“You want to add more lies to a killing?”
“Don’t take this personal, son.”
“Hell, it’s all personal.”
“I see you feel that.” Dr. Tom squinted against the light and crossed his arms, regarding the toes of his boots. He shifted once, and then raised his eyes to Nate’s. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but there was nothing menacing in his face. “Maynard Collie is a done deal. He slaughtered a few pitiful whores, and most people wouldn’t even bother to dig a hole to bury him in. But McGill, see. McGill is still alive and full of malice. You think you know what McGill has done, shooting near a dozen men in the past few years, but you don’t know the half of it. We’ve been following him and his men for over twelve months. We lost him for a short while, but we got the scent again. And you can take it to the bank that this is personal to us. Now, you can ride away back to Franklin right now and tell Drake whatever the hell you want to, but me and George need to finish this up, get him back, and head for Houston.”
Dr. Tom adjusted his hat and began walking to the camp. “I think it’s been time enough.”
Nate followed him back, almost expecting to see the prisoner still pleading with Deerling, his hands filled with rocks and dirt. But when he got close he saw Maynard lying on the ground, the leg irons removed, his stocking feet splayed and unmoving. His eyes were open, and a frothy ribbon of spittle rolled down one cheek.
“Well…” Dr. Tom said, looking at the motionless form.
Deerling, tightening the cinch on his horse, looked over his shoulder at Nate. Then he turned to Dr. Tom and asked, “Is he comin’ to Houston?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Tom answered. He picked up a blanket to cover the body. “Why don’t you ask him?”
Nate, peering at Maynard, was surprised to feel nothing even close to outrage, more of a wilting pity than anything else.
“Just tell me one thing. He done this with his own hand?” Nate asked.
Deerling kneed his horse briskly in the belly and pulled the cinch tighter. “I talked. He listened. He saw the sense in not dragging out the inevitable.” He tugged a few times at the stirrup and then walked to stand at the remains of the fire.
Looking at Maynard’s diminished form now under the blanket, Nate wondered if the prisoner had put out the last of the coals like Dr. Tom had told him to do before swallowing the poison. He believed, almost knew as a certainty, that this was the closest thing to a recounting of the events that he was going to get for a good while, maybe ever.
After a bit, Dr. Tom called, “Nate. Come help me lift old Maynard here up onto the mule.”
Nate wiped the sweat off his face with one sleeve, stooped down, heaved Maynard up by himself, and carried him to the mule. He draped the body over the withers, facedown, and secured it with the long ends of the rope.
He mounted his own horse and began leading the mule southwards, back to town. He did not wait for the other two men to trail directly after. He did wonder, though, and often, in the days following, whether he should have pressed Deerling more about what Maynard’s other choice had been.
Chapter 3
The coach arrived in Hearne at eleven that morning, having been on the road for over two days, changing horses and drivers every forty or fifty miles and discharging passengers in the late afternoons to whatever overnight lodging they could find and pay for.
Grateful for the few hours before the train was scheduled to depart for Houston, Lucinda walked up and down the main street, carrying her carpetbag close to her body, wandering in and out of the open shops, their shelves filled with goods carted in from San Francisco and Boston. She lingered over some dressmaking cloth and finally bought a jar of gooseberry jam, thinking to eat it all in one sitting. She felt well and strong; hopeful, now that the journey was almost done.
During the first night, there had been a moment when a sudden headache had spawned worries of a coming fit, but a few drops of laudanum judiciously taken in water had given her sleep, and the head pains were gone in the morning.
There seemed to be as much street traffic here as in Fort Worth, with an abundance of men who looked more like merchants than farmers or stock handlers and who had uncallused hands and fresh-creased pants. The men tipped their hats and smiled through their beards at her. She nodded in return, her mind reflexively reducing the distasteful but necessary acts of her profession to the more comfortable rules of mathematics, geometry in particular. Where two bodies in motion, with their collective points, curves, segments, and surfaces, intersecting in the horizontal and the vertical, from above and from below, could be reduced to the abstract. It was a trick she had cultivated as a child when committed to an asylum. Her mind quickly grasped the theorems and concepts and could then distance itself from the terrifying experiences of ice-water baths, forced feedings, and painful restraints by reducing the nurses, doctors, and other inmates to mere points in space.
She had come to stand in front of the plate-glass window of a grain store and paused to study her reflection: a woman in a plain cotton dress and a paisley shawl drawn modestly over her shoulders. A man soon came to stand next to her. She sensed him watching her reflection, waiting for her to smile, to turn her head and speak. Instead she stepped away and walked to a hotel set back from the train station.
She took a room, paying for hot water to be brought for a bath. Soon a large tin washtub was brought in by a gaunt, harried woman, along with just enough scalding water to fill it a quarter of the way. The woman then brought a bucket of well water, a chip of soap, and a cloth for drying. She admonished Lucinda not to overturn the bucket and left in a huff when Lucinda asked for more hot water.
Lucinda removed her clothes and sat waist-deep in the water, her legs drawn up almost to her chin. It was not in any true form a bathtub, and yet the heat on her skin was the most pleasure she had had in weeks. Wrapping her arms around her shinbones, she rested her head on her knees and breathed deeply as though sleeping.
She thought of the letter, and of the letter writer, telling her to come to the Lamplighter Hotel in Houston. She thought of his hands as he wrote the letter, the fingers slender and tapered with beautiful nails like a woman’s, and of the long lean bones of his thighs, the hollow of his throat, the jutting ridge of the collarbone.
He had first come to her during her time at Mrs. Landry’s, setting his coins in two neat stacks on the dresser. They had lain together twice with hardly a word spoken apart from the erupting sounds of release and polite good-byes. He was clean, restrained, mannerly.
But on his third visit, a violent fit had overtaken her as she began to undress, and, panting and jerking, she begged him to leave. The few men who had previously witnessed the onset of symptoms had scrabbled for the door as though she had called out, Typhoid. But he carried her to the bed and laid her down, stripped her until she was fully naked. He lay on top of her, still wearing his trousers and jacket, holding her thrashing head cupped tightly between his palms. He brought his face close to hers and tracked her eyes with his own.
He asked, “Are you dying?” His breath was over her grimacing mouth, and she believed that she was. His palms pressed more tightly into her temples to stop the spasms, and he asked her again if she was dying. She was in the full measure of her sickness, with no control of any part of her body other than the erratic pumping of air in and out of her lungs. His weight had become unbearable, even with the bucking movement of her body, but when she closed her eyes, he pried the lids open with his thumbs, saying, “Look at me.”
He smiled, his lips parted with a kind of wondrous expectation, as though he had come to peer into a small pit but instead found a fissure of unknowable depth. He spoke to her, saying, “Here, here,” not the calling of a parent to a wandering child but a demand for her to keep her eyes open and focused on his.
That she would die from her malady, Lucinda had no doubt. Uncontrollably pitched from a landing, or stairs, or even from her own bed, she would one day strike and crack her skull
. Perhaps she would lie in the bottom of a bathtub, flailing and twitching, like some boneless sea creature, slowly drowning in terrified helplessness.
But as he pressed himself over her, the dark irises of his eyes inches from hers, she began to feel a retreat from fear, a blankness of soul. She never fully lost consciousness and was keenly aware of the skin of her belly incised with the sharp edges of his belt, the buttons of his coat imprinted on her ribs and breast.
The entirety of her life up to that moment had been a torment, a restlessness of mind, as though her brain were a frightened, overly large fish inside a brittle bowl. His near-ecstatic study of her eyes dancing on the edge of nothingness had in the instant changed that balance, rendering her mind becalmed and her body agitating for even a careless, wounding touch.
When she had quieted, he undressed and lay back on the bed, then ran his nose along her skin as though sniffing out the source of the illness. Then he touched her for a length of time and brought her to another kind of shuddering.
A sudden, hard knock at the door signaled the hotel woman’s return with the hot water, and Lucinda called her in. The woman closed the door behind her and walked farther into the room before she realized that Lucinda was naked in the bath. She drew herself up short, quickly turning her head away in embarrassment, her face pinched and disapproving. Lucinda asked her to bring the bucket closer, and, as the woman drew near, Lucinda, smiling sweetly, let her knees draw apart to the sides of the basin, showing through the shallow water the private hair between her legs. Dropping the bucket onto the floor, the woman fled the room.
Lucinda finished her bath and dressed in the clean, heavier woolen dress from her bag. She would buy more dresses in Houston and so left the soiled cotton dress behind in the room. Before leaving, she spoke with the hotel clerk, an aging man with inflamed red eyes, and asked him about the dangers of riding the ferry to Galveston. If the German happened to find his way this far south, there was no harm in pointing the trail away from her true destination.
Lucinda boarded the train’s passenger car behind a stout, respectable-looking woman with two small children. She sat facing the little family and smiled pleasantly at them. The ride would be six hours, and she settled back on the bench to look out of the window. The train lurched twice and then slowly began to gain momentum once it had passed the abandoned cotton gin on the outskirts of town.
A few miles south, they slowed for a bridge crossing, and a man in a long frock coat and feathering silver beard walked from the underpass and came to stand near the tracks. He held up a large board as the train’s passenger cars came abreast of him. Printed with hand-blocked letters, the board read God Is Coming. But He Is Not Here Yet.
The woman clucked in agreement and, speaking with the heavy accent of some distant place, told Lucinda she was going to Houston to be married, her first husband having died the year before. She had been a lady’s maid once, but after the chaos and ruin of the war, she had been hired by an undertaker to do the hair and face-painting of the dead. Business had been very good for a few years, but of late the undertaker’s establishment had gone into a decline. She still had nightmares of the dead coming to life and grabbing her around the wrist as she worked on them, but she told Lucinda, “One does what one must to live.”
Lucinda agreed with her. The woman soon fell asleep with the rocking of the train, and Lucinda looked out the window again at the slanting light blazing the grasslands and prairies and thought, Yes, one does what one must.
Chapter 4
Nate looked east across rolling terrain carved deep with escarpments and punctured by thorn grasses, mesquite, and cholla, the thorns of which seemed to leap off the cactus onto passing horse or man. He remembered thinking on his initial ride to Franklin that he had never seen such country. He had been through the Big Thicket and longleaf piney woods of East Texas, gone farther east into the wilds of Arkansas, with its mountains of boulders and sheer drop-away cliffs. And he’d been over the vast expanses of Oklahoma, where he was born, the surface planes of which seemed often molded to a concavity, such was the weight of its flatness.
In Oklahoma, the ground had always appeared to him to be resting. It was solid, packed firm under the hooves of countless horses, bison, and cattle, its ancient upheaval already done. Here in Texas, the ground first buckled and then plunged away, lowering to canyons or surging up into mesas, as though still in the act of formation.
The Sierra Vieja stood at his back as he watched Deerling and Dr. Tom riding a short way ahead. From the time they had left Franklin, following south the floodplains of the Rio Grande to their first supply stop at Eagle Springs, Nate had instinctively lagged behind. It seemed somehow an imposition on seniority to ride next to them, although it wasn’t only his junior status that gave him pause. It was more the sense of violating an unspoken social pact that made him loath to come within earshot.
Watching the rangers together, he was struck again by their similarity or, more to the point, their relatedness, although he knew for a fact they were not blood kin. Upon Nate’s being sworn in to the Texas State Police, Captain Drake had spoken of Deerling’s and Goddard’s long career of rangering—twenty years together, almost as long as Nate had been alive, border wars and Indian chasing for half their own lives. Drake had told Nate personally that if he chose to make a career of the law, he could do no better than attach himself to Tom Goddard and George Deerling.
On occasion, Dr. Tom would drop back and point out animal markings in the sandy loam or a weathered imprint carved into the rock. Often it was to warn Nate to look sharp, to scan the slight rises or abutments of rock for signs of movement from Mescalero Apache or even Comanche raiding south from the Llano Estacado. Earlier, Dr. Tom had taken him to task for his old Dance revolver and his Henry repeating rifle, asking when Nate would grab some sense and be reborn into the religion of Colt and Winchester. He warned Nate, “Someday when you don’t need it to happen, some piece of metal’s going to get fouled under the hammer of that cap-and-ball pistol. You wait and see.”
Nate had to admire the wicked beauty of the brass, self-contained cartridges of the rangers’ converted navy Colts. But he’d never give up his Dance cap-and-ball pistol. It had been given to him at the outbreak of the war by a man closer to him than his own father. He did, however, admit that he would gladly give over the old Henry hanging in a scabbard at his side for a .44 Winchester as soon as he had the means to do so.
The sun set in slow measure, warming their backs until the light was snuffed out and the elevated plain turned cold. They passed through Fort Davis, a dirty, mean, nearly abandoned fort manned by black soldiers left over from the war. They had been assigned to guard the coach and wagon trail routes frequently raided by Indians because of their training in conflict but also because these soldiers had nowhere else to go. No funds were available to keep the fort in good working order, so its window frames stood empty of glass, its barracks empty of doors.
Deerling did not stop at the fort but rode purposefully through the town, saying they would bedroll at Limpia Creek a half mile away. The soldiers stood quietly in groups in the alleyways, hovering around fire pits, their impassive faces turned towards their shoes.
They ate jerky and pan bread next to a fire built up from mesquite wood under an overhang. Dr. Tom pulled from his pack a much-abused news sheet and squinted at the variegated print in the half-light. Nate tossed out the last of the grounds in his cup and started to pull off his boots.
Deerling said, “Don’t do that.”
Dr. Tom pointed to the overhang. “We get a visitation, you don’t want to have to make a run for it in your stocking feet.”
Deerling lay supine on his bedroll, his shotgun cradled like a child in his arms. Closing his eyes, he said, “Tom, take first watch. Then Nate. Then wake me.”
Dr. Tom squinted hard at the newsprint, but the fire had grown too weak, and the wilted sheet was refolded and put back into the pack.
True to their word, th
e rangers had seen to Collie’s burial. They arranged for the local undertaker to claim the reward and sent the balance, after expenses for box and shovel were met, to Collie’s wife in Van Horn’s Wells. There had been no inquiries made in Franklin by Captain Drake or anyone else; no questions, no delays in leaving. Collie was dead by his own hand and that was that. The judge would be intercepted by a rider on the San Antonio mail road. The rangers were asked only to make their reports by telegram to Drake. Nate would do the same to the state police office in Austin.
Dr. Tom rubbed his hands together. “There’ll be snow on the ground soon. We need to be in Fort Stockton before that happens.”
Nate nodded. “My hip’s tellin’ me that’s so.”
“We’ll need to get an early start. If we don’t get held up by you repacking powder in that old Dance.”
“It shoots just fine.”
Nate pointed to Dr. Tom’s pack. “Any news of the world in there?”
“Oh, that’s old. From a Boston paper last year.” Dr. Tom leaned back and recited, “‘No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me.’ It’s Dickens.”
Nate shook his head, having no idea who Dickens was.
“An Englishman. A writer of books, some of them printed in newspapers. I was going to travel all the way to St. Louis a few years back just to hear him stand on a stage and read.” Dr. Tom laughed. “But the train from New York was too much of a hardship for him.”
Deerling said, keeping his eyes shut, “Your talking is a hardship for me at this very moment.”
Dr. Tom nodded to Nate to take to his bedroll and sleep. When Nate was awakened a few hours later, he emerged from his stiffened blanket, feeling with the naked palms of his hands and the soles of his boots the crusted mantle of frost covering the ground. He heard the horses stamping and chuffing in the dark air against the thin dusting of ice crackling away from mounds of basket grass under their hooves. After arranging the blanket around his head and shoulders, he pulled two of the horses together and stood between them for warmth, his carbine downturned against one thigh, the revolver tucked into his belt. Having no pocket watch or any light to see it by even if he’d had one, he counted the passage of hours in the movement of the moon toward the ranges to the west. He heard once the discontented flight of a bird breaking free of brush atop the overhang but no other sound that would have signaled a threat.