Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  When Clemmins heard this news, he went into a murderous fury. He hunted the lands of the murder with his men, never tiring, hungry to avenge the man of God. It so happened that he and Marshall were out alone one afternoon when they came upon the camp of a stray Indian, burning a low fire that let off almost no smoke. There was perhaps nothing unusual about this, but to Clemmins it was a hint of guilt. The two rode in. The Indian jumped up and started to run, stopped and came back and began talking to them in Spanish. Clemmins leveled his shotgun at the man and asked him if he knew the padre who had been killed. The man took a moment to answer, and in this hesitation Clemmins saw guilt. He drove the man to his knees, then had him lie spread-eagled on the ground, and before long he had him tied and bound to a tree. “Bit like you were back at McKutcheon’s,” Marshall added. He nudged Gabriel playfully on the shoulder.

  Gabriel looked away and caught sight of Dunlop, who had just climbed up from the hollow in which he’d bathed, hands still tied behind his back. He met the boy’s gaze from a distance of a hundred yards, then walked on to camp. Gabriel lost the thread of Marshall’s story for a moment, but when he picked it up again, it had turned worse than he could have imagined.

  “He made a slit about four inches long in the red’s belly. Cut right through to the insides.” Marshall demonstrated where on his own body, then went on to tell how Clemmins reached in and probed the man’s insides with his fingers, watching his face the whole time, poking him, watching the pain writhe across his features in spasms, his living hand within the man’s living body. He asked him did he remember it now, was it coming back to him, was he a filthy red murderer and was he regretting it now? That hand found what it was looking for, paused for a moment; then, with one tremendous effort, he yanked from the man’s body a loop of his small intestine. He got a bit of the stuff out into the open air, with the Indian screaming and convulsing and watching Clemmins tug his life out of him. Clemmins stopped when a good portion of the man’s insides had been pulled through the incision. He stepped back, pleased by his actions, looking from the Indian to Marshall with a grin of pure joy. But he was not finished yet.

  “He told me to pull the man’s trousers down. I thought I couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that, but when a man like that tells you to pull, you pull.”

  Marshall did as he was told, an awkward job what with the man’s dangling, bloody intestines. In the end he used the knife to cut the cord that held the Indian’s trousers up, and he pulled them to the ground. He returned the knife to Clemmins and watched as the man handled the Indian’s privates, measuring their weight and texture and length. Gripping the Indian’s penis in one hand and pulling it taut, Clemmins cut it from his body. The Indian flinched but could no longer cry out. It wasn’t even obvious that he still knew what was happening to him. Clemmins held the member up in his bare hand, commented on the size and shape of it, then threw it away, losing it in a landscape of stone and sand. Clemmins nearly split himself laughing. They left the man that way, food for the scavengers of the night. Justice done.

  “All this for a minister who should’ve left them people alone in the first place. What’s worse is, they found the man who really killed the minister a week later. He wasn’t even an Indian, was a halfbreed Mexican-American. Still had the minister’s Bible with him. It had gold leaf, see, and that fool got it in his head that must be worth something, figured gold was gold.” Marshall leaned back and contemplated the boy from a distance that suddenly seemed great. “What do you make of that? Don’t that just seem like a right mistake on God’s part?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Damn right, you reckon. Clemmins claimed he was doing it all in God’s name, and God never said a word against him, never said, ‘Clemmins you’re a right demented son of a bitch, and I don’t want you cutting people up in my name.’ Never said a thing like that. True enough, the man did come to a bloody end himself, but that ain’t no surprise. He didn’t die half as slow as some that he’d killed, or half as early.” Marshall raised the canteen and smelled the liquor. He frowned, but whether at the smell of the whiskey or at his own thoughts was unclear.

  “Anyway, what we done at Three Bars wasn’t a big thing— wasn’t no big thing at the Mexican’s either. That’s my point, even if I didn’t make it properly. Truth is, God don’t give a good goddamn who we kill here on earth. Never did and never will. So you shouldn’t worry about it either. I’m not saying to go and make a habit outta gutting people. I’m just saying if you’re gonna be anything in this world other than a dirt-poor nigger, you’re gonna have to take a few things from some other people. There ain’t enough of the good stuff to go around. So you take it—some gold from this one, some pussy from that one, a life from another. That’s all there is to it. The devil’s an iron horse, my boy. You either get aboard or you eat the lead.”

  The man rose, his foot stirring the water, and drank once more. “As far as the girl goes, hell, she’s just in training. She’ll make more as a whore in San Francisco than she ever would’ve otherwise. She’s a lot better off than her parents, that’s for sure. You just gotta learn how to look at things the right way.” With that he turned and moved off, leaving Gabriel with a mind full of new images to crowd out the old.

  ON THE MORNING OF THE EIGHTH DAY out of Santa Fe, Caleb walked into camp as the others were sipping coffee. He sat down next to Marshall, took off his hat, and set it on his knee. He leaned close to the man and spoke his words directly into his ear. The others all went about their business, drinking coffee, picking bits of food from their teeth, looking over their saddles, but they watched the two men from the corners of their eyes.

  Gabriel knew that Caleb had been out since before sunset. There was nothing new about that, but something in the man’s movements made him uneasy immediately. He had just finished cutting James’s bacon into bite-sized pieces, a chore he’d taken to over the last few days as the boy seemed weary of using the implements himself. He pushed a bowl toward him and told him to eat, then bent to his own meal.

  He’d taken a few bites when Marshall tossed his coffee into the fire. “If that ain’t perfect, I don’t know what is. Get up, y’all. We’re being tracked. And they’re making time on us.”

  “Son of a sodomite!” Dallas said. “Are you kidding me?”

  Marshall stood up and waved his coffee cup in the air, drying it. “Dallas, you ever heard Caleb kid?”

  The boy thought about this for a moment and answered candidly. “No, I ain’t never heard Caleb say nothing, to tell the truth.”

  “Well, I have. He figures we’ve got a day and a half on em.”

  “Day and a half?” Rollins asked.

  “No more than two, but seeing as how they’re closing in faster than a hungry coyote chasing a plump hen, we best make our plans fast and quick.”

  Marshall began to gather up his things, but the others were perplexed, Rollins more so than any. “Now, hang on a second. That don’t sound right. Not by a jugful, it don’t,” he said. “If they’ve been tracking us all the way from Texas, how come we’ve just now noticed them? We done put in hundreds of miles without no sign of anybody. And nobody would track us this far into the territory just for killing Rickles and that whore. That’s for damn sure.”

  This seemed to give the men pause. Marshall pursed his lips and mumbled something that sounded like agreement, then fell silent, contemplating the situation at a different angle. Gabriel was more surprised than anyone to hear James’s voice, cracked and raspy but loud enough to be heard by all. “Could be the Mexicans. Cause of what you done to them and the girl.” He didn’t raise his eyes from the food in his lap, and after speaking these words, he began eating again.

  Gabriel noticed the girl’s eyes flick toward James. She took him in in one quick glance, as if it was the first time she’d done so, then she looked back down into her lap, letting her black hair fall before her face.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! The Lazarus speaks. I feel honored.” Marshall smiled an
d looked around the group in amazement. His gaze settled on Dunlop. “Maybe next we’ll hear from Jesus Christ himself. You got anything to say, Messiah?”

  Dunlop’s gag hung around his neck, but traces of it were clearly to be seen in the indentations running across his cheeks. He looked at Marshall directly when he answered. “Yes, I have something to say. I hope they hang you.”

  Again Gabriel saw the girl look up, at Dunlop this time. She looked down again before anybody else noticed.

  “If it comes to that, they might hang you too.”

  “That’s fine, so long as they hang you first, so I can watch.”

  Dallas stepped toward the Scot as if to strike him, but Marshall discouraged him with a wave. “Don’t get riled, Alabama. I like a man who speaks his mind. And, yeah, a pack of greasers could be trailing us. The man did say he had a son. For that matter, it could be on account of that damn fool at McKutcheon’s. There’s more than one son of a bitch out there with a grudge against us.”

  Dallas pushed his hat up high over his brow, a position Marshall often favored. “I’m not even thinking bout who the hell it might be—I’m thinking, how can Caleb see them if they’re two days away?” He looked at Caleb and cast his voice a bit lower than usual. “You see somebody’s fire? And if you did, how you know they’re after us?”

  Again it was Marshall who answered. “He didn’t see them.”

  “What?” This was too much for Dallas. “I don’t mean no disrespect, Caleb, but damn. Shit. You had me worried. I don’t know what planet you from, but right here on earth we don’t say someone’s after us till we got good reason. Shit.”

  Caleb stared at him.

  “Hold your shits, Dallas,” Marshall said. “I don’t reckon Caleb’s wrong. You don’t have to understand it, just have sense enough to believe it. So let’s say some son of a bitch is trailing us.” He waved away Dallas’s protests. “Let’s just say that’s so. We still got a decision to make. We gonna hightail it away? We gonna set ourselves up and ambush em?” He paused and looked around the group.

  Dallas cast his vote: “I’ll ambush em, if they ever existed anyhow.” He drew his pistol and pointed it in the air and almost fired. He checked himself at the last minute and burst into laughter. “That’s right. That’s right. Gotta save them bullets. Might be somebody following us.” He pretended to look around cautiously, then fell to laughing again.

  But the other men voted to ride. Marshall ordered the boys to their horses and nudged Dunlop with his boot, saying, “Get up, Scotland. You’re an outlaw too.” But the man didn’t move immediately. The Scot’s eyes were turned to the horizon once more, with a different sort of hunger this time. Try as he might, Gabriel couldn’t figure out how to read this gaze.

  THEY CROSSED THE UPPER REACHES OF A BRANCH of the Colorado River that morning and rode into a landscape that changed again. The mountains before them rose like sand blankets draped around skeletons of rock. As they came closer, Gabriel could almost believe they were the ancient carcasses of some giant creatures—backbones, ribs, limbs, and digits stretched out and decaying beneath a godawful sun that followed them and beat down as if to warn them off.

  They rode fueled by fear of the unseen hunters behind them. No man save Caleb was sure of their presence, but all pushed onward just the same. They didn’t gallop for fear of overheating the horses, but they pushed them at a speed that sorely tested their endurance. The pursuers might have been little more than a notion at first, but after a day they all woke up with this notion woven into the fabric of their dreams, making it much realer during their waking hours. Gabriel noticed that each member of the party had his own way of looking behind him. Marshall tugged the brim of his hat down on his forehead and stared back at the land with humorless candor. Rollins rode with his body almost sidesaddle, eyes probing the land. Dallas would canter along, conversing loudly and casually, then wheel his horse around as if he could surprise their pursuers. James and Dunlop and the girl shared a silence on the subject, but each of them could be seen taking in the land with wide sweeping gazes that seemed as hungry as they were desperate. Caleb ignored their pursuers altogether during the waking hours, disappearing only at night on his solitary missions. As for Gabriel, he tried not to look back, but he couldn’t help doing just that, searching with hope or fear—he was never sure which—and finding nothing save land and more land.

  The chaparral became sparser. Saguaros grew up instead, strange, multilimbed figures standing in the distance. Prickly pears, yuccas, and cushion cacti all dotted the landscape. After two days in the mountains, Gabriel felt his body had become a pincushion. Everything in this country, it seemed, came armed with thorns and stingers. Each rock seemed to hide something venomous. He twice found scorpions in his boots and once woke eye to eye with a spiny lizard. And more times than he could count, their horses stirred up the now familiar whir that was a rattler.

  He fought to keep James with him, but the boy showed little improvement. The emotional toll was starting to show on his body. His thin frame grew gaunter each day, his cheeks hollower, nose thinner, each of his features more and more measured by its simple geometry—skin on bone, flesh over muscle. His lips had long ago chapped beneath the sun, and one of his only movements over the long days became the frequent probing of them with his tongue, wetting them again and again, like a lizard testing the air. But his saliva simply sped the drying process. Sometimes when Gabriel prompted him to eat, he noticed creases of blood as the boy chewed. James showed no sign that this caused him any pain, or that he was even aware of why he was eating. Only Gabriel’s efforts made him eat at all, and Gabriel knew things couldn’t continue like this for long. It seemed the boy wouldn’t last another week, much less survive this trek turned flight across desert, mesa, and mountain.

  ONE EVENING THEY CAMPED IN A WEST-FACING CAVE beneath a tall shelf of rock. Dallas spotted a herd of peccaries, small piglike creatures, grazing in a ravine. Against Marshall’s advice, he climbed down the rocky slope and disappeared. Gabriel heard the echo of five shots, and a half-hour later Dallas returned, scuffed and scratched and sweaty but dragging two of the creatures at a rope’s length behind him. For the first time in several days they built a large fire and sat around it to enjoy the smell of fresh-killed meat.

  Rollins complained that the peccary meat was coarse and hard to chew, and furthermore a little hairy for his liking, but he ate a fair share of it. Marshall said he liked it fine: “Puts me in mind of dog.” Dallas challenged him to name the place and date when he’d eaten dog meat, but Marshall just smiled, said he’d eaten worse things than dog in his time, and would proceed no further on the subject.

  Gabriel cut a plate of meat for James, but neither boy had the hunger to consume it. Gabriel’s eyes nervously flicked over the walls of the cave around him. He saw shapes within the sandstone contours, creatures and spirits and other things, but he couldn’t tell if it was just the play of the firelight against the wavering stone or if they were images conjured out of his own mind. It was Marshall who provided the answer.

  “Those are Injun drawings. I see you thinking about it, Archangel. Your mind ain’t playing tricks on ya.” He stood up and pointed with a half-consumed leg. He traced over the lines only partially there, giving them shape as he spoke. “This here’s a deer. That’s something looks like a buffalo, although I doubt there were ever buffalo in this territory. And see that, you know what that is?” He motioned toward a creature on the far wall. “You ever heard the word conquistador? I don’t figure you have, cause that’s not in the average black boy’s education. But that there is a conquistador. One of the first so-called white men to enter this country. Bunch of damn fools, the whole lot of them. Thought they’d find themselves a mountain of gold around here and save their souls at the same time. Spent years hunting for the stuff, making good Christian slaves out of all the redskins they didn’t kill straight away. They got themselves a good many pieces of Indian pussy while they were at it.” He looked at
Rollins and smiled. “Fucked em so hard and long they damn near wiped out the race.”

  “That’s the way I’d do it.”

  The two men talked on, occasionally interrupted by questions from Dallas, who seemed to take quite an interest in the conquistadors. Gabriel only half listened, still studying the image and finding in it nothing human. It was a creature with four legs, with a stout, amorphous circle of a body and two protrusions that might have been heads. Around it were rings of wavering red, as if the creature were encased in circles of fire. Gabriel could make no sense of it, and he saw nothing in it to match Marshall’s words, only a chaos that began in a time that he couldn’t even fathom. He turned from it uneasily and again picked up the men’s conversation.

  “I say we’re carrying too much dead weight,” Rollins said. He didn’t look at the boys when he spoke, but Gabriel understood immediately the turn the conversation had taken. “Can’t expect to make time when half the group ain’t up to it.”

  “I second that,” Dallas said. He took a quick swig of mescal and tossed the canteen toward Rollins. “I second that, for damn sure.”

  Marshall turned this over in his mind. “Could be you got something there,” he said at last. “We ain’t exactly shoveling coal up the devil’s ass, if you know what I mean.” He waited, but none of the others indicated whether they did or not. “But you could look at it another way. You could figure the larger the force, the stronger. Maybe give these two coloreds some arms and let them fight along with us. Y’all would like that, wouldn’t ya?”