Return to Red River

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Mathew Garth thought about his sons. His wife. He thought about Jess Teveler. He thought about Thomas Dunson. And he remembered something he had overheard Groot telling Dunson back when Mathew had been barely in his teens.

  “You knows that boy as well as anybody, Mr. Dunson, but you don’t know ’m a-tall.”

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They had a saying in South Texas:

  “There are only two seasons down here, late spring and Hell.”

  That year of 1886 skipped late spring and went straight to Hell.

  Tom Garth stood up, leaving the knife on the bloated carcass and putting both hands against his back. He leaned back, trying to ease the pain in his muscles, keep that back from stiffening, and looked away from the dead steer. Blood and gore covered the fingers of his gloves, but he did not remove them as he lifted the soaked end of the bandanna covering his mouth. He spit into the mud, spit again, and looked at the endless expanse of Texas.

  “I’m a rancher,” a voice sounded behind him. “Not a cowhand.”

  “Shut up, Lightnin’!” Laredo Downs snapped. “You don’t own your pa’s spread yet.”

  “And if we don’t get these cattle skint,” Joe Nambel said, “even your pa might not be a rancher no more.”

  Nambel had returned from working in a mine all winter down in Zacatecas. Tom Garth wondered if the old man wished he had remained in Mexico. It had to be better than skinning dead cattle. Anything had to be better than—Tom looked up, wiping sweat from his brow—than . . . this.

  The snow was gone, replaced by mud and blood and bones. Twenty yards to Tom’s right, a fire blazed, and the stench of the burning remnants of cattle soured in Tom’s belly. The whole country smelled like rotting flesh, and flies buzzed all around him. He had even swallowed at least a half dozen this day alone. But he figured he had to be getting used to this.

  On this day, he had thrown up just once. Yesterday it had been at least a half-dozen times. The week before, he couldn’t even recall. In the beginning, Laredo Downs had ordered the crew to skin only the hides wearing one of Mathew Garth’s brands. But when Mathew rode up after a day, he countermanded Laredo’s orders.

  “Skin them all,” Tom’s father had said.

  Laredo had given Mathew Garth a strange look, and Groot had chuckled, “Like olden times.”

  “Skin them all, Laredo,” Mathew had said. “Unless you want to live with this stink for the rest of the year.”

  “You gonna explain that to ’em floaters when they come driftin’ here?” Laredo and Groot were probably the only men alive who could challenge Mathew’s authority, or question his judgment, and not rue the day. Had Tom or Lightning tried that, their ears would get boxed.

  Mathew nodded. “We’re not waiting on any crew from . . . hell . . . Canada . . . to come here to claim their hides, Laredo. The way things are, I hear, it might take floaters ten months to work their way down from the Red River. Skin them. Every damned one of them.”

  “You’re right, Mathew,” Laredo had conceded, and he yelled down the drift fence. “Don’t worry about the brands, boys. Just skin anything in sight.”

  Ten months, Tom thought, to skin dead cattle from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Why . . . in ten months, the crew from the Garth Ranch might be only halfway finished skinning dead beeves here.

  Tom spit again. This time, he didn’t bother trying to lift his bandanna. After stretching his back muscles one more time, he dropped to the dead steer again and reached for the knife. Flies covered the blade, and Tom’s streak ended. He jerked the bandanna down, leaned over the remnants of the dead animal’s skull, and vomited.

  * * *

  For the first day, Groot had joked about things. When he rang the cast-iron triangle, he had shouted, “Come and get it, boys. It ain’t sowbelly. It’s cow belly.” One Mexican vaquero named Antonio had vomited. Another called Manuelito had pulled a dagger, held the narrow blade under the stove-up cook’s nose, and said calmly, “This is no opera house, señor, and you are not so damned funny.”

  Groot had made no jokes after that. It wasn’t funny.

  Flies came in swarms. Buzzards and other carrion outnumbered the crews sent out to skin the dead cattle. After the first mile of drift fence had been cleared of dead cattle, Lightning had suggested that the cowboys tear down the drift fence.

  “What would your pa say to that?” Laredo had asked.

  A lariat looped over a fence post, and Laredo, Lightning, and everyone else looked at Mathew Garth, sitting on a chestnut mare, dallying the end of his lariat and spurring the horse, pulling on the reins, backing the animal up until the post bent, then left the muddy ground with an ugly sucking sound.

  “Tear the damned fence down!” Mathew yelled.

  That, at least, had been fun.

  * * *

  When the hide had been peeled off, Tom dragged it to two Indian women from the other side of the river. They scraped off the remnants of flesh, rubbed beef brains against the underside of the hide, and, eventually, pegged the hide to the ground to dry in the sun.

  Tom didn’t know how much his father was paying those two women, but he figured they earned every cent.

  He knew what he was being paid. The same as the vaqueros and other hired hands. One dollar a day. Plus food and a place to sleep. Laredo Downs would draw seventy-five a month as foreman, and Groot fifty as the cook. When Nambel drifted back into Texas and hired on with Mathew Garth, the old cowhand had said, “A dollar a day. That’s what I got paid twenty years ago.”

  To which Groot had said, “And you wasn’t worth it back then, neither.”

  Not that Tom or Lightning would see any of that money real soon. Their father and mother had made sure both boys understood that. Times were hard, and about to get tougher. It would be a lean year, maybe a rough two or three years.

  Their mother had then said, her green eyes hard, in no mood for resistance, “And neither of you will be riding into Dunson City. Not to the Knuckle Coupler. Not to the Rio. And not to Gloria’s Palace.”

  * * *

  The best part of the day came when they returned to the ranch. All of them. By the time they had their horses watered, grained, and cleaned, Janeen Yankowski had tubs filled with hot water, and everyone stripped and bathed—even Groot—while the Polish servant tried to get the blood and gore off the clothes.

  Lye soap almost tore away Tom’s skin, but he never complained. It felt good. He felt clean, even if he knew he would be just as sick, and his clothes and skin just as sickening, come the next evening.

  Above the buzzing of flies around his head and the calls of hungry ravens on the ground nearby, irritated that their feast had been interrupted by skinners, the sound of loping hooves reached his ears. Tom stepped back and turned to the sound. He saw his father riding a black mare.

  It was an excuse to lower his knife and step away from the drift fence and the dead cattle. Groot, Laredo, Nambel, and—of course—Lightning also stopped the ugly chore and waited for Mathew Garth, who reined in near Groot’s old Studebaker that had been converted into a chuck wagon.

  After pulling down the polka-dot bandanna that had covered his nose and mouth, Mathew swung his left leg out of the stirrup and hooked it over the saddle horn. He fished the makings from his vest pocket and began rolling a cigarette.

  “What’s it look like?” Laredo Downs asked.

  Mathew had ridden in from the southwest.

  The lean man did not answer until he had the smoke between his lips and had struck a lucifer on his thumbnail to light it. He drew in deeply, held the smoke for a moment, and exhaled.

  Mathew’s head shook. “By my count, two hundred head of dead beeves per mile.”

  Everyone swore.

  “How many miles?” Laredo asked.

  He took another drag and removed the cigarette. “I rode five miles. Then got tired of riding.” He looked at Laredo. “You went south this morning?”

  The foreman nodded. �
�To the Rio Grande. Good news . . . if you can call it good news . . . is that after a wet winter, the grass is greenin’ up. Most of our herd, south of that damned fence, weathered the winter all right. But not all. Found some bones in a few arroyos and canyons. And saw some turkey buzzards flyin’ over some country I couldn’t ride into. Others got caught in some canyons, covered with snow. Froze to death.”

  “Your guess,” Mathew said, “as to our losses.”

  Laredo spit and wiped his mouth with gut- and bloodstained gloves. “Six percent. Maybe seven.”

  Now Mathew swore, flicked the cigarette away, and pushed back the brim of his brown hat. Tom knew his father was running numbers through his head. Eventually, a smile formed, but those eyes revealed no good feelings. “Well, we’re lucky . . . or luckier than most.”

  “Maybe.” Laredo stared down the fence. Dead cattle stretched down the fence forever.

  “You want some coffee, Mathew?” Groot asked.

  Mathew shook his head. “You boys want some help?” Without waiting for an answer, he dropped out of the saddle and led the black to the remuda. When he returned, he had shed his vest and rolled up the sleeves of his boiled shirt, holding a well-honed skinning knife that he had fetched from his saddlebags.

  “You ain’t gotta do this, Mathew,” Laredo said.

  “The hell I don’t. If we ever want to be finished with this sorry job.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The dumpy man in the ill-fitting plaid sack suit smoothed his graying mustache before gesturing at the empty chair in front of his desk. He did not offer a hand to shake as Mathew Garth sank into the rickety chair.

  “Good morning, Chico,” Mathew said.

  Chico Miller grunted, shoved a few papers aside, opened a drawer, and dumped some others there. “That’s your opinion.” He picked up a soggy, well-chewed cigar and stuck it between his yellow teeth.

  A big man with pasty skin, a fat cucumber of a nose, and thinning hair, Chico Miller slammed the drawer shut and leaned forward, putting elbows on the desk and resting his double chin in the palms of two meaty, sweaty hands.

  “Get on with it,” he said.

  Mathew pointed at the two massive dogs lying at the side of the banker’s desk, one brown, the other reminding Mathew of a blue roan horse. Both of the animals seemed big enough to ride.

  “Those are new,” Mathew said.

  Which got a grin from Chico Miller. He pointed at them with his chewed-up cigar.

  “Cost me a fortune, too. These aren’t American bulldogs, Matt. Got them shipped in all the way from England. Olde English Bulldogges.” He spelled the words, just in case Mathew didn’t understand how important, how prestigious, bulldogs like these two were.

  And they were impressive. Large heads, muscles just about everywhere you looked, and they probably weighed eighty to a hundred pounds.

  “Used them for bull baiting back in the old country,” Miller said, and Mathew stared at him.

  “Don’t worry,” the banker said. “I won’t bait any of your bulls for these two boys.”

  Again, Mathew studied the animals, and when one of the big dogs, the brown one, rolled over, Mathew leaned closer. Pointing at the bulldogs, he asked, “What happened to them?”

  Scars covered their hides, and some of the wounds on the brown dog seemed fresh.

  “Damned coyotes,” Miller said with a growl. “They lure these two beasts into that arroyo behind my house, then ambush them. But you’re not here to talk about my dogs. And I don’t think you’re here as a member of this bank’s board of directors. You want money.”

  His real name, if you believed the rumors, was Charles. Somehow, when he had been banking on the Hudson River back East, he had picked up the nickname Chic. Some said that came from his fondness with the ladies. Others said he earned it because before he had found a job banking, he had sold chickens. It didn’t really matter to Mathew Garth, or Charles Miller. In South Texas, the locals quickly corrupted Chic to Chico. Mathew glanced again at the dogs, grinning at the thought that Chico Miller had spent a fortune on bulldogges—two g’s and an e—that couldn’t outfox South Texas coyot’s.

  “I’m waiting,” Chico Miller said, and shifted the cigar to the other side of his fat jowls.

  “How’s my credit?” Mathew asked.

  “Piss poor,” Miller snapped. “Or should I say, cow poor—like everybody else in this miserable hell some folks think is habitable for humanity.”

  Mathew had heard the other rumors about the lone banker in Dunson City. Back in 1873, shortly after Jay Cooke & Company had failed in September, setting off what became known as the Panic of ’73, Miller had absconded with funds from that bank in New York City. He had fled to Charleston, South Carolina, worked as confidence man to charm Southern women out of their virginity, good china, and parasols—until the good men of Charleston met him with hot tar and feathers. Which was another rumor about how he had earned the nickname Chic. Chicken feathers. From Charleston, Miller had drifted to Birmingham, Alabama . . . Memphis, Tennessee . . . New Orleans . . . Indianola . . . and now, Dunson City, Texas. Mathew really didn’t care what Chico Miller had done in the past. What mattered to Mathew was that the banker, for all his many faults, remained about as savvy a businessman as you’d find anywhere in Texas.

  “You got any advice?” Mathew asked.

  The cigar came out of the banker’s mouth. “Yeah. Don’t invest in railroads.” The cigar returned.

  That hit home. The Panic of ’73 had put a dent in Mathew’s fortunes when he had invested in that railroad that had failed.

  The cigar came out. “Or cattle.” Miller spit out the remnants of the cigar.

  “Too late for that,” Mathew said.

  The bell over the front door to the bank chimed. Miller looked over Mathew’s shoulder, removed the cigar, and yelled, “Get the hell out of here, you damned panhandler!”

  The door quickly closed.

  Mathew did not turn around, but Chico Miller turned toward his teller, cashier, and clerk. “And, you three. Mind your own damned business and stop craning your necks to hear what Garth and me are discussing. It’s none of your damned business.”

  One did not have to crane a neck to hear anything Chico Miller said. Another drawer jerked open, and the banker pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He found a dirty glass and set it on a paper. And began to pour.

  “It’s early for me, Chico,” Mathew said.

  “I didn’t hear me offer you a drink.” Miller slugged down the bourbon, slammed the glass on the papers, but did not recork the bottle.

  After wiping his mouth and mustache with the back of his hand, Miller stared across the desk. “How much you owe in San Antonio?”

  Mathew answered.

  “When’s it due?”

  “November.”

  Miller considered that, scratched the shadow that had already formed on his chin and cheeks, and it was not yet ten in the morning. “And the Cattlemen’s Trust in Fort Worth?”

  “Three thousand.”

  “When’s it due?”

  “Next March.”

  “That it?” Miller refilled the shot glass, but did not pick it up. “Other than what you owe me?”

  “That’s it.”

  The banker slid the shot glass in front of Mathew, who stared at the bourbon. Chico Miller did not offer drinks or advice or cigars or anything . . . without charging interest.

  “How did you weather the blizzards?” Miller asked.

  Mathew shrugged. “We survived.”

  Seeing that Mathew was not going to take advantage of the free liquor, Miller reached across the desk and slid the glass back in front of him. “So far,” he said, not to be petty or vindictive, but merely to state the facts of the matter. He hooked a fat thumb toward the window that faced west.

  One of the bulldogs farted.

  “Those black clouds aren’t clouds, you know. Not rain. Not tornadoes. Not clouds. Flies. By the damned thousands. Flies. Like the Fifth Ward
in August. And it’s not August.”

  “I know that.”

  “You ride five miles out of town and the stink knocks you out of the saddle.” Mathew thought about asking the banker when was the last time he had ridden anywhere or showed his face out of Dunson City. But he was smart enough to refrain. “Stinks worse than that privy behind the Knuckle Coupler after payday in the summer. And it’s not summer.” He stopped, picked up the glass, started to drink the bourbon, but stopped, pointing a finger in Mathew’s general direction.

  “And that’s another thing. Your boys busted up the Knuckle Coupler pretty fair. When was that? A month ago? No. Two months. I remember now. Remember it well. How much did that set you back?”

  Mathew did not answer. A man like Chico Miller already knew.

  “The reason I remember that your sons tore hell out of the saloon was because the very next day Meeker came in here.”

  “Meeker?” Mathew asked.

  “Yeah. Meeker. He wanted a loan, too, like I’d give that worthless bum a nickel. He was faster asking to go on tick than you, Mathew. But that wouldn’t surprise you. Certainly, it did not surprise me.”

  Mathew nodded. He hadn’t seen John Meeker Jr. in better than a year. His father, Big John Meeker, had been the bull of the woods in these parts back when Mathew was a boy and then a young man. Thomas Dunson, however, had dethroned Meeker, much as he had bested Don Diego Agura y Baca. The War between the States then had crippled and busted Meeker. Mathew thought back to that day . . . when he and Dunson had first laid eyes on Cherry Valance.

  * * *

  They had been road-branding the cattle for the trail north to Sedalia, Missouri, when Meeker rode up with only one man. From the looks of that man, though, Meeker must have figured one man was all he would need.

  Meeker had been sixty years old then, or so Dunson had told Mathew, and wore his hair and his mustache, both white, long. Dunson had just ordered Teeler Lacey to brand a Meeker steer with Dunson’s road brand, and Mathew had told Lacey to brand everything. Mathew had argued, Dunson had said he’d take it up with Meeker, and Mathew had smiled—because here came John Meeker.