Stagecoach to Purgatory

by Peter Brandvold

  He continued down the hall and ran out an unlatched door. He stopped just outside, near a clothesline and several piles of split stove wood and an old black, sheet-iron stove. Beyond, a man was running away from Prophet, straight out between two ancient cabins sitting side by side in tall brush and prickly pear.

  Hoof thuds rose to Prophet’s left. He turned as Louisa galloped past him, grabbing the coiled riata from her saddle horn. “I got him.”

  Prophet jogged after Louisa and the man she was chasing. Just as Prophet ran out from between the two ancient cabins and into the open, Louisa twirled the riata about a hundred feet beyond him. She let it sail. The running man screamed and fell. Dust rose.

  A minute later, Louisa trotted her pinto toward Prophet, dragging her quarry behind her.

  She dragged the man up beside Lou and stopped her horse. Her quarry lay writhing belly down on the ground.

  He was a grisly spectacle, his right arm in a bloody sling. Another bloody bandage was wrapped around his belly. He’d been wearing only the bottoms of a pair of longhandles, the top having been hacked off. The dragging, however, had nearly stripped the longhandles off him. One side was bunched around a knee. The other side dangled off his right ankle.

  One sock was gone. The other was hanging from his big toe.

  He was so dirty that Prophet probably wouldn’t have recognized him if he’d been lying faceup.

  Deciding to find out, Prophet hooked his boot under the man’s left shoulder and turned him over. The man groaned, gritting his teeth. “Easy, easy—I ain’t . . . I ain’t in a good way here!” he cried.

  His hair was shorter than Prophet remembered. He wore about three days’ growth of beard on his severely, crudely chiseled face with broad cheekbones and spade-shaped jaw. A bull-horn tattoo with the name Audrina in smeared blue letters marked his throat, behind the beard stubble. From his chin hung a goatee with a six-inch braid hanging down the middle of it, dangling toward his chest.

  “Charlie Butters, you handsome dog,” Prophet said.

  Butters lay on his back, groaning. “I . . . I ain’t in a good way here at all, Lou.”

  “I couldn’t feel sorrier for you, Charlie.”

  “You don’t understand,” Butters said, glaring up at Prophet and showing his teeth like a feral dog. His eyes were the frosty blue of the northern sky in January. An eerie shade of blue—a wild, demented hue. Prophet had thought so the first time he’d met the man, and he thought the same again now. “I’m hurt real, real bad. What’s more, I didn’t deserve none of it!”

  Louisa said, “Tell that to the family of the six-year-old boy and eighty-year-old retired schoolteacher you killed in Alva. Tell it to the families of everyone in the bank you slaughtered just so they couldn’t identify you!”

  That last part she yelled, drawing one of her pretty Colts and clicking back the hammer.

  “Easy, now,” Prophet said, holding up his hand. He knew that once Louisa’s fuse was lit, the powder keg would likely blow. “I know it’s tempting as hell, but we’re not out here to fill this demon so full of holes he’ll rattle when he walks. We don’t have a dead-or-alive circular on this one, partner. Besides, he already rattles. We just have to get poor, misunderstood Charlie back to Carson’s Wash. Alive.”

  The realization carved deep gullies across Louisa’s forehead, beneath the brim of her Stetson. “Oh.” A hard pause, a deeply consternated expression. “That’s right.” She quirked an ironically frigid smile. “Did you just feel the devil tickle your toes, Butters? You were sure close to hell there for a minute.”

  “Damn,” Butters said. “That’s Bonaventure, ain’t it?”

  “Forgive my rudeness,” Prophet said. “Charlie Butters, meet Louisa Bonaventure, otherwise known as the Vengeance Queen. Louisa, meet Charlie.”

  “Hello, Charlie.”

  “She’s crazy!” Butters cried as Prophet hauled him to his feet. “I heard tell she’s crazier’n an owl in a lightnin’ storm!”

  Running footsteps sounded. Louisa’s horse gave a start.

  Prophet shoved Butters back down to the ground and planted a boot on his chest as he unholstered his Colt and turned back toward the cabin. The girl from inside the shack was just now running out from between the two moldering shacks. For the first time Prophet saw that her belly bulged behind the threadbare apron she wore over a shapeless gray, crudely sewn dress.

  The girl was at least a few months pregnant.

  She ran hard, breath rasping in and out of her lungs. She didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon, so Prophet depressed his Colt’s hammer and lowered the piece, throwing up his other hand, palm out.

  “Hold on, now, girl.”

  “Please, don’t hurt him!” the girl cried, half sobbing, as she stopped a few feet away, staring down in worry at Charlie Butters. “Please, don’t hurt him! He didn’t do what they said he did, Charlie didn’t. Charlie ain’t like that no more!”

  “Jackie, go on back to the cabin,” Charlie said. “You shouldn’t be runnin’ like that. It ain’t good for the baby.”

  Louisa had a tight rein on her jittery pinto. In her other hand she held her Colt, barrel up. She glared down at Butters as she said, “Is that child yours, Butters?” Prophet heard the hard, menacing edge in her voice.

  Ah, hell, he thought. She’s gonna kill this buzzard yet and it ain’t that he don’t deserve it but we got other fish to fry . . .

  “Louisa, holster that damn pistol,” he ordered tightly. He slid his gaze between Butters and the girl, Jackie. “Let’s all just settle down. Butters is goin’ to town to stand trial for the murder of Max Dahlstrom, an’ that’s all there is to it.”

  “Charlie ain’t like how he used to be,” Jackie said, pleadingly, to Prophet. “He ain’t that man no more. He didn’t kill Dahlstrom—did you, Charlie? Please, let him go, mister. Charlie deserves a second chance!”

  “He’s gonna get a fair trial,” Prophet said, adding for emphasis, “this time.”

  “You can’t take him all the way back to Carson’s Wash. It’s too far. Look at him—you’ve opened up his wounds. He’ll bleed to death if you make him ride that far.”

  Prophet looked down at Butters. Fresh blood stained the already-blood-spotted bandages. Butters was pasty pale, his face shrunken. He stared up at Prophet, who kept his boot pressed down taut against the man’s chest. Butters’s eyes were pain racked, but a faint, mocking smile twitched his lips.

  “Oh, Charlie!” Jackie cried, and dropped to her knees beside Butters. “Look what they’ve done to you! Are you hurt bad?”

  Butters didn’t respond. He just stared up at Prophet with that same, vaguely jeering look.

  “All right,” Prophet said, removing his boot from the killer’s chest. “We’ll take him back inside. Miss Jackie, you can tend to those wounds, get the bleedin’ stopped, put on some fresh bandages if you see fit. But then Charlie is comin’ along with us back to Carson’s Wash.”

  The girl scowled up at Prophet. “My pa and brothers are not gonna like that one bit, mister!”

  “Where are your pa and brothers?” Prophet asked, glancing around. The whereabouts of the Lowry men had been a nasty thorn poking around in the back of his brain ever since he’d entered the cabin to find only the two women, and Butters skinning out the back door.

  “They went to Mexico for fresh stock, but they’ll be back just any day now. Might even be today. Charlie’s kin. We Lowrys and Butterses are close blood!”

  “Yeah, I see that,” Prophet dryly quipped, glancing down at the girl’s bulging belly. “Tell me, sweetheart, did you really let this mangy cur spew his foul seed into you?”

  The girl bunched her lips and glared so hard at Prophet that the corners of her eyes danced. Butters only laughed and, rolling onto his belly then rising to his hands and knees, said, “She sure did! An’ it didn’t take much convincin’, did it, Jackie-girl?” Butters grunted as the girl helped him to his feet and hooked his good arm around her neck. “She sees the
good in me, Jackie does.”

  “I do see the good in you, Charlie Butters,” Jackie said as she began leading Butters back toward the cabin. “Because there is good in you. It just took some peaceful livin’ an’ hard work at the ranch with Pa an’ me an’ the boys an’ the old lady to make it come out.”

  “We shouldn’t be shilly-shallying around here, Lou,” Louisa said. “We should get that killer on a horse and get him on the trail back to Carson’s Wash. Like the girl said, the Lowrys could be back anytime.”

  “It ain’t gonna do much good to let Butters bleed to death, since your boyfriend needs him alive—now, is it?” Prophet snapped at his partner as he began following Butters and Jackie toward the cabin. He glanced again at Louisa and said, “Why don’t you make yourself useful and fetch my hoss? While you’re at it, cut Tom Lowry down from his horse and saddle a fresh one for Butters.”

  “Any other orders?” Louisa said tightly as she turned the pinto wide around the two ruined shacks and gave it the spurs.

  “That’ll do for now!”

  Prophet slowed his pace. Jackie and Butters had stopped just ahead of him. They were both staring toward the corral in shocked silence. The girl said in a pinched, quavering voice, “I thought I recognized Tom’s horse.”

  Butters looked over his right shoulder at Prophet. “Did you go and kill my cousin Tom, Lou?”

  “No, I didn’t kill him,” Prophet said. “Whoever sicced him on me with that Henry repeater is the one that killed him.”

  Jackie wheeled to glare teary-eyed at Prophet, and yelled, “You’ll pay double for that, you big, ugly lummox! Tom Lowry is my brother!”

  “Sooner or later we all pay double, sweetheart,” Prophet said. “Just get the proud father of that bun in your oven back into the cabin and get those wounds tended or we’ll forgo the doctorin’ altogether, an’ I’ll tie him belly down over his horse and gallop him all the way back to Carson’s Wash!”

  “I can’t wait for my pap and my brothers to get back from Mexico,” the girl said, shaking her head slowly at Prophet, narrowing her eyes. “There’ll be nowhere you can hide they won’t run you down!”

  Chapter 11

  “I’m sure your kin will know where to find me,” Prophet told the enraged girl. “And if they’re anything like your beloved Charlie here, I’ll enjoy shakin’ their hands and kickin’ ’em out with cold shovels. In the meantime, kindly move your ass!”

  Jackie told Prophet to do something physically impossible to himself then continued helping her beloved Charlie Butters to the cabin. Prophet followed them through the back door, aiming his Winchester at the pair’s backs.

  As the girl started to help Butters into the room with the bloody bed, Prophet said, “Nuh-uh. We’re all gonna get cozy in the main room with Grandmom.”

  “What I need to tend his wounds is in here.”

  “Fetch it quick. I’ll be watchin’.”

  The girl eased Butters back against the hall’s right wall then cast Prophet another hard glare before striding into the bedroom. Butters was breathing hard and sweating. He turned his mocking grin on Prophet one more time.

  “Ain’t she a caution?”

  “She’s somethin’,” Prophet said, keeping an eye on Jackie as she gathered some strips of flannel in her arms then swept up some bottles from a dresser.

  The girl glared at Prophet once more as she stepped out into the hall and then, having gathered up the bottles and bandages into her apron, helped Butters into the main part of the cabin. As Prophet stepped through the curtained doorway, he saw the old woman sitting at the table, holding a small, copper crucifix in her gnarled hands that appeared swollen and purple with arthritis. One elbow rested on a large family Bible. She was so sun seared that she looked vaguely Indian. Her light brown eyes were milky with cataracts. Her coarse silver hair was swept straight back and up into a tight bun.

  The old woman looked up as Prophet and the other two entered. Her eyes didn’t focus. She turned her head this way and that, trying to pick up sights and sounds. Nearly deaf and nearly blind. Badly disoriented and worried. She didn’t say anything. She just sat staring into space.

  When Jackie had eased Butters into a chair at the table, she turned to the old woman and said loudly, “Go to your room, Gran. Everything is gonna be all right!” The girl’s voice broke on this last, and she turned her gaze to look out the window at the horse packing her dead brother, Tom Lowry, standing by the corral. Louisa was over there now, tying Mean and Ugly to a corral slat.

  The old woman turned her head slowly toward Jackie, grizzled brows beetled.

  “Go to your room, Gran!” Jackie yelled.

  Prophet walked over to the old woman, placed a hand on her forearm. He squeezed it gently, reassuringly, silently offering help.

  Outside was a hammering explosion. It made the entire shack jump.

  Jackie gasped.

  Prophet jerked away from the old woman, raising his rifle in both hands and loudly racking a cartridge into the chamber. He peered through the window left of the door. The yard had suddenly gone dark. Rain like silver dollars plopped into the dirt, making small craters. He could hear it pelting the roof.

  Prophet’s heart gradually slowed. He’d expected to turn to the window to face a hail of hot lead.

  Behind him, Butters laughed. “Damn, Lou, you look like you thought my uncle and cousins was home!”

  The girl, crouched over Butters, laughed then, too.

  “You know what, Lou?” Butters said, smiling out the window. “I don’t think we’re goin’ anywhere today!”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Prophet said. “Rain never lasts that long out here, and you know it. I ’spect the sky’ll be clear in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  He turned to the old woman again, and helped her up out of her chair. Jackie told him which room was Gran’s, and, letting the old woman hold his arm, walked her to the door in the shack’s far right wall. He opened the door, led the old woman into the small but tidy room, then turned away. He heard a faint clink, saw a thick shadow move on the floor to his left.

  He whipped around as the old woman lunged heavily toward him with a knitting needle sequestered in both her knobby hands. Prophet raised his left hand and wrapped it around the old woman’s two hands clutching the needle, and saved himself a nasty poke.

  “Law!” the old woman hissed, staring at Prophet but not seeing him through her wide, angry, milky eyes. Her breath was hot and fetid. “Filthy law scum!”

  Behind him, Butters and Jackie laughed.

  Prophet plucked the needle out of the old woman’s hands. He knew she probably had more in her room, but he held on to this one, anyway. He gave her a gentle shove onto the edge of the tightly made bed, the woman still glaring at him, flaring her nostrils at him like an angry dog.

  Then he walked back out into the main part of the shack and drew the old woman’s door closed behind him.

  Butters and Jackie were still laughing, jeeringly, as Jackie removed the bloody bandage around Butters’s right arm.

  Prophet sighed.

  He looked outside again. The rain was hammering violently down. Already the yard was a bog. Louisa ran up onto the narrow front veranda, water sluicing off her hat brim. She opened the door, bolted inside, and slammed the door quickly behind her.

  She was soaked, her clothes hanging on her supple frame. Her blond hair was pasted to the shoulders of her wet blouse. Leaning back against the door, she looked toward Prophet, her gaze fateful, and said, “Gully-washer. All-nighter, looks like.”

  “That’s all right,” Butters said with mock good cheer, glancing around the cabin. “Plenty of room here. Nice, tight cabin. And my Jackie-girl can cook a right tasty stew!”

  Another thunderclap rattled the windows.

  The rain was like the symphony of some angry, malevolent god being played on the roof.

  * * *

  “Look at him sleepin’ there . . . just like an angel,” Jackie said much later, well
after dark.

  The storm had stopped, circled back, dumped another load of rain and hail, and was now drifting off to the northeast. It was grumbling into the distance, lightning flashing, like an angry dog after a violent fight over a particularly tasty bone.

  The night air was cool in the cabin. Prophet had laid a small fire in the hearth. It crackled and popped softly, sending the tang of mesquite into the shack.

  Now, sitting at the kitchen table with Jackie, rolling a cigarette from his makings sack, Prophet followed the pregnant girl’s gaze to her “angel,” Charlie Butters, who lay on a worn leather fainting couch near the fire, on the parlor side of the cabin. He lay on his back, a tattered star quilt drawn up to his chin. His eyes were closed. He was snoring softly, thin-lipped mouth opening and closing with each audible breath. The little braid dangling from his chin trailed over the edge of the quilt—a grisly-looking thing.

  A little devil’s tail.

  “Angel layin’ there, huh?” Prophet grunted, rolling the quirley closed in his thick, red-brown fingers. “That ain’t the comparison I would have made. I would have called him a big, fat, poisonous snake, but I reckon you see ole Charlie through different eyes than me.”

  Jackie turned to Prophet. The bounty hunter sat with his back to the kitchen, where he could keep his eye on the front door and front windows. Jackie sat across from him, her back to the door. Her eyes were hurt, angry. “I know Charlie better than you—now, don’t I?”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “All his life. He grew up around here. His pa and my pa is cousins. They was raised out east.”

  By “out east,” Prophet assumed she meant East Texas. Texas was the world to most born-and-raised, dyed-in-the-wool Texans.

  “How long you been . . . ?”

  “Goin’ on a year now. We got to fancyin’ each other when Charlie rode over to here to listen to Gran preach to us all about the Bible Sunday mornings, and pray over our bowed heads.”

  “Yeah, Gran seems real pious.” Prophet glanced at the knitting needle lying on the table, near both his Winchester and sawed-off Richards, which lay there as well, within easy reach.