Return to Red River

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Tom and Lightning Garth had arrived in Dunson City just after the snowplow. They had studied the ice-crusted, yellow-painted fan blades, the red engine, its snow-covered roof, but, unlike most of the town’s residents, had been quickly bored by the novelty and found the livery first, the Rio (where cowboys drank) next, and finally Gloria’s Palace. Now they sat inside José’s Place (not María Luisa’s Café), washing down enchiladas and refried beans with black coffee.

  José’s lovely young daughter, Araceli, came by and topped off both cups of coffee.

  “Gracias,” Tom told her with a smile.

  Lightning said nothing. Just slopped up the grease with a piece of tortilla and stuffed it in his mouth.

  The teenage girl disappeared to the table where the Hanrahan brothers, Doc Aonghus and hammer-swinger Fionntán, sat with bowler hats still topping their heads and their coats still buttoned.

  Tom picked up his cup and sipped the coffee.

  He was two years younger than Lightning. Slimmer. Quieter. Looked more like his dad, though he certainly had his mother’s eyes. He wore woolen trousers, thinly striped blue and green, tucked in tall black boots, a black bib-front shirt, and gray woolen muffler. His battered black hat with a dented crown, the right side higher than the left, rested, crown-down, beside his empty plate. He had shed his gloves, now tucked in a pocket on his leather-lined, red and black plaid mackinaw that hung on the back of his chair. A .38 caliber Colt Lightning, nickel plated with ivory grips, rested in a holster on his right hip.

  Lightning still wore his tan canvas coat and his high-crowned black hat with the telescope crown. He had removed his gloves and his Smith & Wesson Russian, keeping the .44 top-break revolver near his plate of supper. His pants were black woolen, his shirt a heavy woolen red and green plaid, and his bandanna yellow silk.

  Both men wore spurs.

  They looked nothing alike. Lightning was taller, heavier, with pale blue eyes and dark hair that reached his shoulders, his skin so dark he could have passed for Mexican or Indian—though no one would mention that to Lightning’s face. Without looking up, he swallowed the last bite of tortilla and chased it down with the coffee. After a moment, he rocked back on the legs of his chair, burped, and grinned across the table at his brother.

  “Getting late,” Tom Garth suggested.

  The grin never faded as Lightning reached inside his coat, found the Aurora watch in his shirt pocket, and brought it out.

  “For you, maybe,” he said, and slid the handsome watch with the blue-spade hands back into the shirt pocket.

  A few tables closer to the potbellied stove, Aonghus and Fionntán Hanrahan rose, dropped a few coins beside their empty plates, pulled up their collars, and headed for the door.

  “See you, boys,” the doctor called out.

  Tom nodded at the brothers. “Stay warm.”

  “Aye . . . maybe in July,” Fionntán said with a chuckle.

  The door opened. The bell rang. Cold wind filled the café before the door closed.

  “It’s my birthday,” Lightning said.

  “Not till August,” Tom told him.

  “It’s your birthday,” Lightning said.

  “On the twenty-sixth of May.”

  “Close enough.”

  Tom found a Morgan dollar in his pocket and laid it on the table. “We ought to check into the hotel,” he suggested.

  “We could’ve stayed at Gloria’s,” Lightning said.

  “Hotel’s a lot cheaper.”

  “But not as much fun.”

  Tom shook his head. “What’s fun in Dunson City? We’ve seen our very first rotary snowplow. We’ve had four draught beers and two rye whiskeys at the saloon. We visited Gloria’s. We’ve had supper. I think that’s all Dunson City has to offer, especially on a night like this. Less you want to rob the bank.”

  Lightning rubbed his chin as if considering that option. “We’d be stealing our own money,” he said, and shook his head. “Pa is on the board of directors.”

  Tom stared out the window, but saw mostly just frosted glass.

  “Nightcap?” Lightning said.

  “I guess.” Tom knew he had never won a debate, or even reasoned with Lightning.

  They bundled up, nodded at José and his daughter, and stepped onto what passed for a boardwalk in Dunson City. Tom led the way, on purpose, and turned into the hotel. Behind him, Lightning swore.

  “Best get a room first,” Tom said, and he pushed open the door.

  “Why?”

  “Because we have money right now.”

  Even Lightning had to laugh at that as he followed his kid brother into the lobby.

  The rooms might have been Spartan, and the Dunson House had no restaurant—guests were sent to one of the two Mexican eateries—but the lobby would have been opulent outside of San Antonio, Austin, Galveston, or Houston. A fire blazed in the stone fireplace, and the Garth boys walked across the hardwood floor, stepped onto the giant Persian rug, and looked at the portrait that hung over the mantel. The gold plate screwed into the bottom center of the frame read:

  THOMAS DUNSON, Empire Builder, Texas Giant

  Their grandfather. More or less. Everyone in Texas, and all the way up to Kansas, had heard about Dunson. He came to Texas from England, but no one ever mentioned a British accent. On the other side of the Mersey, across from Liverpool, he had been born in Birkenhead. But he was Texan, through and through. Dunson had come across half the continent on a wagon train, then left for Texas. Lucky. Indians had attacked the train, wiped out practically everyone, and Dunson had found young Mathew Garth, herding a cow, dazed, in shock.

  So the hard man had adopted the green kid. That proved Dunson had a heart, romantics would argue. Not true, the skeptics knew. Mathew had a cow. Dunson had a bull. The hard rock from England wanted a ranch. He needed the cow more than he needed the boy. Or so he had first thought.

  But it had worked. They drove across the Red River and all the other rivers—the Brazos, Colorado, Llano, Concho, Pecos, and many others—till they reached the Rio Grande. They had outlasted and outfought Don Diego Agura y Baca, who had once claimed all this land.

  Dunson had built that empire, kept it with his own iron will, unbending principle, and bullets from his—and later Mathew’s—guns. When the war broke out between the states, he had stayed behind, increased his empire, and found himself “cow poor,” as the saying went. So he had driven a herd north, bound for Missouri, before Mathew had taken it from him and turned west for Kansas.

  The newspapers, the history books, and even that play that Lightning and Tom had seen in Fort Worth three years back, all claimed that Thomas Dunson had saved Texas with that first cattle drive to Kansas. Groot, Laredo, and a few of the other old-timers who had known Dunson and Mathew during those years, said otherwise. Mathew Garth? He never said one word.

  Neither of the brothers had ever known their grandfather. Lightning had been a suckling newborn when Dunson had died; Tom hadn’t even been born. Once Mathew had taken the herd away from Dunson, the iron-willed man had found his own gunman and gone after his adopted son. To hang him. But, if the stories were true—and how many Texas tales were really true?—a gunman named Cherry Valance had shot Dunson before being killed himself, and when Dunson met Mathew on the streets of Abilene, the empire builder had collapsed. Tess and Mathew had taken Dunson by buckboard, all that way south, across the Indian Nations, through swollen streams and the baking sun. Dunson had sworn he would live to see Texas, and he had.

  Mathew and Tess buried him on the south side of the Red River.

  The two brothers hadn’t even seen their grandfather’s grave.

  “Ol’ Groot says he didn’t really look like that,” Lightning said.

  “Painter never met him,” Tom said.

  The portrait hadn’t been finished until a few years back, when the railroad tracks reached this far west, the hotel went up, and Dunson City had been christened.

  “But Ma says he sure got the eyes
right,” Tom said.

  Cold. Hard. Gray like lead. Just as deadly, uncompromising, like the bullets chambered in the brothers’ revolvers.

  “Neither one of us got his eyes,” Lightning said.

  “Because he ain’t really kin to us,” Tom said. “Pa said Dunson found him, half-starved, plumb out of his head—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve heard the story a million times. But I’m kin to him. I feel that blood runnin’ through my veins. Me and him?” He jutted his jaw at the portrait—and Tom had to notice that there was some resemblance between Lightning and the old man. But, well, maybe that French-named artist had studied Lightning and not Tom or Mathew when he had created this illusion.

  “We gonna check in or just gape at a dead man?” Lightning said.

  Shaking his head, Tom walked to the mahogany registration desk. The bald man with the black string tie and black Prince Albert had been waiting patiently.

  “Evening, gentlemen,” he said.

  “One room,” Tom said. “One night.”

  “Of course.” He found a key and turned the registry where Tom could sign. “How’s your mother, your father?”

  “Cold,” Lightning said.

  The clerk grinned. “Who isn’t?”

  Tom fished greenbacks from a pocket in the mackinaw, counted out a few ones, and left them on the counter. When he turned, he saw the door closing. Dropping the key inside his coat pocket, he pulled on his hat and hurried to catch up with Lightning.

  His brother had covered half the town. Tom swore, his breath frosty, and stopped as Lightning pushed back his coat to reveal the butt of his Smith & Wesson and pushed open the closed doors of the saloon.

  Where the railroaders drank. Not the cowboys.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Because Dunson City was such a small burg, and what with the freezing temperatures outside and the lateness of the hour, only nine railroaders were in the Knuckle Coupler. Five sat at a table in the corner near the stove, playing stud poker. Three stood at the bar, talking in thick Irish brogues with Sean Dublin, the beer-jerker with a brown patch over his left eye who had called himself John Smith back when he had worked at the Rio, the saloon where the cowboys drank. The last railroader, a brakeman, lay passed out on the floor. One of his colleagues, or perhaps Sean Dublin, had at least rolled him over so he didn’t choke to death on his own vomit, which now served as his pillow.

  Lightning Garth made a beeline for the bar, slamming the doors shut to make sure everyone knew he was here, but carefully stepping over the brakeman, and not even nicking the drunk with the rowels of his spurs—though the thought crossed his mind.

  He arrived at the far corner of the bar, away from the poker players and the beer drinkers, and kicked over the spittoon on purpose. He stuck a foot on the brass rail that ran along the bottom of the bar that had been hauled in from San Felipe del Rio when the Southern Pacific’s tracks were being laid. San Felipe del Rio, which had been shortened a while back to Del Rio, wasn’t much of a town. Neither was Dunson City, and most people expected the Knuckle Coupler to move west down the line to Sanderson or maybe even a place with a future.

  Lightning Garth had decided it was his mission in life to run the railroad saloon out of town.

  “How about a whiskey, Smithy!” he called out.

  Behind him, the door opened. Lightning glanced at the mirror and smiled at his brother. “Make it two whiskeys, Smithy. Rye is our pleasure tonight.”

  The barkeep moved down the bar, grabbing a half-empty bottle off the back bar. He placed the rye in front of Lightning.

  “The name, Lightning, is Sean Dublin.”

  “Well, you’ll always be John Smith to me.” He tapped the bar.

  Sean Dublin, or John Smith, or whatever his real name was, fetched two shot glasses and slid both in front of Lightning. The bartender hooked a thumb at the mirror, which showed a reflection of Tom Garth as he moved around the unconscious brakeman and joined his brother at the end of the bar.

  “This is a new mirror, Lightning,” Sean Dublin said. “The owner would like to keep it longer than the last one.”

  Dublin filled the glasses with the amber whiskey, and Lightning picked his up, killed the rye quickly, and threw the glass as hard as he could, past Sean Dublin’s ear, and smashed the mirror.

  Tom Garth swore.

  The railroaders cursed.

  Sean Dublin hurriedly began collecting whiskey bottles and putting them on the floor, hiding himself while shouting, “No guns! No guns! No shooting! For the love of God!”

  Grinning, Lightning was already removing his coat and gun belt. The canvas coat, he set on the bar beside the rye bottle Sean Dublin had left behind. The Smith & Wesson and the leather rig, he tossed to the back bar, knocking over a few bottles the beer-jerker hadn’t bothered to collect and sending spiderweb cracks from the bottom of the mirror to the far left corners.

  “Are you crazy?” An icy edge accented Tom’s voice as he pulled off his mackinaw, hat, and gun rig. “There are eight of them.” He laid everything neatly on the bar.

  “Nine.” Lightning’s jaw shot out toward the brakeman. “But I don’t think he’ll need watching.”

  Tom spread out.

  “Ma and Pa’ll kill us,” Tom said.

  Lightning laughed. “Not if these boys do it first.”

  The dealer at the card table came up, overturning the table as he picked up a whiskey bottle and shattered the bottom against the rolling edge of the table. The other players charged. So did the boys at the end of the bar, cursing in their Irish brogues. Some shed their coats. One slipped on a pair of brass knuckles. Another had a Chicago nightstick.

  Snatching the rye bottle off the bar, Lightning threw it end over end at the charging beer drinkers. It shattered against the first man’s face and down he went, clutching his bleeding face. Tom grabbed the nearest chair, pitching it at the feet of the poker players, watching three of them crash to the floor.

  Tom turned over the table. That slowed down the one with the busted whiskey bottle, which he wielded like a knife, and the man with the brass knuckles. Quickly, Tom grabbed another chair. He wondered if he looked like that gent with the white cape with the red lining, that guy with the slick mustache from the circus Tom and Lightning had seen in El Paso that time. The one with a whip and a chair, barking fiercely at a lion that, unless Tom’s vision had been playing tricks on him, had no teeth.

  The three men who had spilled to the floor came up, but at least one of them limped now and the second had a busted nose.

  To his right, Tom heard curses, grunts, the breaking of glass, the busting of heads. Yet he knew better than to check on his older brother. Take his eyes off the five men before him, and he would be dead, or at least beaten into obliviousness.

  He feinted with the chair, watched the railroaders jump back. Stepped back. They began to circle him, but Tom swung the chair around quickly, keeping them from enveloping him completely. He wet his lips.

  “Listen, boys . . .” he began, like he was about to plead for mercy.

  Then he slammed the chair across the head of the man with the brass knuckles—that one appeared to be the most dangerous—and what was left of the chair, he brought down hard against the wrist that held the busted whiskey bottle.

  The momentum carried him through the horde of railroaders, and he stumbled against another table, overturning it, but not before he snatched the heavy ashtray off the top. Spinning, ducking, he brought his arm back at full cock, and sent the ashtray spiraling into the forehead of the poker player with the glass eye and crooked nose. The man dropped hard and lay faceup, arms outstretched, on the floor, sawdust soaking up the blood that poured from his forehead and down the sides of his head. Tom was glad to see the man was still breathing.

  “Criminy!” one of the men said. That one had picked up the leg of the chair by the body of the man with the brass knuckles. Which, Tom figured, was better than having him pick up those heavy knuckles.

 
The one with the busted whiskey bottle was on his hands and knees, spilling blood from his mouth and nose, and he waddled around like a castrated steer, bawling just as loud, too.

  Three of the five out. Tom kept backing away from the two remaining ones. Now he had a clear view of Lightning.

  One Southern Pacific worker lay on the floor—the one Lightning had smashed in the face with the bottle of rye—but the others had Lightning. The burly one with the striped britches and soot-blackened face had grabbed Lightning from behind, pinning his arms back, letting the rawboned redhead with the handlebar mustache punch Lightning in the gut.

  Lightning bent down, almost taking the burly gent with him, but when the railroad man jerked him back up, Lightning brought his legs up, knees bent, then kicked out, and the boots and spurs slammed into the redhead’s face. He turned and fell against the bar, knocking over the glass of rye that Tom had not gotten a chance to taste. The redhead rolled over and slid down the bar onto the spittoon that Lightning had kicked over.

  The big man roared, started to push Lightning toward the bar, but Lightning brought his right leg in and the rowel of the spur sliced through the striped britches. Down went Tom’s brother and the railroad man. Tom didn’t have a chance to see how that fight played out.

  Because the two men after him charged.

  Tom ducked underneath the leg of a broken chair—or was it the nightstick?—and felt his hat sail off his head. He came up fast, grabbed the shoulders of the other one’s coat, and pulled him forward while bringing his own head down. The man’s nose and mouth slammed against Tom’s skull. Teeth bit. He saw orange dots from the collision. Felt blood soaking in his sweaty hair. He pushed the man against the potbelly stove and heard him scream as the palms of his hands burned and blistered.

  Breath rushed out of his lungs, and Tom fell against the wall of the saloon. Somehow he managed to keep his feet, and turned, ducking as the nightstick—it wasn’t a chair leg—crashed against the wall and sent a two-year-old calendar falling to the sawdust. The last of the men had managed to slam that stick into the small of Tom’s back.