Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  * * *

  “Is the fate we would visit upon them any worse than that which they have visited upon us? Another of you was shot through a living room window as he watched television. The daughter of yet another had bleach thrown in her face. And the ambulance refused to come into his neighborhood because of the perceived danger, and she lost her vision. Blind now, yet still able to see the terrible portrait this country has drawn of our people, my brothers.”

  * * *

  The night was moonless, but clear and filled with stars. Harrabi stumbled from the tent with his eyes struggling to adjust to the thin light coupled with that from a flashlight rolling back and forth on the ground and capturing the unthinkable in its spill.

  A big man dressed in black was standing over his downed oldest son, wheeling a baseball bat up and over his shoulder and bringing it down on the boy’s skull to a sound like a bottle breaking on the floor.

  “NOOOOOOOOOO!”

  To this day, Harrabi wasn’t sure if he screamed the word or just thought it. But the second and even bigger man holding his younger son’s face in a pool of mud and fetid water looked up and abandoned the boy whose body continued to twitch, feet spasming. He came at Harrabi with a limp, dragging his left leg as if it were a dead weight behind him. Harrabi could have easily made a successful run for it, but in the haze of disbelief he hesitated, moving instinctively for his younger son and shoving the limping man from his path, hearing his own wails echo in the night.

  * * *

  “I was part of this country too once, remember, but I turned away and aside because I saw the hatred on their smug faces. Knew it was only a matter of time before they came for me as they came for others. And when they finally did, I used it to my advantage against them. Their politicians thrive on blaming us for their problems, believing with utter absurdity we would enforce sharia law on their soil when all we wanted was to live in peace as the Americans we were.”

  * * *

  Harrabi’s hands had closed on his son, feeling the stiffness and rigidity of his body, death’s hold already ensnared, when the blow struck him. He felt himself sliding downward in the air toward his son’s side, his head feeling soft as if it were all flesh, cartilage, and muscle with no bone. As if somebody had stuffed it full of cotton, while leaving him his presence of mind and full grasp of the reality around him. So when the man leaned over to retrieve the baseball bat impact had stripped from him, Harrabi jabbed a thumb upward into the man’s eye. He felt the edge drive home and kept it going until it pierced the eyeball and Harrabi thought he heard a pop.

  The bigger assailant screamed and screamed. But then the bat was in the limping man’s grasp, lashing down at Harrabi again. He couldn’t stop it from hitting him, or maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he wanted darkness to come and take all this away from him, perhaps leave him with the fleeting and however brief hope that this was just another dream he would soon awaken from.

  Light exploded in front of his eyes on impact and the last thing Harrabi remembered was a watery sound coming from his ears, as the light flashed to darkness.

  He awoke groggily, his head feeling split down the middle, to the sight of Layla holding their youngest son’s head in her lap, stroking his hair with fingers smeared in the boy’s blood as she sang his favorite lullaby as a young boy, “Yalla Tnam.” She had learned to sing it in Arabic so their sons would understand and never forget that part of their heritage, which made Harrabi love her even more.

  Yalla tnam Rima

  Yalla tnam Rima, yalla yijeeha elnoum

  * * *

  “But that is no longer an option now and tomorrow we embark on a new path that will avenge all the wrongs done onto you. And not just you, but all our people. And not just now, but for generations. Others before us have sought to make this kind of difference, this kind of impact. But they have all come up short. They have failed in the holy mission where we will succeed. Tomorrow we strike a blow on our enemy that will be felt until the end of times.…”

  * * *

  Harrabi dazily listened to his beloved wife singing the rest of the lullaby to their dead son, continuing to stroke his hair.

  May she grow loving to pray and to fast

  Oh God make her healthier each day

  May she go to sleep

  and I will cook a delicious pigeon

  Go pigeon bird, don’t believe what I am saying,

  I just say it so that Rima will sleep

  Rima, Rima, beautiful rose of the prairies,

  you have shining hair

  The one who loves you shall kiss, and the one who hates you will go away

  * * *

  Harrabi’s mind stopped there, jolted back to the present, because he realized the song’s meaning and impact, why its melody haunted him every day of his life.

  The one who loves you shall kiss, and the one who hates you will go away …

  Only the haters had never gone away and the kisses of loved ones had not been enough to keep his sons safe and alive. He was helpless that night and had felt helpless every day since.

  But not anymore.

  Not after tomorrow.

  “Āmin,” Harrabi heard al-Awlaki say.

  “Amen,” he followed.

  PART NINE

  The average Ranger spent seventy-four hours and thirty minutes a week on the job, with no overtime pay. Even in remote parts of the state such as Sierra Blanca, Ranger J. S. Nance handled 166 criminal cases in 1956, including four homicides, two bank holdups, a kidnapping, several armed robberies, and sixty-eight burglaries. Ranger J. A. Sykes investigated eighty-one cases, logging 2,055 daylight working hours, 821 night hours, and 200 hours scouting the Rio Grande.

  —Karl Detzer, “Texas Rangers Still Ride the Trail,” Reader’s Digest, September 1957, pp. 140–141 (As quoted in Time of the Rangers by Mike Cox)

  85

  UVALDE, THE PRESENT

  Teofilo Braga was walking the line of BWM’s recycling facility when he saw Caitlin Strong approaching, wearing her Ranger Stetson instead of a hardhat.

  “I believe you’re not allowed to have any contact with me,” he said to her. “Or maybe you haven’t been informed that my lawyers have filed papers.”

  “Oh, I’ve been informed, but I figured I’d drop by anyway.” Caitlin gazed around the massive warehouse-sized building with machines that chopped, minced, flattened, separated, and ground their contents respectively. The smell reminded her of walking a beach in the wake of a storm, the corrosively bitter, salt-laced stench of dried seaweed and dead fish washed up on the shoreline. “Nice facility you’ve got here.”

  The hum and clack of the machines fighting for space on the cluttered floor expelled heat the exhaust fans could only partially flush out. The result was air baked in strange waves and currents, interrupted by cool shafts blowing outward from the huge, floor-mounted air-conditioning units. A network of catwalks were strung in a crisscrossing pattern above, permitting more convenient access to the largest machines and overhead magnets that separated out the metal from lighter papers and plastics.

  The sorters were massive machines that looked like huge versions of trash compacting trucks with a giant feed slot through which materials were sucked in with the heavier materials, like glass and metal. Once separated from the lighter ones, they were sent via conveyor belt to an adjoining station. This particular MRF, or Materials Recovery Facility, handled both clean recyclates that had been separated from the rest of the garbage prior to transport as well as garbage and recyclates that were mixed. That made it unique in the industry in general and Texas in particular, adding considerably, Caitlin imagined, to Braga’s profit margin.

  The scant number of windows and overhanging catwalk three stories above made Caitlin feel as if she was inside some huge submarine. She smelled lubricant oil along with the coppery stench of machine metal operating at high temperatures.

  Braga drew his cell phone from his pocket. He was dressed in overalls that bagged slightly over t
he clothes they must have been covering. Caitlin noticed the overalls were outfitted with the BWM devil logo on the lapel.

  “Call your lawyers if you want, sir, but you may want to hear what I’ve got to say first.”

  Braga returned the phone to his overalls, seeming to relish the challenge of facing Caitlin head on. “They’re bloodsuckers anyway, while you just spill it. That what brought you out here today, Ranger?”

  Caitlin looked around her, ignoring him. “The original building that used to be here burned three years ago. Circumstances were deemed suspicious by the fire marshal, but nothing was ever proven.”

  “It’s nice to see you’re a true student of history.”

  “I believe you’d made an offer to buy the facility but the original owners turned you down. Then the place caught fire and burned to the ground. Turned out those original owners were underinsured. You got this place for a song at a bankruptcy sale.”

  Braga held his ground, as if his feet were welded to the concrete floor. “You disappoint me, Ranger.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, if dredging up the past is the best you can do.”

  “Actually, I’d like to back a bit farther, sir. To Galveston Island. I’m here because I know you killed those five college boys in 1979.”

  86

  LOUISIANA BAYOU, THE DAY BEFORE

  The Cessna carrying Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and the boys landed in a private airfield just outside of New Orleans where a St. Mary’s Parish sheriff’s deputy was waiting to drive them out to the bayou. Having never seen the bayou up close, they actually were well inside it before they realized the outer reaches were formed of lavish flora rimmed by homes both new and old, some perfectly fit and others in terrible states of disrepair. Those homes, a few palatial in scope, bracketed the swampy water on both sides of the waterway, their shorelines shored up by a combination of live oak trees and wild, overgrown vegetation. The water itself looked brownish-black in stark comparison to the bright blue sky overhead, the sun shining down brightly enough on the shoreline homes to look like heavenly light.

  Deeper into the bayou, just before they reached the boat that would take them the rest of the way, the homes became older with roofs formed of corrugated tin. The sunlight able to sneak through the thick canopy of tree branches reflected off these in blinding fashion.

  The sheriff’s deputy had led them down the dock onto a police boat moored there and, after they’d set out on the water, narrated the sights and scenery for the boys as if they were here on a school trip. The deputy’s narration continued as the houses thinned to a smattering of buildings that looked out of place amid the world they shared with unspoiled flora. That is until the inlet narrowed and something that looked like a Halloween haunted house appeared on the banks of the bayou in a rare sun-drenched clearing just up ahead.

  It had been manually cleared many years before as to erase any sense of human intervention in the form of stump patches or discolored ground suffering from the loss of trees. As a result the clearing looked like a geographical anomaly, an accident of nature that had allowed this rectangular building to be built upon raised concrete pillars that formed a crawlspace so water and wind might pass beneath it. The building, once home to a Cajun family that had grown rich thanks to their illegal alcohol production way back in Prohibition, looked as if it was listing to the side, shrouded more in darkness this late in the day.

  “It’s kind of an old folks home now,” Caitlin heard the deputy say. “The rooms all converted to house men and women who’ve lived their whole lives on these waters. Somewhere in the area of a dozen residents, give or take. Beaudoin Chansoir’s been here almost since the renovation was completed twenty years ago with state money to keep a historical landmark from sliding into the bayou. This place hasn’t been evacuated in a single hurricane. The residents and staff all believe it’s blessed.”

  Caitlin finally noticed that the nametag on the deputy’s lapel identified him as PLANTAINE. “You have a relative ever serve as sheriff on Galveston Island? Folks called him Mugsy.”

  “Believe that would be my uncle,” said the deputy.

  “He worked a case with my father and grandfather more than thirty years ago,” Caitlin told him. “Matter of fact, that’s why we’re here today.”

  The deputy led them up a stone walk rimmed by thick overgrowth on either side that, judging by the stray shavings, had just been trimmed. He used an old-fashioned knocker on a heavy wood door that was warped at the bottom, opened moments later by a black woman with thick gray hair and wearing an apron.

  “Miss Bessie, these are those folks we told you about.”

  Miss Bessie regarded the four of them with a disapproving glance, not nearly as welcoming as her down-home appearance might have suggested. “You tell them that old man ain’t made no sense since I come here?”

  The deputy glanced at Caitlin and Cort Wesley. “They wanted to see for themselves.”

  Bessie frowned. “Man can’t even say how old he is on account of he’s got no birth certificate, but there are days he claims to remember the Civil War.”

  “This shouldn’t take too long, ma’am,” Caitlin told her.

  “Heck, let it take as long as you like. He ain’t gonna remember any of it after you leave anyway.”

  “We just need to show him a few things, pictures and the like.”

  “Show him? Pictures?” Miss Bessie shook her head, coming up just short of a laugh. “Well, good luck with that, ’cause old Beaudoin’s been blind as a bat for a decade now.”

  * * *

  Beaudoin Chansoir’s room overlooked the thick foliage that sloped up the rear of the old home. He sat in a chair by the window with the sun on his face and old hands clutching the arms tightly as if afraid he might fall through the cushion. Both those hands were riddled with tremors, as was his lower lip that drooped a bit further with each breath.

  The boys remained in the doorway, Caitlin and Cort Wesley approaching Beaudoin Chansoir alone.

  “Mr. Chansoir?”

  His head twisted toward her, as if on a piston instead of a neck. His eyes were mere slits held behind lids oozing thick pusslike fluid that left dried, scabby trails down his cheeks.

  “Who you be?” the old man asked in a surprisingly strong voice, his bald scalp gray-toned in patches.

  “My name is Caitlin Strong, sir. I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  “I never been to Texas, no. What you want with me, you?”

  “I believe you met my father and grandfather a bunch of years back. They came to ask you some questions about some college boys who were murdered in Texas.”

  “Never been there.”

  “You drew these college boys a map to lead them to Jean Lafitte’s lost treasure.”

  But Beaudoin Chansoir seemed not to hear her. His eyes had pried themselves open enough to view at least the shape of Cort Wesley through the gooey substance coating the lenses.

  “Is that my grandson?” the old man asked, voice peppered with excitement. “You done brought Augustin with you?”

  “I’m right here,” Cort Wesley said, not moving.

  “Where you been, boy?” Chansoir asked, one frail hand flailing at the air to feel for him. “You ain’t come by in a lot of sunsets. I can tell it’s that time when the heat pulls away from the glass, me.”

  Cort Wesley took the old man’s hand. “I’m sorry about not coming around.”

  “You be in trouble again? You need me to hide you?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve come about the treasure.”

  Chansoir twisted in his chair and blindly clamped his second hand atop Cort Wesley’s. “Our secret, that. I drew you the map.”

  “You remember?”

  “Sure, I do, me. You and that other boy. Remember you both.”

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley looked at each other.

  “What trouble you got yourself into now, you?”

  “I found the treasure,” Cort Wesley said, without thinking.

&
nbsp; “Course you did. Our secret. I remember.”

  “I told you about that night?”

  “What night? I remember the day you was born like it was yesterday. Maybe it was for all I know.”

  “But you drew me that map. Sent me to that island called Galveston.”

  “Don’t know what it be called, Augustin,” Chansoir said, as Cort Wesley and Caitlin exchanged a glance at the name he’d repeated. “Only know where the treasure lay on it from my own granddad. He showed me exactly where it was and made me promise never to go looking. Said the treasure was cursed, that anybody finds it gonna be hurt on its account. Made me promise to keep the secret just like I done with you, passing on the map just as he did to me, yes.”

  “And the boy who was with me the day you passed it down. You remember him?”

  Beaudoin Chansoir turned back to the sun as if his mind had shown him something he didn’t like seeing. “He wasn’t one of us, but you said he was family and should be treated as such. You got a family of your own now yourself, Augustin?”

  Augustin Chansoir, Caitlin thought, comparing the name to Alvin Jackson.

  Cort Wesley’s eyes stayed on Caitlin briefly before moving to Luke and Dylan in the doorway. “I do, PawPaw.”

  The old man smiled, displaying a mouth devoid of teeth. “You ain’t called me that in the longest time.”

  “You remember that necklace you gave me?”

  “Necklace?”

  “From around your neck. Told me it was magic, that it would bring me luck.”

  Beaudoin Chansoir jerked a knobby, vein-riddled hand up to his chest, as if to feel for the missing voodoo charm. The hand dropped inside his shirt, touching the very spot where D. W. Tepper had noticed a discolored portion of skin consistent with the charm’s size and shape. Chansoir’s fingers held there, as his features relaxed.

  “I’d already given one to you, boy. This other one that I was wearing, it was for your friend. On account of you calling him family and all, yes.”