To Hell and Beyond

by Mark Henry

  “Working.” Maggie managed to regain some of her composure, but still wore an embarrassed grin and flushed cheeks, despite the fact that the men in the street wanted to see her hang.

  “Working?” Madsen let his jaw drop. “Mercy, woman, I thought he retired. I’d hoped to spend a little time talking before . . .”

  Chamber Pot cleared his throat. His whiskey-slurred speech quivered as he worked his confidence back to the fore. “You best be moving on, mister, if’n you know what’s good for you. We got us a sworn duty to bring this Injun here to justice.”

  Clay frowned, letting his breath out slowly through his nose in a disgusted sigh.

  “Fiery darts of the adversary!” he bellowed. “These bastards are annoying, aren’t they, Maggie.” Their greeting kiss had knocked his hat back some, and he used his left hand to settle it over smoldering gray eyes as he turned to address the group. His voice built like a hot wind as he spoke.

  “Beat it, all of you. Mercy, I’ve seen meaner lynch mobs at my six-year-old niece’s birthday party. These fine folks are friends of mine and I’ll be go-to-hell if I’m gonna let you damnable fleas get near them.” He turned back to Maggie, ignored the mob again, and tipped his hat. “Sorry about the language, dear, but that man with the funny little belly has kindled my ire.”

  Chamber Pot’s slow simmer shot up to a full boil. He fumed, raised the hickory pick handle, and snapped, “You turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you, you high-minded son of a bitch. I can see what you’re about, kissin’ all over the little red whore. I’m fixin’ to . . .”

  Clay’s long-barreled Colt hissed out of his holster as he wheeled. Advancing on the man with one quick stride, Madsen cut the threatening words short with six inches of cold steel rammed through teeth and against the back of Chamber Pot’s throat. The pick handle clattered harmlessly to the dust. Chamber Pot gagged and fell back to join it with a muffled grunt, both hands grasping the gun barrel that protruded from the bleeding gash of his mouth.

  With slow deliberation, Clay thumbed back the hammer and spoke to the men around him, his voice barely above a whisper. “You boys best sober up and be on your way. If this nice lady’s husband were here, you’d all be lookin’ at your innards ’bout now.” He let the piercing gaze fall to his trembling victim.

  “As for you, you have worse language than I do. This is a respectable woman and I believe she deserves an apology.”

  “Thorry, ma’am,” the deflated man mumbled around a mealy pink drool of broken teeth and blood that dripped from the pistol barrel. His clenched eyes pressed tears of fear from singed lashes.

  “I reckon that’ll have to do,” Clay said, yanking the gun barrel back so a few more teeth caught on the front sight blade on the way out. The man groaned and covered his bleeding mouth with sooty fingers. Clay held the pistol in his relaxed hand and tapped the long barrel against his thigh while he thought. “I expect you’ll have revenge burning a hole in your head if I let you go.”

  Chamber Pot groaned and suddenly smelled as bad as he looked. He shook his head so hard, the charred hat fell off. “No, thir! No, I thwear I don’t.” He winced when he lisped across the broken teeth. Spittle hung in bloody threads from his grimy chin.

  “Just the same,” Clay said, rapping him on top of the head with the heavy gun barrel, “I think you’d better sleep on it.” He stepped back to survey the rest of the crowd.

  “Who’s next?” He played the cocked pistol back and forth across the crowd.

  No one breathed.

  “That’s what I thought. Now, that was just a little layin’ on of hands. Make for the woods, boys, or we’ll have to start havin’ a real prayer meetin’.”

  Two of the would-be vigilantes grabbed their bleeding compatriot and dragged him by the armpits across the dust. The drunk who’d held the bay’s reins silently pushed them out toward Clay, as if he wanted to get rid of them without getting too close to the formidable Texan.

  Clay lowered the hammer on his sidearm and returned it to the holster. “Much obliged,” he said, and smiled as if nothing had happened.

  When the mob had slunk into the brown curtain of smoke up the street, Clay turned to Blake. “It’s been my experience that if you apply a masterful enough ass-whippin’, you can generally take care of a man’s thoughts of revenge—for a while at least.” He tipped his hat to Maggie again. “Pardon the plain talk, hon. Anyhow, we’d probably do well to saddle on up and scoot, in case there’s a back shooter amongst that little mob. What’d you do to rile them up so bad?”

  Blake filled him in, while Maggie went in to get Shad. The boy dozed against her shoulder when she brought him out. Doc Bruner stood in the open doorway with his shotgun, smiling at the entertainment he’d seen, and watched up the street for any of the men to return.

  “You’re right.” Clay nodded, removing his hat to let all the new information settle in his brain. “We can’t leave the boy here.”

  “I’ll stay with him.” Maggie fingered the leather medicine pouch that hung around her neck. “His spirit is sick. He feels safe with me and I can help him.”

  Blake rubbed his face. Being a deputy was turning out to be a heck of a lot harder than being a tracker. He didn’t feel right about leaving his mother. Especially not with drunken mobs roaming around trying to hang her, but he needed to get the information Shad had given them to his father.

  “I’ll be fine, son,” Maggie said. “Really. Ask Mr. Madsen if I can’t take care of myself.”

  “I’m sure as hell scared of her.” Clay grimaced. “Sorry again, Maggie dear. If you don’t count my sister—and I don’t—I haven’t been around a decent woman in so long I’ve forgotten my manners.”

  Blake blew out a quick breath and spoke before he could change his mind. “Let’s get over to the jail. There’s a room off the office you can bunk in. They’ve paroled near everybody in Montana to help with the fires, so it should be empty. It’s built for stout, so it should keep folks out as well as in. John Loudermilk is working tonight. He’s a good man. I trust him.”

  “What brings you all the way to Montana, Clay?” Maggie waved good-bye to the doctor. “You know Ky Roman is here as well?”

  “I heard. It will be good to see him—and that little wart you call a husband. You should have married me, Maggie. You know that, don’t you?”

  Blake chuckled. He’d grown up around such talk, and was used to a certain amount of harmless flirtation between his mother and Mr. Madsen. He was the only man alive who could get away with it.

  “You came up to steal me away from Trap?”

  “Nothing so spectacular. But it is an interesting story.” The Texan looked down the street the way the mob had disappeared. “Let’s head on over to the jail and I’ll tell it to you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  There was something familiar about the smell. Angela wanted to ask Betty about it, but she was busy over by the coach talking to one of the Indians. The sun was right in Angela’s eyes, and made it so difficult to see she felt dizzy. Shad was gone or she would have asked him about the smell. He was exceptionally bright for such a young boy.

  Angela needed to get to her father’s mining operation and couldn’t understand why they were stopped. There was really no time for this. Her head ached and she needed to use a bathroom in a bad way. She would have to talk to the driver about all this dawdling. He was an employee of her father and by association, an employee of hers. Father would be expecting them and she didn’t want him to worry.

  Fritz Mueller opened the coach door and leaned out, smiling widely and ignoring the fact that the Indian talking to Betty had a hand on her shoulder. The handsome young German’s voice was hollow and rattled from the dark nothingness of the doorway.

  “Come back to the coach, Miss Kenworth . . . and bring your finger with you.”

  Angela looked down at her feet and saw her little finger lying on the ground. The ruby ring her father had given her was still on it. It would never do to
leave the ring behind. Mother would be furious. Angela bent to pick up the finger and caught the smell again.

  It was a hard smell, hard enough to hold—and smelling it made her feel heavy, like she couldn’t keep her feet. Slowly, the smell turned to a bitter taste, then Betty screamed and the taste turned to pain. Angela gagged and her eyes fluttered . . .

  She was so hot, it was hard to breathe. Thick, putrid air closed in around her, and she realized she’d vomited down the front of her clothes. Someone had done a cursory job of cleaning it up, but the smell still lingered. Pain replaced the fog in her head. Slowly, with great effort, she willed her eyes open and remembered where she was.

  The metallic taste of blood pushed at her throat. She’d been biting her cheek in her sleep. Sometimes, her brain tricked her into thinking she could still feel her little finger. She couldn’t keep from checking each time she woke up from the shock-induced naps that peppered her time in captivity with black dots in her memory. The finger was gone each time; nothing remaining but a tiny nubbin, no bigger than a chicken bone, covered by a bloody, ooze-soaked scrap of cloth. A sickening, gut-wrenching throb started where her finger used to be and rushed up her arm, where it threatened to blow out the top her head before ricocheting back to her arm again at every beat of her heart.

  Angela couldn’t remember what day it was. She felt a pressing need to use the privy, but it was not yet desperate, and she supposed from that that she’d slept through the night and into another day. She remembered the wilted woman with dirty blond hair and a large mouth taking her to the outhouse the night before. Afterward, she’d tended to Angela’s finger, soaking it in saltwater and whiskey, before putting on a fresh bandage. Once, Angela had torn off the bandage to be certain the finger was gone. The woman had slapped her on the hand hard enough to make her cry.

  “Don’t let the air get on that bone. You best keep it covered like I tell you to,” the woman had whispered in a throaty, liquor-sodden voice that sounded as desperate as Angela felt. She had a humorless look and a racking cough that turned her face red when it hit her. When she wasn’t coughing, she looked as if her whole body was turned down into a deflated frown.

  Now, fully awake, Angela sat slumped against the wall with her eyes half open, trying to get rid of the gritty film that covered them, and looked around her dim, smoky prison. Asleep or unconscious, she’d been all but ignored, so she scanned without turning her head.

  A bald man sat hunkered in a metal tub across the room, blowing noxious green smoke from a cigar as fat as his stubby fingers. Angela had never seen even the top half of a naked man before—not even her father—and she found herself wondering if it was normal for all men to have such a coarse rug of hair over their shoulders. She’d always supposed that when men went bald, they were pretty much hairless everywhere.

  Angela let her head loll back against the rough plank wall. She surveyed the rest of the room to get her mind off the man’s hairy back. The room was no more than fifteen feet across, and there was only one door. Beams of light cut through narrow cracks in the rough-cut timber, and Angela felt herself wondering what the cold Montana winter must be like in such a place. Next to the far wall was a sagging double bed, with a sad-looking quilt and two crumpled gray pillows. From the looks of the bedclothes, Angela thought this woman might have once had taste, but the men she entertained probably didn’t take the time to care for lace and frills.

  A small wooden table squatted beside the bed. A brightly bound notebook with a red linen spine lay beside a chipped porcelain pitcher and basin. She thought maybe the woman kept a diary. Angela had always kept a diary, and supposed a prostitute might find use for such a thing. The book was the only color in the room, and looked out of place in the otherwise drab surroundings. Two chairs that looked wobbly even with no one sitting in them completed the meager furnishings.

  “Come see to scrubbin’ my back, woman.” The bald man’s voice was a rough growl.

  The same blond woman who’d helped Angela with her wound sat up from a tangle of quilts on the creaky bed. She wore a sweat-stained bodice, yellowed by time and washes in mineral-laden water, and a cotton petticoat of the same dingy color. Her blond curls stuck in ringlets against the perspiration on her flushed face.

  As Angela’s head cleared, she recognized the man in the tub as the same man who’d ordered the murder of the stagecoach driver—the same man who’d cut off her finger. She remembered the Indians had called him Feak.

  The sweating woman’s breasts bulged against the threadbare cotton of her soiled bodice. Angela thought of Betty, and caught a sob. It was hard in her throat like a piece of food that was too big to get down, and brought a sharp pain between her shoulder blades and tears to her eyes.

  Feak blew another cloud into the air and coughed while the woman scrubbed his back. “Don’t be so damned rough, Moira.” He leaned forward in the tub, the white knots of his spine erupting from the hairy mat of his back like mountaintops above the tree line.

  “Take off the dirt, not the hide.” He spit into a rusty can on the floor beside the tub.

  When Moira had pinked his back sufficiently, he leaned back and threw an obscenely pale leg over the side of the metal tub. The top of his boot had rubbed a bald spot in the thick rug of black hair halfway up his calf and made him look like a dog with a bad case of mange.

  “I got to be figuring on what to do about that boy.” Feak blew more smoke into the close air. “He mighta seen my face.”

  “He don’t know you from Adam, Lucius.” Moira coughed into her sleeve, then dipped her scrubbing brush into the water and worked on his shoulders—lightly, so he shut his eyes.

  “Don’t matter. Can’t be leavin’ things unfinished.” Angela heard the same cruel rumble in his voice she remembered hearing just before he’d cut off her finger.

  Shad was okay! At least for the time being. If that were not the case, Feak wouldn’t be worried about him. This fact alone filled Angela with a new sense of hope, and she felt the pain in between her shoulders ease some. Even the throb in her hand quieted with the news.

  The door opened and a baby-faced white man sauntered in with the two Indians. He held a half-empty bottle of whiskey by the neck in one hand and a rifle in the other. Feak and the woman must have been used to such intrusions because Angela was the only one who jumped. His name was Scudder, she remembered that much.

  “Look who’s awake,” Scudder slurred, staggering across the room to prod Angela’s foot with the toe of his boot. His pouting mouth was turned up into a sickly grin. The few dark hairs that tried to be a mustache were pasted across his pale, carplike lips in stark contrast and made them look like a badly infected wound sewn together with catgut. “She don’t look like she’s worth ten thousand dollars.”

  Feak didn’t look up from his bath. “Well, she is, so leave her be for now.”

  Angela sighed quietly when Scudder walked away. He was a young man—maybe four or five years older than her—not too tall, but big around the belly from lots of drinking and with a cruel look in his puffy eyes. Angela had seen the look before in her neighbor’s cat when it was toying with a wounded bird. He enjoyed other people’s torment. He didn’t look too awfully strong, merely mean-hearted. His look was the only thing sharp about him.

  A horse snorted outside, then pawed at the ground. The sound of muffled voices carried through the cracked window on the smoky outside air. The door probably led to a back alley so Moira’s patrons could come and go unnoticed by their neighbors unless they happened to pass one another in the alley, in which case they were likely to keep such things between themselves. Bumping into someone in an alley behind a prostitute’s house is not the kind of thing a person brags about. In any case, Angela knew rescue from this place was unlikely. The Indians or Scudder would be on her before she made it to the door. She felt weak, hardly able to even get to her feet, and knew she wouldn’t make it far without collapsing if she did get outside.

  Angela tried to sit up to
ease the pain in her back and make herself a little more comfortable on the rough pallet of blankets, but realized the need to use the privy was becoming more urgent. The woman had offered her some warm soup earlier, but the smell of it had made her gag. Now she felt hungry, but she was afraid if she had anything to eat, it would only make her situation more critical. At first she’d been glad she was wearing britches instead of a skirt. It made her feel more modest when they’d dragged her around. But now there was no way to accomplish what she had to without taking down her pants, something she would put off as long as she could around these men.

  Billy Scudder flopped down backward on one of the two rickety chairs and rested his arms along the backrest. “Turns out you heard right, Feak. There was a kid,” he said, yawning wide enough to show a mouth full of whiskey-rotten teeth. “From what I can tell, they got him over at the jail in Taft. Some Injun woman’s with him. “

  “What they want with a Injun woman?” Feak sat straight up in the tub and stared intently at Scudder. For a moment, Angela feared he would stand up.

  “She’s lookin’ after him, I guess. Funny, I ain’t never heard of no Injun with an Irish name. Maggie O’Somethin’ or other. They got her tryin’ to get the boy to talk.” Scudder chuckled into his folded arms and nodded toward the two Indians, who idled by the wall. “I reckon me and the boys scared the water right outta him with our doin’s yesterday.” He spoke as if they had done no more than a harmless prank. He looked across his arms at Angela and chuckled. “Too bad you conked out and missed all the fun.”

  Angela felt bile rise up in her throat at the thought of what they’d done to Betty.

  “See to the screamer,” Feak had said. But Scudder and the Indians had argued, reminding their boss he’d promised they could have some fun with her before they rubbed her out. Angela turned her head and tried to vomit on the floor, but her stomach had already voided itself of everything but anger and pain. So much pain. It hit her in the back of the head like a hammer. She drew her wounded hand to her belly, curled up in her filthy quilt, and sobbed.