Bullets Over Bedlam

by Peter Brandvold

  On the other side of the river, where the cartridge had sunk, water rippled, splashed by a small, silver tail.

  Hawk stood and raised the pole above the stream. The fish rose from the water and tail-danced across the surface as Hawk swung it toward him and grabbed it out of the air.

  He turned a smile toward Juliana. “A brooky. Just like the ones I used to catch with my—” He cut himself off, stared at the slippery body writhing in his hand.

  Standing beside him, Juliana regarded him soberly. “Your son?”

  Hawk removed the fish from the hook, dropped it in a wicker basket lined with mint.

  “And the braid that fell out of the saddlebag last night. That belonged to your wife.”

  Hunkered down beside the basket, Hawk turned to her. “How? . . .”

  “I overheard men talking in the cantina while you were gone. You are the vigilante lawman from the north.”

  Hawk dropped his gaze. He hadn’t thought anyone in the village had heard of him, much less recognized him. News traveled fast, even to the remotest places on the frontier, it seemed. Traveling, he often used the alias George Hollis. He hadn’t thought he’d have had to use it here.

  “They said your son was murdered. Hanged. And your wife hanged herself out of grief.”

  “From a tree in our backyard.” Hawk looked at her. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

  “I was waiting for you to tell me.” She stared at him for a time, the sunlight glittering in her eyes. Then she dropped down beside him, threw her arms around his neck. “Gideon, I am sorry! You can find peace here . . . with me. You can forget!”

  Hawk wiped the fish slime from his hand, pulled her toward him. He held her tightly for a while, savoring the warmth of her supple body against his, brushing away spruce needles that had caught in her hair as they’d led a burro down the southern ridge.

  “Come on,” he said pushing her away and kissing her cheek. “We’re gonna need more fish than that for lunch. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”

  He rose and baited his hook with another cricket and tossed the line into the stream. She watched him for a time, eyes dark and pensive, then stood, retrieved her own pole, and tossed the line into the creek.

  Behind her, the burro chewed leaves from a willow branch. The crunching sound mingled with the stream’s rush and the forlorn cry of a hawk circling high above the crenellated canyon walls.

  Later, as Hawk dropped his third small brook trout into the wicker basket, he turned to Juliana. She sat along the stream, her back against a boulder, the pole in her hands, long, tan legs stretched toward the water. Her face was tipped up to the sun.

  “I’ll fetch wood for a fire.”

  She glanced at him over her shoulder, eyes brightening. “No, wait. I know a better place for a picnic.” She rose and retrieved her line, then slid her pole under a strap on the burro’s back. When she’d untied the animal, she began leading him upstream, beckoning to Hawk as she made her way barefoot along the rock slabs sloping toward the creek.

  “Come. I will show you a secret place!” She walked a few more steps, then turned another glance toward him, her eyes bright with conspiracy. “But you have to promise not to tell another soul!”

  Hawk chuffed and threw the basket over his shoulder. Hitching his gun belt on his hips, he grabbed his Henry rifle and began following the girl along the canyon’s stony floor. They traced a bend, forded the stream, and meandered along a side canyon cloaked in cool shadows and cut down the middle by a meandering freshet. The girl walked along the base of the canyon’s right ridge—a sheer slab of andosite shooting straight up toward the sky, the wall pocked here and there with swallows’ nests.

  A golden eagle swooped through the canyon, so close to Hawk’s left shoulder that he could see the keen, copper eyes, see the wind rippling the dun feathers, and feel the whoosh of wind as it passed.

  Juliana stopped, tethered the burro to an ironwood shrub, and slung a burlap pouch around her neck. She glanced at Hawk coming up behind her, then crouched down beside an oval cleft low in the canyon wall. She met his gaze, smiled beguilingly, then dropped to her knees and scuttled into the cave.

  Hawk frowned, concern stabbing him. Clefts in canyon walls were favorite haunts of mountain lions, even bears. “Hey, where you going?”

  “Follow me!” Her voice was muffled by rock, and he realized the cleft must be deeper than he’d thought.

  Hawk glanced at the burro. The burro regarded him dully, twitched its ears, then chewed some leaves off the ironwood bush.

  Hawk adjusted the basket’s strap on his shoulder, knelt down, and, leaning on his Henry’s butt, peered into the cleft. It smelled stony, not as musty as he’d imagined, as if somehow it was vented from within. He couldn’t see much. What he assumed was the girl’s shadow shuffled back in the gauzy purple depths.

  Hawk looked around, his innate wariness of enclosed places pricking the hair under his collar. Reasonably sure that he and the girl were alone in the canyon, he dropped to all fours and slid into the cavern.

  He crawled under a low ceiling for ten feet before it suddenly rose and he was able to stand. The passage here was a good seven feet high.

  “This way!” The girl’s voice sounded sepulchral, echoing faintly off the rock walls.

  Hawk peered straight into the mountain. Juliana stood sideways, peering back at him. She was silhouetted by the natural light beyond her.

  As Hawk started forward, she turned and continued moving through the narrow corridor. He kept her slender figure in sight as he moved between the pitted, jutting walls, stepping over rocks and cracks, hearing his boots squishing slightly on the damp, uneven floor.

  As if from far away, water trickled tinnily.

  “Hurry!” Ahead, Juliana had stopped in what appeared to be a broadening of the corridor. Natural light fell down around her, glistening in her long black hair. “It’s going good today!”

  “What’s going good?” Hawk muttered, continuing forward and running his hand along the wall, noting the flecks of fool’s gold etched into the andosite, the smell of bat guano tainting the otherwise fresh, damp air pushing against his face.

  His boots and spurs began echoing more loudly as he approached the opening. The sound of tumbling water grew louder, as well, the humidity rising. Juliana had drifted from sight. The soft, blue daylight before him was etched by a fine mist.

  The walls on both sides pulled away as he strode into a large oval room. Thirty feet above the floor, the ceiling slanted at a forty-five-degree angle, a good half of it missing, as if a lid had been opened onto the blue desert sky.

  The room’s floor was strewn with the rubble that had once been the ceiling. On the room’s right side, water tumbled into the opening from the mountain slope above. It splashed over the strewn rubble and flowed down into a crack it had carved deep into the floor, the black, bubbling water churning out of sight somewhere below.

  Hawk didn’t look at the underground river for long.

  Juliana herself had captured his attention, standing as she was—glistening wet and naked—on a pile of black rocks at the base of the waterfall.

  Hawk’s heart quickened as he watched her turning this way and that in the tumbling water, her dark hair pasted against her head and back. Her heavy breasts jutted proudly, swaying as she moved and laughed, turning to show him her slender curving back and round, pale buttocks over which the water slid then tumbled about her feet.

  She turned a complete circle, faced him again, ran her hands under her breasts, cupping them and lifting them and throwing her head back and opening her mouth to the water—a beautiful, bewitching desert sprite.

  He ran his eyes from her navel to her breasts and then to her face. She stared at him, her broad smile filled with girlish charm. “This is my secret place. I found it long ago, when I was just a kid. You won’t tell anyone?”

  “Your secret’s good with me,” Hawk said, staring at her, transfixed.

 
“Come,” she cried, “the water’s fresh!”

  Hawk dropped the fish, stood his rifle against the wall, and was out of his boots and clothes in less than a minute. Naked except for the bandage encircling his chest, he climbed the rubble, felt the icy mist pushing against him, then stepped into the cold stream tumbling down the wall . . . and into Juliana’s outstretched arms.

  The cold water did nothing to dampen his desire.

  He ripped off the bandage, tossed it away, and held the girl close, kissing her deeply, running his hands up and down her wet back and buttocks. Finally, he sat on a boulder behind the falling water, drew her onto his lap, and spread her legs.

  Sucking his lips and tongue into her mouth, she straddled him, pressing her firm breasts against his chest, the jutting nipples prodding him gently. She adjusted her hips and thighs, pressing her hands against his face, groaning.

  And then she slid over him.

  10.

  END OF THE TRAIL

  NEARLY twenty-four hours after coming upon the ambuscade in Charley’s Wash, D.W. Flagg crested a high ridge and pulled back on his steeldust’s reins.

  He squinted into the canyon gaping before him, the thatch roofs and red-tile roofs of the pueblito’s humble dwellings shimmering in the late afternoon sun. The river winding along the south side of the village glistened like the skin of a Mojave green rattler.

  The six deputies drew rein on either side of the marshal, their sweating horses blowing and nickering as their hooves, heavy from miles of continuous travel, scuffed the talcumlike trail dust and clattered on the rocks.

  “Bedlam,” snorted Franco Villard, reading the faded sign leaning along the trail. “What the hell kinda name is that?”

  The others snorted and chuckled while Hound-Dog took a long swig from his canteen, the water dribbling into his sweat-soaked beard.

  Flagg’s expression remained implacable. “Not long after gold was discovered in these mountains, a crazy prospector killed his three partners with a pickax. Then he killed a padre, a couple putas, and a vaquero passing through town.” The marshal’s eyes ranged along the floor of the canyon. “Appropriate that a crazy lawman would end up here.”

  “Why you so sure Hawk’s still here?” asked Miller. “He might have had a mouthful of whiskey in the cantina, and rode on.”

  “The trail ends here,” Flagg said. “There’s no village beyond here. The only trails are old Indian or prospector tracks. Deep canyons, real devil country, all the way to Mexico.”

  Scowling warily into the canyon, Hound-Dog looped his canteen over his saddle horn and rested his shotgun across his knees, his finger through the trigger guard. “How we gonna play it? There must be twenty, thirty shacks down there. He could be holed up in any one of ’em.”

  “We start with the bartender, and go from there.” Flagg kneed his steeldust down the hill and into the canyon.

  Villard chuckled and gigged his horse after Flagg. “Good idea.”

  The seven lawmen rode two abreast, dropping gradually between the motley collection of ancient Mexican hovels and prospectors’ shacks. Only a few people, mostly old, leathery-featured Mexican men, milled about the street. As the procession passed a cracked, brush-roofed adobe, an old Mexican woman in a sacklike white dress and bright green shawl regarded them from a clothesline sagging between two spindly pepper trees. A goat near a well coping watched her closely, as if fascinated by her industry.

  A low fire burned in the yard. A little boy, long black hair hanging in his eyes, poked in the fire with a stick. Glaring at the lawmen, the old woman yelled at the boy, beckoning, then, grabbing the boy’s hand, ambled into her shack. She cast the lawmen one more angry glance, then closed and locked the door with an angry click of a thrown bolt.

  “You think she’s gonna invite us to supper?” Hound-Dog quipped to Franco Villard.

  Hound-Dog stopped chuckling when he heard sharp, frenetic panting to his right. He turned to see a small, three-legged dog—mostly white but with a black snout and a black ring around its right eye—dash out from a gap between two board shacks and head for Hound-Dog’s horse. When the dog closed to within four feet of Hound-Dog’s chestnut, the mutt barked shrilly. The tired horse, startled by the unexpected attack, whinnied and reared. Hound-Dog, as fatigued and surprised as his horse, grabbed at the saddle horn, missed, and flew back off the horse’s left hip.

  Cursing shrilly, he hit the ground on his back.

  As his horse sidled away, snorting indignantly at the angry cur, the dog closed its small jaws over Hound-Dog’s trouser cuff. Growling like a miniature bobcat, it gave the cuff several fierce shakes before releasing it, backing up, and yipping into Hound-Dog’s face, its tiny eyes pinched with spite.

  “Goddamn mutt!” Hound-Dog clawed his Colt from its holster, and thumbed back the hammer. The dog seemed to know what the big deputy intended. It pivoted on its one rear heel and ran back the way it had come.

  Hound-Dog aimed and fired. The bullet plunked a rain barrel as the dog dashed behind it, disappearing into the gap between the shacks.

  Press Miller had grabbed the reins of Hound-Dog’s skittish chestnut.

  Flagg turned his own horse toward the deputy still floundering on his backside, Colt extended.

  “Deputy, holster your revolver!” Flagg’s jaws were clamped with fury. “Get back on your goddamn horse and try to look like a professional instead of a drunken court jester!”

  Hound-Dog had lost his hat, and his sweat-streaked face was even dustier than before. Lowering the pistol, he looked up at Flagg with a wounded expression.

  Behind him, Miller laughed. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to shoot a three-legged cur, Tuttle?”

  Ignoring the chuckles of the other men around him, Hound-Dog holstered the Colt, grabbed his hat, and heaved himself to his feet. Cursing under his breath, he climbed gingerly into the saddle, the leather creaking beneath his weight, the chestnut rolling its eyes warily.

  “Keep your eyes skinned,” Flagg ordered the men, glancing sharply along the street at the mostly empty windows staring back at him. “That shot probably announced us to Hawk.” He added through gritted teeth to Hound-Dog, “You stupid bastard!”

  Villard gave Hound-Dog a menacing look.

  “Damn dog scared my horse!” the big deputy retorted, slapping his dusty hat against his thigh.

  Flagg flared his bloodshot eyes at him. “Shut up!”

  The procession continued down the street, angling toward the town’s lone cantina on the street’s right side—a big structure hammered together from milled lumber during the prospecting boom, and painted spruce green, with dark-blue lettering above the porch roof announcing TATE GREEN’S SALOON. On a bullet-scarred shingle hanging from two rusty chains beneath the awning, sun-faded letters boasted, “Best Wimen in the Territory!”

  Two vaqueros in steeple-crowned sombreros and bright serapes stood on the porch, holding beer mugs and staring at the approaching lawmen. Both men wore looks of bemusement, but the expressions faded as Flagg drew up before the hitch rack and swung down from his saddle. As the lawman looped his reins over the rack and mounted the stoop, the eyes of both vaqueros acquired guarded, wary casts.

  One removed a brown paper cigarette from his mouth as Flagg stopped before him and shuttled a bland stare between the men. The marshal reached inside his corduroy jacket to remove a quarter-folded sheet from his shirt pocket. His black-gloved, right hand shook the paper open, turned it toward the two vaqueros.

  Flies buzzed around the beer glasses as the men lowered their gazes to the Wanted dodger.

  “Ever see this man?” Flagg asked, waving the flies away from the beer with his left hand.

  The taller of the two men lifted his eyes to Flagg. His face was so sun-seared it looked black behind a two-day growth of beard. He shook his head.

  Flagg glanced at the shorter man. A fly crawled around in the man’s beer-damp, salt-and-pepper beard. “No, senor.”

  Flagg stared into the man�
��s eyes, glanced at the other lawmen behind him, then turned and sauntered through the batwing doors. The other lawmen, each glaring in turn at the two vaqueros, followed Flagg into the building. All but Bill Houston, that was. The tall Texas lawman paused before the two vaqueros.

  “You bean eaters better be sure you never saw Hawk.” Houston spit tobacco quid onto the shorter man’s scuffed, high-heeled boots. “I find out otherwise, I’ll fix ye so you have to take your food mashed up in tequila and drink it from a beer glass.”

  Houston spit a quid on the taller man’s boots, then turned and pushed through the batwings.

  Inside the cantina, Flagg moved slowly toward the bar in the shadows at the back of the big, wood-floored room. There was only one customer, a gray-bearded old Mexican wearing a ratty brown poncho, relaxing at a table to Flagg’s left.

  A lump on the left side of the poncho bespoke a pistol in a shoulder holster. When the old Mexican looked up from his beer glass, two tequila glasses on the table before him, Flagg saw the scarred cheeks and the eye patch over the right eye. The scars were two matching Xs, carved by an Arkansas toothpick across each cheekbone. The same weapon had poked out the eye.

  I’ll be damned, Flagg thought. Palomar Rojas. The marshal would have recognized those scars anywhere—received from the deputy sheriff Rojas had cuckolded some twenty years ago in Fort Worth, even before Flagg himself had once hunted the old border rough for rustling Texas seed bulls back and forth across the Mexican border. He’d never caught the man. Long ago, he’d heard he’d been killed by Lipan Apaches.

  If the old man recognized Flagg, he gave no indication. He glanced at the marshal and the six deputies with keen interest—it wasn’t every day a half dozen territorial lawmen rode into Bedlam—then hunkered low in his chair and buried his face in his beer schooner. He probably wasn’t rustling anymore, but he still had paper on him . . . as well as a contempt for lawmen.