Dust Devils

by Janz, Jonathan

  When he thought the boy was relatively calm, Cody ventured into the dale through which the creek serpentined, forded the water, and climbed a rise. He peered into the darkness and felt his breath catch in his throat. At first his reason discredited what his eyes told him; it was too close to good luck to be true. When he returned to Willet, he hunkered down beside the boy, who still lay with his knees bent and his eyes shuttered wide, the wan moonlight turning the boy’s eyes doll-like and glassy.

  Cody reached out, touched the boy’s arm and for the briefest of moments feared the worst, that the young skin would be cold to the touch. But Willet’s eyes shifted to his, the expression as alert as Cody hoped it would be.

  “When are we goin’?” Willet asked.

  Cody studied the boy a moment. “There’s an old road just over that hill. I expect it leads to Mesquite.”

  Willet started to sit up, but Cody put a hand on his shoulder. “You sure you don’t want to rest some more?”

  “I don’t wanna be out here any longer,” Willet said, and Cody could see the naked terror lurking behind the boy’s tight expression.

  Cody nodded. “We better get goin’ then.”

  They dressed and untethered Sally. Cody hoisted Willet onto one shoulder, gripped the reins and trudged along the bank. They found a shallow spot a couple hundred feet downstream, and though Sally protested and whined, Cody managed to bully her across. It was hard work sloshing through the creek with his dual burdens and his injured leg, but Cody managed. When they’d climbed the bank, Cody patted Sally on the withers and told her what a good job she’d done. Then, awkwardly, Cody and Willet sat the horse and ambled across a stretch of smooth prairie. A few minutes later they were on the road to Mesquite, the ghostly rind of moon attending them like a newly sharpened sickle.

  Chapter Eight

  Cody passed the time and filled up the eerie silence by telling Willet all about his father, all about Jack Wilson.

  “With a name like that, he sounds like an outlaw or something,” Willet remarked. “Like Sam Bass or Billy the Kid.”

  Cody chuckled softly. “Dad’s about as far away from those fellas as a man can get.” He sobered, remembering Jack Wilson as he’d last seen him: broad-shouldered and reddened by the sun, his fair hair, brilliant blue eyes and open good nature marking him as something very different from the other ranchers in southern New Mexico. Cody imagined Jack Wilson as he’d been three years ago, standing at the front gate of his ranch in Escondido. Jack Wilson smiling and beckoning them forward, doing his best to pretend there wasn’t a bad history there. Doing his best to pretend it wasn’t all a futile charade…

  It had been only a few months since Cody had married Angela, so the tension between him and his dad was already stretched taut enough to be uncomfortable for everyone. Cody remembered his stepmother Gladys taking him aside and pleading with him to show more respect. The hell with that, had been Cody’s muttered response. The moment Dad starts treating my wife with more respect is the moment I’ll show him some too.

  He could still recall Gladys’s disapproving silence, her thin-lipped exasperation. At the time he attributed it to her clannishness and to her unreasoning loyalty to Jack Wilson.

  Only later did Cody realize that his father was worthy of that veneration, that it was Cody who was behaving like an ass.

  Of course, it was too late to do anything about that now.

  “So what’d y’all fight about?” Willet asked.

  The boy’s voice had lost much of the strain it had held only a few minutes prior. Cody suspected it was because he was distracted by their discussion, so despite the fact that it was painful for Cody to recount—despite the fact that he’d never shared it with anyone—he figured he ought to continue on.

  “My ex-wife…dead wife…whatever the hell you want to call her, she thought my dad was a jerk.” Cody laughed humorlessly. “Hell, I thought he was too. Only later did I understand he was just trying to help me. He wasn’t as diplomatic about it as he might’ve been, but his intentions were good.” Cody sighed. “Dad’s intentions were always good.”

  They rode in silence a few moments until Willet said, “You gonna leave it at that, or am I gonna hear about the fight?”

  “It wasn’t a fight necessarily. At least not a physical one. Had it been, my dad would’ve kicked my butt. It’s been three years since then, and I’m older and stronger…and he’s three years older too. So now I don’t know who’d win. But then at least I knew he’d embarrass me in front of Angela if I challenged him. So I acted cold toward him instead.”

  “Cold how?”

  Cody shrugged, his gaze sweeping the black horizon for signs of the devils. Somewhere in the distance Cody heard a grouse thumping its wings, but other than that, the wilderness seemed deserted. “I refused to do aught but shake his hand when we arrived at the ranch, and even that I did quickly, like it was just business. Dad, he was always the type for a hug, or even a kiss on the cheek, so I could tell it hurt him that I kept my distance.”

  “You hurt him on purpose,” Willet put in.

  Cody nodded. “If I couldn’t beat him with my fists, I knew I could hurt him in other ways. By withholding.”

  Willet glanced back at Cody. “You and your wife stayed at your dad’s ranch?”

  “Just for a night. Less than twenty-four hours. Took longer to get there than the time we stayed.” Cody hawked, spat into the scrub brush. At the sound a startled owl took flight from a nearby cottonwood in a frantic flurry of wings. “Angela didn’t even want to stay that long. She hated Dad.”

  “He treat her mean?”

  Cody shook his head. “Not then. He was very gracious to her once we were married…tried to treat her like his daughter. I suppose he and Gladys always wanted one to go along with their son.”

  “Then why was she so against him?”

  “Who, Angela? She hated him because when we were first courting, my dad warned me off of her. He’d heard about her from some of the guys he traded with in Escondido. Heard she wasn’t…” Cody cleared his throat, heaved a sigh. “He heard her ways were a trifle loose.”

  Willet didn’t say anything straight away, but Cody could tell by the boy’s posture that he was thinking hard.

  Choosing his words carefully, Cody went on. “Angela had a restless soul. She was always wanting more. In a way you’d probably call her hungrier than those bastards we fought back there. She had to have everybody looking at her all the time. Had to have all the nicest, newest things.”

  “You give ’em to her?”

  “When I could,” Cody said. “Course, that wasn’t often. Despite his objections, Dad gave us some money to make a go of it when we first got married. Dad wanted me to set up shop near Escondido, where he’d moved us when he got remarried, but I insisted on starting a new life somewhere else. So I bought a homestead not far from where we’d lived back in Tonuco. Back where my dad and mom had me. Where my mom died of tuberculosis a month before my fourth birthday. Where Dad raised me till he met Gladys.”

  “What’s your stepmom like?”

  “She’s a mestiza.”

  “Huh?”

  “Part Spanish, part Apache. My dad met her in Mexico.”

  “You get along with her?”

  “Gladys?” Cody grunted. “We never saw eye to eye. But I guess that was my fault too.”

  Willet looked back at him. “You withhold from her?”

  “I suppose I did. Plus there was always that stupid part of me that had to lash out at Dad. I guess I used my coldness toward Gladys as a way of striking at him.”

  “So you two never got along? You’n your stepmom?”

  Something cracked in the brush behind them. Cody whirled and peered into the gloom, but nothing there stirred. The trail was as barren as it had been before, the scrub as lifeless as a graveyard.

  The thought made Cody shudder.

  Willet’s voice was stitched with nascent panic. “Somethin’ wrong?”

 
“Uh-uh,” Cody said, patting Willet’s shoulder. “I was just gonna say my stepmother and I were fine until the grogger.”

  Willet squinted back at him. “What the hell’s a grogger?”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “Why can you say it but I can’t?”

  “A grogger is a wooden noisemaker. They’re annoying as hell. Kids love ’em though. They’re a novelty.”

  “I never heard of one.”

  “Well, that doesn’t matter, does it? The point is, my stepmom got one for me when we went to the Gulf of Mexico one time.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “I guess it was,” Cody said, his voice resigned. “But I didn’t think so at the time. I thought it was patronizing, getting me something you’d get for a little kid.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “That’s still a kid, ain’t it?”

  Cody shook his head, probed the darkness for signs of life. The only thing he saw was what looked like a good-sized jackrabbit taking refuge behind a rock. “Not to me,” he said. “Not back then.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I told her to take her grogger and shove it.”

  “Bet that went over good.”

  “About like you’d expect. Dad smacked me in the butt. Hard. It was right there at the beach in front of all those people. Dad was strong too. Hurt like hell, but I guess my pride hurt worse.”

  Willet shrugged. “So what’s the big deal? You was disrespectful and you got whupped.”

  “The big deal,” Cody said, hating the whiney sound of his own voice, “was him choosing her over me.”

  “So’d she take it back?”

  “Take what back?”

  “The noisemaker.”

  “Hell if I know. Dad probably threw it in the ocean.”

  Willet frowned over his shoulder at him. “I don’t understand what the problem was.”

  Of course you don’t, Cody wanted to say. You’re a little boy with no idea of how the world works. But he held his tongue, not only because Willet had been through a lot and was still badly injured, but because Cody knew deep down he’d been an insolent little kid himself who’d deserved the punishment he got.

  They rode on in uneasy silence for a good while. Beyond a scraggly thicket of olive trees to their left, a broad mesa loomed like a hunched sentinel. Willet leaned forward a bit, as if dozing off, but Cody suspected the boy was just weary and was shifting his position on Sally’s back so as to alleviate the aches in his young body.

  Cody said, “I wish I could go back and reason with my fourteen-year-old self, but I don’t suppose that’s possible, is it?”

  Willet didn’t respond. Maybe he really was asleep.

  Cody went on. “Just as much—maybe even more so—I want to go back and talk some sense into the Cody who was barely into his twenties. I want to tell him to listen to his father. To not marry the first girl he screwed just because of her long legs and her pretty face.”

  Cody stiffened, realizing the inappropriateness of his comment. He hurried on. “I guess it has to play itself out, doesn’t it? We act like assholes to our dads, and then we become dads and have our own sons act like assholes to us.”

  Cody cringed, realizing what he’d just said was infinitely worse. Jesus, Cody, he chided himself, could you be any less sensitive to Willet’s situation? Why don’ t you come right out and remind him his dad just got butchered?

  “Listen, Willet,” Cody began. “I’m sorry for what I said about dads and sons and—”

  With a violent lurch in his stomach, Cody realized Willet wasn’t moving at all. Heart thudding, he craned his head around Willet’s shoulder to look at the boy. If the kid had somehow died, if the blood loss had been worse than Cody’d suspected, he’d never forgive himself.

  Willet’s eyes were closed, his body motionless. He put a hand to Willet’s back.

  Cody blew out quavering breath. Through the kid’s shirt, he could feel a steady heartbeat. Thank God, Cody thought. Willet was sleeping peacefully, his respiration smooth and deep.

  Cody let out a long, trembling exhalation. He guessed it meant he’d begun to care about Willet Black. With a pang of surprise and regret, he realized he’d been enjoying telling the boy of his own childhood. He’d never unburdened himself much with Angela. What was the point? Sharing his soul with her wouldn’t have helped him heal; it would have given her further ammunition for an attack. Angela hated Jack Wilson because she knew the man never approved of her. But that wouldn’t have stopped her from taunting Cody with the knowledge that he’d broken his father’s heart.

  So, with Willet dozing comfortably in front of him in the saddle, with Sally meandering along at a gradual but even pace, Cody slipped back into the snarl of his past again.

  Back to the time when Angela gave herself to the devils.

  The night of the Crooked Tree betrayal, Cody waited for Angela in their kitchen until well past dawn. By the time the pallid blue ghost of moonlight was seared away by the yellow-white blaze of the New Mexico sun, Cody’s belly was aching and his anger was giving way to a suffocating shame. He attempted to fry an egg, but he couldn’t keep his mind to it and burned all but the top of the yolk. The two or three bites he did manage to choke down only made him feel worse, and to rid himself of the foul aftertaste, he swallowed a shot of Irish whiskey. The alcohol didn’t help, but it didn’t worsen things. So he carried the dark brown bottle to the front porch and sipped absently from it and waited for Angela some more.

  By noon there was still no sign of her. A black worm of fear squirmed in his empty belly, and Cody damned himself for still caring. Goddamn the woman, he couldn’t imagine what base instinct had compelled her to leave him for those bastards. Had they promised her jewelry, a life of leisure? God knew she complained enough about the hardships she had to endure out here on the ranch. He’d always attributed her carping to her soft upbringing. Hell, her father never even required her to use a broom in the mercantile store he owned. Yet the horrors of last night’s show had spawned in him a new perspective on a childhood he’d merely regarded as insular before. Had she been allowed to indulge her every whim? Had she, like some capricious princess, spent her days and nights in a hedonistic carnival that alternated between feverish flirtation and languid acquiescence? Just what in the hell had he married? He’d never heard of a person swapping out one character for an entirely new one, and the humiliating truth with which he was now faced indicated that Angela had been this way all along, that her three years with Cody here at the ranch had been the anomaly, that last night was merely a return to the life she had always known.

  That his father had been right about her whoring.

  At one or so in the afternoon, judging from the blazing sun, Cody hopped off the covered porch and was surprised to find himself quite drunk. He leaned over, palms on his knees, to stem the dizziness and to level the slowly canting horizon before it toppled him into the dusty yard. He managed to remain standing, but the puking came anyway, a painful retching that deprived him of breath and caused him to fart like an old mule. He was sure for a moment that Angela would arrive and find him like this, but when the dry heaves finally ended and he could breathe again, the lane leading to the ranch was still vacant and he was still without his wife.

  Cody staggered toward the house, meaning to escape the unceasing assault of the sun, but had to stop and steady himself several times before wriggling lizard-like onto the covered porch. He lay on his side for a time in the hope that the shelter of the shaded porch would restore some of his energy, but the continued heat and total lack of breeze only conspired to weaken him further. He had no idea what time it was—midafternoon maybe—when he managed to crawl through the front door and into the bedroom. His parched throat shrieked for water, but he could do nothing but claw his way onto the bed and collapse, his consciousness evaporating even quicker than his marriage had.

  As occasionally happened, Cody aw
oke but found himself unable to move or speak. He was aware of everything around him: the lace of the white bedcover chafing his neck, the inside of his mouth painted with bile and whiskey, the comforting sound of the cows snorting in the pasture out back. And something else.

  Cody listened, the fog of sleep searing away. He paused his breathing, for holding his breath was the only action of which his body seemed capable, and concentrated on the sound coming from his left. He tried his neck but it wouldn’t turn, nor would his limbs cooperate. Directing all his energy, he found he could make his eyelids respond, and when he attempted to focus on the ceiling, he was surprised to find the bedroom gloomy with dusk. The sound continued, and though Cody now recognized what it was, he hadn’t the faintest notion of how to respond to it even if his body were to escape its paralysis.

  With a herculean effort he was finally able to turn his head and look at the person in the bedroom with him.

  Angela, taking her possessions out of the bureau and placing them inside a giant leather suitcase lying on the foot of the bed, its smooth brown edge actually shoved up against his leg.

  She hadn’t noticed he was awake yet, only went on with her packing, methodically tossing aside the garments she no longer wanted and laying the ones she fancied carefully inside the suitcase. She wore a white dress, different than the one from the play last night, but no less elegant. The only real difference Cody could pinpoint at a glance was that the neckline of this one rose nearly to her chin and covered a good deal more than she’d displayed to the townsfolk.

  Cody opened his mouth to speak but found his throat completely bereft of moisture. When she turned in his direction, cradling a stack of dresses, he tried to reach for her, but his hand scarcely twitched from its resting place. He thought of the play, of Adam Price draining his victims of blood, and for a moment Cody was almost sure he too had fallen victim to the king vampire.

  “Angela,” Cody muttered.

  He was sure she hadn’t heard him, but a few seconds later he noticed her mouth tighten to a grim line. Still riffling through her bureau drawers, she said, “Don’t bother saying anything. I’m leaving after tonight’s performance.”