The Winter Family

by Clifford Jackman

  Honest Jim’s hand clamped down hard on Burns’s shoulder, making Burns wince, and he grinned a terrible grin that had nothing to do with humor or happiness. It was more like a monkey showing its teeth to a rival in a dispute over a coconut.

  “Maybe Conor was right about you,” Honest Jim said. “But that’s a question for another day. For now, if you show weakness before these men, just know I’ll tear your fucking arms off.”

  Honest Jim wheeled to the crowd.

  “Whose city is it?” he howled. “Eh? It’s ours! We’re taking it! We’re taking Chicago!”

  The men roared. There must have been close to sixty, including the police officers.

  “Follow me!” Honest Jim cried.

  55

  Lukas saw the mob coming up the road toward the saloon. He hesitated, the image of Winter coated in blood still swimming in his mind, but eventually he turned and banged on the door.

  “Charlie!” he cried. “Charlie, get out here! Charlie, there’s a whole pack—”

  The door flew open and Charlie emerged, angry, and then he looked in the direction Lukas was pointing and his face went slack. He said, “Johnny! Auggie! You better get out here.”

  Johnny came out first, Winter a few seconds after, with his jacket back on and his bow tie hanging around his neck. The crowd of men stopped just short of the wooden sidewalk in front of the saloon, up to their ankles in the mud of the street.

  “Yer fucking dead!” someone in the back of the mob shouted.

  Winter rested his hand on the pistol strapped to his thigh.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Winter said. “How can I help you?”

  Honest Jim stepped forward.

  “Who are you?” Honest Jim said.

  “Augustus Winter,” Winter replied.

  “I’m surprised to see you admit it, sir,” Honest Jim replied. “You’re wanted for murder.”

  “In Mississippi, I am,” Winter said. “This is Illinois.”

  “It certainly is,” Honest Jim agreed. He looked Winter up and down and then said, “I never heard it said that you were a dandy.”

  “It’s what you might call a relatively recent development,” Winter replied.

  “City living agrees with you, does it?” Honest Jim asked. The drunkards behind him were tittering.

  “It ain’t that,” Winter said. “It’s like the poet said. The time came, as it always does, when it was harder to stay in the bud than it was to blossom.”

  The repeat voters laughed scornfully. Honest Jim’s worn and scarred face rearranged itself into a contemptuous expression. Lukas and the Empire brothers looked perplexed; Lukas even craned his head around to stare at Winter in bewilderment. Winter just tilted his head back. Although his face was serious there was the slightest gleam of amusement in his eyes.

  Burns could feel his stomach sinking, as if he were in an elevator falling down the shaft.

  “I have you at a disadvantage,” Honest Jim said.

  “I wouldn’t say that, sir,” Winter said.

  “I mean you don’t know my name.”

  “All due respect, I’m not sure what your name’s got to do with anything.”

  “I’m Jim Plunkett,” Honest Jim said. “Honest Jim they call me. Now I don’t have no official position but I’m what you might call a leading citizen. These men with me have come to vote. Step aside.”

  “Well,” Winter said. “Everyone’s got the right to vote, don’t they? And this is a polling station, ain’t it? So that’s all right, I suppose.”

  But he didn’t move and his eyes roamed the crowd.

  “Oh,” Winter said. “Mister Plunkett. I do believe there’s been a mistake. That man there, the tall thin one, with the gray hat. He voted already. Didn’t he, Lukas?”

  “Yep,” Lukas said, his eyes shifting from side to side.

  “You’re mistaken,” Honest Jim said.

  “No,” Winter said. “I ain’t.”

  “Officers,” Honest Jim said.

  A sheriff’s deputy stepped forward.

  “Out of the way, Winter,” the deputy said. “You’re interfering with the election.”

  “Well,” Winter said, “you all interfered with it first.”

  Many men in the mob were armed. At least a dozen pistols and rifles were pointed at Winter. Lukas and the Empire brothers were shifting on their feet and trying to look everywhere at once. But Winter never moved, never blinked, never acted for an instant like he was not in control of the situation.

  “This is your last chance, you goddamn mercenary,” the deputy said. “That’s the law talking.”

  “The law,” Winter said. “If I live to a hundred years old I’ll never understand your type. In case you hadn’t noticed, we ain’t doing things by law today. That’s how you wanted it and now you’ve got it.”

  “Get out of the way,” Honest Jim said, “or you’re dead.”

  “I’d rather die,” Winter said.

  He drew his pistol quickly. Someone in the crowd pulled the trigger of a rifle but missed. And then Winter, Charlie, Johnny, Lukas, all of them, began to fire.

  The gunfight, such as it was, lasted less than thirty seconds. The two groups stood ten feet apart and blasted away. The mercenaries were outnumbered, but they were hardened killers who’d been under fire before. The repeaters had always stopped short of murder, unless their passions blinded them, and the men they’d battled had fought by the same code. Johnny was shot in the shoulder while Winter took one in the side of the neck. Blood spouted like a little fountain from the wound. But then the repeaters broke and scattered and fell back, shouting and screaming and leaving behind the wounded and the dead.

  Winter clapped a hand to his neck and grimaced. He ducked down against the side of the building and struggled out of his jacket.

  “Wee-oo!” Charlie shouted. He inhaled deeply and shook his head. “Smell that, boys!” he shouted. “Smells like victory!”

  A pall of gun smoke hung in the air.

  “Fuck all of you!” Lukas shrieked.

  The scattered mob took shelter wherever they could: behind carriages, lampposts, inside buildings, around corners. A few returned fire.

  Honest Jim was crouched in an alley.

  “Murderers!” he exclaimed. “They can’t get away with this!”

  Mickey Burns was next to him.

  “Mother Mary,” Burns said. “How many are dead?”

  Honest Jim grabbed a young man next to him.

  “Rouse up the neighborhood!” he snarled. “Spread the word! I’ll have all their hides! Get everyone into the streets! It’s war! It’s war!”

  56

  Jan was kneeling next to a public pump in an alleyway between two rows of shanty houses, working the handle, desperately trying to get a drink. He knew that in this sewer of a neighborhood he stood a fair chance of getting cholera from the water, but he was so desperate he was willing to chance it. His clothes were stuck to him with sweat and his hair was standing up where he’d run his hands through it. No matter how hard he worked the handle nothing came out. It only made a weird choking noise, like a sick infant in its sleep.

  “Do you hear that?” Bill asked.

  “Yes,” Jan said. “I think some water will come out soon.”

  “No,” Bill said. “Stop for a minute.”

  “It’s almost here,” Jan said.

  He was desperate for the water to wash over his scalp. He felt so dirty.

  Bill took Jan’s hand away from the handle.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Jan said peevishly.

  “Me neither,” Bill said.

  Jan wondered whether Bill was making a joke. Then he realized how quiet it was. They were in a densely packed neighborhood, a hive of humanity, and yet there were no women in the backyards hanging laundry, no sounds of children, nothing. Except for some sort of hum, growing louder and louder all the time.

  “What is it?” Jan said.

>   Dusty, Bill, and Jan stood around the pump with their heads cocked, like hounds straining to hear a distant bugle.

  A single man appeared at the mouth of the alley and pointed toward them. He shouted something, but he was too far for them to hear.

  Dusty raised his rifle to his shoulder. “Get back, you little prick,” he bellowed.

  And then the mob flooded into the alleyway, like a tidal wave rushing into a shallow canal.

  “Run!” Jan shouted.

  They ran, staring behind them at the stunning horde that had come from nowhere, without warning, but when they turned their eyes forward they saw another mob at the other end of the alley.

  “Shit!” Dusty screamed.

  He raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired, and a man staggered, and fell, but the mob was surging forward, men and boys, children even, old women, waving clubs in the air, knives, planks of wood. Fingers hooked into claws. Shouting.

  “Through here!” Jan shouted.

  He leapt over a rickety wooden fence into a muddy yard and ran toward the back door of a shanty. The door splintered underneath his boot. Inside an ancient woman tried to stab him with a knitting needle. A blow from the back of his hand sent her sprawling. He bolted through the little one-room shack, the rags on the floor sticking to his boots, and blundered out into the afternoon sunshine.

  “They’re everywhere!” Dusty screamed.

  And indeed they were. There was nowhere Jan could look where he did not see the mob.

  “Go, go!” Jan cried.

  They ran across the road and burst through another cheap home and crashed out the back door and sprinted through the tangled, trash-filled garden and hopped another fence and came onto a broader street, only to discover that this road was even more crammed with men than the alleys behind them.

  “It’s Winter!” Bill said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Dusty said.

  “Look!” Bill said, and pointed, and sure enough, a couple of blocks down the street, Winter and Lukas and the Empire brothers were leaning out of the window of a faded bungalow, firing their guns on the hordes of men besieging them.

  “Go, go!” Jan cried.

  They ran down the middle of the street. Men were coming at them from every direction: streaming out of buildings, jogging along the sidewalks and springing out of the alleyways. The threat of getting shot kept the pursuers at bay for a time. Finally Bill pulled the trigger on one of his pistols; the only sound was a little click. The mob pounced.

  Jan looked behind him and saw that they were on Dusty, and he drew his knife and cut him loose. He looked forward and saw that they had wrestled Bill halfway to the ground, and he stabbed a man in the neck, a boy really, and Bill wriggled free but then someone hit Jan and he fell and dozens of men pressed down on him.

  “Help!” Jan screamed. Someone kicked him in the face. He still had hold of the knife and managed to swing it a few times to generate a little space, but as he was rising up to his knees a powerful man knocked him to his back and wrapped his hands around his throat.

  “Fucking kill you,” Mickey Burns snarled, “you double-dealing kraut!”

  Burns sat on Jan’s chest, straddling him, trying to choke the life out of him.

  “You did this!” Burns screamed.

  Jan saw that Burns was crying.

  “Look how many people are dead!” Burns said. “It was you! It was you!”

  Jan’s vision was turning pink.

  Okay, he thought. Okay.

  It felt natural and inevitable, like something he didn’t need to worry about.

  And then Burns was struck on the head, very hard, so hard in fact that his head cracked geometrically like an unripe melon. His grip loosened and Jan gasped for air while a strong arm jerked him back to his feet.

  “Come on, Müller,” Winter said. “Fucking move!”

  Winter swung the rifle in his hands back and forth to clear a space and Jan followed. It felt as if he were climbing over a crowd of people. His fingers were scratching, pulling hair, digging into eye sockets. Eventually they got free and staggered up to the porch of the saloon, where they saw that Bill Bread alone was leaning over the rail to provide them with covering fire, ignoring the bullets smacking into the wood all around him.

  They barged into the house and ducked under the windows and then Bill got down as well. Bullets were smashing into the house and glass was shattering.

  “God damn,” Dusty said.

  He was staring at Winter.

  “I’ve never seen nothing like that,” Dusty said. “That was true grit, Auggie.”

  Winter gave Dusty a casual look and put his hand to his bleeding neck.

  “All right, boys,” he said. “We can’t stay here. We ain’t got much ammunition and there’s plenty more of ’em out there. We need to bust out and split up. We’ll all meet up back in Morris, Illinois. We’ll let Quentin take care of our wages. I know we done all we could and we’ve earned them.”

  “Fucking right,” Charlie said.

  Jan was coughing.

  Winter stood up. When he smiled there was blood on his teeth.

  “What you all waiting for?” he said.

  57

  The enormous grain elevators stood silhouetted against the sky and pressed up against the river. They were the tallest buildings in Chicago, visible for miles. Each one was over a hundred feet high and could store over half a million bushels of wheat. In the Fire they had collapsed one by one, falling in on themselves in showers of sparks and smoke. But they had been built back faster than any other buildings in the city, in a matter of months, reconstructed by the nameless, decentralized force that had compelled their construction in the first place. They were the temples of a new natural order that would remake the world in its image.

  The train lumbered westward and crawled up to them, coming to a shrieking halt in front of a massive steam-powered conveyor that stretched up into the dim and smoky rafters.

  Two men came up from the riverbank. They jogged past the massive gray walls of the grain house and skipped over the railway lines to the waiting train. A few of the workers glanced at them but went back to their work, thinking they were only the usual beggars, come to pick handfuls of spilled wheat out of the dirt.

  Jan Müller and Bill Bread crouched up against the train. They were bruised and bleeding, tired and very hungry. They had no ammunition for their weapons. Separated in the tumult after they burst out of the saloon, they had reunited in the middle of the night on the muddy banks of the river.

  The train crawled forward for an hour, so that each car came to the elevator, tipped to the side, and dumped its silky golden cargo into the pit where the screaming elevator scooped it up and carried it aloft. Then the whistle shrieked, and the train backed out. Jan and Bill climbed onto the roof of one of the cars as it left.

  “Lie down,” Jan said.

  And so they did, right on the spine of the serpent winding its way through the heart of the city, but even if they were invisible to the men on the street they still felt dreadfully exposed to the windows of the buildings and to the eye of God above.

  It was worst when the train came to a stop, at it often did, at crossings and in rail yards. They would have to wait, knowing that if anyone recognized them they would be as helpless as if they were in a cage. But it was at one of those stops, in a crowded rail yard where half a dozen trains were resting next to one another, that Bill saw Fred Johnson sitting on a train car less than a hundred yards from them.

  “Look!” Bill said.

  Jan turned and looked. His heart froze, but he quickly came to a decision.

  “We have to let him know where to meet,” Jan said.

  They stood up and leapt across the gap to the next train and ran along the cars for a while. Then leapt to Johnson’s train and made their way over to where he was waiting, and watching, with his wise and dangerous brown eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Jan asked.

  “H
ow do I look?” Johnson said.

  Jan heard a strange noise. He realized that the railroad car they were standing on was full of pigs, grunting and rooting around beneath him.

  “What about the others?” Jan asked.

  “Don’t know about Reggie,” Johnson said. “Quentin’s all right. He went with Winter.”

  The train shuddered to life and began to roll slowly forward.

  “So you know we’re meeting in Morris?” Jan said.

  “Yeah,” Johnson replied. “That’s what Winter said.”

  “We’ll go with you,” Jan replied, settling back down against the train.

  Johnson looked at Jan with what he perceived as hostility.

  “What?” Jan said. “You’d rather be by yourself? I know you don’t like me, but I came all the way over here to—”

  “I ain’t going to Morris,” Johnson said.

  Jan realized that what he had mistaken for hostility was frustration. And it was not directed at him.

  “Where are you going?” Jan asked.

  “I’m going to the stockyards,” Johnson said.

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause that’s where Winter is.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jan said.

  Johnson hesitated, then spoke. “I went with Quentin to go see Noah. This was midnight, nearabouts. We climbed up a drainpipe and broke a window and we found his office. Noah came in real early the next morning. When he saw us he was mad. Him and Quentin went into another room. I could hear them screaming. Quentin came out. Smiled at me. Said it would be all right. I said, Where are we going? He said we’d be fine.”

  The train was picking up speed, rocking back and forth on the tracks. The pigs squealed louder, as if they were engaged in a heated debate and had to talk over the noise of the moving vehicle.

  “Well, it was fucking morning. We went out in the streets and I didn’t know what we were going to do. Everyone was looking for a big colored man. There wasn’t no place to hide. We went back to the restaurant and Winter saw us. He was in an alley, hat pulled down over his eyes. Real still, like some animal waiting for dinner to walk up. He said he’d sent everyone to Morris and we should go there. Then he asked about our pardons. Quentin started to give him the runaround. You know how he does. Well, I don’t think it’s so easy to give the runaround to Winter no more.”