Storm's Thunder

by Brandon Boyce

  Wallace does not like thinking about any of this as he watches the Snowman scoop up the flour sack and carry his trademark explosive toward the safe where the man in the silk blue mascada carefully unwraps the fuses from a square of cheesecloth. The Snowman wedges the sack beneath the front leg of the safe and forms it gingerly into the crevice between the door and side panel that the manufacturer will no doubt reconsider on future models.

  There is talk between the men, Wallace says, but the fear grips Wallace’s ears now and pummels the words into a flat, meaningless drone. The man in blue inserts the fuses with the precision of a surgeon. An artist, Wallace thinks, turning his head toward the customer side, where Widow Daubman bleeds out into an expanding puddle. Wallace looks down at his own puddle and steps out of it.

  The commotion of the remaining men draws Wallace’s gaze back to the office, where the haphazard destruction of the furniture seems to have taken on meaning. Nearly every stick and cabinet lies piled up against the partition that separates the office from the customers’ area, forming a barrier, a shelter, from what is about to happen.

  The fiery fuse snakes to life, shooting thin, gray whippets of acrid smoke in its wake. The Snowman appears before Wallace, his mouth moving with understated urgency. “You would be advised to secure yourself.” The bandits scamper like schoolchildren around the partition and down onto the floor behind the tangle of furniture. Wallace stands there, unable to digest the one thought that chews through his reasoning brain. Why am I still alive?

  His other brain, the animal one, tells him to move his legs. Wallace dives into the pile as if it were made of hay instead of oak and iron, clutching himself small behind Mr. Farley’s upturned desk. And then everything goes white.

  * * *

  “How about crack us a window,” Sheriff says. “Getting a mite close in here.”

  I lean my broom against the wall of the cell and walk around the desk where Sheriff sits, boots up, spit-shining his badge. Sheriff prefers this time of day, even though it is the hottest. The heat subdues lawless ways, he once told me, or at least sends them under a rock till the sun sets.

  I throw open the shutters. The flecks of desert dust dance in the harsh beams of sunlight that cut through the gloom of the station house. Beyond the glass, the big red eye has just started to drop behind the Sangres, pulling the long shadow of the church steeple from one end of Caliche Bend to the other. The big red eye sees all, and at night the little white eye catches the rest. Mamma taught me that, in between her customers. I see best when there is no eye at all, in the dead of a moonless night. That is the Navajo in me.

  I jimmy up the window sash and take the air deep into my lungs. A breath of sage rides the September breeze, undercut by the thick scent of horses from the stables and the frying bacon from the hotel next door. Dancing high above it all, like the thinnest wisp of a cloud, is the faint vapor of potassium nitrate.

  “They start back up at the copper mines?” I ask.

  “Lord, no. Those mines have not been step foot in, nearly two year.”

  “Somebody burning quick match.”

  The sheriff pulls his feet off the desk, rubs the stiffness from his knees before rising. “Well, I know better than to doubt your nose, Harlan. Or your ears, or eyes, for that matter. If I were not sure it was equal part Navajo and White Man blood running through your veins, I would swear it was half hawk and half bloodhound.” He smiles as he heads over to the window, wanting to take a breath for himself.

  I smile too. Sheriff’s ribbing never bothers me. He and Mrs. Pardell earned the right through kindness.

  “Cannot say I smell any quick match. Perhaps the chemist has concocted a faulty remedy and pitched it out the window.” I nod politely. I do not think much of Sheriff’s conclusion. So I swallow a little tobacco juice and go on staring.

  The thundering boom cobwebs the glass before my eyes. Through the prismed lattice Sheriff and I see the charred, iron cube shoot clean through the back wall of the Loan and Trust and land on the dirt. White smoke rises from where the safe door cleaved from its hinges. The paper money, most of it aflame, flutters through the choking black cloud that billows from the shattered windows. Something wrapped in white, bloodstained cotton lies smoldering on the ground.

  “God in heaven.” Sheriff’s voice trembles like it did when he told me the typhoid had taken sweet Mrs. Pardell, but then it regains its lawman timbre. “Get my Spencer thirty-aught.”

  I scamper to the cabinet and key it open. Sheriff has his second Colt loaded and holstered before I even free the rifle from the rack. I toss it to him and he catches it without breaking stride for the door.

  * * *

  Frank Wallace opens his eyes and learns that the Snowman’s moniker is well earned. The whiteness drifts through the air like a high-country flurry, catching the golden sunlight through the brand-new crater in the back wall. Settling on the shoulders and brims of the bandits, the flour casts each man in a ghostly pall.

  The Snowman is on his feet, stuffing the scattered gold pieces into a satchel. He yells something to the man in blue, but Wallace hears nothing—nothing but the constant, high-pitched ringing in his ears. He looks left where the bandit who killed Widow Daubman now slumps against what is left of the woodpile. A chair leg protrudes from the murderer’s skull, wet with the pink liquid of brain and blood.

  The third bandit hops down through the blast hole and snatches the remains from the scorched, upturned carcass of the safe. The man in blue strides for the front door. Frank Wallace feels the warmth in his left shoulder and looks down at where his arm used to be.

  * * *

  I see Frank Wallace fall out the back of the Loan and Trust as I follow Sheriff Pardell down the boardwalk. Sheriff moves fast when he needs to. “Back inside, Polly!” Sheriff yells without looking. Polly McPhee retreats into her boardinghouse and bolts the door. “You too, Merle, get these drunken fools inside! The bank is being robbed.” The drinking men clutter the boards outside the Jewel as we pass.

  I hear Merle try to wrangle his customers back to the bar. “You heard the sheriff. Get back inside and I’ll buy you cocksuckers a drink.” But the promise of a shootout draws men’s attention like flies to a dead cow, even under the threat of free whiskey.

  A drunken voice yells out, “Send the halfbreed in after ’em, Sheriff. No sense in gettin’ you’self kilt.” I want to turn around, but do not.

  Elbert Pooley’s wagon lies jackknifed in the middle of the road. His two mules, spooked by the explosion, strain and whinny against the reins, dragging the wagon in a slow-moving arc. Elbert is down with the mules, holding the bridle of one and trying to grab the other. “Take cover, Elbert. Leave them mules be,” I say to him.

  “Their legs will snap!” Elbert pleads, trying not to cry. I take the bridle of the bucking mule and calm her.

  “Cut ’em free then.” I know by Sheriff’s tone that this is meant for me and I start pulling at the leather. Elbert stops dithering and gets busy on the other mule. Sheriff takes a knee behind the overturned wagon and peers around at the bank door directly in front of him. I get my mule free, slap her hindquarter, then set about helping Elbert, who is making a mess of it.

  “This one here,” I say, unfastening the proper line. The mule pulls free and I put Elbert’s hand up to her bridle.

  “God bless you, son. God bless, you!” Elbert says, leading one mule off with him to chase after the other.

  I glance over at the bank, squat down behind Sheriff. “Two geldings hitched up out front.”

  “And neither one spooked,” Sheriff says. “I suspect they have seen this before.”

  “Not much cover here with this wagon.”

  “No, but it will have to do.” Sheriff turns his head toward me, but not all the way, keeping one eye on the door. “You best go on. Get over to the post office. Tell Bertram to wire the governor’s office. Tell him to send marshals. Then go fetch Doc. We are going to need him for sure.” Sheriff sees that I do no
t want to leave him so he says, “I will be all right, Harlan. Now go on.”

  I stay crouched and run off down the alley opposite the Loan and Trust. At the end of the building I turn left and flank Main Street from the alley behind the chemist’s. I enter the post office through the back door, all the while hoping I do not hear a gunshot, or worse, a scream. I arrive at the front of the post office but find no one behind the counter. “Anybody here?” I ask.

  “We’re down on the dang floor and I suggest you do the same.” The voice of Bertram Merriman, the postmaster, sounds far away. I turn toward the window and see Jasper Goodhope on all fours behind the writing desk, still clutching the letters he came in to post. Through the window I have a clear view of the Loan and Trust. The upturned wagon is off to the left and I can just see the edge of Sheriff’s boot behind it.

  “Who is it?” Jasper asks. “Is it the Snowman, you reckon?”

  “Don’t know.” I crouch down to where the glass meets wood. All at once a man kicks up a horse and a second later that same bandit who followed the safe outside comes barreling around from the back of the bank on a palomino he must have had tied up there. Clever thieves. Keep the horses spread out. He is at full gallop when he hits the street. He cuts hard to the left, rushing away from the sheriff. The bandit fires his Colt three times, hitting the wagon twice. He holds the booty in his rein hand. A fine rider. Even better with the gun. Sheriff rises and fires off two shots from his Spencer, but the palomino knows what guns mean and has her rider a hundred yards off before Sheriff can get a bead on him.

  I see the door of the Loan and Trust swing open, revealing darkness inside and little else. Sheriff swings the Spencer around toward the door. “You come out slow with your hands where I can see them.” Sheriff’s voice echoes through the window. Then silence. I hear Jasper Goodhope’s heart pounding beneath his clothes. Sheriff rises a little, which I do not like. But he might see something I cannot.

  The dark interior of the bank holds no clue, until a muzzle flash barks out from it, biting an apple-size chunk from the wagon’s flank. Sheriff falls to his side, hit, but not dead. He regains the Spencer, leans around the side of the wagon, pounds a half dozen rounds into the dark void and through the walls. The Spencer clicks empty and he grabs his right-side Colt. From the darkness comes a single shot that pierces the wagon like it was not there. Sheriff slumps.

  Two men charge out of the bank. The barefaced man fires deliberately toward the saloon, discouraging any vigilante sniping. The one covered in blue leaps from the railing and lands in the saddle of his gelding before positioning his compatriot’s horse for a similar mount. He calls out to the town, but I swear his eyes fall on me. “Anyone riding after us gets the same.” Then he kicks up the gelding and they are gone.

  I am already halfway to Sheriff. I turn him over—his green eyes seem to look through me. But then they focus, finding me, recognizing me.

  Sheriff touches my face for only the second time in my life. “It was the Snowman. I seen him with my own eyes. Snowman, sure as day.” He tries to say something else, then stops, exhausted.

  “We will get you to Doc’s. I swear it.” I watch the blood drain from his face. He starts to look through me again, all the way to heaven. I try to lock eyes with him, but I cannot see his face through all the damn water.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The last of the mourners disappears down the hill trail heading back to town. My Sunday shirt is soaked from shoveling. I take a seat beneath the shade of the big pinyon pine and steal my first smoke of the day. Even with three of us laying into our spades, it took a quarter hour to fill in the berm of fresh earth that holds the sheriff.

  The widow was laid to rest earlier this morning, in the churchyard. Padre spoke a good piece beforehand, carrying on about damnation for the offenders and the broken morality of the West. He had to lump his lamentations for Sheriff and Widow Daubman into a single go because he knows most rightly that assembling the citizenry of the Bend twice in one day, even if the second time is for their beloved sheriff, is beyond the miracles of the Almighty.

  From the churchyard the townsfolk followed the wagon carrying Sheriff’s casket—a handsome, cherrywood design donated with respectful condolences from the mortuary in Heavendale—in a slow-moving processional down Main Street and up the half-mile trail to Sheriff’s final resting place. The heat stirred a few sighs of vexation, which stern eyes quickly silenced.

  All of Caliche Bend had come to honor its fallen lawman. All except Frank Wallace, who remains bedridden on Doc’s orders, and Mrs. Wallace, who must be half deaf herself the way poor Frank shouts everything now. Frank Wallace has come along in the two days since the Snowfall, when the search party, headed by me, found him mumbling nonsense in Big Jack Early’s cornfield an hour after dusk. My nose led the way, the smell of charred flesh and urine-drenched wool lighting him up like a beacon.

  Frank Wallace is lucky. Whatever shard of metal dismembered him was hot enough to cauterize what it left behind. Otherwise he would have bled out and the smell that drew me to him would have been the same one that attracts the vultures.

  Doc worked on him through the night while the padre convened a vigil of the widows that prayed and wailed by candlelight until dawn. When Frank Wallace opened his eyes just before noon the next day, he was, save for his damaged hearing, in remarkable possession of his faculties—so much so that two hours later he was able to holler out his account of the robbery from his bed.

  At the mayor’s insistence, a man from Western Union was brought in to serve as scribe, scribbling down every word. I and a dozen other folks gathered outside Frank’s window to hear the account, while Mayor Boone stood bedside, nodding solemnly at the appropriate junctures. When Frank Wallace, hoarse and weak of body, finally concluded his narrative, Boone anointed himself official witness by certifying the written record with his signature.

  “Well done, Frank. They will hang by this, for certain,” Walter Boone said, collecting the ream of parchment the moment the ink had dried.

  Tending to personal matters in Santa Fe at the time of the murders, Boone had received the news by telegram at his hotel and returned on the first train. He had not yet been home when he strode out of Frank Wallace’s house carrying the pages in his valise. The sight of his steamer trunk aboard the wagon, hastily packed no doubt, confirmed his direct arrival from the depot.

  * * *

  The fine headstone, spared the vicious glare of an unfettered sun by the broad branches of the pinyon, sends its gentle warmth through my waistcoat as I lean against it. I know it is the warmth of Sheriff and of Mrs. Pardell next to him, beneath a fathom of New Mexico dirt. My finger drifts languidly over the stonecutter’s work. The Pardell name I have seen enough times to know the letters. But the latest amendment, D-A-V-I-D, chiseled this very morning, marks what can only be Sheriff’s Christian name, while the fresh numbers recall a life that began some fifty years ago and ended, by a lone slug from a murderer’s forty-four, in 1-8-8-7.

  “If I go before my dear Catherine, be sure I am buried here.” Sheriff said those words to me after the huge Mexican bighorn gave the place to us. I’d spotted the big male among the ewes, stone still, nearly invisible against the ashy rock slope. His eyes had me in his stare. I nodded just the slightest to tell Sheriff I had something.

  “I don’t see him,” Sheriff whispered.

  “He’s there,” I said, even softer. “Just below that gray boulder.” A half minute passed before Sheriff let out a small breath that told me he saw the ram too.

  Sheriff brought up the Spencer and fired. The ram buckled, then recovered and skipped off. The ewes scattered. With Sheriff clamoring behind me, I tracked the ram for an hour, following the scant blood drops and faint click of his hooves over the rocks until the animal could run no more. He knelt down and waited for us. When we found him he was still breathing, his eyes open and at peace. This was a few yards from where Sheriff now lies. The big ram wanted us to have this place—we
had earned it. He stayed alive long enough to make sure we understood.

  I thanked him and with my knife passed him on without suffering. I joined Sheriff at the edge of the overlook. “My God,” Sheriff said. “What a view.”

  As I stare out at it now, the panorama of the landscape appears much as it did on that day three years ago when we discovered it. The whole of the valley stretches in both directions to the horizon. To the south, the white houses and fertile fields of Agua Verde hug the banks of the river. The snaking, emerald water holds its hue even in the full glare of the sun. Clear air makes the town appear much closer than its true distance of twelve miles, but to anyone in Caliche Bend, the bloom of prosperous green that is Agua Verde lies across a dusty, inhospitable ocean of busted claims and broken dreams.

  Our neighbors to the north seem equally unreachable. The town of Heavendale, with its mines running rich with copper and turquoise, shimmers regally from its perch atop the foothills of the valley’s northward rising edge. Eight hardscrabble miles of high desert separate it from the Bend, which, after crossing, greet the weary traveler with a sign that reads: Heavendale—Closer to God.

  The Sangre de Cristo range rises like a spine to the west, straight across from me, bridging the whole of the valley and pinning those who live in it behind an impenetrable wall of cragged peaks, perilous ravines, and general misery. The Sangres swallow a man whole. They can wilt the heartiest frontiersman or freeze an entire mule train in its tracks. Billy goats starve in the stingy landscape while the punishing winds have been known to grind adobe huts into dust. Even the strongest Navajo hunters stay away from all but the lowest ridges—and even then, they venture into the Sangres only for a guarantee of a big reward, perhaps to finish off a wounded elk that could feed a village for a week. The Sangres were not put here to be crossed. They are here to be respected.