Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  A rifle’s report echoed in the air, a small thing, a noise no louder than a person clapping. The man’s face went blank, his eyes careened up in their sockets, and he stumbled forward, grabbing Gabriel’s shoulder with his enormous hand. His grip was so strong that the boy didn’t even think of moving, but the man did. His head began to shudder, his neck loosened, and his body leaned over backward, pulling Gabriel part of the way with him but letting go as he hit the dry boards of the floor.

  Ugly Mary took only a second to recover. Her rifle fanned past Gabriel and beyond him toward the prairie. She shot, her bulk quivering with the force of it, and Gabriel finally moved. He hit the deck, felt two bullets pass above him, and thought better of his position. He crawled off the far end of the porch in a second and looked back to see the carnage behind him.

  Mary stood wide-legged, with her repeating rifle spraying bullets before her. Her reign of terror didn’t last long, though. She quickly spent her cartridges, and just as quickly the unseen foe’s bullets found her. They entered her flesh like concussions delivered to bone and muscle and flesh. She stumbled forward, dropped to her knees with a weight that must have crushed her kneecaps. Of this injury she showed no sign. She held the gun as if she might kill her attackers with the instrument and her will alone. She began to yell, a wail that started low and unintelligible but slowly became something of English speech. She invoked the wrath of her God and asked that she meet her murderers in hell. She began another curse but was cut short when a bullet smashed her lower jaw and blew out a portion of her skull. She fell backward and cursed no more.

  Gabriel stared at the two fallen forms and didn’t move until he heard the other men approaching. They collected around the porch and surveyed the scene in silence. Marshall looked down on the two bodies with eyes that seemed almost sad. Kneeling before Mary, he touched her cheek, testing it for warmth as if the flu might have been what ailed her, staining his hand with her blood in the process. He didn’t seem to notice or care. He was silent for some time, and Gabriel thought he read in his eyes a kind of passion that made this all seem meaningful. But when he spoke, his voice was without remorse.

  “Guess they had it coming.”

  Marshall sent Dallas back for Dunlop and James, and when they arrived, he instructed the three boys to go inside with Rollins and take anything useful. James surveyed the scene with trembling features, his face a pale reflection of its usual rich color. Gabriel felt he could scarcely move himself, but when Marshall repeated the order, he pulled James by the wrist to get him going. They followed Rollins inside, stepping gingerly around Mary’s body to do so.

  For the next twenty minutes they ransacked the place. Rollins yelled out instructions, demonstrating the proper way to throw open drawers and overturn furniture. Dallas proved more than proficient at this, punctuating each action with hoots and curses. Gabriel and James went through the motions of searching but seemed oblivious of the motives of their work. James found a rifle cabinet, opened it, and stared at its contents as if he’d never seen such weapons before. He had just turned away from it when Rollins noted his discovery and told James to carry the weapons outside.

  Gabriel found nothing of value. Left alone for a moment in the upstairs bedroom, he sat on the bed and stared at the photographs lining the dresser, daguerreotypes of an array of people. He found himself remembering his home in Baltimore, remembering a dresser much like this one on which photographs of his own family sat. He felt his eyes go watery. The world before him blurred, and for a moment he felt that he’d forgotten how to breathe. A new round of shouting from downstairs brought him back.

  Rollins called Marshall inside. “There’s a safe here.”

  It was a small thing, solid and nondescript and no bigger than a breadbox, so plain that neither Gabriel nor James had even noticed it. The men quickly discovered that it was locked but could be opened with a key, if one could be found. The next half-hour passed in a hasty search for the key. It was eventually found, on a hunch of Marshall’s, on a chain around Mary’s neck, hidden in the folds of her bosom.

  From where Gabriel stood, he couldn’t see the safe as the men huddled around it. He looked out the front door at the limp torso of the woman, at the great plain and the yellowing sun behind it. Rollins let out a low whistle, which brought back Gabriel’s attention. Marshall turned slowly, holding something in his hand, something heavy. It looked like a block of wood in the shadow where Marshall held it. But when he stepped into the sunlight, it threw back the light like a thing afire. Gabriel realized what it was, a long, brownish yellow piece of metal—gold, a brick so dense that Marshall had to support it against his abdomen.

  “My friends,” Marshall said, “justice never got any better.”

  Another twenty minutes found Gabriel and James standing outside as the men prepared to leave. Marshall was in a fine mood, seemingly untroubled by thoughts of escape or capture, or by any remorse. He spoke to the boys as he checked his saddle and rigged it to carry an extra saddlebag.

  “So here’s the way things lie, boys. We got ourselves these two dead bodies here, two in the bunkhouse, and we got that other guy back at McKutcheon’s. That’s a whole lot of killing for a few days’ work. You boys got two choices. You sit here and wait for the law to show. You tell them the best story you can and then get yourselves hanged. Cause that’s what would happen. Two niggers sitting on the porch with a string of dead bodies around and an open safe. You know you’re hanged already. That’s option number one. Number two is you take a hold of one of them guns and come along with us and quit this country and try your luck elsewhere. Which is it?”

  Gabriel was stumped by the question.

  It was James who spoke. “I . . . I don’t aim to be no killer.”

  “Oh, shit. You ain’t gotta do no killing. These two here, they were just an old score. That man back at McKutcheon’s . . . Well, I reckon I just did that to save you boys’ lives. Not that you ever did say thank you. Myself, I don’t give a good damn. I’m going to California.” He looked at Rollins as if he’d just discovered their windfall and was still processing the possibilities. “Shit. What do you say, Rollins? How bout we spend the rest of our lives drinking tequila by the beach and sticking Mexican whores? That ain’t a bad way to go. My daddy would roll in his grave, but he never did know a good thing when he saw it. Anyway, boys, I don’t give a good shit what you two do—”

  “Marshall?” Rollins interrupted him. “We can’t leave them boys here. First sheriff asks them a question, they’ll spill their guts quicker than a pig at slaughter. That ain’t no clean getaway. Same goes for Dunlop.” He motioned with his head. “He’s looking a little spooked.”

  Gabriel remembered Dunlop and turned in the direction Rollins had indicated. The young Scot stood beside his horse, holding the creature by the reins and staring around him like a man totally lost.

  Marshall pondered all this for a troubled moment but quickly reached a decision. “All right, I take it back. You two saddle up. California’s waiting.” He strode away, seemingly unconcerned as to whether the boys would obey or not. He went and spoke to Dunlop, and whatever he said proved most convincing.

  Rollins watched the two boys as if he’d had another alternative in mind, but he didn’t state it. “Come on, then,” he said, and he followed them till they were saddled and ready. Gabriel’s horse, a rust-colored mare with timid eyes, shied and shimmied. The boy sat her with a concerned face that seemed only half there. The horse sensed this and was uneasy about it, and only quieted when actually under way. The party rode out to the northwest, Gabriel toward the back of the line but followed by Caleb. They left behind four dead, the two in the bunkhouse, whom Gabriel never saw, and the two on the porch, whom he’d seen all too closely. On some whim, Marshall propped Mary and Rickles up against the wall, their empty eyes staring unblinking into the morning sun, an image that Gabriel never managed to clean from his mind completely—the first true sign of the things to come.

 
Part 3

  THE FIRST TIME THE BOY SAW THE CREATURE, HE KNEW where the tales of monsters sprang from. He was awakened from a long, meandering dream by the sow’s anxious squeals and Raleigh’s deep-throated neigh. He had his trousers on in a few seconds, boots just after. He ran for the door without lacing them, shoved it open, strode out into the night, and circled the house toward the barn. He wasn’t ready for what he saw there and knew so immediately.

  A beast stood poised on the sod fence of the pigpen. It was outlined in the starlight, rendered unreal and ghostly and more fearsome than it might have appeared in the reasoning light of day. The boy tried to name the beast, but he couldn’t create the word in his mind. Its legs were spread wide, its neck was low, and its ears lay flat against its head. The hair along the crest of its shoulders and down its back stood at attention. It had been gazing down at the frantic sow, but when the boy appeared it snapped its head around. It stared at him, head slinking from side to side, paws kneading the turf beneath it. It seemed to consider the boy first to discover if he was to be feared, and then, having decided that he wasn’t, to decide whether it might dine doubly tonight.

  The boy read all this in the creature’s eyes, for the beast concealed nothing of its thoughts, or the hunger within it and the need, above all else, to quench it. But only when its lips drew back from its jaws and exposed the white glint of its fangs did the boy remember its name: wolf. He tried to step back, but his feet were stuck to the ground. He tried to call out, but he’d lost his voice. The boy grasped at his thigh as if somehow the action might produce a weapon, or suffice as a call of alarm that he couldn’t otherwise muster. It did neither.

  The wolf let out a growl, sank low, and prepared to dive for the boy. It might have, except that the boy’s uncle came bounding around the side of the house, rifle in hand. The man aimed and fired before the wolf had fully taken in his presence.

  What happened next neither the man nor the boy could fully say later. It was as if the rifle’s blast took the wolf away with the speed of the bullet. The animal simply vanished, leaving nothing but empty space before them and ringing silence and the question as to whether it had been an illusion. They might have thought so, except that the wolf let up a howl of protest from the safety of the black fields, a cry ringing with indignation and resentment and with the pent-up lusts of a lifetime. When it began to fade, lesser creatures picked up the call and added to it. The night came alive with cries of canine camaraderie, from all directions and distances, leaving the boy with the feeling that they were hopelessly outnumbered, surrounded by and deep within a legion of carnivorous life.

  The next morning, the boy searched the ground with his stepfather and uncle. They found the wolf’s tracks in the soil beside the sod fence and on the fence itself and around the back of the house and at the door to the stables. They kept the pig in the barn from then on, but two days later they awoke to find four of their five hens dead and feathers strewn about. Again they found the beast’s tracks.

  Looks like we got a little problem, the stepfather said.

  The uncle and the boy agreed.

  GABRIEL AND THE OTHERS RODE HARD through the next week, hitting the Pecos River late on the second day, turning and following its course northwest. Most of each day was spent in riding. Although they stopped regularly to water the horses and rest them, they never broke for long. The constant motion atop a living being of hard contours, sinew, and muscle wreaked havoc on Gabriel’s body. Each stride sent jolts of pain through his backside and into his lower back and straight up the chain of his spine. His hands clenched the reins with a white-knuckled passion that left his fingers twisted like claws. When he dismounted each evening, he walked on bowed, clumsy versions of his former legs.

  They passed from Texas into New Mexico at some unmarked boundary, and as the week wore on, they kept the Pecos to their left. Across it Gabriel spied the foothills of the southern Rockies, sharp, sand-colored ridges out of which grew buttresses of reddish stone and beyond which the ground rose to greater heights. To their right lay the great expanse of the Llano Estacado, a land so barren that Gabriel could imagine no creature living there by choice. The plains stretched to the horizon, spotted by occasional prickly pear and tree cholla, all sharing muted colors that varied little except with the rising and setting of the sun, when that orb played tricks of light across the land and set colors moving in ribbons.

  At night they huddled around a tiny fire. Sometimes they laid up in dry areas of the riverbed, finding shelter within the water-carved features. Although days were passing, pushing in between themselves and the horror of Three Bars, neither Gabriel, James, nor Dunlop had found his voice again. None ate more than his first plateful of food, and none joined in the nightly discourse held between Marshall and Rollins and Dallas, all of whom seemed like actors finally realized, finally given their moment in the light and loving every second of it. As the two boys sat staring at the fire and Dunlop sat staring into the night, the other three threw out plans for their future in California. Rollins talked only of whores and a life of leisure; Dallas considered trading in his spurs and sailing to Hawaii; Marshall cast webs of schemes, business ventures and building projects and even plans for a career in politics. Gabriel would have said they looked and sounded more like children at play than fugitives and murderers, except he knew that wasn’t true. They looked like all of these.

  Caleb rarely joined them in these sessions. He developed a habit of nightly reconnaissance. He’d backtrack their trail during the early evening and return in the black hours, emerging suddenly as a shape beside the fire. He walked with such stealth that nobody saw him arrive. Rather, they just realized at some moment that he was among them once more. Each evening, by his silence, he assured the men that they were not yet being followed. Gabriel thought many a time that if Caleb were tracking them instead of with them, they’d all be dead before the next sunrise. He wondered when Caleb found time to sleep, and whether he went on his nightly searches as the hunted or the hunter.

  Marshall spoke to the boys as if he hadn’t noticed their silence. In his orations they had been partners from the beginning and shared any guilt equally with the rest. It seemed that all knew and none needed to hear again of the boys’ obligations to the group. But Gabriel felt the other men’s watchful eyes on them day-long, saw in their glances a constant scrutiny, especially from Dallas and Rollins. These two watched them as if they longed to be provoked and were just waiting for the digression that would give them the excuse.

  On the fourth night out, they camped in a protected arroyo with a view toward the setting sun. They supped on frying-pan bread and thick strips of bacon. For the first time since Three Bars, Marshall retrieved the gold from his saddlebag and set the brick on a blanket. The men studied it from several angles. None touched the bullion, as this seemed a luxury meant only for Marshall, but they commented on the glint of the stuff in the setting sun and whistled at the prospects the soft metal conjured in their minds. Gabriel, from the edge of the group, couldn’t help but find the display somehow wrong. He couldn’t get the images of Ugly Mary and Rickles from his mind. The bar of gold seemed a strange, dead thing, like a coffin set out in state or the mound of an unmarked grave.

  “What do ya think it’s worth?” Dallas asked.

  The men debated this question for some time. Rollins was convinced it would fetch a thousand dollars. He called it a “thousand-dollar bar” and said the logic of it was clear to anyone with a lick of sense. Dallas thought it might go for more. As gold-hungry as people were out in California, they’d probably fall over themselves offering hard currency for the stuff, until each of the men would be as rich as the king of Siam. This comparison drew some interest from Marshall, who couldn’t imagine what a skinny-necked Alabama boy like Dallas knew of the riches of the Far East.

  “I tell you boys the God-honest truth,” Marshall said at last. “This here gold ain’t worth what it used to be, not anymore. There was a time you could’ve wiped
out a whole nation of redskins for what we got laying here. There was a time you could’ve hung a thousand Jews from crosses and beat the living shit out of your slaves and nobody’ve batted an eyelash.” He looked around at the group, pausing on Gabriel and James and then shaking his head sharply to bring back his wandering mind. “But them days are long gone. Sad truth is, the world is changing and ain’t one of us knows what it’s gonna end up looking like. That’s why I don’t mind us staking ourselves to a little insurance.” He picked up the brick with reverent hands and held it up for the others to see. “I can’t say exactly, cause I wasn’t there when they picked this fella up, but you’re looking at more than a couple thousand here. Old Mary never cared for banks. There were too many Easterners involved for her liking, too many Yankees. I remember her saying she’d look after her own cash, thank you very much. Nobody’d get hers except over her dead body. And those were her words, not mine.” He paused and weighed the brick in his hand. “Yessir, this here’s the weight of justice done. No fat bitch’s gonna outfox the man who taught her all she knew.”

  “Hell no she ain’t,” Dallas agreed, “not when she’s full of lead and twenty pounds heavier for it.” He couldn’t help breaking into a little dance, a sort of a heel-to-toe jig to the music of his own whistling. Rollins knelt close to the gold and repeated its worth several times, until interrupted by Dunlop’s forlorn voice.