Storm's Thunder

by Brandon Boyce

  “Rest your mind, Mister Van Zant. I inquired about the trains before we left the Bend. It seems the railroads don’t run on my schedule. I’ll have to see what I can do about that.” Van Zant smiled. That was as close to humor as Cross got. But Van Zant knew that Cross was only half-kidding. He’d seen the sonofabitch move bigger mountains than getting the railroad bosses to rejigger a few timetables.

  Saulito sat with his back to them in the rear of the buggy, his arms bound behind him, his eyes skyward. The sound escaping his mouth was like nothing Van Zant had ever heard—something between a chant and the weeping of a child.

  “What’s he carrying on about?” Van Zant asked.

  “He’s praying. Would you like him to stop?”

  “Far be it for me to come between a man and his maker.”

  “It’s hardly his maker,” Cross nearly spitting with contempt. “If that heathen could understand the benevolent grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. Instead what you’re hearing is wasted breath to the Great Spirit. Waka Tana.” He turned and barked something to Saulito. The Apache stopped praying.

  “That’s better,” Cross said.

  “Pretty country,” Van Zant nodding toward the Sangres.

  “Hmm.” Cross sat back and took it in for himself. “You never saw a great buffalo run, did you?”

  “Nah. They was all gone by the time I come west.”

  “I saw many as a boy. A sight like nothing else. A swirling sea of darkness. Like a thunderstorm. Only louder. Shook the ground for twenty miles. Even after they’d passed through, their dust would blacken the sky for hours. The next day I’d still feel the rumble in my bones.”

  “They didn’t run this far south though, did they?”

  “Oh, yes. Long time ago. Ran clear to Arizona.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “One buffalo could pound this wagon to splinters if the notion took him. Imagine what ten thousand could do. And yet, whole generations—his ancestors,” Cross jabbed a thumb toward his prisoner—“armed with nothing more than sticks and stones hunted them, and lived off them, for thousands of years. How do you think they managed that?”

  “Well, if you’re asking,” Van Zant doing his best to answer without driving off the cliff, “I reckon they run their horses up alongside and spear ’em.”

  “Ah, but you’re implying they had horses. Go back farther, centuries. Even before the Spanish came with horses to trade, when the Indians roamed on foot. How then?”

  Van Zant shrugged, his mind too occupied with keeping the bay on solid ground to entertain a parlor game.

  “I need to piss,” Cross said. Van Zant halted the wagon. Cross climbed down and walked around the back of the buggy to the other side and undid himself while Van Zant stared straight ahead. He didn’t much care to witness another man relieve himself, but when it came to Cross, he found a strange comfort in it because—just like when Cross ate, or slept, neither of which seemed to happen very often—it made him human. And sometimes, Van Zant had his doubts. The water splashed down the sheer rock face and then trickled to a stop.

  “Well?” Cross said, buttoning himself up. “What is your answer?” Cross walked over along the edge of the trail and stopped next to Van Zant.

  “I don’t rightly know, sir.”

  “Gravity.” Cross grinned, his lips curling back to expose the white of his teeth. “They’d herd the buffalo toward a cliff, until the animals had nowhere else to go but over.”

  “Golly.”

  “Such is domination of man over beast.”

  Then Jacob Cross turned behind him, yanked Saulito down from the wagon, and hurled him over the cliff. The Apache screamed until he hit bottom.

  Cross climbed back into his seat. “We don’t have time for San Carlos.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Spanish named it The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi, and even though it has grown into a straggling aggregation of low adobe huts that make it the biggest town in the territory, Storm manages to gobble through the entirety of Santa Fe in all of two minutes. “Takes longer to speak it than to cross it,” I tell him as the last of the buildings gives way and we find ourselves on a bluff, staring southward at a sweeping blanket of sagebrush that slopes down for miles before leveling off at the valley floor and then rising again at the foothills of the Sangres. Storm blows hard from the sprint, harder than usual. I ease him down into a canter and let him shake out his legs on a ribbon of level ground. Then we stop in earnest. Storm is tired and I need a think.

  You think better when we ride.

  “And sometimes I require a ponder what without my bones jangled, or you thundering my ears into deafness,” I say, removing my hat to cool the sweat in the high desert air. A young shoot of milkweed within striking distance proves too irresistible for Storm and he dips for it, not minding a hoot what my thoughts on the matter might be. “I saw that.” Storm gulps it, but dares not test me on going for seconds. The sky above blazes deep turquoise and the blooming sage flavors the breeze. “And as far as thinking places go, we could do considerable worse than what we find ourselves offered presently.”

  All at once we hear something else riding atop the breeze, both our heads turning left as the faint, lonely whine of a train whistle rolls up from the valley. I replace my hat to lessen the glare and make out a scratch of unnatural blackness cutting a line, straight as an arrow, across the valley floor. The whine comes again, softer as the locomotive charges away from us, followed by an eruption of gray vapor from its leading edge.

  “Maybe it might be the best way after all.” For all the vulgarity of its mechanized intrusion into the landscape—its coughing and clattering—I find myself drawn to the rhythms of the churning wheels, seduced by the Great Step Forward that is the rail. The truth is, the mysteries and riches of California lay at a distance too daunting from where we stand at present to be conquered by one man and his horse, even one as fearless as the stallion. We might just survive the treachery of the mountains and the pounding heat of the desert that lies beyond, but the third challenge—the one that stamps its bloody imprint onto my mind’s eye even as I try to shunt it out—tips the scale beyond recovery into the domain of madness. Those naked, butchered bodies entombed upriver speak to a roving evil that surely has not sated its lust for blood.

  I paw through my coat until my fingers find the rounded edges of the brass buckle, the letters U.S. as gleaming as they were in the sunlight a day earlier. If a detachment of trained army cavalry, to which I am certain this hardware belonged, could offer only pitiful resistance to such an overwhelming defeat, then the considerable faith I stock in my own skill of survival would do little more than drag out my death and prolong the inevitable, as those responsible would eventually track me down. “We both managed to keep our balls this long, I ’spect we deserve to die with them still attached.” Storm throws that eye he gives me whenever I’m not sure if I have been thinking out loud.

  I bring him about toward town again and we start back the way we came. No sense in leaving a conversation unfinished once I start it anyway. “Good news is we both get to bed down soft tonight. Right now, the plan is we slip back into town so I can sort out this train business.” Storm decides to point out the bad news by stopping dead in his tracks, giving me a chance to reconsider. I heel him forward and he blows a long one. “Yeah, I know we made two enemies already, but I don’t think they will be up and about anytime soon.”

  * * *

  Near the edge of town I dismount and lead Storm by the bridle into the alley that flanks the shops along the main drag. We creep silent in the tall weeds, one ear trained up the road for any afterclaps of the previous scuffle, or a pair of curious eyes that may connect us to it. But in the harsh glare of late-morning, the only sound in this quiet corner is the droning, relentless wind. A single line of track extends off to the left, dead-ending at a cluster of low buildings, newly erected with sturdy pine and fresh pain
t unfaded by the sun. A square hut in the center, closest to the track, shows an “open” sign in the window. From a pole atop the roof, the Stars and Stripes rips stiffly, just above a second flag carrying the brilliant colors of the Santa Fe line. This must be the place. There is nothing quite as still as a train depot an hour after departure. I skirt around the rear of the ticket hut, where a second window, obscured from any view of town, faces the rail line as it winnows out toward the horizon.

  “You stay put.” I ground-tie Storm and, not wanting a repeat of the earlier temptation, take the Spencer with me as I float up the steps of the ticket office. The door creaks open. Stepping inside, I am greeted in the close quarters by the broad backside of a man, stooped over, as he works a pile of collected dirt into a dustpan with a short-handled broom. He rights himself as the door bangs closed and, turning around, startles at the sight of me.

  “We got no cash here.”

  “What?”

  “Lock-box went out with the 10:14. All I got what’s in the till, enough to break a twenty note and that’s it.” He is a big man, crammed into a suit two sizes too small, with orangey-red hair cropped short beneath a ticket clerk’s black cap. My second ginger of the day. And my second problem. He thinks I have come to rob him.

  “I’m here to book passage.” The man stares at me, dumbfounded, all googly-eyed and razor-burned. “Aboard the Santa Fe . . . Am I in the right place?”

  “Lordy, fella. I thought this was a stick-up.”

  “Sorry to disappoint. But if thieving’s a worry, you might consider stocking more iron than that Derringer in your hand.” The clerk shrugs and flashes the tiny one-shotter jutting from his meaty fist. It was a slick draw though. Against a slower eye, he might had a chance.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not behind the counter.” He says, returning through the locked door into the barred cage that separates clerk from customer and where, I have no doubt, nothing less than a twenty-gauge lays within easy reach. The robber barons of the East have seen fit to instill admirable precaution in their expansion westward. “And I’ll tell you something, buster,” he begins, reddening in the face and addressing me now—noticeably—as buster. “You’ll do yourself a kindness to stand down on the fire power. This here’s a respectable business.”

  “No aggression intended,” my palms open now.

  “You must be from out backcountry,” he says, letting his contempt fly.

  “Not so back. But not so settled a man don’t travel armed, indoors or out.”

  “Well aboard the Santa Fe, gentlemen are expected to keep all weapons in their war bag. That goes for the Spencer and them pearly Colts.” The clerk blows a long, imposed-upon breath before taking his time opening the ticket book. “Destination?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “We’ll get you as far as Barstow. You change there for the line north.”

  “How long to Barstow?”

  “Four days.” The clerk runs his finger down a list of numbers. “Let’s see, third-class to Barstow set you back two-dollars-fifty.”

  “Third-class. What’s that get me?”

  “A seat on a bench.”

  The clerk scribbles something in his book. “Next train leaves here eight past midnight tonight. Is it just you?”

  “Me and the horse.”

  “Your horse?”

  “That stallion, there.” I jab a thumb toward the window and Storm, sensing the attention, flutters his gleaming mane against the breeze.

  “Fine-looking animal,” the man says, pawing through a drawer for a second booklet.

  “Don’t he know it.”

  “He’ll need a tariff for the stock car. Two dollars.”

  “Stock car. Hmm.”

  “That a problem?”

  “For your stock, it is. Best for everybody if Storm keeps to himself.”

  “Well, only other option is a thoroughbred stall. That’s how we move racehorses. Gets his own feed and fresh hay daily.”

  “That’ll do.”

  “It’s fourteen dollars.”

  I reach into my pocket and return with a stack of gold coins, riffling them slow and loud between my fingers. His eyebrow raised, the clerk says, “That rules out the midnight train. I have to wire Topeka, put in a request for a horse car. Hopefully there’s one already coming through. Your new departure time . . .” the man thumbing through his papers, “is one-twenty-five tomorrow afternoon. Now that’s from the Lamy Junction, not from here, you understand? The train can’t get up here.”

  “I saw an engine rumble out of here an hour ago.”

  “Yeah, that’s the spur. It connects with the ATSF main line out Lamy. That’s seventeen miles from here.”

  “Seems like I’ll be needing a ticket for the spur on top, then.”

  “If it was just you, that would be fine, but there’s no car for your animal. It’s a smaller gauge track. Just two cars for shuttling passengers.”

  “You’re telling me a train everybody calls the Santa Fe don’t quite make it to Santa Fe.”

  “You have stumbled on the great irony. The fine city of Santa Fe sits at an elevation just high enough to defeat even the brightest engineers of the rail line that bears its name. The powers that be, therefore, had to come up with an alternate solution. Hence this shiny new depot and the one at the other end, named for his holiness the archbishop. I trust you can get yourself and your stallion to the depot at Lamy by one tomorrow?”

  I gaze out at the ribbon of track, straight as a rifle barrel until it gently fades down and to the right near the horizon. The gleaming rails still hold their steel-mill luster, and so green are the softwood ties that their piney scent—mixed with the acrid spike of fresh creosote—filters through the closed window with full pungency. All vegetation has been cut back from the tracks for as far as the eye can see, leaving a pleasant width on either side to pass.

  “I can’t follow a track downhill for seventeen miles, I might as well lay down on it,” I say.

  “I’ll need your name?” The clerk dipping his pen.

  “Seems to me, you don’t.”

  “What?” The clerk looking up, puzzled.

  “My name. I understand it, that ticket there gets me on the train. My name don’t figure into it.”

  “No, for the ticket, you are correct. But if you ever want to see your horse again, you’ll be needing this here tariff receipt to match up with the name I’ll be adding to the manifest.” He holds his gaze on me and I let the silence ice over like day-old snow. Finally he breaks off and rubs his neck, his breath shallow.

  “Name of Two-Trees,” I say. “Harlan Two-Trees.”

  The corners of his mouth tighten. He swallows hard—a sickening brew of castor bean and turned milk. He starts to scratch out my name, and with every pen stroke, the distaste reverberates through his fingers, as if setting the letters down in ink is to somehow lend them credence. A cold tingle curls up my spine.

  He peels the ticket from his book and slaps it onto the counter as an image powers to the front of my brain. Four days on a bench, my only landscape the sad faces sitting across from me. I remember the steerage cars that would rumble past the Bend, with their tiny windows. Nothing to look at. Nothing to breathe but hot, sickly air. A thousand nights I could sleep most comfortable beneath the church of the starry sky, only firm earth for a mattress. But to willingly entomb myself with the White Man’s pox-ridden, consumptive air—when I am flush with the means to do otherwise—rings dumber than a prop bet at a travelling faro game.

  “Third class, plus the tariff. That comes to—”

  “I think I’d rather stretch on a bed, now you’ve set my mind to it.”

  “No beds in third-class. Bench seating only.”

  “Guess I better splash out for second, then.”

  “No. Second-class is cargo.”

  “Cargo. Sounds like freight travel better than a man.”

  “It’s just a term. Read no deeper meaning in it.”

  “I reckon I’
ll go by way of first, then.”

  The clerk eyes me sharply. “If by first, you mean the Palace Car—but I don’t recommend that. It might make you uncomfortable, rubbing shoulders with the tea-and-cake crowd.”

  “No. Would it make them uncomfortable?”

  “We don’t like to upset our passengers.”

  “I’m a passenger.”

  “Not yet, you’re not.” And that is when the curling tingle settles cold and heavy in the back of my throat. He tries to stiffen up behind his words, but then he makes the mistake of meeting my eye. “It’s not a cheap ticket,” the clerk says, trying a new course. “Why, a private drawing room, that would run you twenty-eight dollars.”

  “I don’t need all that. Just a bed.”

  “There would still be shared amenities with the other passengers. Common areas.”

  “I ain’t fussed to be sharing.”

  “Now you know that’s not the point.”

  “Tell me the price on the bed.”

  “A shared berth is seven dollars fifty. But I can’t sell you that.”

  “My money spends, same as the next man’s.”

  “I can’t because I can’t have you bunking with a—because it’d be my job. I can only sell you a double berth, and that’s fifteen.”

  “Done,” I say, no more interest in his words. I stride twice to the counter—his eyes widening—and smack some coins down in front of the cage. “Fourteen and fifteen make twenty-nine,” I say, pulling my hand back to reveal three ten-dollar pieces. “That there extra dollar’s for you, to make sure there’s a stall and fresh hay for my friend. Are we transacted?” The clerk nods weakly, passing his hand over the coins and pulling them through the cage. “I’ll give you the tariff receipt.”

  He separates the tariff in two pieces and slides one half through the bars. I look at the scribbling and hold it up for him to read. “What’s that say there?”