Storm's Thunder

by Brandon Boyce

  “Oh, God,” Van Zant recoiling, his bearded face appearing directly over my piss bucket. “Stinks to high hell in here.” The door slams again, the bolt sliding into place.

  “An Injun afraid of thunder,” Van Zant grumbling, amused. “There’s a campfire story.”

  * * *

  I lay on the bench in silence, letting him settle. He chuckles to himself, his chair leaning back against the door. A thunderclap cracks again, but the storm is on the move, the worst of it speaking elsewhere. Soon a low vibration rumbles from him, mellowing into the familiar pattern of his snore.

  I slink off the bench to the floor, groping to make out the corners of the screen. I move more cans, nesting their metal edges against the dirt without a sound. Peering straight down along the wall to where it meets the floor, I wait. My breath slows to near stillness. And then it returns—a faint flutter of light—the weak throw of a single candle, struggling to stay aflame in the drafty hollows below ground.

  The light draws near, the softest patter of movement joining it. Slowly the patch of screen on the floor reveals its shape—a square iron grate, less than two feet across, with a dust-coated wire screen lashed across it to fend off small invaders.

  But management hadn’t planned on this cunning little creature.

  A nubby candle appears beneath the grate, held by the most beautiful hand I’ve seen. The hand withdraws and I drop to my knees, my face suspended a foot above the grate. Her candle draws near the opening again, but instead of a hand pushing it through, a quarter of a head appears.

  In the wavering light, I see a cheekbone, banded with freckles, and a single eye the color of green ice. A glorious tightness, like an eagle unfurling its wings inside my chest, beats against my ribs. I touch the screen. Her eye dances with recognition, with triumph.

  Hannah.

  Hannah.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A thousand thoughts explode inside my head. I want to touch her, to feel her skin against mine. All at once, the injustice of my imprisonment—to which moments earlier I had resigned myself—compels me to freedom. And when I have it, what factors shall determine my first step? Incomplete as I am, in my present form, the answer comes in a shattering crack of thunder. This journey began with a team of two. And I was raised to leave no man behind, not when he calls himself your partner. My first order of business, therefore, announces itself this very moment—with the winds and rain and thunder—commanding us to harness its power. And then once free, I will find him—my partner—namesake of the tempest sky that howls from the heavens as loud as the stallion himself.

  But what of Hannah? How far do I entangle an innocent girl in my trajectory? I could send her away right now—her service rendered—but would she go? I get ahead of myself. We have work to do.

  And it must happen without speaking. I run my fingers along the sides of the iron grate sunk into the floor, finding no grip or leverage to speak of. Hannah watches me through the screen, nodding, as if she understands my dilemma. Her face vanishes through the hole. I hear a tinkle of metal, and her hand reappears. Clutched in her fist, is a hammer. She turns it upside down, pressing the butt of the handle up against the center of the grate. I paw for the edges of the forged iron square. She strains to push the hammer upward, loosing the grate just enough for me to locate its corners and give purchase to my grip. I start to pull—and stop immediately—when the grinding clang of rusted iron spikes the silence. We freeze, my ears tuned to the doorway. Van Zant grunts, but keeps snoring. The grate feels like it will lift with our combined effort, but not without considerable noise.

  Hannah pops her head in again, her eyes eager and attentive. We bring our faces as close as we can. Soundlessly I mouth a single word.

  “Thunder.”

  Her eyes brighten. She pulls her head out, sticks in her hand and throws me an affirming thumbs-up. Clever girl. The hammer reappears, placed gingerly against the grate. I reclaim my grip on the corners and we wait.

  And wait.

  Unable to see each other’s faces, we depend on our mutual intuition—a suitable thunderclap, and then we shove. We hold there—legs burning and starting to cramp, her arms twisted into the hole, supporting a heavy hammer. The heavens choose now to be uncooperative. Fitting, in that the stallion— named as much for his tempestuous demeanor as the thunderhead coloring of his coat—made an art of doing things in his own time. A low, sustained grumbler rolls in through the walls, teasing us to make our move. But we both know to hold our line—when Storm speaks, he speaks loud.

  I see her arms start to tire and hear the fatigue in her soft breath.

  Hold on, girl. It won’t be long. A weak, but shorter, clap barks outside and I get the sense the storm has another wave in it. Then, in a sudden, frightening crash, a mighty peal of thunder BOOOMS overhead. Hannah’s arms tense. She shoves upward, I lift with my legs—the grate rising from its screws—the dry, grinding squeal all but lost in the din of colliding heavens. I stand up, nearly falling back into the tower of stacked cans, the grate clutched in my grasp. I steady my balance, heart pounding, and deftly set the heavy chunk of iron on the ground without a sound. I look down at the opening, Hannah lighting the way with the candle. A few pesky wires—remnants of the screen—jut into the mouth of the opening like jagged teeth. Surely, they will snag my clothes. Without thinking I pull off my boots. I yank off the shirt and shuck loose the trousers and shove them through the hole. Hannah dutifully takes them, no doubt confused that I am no longer in them. A thought occurs to me: I don’t know what lies ahead, but I’ll need strength. I grab a couple of the nearest cans and pass them down. And then, stark naked, I sit on the ground and feed my legs through—like I’m slithering through a hole in the ice. The sharp wire snares my hips, and I push through it, ignoring the pain, until my waist and belly and chest drag across the metal, scoring a long deep grove in the skin. White-hot agony courses down the spine. I nearly bite through my tongue suppressing the urge to cry out. But I don’t, and with my eyes bleary with tears, I feel Hannah’s hands on my naked hips, pulling me through.

  I pass through the hole and spill out in a dark, damp passageway carved directly into the earth below the building. Hannah looks down at me, her face fixed in a battle of concern and readiness. Then, all at once, she bends down and brings her lips into mine. We kiss—our lips conveying the words of a hundred stories. Our arms enfold one another, her hands pressed into my naked back. And then we stop. She turns around, and in the tepid wash of the candle, I shimmy back into my clothes. Stomping in my last boot I touch her shoulder and she starts down the corridor. How many late-night explorations it took her to discover this place I can’t hazard, but if anyone would know every crack and crevice of her landscape it would be the resourceful housecat leading me presently.

  I follow her to the end, where a ladder—nothing more than shards of wood nailed to a post—leads up into a dark hole. She grabs ahold and starts to pull herself when I stop her. I turn her face to mine.

  “The barn,” I whisper, barely audible. Hannah nods, a grin forming, as if she’d known my destination before I had determined it. She waves me to follow and begins to climb. I let her get ahead of me, somehow compelled to catch her should she fall. But with the surefootedness of a goat, she ascends the tricky ladder, and I am watching her round, little backside rise upward, veiled in the thin fabric of her bedclothes. Once she reaches the top and crawls off the ladder into darkness, I grab hold and pull myself up. The slats creak against the nails as they absorb my weight, pausing my ascent as I listen for Van Zant. Free of the jail cell, I hear the patter of gentle rain outside, and with it, the tantalizing closeness of freedom.

  The ladder ends beneath the floor of what I figure to be the kitchen. Hannah crouches on all fours, just off the ladder, in a dirt-lined crawlspace separating the cellar from the ground floor of the house. She wriggles along, toward the near wall. I follow, the earth beneath us dampening as we near the outside. A swirling draft blows over, extin
guishing the candle, but now the blue-green hue of night air seeps through every crack and crevice in the boards that skirt the building. We reach the edge of the crawlspace, Hannah stopping at a rectangular panel that, I see now, sits just off its mooring. Beside her lay two folded lumps of fabric. She passes one to me. It is a man’s coat. I feel like kissing her again, but instead I put it on, and transfer the canned food to the outer pockets. The other garment is a coat for her, which she dons. The loosened panel pops out without effort or hardly any sound. Rainwater from the roof splashes down into the mud outside. I’ve never been so happy to have my face splattered.

  Hannah slithers through the opening and I go right behind her. I am barely standing upright when she takes off running across the backyard toward the barn. Wind and rain lash from all sides as I give chase. Compared to the pitch darkness of the pantry, the stormy night glows like a midday sun. We slosh toward the barn, our feet making more racket than I care to, but the howling storm provides ample cover. Hannah bounds across a short field toward the barn, circling around to the back side, where the double stable door bangs against the chain that holds it closed. But enough space appears between the doors and Hannah slips through without touching wood. She holds the doors apart for me and I slide through into the dry warmth of the barn. The smell of hay and horses charges my lungs with newfound energy, my heart pounding.

  Hannah turns to me, soaked to the bone, her hair dripping and matted to her head and we fall into each other’s arms, stifling our nervous laughter and rejoicing in victory. She wears a dark winter coat over her bedclothes and a pair of thin black slippers, good for padding around in silence and not much else. I notice that the coat she found for me looks familiar, in fact, I had seen it on the previous wearer just a few hours ago.

  “I knew you’d need a coat,” she whispers. She is right about that, but how she managed to get Ballentine’s, I can’t guess.

  “Did he give it you?”

  She shakes her head. “No, but I gathered, of all the men here, he’s the one who wouldn’t mind you having it.” Right again. I feel something heavy in the pocket and reach inside. My hand returns holding a cold, black forty-four pistol. Hannah shrugs, sheepish.

  “Figured you’d need that too.” The pocket jingles with a good supply of bullets. Spooner took this coat off a dead passenger when it turned cold in the arroyo. The gun he found the next morning. I reckon he won’t mind both getting put to good use.

  I see horse blankets folded in the corner and I gesture to them. She follows me over and we sit down.

  “I hate this is how you’re seeing me, trussed in here like a criminal. I didn’t do the things they’re saying I done—”

  She touches my lips. “I know you didn’t. Because I know you’re a good man.”

  “You don’t know much about me.”

  “I know enough.” And then she says. “Did you ever think about me?”

  I want to tell her that, facing the moment of my death, it was her face that I saw. And that had told me everything I needed to know. But instead I take her hand and say, “I thought about you, even when I had no business doing so.”

  “Well, that settles it then. Because I never stopped thinking about you.”

  Indeed it is settled. But what it would look like—the two of us together—right now seems murkier than fog on lake.

  “I ain’t got much time to explain too much,” I say. “You done good by me, better than a lot of fellas what break out of places for a living.”

  “We’ll need a horse. I think we should take Queenie, she’s the fastest.”

  “We?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not,” watching her eyes jerk, like she’d been punched. “What I have to do is too dangerous for you. I’m not bringing you into that.”

  “I’m already into it.” Again, she is right. But staying here, she at least has options.

  “You remember that horse of mine?”

  “Storm, of course.”

  “I need to go get him.”

  “You can’t come back here after. I’ll have to meet you.”

  I think about that a moment. “The train, that’s the best bet. As soon as they start up again, you need to jump on and head west. Don’t wait, you understand? And stay clear of that fella, Cross. Do you have money?”

  “Almost two hundred dollars.”

  “That’s good. I don’t like you on a train by yourself, but I don’t see any other way.”

  “I’ll be all right. I’ll find some older couple to sit next to, pretend to be their daughter.”

  “That’s smart.”

  “You’ll write me, care of Western Union, tell me where to meet you.”

  “No, I leave any trail like that, Cross will find it. We need to have a place picked out, a place only you and me knows about.”

  “In San Francisco, then.”

  “Neither one of us ever been there.”

  “All right,” she says, with a calm far beyond her years, “every city has a central post office. I’ll meet you on the steps of San Francisco Post Office. Twelve noon, every Sunday. For one hour, I’ll wait for you. Or you for me, whoever gets there first.”

  “You’re a born bank robber, girl.” I kiss her again, our mouths hungrily entwined.

  “Which way are you heading?” she asks, pulling away. I am about to answer when I realize the next thing I say could cause her problems. So I tell her some things I’d figured out, but leave off a few more she don’t need to know about.

  “Them men what robbed the train weren’t soldiers, despite what you’re gonna hear. They was logging men, come down from timber country. The way they killed, tools they used, even the smell of their clothes. That means from the north, out near Flag, or some such. I ain’t shared that with no one. You keep that to yourself.”

  “I will.”

  What I don’t tell her is that I’ll be heading south, following Storm and the Apaches, who split from the Dazers and broke toward Mexico. What Hannah don’t know can’t hurt her.

  “I need to go,” I say, standing up.

  “Queenie’s down this way,” she pulls me and I stop her.

  “Hannah, I’m running because I ain’t looking to die for something I ain’t done. But if I steal a horse, it changes things. They’ll hang me for that.”

  She bites her lip, seeming to understand. “What’s a horse cost?”

  “Oh, a decent mare, that’s about fifty dollars.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t even think about paying for it. That wouldn’t work anyway.”

  She nods, agreeing. “Well then, you’ll just have to make sure you don’t get caught with it. I’ll leave the door open. They can think it blew open in the wind.”

  “I doubt your Mister Duquesne will buy that story.”

  Hannah looks at me, knowing. “You let me worry about Duquesne.”

  “All right then.”

  She leads me down the aisle to the stall, where a strong, chestnut mare sniffs at us. Queenie.

  “She’ll do fine,” I say.

  “You need a saddle.”

  “No, I don’t.” I touch her face, burning it into my memory, as if I’d ever forget such wonder.

  “Tell me something,” she says, the moment of our parting at hand. “Am I your girl?”

  “If I die tonight, I die your man.”

  She steps back from me, behind her, a pile of fresh hay. Her coat falls to the ground and in a single motion, she peels off her nightgown, standing before me, naked.

  “I ain’t got a minute to spare,” I say, lost in her curves.

  “Well, then, you’d better be quick about it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Xenia prepared the bath precisely as he had instructed—bringing the water to a boil and then allowing it to cool for exactly one minute. After a lifetime in service, she had drawn countless baths for men—first the cotton baron, his doughy, pimpled paunch seared forever in her memory, and th
en when he grew tired of her, for Garber, who at least was kind in his infantile baby talk. But Mister Cross was different. Never had she seen a man lower his naked body into a cold empty tub and have the water, scalding hot to the point of blistering, poured over his back.

  And the story told on his back frightened her. The intricate arrangement of lines and geometric shapes, deeply inked and spanning the width of his smooth, brown canvas, looked to Xenia’s untrained eye as if it had been scraped into his skin with some primitive implement—a bone or a shell—rather than a tattooist’s needle. What did the markings signify? Only once had she asked him about the design—not with words—the pain of speech still too unbearable—but by running her finger down the central pattern. The lines reminded her of an arrowhead.

  “A godless custom,” he had said, almost ashamed. “Boys were taught to be hunters and fighters. But nothing of Christ’s love.”

  She lifted the bucket and poured it over his neck and shoulders. Cross barely flinched, he only sucked the air in slightly though his teeth. As he leaned back, some of the water splashed out of the tub and onto the dark wood of the rented caboose. She froze, petrified. But he said, “It’s all right, child. Water is God’s tears.” And then he raises his hand, as if gesturing to the falling rain outside.

  Tonight she was more nervous than on previous bathing sessions. For one thing, the hour, the small clock on the table said it was not even three in the morning. But mostly she feared she had displeased him earlier by washing the bloody forehead of his “prisoner.”

  “Such a compassionate creature, you are,” was all Cross had said on the matter.

  It was her nature to clean things. Although the brush she used on his skin took some adjustment—for her, not for him. It was the kind of stiff bristled scrub brush meant for stone or tile, not the human body. And Cross demanded such force in her scrubbing that she though she would peel off his skin. Maybe that was the idea, she wondered. After a few days, she got used to it. But she would never understand why he required her to be naked as well. If he wanted to touch her—sure—that would make sense. But Cross never laid eyes, or a finger, on her when she bathed him. He only stared straight ahead. And when she came around in front to scrub chest and his sex, he kept his eyes tightly shut.