by Jake Logan
One of the Indians kicked the fat man in the ass and he squealed and pitched forward, facedown in the dirt. The Apache laughed, all but Broad Chest. He bellowed something in Apache that made them all shut up as quickly as they had started. While the fat man was still on the ground, one of the Indians dropped down onto his back with one knee, jamming the breath from his lungs.
“Is that necessary?” shouted Julep, staring hard at Broad Chest, who nodded toward her, then Slocum, indicating she should knee-walk over beside him.
“Julep, let it go,” said Slocum in a low voice. “We need to pick our battles now, and this isn’t one of them. He’ll be fine.” They both looked at Mort grunting and writhing under the Indian’s knee as the brute tied the fat man’s hands tight behind his back with leather thongs.
“What’s his story anyway?” said Slocum to Julep, nodding toward the fat man.
“Mort’s harmless. Good enough fella, but for some reason has always thought the sun rose and set with ol’ Shinbone.”
“Speaking of good ol’ Shin, what’s his story?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is he a trusted ally of Deke? And what was he doing spying on us?”
“You don’t think it could be because of me?” Julep didn’t sound as if she was joking.
“No, but I’m curious to know why he’s out here, afoot, and shouting and lighting lanterns and all. It seemed like he was doing all he could to attract the Apache.”
Julep snorted. “I think you’re giving Shinbone too much credit. I wouldn’t say he’s dumb, but he’s not the sharpest knife in the kitchen.”
And then, without a glance backward, the Indians blew out the lanterns, and prodded Julep, Slocum, and the fat man into a walk, their arms tied behind their backs, and they fell into line following the four horses. Broad Chest rode the lead horse, which happened to be Julep’s. Slocum thought the choice showed that Broad Chest had decent taste in horseflesh. His own old mare, still looking mostly unperturbed, but tired, bore the sagged weight of the unconscious Shinbone.
“Why did Shinbone come back then, if he was planning on stealing from Deke?” said Julep. “He could have made a clean escape. It’s not like Deke would ever go after him. He’s so obsessed with his stockpile of weapons and with the Apache that he would just fume at Shinbone’s absence, probably nothing more.”
Mort looked shocked, as if he were just hearing something for the first time. “Why, Julep, I thought you would know.”
Julep shook her head. “Know what?”
“Shinbone, he come back for you. Said you’d be waiting for him. Said he was going to take you away with him. He said he even got himself a piece of land back home and everything. Said you and him were going to start your own branch on the family tree.”
While the fat man said this, Slocum watched Julep’s face. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. The look of pure disgust that crept across her pretty features was a sight to behold. “Such a prospect can’t be all that bad,” said Slocum, trying to keep his face serious.
“Bad?” she said, loud enough that several of the Apache regarded her with their peculiar looks of contempt.
“Oh, I don’t know. Shin’s okay. You know how he can be, Julep. You’ll have a fine family with him.” Mort’s eyes widened at the unspoken thought.
“Mort,” Julep sighed. “Look around you.”
Mort did as she bade him. The sullen, silent Apache men tromped alongside them, but a few feet away.
“You honestly think they’re going to let us live?”
Mort’s eyes widened and his jowly face shook in fear.
“Even if they did, Shinbone isn’t likely to be in any sort of shape to go off on his own. Likely he’ll end up fighting with or against Deke.”
Mort swallowed. “Then you ain’t sweet on Shin neither?”
Now it was Julep’s turn to stifle a laugh. “Not hardly, Mort. He’s my mother’s brother.”
“So?” Mort sounded to Slocum as if he were serious.
“Mort,” said Julep, taking her time. “Shinbone is my uncle.”
“Yeah, I know that. Heck, I’m your cousin and I been sweet on you since forever.” The fat man smiled as he said it.
Slocum wondered just how it could be that the world had gotten as populated as it had without more mishaps and madness. And then he thought about all those fools back East in cities and figured maybe he was wrong. Maybe it hadn’t gotten all that far. Maybe the world would be filled with all manner of lots more impressive inventions and smarter people running around, if only . . .
The Apache were slowing their pace. Slocum looked up from his reverie. He had a plan; he just needed to figure out the best time to get it in motion. As plans went, it wasn’t much of one, but it would have to do. Now all he had to do was worry about timing.
As they descended down a wide packed trail that narrowed as it snaked toward a jumble of boulders, he saw the one thing that could turn his plan from success to failure, or vice versa, in the blink of an eye. For there, standing proud and lean atop the rocks, with her hands on her hips, stood the little Apache princess who had been somewhat responsible for him finding himself in this mess.
As they passed by the rock, she stared down at them. Slocum caught her eye, but if she recognized him, she gave no indication. Though he did fancy that when her eyes fell on Julep beside him—tall, proud, blond, and white Julep—they narrowed. What might that mean? His entire plan hinged on whether the chief, the princess’s father, would believe him about Deke’s weapons stash and plans.
14
Deke had never been so angry in all his long days. And in the past few years he’d had a boatload of things to be angry about. He wanted to say that it had all started going to the dogs when that damned Slocum had flopped down from on high into their midst. But that wasn’t really the case, and he knew it deep in his thumping rebel heart.
But he didn’t really want to admit what he knew to be the dawning truth—he was being chewed apart from the inside of his family. For that was what he thought of the entire group of people he’d brought here to this magical canyon. He felt like their big daddy, their savior, and their leader, all rolled into one. He’d always been a big man, big as a bull grizz, as his friend and kinsman, Shinbone, used to say.
But that damned Shin, he’d been gone for too long now. Deke had foolishly thought that he could trust ol’ Shin with more and more duties. He’d had bad luck lately with the younger men, all wanting more and more power, more excuses to up and leave the canyon, and what was it getting him?
That was why he’d begun to explain things to that Slocum, to show him the weapons cave, to introduce him to the boys, all the rest of them. That Slocum, Deke just knew he was a straight shooter. Or at least he’d thought he’d been. And now he up and absconded with Julep? His very own sister!
Deke looked around their own cave. They’d made it right nice. He always slept out on a pallet by the fire, which he felt was only right, given that Julep was his sister. He’d always felt bad that she never really seemed to settle on anyone. Lots of men here in the canyon would give their teeth (what ones they had left) to marry up with her, but she was a finicky sort.
And then, lo and behold, John Slocum drops out of the sky and he ends up being the man she sets her cap on. Deke just knew it, could tell by the way she started singing again around the fire, when she was cooking and when she was cleaning, gathering wood. Heck, she’d laid off complaining that there weren’t enough women around to talk with.
Incredibly, she’d even stopped voicing her doubts about Deke’s predictions that the Bluebellies were coming around looking for the Southern rebels. The holdouts, as Deke liked to think of himself and the rest of his brood. They were holding out, all right. But only long enough to stockpile arms, and recruit enough fighters to foul the North-led army’s plans of broadening the
great U.S. empire, even though they had all but crushed every last speck of happiness and humanity from good old Mother South.
“We’ll see who leaves old Deke and gets away with it.” He stared at the cold cook fire, at the neat row of Dutch ovens, lids and bales all lined up, scrubbed and seasoned, at the coffeepot resting on the rock, at the crock Julep kept all the spoons and knives standing in. She’d left it all as she did every day after the morning meal, as if she was coming back. But here it was early morning again, and she was still missing, along with that rascal, Slocum.
Only one of two explanations he could think of would account for this odd turn of events. Could be that Slocum had kidnapped Julep, and that one had to be the case. Because the other didn’t bear thinking about. No way in hell could a good rebel gal like Julep abandon her family and willingly run off with Slocum. He’d said he was a Southerner, but he sure as hell didn’t act like one. No, Deke was wrong about it all, had been, and that ate him up inside worse than rats gnawing on the dead at Shiloh.
And it stuck in his craw like a big old hunk of bad food that he couldn’t bring himself to swallow. So Deke did the next best thing he could think of whenever he was faced with such a situation—the same thing he always did when he was angry and frustrated—he slipped into a blind burst of anger.
A film of gray-blue muck seemed to slide down over his eyes. He felt blood pump into his temples, and pulse there like tiny fists. He gritted his teeth and roared an unintelligible oath, then lashed out with a big ham of a leg, his boot clocking the nearest set of stacked pots.
The vessels scattered, bouncing off nearby rocks and the logs arranged for his people to sit at during meetings. Utensils sprayed across the dormant campfire, clattering over rocks. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. Deke’s big chest heaved with pent-up rage for all the wrongs he felt he’d experienced since long, long before the war, back when he was half the size he was now. Back when his pap would come lurching home, reeking of corn liquor, howling for blood because something around the little farm wasn’t done right, some little thing had been forgotten.
Pap never seemed to remember that Deke might well have been big for his age—something that he always was his entire life—but he was still a boy and not able to run the whole place, the whole farm the way Pap wanted it run. As Deke grew older, he felt sure that if he could only talk with Pap, he could let him know he needed help. Maybe if Pap spent more time helping Deke and the other children tend to the place, to the livestock and the sorghum crop and the hay, instead of suckling on the mouth of that corn liquor jug every afternoon—and sometimes in the mornings, too—why, that might be just the thing to make the farm useful again. So one day he did just that.
Even as Deke lurched about the canyon camp, scattering the firewood stacks and ripping up the rock fire ring, stomping Julep’s bedding, tossing her clothes and hurling everything about the once-neat place, he recalled that run-in with Pap with a clarity that he only ever experienced in his hate dreams, as he called them.
What he saw was Pap, big ol’ Pap, bigger a man than even massive Deke would turn out to be, bent low over him, his broad black leather belt sliding out of his trouser loops as if it were a snake. And he remembered how Pap commenced to whomping on Deke as if he were putting out a fire.
All these slashing, spiky, searing memories came back to him as he lurched about the place that had been his home, the campsite he had shared with Julep. The one he’d always protected, the one who had warned him about so much. About Pap, about the war, about his dear dead wife, about storing all those weapons, all of it. She’d warned him about the canyon, said it would never be home, could never take the place of the dear old homeplace.
But he’d never listened, and now look at his life, look at this place. For months his people, his chosen family, had slowly been pulling away from him, pulling back from all the goodness he was sure to come, if only they would stay on track with him, believe in him. Wasn’t he their savior, after all? Wasn’t he their leader? Their father figure? Wasn’t he their . . . pappy?
Long minutes after he had begun his rampage, Deke spun slowly to a standstill just before the spot where the campfire had, until a short time before, resided. Now it was a mere smear of blackened cinders. His massive chest rose and fell with his rapid breathing, his beard flecked with spittle and sweat. His hands hung at his sides, trickles of warm blood drip-drip-dripping from his fingertips.
The hollow wash of sound made by his pumping blood slowly receded, not unlike ocean waves pulled back before their next rush in. Deke heard a regular hugging, rasping sound, as if a locomotive were working its way hard up a steep grade, and not doing a very good job of making it to the top. He realized with a start that it was his own breathing. And it was matched in counterpoint by his hammering heart, doing its best to drive a hole through his chest wall.
On and on he huffed, and louder and louder his breathing grew until he finally felt like he was getting the better of it. Deke opened his eyes, and the world was fuzzy. He shook his head as if to dispel an annoying bee, and looked again. Gathered in a mass before him, huddled together, were most of his fellow canyon dwellers. They stood staring at him, cowering with their heads bowed, their shoulders slumped, their eyes cast upward in the middle as if drowning in a deep pool of fear. They even clutched at one another like children with their hands wrapped tight in their mamas’ aprons.
He tried to speak, but could only manage a weak croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What do you all want?” he said. “Seems to me you could find a better way of going about your business than coming to watch me . . . rearrange my camp.” But his normally jovial voice sounded blown out and raspy. “You hear?”
“Deke.” A short, thin man stepped forward and held up his hands as if he expected he was about to be shot. “You got to go easy on us. Not too many of us here seen any men, ’specially you, act in such a manner. You was a wild man, Deke. We tried to stop you, but not a one of us could get near enough to you to do anything of use.”
Deke looked around at the mess he’d made. He’d lived in fear that this might happen again. It had been years since he’d done such a thing.
“Anybody hurt?” he said in a deep, raspy voice.
“Just you,” said the thin man. “You’re a bloodied mess, Deke. Wish you’d let one of us take a look at them hands of yourn.”
Deke held up his hands before his face. The very act of raising them sent rockets of pain lancing up his sides, up his forearms, and through his shoulders. But that was nothing compared to the agonizing sight the bloodied, shredded fingertips brought to his still-clouded mind.
The gory spectacle transported him back to the battlefield, to the worst day of them all, when both sides, the Rebs and the Yanks, came at each other in a thrashing flurry of hellfire. The thunderous clapping of cannon fire resounded all about them; brutal fusillades slammed everything that dared move for what seemed like miles around. Horses screamed, still running the last few feet their big, proud bodies would ever run, unaware that one of their back legs had been punched clean off by a cannonball.
Bayoneted men lurched back and forth at each other; men tried to scream but blood gouting from their open mouths prevented it. And in the midst of it all, Big Deke, as he was known then, stumbled from Bluebelly to Bluebelly, stabbing and thrusting a saber he took off a dead colonel. He hacked at anything that looked remotely Northern, relishing every single stroke.
Deke took two bullets that day, one in the neck—it came out just under his chin, and gave him the reason to wear his full beard thereafter—and another in his meaty thigh. Neither wound slowed him in the least. If anything, they fired him up further. But this was the same way he’d been on every single battlefield, every single patrol at which they found Bluebellies encamped, every single time since the war ended that he found a carpetbagger who’d taken over a solid old Southern homestead for his own, had appropriated land that
had once belonged to a fine Southern family.
It wouldn’t take but a minute or two of conversation, a carefully worded question or two, for Deke to learn that the man and his foul wife and children were not from the Heart of Dixie. Something would happen, sometimes he could feel his men tugging on his arms in an effort to calm him, but it was no use. He would see that sticky gray-blue mass commence to wash over him, feel the blood pump and throb as if his forehead would burst apart. Sound would become a storm of clanking and thunder and the snap and crack of a wide black leather belt, falling hard and fast, over and over and over.
And now it had happened once more. He stared at his bloodied hands and felt odd, not like it was going to happen again, but as if he were sick, sort of an all-over-his-body throbbing ache. And then he felt the earth rush up fast to meet his face, felt a pain on the back of his head, and knew no more.
15
Slocum was tired. Dog-tired. And as they were herded into the Apache camp, he knew his day had only just begun. He tried to edge a bit in front of Julep, but she was having none of it. He had gotten close enough to her on the walk to whisper to her about the boot knife. He’d waited until they were a sufficient number of steps ahead of Mort, the fat man, because he didn’t trust him. If he was dimwitted enough to think Shinbone was the next Moses, then he couldn’t be trusted with any information, vital or not.
Now that they were in the camp, he would do his best to protect her from the open leers of the young braves and the angry stares of the women. He scanned their camp. There were a few mangy curs, walking as if they spent their lives under the switch, ribs looking as if they might punch out through their tight hides, teeth bared at anything that came near them.
A number of poorly built huts leaned in various directions, propped up by rocks and a few well-worn poles. Small campfires smoldered and smoked. Several deer hides had been stretched on racks, partially scraped clean, and a particularly hard-looking dog stood under one, bugged eyes scanning the crowd. He’d taken the opportunity, while attention had been diverted by the newcomers, to sneak in and mooch a gristly meal of dried hide and hair. Slocum was glad their arrival could provide the beast with a snack.
