The Trench Angel

by Michael Keenan Gutierrez

  With my boots caked in Rahillville ash, I went into the jailhouse, stopping on O’Leary’s bloodstain, then looked at my uncle. He sat at the desk, his hat on the table, and he wrote out reports like some insurance man. There were nearly a dozen Pinkertons mulling about but I didn’t see Jacob and I was relieved. I walked toward my uncle but I was stopped by a couple of men I recognized: the no-neck Pennsylvania union men. It took me a moment to figure out why they were here, and, more importantly, why they weren’t upset. They’d been in on it. Forest was a liability for them, not only because of Clyde’s check, but because Forest was mostly honest and that did them no good.

  “I came for Tillie.”

  Seamus kept working on his papers. “Sit down, Neal, just for a moment. There’s so much paperwork.”

  “Have one of your thugs unlock her. I don’t care who does it.”

  He looked up, glancing surprise.

  “The world doesn’t stop for you,” Seamus said. “There are letters to the Governor, the county commissioner—”

  “Give me the keys. I’ll do it myself.”

  He put down his pen and waved at a Pinkerton wearing a Garibaldi coat to fetch my sister.

  “I know seeing dead men is hard, Neal.”

  It was a silly thing to say to me.

  “Just know that we’re better off now,” he went on. “You’ve spent too much time out in the world away from your people. You’ve come home with these ideas, this kind of infection, and you apply them without thought, but that doesn’t work here. Out here is the border between savagery and civilization. You should know that by now.”

  I bent toward him, whispering, “Out there, what you did, isn’t just and isn’t Christian.”

  His eyes went wide and he slapped me across the head like a dog. Before I got my bearings, I felt a gun against my back and saw the Pinkertons crowd in on me. My uncle looked at his hand, surprised, as if it was another man’s palm. His face slackened and he turned toward my sister slumping down the hall.

  “Tillie,” he said. “You understand, right?”

  She turned away. I went to my sister and took her hand and pushed through the Pinkertons to the doorway.

  “The both of you,” Seamus said. “Leave here and don’t come back.”

  “I’ll go when I’m ready,” I said.

  “If you help your father.” He came around the desk and the Pinkertons parted for him and he stopped in front of me and looked at me with his Victorian solemnity. “Well, just know, we aren’t family after that. No forgiveness.”

  Garibaldi pulled me out the door and I stumbled into the parking lot, my sister close behind, and I saw Jacob leaning against his car watching as Pinkerton Burnsides struck a match and threw it on to a piece of man: fire flared then receded into a slow burn that cooked the dead.

  Garibaldi laughed, then yelled, “Use enough gas there, Ralph?”

  Jacob looked at me and I lowered my eyes until he’d cranked his car engine, got it started, and drove off.

  Tillie took my arm, her eyes trained on the fire. I looked over at my car. My father had left it when he’d come for Mattie and I’d been grateful to have it back, but now, seeing it in the light of the fire, I remembered it wasn’t my car. Seamus had given it to me when I’d first come home from Europe and I don’t remember having any papers saying it was mine. I took Miss Constance from the car’s floor and slung the camera around my shoulder. I left the keys in the ignition.

  —25—

  We walked the road to New Sligo like a pair of soldiers returning from Appomattox, keen on every noise and every odor besieging us. We straggled side by side with burnt-smelling clothing and muddy shoes within the tracks laid down by militia trucks and mule carts. Our bodies were warmed by the dying coals of Rahillville, which was a mess of iron and tin simmering above weary flames. The wind dissipated and the air felt as still as a tar pit and all that could be heard were our own footsteps along the mud and the gravel. The road seemed like a steeple race, as we hurdled over scores of dead animals: cattle, hogs, goats, mules, cocks, sheep, and alpacas. But mostly dogs. Some soldier had taken to shooting everyone in his path and a mess of hounds were piled along the roadside in a dune of limp tongues and wet fur. Beneath a turned-over wagon, a burro lay with twin bullet holes adorning its forehead. In a pond off the road, a pair of kittens floated limp and buoyant atop a poorly bound satchel. Scavengers circled overhead. We would have covered our mouths because the stench in the static air was unbearable, but our kerchiefs were useless because they were doused in the ashes of dead men and it seemed like we’d never lose the smell of them.

  Tillie stopped in the road, above a dead raccoon, and then vomited. I held her blouse as she convulsed, her whipping ribs plain against my hand. A crow squawked above the carcass of a dead horse, its beak stained in the mare’s entrails. When Tillie finished, when she’d wiped her mouth and regained her balance, we trudged on.

  At the western edge of Germantown, in a long abandoned field poisoned by smelting fumes and coal dust, a refugee city arose from the dead soil. Thousands of tents lined the land. Cooking fires burned in oil drums. Men dug latrines. The colorless refugees seemed dressed in mourning, but it was ash staining their clothes. Militia trucks sat along the roadside, their occupants becoming men overnight, trading their freshness for newly sprouted beards. Their rifles had lost their sheen, dulled by the repetition of firing. A few old miners, men with hunched backs and no hair, sat on crates beside the road, watching us pass. I remember wondering if they knew about Forest. Did they know it was my doing? I couldn’t look at them, only giving a vacant nod toward town.

  Once beneath the railroad steeple, we entered the merchant neighborhood lined with Victorian homes set behind cement sidewalks and fresh cut lawns and the only odor of death came from our own clothes. Tillie turned to the railroad track. “I’m getting on that train.”

  “Denver?”

  “Somewhere farther. Somewhere else.”

  “I can’t go with you.”

  “You shouldn’t,” she said. “I need to be alone.”

  I took her hand and led her along the sidewalk into downtown New Sligo.

  “You know they tortured him,” she said. “Forest, they tortured him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s how they were raised, how they’re bred. They kept asking about our mother though. I don’t know why. I couldn’t hear everything, just his screaming and our mother’s name over and over again. It’s like every phobia I ever had came to me in a dream.”

  The wind blew east from the mountains and cut through our clothes to our skin and I wrapped my arm around her.

  “It wasn’t dirty,” I said. “I loved her and I’m not sorry I married her, only sorry it ended as it did.”

  “I don’t care, anymore,” she said. “We’re no better than dogs. Any of us.”

  When we got to her home, she stopped me at the door and told me not to come in because she wanted to be alone, to wash the day off of her before she left New Sligo. She’d write me when she settled somewhere.

  “I was with our father the night O’Leary died.” She paused in the doorway. “He didn’t kill him. You need to know that. I don’t know who killed him but it wasn’t Dad.”

  “Alright.”

  “You can trust him,” she said. “If you need to. He may be a madman, but he’s mostly a good man.”

  “He didn’t come for you or me.”

  “He’s not God,” she said. “He can only do so much.”

  She leaned across the doorway and kissed my forehead. Her hair brushed across my cheek, the strands smelling of burnt skin. She closed her eyes and shut the door.

  —26—

  That afternoon, I drifted through town, past familiar haunts and shuttered storefronts. I bought cigarettes from an Arapahoe tobacconist, and then smoked three in quick suc
cession. I stared for a long time at a flock of southbound Canadian geese, contemplating the merits of nature photography. I wandered the empty streets, quiet like a snowstorm, reliving the week’s events. The papers would call Forest a murderer who had been justly executed. They’d call Seamus a western hero. Historians would tell that story. I was responsible for those lies.

  Before I knew it, I found myself roaming Pioneer Park. I stopped at the pond’s western edge, studying my warped reflection, which projected a man with two fat eyes, a swollen jaw, a crooked nose, and an uneven beard. But it wasn’t a distortion. That’s what I looked like: grotesque. I turned down the path, walking for a spell, until I saw Roosevelt smoking a pipe on the bench, looking no worse for wear, probably concocting an elaborate scenario by which Forest’s death was a sort of political suicide, rather than an old fashioned western lynching. Hell, maybe he’d accuse Forest of dying while trying to escape. We printed shit like that a lot back then.

  But I was wrong.

  As Roosevelt let loose a sadistic grin of carnivalesque proportions, a young couple picnicked not ten feet away atop a bed of dead leaves, eating sandwiches and drinking pop with the delight of their blonde youth painted across the clear canvases of their Hollywood faces.

  Roosevelt, with the bravado of a ringmaster, swung his cane into the air then pointed it at me.

  “You lived to walk another fucking day,” he hollered. “Bravo. I thought those cocksuckers had broken you like a raped mule.”

  The boy left his mouth agape in rehearsed shock. He clasped his sweetheart’s ears, and then whispered to the old scribbler.

  Roosevelt revealed a full set of teeth grinding beneath his moustache, and then hobbled toward the couple, whacking his cane on their blanket, splattering mustard across dead leaves.

  “Unless you want me to bugger you with your love watching, you’ll hold that tone before me. Now toddle off before I drop my trousers and show your lady what Shakespeare meant by a brave new world.”

  As Roosevelt yanked loose his suspenders, the park flooded with the squawking of sparrows and blue jays, while hundreds of red leaves rained upon the couple as if Roosevelt’s curses had summoned a sort of tree god. Quickly, the girl abandoned her perch, while the boy trailed behind, dragging his blanket like a child sent to bed.

  “Sons of bitches,” Roosevelt said. “I curse you both with chlamydia.”

  He returned to his bench, exhausted from his fit of righteous taunting.

  “I just can’t stand happiness,” he said. “It’s like summering in an asylum.”

  I slid in beside him.

  “How can anyone exude joy in such times?” Roosevelt struck a match to his pipe. “It’s a type of syphilitic insanity. That’s what it is. Like man has become so enamored in the self, like he’s so infatuated with his own id or ego or whatever those alienist sheenies are saying that he fails to acknowledge the storm thundering over his own head. Just bloody balls-up bullshit if you ask me. By the way, you smell like death.”

  I did. Even drenched within the odors of autumn, I couldn’t shake it.

  “That’s fine. I can speak for both of us,” he said. “I quit the Eagle. Gave my notice, unfurled my pecker and pissed clear across my own desk for the next bastard to clean up.”

  “You’ve been there twenty years.”

  “And I’ll die before I’m there another twenty minutes. See. Speaking isn’t that much of a chore, young Stephens. Just open your mouth and let your tongue do the work.”

  “Forest died in a bad way, Rosy.”

  “I know. I know. Seamus bragged to me. Just laughing gleefully like the bog-trotting Irish cunt he is. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t. I’ve covered up enough for that leprechaun and I won’t do it anymore.”

  “But you’re out a job.”

  “Maybe I’ll go into the blackmail business. O’Leary seemed to do well by it.”

  “Except for getting murdered.”

  “Yes, there’s that.”

  “I take it he hasn’t nabbed my father?”

  “Not even close. People have been sighting Jesse all over town and even as far south as Santa Fe. Your uncle thinks Jesse’s here to kill him.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No,” Roosevelt said. “I think he’s here to burn the lot of us down. He can have my matches.”

  “I don’t understand. If he hasn’t caught my father, why was he happy?”

  “Perhaps because the chase is still on. Perhaps killing men gives his cock a jiggle. In either case, he’s pissed at you. He said you’re an ingrate and a Benedict Arnold and that you’ve been helping Jesse the whole time and I told him it wasn’t true because you haven’t a damn principle in that 90 proof body of yours. In any case, Stephens, you’ll need to find new work.”

  The last rays of sunlight dripped through the trees and spilled upon the pond, crisscrossing shadows atop the leaves like a spider web. But the connections were tenuous, blurred, and imaginary.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Once it gets out about Lorraine, that I lied, I’m fucked. No one will hire me.”

  “There’ll be new lies. You’re still a young man,” he said. “You’re not quite aware of what being really fucked feels like. Makes you walk with a cane.”

  I told him my plan to move to the mountains and live as a hermit, take up nature photography.

  “It’s not as bad as that, Stephens. I took your file out back to the jakes and read it over again with clear eyes and all you did was marry a Negro, and in France no less, which is nothing any honest man, or at least scoundrels like us, wouldn’t do, and it certainly isn’t worth too much blackmail or ruin or social shame as far as I’m concerned, not for men who work in such a low profession as we do, so I gave it the justice it deserved and crapped all over it, then left it to fester in the hole with the rest of the turds. You got to remember, Stephens. We’re in a new age, a new world. There I go again with the imperialist talk, but it’s a truism like a modern day Song of Songs. In some circles you’d be hailed a hero. Hell, you might consider turning red. Easy snatch and cheap rent.”

  “I didn’t make up the Trench Angel. All the other shit was lies, but Rosy, that was real. It was on my camera. All I did was develop it. I don’t remember taking it, but it was on my camera.”

  “Do you really think it was your wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you believe it was her?”

  “I’m not so sure anymore,” I said. “I don’t think I know what’s true about that day.”

  “She’s dead and you’re mourning her still.”

  “I think so. I was sure then, but now I’m having a hard time remembering why.”

  I lit a cigarette and gave him one.

  “Where do you think my father is?”

  “Just walk around long enough,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll find you.”

  I had something else to do first.

  —27—

  It was near sundown by the time I got to the cemetery. I buttoned my coat while an army of clouds marched down from the mountains and a cold wind led the charge. At the foot of the graveyard, I bought flowers from a Chinese boy—he might be the only one who made a fortune during that week of funerals—and trudged up the hill through rows of Irish surnames until I found the Rahill plot erected in the heart of the dead. Although we only numbered three—my grandfather, my grandmother, and my mother—our headstones were the largest, the bone yard’s center of gravity, as was Seamus’ wish.

  I sank to my knees, laying the flowers beside my mother’s stone in the silence of the early cold. We’d buried her ten years earlier, but the calendar is a poor gauge of time. Some decades slip by like a passing car, their impressions fleeting, forgettable. Other decades seem like a long exposure in dim light, forever ingrained upon the celluloid of your mind. The ten years
after her death were the longest of my life, yet, even remembering all that occurred, I couldn’t recall much of my mother’s final year. I’d seen her at Christmas, but I was away at school when she finally passed, only discovering how she died after a nighttime confession by Seamus; she’d left a note of apology, sending her love to Tillie and I, but she could no longer bear her abandonment by my father.

  Seamus told me she’d been peaceful on her last day, going up to bed early after supper, taking all of her laudanum in a single glass. But he told the town—and our priest—it was pneumonia. Seamus struggled with the lie, knowing God would judge him, but he wanted her buried here.

  I prayed.

  Mattie Longstreet, my father’s woman, waited for me at the gates of the graveyard, her hands in coat pockets, no doubt massaging a pistol butt. I lowered my hat and walked past her, but she strode alongside me.

  “You like graveyards?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Every time I’m in a new city, I first visit the cemetery. I can get a feeling for the people that way.”

  “Well, we’ve got that in common,” I said. “Should I call you Ma now?”

  “Men have said worse.”

  We walked through empty Pioneer Square. My grandfather’s statue had been swept away, and now there was just the stump of a pedestal in the middle of the circle.

  “I’m glad you blew it up,” I said. “I hated that statue.”

  The Square was empty and there wasn’t even a militiaman on the street, just some stray dogs. “It’s like the whole town’s gone and died.”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic,” she said. “People will lift their heads up in a few days. That’s how it usually works.”

  She stopped by a park bench and she figured I’d stop with her. When I didn’t, she pulled out a bottle and offered it to me.