continued with my unsolicited, meandering musings.
“Don’t see how you could forget a gob of dung like Pike. Evil bastard murdered a boatload of innocent folks before we finally pulled him down. Always took a certain amount of pride in the fact that we’re the ones what brought him to book.”
Boz scratched a spot on his back by twisting from side to side against the porch prop. “Hell, yes, I remember Jasper,” he grunted and continued his bearish exercise. “Cussed hard to forget a belly-slinkin’ snake like that ’un. His kind of gutless bastard makes a Christian body wonder why God bothers to stack piles of human manure that high.”
I let a crude chuckle escape despite efforts to the contrary.
“Tell you true, Lucius, older I get, amazes me as how shit can somehow pull on boots, then get itself upright and walk around on two legs just like us regular humans.”
“He was a bad one, all right, Boz. No doubt ’bout that.”
“Aw, hell, bad don’t come nowheres close to describing that human gob of fanged evil. As I remember the man, and I use the term man loosely, he drank a tubful of bad liquor, then murdered his entire family. Beat all of ’em to death with a roofin’ hammer one lightnin’-spiked night.”
“There you go. Even killed his kids. Was a bloody mess we found.”
“If memory of the event still serves, he bolted from that god-awful scene, then went on a murderin’ rip the likes of which hadn’t ever been witnessed in this part of Tejas. Leastways, not since back in them days when the Co-manche used to slaughter hell and yonder out of every living thing in their path on those yearly raids of theirs down Mexico way.”
“Ole Pike put a bunch of folks in the ground, and that’s for damned sure.”
“Uh-huh. In my humble opinion, that’s a far patch of rock-strewn road worse than bad. As a consequence, by God, Jasper Pike ain’t exactly the kind of bastard I’m given to forgetting about.”
I thumped the still-smoldering butt of my smoke into the air and watched as the sparks arched and went to ground like a Fourth of July whizbang. “Figured you’d remember the sorry stink sprayer, Boz. Got to admit, it’s most gratifying now for me to cherish the recollection of how God gave the pair of us the distinct privilege of killing the hell out of his sorry self.”
Boz grimaced and rubbed his leg again. “Mostly you, as I recollect. You peppered his worthless, murderin’ ass pretty good, Lucius. Put a bunch of bullets in his sorry hide. Think maybe I only drilled one good ’un in him.”
“Well, I ain’t so sure ’bout that.”
“Uh-huh. Be that as it may, personally think I could find somethin’ better to occupy my nightly dreams, if you want to know the truth of the thing, pard. You know, women like that there hot-blooded Josephina Martinez. God as my witness, done got to where I think ’bout that gal a lot when it comes on nighttime.”
“Jesus, Boz. Think you’ve taken to spending way too much time thinking about one willing woman or another.”
“Well, you can think about whatever’n hell you want to think about, and I’ll think about bow-legged gals like Josephina. Remember her? Healthy, well-fed muchacha from over ’round Val Verde? Now, I’ll tell you, by God, don’t mind one little bit dreamin’ about that gal’s big ole ...”
Boz abruptly stopped in mid-thought. For a second, struck me as how he bore a striking resemblance to the dog, when he tilted his head to one side. Seemed pretty certain to me he just might cock a leg up and scratch one ear with his foot—the one attached to his undamaged leg.
“Damn, there it goes again,” he said. “Sounds most like pistols to me. Maybe half a dozen of ’em. What you think ’bout it, Lucius?”
Ran the fingers of one hand through my sweat-dampened hair again, then twirled one sagging end of my moustache around a nervous finger. Right c
ertain I appeared lost in deep thought.
Slid the same finger into my mouth, then held it out into the barely moving air. “Not so much as a light breeze out here right now, Boz. World’s as still as a sack of flour sitting in an old maid’s pantry. Least kind of sound can travel a long way on a morning like this. I’m guessing as much as five miles or so north along the river. Maybe more, maybe less.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds about right to me.”
“Seems as how the blasting just about has to be goin’ on over around that pocket of ground right on the edge of Turkey Mesa. Green spot next to the river. You know the one I’m talking about.”
“Yep. That’s how I figured it, too. Place where Three Mile Creek seeps down to the river—when there’s enough water to do anything by way of seeping that is. Passin’ itinerants have always liked that particular location. Yep. All that blastin’s gotta be somewhere close to that ’ere shade-givin’ stand of cottonwoods and good grass, I’d wager.”
“Yeah. Heard tell as how some of them old forty-niners laid over in that spot on their way to the West Coast back during the gold rush days. Can’t say as I blame them much. Fine site for tired folks to take their ease. Rest up on the difficult way to wherever they might be headed. Location has pretty much everything going for it—shade, grass, water. Nice, real nice.”
Those words had barely passed my lips when another round of faint popping echoed down the river, ricocheted off the surface of the glass-still water, and, without welcome, bounced onto the doorstep right at our feet. The rapid burst of gunfire tickled the edges of our pricked ears. A tingling sensation crawled up my spine like a Mexican scorpion on the prowl for something it could sting to death.
I squinted and said, “Who you reckon would be doin’ that much shootin’ this time of the mornin’, Boz? Sun’s only just now gettin’ up good. Got nothin’ more’n a fingernail-sized sliver of moon for real light right now. Could barely see my hand in front of my own face not more’n ten minutes ago.”