Lonnie Gentry

by Peter Brandvold

  Lonnie walked slowly forward so the horse wouldn’t spook. The General wasn’t normally the spooky type, but he didn’t normally hear as much gunfire, either. Lonnie didn’t want to chance the horse galloping off and leaving him out here on foot, with a crazed lawman dogging his heels.

  Why the men had been after him, he had no idea. All he knew is they’d been shooting first, apparently content to ask questions later, and now that Lonnie had inadvertently shot one of them, he was probably more wanted now than he’d been before.

  He wanted to get home—back to the relative safety and comfort of the ranch. Not that the law couldn’t follow him there, but where else could he go?

  He managed to walk up on General Sherman without unduly frightening the horse. When he had a hold of the reins that were dusty and cracked from being dragged and stepped on, he adjusted the saddle, which had slipped onto the horse’s left side during the General’s run out of the mountains.

  “Thanks a bunch for leavin’ me up there, General,” Lonnie said, grunting as he pulled the latigo tight. He glanced toward the eerily quiet ridge bathed in golden, late-afternoon sunshine. “Really appreciate your loyalty in extreme circumstances, you ole hayburner.”

  The horse whickered and testily stomped its front left hoof down close to Lonnie’s right boot. The horse had a jeering cast in the big, brown eye it was directing at Lonnie.

  “You step on my foot, galldangit,” Lonnie said, talking only because he was nervous, his blood still surging, “I’ll bite one of your ears off. How would you like that, you old cayuse?”

  The General gave another testy whicker.

  Lonnie toed a stirrup and, grabbing the horn with his left hand, the cantle with his right, heaved himself up into the leather. He turned the horse and headed south along the willows lining the gurgling stream. The General bounced into a spine-jarring trot. Glancing once more toward the ridge, Lonnie touched his spurs to the horse’s flanks, and the General shook his head again testily and lunged forward into a rocking lope.

  He and the horse ate up the ground, making their way along Willow Creek for two miles before Lonnie turned the horse across the shallow stream and followed Wolf Creek, which fed Willow Creek from the north, toward a distant ridge. His ranch lay at the foot of that ridge. He considered it his since only he and his mother lived there now, his father having died so long ago that Lonnie couldn’t even remember what Calvin Gentry had looked like.

  Three years was a long time to a thirteen-year-old boy.

  Lonnie couldn’t see the cabin and barn until after he and the General had ridden hard another twenty minutes, rising and falling over a couple of low hills stippled in pines and aspens, following a two-track wagon trail. Dropping down off the shoulder of the last hill, he saw smoke lifting from the cabin’s stone chimney and making a soft, gray wash against the pine-and fir-cloaked ridge behind it. The ridge was turning darker and fuzzier now as the sun fell behind the shadowed, western mountains.

  The General followed the trail through the ranch portal, which was a stout birch log stretched between the tops of two peeled pine poles driven into the ground on each side of the trail. The birch plank had the Gentry Circle G brand burned into it. The name GENTRY had been painted in an arc over the brand, but the paint had long since faded so that you could only make out the name if you were right up on it and were looking for it.

  Beyond the portal, the General shook his head and whickered disconcertingly. The horse stopped, and Lonnie tensed as he stared over the General’s head and into the yard, which consisted of the one-and-a-half-story, shake-shingled log cabin, sitting with its back to the ridge, on Lonnie’s left, and the barn and corrals on his right, across the yard from the cabin. There were a few outbuildings, including a keeper shed for meat and vegetables, as well as a small bunkhouse used by the two or three hands Lonnie’s mother hired during the spring and fall roundups but which sat empty for most of the summer and all of the winter.

  As Lonnie looked around, he saw that what had troubled the General were the three strange horses in the pole corral on the near side of the barn, standing separately from the half dozen horses in the Gentry remuda. The horses were eating the fresh hay that had been forked to them from the crib fronting the corral.

  They were what bothered the General. What bothered Lonnie, however, were the men the horses obviously belonged to— the three men sitting on the cabin’s long, brush-roofed front stoop.

  CHAPTER 4

  The man on the porch who bothered Lonnie the most was the big, rangy, hawk-nosed, blond-headed man on whose knee Lonnie’s mother was sitting, though, seeing Lonnie, she climbed awkwardly to her feet and cast sheepish glances toward her son, grinning with embarrassment and swatting at the blond gent’s grabby hands.

  Maybelline Gentry apparently hadn’t seen her son ride up. She’d been too busy making time with Shannon Dupree, the big blond gent who was funning with Lonnie’s mother, grabbing at her skirts and apron while casting his jeering, hawkish gaze into the yard at Lonnie.

  The other men sat around Dupree—two dull-eyed tough nuts Lonnie recognized from previous visits. The short, stocky man with long, black hair and wearing a necklace of wolf teeth over his buckskin shirt, which was open halfway down his chest, was a man whom Lonnie knew only as Fuego. Fuego was half Indian, probably Arapaho. He rarely smiled or even spoke, and the few times Lonnie had seen him, he’d reminded the boy of a dangerous, wild beast who always smelled so strongly of sour sweat that it had made Lonnie’s eyes water.

  The other, younger man wearing a thin, sandy-colored mustache and sideburns and whose pale-blue eyes were set too close together, was Childress. Childress smiled a lot but in a mocking way, not in a friendly one. It was as though he were always thinking about a joke he could play on someone else. Lonnie thought his first name was Jake, or something like that. Dupree, Childress, and Fuego all rode together.

  A Winchester rifle leaned against the front of the cabin, between Dupree and Fuego. The three were passing a bottle around and staring at Lonnie with expressions stretching the gamut from bland indifference to sneering condescension.

  Those snakes formed knots again in Lonnie’s gut. Everything was coming clear, and he was fighting not only fear of who might be following him, but fury at the men sitting so casually on the stoop of his own cabin. Yes, his cabin. He may have only been thirteen, but the cabin was half his, because he did the work of a full-grown man around the place, and without him, there would no longer be any ranch in the wake of his father’s passing.

  Without Lonnie, his mother would have headed back to Arapaho Creek. Shannon Dupree came by every once in a while. He’d play at being a rancher for a few days or weeks at a time, but mostly he’d play at being Lonnie’s boss while he caused more work than he accomplished and spent most of the day drinking and eating or “taking naps” with Lonnie’s mother.

  Lonnie booted the General ahead, turning him toward the barn. He kept his eyes off the men on the cabin’s porch, as though his not seeing them meant they were no longer there.

  He knew they were still there, though. He also knew that their presence here at the Circle G meant trouble. Probably had already meant trouble. Everybody knew that Shannon Dupree and the men with him were outlaws. They’d likely robbed a stagecoach or a bank or something, and that’s why the lawmen had been on the ridge earlier. The lawdogs had probably lost Dupree’s trail and had been looking around for him when they’d run into Lonnie, and, not getting a good look at him, probably thought he was one of Dupree’s bunch.

  Because of Shannon Dupree, Lonnie Gentry was a killer.

  Lonnie trembled as he swung down from the General’s back. The barn doors were standing partway open. He swung them wide and led the General inside.

  As he reached under the buckskin’s belly for the latigo, footsteps sounded behind him. He glanced through the barn’s open doors and out into the soft saffron light mixing with the deepening shadows and the cottony smoke from the cabin’s chimney. T
he smoke was perfumed with the tang of burning piñon. Lonnie’s mother, Maybelline Gentry, was walking toward the barn, holding her yellow skirt and the hem of her white petticoat above her black patent, side-button shoes.

  Lonnie’s mother was a pretty woman. She turned heads everywhere she went. Lonnie didn’t like that about her. He didn’t like the way men looked at her, the way Shannon and the other men on the porch were looking at her now as she strode toward the barn, her yellow-blonde hair hanging in a strategically messy braid down the right side of her head, with many vagrant strands sliding against her peach-colored cheeks. She’d gussied herself up for Dupree in a fresh yellow housedress, which hugged her a little too tightly, with white lace collar and sleeve cuffs. Lonnie thought she’d added a little blush to her face and red paint lips.

  Lonnie often wished he had a fat, ugly mother like Oscar Lomax’s mother on Dead Mormon Creek, so that men would leave her—and Lonnie—alone.

  Lonnie turned back to his work as she entered the barn. He considered whether he should tell her about the trouble—about his having killed the lawman. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to get it off his chest in the worst way.

  At the same time, it felt like too much of a confession right now, in light of the presence of Shannon Dupree. He didn’t want Dupree to know. He thought his killing someone might cause Dupree to think that he, Lonnie, now had some sort of kinship with Dupree, a known outlaw. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Dupree had likely killed many men though Lonnie didn’t know that for sure.

  Lonnie had shot that lawman accidentally, and he just wanted to forget it had happened. It sure as hell didn’t mean that Lonnie was anything like that cross-grained, bottom-feeding trash, Dupree.

  “What’s he doing here?” Lonnie said, reaching up to slide the saddle off the General’s back.

  May Gentry stopped inside the barn door. “He rode in this morning, right after you rode out.”

  She had a light, free and easy tone, and Lonnie turned to see that her cheeks were flushed and that her blue eyes were fairly glowing, as though a lamp inside her head had been turned up bright. The sick, shaky feeling inside of Lonnie, the feeling that he’d been stabbed with a rusty knife and that the blade was still in there, twisting, got even worse.

  It was the look on his mother’s face that had made it worse.

  “Oh, no,” Lonnie thought, feeling his knees quake. “Oh … no...!”

  His mother was smiling and fiddling with her hair. As she glanced back toward the cabin where the three outlaws were passing the bottle on the porch and laughing and talking in secret, jovial tones, she said in a quiet, delighted little voice that made Lonnie want to vomit again—“Lonnie, honey—I have most wonderful news. Shannon’s asked for my hand!”

  CHAPTER 5

  A hard knot formed in Lonnie’s throat. His head was swimming. So much to take in: killing a lawman only hours earlier, Dupree here at the Circle G with Fuego and Childress. Now, on top of all that, Dupree had asked his mother to marry him.

  A man Lonnie hated above any other he’d ever known—even more than he hated the Devil—had asked his mother to marry him.

  Lonnie already knew the answer to his next question, but, hell, things really couldn’t get any worse than they already were. So he drew a deep, calming breath, and asked, “What … what’d you say, Momma?”

  May Gentry smiled down at Lonnie angelically. He could tell it was not only her love for Shannon Dupree that made her look that way. She’d probably taken a couple of nips from Dupree’s bottle. But she blinked, and the angelic smile lost some of its luster. She wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose and stepped toward Lonnie, turning her mouth corners down and tilting her head to one side.

  “It’ll be all right, Lon. Really, it will.”

  “What’d you tell him, Momma?” Lonnie couldn’t help the way that had come out. His nerves were jumping around beneath his skin like the baby snakes he’d once seen writhing around inside an old cabin wall, and he hadn’t been able to keep himself from practically shouting the question.

  His mother’s face turned sunset red. She bunched her lips, then her arm swung up and forward, and crack! The palm of her right hand smacked Lonnie’s left cheek. It felt as though she’d laid a hot iron against that side of his head.

  Lonnie grunted and stepped back. Tears welled in his eyes and a sob was rising in his throat like a slow croak, but he fought back both the tears and the sob, blinking his eyes and swallowing hard. There was a toughness in Lonnie Gentry that sometimes surprised even him. He wasn’t sure where it had come from. It was sort of like realizing your hands were no longer sore after a hard day’s work, because they’d acquired a hard layer of calluses.

  That’s kind of what had happened to Lonnie’s heart over the past three years, since his father had died and he’d had to take over responsibility for the bulk of the outdoor work around the Circle G, knowing that if he couldn’t keep up, he and his mother would either starve or they’d have to head to Arapaho Creek and maybe live in a boarding house.

  Lonnie wasn’t sure which would have been worse. He just knew he wouldn’t want to do either. So he worked twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day during the busy seasons—during spring calving, the summer hay cutting, and the fall branding and roundup. And somehow, doing a man’s work at thirteen had given the boy a working man’s thick skin that only a few things could penetrate.

  A slap wasn’t one of them.

  That seemed to puzzle his mother, who stared down at him, frowning, until she glanced toward the cabin, and said in a hard, accusing voice, “You never have liked Shannon.” She turned back to Lonnie, lines of anger cut across her lightly tanned forehead. “No, he’s not your father. But he could be, if you’d let him. You probably don’t remember, since you were so young, but your father was no saint. No man is. There is no such thing, Lonnie. But we could use a man to take charge around here—you an’ me.”

  “Leave me out of it.” Lonnie knew he’d crossed a line there, but there was so much fear and anger surging inside him, he couldn’t hold it all back. “We’re doin’ fine, Momma.”

  “We’ve done all right, but we need help.”

  “I don’t need no help. All Dupree ever does when he’s here is suck on a bottle the way the calves suck the heifers’ teats. Besides …”

  Lonnie glanced toward the cabin. One of Dupree’s “boys”—he always called them “the boys” though they were as old as Dupree, well into their thirties—walked around the front of the cabin and headed toward the privy flanking the place. Jake Childress’s feet looked a little light and unsteady. He had to reach out and grab the cabin wall to establish his balance.

  Dupree and Fuego were still on the porch, smoking and taking turns with the bottle, as they stared toward the barn, their seedy eyes glued to Lonnie’s mother, who was only twenty-seven. She’d had Lonnie when she was fourteen. Fuego had the Winchester across his knees now, and he was rubbing it down with a rag, a quirley smoldering between his lips.

  “Besides what?” Lonnie’s mother said.

  Lonnie licked his lips and canted his head in the direction of the cabin. “Besides, you know what they been up to? Before they came here? You know where they were?”

  “They were working over at the Fifty-Five Connected for Mort Bradley in the Mummy Range. Why?”

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “What are you saying, Lonnie?”

  “How do you know they didn’t rob a bank or somethin’?”

  “Because Shannon told me months back they were through with all of that. Shannon did his time. He’s a changed man. I don’t like how you’re talking to me, Lonnie. I hate that tone. You know that.” May Gentry glanced toward the cabin and lowered her voice. “And I will not have you talking Shannon down to me anymore.”

  “I saw some lawmen up Willow Run,” Lonnie blurted out, his knees feeling weak again. He could not confess the killing. Not to his mother, not to anyone. It was just to
o awful. “I seen some lawmen … from a distance. They wore badges, and they were carryin’ rifles and they were looking around at the ground like they were trackin’ someone. Outlaws, maybe.”

  A dark cloud of apprehension scudded across May Gentry’s face. She studied Lonnie pensively, then she said in a quiet, defensive tone, “There’s plenty of outlaws in these mountains,” she said. “You know the Never Summer range is their favorite place to hole up after they committed some robbery in Cheyenne or Julesburg. There aren’t enough lawmen to cover all this country …”

  Mrs. Gentry let her voice trail off and she glanced back at the cabin. Shannon Dupree lifted his head to peer over his boots resting on the porch rail, and called, “When’s supper, May? Me an’ the boys are so hungry our bellies are startin’ to think our throats have been cut!”

  Lonnie’s mother forced a smile and waved. “Comin’ hon,” she yelled. To Lonnie, she said, “Supper’s ready. Get washed up.”

  “I ain’t hungry,” Lonnie said, pulling a curry brush off a nail.

  “Finish with the General and get washed up,” his mother said firmly, and headed back to the cabin. “Scrub beneath your fingernails and comb your hair. Like it or not, this is a special night.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Lonnie took his time with the General, first wiping him down with a scrap of burlap sacking and then slowly currying his coat. He checked all four hooves to make sure they hadn’t picked up any sharp rocks or thorns, and cut burrs out of the General’s tail. When he was sure the horse had cooled down enough, he brought him a bucket of water, and when the General was finished drawing water, Lonnie looped a feed sack of oats over the horse’s ears.

  When he’d turned the stallion into the corral with the other horses, he forked some hay from the crib and turned to the cabin. Lonnie gave a ragged sigh. It was nearly dark now, only a little green light left in the sky. The high, forested ridges that rimmed the ranch yard were black as ink. A lone wolf was howling somewhere on the mountain behind the cabin.