Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  Monty chuckled. “His bit arm?”

  She just nodded and rode on, chin up.

  “You don’t miss…?” Monty trailed off and spit a stream of tobacco juice. He’d never asked her much about her life. He’d never had to.

  “Nothing to miss,” she muttered, and he nodded along, sympathetic-like.

  “Just keep close and stay on your horse. Once we get the herd running, get behind ’em and holler hard as you’re fit. That’s all you got to do,” Monty said for the fifty-first time, and Nettie gulped and nodded.

  “You ain’t worried about de Blanco?”

  Monty twitched his graying mustache and wagged his long face. “Hell, no. We been trading horses and cows back and forth over this river for thirty years. Sil’s just messing with you ’cause you’re new. He bet some of the old hands that you’d yark your supper and fall off your horse. It’s a long life in Gloomy Bluebird, and bettin’ on the new kid dyin’s more interesting than bettin’ on which way a horse’ll switch its crap.” He looked her up and down and tugged on the faded red bandanna that was always tied around his neck. “Did you forget your kerch, Nat? Dust is likely to choke you to death. Best head back on up to the bunkhouse and fetch it afore we take off.”

  Nettie blushed hot and fumbled with the sweat-crusted collar of her shirt. “Oh, I reckon I’ll make it all right…”

  “Don’t be a fool, now. You can’t go on a raid without a bandanna. Run on back to the bunkhouse and grab one of mine off my bunk, if you need to borrow one until yours are clean.” He grinned. “Better yet, you stay on your hoss during the raid so I don’t lose the nickel I bet Sil, and we’ll just consider it yours.”

  Nettie nodded until her cheeks felt cool again, spun her mare, and loped toward the bunkhouse. There was so damned much she didn’t know about being a wrangler, and she was lucky to have an experienced hand like Monty around to help her out. But the rangy old cowpoke had always been kindly to her, ten years and more, for no reason she could name. Kindness was a thing as foreign and far-off as snow in a Durango summer, as far as she understood it, and she wondered if the warmth and gratitude she felt for Monty was something akin to love.

  Ragdoll skidded to a stop by the porch, and Nettie leaped off onto wobbly legs and ran inside. The only lamp was on the floor beside the Injun woman. She slept on the porch at night, but during the day, they let her stay inside on a pallet so the sun wouldn’t bake her. Poor critter was still in a fever, sweating through her clothes and moaning under her breath in whatever language it was she spoke. Whenever a wrangler came into the bunkhouse, he’d dip a little water into her mouth from a pot kept by the door. Nobody liked having her there much, but nobody wanted to be the one to find her dead and have to bury her body in the rock-solid crust of the desert, neither. Nettie reckoned she’d been left inside tonight so a coyote wouldn’t drag her off while the men were off raiding.

  Nettie would’ve been silent if not for the stranger’s boots, which had high heels that echoed on the boards. The woman’s head jerked to stare, her eyes wide and dark and wet, reflecting the lamp turned low.

  “Half-breed,” she said, voice hard, before chuckling to herself. “More than half-breed. You are many things, and none of them have a name.”

  All the hairs on Nettie’s neck rose up as she chose a mostly clean bandanna from the pile on Monty’s prime-placed bunk. Her sweat-slippy fingers found the grip of her knife. The woman had never spoken in any language but her own outside of Nettie’s nightmares, and her voice was deeper than it should have been.

  “You talkin’ to me, woman?”

  “Come here, child.”

  Although she lay on the floor in a tangle of moldering horse blankets, the woman’s form seemed to rise up with the flap of dark wings around her battered face. Nettie’s feet wanted to run, but something in her chest felt a tug, as if the fractured creature had lassoed her ribs and was pulling her forward, a step at a time, until she stood at the figure’s bloodstained feet.

  “Come down here.”

  The floor fell out from under Nettie’s boots, and her knees slammed into the boards. With the suddenness of a hawk’s dive, broken fingers caught the front of Nettie’s shirt and yanked her face close to one drenched in sweat and tears and filled with a fervent fire.

  “Pia Mupitsi,” the woman said, a long hiss.

  “The Big Cannibal Owl,” Nettie whispered in response.

  The woman nodded once. “You will hunt it.”

  Nettie struggled back and away, but the woman’s hand was an iron vise around her shirt. “I ain’t, begging your pardon. I’m a wrangler of the Double TK Ranch, and I’m headed out on a cattle drive.”

  The woman shook her head gravely. “Maybe not tonight, half-breed. Maybe tomorrow. But you will hunt it. And you will destroy it.”

  “Or what?”

  The corners of the woman’s mouth pulled back, showing a skull’s rattling teeth. “Or I haunt you. I’ll dog every step of your short, violent life until you die. You’ll never know peace. Just as I will never know peace until my child is avenged.”

  “And what if I still say no?”

  The mouth opened, a sucking cave, and Nettie couldn’t pull away.

  “The new moon brings death. Hunt Pia Mupitsi, or the blood of the next massacre will be on your hands.”

  “Next massacre?”

  “Cannibal Owl needs to stock the pantry. New moon’s the best time to fill the basket with children born in springtime. That’s when Pia Mupitsi came to your village, little one.”

  Nettie’s heart jerked. “Did you just say… my village?”

  Outside, far across the prairie, the cowpokes unleashed a big, echoing whoop, and Nettie tumbled backward. When she looked again, the woman was small and dark and wet with sweat, drawn into herself again, her eyes crusted closed and her parched lips muttering. When Nettie leaned close, she heard the same two words rattle, again and again.

  “Pia Mupitsi. Pia Mupitsi. Pia Mupitsi.”

  “What did you say? What about my village? What do you know, woman?”

  But the crooked, broken figure on the ground gave only mutterings.

  “Pia Mupitsi. Pia Mupitsi.”

  The spell was broken, or Nettie’s imagination had run off again, or she was so skitty about the raid that she was hearing what her heart had always wished for. No way the dying woman could know what she’d claimed, could identify Nettie’s kin. Death rattles couldn’t hold truth. Just more questions. Just madness.

  Nettie stood and tied the bandanna around her neck.

  “You ain’t doggin’ nobody, Injun,” she muttered. She dribbled some water from the bucket over the woman’s lips, though, before she hopped on Ragdoll and took off.

  Just in case.

  The raid went off without a hitch. Nettie stayed on her horse, did her part, and didn’t choke to death on the thick dust, thanks to Monty’s bandanna. Two hours’ ride down south, a swim across the silt-sticky river, a yipping, yowling, pounding gallop to hustle up two hundred head of cattle and a few dozen horses while a handful of drunk vaqueros randomly shot into the herd and cussed up a storm in Aztecan. Another swim, two more hours of riding, and they were home again, driving the cattle into pens and setting up the fires and branding irons with jaw-cracking yawns.

  “That was almost too easy,” Monty said, as they processed the sweaty beasts, keeping the cattle from doing anything too stupid with shouts and cracks of their whips.

  “Seems to me too easy ain’t much of a problem,” Nettie answered, still full of piss and vinegar and pleased beyond punch that she’d managed to hop off Ragdoll in the middle of a tussle to grab the pistol off a dead vaquero and claim it for her own.

  Far as Nettie could see, not a damn thing had gone wrong. The farther she’d gotten from the Injun woman, the better she had felt. In the heat of the raid, she’d forgotten all about Pia Mupitsi, about the whispered possibility that some time, long ago, she’d had a village, a people. The Double TK were her pe
ople now. She was a real wrangler, by crow, and she couldn’t wait to see just how good her new gun could shoot.

  Monty shook his head and rolled the corner of his gray mustache between his fingertips. “Should’ve been more vaqueros watchin’ the herd. Best I can figure is the good ones were raiding across the river, maybe crossed right by us on our way back. While we were over here, stealing cattle, they were over in Durango, stealing some more cattle of their own. The fellers I saw didn’t look like de Blanco’s men, is all. And it’s a right small herd.”

  “I still ain’t seeing the problem.”

  Monty sighed. “Guess there ain’t no point in making a problem where there ain’t one. You did fine, Nat. But there’s something unsettled tonight. Something about the way the moon’s sitting, all distrustful-like.”

  Nettie looked up at the quarter moon, the Rustler’s Moon. For a half second, maybe, it reminded her of the Injun woman’s eyes, when they’d gone all wide and wet and promised to haunt her. But she shook off that fancy. The moon was just a slender, shiny thing, far off, and there was nothing to fear from its darkness except maybe tripping on a rock on the way to the outhouse. Surely the Cannibal Owl wasn’t waiting for a day on the calendar to do dark deeds. The moon was the moon, and the crazy Injun woman was the crazy Injun woman, and folks who’d had only a one-eyed mule last week and now had a mustang mare, a Bowie knife, and a gun had no cause at all to complain. She picked up a cherry-hot branding iron and went to join the fray. For Nettie Lonesome, now Nat Lonesome, all was well.

  At least until the company returned to the bunkhouse and found the Injun woman drowned in the middle of the floor, a puddle spread around her like wings, and the whole scene ten miles from a body of water big enough to dip in more than her toes.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Most folks don’t die that easy.

  It happened the next night, just like the Injun woman had promised. Something in the air told Boss Kimble not to raid, to let the cattle sit a spell, send out a scout, and go out the next night to build up the herd. Still exhausted from the long night of riding and a longer day of branding, the cowpokes fell into their bunks without even glancing toward the town and the fine flesh of the Leaping Lizard.

  The skin prickled all over Nettie’s neck as she tossed and turned on her bunk. There was something rustling outside like a fox snuffling in a henhouse. But when she got up to look, there was nothing to see. Unable to swallow down the dry grit coating her tongue, she took a dipper of water from the ewer; when it held the tang of salt, she stepped outside to spit it over the rail and into the dust. There, out on the porch, lit by a tiny slice of moon, she finally saw it: a dark figure on horseback where no figure had any right to be, standing on the Injun woman’s shallow grave. Watching.

  The horse looked familiar. But surely her mind was playing tricks.

  The troublesome black filly couldn’t be caught, much less calmly ridden.

  Without a sound, the shadow raised an arm, pointed a finger. Nettie swallowed hard and put a hand to her new gun. The black horse reared and spun and galloped away. When it was long gone, Nettie crept out, barefoot in the dirt. The hoof prints where the figure had stood in fresh-turned earth were filled with saltwater.

  Nettie didn’t sleep that night. And she didn’t tell anyone what she’d seen.

  Haunted cowpokes were probably as unlucky as women, when it came to rustling cattle.

  The next morning, they found two half-eaten cows in a corner of the corral. All the other cattle were crowded together on the opposite side like old women hiding from a rat. As the newest of the wranglers, it fell to Nettie to do the dirty work and drag the carcasses out to salvage what they could of the meat.

  “I reckon I don’t want to eat a bite of this beef,” she said to Chuck, the next most junior feller. They both had their bandannas pulled over their noses, as the meat had somehow managed to go bad in just a few hours. The edge of it was eaten away, all rusty-looking and none too appetizing. Dragging the carcass half a mile by horseback didn’t help its attraction. She unhooked her rope from the cow’s horns and looped it up on her hip, staying alert just in case whatever had killed the cows was still nearby and hungry.

  “Ain’t yours to reckon.” Chuck had an unearned sort of bravado around Nettie, even though he was a year younger than her, mainly because he was taller and had managed to sprout a few whiskers. “Boss said to save what we could, and I don’t aim to let him down.”

  Chuck’s knife was no sharper than hers, but she wasn’t willing to test her new blade on rancid meat, so she let him chop into it while she held the cast iron cook pot ready. The cow was a cavern of crusty entrails, the eyes all bugged out and the ribs and legs holding it open like a monster’s maw. Chuck hacked into what was left of the flank, and a chunk of meat slithered off. When it slapped into his palm, he screamed and dropped it.

  “It’s just meat, you goose,” Nettie said with a sniff.

  “Goose yourself. Meat ain’t supposed to burn, is it?” He held up his hand to show raw, red skin before sucking on the wound with an audible slurp.

  “Huh.” Nettie used a mesquite twig to lift the sand-sugared slip of beef out of the dirt. She dropped it in the pot, and it sizzled. When she flicked it back out, a chunk of metal had been eaten away, the seasoned iron as raw and red as Chuck’s hand.

  “Reckon that would eat through a man’s innards, don’t you?”

  Chuck nodded and clutched his hand open and closed. “That I do, Nat.”

  Nettie stood and looked back to the ranch. Everyone else was going about the usual business, nobody paying the time of day to two green hands and a couple of cattle carcasses.

  “Tell you what, Chuck. If you’ll drag ’em out farther over that hill, I’ll hunt up enough meat so nobody’ll notice we left ’em for the crows.”

  Chuck stared at her through narrowed, close-set eyes, his burned hand clutched to his chest. “You just got a gun yesterday and you ain’t ever shot it. How do you expect to kill anything?”

  She shrugged. “I have my ways.”

  He chewed his lip for a minute, considering. “I’m gonna trust you, Nat. Best not let me down.”

  When Chuck stood and spit in his good hand, Nettie spit in hers to shake. They nodded at each other as men, and she hopped on Ragdoll and took off for the far corner where the Double TK backed up to Pap’s land. He was too lazy to ride his fences, much less fix them, and she’d been hoping for years that someone would teach the old bastard a lesson. Sure enough, she found a few rangy, unbranded cows grazing on the wrong side of the fence, which meant, according to the law, that they were wild. For just a second, she let her fingers tickle the trigger on her new revolver, but in the end, she just found a big rock and took down the least noticeable of the beasts. By the time she’d wrapped her rope around Ragdoll’s saddle horn and dragged the stolen cow back to the cook pot, Chuck had done his part with the rancid carcasses. All that was left were wet drag marks and a sweaty cowpoke with his hand wrapped in a dirty bandanna.

  Together, wordlessly, they cut up the fresh beef. Chuck didn’t have to ask where it had come from; its pathetic keep and lack of the TK brand told him well enough where it didn’t come from, and that was all that mattered. By the time they’d butchered it and cut the meat up into small enough chunks to conceivably connect them with the chewed-up beeves, it was well into afternoon, and Nettie was sorely missing the feel of a fresh mustang twitching under her and a new quarter tickling her palm.

  “Reckon I’ll try to break a bronc before supper and practice with my pistol.” She stood and wiped bloody fingers down her only britches. “You coming?”

  Chuck looked up and flinched away from the bright sun, holding a hand to shield his eyes. She let the hat hide her face in shadow, should he stare a little too closely once the sun blindness had cleared. But Chuck looked downright feverish. His forehead shone with dirty sweat, and his eyes were red, and his hands shook
as he shoved his knife’s blade into the dirt to clean it.

  “Sun took me hard.” He wiped the blade off on his pants and fumbled it into its sheath at his belt. “Need me some water. Maybe rest in the shade.”

  Nettie nodded and dragged the cook pot toward the back door of the ranch house, where the old cook sat, whittling a spoon.

  “Two beeves. Should be more meat,” he muttered.

  Nettie tossed the pot down with a clank. “Then go pick at the bones your own self.”

  She didn’t ask Chuck what he’d done with the other carcasses. She didn’t want to know.

  That night, as they saddled up for the next raid over the border, Nettie couldn’t help scanning the horizon. She didn’t see a shadowy figure on a wet-black mare, but what she did see was Chuck riding his paint horse, Rain. The boy was all slumped over and jiggly, like maybe he was working on a good case of the trots. Nettie loped over, but he didn’t look up.

  “All right there, Chuck?”

  He wagged his head sorrowfully, his hat fallen down his back and his eyes wet and red. “Reckon not. Feels like I ate a hive of bees, and they’re right vengeful.”

  “What’s the last thing you did eat?”

  With a sad little shrug, he said, “I don’t rightly recall. Will you ride with me? If I fall off, maybe you can tie me back on before the other hands notice?”

  Nettie hadn’t heard Chuck act anything but cocky as a banty rooster, so she just nodded and took up beside him at the tail end of the cowpokes heading out. As they hit up a hard trot, Chuck looked like he might wiggle right off Rain’s rump, but as soon as the moon rose, he stiffened up with a renewed vigor that made Nettie think maybe he’d shaken off the sick.

  “Feeling better?” She kept her voice low and husky, as the moon in the bright sky made her feel more exposed than usual.

  Chuck put a hand to his forehead and then to his heart as if checking to see if he was alive. “Reckon I do. Feel like I could eat a whole damn side of beef, just now. Don’t know what came over me for a while there. Moon feels mighty good, don’t it?”