Gabriel's Story (15 page)

Gabriel put a hand on the boy's shoulder. He felt awkward over this tenderness, but he let it lie there. “He didn't get you, though. We got him.” He rummaged through his pockets and displayed his findings on the ground before them. “Look, we got something—near a dozen carrots, some turnips too.”

“Shit. I can't eat no raw turnip. Anyway, I ain't even hungry no more.”

“You will be. Give it a few minutes.”

“Near lost it all for twelve carrots.” James shook his head at the thought of it.

“Not even gold ones, either,” Gabriel said.

It took James a few seconds to look at Gabriel. His jaw dropped with shock when he saw the smile on Gabriel's face. “You think that's funny? Now you're suddenly gonna have yourself a laugh?” Gabriel couldn't help nodding. “That's not even a slight bit funny.”

Gabriel went on smiling, almost chuckling. “It is, a slight bit, ain't it?”

“No, I'm not gonna laugh. Don't smile.” He pulled a stern face but couldn't hold it. All jokes aside, life, and the continuation of it, tickled them both with playful fingers, and they felt the mirth of those who have felt the passing breath of death but not its sting.

They washed the carrots in the river and divided them. Their mouths were watering before the first bite, and James said he'd never thought a carrot looked so good. They crunched into them, one bite after the next, and in the space of twenty minutes the boys were left contemplating the turnips. “You gonna try it?” James asked. Gabriel said he would if James would, and James said the same. They passed another twenty minutes at a standstill, then they both went at it. The turnips were hard to bite and difficult to chew and sour. They left a knot in the boys' stomachs and the next morning a taste in their mouths that they'd never forget.

ALL THE NEXT DAY THE BOYS WALKED on through the unchanging landscape. They reached no settlement and met no people, and all passed in monotony. By noon Gabriel's head was throbbing with a thick wrap of pain that went from his eyeballs up onto his forehead, out over the temples, and all the way around to the nape of his neck. He begged silence of James, and they walked like two mute and impoverished monks. Only once during the day did they see a human, a horseman across the river and a good few miles off. If he saw them, he showed no sign. He simply traversed the horizon like a silhouette puppet on a distant stage and moved on.

They camped that night on a flat slab of rock that allowed no sleep, and they were walking again before dawn, under a light rain that disappeared as the sun rose. They drank often from the river, slurping the surface, sinking their faces into the water and coming up gasping and dripping and luxuriating in the refreshing chill of it. When they peed, they did so facing away from each other, the splash of their urine the only sound save for the wind. Emptied, they were slow to move on, each boy watching the play of the heat on the horizon. The pain in Gabriel's head grew deeper, like an infection entering the bones of his skull. He felt as though his body were shutting down, his bowels constricting from lack of use, his muscles growing weak under the constant strain of work without fuel. James no longer talked of his feet, or of the journey west, or of much of anything. The two boys conserved their energy for the chore of movement, the task of steadying their dizzy heads and squinting in the white light of midday.

A little before dusk they came in sight of a settlement, which they took to be McKutcheon's Station. James pointed it out, then fell to his knees and whispered a quick and heartfelt prayer. Gabriel's body also went limp, as if the sight might be too much for his strained resources. He caught himself and shook his head. He immediately regretted doing so and stood blinded by a long contraction of pain. When it passed, he opened his eyes and nudged James into movement, saying, “Come on. You can't walk on your knees.”

McKutcheon's Station was a small conglomeration of buildings built of a white wood, weathered and parched but a far cry from the sod homes of the homesteaders. No more than a half-dozen in number, they faced each other along what might have been the main street in a large town but was little more than a central open space in this one. An extensive, although entirely empty, corral system stretched out from the eastern side of the settlement. Fences cut out onto the prairie in chaotic dimensions, rounded pens with thin shoots connecting them, like an equation writ large for celestial observers.

At the edge of the settlement they came upon Dunlop. He was sitting on a tree stump, rolling a cigarette with the utmost concentration. Beneath the trees nearby, the men's horses grazed. They looked up as the boys walked in, studied them, then lowered their heads and fell to cropping the grass. Dunlop didn't notice the boys until they were a few feet away. His head snapped up. He eyed them wearily, recognition only slowly taking hold of his features. “All right, lads? I wasn't sure if I'd set eyes on you again,” he said. There was something a bit thick about his voice, a dryness in his throat, and more than the usual lilt of Scotland. His eyes were tainted a faint shade of red, and his cheeks were alive with a fur of reddish brown stubble. “You two are in a bit of a state,” he added.

Gabriel stood looking at him for some time, thinking that much the same could be said about him. But it was James who remembered the reason for their state. “You know where we could get some vittles?”

“Aye, aye, some food'll do you good.” Dunlop started to rise but found the motion awkward, as he still held the half-rolled cigarette in his hands. He tossed it away and led the boys into McKutcheon's Station proper. It was even smaller than it had seemed from a distance. In fact, it was not a town at all. It was more of a way station for cattlemen on their journey north or south, dominated by McKutcheon's General Store, with its adjacent McKutcheon's Livery, which sat across the street from McK's Watering Hole. There were a few other buildings, but all had an air of abandonment about them.

Dunlop led the boys across the main street and around to what appeared to be the back of a small building. He called out and was soon answered by an elderly Hispanic woman. She was dark-faced and wrinkled, with a bulging mass of oil-black hair trailing down her back. She eyed the boys with something like distrust but waved them toward a rough-hewn table set against a tree for support.

The boys sat slouch-shouldered on a bench, lacking the energy to swat at the flies that plagued their arms and faces. As Dunlop began the long chore of rolling another cigarette, he filled them in on the events of the last few days. Apparently Marshall had convinced neither the Mexican girls themselves nor McKutcheon on their behalf that they should go into prostitution. Marshall raised a bit of a fuss, but McKutcheon locked the girls away in his barnlike abode and would hear no more about it. Dunlop had seen no sign of them since the first night. Marshall and the others had then turned their full resources to drink. Thereafter, the time had passed in a sort of drunken haze of card games and shooting contests, in arguments and laughter, and occasionally in retching. It was this last activity that had taken Dunlop to the spot where the boys had found him, where he was fast deciding that he preferred the company of horses to that of men.

The Hispanic woman returned with two plates of refried beans and a platter of steaming corn tortillas. The boys eyed the food with silent awe. Both were slow in trying it, as if they doubted their ability to consume such fare and thought they were better off taking it in with their eyes. The woman seemed pleased by their reaction but wouldn't leave until they began eating, scooping up big helpings of the beans with the tortillas and chewing with slow relish. Dunlop watched them for a moment, then turned away as the previous evening's drink threatened to well up once more.

The food held James's full attention for only a few moments. He kept chewing but managed to speak between mouthfuls. “Dunlop, what the heck happened back there? What was that Dallas talking about, with them horses and all? Y'all weren't horse-thieving for real, were you?”

Dunlop shook his head, a sad gesture more like a nod than a denial. “For Christ's sake, lads, it was just a wee joke—just a laugh, really. An expensive joke, aye, but . . .” He explained that the butt of the joke was the ranch called Three Bars. He'd never seen the place properly himself, but he more than knew it by reputation. It was run by the dubious couple of Jim Rickles and Ugly Mary. Rickles was an Indian fighter and Civil War veteran who wore the wounds of those professions with distinction: a ragged scar across his forehead, from where his skull had been loosened by an Apache hatchet, and a left hand of three digits only, the other two severed by a Union bayonet. Ugly Mary was a former prostitute. It was said that she'd thrice had bottles broken over her head in barroom brawls. The first had knocked her cold, the second had only stunned her, and the third had just made her mad enough to shoot the man who had injured her. She was also famed for having once emasculated an unpleasant customer with her bare teeth.

“She did what?” Gabriel asked.

Dunlop nodded his head in answer. “Took away the very thing that God gave Adam.”

Rickles and Ugly Mary had retired from their lines and taken up ranching a few years ago, joining their holdings in a state of unsanctified matrimony. They scrounged together a motley crew of punchers from the far corners of the state and had been suspects in horse- and cattle-rustling debates ever since. Nothing had ever been pinned on them, but no honest ranch in Texas had any kind words for them, and Marshall seemed to have a particular loathing for them. Indeed, Dunlop suspected that Marshall had once been in some sort of partnership with them, a deal that had gone sour and left Marshall vengeful. “But who would've thought they'd have us turned out? It's injustice all over again. I still can't believe it. Aye, we stole a few head from them, but they stole them in the first place and everybody knows it.” He fell quiet, shaking his head at the whole thing and holding his cigarette out before him as if he were offering it to some invisible person. “Something has to be done, if Marshall ever sobers up long enough. He'll make us all drunkards before he's through.”

IT HADN'T STARTED AS A HUNTING TRIP. The younger son and
his uncle hitched the wagon to the mule and rode out on the prairie
to gather cow chips. They spent the afternoon at this, talking as
they did so, the man telling tales of home, things that made the boy
wonder whether the souls of white men were different from those
of other beings and if they were measured by the same scales in
heaven. They were just preparing to leave when the boy spotted a
herd of antelope. They were nearly a mile away, but the sighting
excited both man and boy and the two set out toward them at a
fast walk. The man grabbed his rifle, almost as an afterthought,
and told the mule to stay put.

They were lucky enough to be downwind, and they approached
the creatures slyly and quietly. They moved forward in fits and
starts and before long came to a slight rise above a long dry wash.
The man's hand shot up to steady the boy. The antelope grazed on
the other side, spread in a loose herd, alert and relaxed at the same
time, ears and eyes never halting long in their diligence. This is
the best we're gonna get, the man said. It's a shot.

It is that, the boy said, but only then did the possible purpose of
this venture become clear to him. He felt a thickness in his throat
and suddenly became aware of the pulse in his palms. He found
the rifle in his hands and was unsure how it got there.

Give it a go, the man said. You've got a steady arm already,
and your eyesight's damn sure better'n mine. But mind the wind,
and take your shot before they scent us.

The boy took the rifle and looked out at the antelope. Which
one should I shoot?

The man chuckled at his optimism. There's a hunter what
means business. He pointed out one of the older bucks and asked
if the boy saw the one he meant.

Yeah. The boy lifted the rifle up and sighted the animal and
held it in view for the space of many breaths. There was no wind
where he stood, but the grass at the antelope's feet switched and
swayed with it. He accounted for this as best he could and waited
longer still. When he pulled the trigger, he had the sensation that
part of him flew out of the barrel of the gun behind the bullet. It
was as if he touched the animal over all that distance, and with
his touch the antelope stumbled backward and fell down. It got up
again, dazed by its own clumsiness, walked a few steps, considered
the horizon, on which the silhouettes of its kind stood out, then
crumpled. The others watched it fall, then darted off like dry
leaves scattering before a breeze.

The boy felt his uncle's hand on his shoulder. Dead on.
When they reached the antelope, it lay staring wide-eyed at the
sky. The clouds passing overhead were reflected there but were no
longer seen by those eyes or thought of by the beast behind them.

The bullet had entered its skull but had not left it. The man
speculated that it had ricocheted around in the skull, shredding
the brain. Looking at the boy's expression, he added that this
was a most humane way to die. Couldn't be more painless.

The boy stood nearby as the man skinned and gutted the animal. He didn't offer to help, and the man didn't ask. That night
the boy dreamed of the sky reflected in the orb of an antelope's eye.
He woke up wondering what that meant, and for the first time he
knew that the world was a tableau laden with signs.