by James Wade
17
The desert prairie in front of us was pocked with scrub brush and we raced through it, toward the darkness in the east, pushing the horses away from the thought of the Lobos giving chase. By nightfall we decided if they’d followed, they’d done so as ghosts.
We made no fire, and I studied the distant mountains, shoveled up against the setting sun, deciding the horizon. The charred, orange glow of the dying light outlined their peaks and in that moment they were aflame and perhaps it was beautiful to others, if there were others to see. To me it was hellfire and it burned eternal and there among the desperadoes and demons was a trapped soul and here I sat, a shell of a boy. I thought of repentance but found no comfort in a savior or a rebirth, and decided I had been wet in a river and nothing more. And so it was only a fate as twisted as the bare mesquite posts dotting the plains where a fence once stood, perhaps would stand again.
I waited until night overtook the world, killing the fire with cold and black, and I untied the horse and told him he deserved better than me and it was true. I mounted up and slipped away and the night was still and there was a finality in my mind that brought me great peace. I would die, there was little doubt as to that, but maybe the girl would live, and I saw it not as an eternal bargaining of the soul but as a human notion of right and wrong. If there is a darkness, I thought, I am bound to it after death no matter what course I take from here out, but if I could save the girl from the coming storm, I could face my death and my fate, the two of them, having lived a human life—where consciousness and stardust meet and we try to do right and we fail and we try again and again until the trying becomes the memories we look back on at the end.
The hills loomed larger as I drew near and I hoped for stronger winds to cover my approach. I moved south to the first sandy draw and began to follow it up and there I heard a rider coming on hard from my rear. I led the horse around a jutted rock formation and dismounted. The rider didn’t slow and as he came into view I lay the rifle across the saddle and trained the bead on his chest. I recognized the horse before the man and lowered the rifle as Bullet climbed into the draw and led my brother to me.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.
“I knew you was gonna go after that girl,” he said. “You’re too goddamned soft, Caleb.”
“I’m set on it. Don’t bother trying to stop me.”
“I ain’t here to stop you. I’m here to help.”
And there it was, the light I’d been searching for since Longpine. Family is family, and my big brother was standing by his words. Of course, I couldn’t let him do that.
“We ain’t gonna be no help to nobody if we both get ourselves killed. Let me go in alone, and I’ll send the girl your way. Give her the horse, then you and Bullet go a different direction. Be harder for them to follow her if there’s two sets of tracks.”
Shelby didn’t say anything but nodded intently.
“Shelby,” I said his name and looked into his eyes and spoke in a way that gave feeling to every word. “Do this for me. Help her. Don’t talk to her. Don’t touch her. I’ll forgive you for everything you’ve ever done. Just help her, please.”
“Alright then, little brother. I swear it.”
* * *
I scrambled up the south side of the ridge and took off my hat and put my stomach in the dirt. There were a few fires smoldering below, but the camp was quiet and motionless and I realized then I had no plan to speak of. I didn’t even know which tent the girl was in. It was only by chance, as I lay there on the hill, that she appeared. With Indian Tom at her side she emerged, dressed in a gray cloth shirt and a long ruffled skirt. She emptied her bladder and I watched the light from Tom’s swinging lantern as they walked back to the center of the camp and disappeared inside a tent. A few minutes later Tom came back out and I cringed as he unfurled a bedroll in front of the door flap and blew out the lantern.
An hour later, I left my hat and the rifle on the ridge and moved slowly down the hillside. I took a route that put me at the bottom of the camp, where there was more darkness but less chance of a misstep that would send rocks tumbling into the tents to announce my arrival.
I made my way along the back of the outermost tent row and heard nothing to suggest I’d been spotted. I picked an opening between tents and crept through, my eyes half watching each step while also taking note of the big Indian asleep up ahead. I reached the back of the tent and the wind finally picked up but now it was a hindrance as I tried to speak softly to the girl.
“I have a knife,” I said. “I’m going to cut a flap and help you run.”
I was crouched in the grass with the small pocket knife in my hand when Indian Tom rounded the corner of the tent and looked down at me. I froze and he smiled and unsheathed a foot-long blade with a curved end. I prepared for the fight, knowing it would end quickly, and I tried to tell myself this wasn’t a mistake but somewhere inside the fear outweighed it all and I thought about begging for my life.
“Don’t shoot!” Shelby’s voice called out and we, me and Tom, decided to put our tussle on hold.
“Don’t nobody shoot!” Shelby yelled again. “We’re unarmed. We ain’t looking for trouble.”
Men began to emerge from their tents, guns in hand, wondering whether to follow Shelby’s instructions.
I backed away from Tom who saw fit to let me do so and met my brother in the middle of a tent row. His hands were straight up in the air and a dozen or so men were watching. I saw the girl’s head stick out from her tent and I couldn’t be sure but I thought maybe she was happy to see me.
“What is this?” I asked him, but he looked past me to where Grimes stood above the camp.
“We decided to join up with you,” Shelby called to him. “Turns out you just asked the wrong brother.” And with that he looked at me and grinned and I knew it had been his plan all along and I would never forgive myself for being so ignorant.
Grimes stood for a while and some of the men went back in their tents and finally he called down for Jimmy to find us a spot and a blue-eyed man with thinning hair walked toward us with the look of sleep about him.
“You boys sure made an entrance,” he grumbled. “Come on to the pack mules and we’ll cut you some cloth. Y’all don’t mind sharing a tent?”
“Not at all,” Shelby answered. “We’re blood. We share everything.”
* * *
We didn’t speak, me and Shelby, and my anger made the work go faster. The tent wasn’t much: two pine posts—one crooked and knotted in the middle, the other too short—and there hung the torn fabric thrown at us by Jimmy.
“This should be big enough,” he said. “If not, don’t wake me up. We’ll sort it in the morning.”
“Say, y’all got any grub left from—” Shelby began, but Jimmy stopped him short.
“Morning,” he repeated and was gone.
The cloth, which looked to be actual tablecloth like you would find at one of those hotel restaurants in San Francisco, was too short and the wind played at it and me and Shelby sat on either end and I had never hated anyone as much as I hated myself but I thought maybe in that moment I hated Shelby more.
“You lied to me,” I said, breaking the silence and trying to resist the urge to break his nose.
“Lied to you?” he acted shocked and hurt and it only made it worse. “I saved your goddamn life. That big ol’ Indian was ’bout to add your scalp to his belt ’fore I came up.”
“Don’t deny it, you selfish bastard, you just wanted us both in camp so you could volunteer to be the outlaw you always dreamt of. You knew I wouldn’t be able to object or they’d probably shoot us both on the damn spot.”
“You gotta trust me, little brother. You’re the one always going on about us not having no plan. Well, by God, here’s one that just happened upon us. Ever’ one of these sumbitches is wanted for something. Hell, th
e number one priority of the whole outfit is to stay away from the law. They got food, whiskey, and by the looks of it, plenty of money to go around. We could do a whole lot worse.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Momma, the boy, none of it.”
“I know, Caleb. I know you’re hurting. But this is a good opportunity, and we ain’t even gotta do nothing but say yes.”
“You almost had me convinced, you know it? Those nights out in the desert. I thought, we make it to East Texas, catch on with a logging outfit, I could build me a little cabin somewhere. Maybe by a river.”
“You can still build a cabin,” Shelby started, but I wasn’t listening.
“Put in a week of work for a week of pay. Go fishing on Sundays, or maybe just ride out on a lake trail and feel the sunshine warm my face. I told myself, maybe, just maybe, I could find some sort of peace.”
Shelby looked down and shook his head.
“But that never was the plan, was it?” I asked. “Not for Shelby god-damned Bentley.”
“Naw, peace wasn’t the plan, little brother. Not in this life. But this is gonna be real good for us, little brother. Real good.”
“It wasn’t your choice to make.”
“Aw, yeah, like when Grimes asked if we wanted to join up and you told him no without talking to me?”
“He didn’t want us. He wanted me.”
“Horseshit.”
“Believe what you want. But go on and ask yourself why a man like that would want a dumb son of a bitch like you riding with him.”
“You watch yourself, Caleb.”
“You ain’t gonna be no famous outlaw or no rancher or nothing else. You’ll live and die as the same sorry shit you’ve always been. I know it, you know it, Daddy knew it—that’s why he left us.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth!”
“And Momma knew it too. She told me before she died. Said I’d have to be the one to look after you.”
Shelby came out of his crouch and met me where I sat and the two of us went rolling into the loose cloth and took most of it with us as we tumbled across the ground. I grappled my way around him and took his back and held him and told him to calm and he put an elbow in my ribs. We traded some half-blocked, short-range punches and there were words hurled as well and I couldn’t tell you what they were, but rage was controlling the puppet strings and there was no reason or hesitation. The violence came and it came natural and I caught my brother with a sharp left hand and he was stunned long enough for me to mount him. Once I had the position, I could’ve stopped it. My whole life I’d been putting a stop to Shelby’s bullshit, or worse, I’d been getting caught up in it.
“What would you have done?” Grimes’s words echoed in my head. “Would you have killed him? Killed your brother?”
Men talk about fighting—saloon stories to impress the whores or, more likely, to impress the other men. They drink and laugh and the fighting talk comes easy, but it shouldn’t. It’s not a normal thing and you need look no further than the sound. Until you hear the dull thud of your fist on a man’s bone, you don’t know fighting. Sit and laugh at the stories but don’t think you know the fight and what it means and what it does. I knew fighting and I’d always tried to stay away. But sometimes things just find you and it found me that night and I had the chance to stop it and instead I took a quick breath in and I went to work.
I was sure my right hand was broken, and maybe my left, and the sound had changed from bone to mush and I realized later I would have killed him, killed my brother, had a giant hand not enclosed my shoulder and tossed me backward.
Only then did I realize I’d been crying and I stopped and looked up at Tom. His face was concerned and he looked at Shelby, squirming and moaning and coughing blood, and then back to me.
“Grimes,” he said and motioned for me to follow.
I staggered to my feet and felt a little dizzy and wiped the blood from my lip and inspected my raw, red hands.
“You got brothers, Tom?” I asked, almost sheepishly, as we hiked up the hill to Grimes’s camp.
“I have many brothers,” he replied.
“Where are they now?”
“There,” he said and pointed out at the rows of tents that shrank behind us.
A few paces from Grimes’s tent, Tom told me to stay put.
“You were going to kill me, right?” I asked. “Earlier.”
Tom smiled and his mouth was big even on his sizable face. I nodded and put my hands on my knees and bent forward, exhausted and hurting.
“You are looking to die,” Tom said, still smiling. “Your brother says you want to be here, but your eyes say different. We will find out.”
“And then you’ll kill me?”
“We will find out.”
Tom pulled the flap back and entered the tent and I saw a lantern burning and soon he reappeared and motioned for me to come inside.
“Welcome back, Caleb,” Grimes said, not looking up from his rolling tobacco. He sat shirtless and cross-legged on the ground, his hair slicked back and his face red in the absence of the beard and he looked both older and more alive. His muscles were sagging but sinewy and a bullet-sized scar on the left side of his chest caught the light from the lantern.
“Yessir,” I managed.
“Change of heart, huh?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, I doubt that, but we’ll leave it for now,” he said and then licked the paper holding his smoke. He motioned for me to sit, and in case there was any confusion, Tom’s big paw gripped my shoulder and shoved me down.
“Tom says you have an interest in my daughter. I say the same. What say you?”
“She seemed scared to be here’s all. I wanted to make sure she was alright.”
“See, Tom, that’s what I like about the boy. He’s a straight shooter,” he paused and considered his own words. “Well, for the most part. Tom also tells me you about killed your poor brother down there just now. You reckon he needs a doctor?”
“I can’t rightly say. But like you already know, we’re wanted men. Don’t know that I’d trust a doctor or no one else with them posters out. Lucky we didn’t run into trouble in Valentine.”
“That’s not a problem, Caleb. We have our own doctor here, in this very camp. Another two down south. Well, really another doctor and one dentist, but old Jeffries gets ornery, don’t he, Tom?”
The two men laughed and Grimes lit up the cigarette and breathed it in and the fire ran down the paper, smoke chasing after it.
“You have an outlaw doctor?” I asked.
“Sure, and lawyers and cooks, a few smittys—hell, we even got a sheriff. Or a former sheriff, I guess.” And again the two men laughed and Tom said something in Comanche and Grimes laughed even harder.
“And you were a Ranger.”
“I knew you’d heard of me last time we chatted. I knew he’d heard of me,” he looked to Tom and then back to me. “That’s right, and I was a Ranger.”
“What happened?”
“You want me to send for the good doctor, or just let your brother lay there bleeding?”
I lowered my head and there were my boots, folded up with my legs beneath me and covered in blood. I knew what it felt like to kill and it wasn’t like that with my brother. I knew he’d live, but I nodded anyway.
“Yessir, I reckon somebody ought to take a look at him.”
“Alright then,” Grimes said and nodded at Tom and Tom disappeared outside the tent and I wondered if that was all but didn’t move.
Grimes stared at me and by now I was getting used to it, and the smoke crawled from his nostrils and hung in the air and I thought about the way a soul is said to leave the body and how some folks believe you can look down at yourself.
He tapped the burning paper and the ashes fell to the ground and one was still
lit and both of us, Grimes and me, saw it and he smiled and brought his boot down on it.
“The people of this great nation saw fit to call me a war hero.” He spoke and I listened and he looked at something far off, as if he could see through the tent cloth. “I wasn’t much more than your age. A child in many eyes, but I killed men and eventually led men and in the end they gave me medals and honors and glorified my deeds in ways unnatural. Death is natural. Killing is not. Do you understand the difference?”
I nodded.
“The ghosts of those fellas, the ones I killed, followed me back home to Nacogdoches and in the daylight hours the good people of East Texas would call me a traitor and a nigger-lover and a murderer, all on account of me fighting for the Union. Then at night the ghosts would come and make sure I didn’t sleep a wink. That was bad enough in its own right, but I could manage it, until the bastards started following me around during the day too. So I’ve got a racist redneck hollering at me, a ghost mocking me, and I don’t know which one to fight and which one to ignore. Anyhow, a doctor gave me some magic cure—a bottle of syrup he said was cooked up back east. It worked for a while.”
“What happened?” I asked, and Grimes was back to looking at something I figured only he could see.
“You ever carry something so long it becomes a part of you?” he asked and ashed what little was left of his cigarette. “See, that medicine did what it was supposed to do, but something didn’t set right with me. I found myself missing the things that haunted me. A man carries his deeds with him, in this life and the next, and the way I saw it, I didn’t want no exemption. I figured the best thing for me was to go back to work, and seeing as how I was a hero and all, I caught on with the Rangers with no questions asked. At first I was just rustling up cheats and cutthroats in San Antonio, but pretty soon they sent me out west to clean out the Indians so as the respectable, God-fearing folk wouldn’t have no native problems when they rode their wagons into the great unknown.”
He licked his finger and thumb and brought them together over the cigarette end and he looked down and studied it or studied something in his mind and his face was pained.
