Malice of Crows

by Lila Bowen

  “Do you miss him?” Dan asked after a few long moments of sawing and chucking bits of meat into pots.

  Rhett looked up and sighed. “I miss him being alive.” It was an honest answer, but it wasn’t enough. “But, no, I guess I didn’t like his personality in particular. He helped me once, and you can’t put a price on that. I reckon some folks are just around long enough to teach us something, but that doesn’t necessarily make ’em a pleasant companion.”

  Dan looked at him sharply, and Rhett’s gut went cold. “It’s strange, that the Rangers managed to shoot him in the heart during such a heated battle.”

  Goddammit, Rhett hated lying, especially when the other feller knew he was lying. But he owed it to Earl – to let Dan and everybody else believe their companion had died nobly. “I can’t believe it, either, but there it is. His sadness was killing him, anyway. Maybe he’s happier wherever he is now.” Sick of the way Dan was looking at him, he stood up by Inés’s cauldron. “I’ll take this in. You go on and help with the books so we can get on the road.” Instead of arguing, Dan just nodded thoughtfully.

  “You might consider having a wash,” he said, and it sounded more a kindness than a ribbing. “You know how fussy Sam can be about baths.”

  Rhett at first took offense, then looked down. He was a mess of blood, sand, dirt, black ichor, and weeks’ worth of trail dust. Once Sam was back to himself, he might be a bit put off. “That’s a right fine idea, Dan. I do feel a bit mussed.”

  “Best get to it, then.”

  The look Dan gave him – well, if Dan didn’t know everything in Rhett’s head, Rhett would’ve been surprised. The coyote boy was too clever by half, and Rhett was right glad to get out of the room with him before Dan laid all his secrets out on the dirt like the cut-up cow.

  As he brought the dinner beef into the kitchen, Rhett found Inés, Winifred, and Cora laughing as they sorted through books on the long table, deciding what could stay here in the mission’s secret library and what was needed with them on the road. Dan came and went, taking the books they’d indicated down to the cellar or out to the wagon, looking stern and businesslike but more than happy to do as they asked.

  “What’re you-all laughing at?” Rhett asked when they all giggled like hens.

  “Girl business,” Winifred shot back.

  “And none of yours,” Cora finished.

  For once, Rhett didn’t like being left out, but he wasn’t about to say a thing. If they all thought of him as a man and nothing else, then he wasn’t about to change their minds just for the sake of knowing what the joke was.

  “Well, Bessy wants to join in,” he said, putting the old iron kettle at their feet. He didn’t stop to see their reaction to the pile of raw meat, just turned around and walked right back out to do his washing at the trough by the well.

  What he saw there just about made his jaw fall off. The sun broke through the clouds, and there was Samuel Hennessy, his shirt stripped down to his waist, pouring water down his neck and shoulders, letting it run in rivulets down into his britches, flowing over all those interesting muscles and into crevices and through little patches of honey-gold hair. He was thinner than he’d been, but it only served to make the lines of his body more raw, more real. Rhett swallowed hard, transfixed.

  “Well, howdy, Sam,” Rhett murmured. “Didn’t know you were up to bathing yet.”

  Sam’s eyes popped open, and he looked up and started to pull on his shirt. “Oh, hell, Rhett. I didn’t know you were there. Inés fed me a good breakfast, said she put some kind of potion in it, and once I had a full belly, I got all jittery. Full of energy. I just had to wash. I felt all gritty from the trail, and now there’s blood and black junk mixed in it, and who knows when we’ll find the next creek. Didn’t know if we’d get the chance to bathe before we hit San Anton. Those city folks, they look down on a feller who hasn’t changed out of his duds since last winter. I didn’t want to look disreputable. As a Ranger, you know.”

  Rhett looked down at himself. He was rumpled, covered in cow blood and lizard sand, too. His hair had kept on growing out and was starting to get in the way of his hat. He let the battered thing fall down his back and ran a hand over his head.

  “I reckon you’re right. We look like no-good rustlers, don’t we?”

  “Right disreputable.”

  Rhett’s eye trailed down from Sam’s bluer-than-blue eyes, down his throat to the water droplets caught in the golden fuzz on the man’s chest. For all that Sam had looked about dead yesterday, he seemed full of goddamn life at the moment. Fuller than full.

  “Then I reckon we’d better bathe. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Sam swallowed hard and started buttoning his shirt… with one button off.

  “It’s our duty,” he said. “Let’s see if they got better facilities.”

  Rhett grinned, went to grab his saddlebags, and headed back to the kitchen with Sam in his wake. “Inés, you got a bathtub in here? Or a convenient creek?”

  Inés inclined her head to the hall. “There’s a cistern and a copper tub out back. The water will be cold.”

  Rhett’s eyes met Sam’s. “Oh, I think we’ll do okay.”

  “I bet you will,” Winifred murmured, and she and Cora giggled.

  “Buncha damn fool hens,” Rhett muttered, stomping out back.

  But Sam was following him, so who cared what the damn fool hens thought?

  His Sam was back.

  They had a hell of bath, although Rhett kept his binder on until Sam gently tugged it off. It was a new thing, being in his altogether in the middle of the day with another person, but Rhett was so glad Sam was alive that he didn’t care if maybe his body wasn’t how he felt it should be. Sam wasn’t complaining. He would’ve expected Sam to be weak and easily tired, but the man was goddamn ravenous, as if trying to make up for time lost while he’d been asleep.

  When Rhett asked him, “Sam, are you sure… ?” Sam just grabbed him by the hips and put him where he wanted, and Rhett didn’t complain. It was like a dream, and after they’d messed around, they had to go on and bathe again. Nobody from inside the mission ventured outside, and Dan kept to his book-hauling around front, and Rhett figured baths weren’t so goddamn horrible after all. They changed into their clean duds and went to the trouble of washing their trail clothes and hanging them to dry on Inés’s lines. When they were done, the trough was a dirty, oily mess that they emptied out and refilled from the deep, cool well. When they reentered the kitchen, every good smell rode the air, and the books spread over the table had been replaced with platters. Inés was grinding masa on a stone board while Cora chopped green things and Winifred stirred something in a kettle.

  “You’re looking much improved,” Inés noted, watching Sam closely.

  He grinned, his color high. “Whatever you put in that breakfast did its work, Señora Inés.”

  Rhett couldn’t see it, but he imagined she smiled fondly at Sam. Because everyone did.

  “How’d you like to take some clippers to me?” Rhett asked, poking Winifred in the back, and she laughed and limped over to knock off his hat and said, “It is always fun to have scissors so near your throat, fool.”

  Soon he was shorn down to where he liked it, and Sam was shaving with his knife using a tin plate for a mirror. The effect was rough and lovely and made Rhett’s throat ache. As Sam pinned his badge back on his clean shirt, Rhett’s heart sunk back down. They’d almost had a normal day, hadn’t they? Good work, laughter, the smell of dinner that wasn’t Dan’s rabbits over what should have been Earl’s fire. Damn that donkey for up and killing himself right when he’d figured out exactly how to build and bank a fine fire. Everywhere he went, it was like Rhett carried ghosts with him. Monty, Chicken, Regina, Grandpa Z, the Captain, all those bitty babies the Cannibal Owl took while Rhett was stumbling around, trying to find his way as the Shadow. Even Chuck, who was a chupacabra now – unless somebody’d killed him – that was on Rhett’s conscience, too, heavy as
a stone around his neck.

  He stood from the table, where the women were about to serve dinner and the men were joshing as men do, and shook the fuzz from his shoulders. After giving Winifred a nod of thanks, he walked alone back toward the chapel. As Sam finished his ablutions, Rhett suddenly felt like the kitchen was a very full place, and he needed a quiet moment alone.

  With every step down the hallway, with every lit candle he passed, his pace slowed. A wind whispered from somewhere, cool as water in the desert. The chapel looked about like it always did, flickering with candlelight and rounded and warm. Welcoming, even. He’d never been in the town church back in Gloomy Bluebird, never much approved of the stern preacher and his pucker-faced, hateful wife, which meant Rhett didn’t know what a church was supposed to be, really, or what was supposed to happen there. He’d never heard a real prayer, outside of that hogwash Earl had spouted right before he’d done the goddamn unthinkable.

  Rhett walked first to a rough statue of a skinny white feller in a breechclout, nailed up to some sticks and looking pretty mournful about it. As a figure, this one held no appeal for Rhett. Instead, he wandered toward a painting of a sleepy-looking lady in a fancy blue nun suit holding a fat white baby. She looked pretty kind but also harmless, which likewise offered no connection. Moving around the room, he passed banks of candles and small portraits of various serious-looking fellers, and even one skinny boy stuck full of arrows, but the first thing to appeal to him was a skeleton lady in a fancy dress with black holes for eyes. Around her feet were a few coins, a piece of brown stuff, and several hand-rolled cigarettes.

  “Santa Muerte,” Inés said, somewhere behind him. He hadn’t even heard her approach, nor recognized the slight wobble he felt every time he was near a monster.

  “Bless you,” he muttered back.

  He could hear the smile in her voice. “I did not sneeze. The statue there is of Santa Muerte, Lady Death.”

  “Don’t sound much like a church lady,” Rhett observed.

  “Yes, well, there’s more than one church and more than one god. She calls to you, does she?”

  “She’s more interesting than all these other sad-looking white folks.”

  Inés stepped closer but didn’t touch Rhett, and he didn’t turn around.

  “Winifred says you have no love of women.”

  He snorted. “Oh, I got a use for ’em, from time to time. Even like a few of them, more or less. It’s useless folks I can’t abide. In a life like mine, if you can’t kill what’s coming at you, you don’t deserve to walk away from the fight. You just stand there, screaming and tossing your skirt over your head, I figure you deserve to get bit by whatever’s running at you. But this lady…” He stretched out a finger and traced the carved wood of her hem. “She looks like she gets it. Like she’d drink with you, then laugh during a bar fight.”

  “She might at that, if she was in the mood. This was once a strict mission of monks, but now I invite any gods or saints who need a place to rest. There is a place for each of them. Santa Muerte only understands death, but she is honest about it. You two might get along. Every person, after all, needs to believe in something.”

  Rhett looked skeptically into the statue’s dark eyes. “Long as she don’t expect me to pray.”

  “Just keep killing things,” Inés said, her voice moving back down the hall. “She likes that.”

  Rhett tipped his hat. “At your service, I reckon.” He turned away, but before he left the room, something pulled him back. Hunting around in his pocket, he found an old nickel and tossed it at Santa Muerte’s feet. He wasn’t sure it was the proper way to do things, but he figured that when a feller found something bigger than him that he couldn’t kill, he ought to give it a gift and a wide goddamn berth.

  “Thanks for not taking Sam,” he said.

  They slept in the monks’ cots, taking watches just in case the Gila monsters – or something worse – arrived, drawn to Rhett like flies to honey, or possibly vinegar. Nothing arrived. Rhett spent his few hours at watch sitting outside near the sleeping horses on a rock with a good view, trying hard as hell to draw the old comfort from their warm simplicity. But life had grown too complex. He could feel Trevisan, not far away but still out of reach. Everyone’s expectations weighed heavy on him: Cora, Dan, Sam, even the Captain’s ghost, entirely imagined though it was. Problem was, he knew deep down that his usual method wasn’t enough. He’d killed Trevisan once already in his own way, and the killing hadn’t stuck. If his friends couldn’t find what they needed in all those goddamn books, it didn’t matter how ready Rhett was, how dangerous or lucky or well trained or well armed or dastardly.

  If he killed Meimei, Trevisan would just jump into somebody else, and then Cora would probably stab Rhett in the goddamn heart for failing her. They had to find a way to stop that crucial jump. So it was down to what they could find in the books. Which Rhett couldn’t read. He pulled out one of his pistols and pointed it at his old adversary, the moon. But he didn’t pull the trigger. If he did, he knew damn well the others would run out in their bare feet, weapons in hand, thinking there were more Gila monsters or scorpions or whatever monster got called up next.

  “Bang,” he said, mimicking the gun’s kickback.

  But he did throw a few rocks, just to have something physical to do.

  When he found himself sitting upright on the rock, wobbling, eyes drooping closed, he went in to wake Dan and send him out for his own turn at watch. Considering the long line of cold cots, he came to a decision. Kneeling by Sam, he placed a soft kiss right behind the feller’s ear.

  “Howdy,” Sam said, all breathy and welcoming.

  “I know it’s a small bed, but you got room for one more?”

  Sam rolled over to make room, and Rhett shucked his boots and settled in with another kiss on Sam’s cheek. Relaxing into the space, body to body, he felt himself tenderly held in the lingering scent and warmth of the person he liked best, all his questions silenced by a rare sort of comfort. Sam was already snoring, and it made Rhett smile fondly. He fell into a deep, sweet sleep and woke to the cawing of crows.

  The bastard black birds were everywhere, but the biggest ruckus came from the chapel. It was barely dawn, but they cawed in every niche, on every pew, sitting on the skinny feller’s outstretched arms and Santa Muerte’s head and lined up along the rough wooden rafters like they were waiting for a show. All the candles had blown out, and the church was cold and smelled like a cave, like a one-way trip to the bowels of cold, dark hell itself. Even the saints somehow seemed to be looking the other way. Rhett pulled out a pistol, but Inés appeared behind him and pushed down the barrel, pointing it at the ground.

  “Don’t waste your bullets on devils,” Inés said.

  Rhett did not argue.

  When Inés walked back toward the kitchen, he followed her. Soon the rest of the crew, accustomed to early waking, sat around the table looking downright tense, their bags puddled at their feet. Cora’s foot tapped, her mouth pinched down. This close to hitting the road and finding Meimei, she just about couldn’t handle herself. But Rhett’s thoughts, as usual, moved to Sam. He watched his friend from under cover of his hat, noting that Sam’s usual sunniness seemed… dampened. The feller’s blue eyes were fixed ahead, his movements preoccupied. He was being right quiet. Something was bothering Sam.

  Rhett scooted closer on the worn old bench until their knees touched under the table.

  “You okay, Sam?” he asked, real low.

  Sam looked at him, kinda panicky, and tried to muster up a grin. He partially failed.

  “Well, it’s bothering me, I guess. Seems like I feel the bullet hole more when it’s rainy. Makes me think about that shoot-out back at Las Moras. I got a hole in me right now, and I reckon I’ll feel it for the rest of my days, even if Buck helped move along the healing and Inés finally got the poison out. And then, I think about what would’ve happened if I’d been the first one to open the doors here. I’d be dead. Or stone
. I don’t know which is worse. I guess that I’m starting to feel pretty fragile, for the first time. Up till now, I thought I was gonna live forever.”

  Down the table, Inés chuckled. “Feeling foolishly immortal is a symptom of youth, and of a life that hasn’t fully tested your mettle. The only cure is middle age or death.”

  Sam shook his head. “I liked it better then, though. Now it feels like shadows are always pressing in, like something’s always waiting to get me. I never had any trouble falling asleep before, but last night it took me a right long time, and my heart just about skittered out my mouth, and I couldn’t stop thinking of all the times in my life I coulda died.” He set down his spoon. “I envy you-all being hard to kill, I guess.”

  “No.” Rhett turned to Sam, feeling tight all over. “Don’t say that. You’re the best of us, Sam. You’re good to the core, and we’re…”

  “Say ‘monsters,’ and I’ll turn into a coyote and bite your leg,” Winifred muttered.

  “We’re not natural,” Rhett finished.

  Dan pointed his spoon at Rhett. “Bullshit. Again. We’re as natural as he is. That’s like saying a wolf is less natural than a mouse. Stop thinking of us as good and bad and just realize that we’re all animals. We all have our purpose. I’m tired of you placing value where value doesn’t matter. I’m sick and tired of you hating yourself. For being born a girl and a monster.”

  “I don’t hate myself,” Rhett said.

  “You think women are useless and monsters are unnatural,” Winifred said, her color high.

  “It’s not that,” Rhett said, but he felt his own cheeks flash red in return. “It’s just that…”

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” Sam murmured. “They’re kinda right. But it’s a compliment. We think more of you than you think of yourself. You got to start seeing yourself as somebody.”

  Rhett’s head hung down, his eggs forgotten. What they were saying was true, but it was awful hard to swallow. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Being a white man is not the greatest thing on this planet,” Winifred added. “So stop thinking it.”