Storm's Thunder

by Brandon Boyce

  I break from my cover and sprint up the hill—all the way to the top—and dive onto my belly, raising the rifle to shoot prone. Long-hair drives the horse hard down the back slope, gaining momentum. They hit the flat ground and the horse digs in, racing for the safety of darkness. Short-hair clings on for dear life, both arms bear-hugging his kinsman to stay aboard. I pull the trigger, the shot echoing up the arroyo. Short-hair arches his back, and then slumps, but still he holds on. The horse passes through the light of the fires and then disappears into black.

  * * *

  With Ballentine’s help, I get George and Owens and Owens’s little girl back to what’s left of the group. The old woman’s husband died, but she proves pretty good with a sewing needle and gets Owen’s head stitched back up. Owens is so eaten up with anguish that the pain of the needle hardly earns a grimace. He just pets the little girl’s hair and tells her we’ll get mamma and Jimmy Junior back soon enough, until she finally falls asleep. As for George, the bullet passes clean through his side and by some miracle missed anything important. The wound, or its infection, might kill him, but I doubt it’ll kill him tonight. Then Ballentine and I fetch little Reggie from his hiding place and Spooner has to lure him out with a stick of chewing gum. Before heading back I stop at the horse I had killed and ask his forgiveness and make a promise that I will bring him oats and sugar when we meet again on the Spirit Side. Then I lead Ballentine and Reggie back to the others. The old woman weeps with delight at the discovery of the boy and takes Reggie down the way to get him cleaned off.

  Owens sits up, testing his strength. “I’m going after ’em. Tonight.”

  “Don’t be silly, Owens.” Spooner handing him a flask. “We’ll get the army after them.”

  “And in the meantime, what you think those savages are doing to her, huh? And my boy. My sweet boy.” Owens takes a drink, then he looks at me.

  “Them Apaches took your stallion. We’ll go after them together.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Hell, we can’t.”

  “There’s no horses.”

  “What you mean, ‘no horses’?”

  “I been up and down the train, there’s no more horses. Half them Dazers was doubled up riding outta here.” Owens looks around, we all do. Dead horses are as much part of the landscape as a burning sagebrush or a gutted Pullman.

  All I want to do is go after Storm. The thought of him under some strict Apache, biding his time, confused—turns my stomach. I can track the Apaches on foot. And I can track them at night. But I can’t track them on foot at night, not at the speed they’re going. As much as it kills me, I have to wait until dawn to have any chance of seeing Storm again.

  I say, “First light, I’m heading out on foot.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Owens handing me the flask.

  “I can’t say we’re going the same direction. The boy says Storm went south, but your Apaches headed north, same as the White Men.”

  “That may have just been convenience. Maybe them Apaches are all fixing to rendezvous elsewhere.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I travel better alone. You do like Spooner tells you.”

  “Ain’t nobody tells a man I can’t go after my own wife.”

  “I ain’t telling you can’t go.” I look down and make sure the little girl is sleeping. “I’m telling you, sure as morning, they’ll kill you. And that sweet girl there is an orphan. Let the army handle it. They don’t take kindly to Indians running off with white women.”

  “The army ain’t gonna do jackshit to find my wife and boy.”

  “Now hold on,” Spooner says. “I’ll go to my grave before I praise a Union soldier, but I’m inclined to agree with Harlan on this.”

  “And I’m telling you, the army is gonna go after one thing only. Their money.”

  “Their money?” Spooner crinkling his nose.

  “You boys didn’t see into that safe like I did. Them gold bars was wrapped up in bands that said ‘U.S. Department of War’ all over them. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “Oh my God,” Spooner realizing. “They stole the army’s pay.”

  “That spy they had on board, that’s how they knew which train it was,” I say, all of us piecing it together now.

  “Exactly. Bunch of pissed-off soliders looking to get revenge on the army. Hell, that’s how I’d do it. Rob it blind.”

  “Crazy Dazers,” Spooner says. I finish his thought.

  “Not so crazy after all.”

  * * *

  I get up from the others and head down toward the front of the train in search of supplies. I see a flash of movement out in the arroyo and make out a human figure climbing down from the hillside. In all the confusion with Apaches and the fires and the boy, I’d forgotten about the sniper. We all had. And yet without him, none of us would be alive. He walks out of the darkness, his jacket hanging open.

  “You don’t look surprised to see me,” he says.

  “You think I don’t know the sound of my own rifle. You’re the only one knew where it was.”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind,” Burke says.

  “Mind? You’re better with it than I am.”

  “I doubt that sincerely.”

  “Two shots, two kills. That’s how you started off.”

  “True, but the first shot, I was aiming for a different fella.” Burke smiles. “This Spencer of yours pulls strong to the left.”

  “That it does. And it took you all of one shot to make the adjustment.”

  Burke nods, staring out at the horizon of a distant, but powerful, memory.

  “Second Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers.” He hands over the rifle. A soldier’s habits die hard, even twenty years removed. I made Burke for infantry the moment he picked up the Spencer aboard the train. But the way he shot it—the precise firing, the subterfuge at avoiding detection, and the maddening terror caused by such an unrelenting assault—that is another animal altogether.

  My mind imagines a string of dead, Southern rebels—gray tunics stained with blood—who fell at the hands of a killer they never saw. Burke’s facility as a sniper speaks of unheralded stories I’ll bet rarely cross Burke’s lips, except on long whiskey-soaked nights around the fire.

  “I didn’t have no clean shot to save the Pinkerton. Y’all was too close.”

  “Pinkerton could’ve saved himself.”

  “And I was already climbing down when this last tussle broke out. I couldn’t see anything. Mrs. Owens, she all right?”

  “They took her. And their boy. We got the little girl back.”

  “Lord have mercy.” Burke shakes his head, his eyes grave.

  “Burke, ain’t nobody hold a grudge on anything you done. Weren’t for you, we’d be dead.” Burke looks up at the small campfire near the others and then back at me.

  “What you out here looking for?”

  “Supplies. Heading out at dawn. You go up to the fire, get yourself warm.”

  “All the same, Mister Harlan. I think I’ll tag along with you for now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The small hours of night creep forward in a maddening cycle of restless sleep and mind-numbing wakefulness, punctuated by crying fits from the injured and bouts of choking, eye-stinging coughs brought on by a smothering blanket of smoke. The fires have nearly burned themselves out a dozen times, only to kick back up in a gusting wind and by dawn, burn themselves out again. I lay on the ground, scouring the heavens, until the first streak of pale shatters the blackness of the eastern sky and then I get moving.

  “You done looked over those provisions ten times already,” Burke watching me through a half-closed eye from his perch against an upturned boxcar.

  “Nothing else to do,” brushing myself off. I managed to piece together a pretty good haul of supplies during the night. A couple of dead Dazers gave me a shotgun and a second pistol and all the ammunition I can carry, including plenty for the Spencer. Burke showed me how to get back to my berth. Mo
st of the car had been obliterated, but somehow the fire missed it. One half of the compartment had been smashed like a tin can, yet the other half remained bizarrely intact. Just yesterday—stepping through that door the first time, handing my bags to Burke along with a good tip—it seems like a lifetime ago. I found my other suit still on its hanger and switched into it. The saddlebags were wedged so tight I could only get one of them out, but one will do fine.

  Next I sniffed out the galley car and scrounged up some food—canned peaches, tomato juice, and in the icebox, an entire ham. I hacked off a chunk of the ham and folded it into a napkin and put it in the saddlebag with the canned goods and carried the rest of the ham over to the campfire for the others. The men tore into it while the old woman fed little bites to the children like baby birds.

  “They got a ham up there,” I say to Burke. “Going fast, though,” the sky lightening behind us.

  “I got some pork ’n’ beans, some of them canned peaches. I’ll be all right.” Burke folds up his bedroll and stuffs it into the sack he’d been using as a pillow. He looks like a man fixing to light out, same as I do. “Mister Harlan, you tell those folks I was down here?”

  “No. I got the impression you didn’t want them to know.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Though I ’spect they’re all itching to know who their sharpshooting angel is.”

  “Well, if they’re already thinking ’twas an angel, far be it for me to step on the toes of God Almighty.”

  A sound turns my head—a high metallic zing—soft, but rising steady. I look upward, over my shoulder, at the pair of steel rails, jutting from the high ground of the track to the nothing space where the trestle once stood.

  “Train coming,” I say.

  I look to the campfire. Reggie’s young ears—well-tuned to the rails—are the first to hear it.

  “Train’s coming! Train’s coming!” The boy leaps up, pointing at the high road. The zinging gets louder. A fat plume of gray billows upward against the pastel sky.

  “I hear it now, small train.” Burke cocks his head, his ear picking apart the subtlety. “It’s barely crawling. He’s riding the brake.” Burke shakes his head, frowning.

  “That means they know the road’s out. Looking to stop.”

  “Time for me to go,” Burke slinging the sack over his shoulder.

  “Hold up a minute.”

  “Best I move along.”

  “What’s eating you, Burke? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Burke stops, turns back, his shoulders slumping. “I killed white people.”

  “You saved white people.”

  “That don’t change the first part.”

  “They was killing whites too. A lot of them. Ain’t nobody more deserving of death than them what done all this.”

  “You know that, I know that, but I ain’t interested in seeing that fact get chopped up, and turned around, and twisted into something it ain’t. You know how this go. Time goes by, the truth get inter-pretized, people hungry for justice that ain’t there. Because the only fact that ain’t never gonna change is that this here old nigger killed himself some white people.”

  “I’ll stand in court and tell it square, exactly as it happened.”

  Burke blinks his big, brown eyes and stares straight through me. “Men like you and me got no business staking our lives to the minds of white people.”

  I never told Burke about me, but he knows. And by his face, he knows that I know that he knows. Any argument on the subject would insult us both.

  “Where you headed?”

  “West,” Burke says, looking off to the horizon.

  “Hard country, that way.”

  “I’ll manage. If you’re smart, you’ll set out right now too.”

  “I’m right behind you. Just gonna help load the injured.”

  The brakes of the train squeal loud and hard behind us, the whistle pealing—tinny and sharp, nothing like the Santa Fe’s mighty roar. Burke shakes his head.

  “I got a bad feeling about that train.” The moment Burke says it, I know I have a bad feeling too. Every instinct says to pick up my bag and start off South and don’t look back. But I was raised that you don’t leave people behind, not once you get to feeling responsible for them. Two days ago I didn’t know Spooner Ballentine, or James Owens—and George, I didn’t even like him—but once you’ve fought side-by-side with a man, against other men who are trying to kill you, a bond forges that don’t break easy.

  “I can’t just leave,” I say. Burke nods. He understands. Then I say, “You got a gun?”

  “I’ll scurry up an iron on the way out.”

  “Hang on.” I pick up the Spencer and toss it through the air. Burke catches it, a stunned look on his face.

  “You lost your mind?”

  “Keep it. You need a good rifle.”

  “This your weapon, son. This here a part of you.” I can’t argue with Burke on that. That rifle seen as much with me as the stallion has.

  “Tell you what, hang on to it for me. I might need it back someday.”

  “Oh sure, once old Burke fix that nasty pull you put in it, gets it working proper for a change. Listen here, I put the work in, I ain’t likely to let it go.”

  “Then I’ll know it’ll be in good hands.”

  Burke tips his porter’s cap. “That it be,” he says. Then he disappears through the wreckage as the Big Eye breaks over the mountains.

  * * *

  Ballentine helps Owens to his feet, and George gets up on his own accord, using a thin wood plank as a crutch. He grimaces as he starts moving, the bandage around his lower ribcage soaked reddish brown.

  “You should be lying down,” I say.

  “Hell with that.” Once again, the pageantry of an arriving train—even one as small as this—proves too irresistible to miss. The children run up ahead, the old woman trying to keep up.

  “Not too far ahead, Eleanor. Stay close to Mrs. Whitehurst,” Owens calling to his daughter. “I can’t see right. I see three of everything.”

  “If we have to shoot anybody, aim for the one in the middle,” Ballentine says.

  “Maybe let us do the shooting,” I say. “Is everyone armed?”

  Ballentine pats his coat pocket and I see Owens has a pistol stuck in the back of his trousers.

  “I’ll never be unarmed again as long as I live,” George flashing me a knife in his boot and that sawed-off four-ten in his belt.

  “Gentlemen,” Spooner says, “I’m inclined to believe the need for firearms has passed.”

  I want to share in Spooner’s optimism, but with every step the bad feeling grows a little stronger. We work our way up the slope toward the tracks. Reggie bounds up the rocks like a jackrabbit. Spooner looks back over his shoulder, the elevation giving a newfound perspective to the scope and calamity of the wreckage.

  “Considering how far we fell, it’s a miracle the crash didn’t kill us all.”

  “We weren’t meant to die here,” George says. “That’s the only reason we ain’t dead.”

  * * *

  We reach the high, flat ground where the road runs, sweat beading our necks, the sun now well clear of the mountains. Two hundred yards down-track, a locomotive crawls toward us, the engineer’s head hanging from the side portal as he scrutinizes the condition of the rail. He waves his arm and the children wave back and then a crewman jumps down and runs along side, relaying the remaining distance back to the driver.

  “Well, I may be punch-drunk,” Owens shaking his head, “but I think I’m looking at the shortest train I’ve ever seen.”

  The engine hauls behind it a tender and a single caboose and nothing more. But as it draws near, the fineness of its lone passenger car—paneled in dark wood and fresh-painted with gold and green trim—makes clear that this train carries someone important, the man who hired it. A bright Union flag snaps crisp in the breeze. The caboose reminds me of a stagecoach I saw once—the stateliest and most fab
ulous vehicle to ever roll into the Bend. All it brought with it was a mess of trouble.

  “You need to stop right there,” Owens yells. “Are they as close as I think?’

  “Halt your train!” Spooner amplifying the sentiment.

  The young crewman sprints ahead in our direction, his eyes wide as saucers when his brain registers the ripped-apart rails and sudden drop where the trestle used to be. He spins and throws his hands up.

  “Stop!”

  Owens grabs hold of his daughter. The old woman—Whitehurst, her name—snags Reggie’s wrist and detains the squirming boy as the lone brakeman lays into his lever. The train hisses to a halt.

  “Good God,” the young crewman says, “what happened to the bridge?”

  “Son,” Ballentine says, “you need to prepare yourself.”

  The crewman walks to the edge where the road ends and stares down at the view. His whole body slumps. The rest of the crew—the brakeman, a fireman and the engineer—disembark and tend to their immediate duties, but the looming spectacle tugs at their attention.

  “How’s it look, Teddy?” the engineer’s face heavy with concern. The young crewman—Teddy—doesn’t answer. He looks down at a quarter mile of tangled steel and smoking lumber and begins to weep. The fireman lays a two-step platform at the door of the caboose for the passengers and doesn’t wait for the door to open. He runs to join Teddy. Our raggedy group holds its ground—disinclined to take in a vista that needs no reinforcement in our minds.

  The engineer strides past us, “What happened here?” he says without stopping. None of us knows how to answer that, and we let him go see for himself. He reaches the end of the road and stops. A throaty sound—like he’d been gut-punched—comes out of him and he drops to his knees.

  The brakeman cranks open the caboose door and steps aside, revealing a small man in a brown suit—brown head to toe—waiting there, impatient. The brown man’s gaze falls—unwavering—upon our group, as though the attack of the Santa Fe, and the presentation of its aftermath, bore not the slightest curiosity for him. A second man, heavier, with a graying beard and a big-gauge—no, make that two shotguns—falls in behind the brown man and the two of them stride with determined purpose toward our position.