by Nelson Nye
Rafe
Nelson Nye
1962
*****
Rafe jerked his pistol, firing as soon as it cleared the holster. The middle horse reared and, toppling sideways, crashed into the one on its left, kicking frantically. Something jerked at Rafe's vest. The pfutt pfutt of slugs was around him like hornets. He shot the third horsebacker out of his saddle and ran on, trying in the confusion of kaleidoscoping shapes to sight Spangler. The shots and gunblasts beat at him like hammers. A whickering riderless horse slamming past nearly bowled him over and then, unbelievably, the street was empty, the drumming of hoofbeats rapidly fading in the south.
*****
I
It was hotter than the bottom of Lucifer's skillet. Heat hung like smoke above the Sulfur Springs Valley, turning the Cherrycows gray as slate; and the lesser mountains north and south were almost lost in the shimmering haze that draped them like a tangle of cobwebs.
The hands stood straight up on Rafe's tarnished watch and, squinting into the glare, he cursed. He had run out of grub the other side of the pass and two mornings ago had chewed the last of his jerky; his canvas watersack, snagged by thorns, refused to yield even so much as a gurgle. Pitching it away in disgust he stepped down, for his skewbald mare was about at the end of her rope by the look. Peering into the sky he shook a fist at the buzzards. "Bastards!" he croaked in a cracked off-key whisper.
He was a yellow-haired man, gaunt in ragged red shirt and baggy-kneed trousers. The yellow silk of a Confederate cavalry sash was partially obscured by a brush scarred vest which had once cost money and was attractively spangled with flowers embroidered by somebody's needle. Likewise showing a deal of hard usage were the boots into which his pants had been stuffed, but the spurs were silver and bright as new coins where the sun struck across them.
Now his eyes sharpened. A streamer of dust crept up out of the west. Coming from low hills were a number of specks; horses, Rafe decided, and humping along like the devil beating tanbark.
Straight out across the flats they spilled in a ragged line, hellity-larrup like a bunch of red Indians. They were still too far off to be heard but would cross his tracks hardly a quarter mile away. He climbed back on the mare and, swinging his reins, whipped her forward in a shambling run.
It was all open here, a cactus-strewn waste of wind-riffled sand. What air there was was like the breath from a furnace, but as the horsebackers bore down he started waving his hat in great circles, hoarsely shouting to make sure he was sighted.
There were seven in the bunch—he could see that much. They showed no intention of pulling up or veering toward him. Badly rattled, Rafe fired his six-shooter. They couldn't fail to hear that.
When they kept straight on he could scarcely believe his own eyes. They never even turned their heads to peer back at him.
He pulled the floundering mare to a halt, conscious of the trembling of her legs beneath the leathers. Some of the things he yelled would have set a white oak post to smoking. But the outfit kept on, a swirling, swift-dwindling column of dust eventually lost against the far horizon.
Long before this Rafe was out of the saddle, dragging the black-and-white mare by the reins, shouting and cursing, plunging furiously after them, stumbling, falling, scrambling crab-fashion up and erratically staggering, the breath sawing through his cracked lips like gagging. Not until exhaustion left him sprawled on the sand like a ruptured duck did he finally give up, great tears of rage rolling over the weather-toughened, beard-stubbled cheeks.
When reason returned and he got his chin from the grit, the yonder slopes were red with the last rays of the sun. He got up slowly, half fried from the heat, his bleared vision taking in the empty waterless flats, the barren hills all about. A terrible sigh welled out of him. The mare lay on her side, spavined legs stuck out, half sunk in the burning sand, tied to his fate by the reins still clutched in a tight shut fist.
It took a good while, a deal of yanking and prodding, to convince the fool critter she was not beyond aid. Moving around to her rear he tailed her like a bogged-down cow. He got her hind end up and there she stuck, groaning piteously. He might have gone off and left her if his case hadn't been so desperate. He whacked her rump with a piece of rope cactus; she lunged onto her feet squealing like a stuck pig. Then she whirled, ears flat, trying to bite when he caught up with her. A lump of sugar from his pockets consummated an uneasy truce. Reins bent over his shoulder he set off, pointing east, in the tracks left by the inhospitable seven.
He lost count of the times their waning strength forced halts. Ever and again they went stumbling on while the moon came up and millions of stars winked down, bright as sparkling emeralds; but Rafe had no mind for beauty. There was a bulldog clamp to the thrust of his jaw and he kept his stare hard-fixed to the trail.
But even a concentration as indomitable as his could not withstand entirely the needs and adjustments of nature. He was seeing things now which no longer had substance—faces and shapes floating out of his past. He was beginning to babble the croakings and gibberish that accompany delirium. His father's face came up out of the tracks. He saw young Duke and his sister Luce, the hardscrabble hills of the Bender farm with the sedge pushing up from the worn out earth, the frowsy tangle of sassafras and locust, just as he remembered from the day he'd gone off with his squirrel rifle to find Jeb Stuart and whip the Yanks.
Eleven years ago! It seemed like only yesterday he had marched away with a heart filled to bursting and a head full of nonsense. There hadn't been a bit of romance to it! War was blood and guts and the stink of broken bodies. Cannon smoke and bullet screech, the screams and curses of mutilated men.
He was screaming himself as the ugly sights took shape in his brain. The skewbald mare reared back on her bits, snorting and shaking; by main strength he dragged her on into the flare and the flashings while the big guns rumbled and banged all about him. Retching and grasping he went stumbling on through the stinking mud, his one good hand holding hard to the reins, mind clenched fierce to his faith in Jeb Stuart—someway old Beauty would pull him clear.
Next thing he knew he was flat in the mud—sticky end slimy as a fistful of slobbers. The moon was gone and a cold wind blew, whining through the sparse grass and ghostly patches of chaparral; far away on his right tiny points of light were blinking like a huddle of fireflies.
He didn't know, by God, if he could get up or not, but he finally made it. The growth near enough to touch and to feel was beaded with moisture and the night wasn't far enough gone for dew. He had no memory of rain, but the clammy bind of his sodden clothes and the quaggy give of the ground underfoot appeared to imply there'd been patches of time which had got clean away from him.
A peculiar sound, like castanets, crept into his notice and was suddenly pinned down for the chatter of teeth; with this awareness he began shivering and shaking as the damp bit deeper into his bones. He guessed he was probably coming down with something. His head felt funny and his face, when he touched it, was hot as a stove lid. He knew damned well he couldn't walk another mile.
He tried to get onto the skewbald mare but his foot and the stirrup wouldn't get together. He got hold of the horn but his bumbling attempts to heave himself up eventually wore out the animal's patience. With a panicked snort she flung up her head and fled from his reach.
The goddamn wind was rough as a cob. It shoved him around like a cork on a fishline. When the lights spun into his vision again he set off, stumbling toward them, muttering like a man in his cups. He saw Duke again, the Old Man and his mother, the side-hill farm that was back in the Ozarks and the bull-tongue plow he had bucked through the stumps.
He was back in the smoke of battle once more, down flat on his face with an arm doubled under the dead weight of his horse and the fires of hel
l tearing through him like splinters. He heard the hoofs pounding round him, the clashing of sabers; and the next thing he knew he was in a Yank prison. Then the war was over and he was hunting his folks. Someone else had the farm, they'd never heard of the Benders. Elsie Potts, whom he'd rolled in the hay, said his people had took off West in a wagon.
So Rafe had come West. Missouri, Kansas, the Indian nations. He had lost them in Texas. Five years he'd put in trying to pick up the trail, riding for ranchers, buying hides, driving stage. Finally, working out of Brady, he'd hitched on with a freighter. Near El Paso he'd took up last winter with some pretty hardcases holed up in the Van Horns, making a living of sorts stopping coaches. One of them fellers had come from Colorado.
Was some Benders, he had said, in the horse raising business somewheres west of Shakespeare, over in Arizona Territory. He didn't know much about them except their iron was on some pretty fast steppers. Had been mounted on one himself, he claimed, till a Wells Fargo messenger with a sawed-off Greener had blasted this gelding plumb out from under him. Best damn bronc a man ever straddled.
Along about there someplace Rafe's fever broke and he fell into a sound sleep.
Next time he got his eyes open to know about it, the first things he glimpsed were the peeled yeso-coated poles of a sod roof. That took some studying. Presently his glance, dropping down a whitewashed wall, stopped at a window through which sunlight was pouring in a golden flood. Through scrinched up lids he stared incredulously at a set of lace curtains, wondering what fool was so out of his mind as to hang such geegaws against dirt walls.
The skreak of a chair, the long bend of a shadow, drew his eyes to the side. There was a halo of hair not two foot away from him. Then her features took shape, appearing to float over him—which was when Rafe knew that by some flip he had got off the track and bumbled into heaven.
He got up on one elbow the better to see. He was pretty near carried away, sure enough. Lips red as cherries. China doll eyes and dimples—Lord! Handsome, he thought, as an ace-full on kings, so sweet bee trees was gall beside her. Never knowing he'd been tucked into a bed he sat straight up and found her hand against him. Her eyes got big. Rafe suddenly discovered he was naked as a rock.
*****
When he finally came out from under the covers, still flushed of face and plenty mortified besides, the girl was gone. In her place sat a man who looked bigger than a load of hay with the poles up. He sure had tallow. Three sets of chins, and most of the rest of him looked to Rafe like stomach. You'd of had to throw a diamond hitch to keep him in a saddle.
It was hard to know what to make of so much bulk, and while Rafe was trying the three chins twisted round, the great head tipping back in an attitude of listening while the eyes, nearly buried in the arroyos and billows of a network of wrinkles behind that great reddish lump of a nose, sneaked a stealthy look in the direction of a door that was not quite closed.
Apparently reassured, the head came forward with a kind of grunt, a hand shot out, dipping from sight beneath the bed to be presently resurrected wrapped about an unmarked bottle of what appeared to be rye whisky. The other hand wrestled the cork from its neck. But just as he straightened, making ready to lift it, a light tapping of heels just beyond the door turned him stiff as a poker.
His eyes took in Rafe and became flat as fish scales. The three chins quivered, the vast bulk jiggled, appearing to heave as with inner convulsions, and somewhere in the process the bottle disappeared.
The door was pushed open. The girl again. Slim as a willow shoot and, even in the made-over dress she had on, a vision so lovely it made Rafe blink. "Oh—" she cried, stopping, "you've waked up! How do you feel?"
With his tongue clapped against the roof of his mouth Rafe couldn't do more than gulp and goggle. Never had he got his sights on anyone able to upset him the way she was. He had the same nerve-shattering blinding impulse to get up and run that stampedes cattle—the flap of a blanket would have set him off. And yet, incredibly, he liked looking at her. The put-up hair was like burnished kettle copper and her eyes in this light looked the shade of blue larkspur all sparkling and misty with morning dew.
She came over and fluffed up his pillow. "Are you hungry?" she asked, considering him, smiling.
The bulk in the chair heaved and puffed like a porpoise, clearing its throat like a rattle of stones coming down a tin chute. "Goddlemighty, girl—been three days, ain't it? Go fix the boy something before he expires!"
Picking up her skirts, prettily flushing, the girl turned and fled.
A clanking of stove lids came almost at once, a banging of pots interspersed other sounds. The bottle reappeared and the red-nosed old walrus with the milkweed hair took a couple hearty swigs, smacking his lips as he drove home the cork before resettling it under Rafe's covers. He raised a finger in front of his mouth, rheumy eyes twinkling amiably. "Mum's the word, eh, laddie?"
Then the old duffer sighed. "All right, boy. Get it off your chest afore you burst."
"Three days I've been here! Where am I?" Rafe growled.
"You ain't looking at St. Pete, that's for sure. This here's the town of Dry Bottom. About three steps from hell."
This didn't mean a heap to Rafe, but the way those eyes in that tub of lard kept flattening and swelling was enough to set a man's teeth on edge. The whole deal was unsettling, three days gone straight out of your life, waking up with no clothes in someone else's bed, and then this feller. Rafe would about as soon have been watched by a cobra.
"That—girl?" he gruffed, swallowing, nervous.
"Matter of opinion. My keeper, some would tell you, and they wouldn't be far wrong." The vast bulk heaved as with internal convulsions. If Rafe hadn't known better he might of figured the old fool was growed to that chair; he sure didn't look like he could get around much with his short stumpy arms and great barrels for legs. He was the craziest sight Rafe had ever run into, and yet—those damned eyes, the way they swelled up and flattened, always picking and prying, seemed to dig right into a man's quivering marrow.
Rafe snorted to think he could be such a ninny. "Well," he said, defiant, "who is she?"
"Name's Bunny. You may be hard put to believe this, but she happens to be my daughter." He cleared his throat with an avalanche of sound so sharp and sudden Rafe's good hand shot out to clamp hold of the bed. "I'm Wilbur Pike," the old walrus said, seeming to own to it grudgingly, afterwards growling, "Who're you?"
"Yell 'Rafe' and I'll come if I'm in shoutin' distance."
"That all the handle you got?" Pike said.
There was a limit to how beholden a man ought to be, and Rafe didn't figure it included personal history—especially since he hadn't asked to be saved, and particular by no he-hog who was living off a chit of a girl and sneaking drinks every time she turned her back. He shut his eyes, feeling kind of lightheaded, but they came open quick enough when the old boozer said, "Somebody camped on your shirt tail, boy?"
"Look," Rafe snarled, "if you don't want me here just fetch my clothes an' I'll shake your dust so golram fast—"
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. If there's nobody hunting you, why so edgy? You're being took care of." Pike leaned forward, grunting a little, and it was like a damp wind coming off a distillery. "You want a shot at that elixir?"
So tangled and excited he was pretty near shaking, Rafe threw back the covers and sat up. He was trying to find the floor with his feet when he heard the girl coming. With a burn blazing through the anemic look of his cheeks he was forced to get back and yank the sheets up again.
Bunny appeared with a bowl and some crackers. She could see he was riled, and looked at her father. The old reprobate grinned. "He was fixing to get up and put on his duds."
"Oh, he mustn't," Bunny cried, hurrying over, blue eyes reproachful. "Why, you're weak as a kitten." She put a hand on his forehead. "He's burning up!"
"It's the exposure," Pike wheezed. "He'll feel better when some of that broth gets into him."
She set the bowl an
d the crackers on a stool and bent to lift and prop the pillows back of him. She got an arm under his shoulders. "Scrooch up a little. There ... that's more like it."
The clean woman smell of her was like an ambrosia, albeit somewhat disconcerting with so much of her so close. Rafe, self-conscious as a cow in bloomers, ungraciously growled, "I can feed myself!"
"Well..." she said, stepping back, "go ahead." She handed him the bowl and the crackers and a spoon, still hovering over him, blue eyes dark with concern. The old tub, watching, chuckled silent as an Indian. Then his look winnowed down. "What's the matter with that hand?"
Seemed for a moment Rafe wasn't going to answer. He couldn't conceal his awkwardness and apparently his pride was touchy about it. Then his glance, crossing Bunny's, kind of yawned away. "Arm wasn't set right. Horse rolled on it."
Bunny's eyes got awfully big. "In the war?" she whispered.
Rafe testily nodded. He managed to get the bowl anchored with the paw, transferring the spoon to his good left hand. "Didn't waste much pains on us Rebels up north."
"Daddy could fix it."