The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  “I know that, dammit! Lottie was at the Eagle the night Adeline died, and Bob was out at the Lucky Seven with me. Neither one could’ve done it.”

  “Then why in God’s name would you accuse them of it?”

  “Because we killed a man tonight. And not just any man—Ragsdale and Bock’s straw boss. They’ll know who’s to blame, too. One way or another, they’re gonna come gunnin’ for us, and they ain’t gonna care who gets caught in the crossfire.”

  Gustav glanced back again, but there was nothing behind us to see anymore.

  We’d rounded a bend in the road. The lantern light was lost to us.

  “It’d be best,” Old Red said, “if Bob and Lottie steered clear of us.”

  “Spittin’ in their eye was the only way you could get that to happen?”

  “It worked, didn’t it? They’ll be safe down on their ranch. Squirrel Tooth, too.” My brother narrowed his eyes, scowling into the darkness ahead as if he could see through it to something even darker—something infinitely black—waiting on down the road. “Things around town are about to get pretty bad.”

  I gave my blood-crusted shirt a little flap. “And so far it’s been a barn dance?”

  Gustav shrugged and favored me with a sentiment that sums up much of his outlook on life: “There’s always room for worse.”

  After a brisk trot of maybe ten minutes, we hit the northeastern outskirts of San Marcos. From there, we slowed to a slink. It was a little unnerving sneaking around back of the hotel again—if anyone was out hunting for Stonewall and Squirrel Tooth, this was the place to start. But we made it inside without being spotted…or spotting anyone spotting us, anyway.

  “There other hotels in this town?” I asked as we slipped up the back stairwell.

  “Sure. A couple.”

  “Well, don’t you think it’s time we moved over to one or the other? Seems to me we’re pushin’ our luck stayin’ here.”

  “Yeah…you’re right,” Old Red said, sounding vaguely surprised. “We’ll clear out tomorrow.”

  You might think I’d find it gratifying, my brother listening to my advice, for once. It actually unsettled me, though.

  If I was the only one thinking straight enough to keep us out of danger, we really were in trouble.

  “You take the bed first,” Gustav said after we crept into our room with guns drawn, half-expecting an ambush that didn’t come.

  “You sure?”

  “Go on. Clean yourself up and get some rest. I ain’t gonna be fallin’ asleep anytime soon.”

  When I returned from the WC, Old Red braced the door with our chair, turned the gas lamp down to a soft amber glow, and seated himself on the floor nearby.

  Looking at him there, propped up stiff and still, back against the wall, eyes gazing at nothing yet seeing far too much, I knew he was right. For him, there’d be no sleep—no rest—for quite a spell.

  “I am sorry, you know,” he said as I stretched myself out on the bed. “About you gettin’ hurt…and the rest of it.”

  I ran my fingers lightly over my stomach. The wounds had cleaned up quick and easy—they weren’t much worse than cat scratches, really.

  All the same, absolution was something I wasn’t ready to offer.

  “I know,” I said, and my eyelids slammed shut.

  If Old Red said anything more after that, I didn’t hear it. Sleep came to me fast. As did the nightmares.

  Vivid as my dreams must have been, given all the tossing and turning and pillow punching I did that night, all I can recall of them is this: Gustav taking shears to a young sheep, only the wool he’s shaving off turns into clothing, and the sheep becomes a man, and then it’s not a shirt being cut away but skin tearing off in long, bloody strips, and the bleatings turn to screams, and a hand grabs my shoulder and shakes hard.

  The hand was real.

  “Otto,” Old Red said. “Otto, wake up.”

  I jerked my face out of the covers smothering me and found myself sideways on the bed, my feet hanging out over the side.

  “Thanks for wakin’ me,” I groaned. “I was dreamin’ I woke up with a big ol’ soup-strainer mustache and my new suit had turned into ratty puncher duds and I was a scrawny little thing with no more meat on him than a chewed-over chicken bone and I had a horrible temper and no sense of humor. It was terrifyin’.”

  I rolled over to look at my brother…and had to wonder if I was really awake at all.

  For one thing, sunlight was streaming in through the window. It was morning. Gustav had let me sleep all night.

  Yet even more miraculous was his appearance. His clothing was unstained and unwrinkled. His boots were freshly shined. His hair was combed, his face shaved, his mustache neatly trimmed.

  He almost looked…well, he’d never pull off handsome with his high forehead and, shall we say, generously proportioned nose and ears. But presentable—that he could manage. Just about.

  “Sweet Jesus.” I rubbed my eyes and blinked at my brother like he was a mirage. “You goin’ to Sunday school or something?”

  “Yes.”

  My hands fell to my sides. My jaw just about fell to the floor.

  “Is that a yes to the Sunday school or a yes to the something?”

  “The Sunday school. Or Sunday service, more like. I did me a lot of thinkin’ last night, and…well…I think I’d like to hear what Brother Landrigan has to say this morning.”

  I gave my left thigh a vicious, twisting pinch. It hurt.

  “No…definitely not still dreamin’,” I said. “You ain’t really gettin’ religion on me, are you?”

  Old Red growled at me—and I mean a real, rabid mongrel “grrrrrr”—and stomped toward the door.

  “Service starts in twenty minutes. Meet me on Fort Street in ten, if you wanna come along.”

  He was gone before I could tell him to wait. Which was alright, actually.

  I didn’t know if I wanted him to.

  26

  The Assembly

  Or, We Return to the Fold—and Find a Wolf There Ahead of Us

  My dear old Mutter was a good Lutheran woman, and she did her best to put the love of God in all us young Amlingmeyers. Unfortunately her “best” meant hours in a wagon every Sunday, heading into town rain or shine (or snow or gloom) to hear doddering, drooling old Reverend Kracht drone out homilies so bone-dry they’d have made hard tack seem like cherry pie. The reverend was ever exhorting us, in his plodding way, to think of eternity and the afterlife, and in a fashion he succeeded: I often wondered who would die first, him of a coronary or me of boredom. As it turned out, he won that race, and in the pulpit, to boot.

  Our uncle Franz was a lot livelier on the subject of salvation, but sadly this was because he thought Jesus lived in a hollowed-out oak behind our outhouse, and nearly every day he spent an hour or two back there praying and singing hymns underneath the tree…right up to the day he hung himself from it.

  After all this, frankly (and hopefully no offense), churches and God-talk gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I think it was the same for Old Red. Once we were out on the trail just the two of us, we never darkened the door of a house of worship, nor had we spent more than five minutes in the last five years discussing the mysteries of the spirit. God may be everywhere and in everything, but we’d done a pretty good job of avoiding Him so far.

  All good things must come to an end, though. I was going to church.

  I found Gustav waiting a little ways off from the Star, a greasy-bottomed paper bag in his hands. Our faith in the Almighty may have been in question, but of my brother’s faith in me I saw proof positive: He’d been so sure I’d show up, he’d bought me doughnuts.

  I wished my faith in him could be as firm.

  “Thanks,” I said, and half a cruller disappeared into my mouth.

  “Can’t have your stomach growlin’ all through the sermon. Uhhh…speakin’ of which…”

  Old Red glanced down at my belly, looking sheepish.

  I gave
my breadbasket a gentle pat.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said, doing my best not to spray Gustav’s (for once) tidy clothes with crumbs. “I’m healin’ up fine. Just itches today, that’s all.”

  “Alright, then.”

  My brother nodded brusquely and hustled off up the sidewalk.

  “So,” I said, striding after him, “why in God’s name do we care what Brother Landrigan’s got to say in God’s name?”

  Old Red chewed on that while I chewed on my cruller, and a dozen paces were behind us before he answered.

  “It occurred to me that Stonewall might’ve been tellin’ the truth.”

  “About what?” I was about to ask.

  Gustav cut me off before I could get out the first word. “Now hurry up and eat. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  In other words, shut up.

  I obliged. The questions could wait. My empty stomach couldn’t.

  While out hunting up doughnuts, Old Red had apparently scouted out the way to Brother Landrigan’s church, too, for he walked with the quick, straight step of a man who knows where he’s going. He zipped first around the town square and then down one of the side streets shooting off it like the spoke of a wagon wheel. Then he turned again, and my own zip faltered.

  We were about to pass Ragsdale and Bock’s wallpaper store.

  I slapped the sugar from my fingers and slipped a hand under my jacket. My brother might have given me guff about buying a shoulder holster the day before, but it sure was handy having a rig for my iron I could actually wear to church. Unless he had a .45 stashed under his hat, Gustav wasn’t packing at all.

  “Don’t worry—Ragsdale and Bock ain’t around,” Old Red said as we hustled by the store. It was dark inside, and a sign in the window said closed. “They got other things on their minds today than sellin’ wallpaper.”

  “Oh, sure. It’s the Sabbath. I bet they’re slippin’ on their choir robes even as we speak.”

  I knew exactly what my brother meant, though. It had to be very, very clear by now that Stonewall and Squirrel Tooth weren’t coming back to the Phoenix. Which made it equally clear to me that their bosses would soon be coming after us.

  I had to figure we were safe for the next couple hours, though. Even lowlifes as bold as Ragsdale and Bock wouldn’t gun us down on the steps of the town’s most popular church.

  Brother Landrigan, it turned out, presided over the towering white tabernacle I’d noticed our first day in San Marcos. Dozens of parishioners were making their way inside with the slow, stately steps so many folks seem to deem appropriate for entering or leaving the house of the Lord (and which I always suspected had less to do with reverence than with the ladies’ rib-crushing corsets).

  As we reached the edge of the herd, I came to a stop, putting an arm out to force my brother to rein up, too.

  “Something just occurred to me,” I said. “Everyone’s been tellin’ us Milford Bales and Brother Landrigan are thick as thieves. So don’t you think Bales’ll be here this morning?”

  Old Red nodded slowly. “Yup.”

  He took a big step into the oozing-slow molasses flow of the crowd.

  I sighed and joined him.

  As we shuffled toward the doors, we were greeted with friendly grins and nods from some of our fellow churchgoers. They uniformly wore the upright, straitlaced look of any prosperous Protestants come Sunday morning, and it occurred to me that among them would be the selfsame folks who’d scowled at my brother’s drover duds Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

  I suppose your “Sunday best” doesn’t always refer to just your clothes.

  Were these people Baptists? I wondered. Methodists? Presbyterians? Landrigan sure hadn’t sounded like Reverend Kracht when we’d heard him ranting outside a saloon a few days before, so Lutheran seemed a stretch. And given the man’s emphasis on hellfire and being saved by “the blood of the Lamb,” it was a safe bet he wasn’t Mohammedan, Hindu, or Hebrew, either. Or Unitarian, for that matter.

  I craned my neck and went to tippy-toe in search of a sign or cornerstone that would tell me the name of the church. We were almost inside by then, though, and there was nothing in sight.

  “Looking for someone, Mr. Amlingmeyer?”

  Old Red and I turned to find Mortimer Krieger, the photographer/amateur librarian, behind us with his wife on his arm. We offered the couple our good mornings, which they returned with prim little smiles.

  At least, I assume Mrs. Krieger wished us good morning. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her voice, and for all I knew she was whispering, “Oh, God…these dumb-asses again.”

  “To be honest with you, sir,” I said to her husband, “I was tryin’ to figure out what this church is called. My brother and I were just out for a morning stroll when we saw the line here and, being devout Christian men, decided to sample the services. Certainly the size of the crowd and the beauty of the church speak well of the congregation, but other than that this has been a real leap of faith, so to speak.”

  Mr. Krieger chuckled.

  Mrs. Krieger just kept smiling in a way that looked more waxy and masklike with each passing moment.

  “In that case, Mr. Amlingmeyer,” Mr. Krieger said, “it’s my honor to welcome you to the Shepherd of the Hills Assembly of the Living God.”

  “Ahhh,” I said, nodding as if this actually meant something to me. Which it did not.

  “What denomination is that?” Old Red asked bluntly.

  “Its own. Our minister, Brother Landrigan, built all this himself,” Mr. Krieger said, and he held up his hands and gazed past me and my brother.

  We were just reaching the bottleneck that had been slowing the throng so—the doors into the sanctuary—and I turned and looked ahead again.

  Stretching out before me I could now see a long, red-carpeted aisle. At its end was a blocky altar set between a white pulpit and a lectern upon which rested an open Bible only slightly smaller than a steamboat. Hovering just beyond and above all this was an enormous pair of stained-glass feet, though I couldn’t yet see who they belonged to. As they were clad in sandals, I could only assume it was Jesus and not Brother Landrigan himself.

  All in all, the place made Reverend Kracht’s drafty, rough-hewn church seem about as awe-inspiring as a trapper’s lean-to. To add to the impressive (and, for me, oppressive) atmosphere of unearthly grandeur, an unseen pipe organ was filling the air with the low, spectral tones of “Though Your Sins Be as Scarlet.”

  I can easily imagine how the place would give the faithful goose bumps. Me it gave the creeps.

  “Five years ago, all this was just an empty lot on one of the town’s most notorious blocks,” Mr. Krieger said. “Now that’s progress, right, dear?”

  He patted his wife’s hand.

  “Yes,” she said.

  As we passed through the doors two by two, I noticed something large and dark looming over us, and I looked up to see the low-hanging bottom of a balcony jutting about a quarter-way into the sanctuary. The organ, I could now tell, was up there, a little closer to heaven so as to better rouse the Lord should He (like me) be tempted to sleep in come Sunday morning.

  “Your Brother Landrigan,” Old Red said to the Kriegers. “Where’d he come from?”

  “I believe he had a small congregation up in Dallas originally,” Mr. Krieger said, “but it was here his message really took root. Martha and I decided to give him a try when we noticed the pews of the Presbyterian church were half empty…and growing emptier every week.”

  Mr. Krieger’s soft, bland, eminently forgettable face momentarily took on some character—in the form of a smirk. “A smart businessman always follows the flock.”

  “Sure,” I said. “More sheep to fleece.”

  Mr. Krieger’s smile froze. “Yes…well…” Something off to our left caught his eye, and, looking grateful for the distraction, he brought up a hand and waved. “You might have an admirer here today, Mr. Amlingmeyer. It’s Mr. Coggins there who checked
your book out from our library.”

  “Mr. Coggins?”

  The name rang a bell, though faintly—the chime of it was nothing but a muffled echo until I turned to see who Krieger was waving at.

  Sitting in one of the rows nearby was the mousy little clerk from Ragsdale and Bock’s wallpaper store. He was staring at my brother and me so wide-eyed I almost expected him to duck under his pew.

  I waved at him, too.

  He hurriedly hid himself in a hymnal.

  “You know Mr. Coggins?” Mr. Krieger asked as we continued up the aisle.

  “We’ve met,” I said. “In the course of our inquiry.”

  Mr. Krieger nodded sagely and shot me a conspiratorial wink. “Of course,” he said, voice going as whisper-quiet as his wife’s. “His employers. Don’t think that hasn’t been a topic of gossip around here.”

  “How do you feel about a member of the congregation workin’ for men like that?” Gustav asked.

  “Well…” Mr. Krieger shrugged. “There’s nothing in the Bible against selling wallpaper.”

  Most of the pews we’d been passing were full up, but now we came to one that was half empty, and Mr. Krieger stopped and motioned for his wife to scoot in and have a seat.

  “Would you care to join us?” he said, still keeping his voice low. “I know it’s hardly a topic worthy of church, but I’d be most curious to hear how your investigation’s proceeding.”

  “Maybe later, Mr. Krieger,” Old Red said, his eyes locking on something up ahead, on the other side of the aisle. “Right now I see someone else we should say hello to.”

  I followed his gaze and spied Horace Cuff sitting alone in the very first pew before the pulpit. The newspaperman’s face was pointed straight ahead, away from us, but I recognized his slender build and his fair, wispy hair, and, most of all, his bearing. Even sitting, the man looked stiff and steely, all straight lines and right angles like the big-city “skyscrapers” he no doubt loathed. He was passing the time before the service by reading from the Bible, holding the book up directly before his eyes so as to spare himself the indignity of tilting his head.