These Violent Times

by C. Courtney Joyner

  There was a moment when no one moved. None of the three was sure why. Then Bishop reached for the shotgun, but White Fox had it first, held it up, and pushed it into Duffin’s leather pouch. She then packed in the ammunition, took the sawed-tooth battle club from her belt, and looped it around the bag’s metal catch so it would hang.

  “Now, that’s more than good,” Duffin said. “I know this is a crazy situation, and I’m feeling halfway dead, but I’m going to do my job. And you both will ride with me.”

  Bishop glanced toward the gully, then looked back at the injured man. “You’re damned lucky the right outlaws won.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Blood and Ashes

  “You’re riding back into your own history,” Duffin said. “How’s that feel?”

  Bishop’s response: “How’s the leg feel?”

  “Like hell—”

  Duffin had his answer and the words dropped off, pain scorching him as it did whenever the horse swayed a little off-center. A moment, then a recovering, holding on, his gun tucked into his belt and cushioned by his belly. Riding between Bishop and White Fox, he was keeping a few paces behind, watching their backs and moves.

  “That Hospitality House, that news was sent over telegraph,” Duffin said.

  Bishop nodded. “That would be Avery, wanting to make the most of it.”

  Duffin said, “It surely came from him, but the commander didn’t really care. Not his jurisdiction.”

  “I figured.”

  “No,” Duffin said. “That had nothing to do with anything.”

  “You showed me your reason for coming, Miles.”

  “I guess I did,” Duffin said, sucking in cool air as pain hit him again.

  “Sorry we have nothing to give you,” Bishop said.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. A few seconds, the burning passes.”

  The marshal marshaled his thoughts as best he could. “All right—now miss, do you happen to know what your husband was trying to do in these trees?”

  Duffin was now looking up at the lengths of barbed wire in the pine tops; hundreds of jagged feet strung between dead limbs like the web of a giant insect. Long sections hung from split branches, and had been anchored to railroad spikes hammered into the trunks, bleeding the trees of sap and killing them. The entire thing, taken as one, looked like a dragon had come here to die.

  “Was he planning to string telegraph wire, or what?” Duffin wondered.

  Bishop said, “More like ’what.’ The spikes were so the lout could rest his gun, have his drinks, and shoot steady from anyplace in these trees. Those were his turrets.”

  Duffin considered that. “Sounds like my grandpa’s drunk logic. I guess that’s one way to fight off an ambush. He was surely expecting somebody.”

  “Who the hell knows?” Bishop said.

  “I haven’t been on this road in years,” White Fox said.

  “Well, somebody has been,” Duffin said. “Somebody’s been here to do business in the last weeks. There’s still a few tracks.” He pointed to a spot along the side of the worn section of plain that passed for a road. Someone had tried to not leave tracks. There were flattened grasses and broken twigs.

  “Business?” Bishop said, more to himself than to Duffin.

  “Again, miss,” Duffin said. “What do you think your husband was up to with his—what would you call them? Experiments?”

  “I don’t know,” White Fox said.

  Bishop was trying to read the feeling in White Fox’s black eyes. “You know, Miles, nothing personal, but you’re making me sorry we didn’t let you bleed to death back there.”

  “I’m meaning no offense, Doctor. I truly am not.”

  Bishop pursed his lips, then said, “I’m sure of that. But it’s being given just the same.”

  Miles rode up a few paces so he could address the woman in quiet earnest. “I am sorry. I am simply trying to get information. Information that will help a lot of souls.”

  “Do what you must,” White Fox said flatly.

  “Miss, there’s no need to—”

  The horses pulled up suddenly, stepped backward. Reacting urgently with a head twist. Before them, mostly concealed in a patch of high grasses, an insect-eaten pine, massive, decades-old, had been dropped to block the last turns in the dirt road, branches and trunk stretching completely across from ditch to ditch.

  White Fox faced Duffin, who was to her left, while still on the painted’s back. Then she dropped off, saying, “I have said I will help do what you need done. But you have the way of a mole, digging, digging, and I do not like it.”

  As Bishop looked over admiringly, she took the reins of Duffin’s horse and walked it in, stepping over branches, smashing some down, then around the last of the tree, while kicking broken chains and large pieces of dead iron out of the way. More barbed wire was hidden within the branches, to slice anyone trying to move them, and pieces of hammered steel stuck out of the road’s muddy edges as jagged teeth.

  Clearing the obstacles, encountered by chance, White Fox handed Duffin back his horse. She looked up at him hotly. “So you understand it, because you say you need to understand it, that wire, all that iron from years ago, was to stop me trying to run away.”

  The three rode the last mile near-rubbing shoulders, tense and silent. Two were displeased with how things had gone. Bishop had expected it.

  The other tall pines along this stretch, the ones that hadn’t been strangled by barbed wire, were scorched to the roots, becoming something more than dead trees, but like rows of standing, dead men. Stripped husks for bodies, burned limbs now twisted arms, ending with branches that had become claws. All of it covered by white ash, the blowing remains of a recent forest fire.

  “I know it’s hogwash, but riding by these woods gives me the chills,” Duffin said, trying to be conversational as he shook water from his canteen. “I imagine this place was a nightmare even before the fire.”

  “It was,” Bishop said. “The kind that daylight doesn’t dispel.”

  “Like a bad fairy tale.”

  “They’re all bad,” Bishop said, thinking back to when he’d read them to his boy. “Else they’d be boring.”

  If Duffin heard, the meaning didn’t register. “Miss, how old were you when you came to live here?”

  White Fox rode for a moment, then answered Duffin. “My fourteenth birthday. My father traded me for a freight wagon loaded with fruit trees and four cases of rifles. He wanted those guns.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you your reaction,” Duffin said, “but did you burn these woods?”

  Bishop answered. “She did not. But she held your knee together while we pulled out that bullet.”

  Duffin sounded exasperated. “Doc, you fixed me better than anyone could, and not for the first time, and I’ll say that to whoever’ll listen. But you both have something around your necks, and my commander tells me it could kill a lot of people. Maybe already has.”

  “You’re dancing again.”

  “Yes, sir. And on more than half a leg, thanks to you. But—”

  “To me, a man is dancing,” Bishop said. He wanted to make it clear the surgery hadn’t created a social bond between them. “It could be any man I fixed. It happened to be you. I believe in helping when I can. I believe in protecting myself when I am left no choice. Take that as gospel—other wise, I mind my own business. This witch hunt of yours, it’s a waste of all our time.”

  “What would not be a waste, Doc? Tell me that.”

  “Looking at a bigger map than just the fort’s interests,” Bishop said. “Let’s assume that your affairs and mine intersect. It’s possible, maybe even likely. Who wanted me dead back there?”

  Duffin angled his horse around a wide, spreading puddle of ruined water, top thick with floating oil. “I do not know who in hell attacked us, did not recognize them when we rode past. I know a lot of the outlaws running between these borders, I’ve seen the wanteds, and it wasn’t any of them.”


  Bishop said, “I wish I could believe it’s just more of the goddamn fools that come after me these days. Someone who read those damn magazines and knows my habits.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “With pox in glass jars? In my backyard? There’s a whole country they could have attacked. Why here? And I have to ask myself who they were waiting for—me or you?”

  “Why me?” Duffin asked.

  “Exactly,” Bishop said. “I wouldn’t’ve gone to the fort without you. Maybe someone doesn’t want me there.”

  Duffin considered all of this between flashes of pain.

  “They didn’t seem to know White Fox was coming, was there,” Duffin said.

  “That was apparent,” Bishop agreed. “We’re lucky she was.”

  Duffin regarded her. “Thank you.”

  White Fox dipped her forehead—or it might just have been the gait of the painted that caused it. Or she might have been smelling the lingering scent of burned everything—to her, not death, not destruction, but the odor and taste and gray ruin that is the price of liberation.

  “You two decorated the ground with them like you’ve been doing battle together since you were born,” Duffin said. “Does that come naturally?”

  “Did killing, to you?” Bishop asked.

  “No.”

  “Then maybe you weren’t properly motivated,” Bishop observed.

  “Why do you say all this, Marshal?” White Fox asked intemperately. “Why keep talking endlessly?”

  “Because whatever’s happening to your people, the reason you and the doc are racking up bodies like cordwood, started here,” Duffin said. “With the man who beat the hell out of you until you stabbed him.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bishop asked. “White Fox killed the bastard. And before you open your jaw, two things you should know about that: it was self-defense and good riddance.”

  White Fox added, “I did it . . . I don’t regret it.”

  “Actually, you didn’t kill him,” Duffin said.

  The marshal was spit-roast between the gaze of the two riders athwart.

  “That a surprise to you?” Duffin asked, too coyly.

  This made White Fox wheel and face him, lock eyes with Duffin, who was pleased he had struck a nerve. He fiddled to keep his leg straight off his saddle.

  “You better keep talkin’,” Bishop said. “She don’t need a knife to kill you. Just a stick up your horse’s ass.”

  Duffin fell back a few paces without realizing he’d done so. He caught up.

  “He lived after you knifed him, kept working on all sorts of weapons, for all sorts of folks,” Duffin said. “At his old place . . . where we’re going.”

  Duffin gave the two a moment to digest the information. “He is the same lout what built your arm-rig, right, Doc?”

  Bishop nodded. “He had a twisted, creative bent.”

  “And now you two are together.”

  “You don’t have to tell me my life story—and I don’t appreciate the innuendo.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything. What I mean is, would that bend him more? He survived a murder attempt by his wife—justified, yes, I’m sure—and then he hears about you and your gun becoming famous, about you riding around with his woman, and things get a little dark in his brain.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is?” White Fox asked.

  “Do you?” Duffin asked.

  “She just said she thought he was dead,” Bishop said. “You saw.”

  “That’s why I was so insistent about you joining us. I was hoping you could tell me more about him. Or at least point in some direction.”

  She shook her head.

  “He shouldn’t be difficult to find,” Bishop said. “His handiwork is not exactly subtle.”

  Duffin was silent.

  * * *

  Duffin took a scouting lead of a quarter mile, brought his horse to the dirt road’s widening, letting Bishop and White Fox catch up their few yards. This was the last of the road before the small house in the cutout of dead trees. White Fox put her eyes anywhere else. Scattered around, old bolts and nail heads were acorns, making a trail to a large pile of rusting iron, and beyond it, another heap of old metal. Bent, torn, and surrounding the house.

  And there was more.

  Tons stacked and corroding. Wagon frames and a blown-apart locomotive boiler were the big pieces, leaning against a back wall, reaching above the roof, caving part of it in. Cannon parts and slag steel were pushed to the sides of the house, also piled high, so the place seemed to have grown out of the wastes of forged metal, heaped together, and rust-bleeding.

  Ash from the forest fire covered it all with a thin layer of white, turning the grounds the color of a corpse.

  Duffin stopped and waited for the others.

  “Just as we knew it. Nothing alive at all,” Bishop said.

  “I didn’t say there would be,” Duffin said. “The report from the unit that came out here had ’dead’ or ’death’ a lot.”

  White Fox turned her head from the shack. Defiant, she kept her hands on the painted’s mane, stroking it more to calm herself, as Duffin threw out: “Do you want to stay behind?”

  She shook her head.

  “She’s probably thinking about all the times he almost killed her,” Bishop said, riding nearer to the marshal. “When I set her broken bones, or stitched up her head. Or trying to forget all of it.”

  “Either way, you did a good job, Doc. Let’s go in.”

  He angled himself from the saddle, bringing his injured leg over, then struggled down. White Fox was off the painted and courageously came forward, lent a shoulder getting Duffin to the ground. He balanced against her, then grabbed a saddle fender to hold on, straightening himself. Grunting effort.

  Bishop said, “This woman is special. Don’t ever forget that.”

  White Fox said, “Wait,” then pulled a piece of a wagon axle from a scrap heap. Part of a brake handle, long, with a curved, bolted edge. White Fox clamped Duffin’s hand over the top of it, her fingers completely over his, squeezing.

  She said, “He broke his leg once, used this for his cane. You should use it too.”

  “As always, miss, I’m obliged for your concern and thoughtfulness.”

  She examined it. “He tried to beat me with it . . . tried.”

  White Fox took several steps away from the house, turning her back, as Bishop and Duffin, leg dragging, made their way around the metal heaps to the front porch. Bishop steered Duffin from a small, open pit, with stacks of barrel bands, ends sharpened to razor-points, lining the bottom.

  “Traps everywhere,” Duffin said. “Miss, your father has his place set up the same way, don’t he? That’s what I’ve read about, anyway.”

  White Fox was back at the painted, checking the horse’s slash wound with her light touch, as Bishop answered for her.

  “The Cheyenne didn’t need a white lunatic to tell them how to rig traps,” he said. “And there’s a vital difference. White Claw built his snares and pitfalls to keep marauders out. These were made to keep someone in.”

  “Well, Doc, it didn’t work either way,” Duffin said, pulling a bandanna from his pocket, tying a knot, and presenting it. “You’re going to need that.”

  “I could tell,” Bishop said, accepting it and working it on with his one hand. “What else did your men find that needed ’dead’ or ’death’?”

  “A moment,” Duffin said.

  But the doctor knew the smell; a heavy decay that found its way to the bottom of his throat and settled there. This time it wasn’t mixed with battlefield sulfur and black powder smoke; instead the rot in the air was the sweet, rancid taste of disease. He pulled the bandanna over his face.

  Bishop observed clinically, “These rags aren’t enough.”

  He lit a torch from a tar barrel, letting the black smoke clear the stench for a few breaths, before standing in front of the house’s hard-leather door. Duffin wiped his eyes on the ban
danna, then pushed the door open with the piece of scrap iron, a rush of flies bursting around them, before they stepped in.

  The front room was the whole house, with stove in the corner and beds on the opposite side. Rats scuttled as Duffin and Bishop came farther in, the torch throwing yellow across the caved-in floor, not holding the weight of the metal trash, corn-whiskey jars, and infested furniture. Windows were boarded, with iron plates stacked against them, murdering all sunlight; no way to tell day from night.

  Duffin said, “Like a bear’s cave, isn’t it?”

  “He didn’t believe in clocks or calendars, so White Fox wouldn’t know how long she’d been kept.”

  “You knew this man damn well.”

  “That’s no secret.”

  Duffin kicked brass fittings across the floor, hitting the toe of Bishop’s boots. They clanged dully. “Those all look like parts for something he’d build for you,” Duffin said.

  Bishop scooped some up with his one hand. “Again, no secret.” He let them drop noisily. “So this was where you got my drawing?”

  “He’s got more of your plans, and a diary of all the work he did for you,” Duffin informed him.

  “We worked on inventions to fight disease and disaster,” Bishop said.

  “I know. Something to breathe through smoke; a special saw you figured up, cuts through a man’s chest and holds the ribs open at the same time so you can get to the heart. Never heard of a sawbones using anything like that. And all your special helmets and suits, to seal you off from the diseased while you give out medicine. Very fancy, Doc, and more than this son of a bitch could’ve come up with on his own.”

  “Again, all medical instruments.”

  Duffin said, “Yeah, but now being used for something else.” He dragged himself around another heap of brass pipes, scraps of steel, to half a rifle stock, lying in a corner with strips of tied canvas dangling from it. Bishop held the torch to light the room. Duffin lifted the stock with, “What was this, the first try for your rig? Doesn’t look like it would work too well.”