Vulture Wings

by Dirk Hawkman

  Charlie could sense it, too. He had won or lost literally hundreds of fistfights during his years. The invisible and furious energy radiated by Bob warned him. Bob was about to crouch to meet Charlie at eye level, but Charlie was rattlesnake rapid. He sprang to his feet, and backhanded Bob with venom. This swiftly efficient blow startled Bob. The strike sent him staggering. Adam rushed to steady his brother with an arm over his shoulders. He led Bob back to his seat, Bob glowering poisonously.

  Though Dwight tittered shrilly, and the saloon’s customers rested their chatter to gawk, Charlie experienced a pang of guilt. Though he had delivered countless pummellings and worse, he felt a touch of regret. Striking Bob was, Charlie imagined, like chastising a son.

  ‘Now you watch your step, Bob,’ Charlie commanded. ‘I need a man like you. Don’t give me cause to hurt you.’ He noted that Bob was so incensed that he seemed to glow.

  Charlie reached into his jacket where he kept his secondary Colt in its holster. He could see the Connors squirm as he withdrew it, so smiled to reassure them. Charlie rested the gun flat on the table and slid it over to Bob. It made a gentle yet menacing, grinding sound on the coarse wood.

  ‘Take this, Bob. I trust you. You’re too smart to try something on me. Even if you did, Dwight and I’d . . . well, you won’t try nothing.’

  Noticing that the weapon was loaded, Bob stuck the Colt in his belt. Bob did not wear a holster, and the gun hung loosely and uncomfortably from his waist. It amused Charlie to see the weapon suspended so clumsily.

  For one night, Charlie had endured enough babysitting. Desolation was where crooks on the run came to party. It was time to start enjoying the evening. Charlie drew a wedge of dollar bills from his pocket. His patron was paying him well for childminding. He slid these over to Bob, as well.

  ‘Fetch us a round of drinks, Bob. Let your hair down, dang it.’

  Bob took the bills and approached the bar. His Colt wedged awkwardly in his belt, he was naively advertising his inexperience with the weapon. Bob did not care to dwell on Charlie’s reasoning for entrusting him with a gun: arming him to disarm him. He was tiring of Charlie’s psychological games, and unwilling to play.

  ‘Four whiskies, please, Suzanne.’ Charmed, Suzanne obliged. Despite the company he kept, and his disgraceful tryst upstairs, this young man had not forgotten his manners.

  As Suzanne poured the drinks, a grossly fat drinker in a Stetson waddled up to Bob. He was a drunk bully and, seeing Bob’s youth and evident naïvete, thought he would enjoy some spiteful sport. Perhaps he could even hustle a few bucks.

  ‘Boy – you old enough to drink?’ the boozer chortled, spraying Bob with spittle. Still enraged by Charlie’s backhand, Bob struggled to remain calm.

  ‘Please, partner. Just buying a few drinks.’

  ‘Where are you from, boy?’ the drunk insisted.

  ‘Excuse me, suh.’

  The whiskey hog shoved Bob, smugly grinning at his own imagined audacity. ‘Asked you a question, boy.’

  Perhaps the Strongs had trained him too well, for Bob instinctively snatched his Colt, cocked the weapon, and fired. The bullet made a sound like a camera flash as it hit the pillow of the saloon sloth’s fleshy gut. He collapsed to his knees clutching his rent belly, his final facial expression one of incredulity.

  There was an instant of silence before a chorus of whoops and cheers filled the saloon. The first ones to embrace Bob were the Strongs. As they hugged him close to their breasts, their pride practically shone. Bob attracted a throng of admirers, applauding and congratulating him. Nobody noticed Suzanne’s men dragging the glutton’s bloodied remains away.

  As Bob swallowed whiskey after whiskey pressed on him, he noticed Adam sitting alone at the table. Their eyes met, and for Adam, it was as if he was staring into an endless black well. Adam did not understand what his brother was becoming.

  Bob recognised that glint of incomprehension, but it did not quell his cheer.

  Darn, Bob thought. Killing feels good.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Strongs’ attentions and backslapping did nothing to warm Bob to them. In slaying the overbearing drunk, Bob had acted not so much mindlessly as from an urge in his gut. Bob knew that he ought to feel appalled by himself, yet he was electrified. His assassination of the boozer had ignited a blaze of energy in him. Despite whiskey after whiskey, his murderous fire was unextinguished.

  Nevertheless, though the Strongs embraced him as they would a long-lost kinsman, Bob could not forget his circumstances. Charlie and Dwight had scraped him and Adam away from their home at gunpoint. Bob could still not fathom why. While he did not regret killing the fat barfly, Bob was a different species to the Strongs. Wasn’t he?

  The death of the glutton (who, not thirty minutes after his destruction, was interred under a thin layer of gravel on a boot hill) had also charged the saloon. The bar’s contented murmurs had been magnified into thrilled laughter and a buzz of screaming chatter. At home in Morriston, such an event as a shooting would have deadened the atmosphere of the whole town. In Desolation’s whiskey trough, though, a death was only an amusement.

  ‘Good work, son. Liked the way you offed that fat pig,’ congratulated Charlie, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he put yet another whiskey in Bob’s hand. Bob was leaning against the bar, and his unexpected glimmer of cocksureness was not lost on Charlie. ‘When I put that Colt in your hand, I knew that something big was going to happen,’ he added.

  While Bob could not deny his own feeling of arrogant invulnerability, Charlie’s comment irked him. Had he been manipulated? Had Charlie predicted what would happen?

  ‘What do you mean?’ snapped Bob. Now, he was not merely obstinate and defiant. Bob was fixing Charlie directly in the eye.

  You’re not afraid of me, are you? Charlie thought. Good stuff.

  ‘I just had a good feeling about you, Bob. If you must know,’ he nodded surreptitiously to Adam, still alone at the table, ‘you’re my favourite. A little voice in my head told me that you’re different. Adam’s got potential, sure, but you’ve got the brains and the balls to deal with a nasty situation.’ Bob had somehow known what Charlie would say next. ‘You’re just like me, Bob. Just like me.’

  Enraged, Bob spun away from Charlie to face the bar. He was not angry because Charlie’s words were so offensive. Bob was furious because he feared that Charlie had reason. Was Bob transforming into a new creature? Or was Bob acting as the man he always was – but did not realize?

  He felt for the Colt, which was again stuck uncomfortably into his belt. The weapon had now cooled and was icy against his fingertips. His head swung back to glower at Charlie. Charlie could sense what Bob was thinking about and smiled in approval. He was pleased to see Bob in psychic turmoil.

  Further angered by Charlie’s grin, Bob turned his attention back to the bar.

  ‘Two more, Suzanne.’ The barkeep nodded in acknowledgement, but did not speak. Bob Connor – if that was his name – had changed. He was no longer the courteous boy who had walked in not two hours ago. Suzanne dealt with the human equivalent of poison every night. Her customers were thieves, gangsters and killers. Yet it saddened her to see this young man sullied so. He looked barely nineteen. He had had a lifetime of possibilities ahead of him. Now, his conscience would forever be tainted by another man’s blood.

  Deliberately ignoring the Strongs, Bob carried the whiskies over to Adam’s table. Perhaps it was his own dampened zeal, or possibly the clientele was now tiring of discussing the killing over and over, but the ambiance seemed subdued. Sitting back down with Adam hardly cheered Bob. His younger brother had typically been so boisterous and alive with energy. He now seemed withered and shrunken, and looked on Bob with timid eyes. To Adam, Bob appeared to be much like a stranger.

  Sliding the whiskey glass over to Adam, Bob noted that Adam had not yet touched his last drink. They sat unspeaking for a little while before Bob broke their loaded silence.

  ‘You OK, Adam?
’

  Adam took a moment before responding. He seemed to be composing himself for a difficult task. ‘Why’d you kill that man?’

  Bob had an inkling that this question was coming. In truth, Bob did know why, though it was impossible to articulate his thoughts and feelings. When he had squeezed the trigger on that fat bully, Bob had been acting on a purely animal level. Bob sipped a little whiskey before responding.

  ‘It was pure gut instinct, Adam. That drunk dolt was pushing me around. Maybe all that shooting practise out on the plains rubbed off on me. I wasn’t thinking about it when I shot the fat fool. And I don’t mean I was being dumb. I mean my fingers had a life of their own.’ Bob took another sip, for he had also predicted Adam’s next question.

  ‘What was it like?’ This was not ghoulish fascination. Adam was trying to decipher who the stranger sitting next to him was. Bob paused before answering.

  ‘It was like a drug, Adam. Better than liquor or opium. I felt invincible: ten feet tall.’

  Adam did not comment, but his look of wary apprehension spoke for him. He had already been fearful of the Strongs, and now feared that he had a third enemy. Bob reached over and put a comforting hand on Adam’s forearm. Adam was not reassured.

  The saloon did not ring a bell for the last orders. Instead, Suzanne alerted her customers that the bar was closing by firing a shotgun through an opened window.

  ‘Party’s over, you bums! Get out of here!’

  The Strongs drunkenly staggered over to collect their charges. Charlie was a little jolly when he commanded them.

  ‘All right, boys. Time to bed down. Hope you enjoyed. Tomorrow, it’s another long ride. There’s somebody we’d like you to meet.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Eli had paid for a room for the night in Wells. As desperate as he was to find his sons, it was senseless to ride out onto the plains when the grasslands were masked by darkness. Before retiring, Eli had attempted to eat a good meal in the hotel’s dining room. This notion was borne by Eli’s knowledge that he should eat, rather than any great hunger.

  In the hotel’s restaurant, Eli had dreamily sawed and poked at his steak and potatoes. He was indifferent to the gentle clink of the other guests’ cutlery. The pleasing aroma of gravy and roast meat from the kitchens only strengthened the appetites of the other diners, but Eli did not even notice. He was ordinarily wakeful and alert, but so engrossed was Eli in his painful reverie that the other patrons’ odd looks and bemused muttering did not register with him.

  Eli did not know how long he had been entranced at the table when he came around. The staff were dimming the lanterns, but were too wary of the peculiar stranger to eject him from the dining hall. Eli found his food cold and uneaten, but absent-mindedly cut into little pieces. He half-wondered how the plate had arrived there.

  The hall was deserted now, and Eli felt a little like the last drunk in the saloon, impotently refusing to leave. He rose and ascended the wooden steps to his cheap room, the hotel ghostly quiet but for his padded footsteps. The silence only emphasised Eli’s tortured lonesomeness. He shivered, not from the evening’s plunging temperature, but from anxiety. Eli’s longing for his sons was a physical pain.

  Frustrated that his manhunt had to take pause for the night, Eli slammed his bedroom door behind him. He did not care if he disturbed the other guests. Even if he had, none of them would have dared come to accost that stranger with the crazed countenance about him.

  Eli lit the oil lamp and sat on his spartan bed. Wells did not receive many travellers, and the plain hotel room befitted the town’s veneer of welcome. The dim, orange glow of the lamp mirrored Eli’s drowning spirits. Yet the dancing flame within the lantern’s glass prison also mimicked Eli’s burning love. Though he was physically and emotionally drained, Eli’s scorching dedication to his pursuit smouldered undiminished.

  He was in turmoil, though. His feelings meandered from anger to sadness to listless indifference. Sat on the bed, and ignoring the itch from his new bed-mates, Eli was once again mesmerised. A memory he had not recalled for many years returned.

  Adam and Bob had been perhaps nine and ten. They were still in school, and spent their Saturdays working in the store. His sons were well-behaved boys. Adam could be a little cheeky, but he was never in trouble. Bob was particularly mature for his age. When Eli and Cassie received an invitation to dinner at their neighbours’ house, they thought they could trust their boys to behave for one night when they went out.

  Eli, rapt by his recollection, did not realize that he was smiling to himself. In Morriston, your nearest neighbour was a good two miles away. Eli and his wife thought nothing of the short journey. It had been a comfortably warm summer evening. Walking arm in arm, Eli and Cassie had chatted and giggled about nothing all the way. The sun had been retreating, but not even the stretching fingers of grey shadows could blur Cassie’s magnetic beauty. Her golden locks and blue eyes sparkled despite the darkness. Not for the first time, Eli thanked the heavens for his great fortune.

  Dinner with the neighbours had also been joyful. Eli had become a new man since sharing his life with Cassie. Years earlier, Eli’s mind had been consumed by nothing but his next arrest. That night, over bowl after bowl of beef stew, Eli had gossiped and shared atrocious jokes that nonetheless caused roars of laughter.

  The Connors shared heartfelt embraces with their friends before their stroll home. Eli was armed, of course, but Morriston (at least then) tended to be a peaceful town. The couple were not bothered by brigands nor outlaws, but on arriving home, their house looked like it had been burgled.

  Central to the disarray, Eli had found Adam and Bob fighting. Or rather, Adam had been laying into his brother while Bob cowered behind hands covering his face.

  Eli would not let two naughty boys ruin such an enjoyable evening, but he had to play the part of the strict father. He had barked instructions, and the boys had rapidly reversed the mess they had created.

  His sons had each received a stroke from the slipper before bed. Interestingly, Adam – the more brash and boisterous son – had cried childish tears after his chastisement. Bob had steeled himself to the slipper’s bite, and dutifully apologised before going to sleep.

  Eli had witnessed this so many times with his sons. Bob was stocky and tall, but was kind and gentle. Bob was big enough to defeat Adam in a fight, but he always deliberately surrendered to Adam’s fists. Eli suspected that Bob did not have the heart to beat up his little brother. This streak of goodliness in Bob gladdened Eli.

  The blissful memories faded away, and Eli again found himself in the dingy hotel room. He undressed, and would try to enjoy some rest – even if it meant staring into the darkness for hours. The fears haunting Eli remained, but his happy recollection cheered him a little. His sons were in danger – but Eli was fortunate to have somebody worth fighting for.

  The abduction was also half the mystery. Eli wanted to know the import of the string tie and the identity of his assailant in Beulah. There were many strands to this cobweb of deception, and Eli was determined to follow them, whatever monstrous spider waited at their centre.

  He tried to draw some solace from his memory. Eli was certain that Bob would be watching over his younger brother. The stories from Wells had alarmed Eli, but they were only rumours. Bob had a touch of kindness and decency that would never be corrupted.

  At least, that’s what he hoped.

  CHAPTER 18

  Eli may have spent the whole night staring into the gloom, for he was awake to watch grains of dust dancing in the rays of the sun. He was pleased that the wretched night was over with and it was light enough to ride again. Turbulent as Eli’s thoughts were, he prayed that the day would bring a sliver of hope, however thin.

  After last night’s pathetic failure to ingest a hearty meal, Eli did not even bother to attempt breakfast. He gulped cup after cup of bitter coffee in the dining room, only rising to leave the table when his belly was full.

  Wells had receiv
ed him cordially, if coldly, but he was glad to be leaving. Mounting and setting off, the sun had fully risen in the East. The heavens were a serene, faded blue and Eli inhaled the rich smell of the grasslands ahead. But for the troubles that lay ahead of him, it was a beautiful day.

  Desolation was north of Wells. It would take the best part of a day to reach the mountain trail to the deadly township. Eli forced himself to concentrate on the ride ahead. His wrought imagination created dozens of different and perilous scenarios for his sons. Eli fought to close his mind to these frightening visions. As he rode harder and harder, those images of danger kept returning and returning. Eli had to wipe his unshaven face clean several times, but he was not certain whether he was brushing away perspiration or tears.

  At last, the mountains appeared in the distance. At first, they resembled an ugly, black rock perched incongruously on the horizon. Drawing closer, Eli could discern the hills’ broken, grey teeth and hideous, grasping claws. He trembled. Twenty years ago, Eli would have approached the mountain’s angular claws fearlessly. Indeed, he had pursued his quarries to Desolation several times. The thought of his sons in the clutches of evil men hidden away in these hills was repellent. He steeled himself as he started up the mountain trail.

  Though it had been decades, Eli’s memory remained as cutting as a bayonet. The trail had not been designed by men. Rather, it was a jigsaw of rock platforms and pebbled slopes that were not too steep to ride on. Eli rode with great caution, subconsciously happy to be distracted from the nightmare pictures in his mind.

  Desolation was an outlaw outpost. Eli wondered how the saloon there, so remote, could remain stocked with whiskey and beer. Hoodlums laying low would pay a pretty penny or an ugly dollar for booze, he supposed. When he sighted the settlement on the path ahead, Eli drew breath. While he was no lawman, the rodents who inhabited Desolation would be able to sense that Eli was not one of them. They would view him as either prey to be exploited, or a hunter to be shunned. Moreover, while criminals did not tend to live very long nor boast great intellects, they had long memories. Eli wondered if any of the township’s denizens would know or remember him.