Either way, this was no time for reading. He’d have to wait and see. Joe coughed up phlegm and felt pain sear in the stricken meat behind his shoulder. Then he levered a cartridge into the rifle’s receiver and followed his brother, who was already trying the back door of the saloon.
KAREL DECIDED to leave the heifer there to rot. He’d have the boys deal with it when he found them, and it warmed his cheeks to imagine what it would look like, the boys hitching the thing behind its front legs with cinched rope, the jerk of the tractor when they released the clutch, the irregular wake the thing would make in the short pasture grass as they dragged it out toward the creek where they could set it afire with kerosene or leave it there to decay beneath the work of sun and wind and vultures and time. He thought it might make for fine amusement to sit on the fence near the cattletank, smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee while the boys worked beneath his gaze, while they broke a sweat even in the cool December air. He envisioned the calf coming loose halfway across the pasture, sliding sick and foul from the dead heifer’s cavity and giving the twins twice the job to do.
He’d teach these boys more than one thing, and he’d do it soon, and with the tight smile of his imaginings pinching the bridge of his nose, he went to fetch his gun from the house. Inside, there was still the faint trace of sweetness in the air, a hint that the last food to be pulled from the oven had been Sophie’s kolaches two days before. In the sink, a single cup. On the table, another sat half full of cold black coffee atop a stack of currency and a page torn from the newspaper with a note scrawled in a childish hand in the margins. For the trailer, it read, and the beer. Can’t linger.
Karel remembered his father’s words after he’d hit Stan that day near the creek, words that he’d since coupled in his mind with his understanding of the difference between the trouble that befalls boys and that which comes to call on men. It ain’t going to be that easy for you anymore. So help me, it ain’t, Karel thought. Besides which, what about the gasoline? What about the damned cow? He crumpled the paper and the bills and stuffed them together in his pocket, then he fetched his gun and a handful of cartridges and made his way out to the truck.
AS EXPECTED, the door was bolted, and Raymond jerked his head to the side, indicating the northern side of the building. The brothers moved warily around the corner of the saloon and made their way in the shadows to peer into the dusty, double-hung windows. Inside, there stretched a long bar of unfinished pine. Three tables were set with four chairs apiece for cards and dominoes and the swapping of lies, a scalloped glass ashtray in the center of each. Between tables and near the front door, spittoons stood at the ready while, overhead, plywood signs had been affixed unevenly to the rafters beneath the loft. In painted lettering that slanted and curled with enough flourish to indicate the work of a woman’s hand, they advised against gambling and the use of foul language. Beside the bar, which was fronted with stools made of sectioned logs, rawhide nailed atop the cross sections, was a long vertical slateboard with prices written in chalk. Above the slate, a tin Coca-Cola sign had rusted through at one corner’s nail hole and hung askance from the other. Just the sight of it made Raymond thirsty. At just shy of fifteen, hairless though he was about the chin and chest, he would never admit it, would never drink anything other than beer or whiskey in the company of men whose whiskers had already come in, but oh, how he preferred the fizzing thick sweetness of a cold Coca-Cola to damn near anything, clear winter well water and his mother’s sweet tea not excepted.
He tried the window, leaning into it such that a long ribbon of peeled paint came loose of the window’s latticework and stuck to his palm, and then he caught his brother’s eye and shrugged. He pulled his gun from the back of his pants and held it by the barrel, averting his eyes when he reared back and crashed the etched walnut butt through the pane just above the window latch. The sound was one of china hurled against a wall, and for a moment Raymond saw the twisted, fire-eyed snarl of his father come home from a different saloon some twenty miles from this one and many months ago. Joe stepped away from the shadows cast by the old barn’s eaves and gave a glance toward the street out front. He shook his head, and Raymond went to work clearing the shattered shards of glass with his gun barrel until there was room enough to slide a hand safely inside to free the latch and lift the window. He tucked the revolver back into his waistband, brushed a few glinting splinters of glass from the shoulders of his vest, and then he hoisted himself up and in through the window with a grunt.
After he’d had a look to make sure he was alone inside, he threw the bolt of the sliding door, gave it a heave on its squealing rollers, and Joe joined him inside and set his gun against the back wall and surveyed the loft ladder that rose against the back wall to a closed trapdoor. Dropping the rope to the floor at his feet, he turned to his brother, indicating his shoulder, and Raymond shook his head there amidst the smells of coal dust and old tobacco spit and spilled beer. Then he crossed the room and shrugged the coil of rope onto his own shoulder and made the ascent in smoothly measured steps. When he pushed the trapdoor open, the cold air fell from above like the settling of an invisible fog that made it feel as if everything his skin contained had leached to jockey for position just beneath the skin, leaving the rest just a hollow strutted and braced by his bones. Inside, there were kegs stacked three high around a column of ice. The floor was sawdust that had mixed with just enough water to make it adhere to his boots. Against every wall, square bales of hay reached to the ceiling. In the corners, more two-foot blocks of ice stacked three high. Overhead, there were three slave-driven fans spinning lazily from the rafters, the metal fasteners of their leather drive belts clicking over their sheaves in regular, reassuring intervals. The room was so cold that Raymond’s back teeth ached. These is some crafty sonsabitches, he thought, rolling one of the outermost kegs toward the trapdoor and working a cinch knot into the rope. He looped the rope one turn around the topmost loft ladder rung to act as a makeshift pulley and safety all in one, and then he got the first barrel lassoed and looked down through the trapdoor to find his brother below, waiting with his rifle in his hands and his eyes fixed on the back door. Raymond whistled softly and his brother looked up to find the first keg of beer descending from the hole in the ceiling, the rope humming its braided hymn to friction against the topmost rung of the ladder.
Thirty minutes later, they had ten kegs set sidelong atop the whole stretch of the bar, another centered on each table, and eight others hidden beneath hay and strapped down in the trailer. The exertion had reopened Joe’s wounds, and just above his collarbone his shirt stuck fast with blood to the bandages beneath it. Raymond took notice and asked after him with his eyes. Joe shrugged, if only with one shoulder, and then they went to work in earnest, uncorking the barrels until all along the bar and from each of the tables there gurgled amber spills of pilsner. When they’d finished, Joe stood at the back door with his rifle while Raymond removed his hat and knelt down at the nearest end of the bar so he could take a long draught from one of the opened kegs. It fell in a pulsing stream, like a blood spurt or milk sprayed from an udder that was pulled and released by a palsied hand, and when he stood, Raymond’s dark curls were drenched and he was blinking the stuff from his eyes. He smiled so that his teeth, yellow but straight, were visible to the gum lines, and Joe had seen this smile only once in the last year, when they’d stood out in the pasture lit by a full moon and the roaring blaze of the house fire they’d kindled with kerosene-soaked curtains in the front room of their father’s house.
Raymond leaned forward at the waist and shook his head playfully, a dog come up wet after a deep drink from a rushing creek. “They brew a damned good beer in Shiner, brother,” he said, stomping a boot down for emphasis. “I hope these here floorboards is thirsty.”
BY QUARTER OF eleven, Karel had made the trip to Hacek’s in Moulton and found, parked between the train tracks and the storefront, the unmistakable new black Packard of Guillermo Villaseñor, the pain
t throwing sunlight from its polished surface like the oiled, blued receiver of a fine rifle. Karel’s skin went tight around his muscles, and he pulled his pouch of tobacco from his breast pocket and rolled a cigarette to calm his nerves. He sat smoking in the cab of the truck for a long minute before swinging the door open and climbing out, hitching his trousers up and pulling his hat down low over his hairline. The town, less than half the size of Shiner, had been erected in one long row of raised storefronts along the rail line as if its founders, with transient hearts and foresight, expected one day, when a train was made that could bear the load, to roll the whole town broadside onto flat railcars and haul it to some other, more fitting, location.
Between Hacek’s place and the nearby dry-goods store stood padlocked rows of slope-roofed bins in which the old man kept the coal shipped in from upstate by rail. From the telephone lines strung parallel to the storefronts, crows gave voice to their grating complaints. There were townsfolk out, walking between stores on the piered pine decking and airing themselves out front of the barbershop and the green grocer’s.
Karel tipped his hat to a woman making her way from the barbershop past the icehouse with a young boy in tow, his hair cropped short and parted with a wet comb in a fine straight line over one ear. The woman nodded, pulling the boy along none too gently by his outstretched arm, and Karel remembered the cold fear of being a boy set atop a board laid over the arms of a barber’s chair, of the sick smell of hair tonic mixed with the minty scent of hot shaving soap, of the swishing sound of the push broom’s bristles on the hard-planked floor. He wondered how old his boy would have to be before he’d need to be taken to Wasek’s shop in Dalton for his first haircut. Then he ground his cigarette beneath the toe of his boot and reached for the doorknob of Hacek’s icehouse. He told himself to quit worrying over the had-beens and the would-bes and set his mind instead to the business at hand.
Inside, dust hung in the wide slants of light from the front windows, and Villaseñor stood flanked by his two men, who went hatless as children but wore their graying hair slicked back in the fashion of their master. Deep wrinkles stretched from the corners of their eyes. They hadn’t missed any meals, and their smooth leather vests bulged out above their rifles, which were held, as ever, across their bodies waist high. Villaseñor leaned against the bar, his hat in his hands, his spectacles low on his prominent nose, and when the bell over the door signaled Karel’s arrival, he turned from his conversation and, with a bemused, curious arc of his brows, buttoned his suitcoat and turned back toward Weldon Hacek, who’d found a rag and now busied himself with the nervous work of buffing from the gleaming bar top some blemishes of his own imagination.
Karel stopped just inside the door, made to remove his hat but then, thinking twice of it, left it on and made a show of rolling another cigarette and putting a match to it. He exhaled through his nose and crossed the room with the cigarette smoking between his lips, leaned over against the cant of his neck until his hat brim touched the bar and Hacek had no choice but to meet his eyes. “How about you draw me a beer,” Karel said. “You ain’t run out of pilsner, now have you?”
Hacek stopped mopping the bar, fetched a glass from the shelf on the back wall and tilted it beneath a tap. The man had a reputation for tasting his inventory at regular intervals, and his nose was a pocked and swollen bulb that hung with such a profusion of brown hairs that they appeared to be the tangled source of the thick mustache that hid the better half of his upper lip. “Was near out after last weekend,” he said, sliding the glass toward Karel, “but this here is from a fresh drum I just took delivery of yesterday morning.”
“Come by way of a couple boys towing my trailer, did it?”
“Matter of fact,” Hacek said.
Villaseñor cleared his throat, set his hat on the bar and removed his spectacles, the lenses of which he studied with a frown before cleaning them with a pressed white handkerchief pulled from his breast pocket. “Well now,” he said, keeping his eyes on his work, “if it’s a new barrel, then let’s all have a taste, shall we? Draw one for yourself, too, Weldon.” He pulled a thick bundle of banknotes from his trouser pocket, pulled two dollars from the fold, placed them on the bar with the flat of his hand.
Karel noticed that, after all these years, the man still wore a silver wedding band. “On a first-name basis, are we now, Hacek?”
The shop owner retrieved four more glasses and commenced filling them while Karel tasted his and felt the cool tingle of the froth on his lips. He pulled on his cigarette and flicked the ashes onto the floor while he watched Hacek pour and set the glasses in front of Villaseñor and his men. The latter leaned their guns against the front of the bar and put their hands around the glasses, but they did not drink. Instead, they waited for their boss’s prompting, and by the time Hacek filled his own glass, Karel had let the informality of the Mexican’s address do its work on him. When Hacek turned all at once to face his vendors and customers, Karel held a finger up before the man could drink while he drained his own glass in one draught. “I do believe I’ll have another,” he said. “Long as my brothers’ keeper here is paying.”
“It would be my pleasure,” said Villaseñor, holding his spectacles up to the light from the windows before putting them back on. “I was just telling Weldon here that I’d like very much to give you far more than a beer. You’re the uncle of my grandchildren, after all, though they barely know you by sight. It’s a shame, but it’s true.” He waited until Hacek put a new glass in front of Karel, nodded to his men, and they all drank together, excepting Karel, who let his glass sit untouched on the bar. “Anyway, as I was saying, Skala, it might be better for everyone if I paid you off your share of the Spoetzel concern. Especially if you insist on hiring boys without manners to tend to your business in your absence. My son-in-law tells me he had to put some birdshot into one of them yesterday. Said they came into our store out in Gonzales trying to unload some kegs and didn’t like the reception they got.”
“Shit,” said Karel. “If you still got Thom running that place, ain’t anybody likely to take a shine to the welcome he rolls out. Or have Graciela’s better graces softened his temperament same as they stiffen his pecker? How many little half-breed nieces and nephews do I have, anyway? I can’t keep track.”
If Villaseñor took offense, he didn’t show it. He squared his shoulders over his polished black shoes, let out a sigh that seemed occasioned more by relaxation than impatience, and took another sip of his beer. When he set the glass back on the bar, he spun it slowly in the condensation of its own making. Then he smiled at his men and winked at Weldon Hacek. “I was afraid you’d fail to see the sense in a buyout. But no matter. The offer was only courtesy, really. I’ve spoken with Kosmos. Called on him last night at his home. What a fine wife he has, too. Have you had occasion to dine with them? A woman with a proper sensibility and impeccable taste. We sat in the parlor after our meal and shared some brandy, enjoyed a couple of top-rate cigars I brought with me, and by the time I’d taken my leave, we had come to an agreement that is . . . well, that is somewhat exclusive.” He lifted his glass, studied the ring of water it left there on the polished bar, and then he set it back in the same spot and began spinning it in the opposite direction. He looked up only with the corner of his eye, and Karel forced a bemused grin. “Then, just now before you arrived, I shook hands with Weldon here and agreed to take his business at fifty cents per barrel less than you’ve been charging him, and to deliver it upon demand rather than merely twice per month. I have several trucks, of course. It’s all the same to me. And, as a matter of course, I sent Stan and Eduard down to Yoakum this morning, and I trust they are making the same offer to some of your other overcharged customers.” The man smiled now, but his eyes didn’t shine. They remained dull and black and entirely unamused. “You see, Karel, you can’t really expect me to respect our arrangement and keep my business out west so long as you’re sending children who carry firearms and make threats into my very
own store, now can you?”
Karel took a slow drink and dropped his cigarette to the floor, letting it burn there at his feet without stepping on it. A dry, leathery tightness had begun to creep into the tendons of his neck, one that he recognized as having nothing to do with the cool weather, and he would have sworn it was contracting such that his ear was nearer his shoulder than normal. “If them boys have been out Gonzales way,” he said, “they done it on their own. I told them only to make my deliveries here in Moulton, and to call on some others between here and Shiner. Nothing more.”
Villaseñor finished his beer, took his hat from the bar, and nodded to his men. They followed suit, setting their empty glasses aside and retrieving their guns before crossing the room to flank the door. “Well, they did a fair bit more than that, it would seem. Spat on the floor of my saloon, one of them did, and used foul language. If you can’t trust the men you hire, Skala, then you either hired the wrong men or you didn’t make it well enough worth their while to do as you said. Either way, you carry the blame.” He nodded, and one of his men opened the door, tinkling the bell overhead. “Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Cut those boys loose so you don’t end up having to send word to their mother that they’ve found an early way into the ground doing your bidding.”
“They ain’t got a mother,” Karel said. “And I didn’t come here wanting advice.”
“You’d do well to take it all the same. Mind your business while you still have some left to mind,” Villaseñor said, and then he settled his hat in its place and took his leave.
MEANWHILE, WHEN THE Knedlik twins slid open the back door of the Drycreek Saloon, they found Thomàs Skala perched in the trailer atop one of the square bales, his hat set beside him and his shotgun in his lap, his blond curls catching sunlight and blowing about his ears in a burgeoning wind. They hadn’t heard the engine of his truck, which was nowhere in sight. Raymond cursed himself for parking right out in the open, visible from a good distance up the road, where he supposed now that Thom had pulled over and come the rest of the way quietly on foot.
The Wake of Forgiveness Page 17