A Congregation of Jackals

by S. Craig Zahler

  “Get up.” Charles righted his chair and reseated himself.

  The talker said to Jessica, “You put your finger back in his mouth or my brother’s gonna lose his temper. He’s an angry one.” Arthur stared on, aloof and inscrutable.

  Jessica raised her right hand; Charles clamped his teeth to his wife’s pinky; her long fingernail settled against the tip of his tongue. His cheek smarted where the bottle had struck him, and his entire face stung with the heat of his embarrassment. He felt his wife’s heartbeat within the soft flesh of her fingertip—it was as quick as his own.

  “What did Burt’s prick look like?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at it.”

  “Afraid, huh? You one of them that just lies there, eyes shut, feet to the ceiling and takes it like cough syrup?” He looked at Charles and said, “Sorry.” He returned his gaze to Jessica. “So you just lie there with your eyes closed, huh? Maybe a buncha fellows was on top of you, takin’ turns and you didn’t even know it?”

  “It was just him.”

  “What did Burt’s prick feel like? Bigger than Mr. Lowell here’s? Got a lot of veins or hair?”

  Charles felt his wife’s fingernail dig into his tongue and realized an instant later it was because he had unconsciously bitten her again. Jessica winced and shut her eyes.

  “Stop biting your wife, Mr. Lowell. She don’t much like savages.”

  The talker looked at the Arizonians pointedly.

  Charles, embarrassed, nodded minutely and, with ungracious, finger-obfuscated enunciation, said, “We understand your point.”

  “Good. But that don’t mean you learned your lesson.” The talker turned to his brother. Arthur shook his head; the arc of his chin traversed only an eighth of an inch, but the gesture twisted Charles’s stomach into a knot. “He says you ain’t learned.” To Jessica, the talker said, “Was Burt’s prick bigger than the one dangling between Mr. Lowell’s legs? Don’t lie.”

  Charles (unsuccessfully) attempted to ignore his wife’s response.

  She said, “I’m not sure. It hurt because it was the first time.”

  “The next time you done it, it feel good?”

  “It didn’t hurt as much, though I didn’t like copulating with him.”

  “But would you go back looking for old Burt if your husband got himself killed?”

  A silence like winter dawn settled upon the quartet. Charles felt his wife’s pulse race through her captive digit. Arthur yawned, saliva glinting upon his swollen gums and the limp stub within. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the Arizonians.

  “I plan to spend the rest of my life with Charles.”

  “So you’ll forgive him then?”

  “For what?”

  The talker punched Charles’s chin; his jaw snapped shut; the tip of his wife’s pinky and a gout of crimson flavored like copper and honey flooded into his mouth. Jessica shrieked and fell from her seat; Charles vomited upon the table.

  The sun-bronzed siblings stood up, guns in their right hands. Jessica’s shrieking became hysterical sobbing; Charles wiped bile from his mouth and knelt beside his agonized wife. The shadow of the twins fell upon the Arizonians, but neither looked up at their persecutors. Charles wrapped Jessica’s finger with a handkerchief to stop the bleeding and thought about Jesus Christ for the first time since their wedding.

  A deep voice with a thick Irish accent said, “It’s never hard to locate you boys. Let’s go.”

  “Yessir,” the talker responded. Without preamble or delay, the siblings strode from the Arizonians toward the door.

  Charles and Jessica looked up. Night had fallen on San Fortunado and against that blue-black sky, beyond the reach of the saloon’s oil lanterns, stood a tall, extraordinarily lean man with a curved back wearing a gray suit, a gray hat and a matching scarf tied over his face. Through the tears in Charles’s eyes, the man looked like a cane made of smoke.

  The siblings exited the saloon and disappeared into the night, but the slender man in gray remained.

  He spoke to the Arizonians, his Irish brogue deceptively cloying. “Don’t take this to the sheriff.”

  Charles, emboldened by the absence of his persecutors, heatedly replied, “I certainly will—those men attacked us!”

  “You are both alive. Your wife still has her clothes on. Nothing serious happened.”

  The tall gray shade turned away; Charles opened his mouth to respond.

  With her good hand, Jessica squeezed his shoulder and said, “I don’t want to be a widow.”

  Humiliation replaced the anger burning within Charles, but he said nothing. The narrow gray wraith twisted weirdly and was welcomed into obscurity by the night.

  Chapter Two

  Troublesome Boots and Telegrams

  The rancher remembered a time not so very long ago when he could remove his boots without sitting down. Even as recently as his early forties, he was able to place the palm of his left hand upon a wall or a tree or a calm horse for support, twist a leg up at the knee and pull off the lifted boot with his right hand. He currently found that—in addition to forty-seven years—the dexterity and flexibility required to become shoeless while standing was behind him.

  The strong, hard man sat upon a flat rock beside the creek and removed his left boot and then his right—a low grunt accompanying each endeavor—and set the pair upright beside him, as if awaiting a spectral inhabitant to step into them. He arched his back, eliciting a dozen cracks like wagon wheels on pebble, and inhaled the moist sweet air that only blew in this dell at the edge of his property line. He removed his socks, set them upon the sun-baked stone to dry and then plunged his callused feet into the running water.

  Even though he was not a tall man, within this private sanctuary he was a giant, and the animals of his ranch and his house and his wife and his children were but thoughts. The rancher loved all of these things deeply and thoroughly, but he had lived a very different life for many years and still required time to be a solitary giant, time during which the only world that existed was a simple, wordless place.

  He leaned back upon the warm rock and observed the surroundings. The shadows of dragonflies slid across the creek; the water broke in foaming complaints as it struck protuberant stones; the leaves turned in the moist wind, caught sunlight and illuminated like emeralds. The aches in his feet dissolved in the cool water; his face warmed in the golden twilight sun; his back melted into the stone. For an instant, all of his mundane concerns, all of the names he knew and treasured, as well as those he would prefer to forget, were borne away by the wind and he simply was.

  Then came a sound that touched the melting giant—a person speaking, calling out. He recognized his wife’s voice and a moment later the thing that she was uttering, a thing which solidified and returned him to himself. That thing was his name.

  “Oswell,” she repeated.

  Oswell Danford, the forty-seven-year-old rancher with a wife and two children, sat up, grunting at the exertion. He turned his head on his broad shoulders, wiped the light brown hair from his hazel eyes and scratched an itch in his mustache. (He never had itches when he was the melting giant.)

  “Oswell, are you down there?”

  It took him a moment to find his voice, as if he had misplaced it in a shirt pocket or the dog had snatched it up and run off with it. Upon the escarpment he saw his wife, the sky purple and gold behind her fine full figure, her red hair and yellow hem pulled east by the western wind.

  “I’m down here,” he said.

  Elinore looked at him, her bright green eyes agleam with the lowering sun, and said, “You received a telegram.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “I didn’t read it. I didn’t know if you’d want me to, so I brought it out here for you.”

  One of the seventeen reasons Elinore made such a good wife was that she did not snoop. Another was her Oklahoma accent that sounded like honey to Oswell even after fourteen years of marriage. The thirty-nine-year-old woman’s
right hand disappeared into the folds of her yellow dress and then produced a small white card that appeared no larger than a tooth from where Oswell sat.

  “Where’s it from?”

  “Montana Territory.”

  Oswell’s guts froze. There was only one person he knew in the Montana Territory, and he had not heard from him in more than sixteen years.

  “Do you want me to read it to you?”

  “I’ll come up there and read it.” As Oswell pulled on his stiff, sun-baked socks and his warm, sun-softened boots he looked at the dragonflies circling atop the water and had an atypical urge to swat them.

  Winded from his climb up the dell, Oswell huffed and then kissed his wife on the mouth. She handed him the white card affixed with cut-out pieces of typeface. He read it.

  “I need to get back to fixing supper,” Elinore informed him.

  “I’ll come with you. Rabbit?”

  “Yes. And turnips.”

  Oswell took his wife’s hand and they walked in silence toward the wooden gate that marked the perimeter of their Virginia ranch. He saw one brown cow grazing in the distance.

  “She’s eating again,” he remarked.

  “You think we should leave her out tonight or get her back in the barn?”

  “Let’s leave her be. It’s not cold and we’ve got to get some weight on her before those cowboys come on through.” He untied the post and swung the log gate wide for his wife; the hinges creaked; the distant cow looked up and assessed the bipedal intruders.

  “I’ve gotta fix that. Scares the girls.” Oswell spat upon the top hinge and then the lower one; he slowly closed the gate. The metal groaned longer and no less loudly than when he had opened it. “I’ll oil it tomorrow,” he said as he shut and tied the post.

  Elinore scrutinized the hinges, shook her head and said, “We might need new ones altogether—I believe they’re rusted inside.”

  “You might be right.”

  The couple walked up the wide flat field upon which they grazed their cattle, through another gate and then across the wolds upon which seventeen sheep chewed, bleated and considered grass. During this walk, Oswell read the telegram two more times; after his third perusal, he spoke of its contents to his wife.

  “I’ve been invited to a wedding.”

  “In the Montana Territory?”

  “Yeah. James Lingham’s.”

  “I’ve never heard you mention him before.”

  He shook his head and said, “I haven’t.”

  “Do you intend to go?”

  Oswell did not yet know the answer to the question, and presently, in his silent ruminations on the matter, forgot that it had been asked aloud. The couple approached the house in which they had dwelled for the past eleven years—since the day Elinore quit teaching and gave birth to their first child, Benjamin. They walked toward the side porch, their shadows preceding them onto the wood; Oswell shook his head irritably and muttered something he did not wish his wife to hear.

  “I’ll tend to supper,” Elinore said. She leaned over and kissed her distracted spouse on the cheek, opened the door and entered the house. Oswell stood there, the telegram cradled in his hands like a dead infant. He sat heavily upon one of the two rocking chairs and read it again.

  MR O W DANFORD

  13 CUTTER WAY HARRISFIELD VA=

  DEAR OSWELL

  I AM TO WED BEATRICE JEFFRIES ON 12 AUGUST

  PLEASE JOIN US AT CEREMONY

  ALL OLD ACQUAINTANCES WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE=

  J LINGHAM

  TRAILSPUR, MONTANA TERR

  Though the pasted words were of a uniform typeface, the phrase “all old acquaintances” seemed printed in far darker ink. There was nothing he wanted to do less than travel to the Montana Territory and witness this ghost from his past get married—but there was a reason the invitation had been sent.

  “You got the telegram, I see.”

  Godfrey hitched up the warped rawhide belt that waged an internecine struggle with his potbelly; he climbed onto the porch, the rolled cigarette in his mouth not yet alight. Oswell saw a similar telegram clutched in his older brother’s right hand and nodded.

  “Yeah. I got it,” the rancher said.

  The beefy man sat in the adjacent rocking chair, adjusted his denims and said, “Should we inquire what he meant by the phrase ‘all old acquaintances’?”

  Oswell looked at the window behind him. Elinore cleaned a rabbit in the kitchen and then quartered it. The sound of the knife impacting the wood was silenced by the glass.

  “She can’t hear us,” Godfrey said as he struck a match and lit his cigarette, rocking his chair forward as if the flame might escape him.

  “You know what Lingham meant,” Oswell said. “You know who he meant. He wouldn’t have invited us otherwise. I didn’t invite him to my wedding, and you didn’t invite him to yours.”

  Godfrey scratched his red and silver beard, drew thoughtfully upon his cigarette as if it might contain wisdom and said, “Do you suppose that he could have been coerced into contacting us?”

  “I hadn’t considered that.” Oswell brooded upon his older brother’s suspicion and shook his head. “Nah. Lingham wouldn’t.”

  “The Lingham we knew wouldn’t, but we don’t know this one—it’s been decades. We’re all different than we were.”

  “You are fatter, that’s for certain.”

  “You always call me fat when I’ve outsmarted you.”

  “Lingham was solid. I don’t think he’d be part of a trap, no matter what. I can’t reconcile that suspicion with him.” Oswell turned and through the window watched his wife quarter an onion. To his brother’s reflection in the glass, he said, “You’re like Ma that way, always suspicious. The way she made the butcher weigh the meat before he charged her and then again after, to make sure he didn’t sneak any for himself.”

  “You think we should go? Travel across the whole damn country and get tangled up in this old mess?”

  Oswell turned from the window and looked at his brother directly, “I don’t think we’ve got a choice.”

  Two small figures strode up the dirt road, excitedly discussing some subject, but the distance dissolved their words into unintelligible squawks by the time they reached the ears of Oswell and Godfrey.

  The rancher continued, “It’s our mess as much as Lingham’s—or maybe more. And even if you’re right, even if he was coerced into contacting us, the man who coerced him is alive and likely knows where we live. Better to meet him out there.” Oswell glanced pointedly at his children coming up the road; Godfrey looked at his approaching niece and nephew and nodded.

  In a quiet voice, the plump man said, “All these years, I prayed that he was dead.”

  “So did I. Lingham and Dicky said the same prayer, I bet.”

  “Do you think Dicky will go?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t one for responsibility, but he’s no coward.”

  The children walked closer to the house, the words “not” and “hogs,” “licorice” and “penny” dimly audible to Oswell. Even from this distance, it was clear that they were his children.

  Godfrey asked, “You’ve still got our gear?”

  “Buried beneath the porch.” The children, a skinny brown-haired boy of eleven and a chubby redheaded girl of nine with freckles and a smile, reached the edge of the Danford property. “I put it down there when I built this place.” The brothers watched the children approach the house.

  In a quiet voice that begat a coiled serpent of smoke Godfrey said, “You better dig it up.”

  Chapter Three

  He Knows How to Talk to Ladies:

  He Read the Dictionary Thrice

  As a child, Richard Sterling had hated the nickname Dicky. When he was only three years old, his father had died of tuberculosis, leaving him in a New York City apartment bursting with women: three sisters (Peggy, Sam and Girdy), a mother and her mother. The absence of a male figure and the ubiquity of women had not made y
oung Richard Sterling an especially masculine boy, nor did his delicate, pretty features, which his mother and her mother regularly referred to as “girl-handsome.” The nickname Dicky emasculated him further.

  The lone male Sterling, with only eleven years behind him, had taken his first job working for a fishmonger on the east side near Park Row; when he came home, fetid with fish oil, pinched by blue crabs, iridescent scales in his black hair from when he scratched himself after handling carp, he looked at his mother and said, “Please call me Richard.”

  Despite his request, no member of his family (excepting the deceased father) called him Richard. His grandmother died without ever once uttering the name. He resented being infantilized in a family where he and his dead father’s bank account provided almost all of the income (two sisters would hem dresses on occasion), and his ire at being saddled with the name Dicky only grew with its longevity.

  Contrarily, as a strikingly handsome man of forty-four years, there was no other name he would have preferred over Dicky. No matter what he said to a woman, no matter what promises he made to her, no matter what fantastical shared future he promised her, he could not be wholly accountable: he was a guy named Dicky. Ladies should not take an adult man named Dicky too seriously, and if they did, who should they blame but themselves?

  Several women on several different rainy days in several different bars said roughly, “He told me that he had never before been so truly in love with a woman as he was with me, that my voice was the sound he hoped to hear call him to dinner each night and read to him by the fireside. He asked me the size of my ring finger and also which type of caviar I most enjoyed.

  “On Thursday, after we . . .” (The women trailed off here, embarrassed, momentarily excited and then ashamed of that brief excitement.) They continued, “On Thursday”—they leaned close and whispered—“afterwards . . . while we laid intertwined, he said that he was going to send his driver and carriage around to pick me up and take me to Connecticut. He intended to introduce me to his family.”