Gabriel's Story (19 page)

Part 3

THE FIRST TIME THE BOY SAW THE CREATURE, HE KNEW where the tales of monsters sprang from. He was awakened from
a long, meandering dream by the sow's anxious squeals and
Raleigh's deep-throated neigh. He had his trousers on in a few seconds, boots just after. He ran for the door without lacing them,
shoved it open, strode out into the night, and circled the house toward the barn. He wasn't ready for what he saw there and knew
so immediately.

A beast stood poised on the sod fence of the pigpen. It was outlined in the starlight, rendered unreal and ghostly and more fearsome than it might have appeared in the reasoning light of day.
The boy tried to name the beast, but he couldn't create the word in
his mind. Its legs were spread wide, its neck was low, and its ears
lay flat against its head. The hair along the crest of its shoulders
and down its back stood at attention. It had been gazing down at
the frantic sow, but when the boy appeared it snapped its head
around. It stared at him, head slinking from side to side, paws
kneading the turf beneath it. It seemed to consider the boy first to
discover if he was to be feared, and then, having decided that he
wasn't, to decide whether it might dine doubly tonight.

The boy read all this in the creature's eyes, for the beast concealed nothing of its thoughts, or the hunger within it and the
need, above all else, to quench it. But only when its lips drew back
from its jaws and exposed the white glint of its fangs did the boy
remember its name: wolf. He tried to step back, but his feet were
stuck to the ground. He tried to call out, but he'd lost his voice. The
boy grasped at his thigh as if somehow the action might produce a
weapon, or suffice as a call of alarm that he couldn't otherwise
muster. It did neither.

The wolf let out a growl, sank low, and prepared to dive for
the boy. It might have, except that the boy's uncle came bounding
around the side of the house, rifle in hand. The man aimed and
fired before the wolf had fully taken in his presence.

What happened next neither the man nor the boy could fully
say later. It was as if the rifle's blast took the wolf away with the
speed of the bullet. The animal simply vanished, leaving nothing
but empty space before them and ringing silence and the question
as to whether it had been an illusion. They might have thought so,
except that the wolf let up a howl of protest from the safety of the
black fields, a cry ringing with indignation and resentment and
with the pent-up lusts of a lifetime. When it began to fade, lesser
creatures picked up the call and added to it. The night came alive
with cries of canine camaraderie, from all directions and distances, leaving the boy with the feeling that they were hopelessly
outnumbered, surrounded by and deep within a legion of carnivorous life.

The next morning, the boy searched the ground with his stepfather
and uncle. They found the wolf's tracks in the soil beside the
sod fence and on the fence itself and around the back of the house
and at the door to the stables. They kept the pig in the barn from
then on, but two days later they awoke to find four of their five
hens dead and feathers strewn about. Again they found the beast's
tracks.

Looks like we got a little problem, the stepfather said.

The uncle and the boy agreed.

GABRIEL AND THE OTHERS RODE HARD through the next week, hitting the Pecos River late on the second day, turning and following its course northwest. Most of each day was spent in riding. Although they stopped regularly to water the horses and rest them, they never broke for long. The constant motion atop a living being of hard contours, sinew, and muscle wreaked havoc on Gabriel's body. Each stride sent jolts of pain through his backside and into his lower back and straight up the chain of his spine. His hands clenched the reins with a white-knuckled passion that left his fingers twisted like claws. When he dismounted each evening, he walked on bowed, clumsy versions of his former legs.

They passed from Texas into New Mexico at some unmarked boundary, and as the week wore on, they kept the Pecos to their left. Across it Gabriel spied the foothills of the southern Rockies, sharp, sand-colored ridges out of which grew buttresses of reddish stone and beyond which the ground rose to greater heights. To their right lay the great expanse of the Llano Estacado, a land so barren that Gabriel could imagine no creature living there by choice. The plains stretched to the horizon, spotted by occasional prickly pear and tree cholla, all sharing muted colors that varied little except with the rising and setting of the sun, when that orb played tricks of light across the land and set colors moving in ribbons.

At night they huddled around a tiny fire. Sometimes they laid up in dry areas of the riverbed, finding shelter within the water-carved features. Although days were passing, pushing in between themselves and the horror of Three Bars, neither Gabriel, James, nor Dunlop had found his voice again. None ate more than his first plateful of food, and none joined in the nightly discourse held between Marshall and Rollins and Dallas, all of whom seemed like actors finally realized, finally given their moment in the light and loving every second of it. As the two boys sat staring at the fire and Dunlop sat staring into the night, the other three threw out plans for their future in California. Rollins talked only of whores and a life of leisure; Dallas considered trading in his spurs and sailing to Hawaii; Marshall cast webs of schemes, business ventures and building projects and even plans for a career in politics. Gabriel would have said they looked and sounded more like children at play than fugitives and murderers, except he knew that wasn't true. They looked like all of these.

Caleb rarely joined them in these sessions. He developed a habit of nightly reconnaissance. He'd backtrack their trail during the early evening and return in the black hours, emerging suddenly as a shape beside the fire. He walked with such stealth that nobody saw him arrive. Rather, they just realized at some moment that he was among them once more. Each evening, by his silence, he assured the men that they were not yet being followed. Gabriel thought many a time that if Caleb were tracking them instead of with them, they'd all be dead before the next sunrise. He wondered when Caleb found time to sleep, and whether he went on his nightly searches as the hunted or the hunter.

Marshall spoke to the boys as if he hadn't noticed their silence. In his orations they had been partners from the beginning and shared any guilt equally with the rest. It seemed that all knew and none needed to hear again of the boys' obligations to the group. But Gabriel felt the other men's watchful eyes on them day-long, saw in their glances a constant scrutiny, especially from Dallas and Rollins. These two watched them as if they longed to be provoked and were just waiting for the digression that would give them the excuse.

On the fourth night out, they camped in a protected arroyo with a view toward the setting sun. They supped on frying-pan bread and thick strips of bacon. For the first time since Three Bars, Marshall retrieved the gold from his saddlebag and set the brick on a blanket. The men studied it from several angles. None touched the bullion, as this seemed a luxury meant only for Marshall, but they commented on the glint of the stuff in the setting sun and whistled at the prospects the soft metal conjured in their minds. Gabriel, from the edge of the group, couldn't help but find the display somehow wrong. He couldn't get the images of Ugly Mary and Rickles from his mind. The bar of gold seemed a strange, dead thing, like a coffin set out in state or the mound of an unmarked grave.

“What do ya think it's worth?” Dallas asked.

The men debated this question for some time. Rollins was convinced it would fetch a thousand dollars. He called it a “thousand-dollar bar” and said the logic of it was clear to anyone with a lick of sense. Dallas thought it might go for more. As gold-hungry as people were out in California, they'd probably fall over themselves offering hard currency for the stuff, until each of the men would be as rich as the king of Siam. This comparison drew some interest from Marshall, who couldn't imagine what a skinny-necked Alabama boy like Dallas knew of the riches of the Far East.

“I tell you boys the God-honest truth,” Marshall said at last. “This here gold ain't worth what it used to be, not anymore. There was a time you could've wiped out a whole nation of redskins for what we got laying here. There was a time you could've hung a thousand Jews from crosses and beat the living shit out of your slaves and nobody've batted an eyelash.” He looked around at the group, pausing on Gabriel and James and then shaking his head sharply to bring back his wandering mind. “But them days are long gone. Sad truth is, the world is changing and ain't one of us knows what it's gonna end up looking like. That's why I don't mind us staking ourselves to a little insurance.” He picked up the brick with reverent hands and held it up for the others to see. “I can't say exactly, cause I wasn't there when they picked this fella up, but you're looking at more than a couple thousand here. Old Mary never cared for banks. There were too many Easterners involved for her liking, too many Yankees. I remember her saying she'd look after her own cash, thank you very much. Nobody'd get hers except over her dead body. And those were her words, not mine.” He paused and weighed the brick in his hand. “Yessir, this here's the weight of justice done. No fat bitch's gonna outfox the man who taught her all she knew.”

“Hell no she ain't,” Dallas agreed, “not when she's full of lead and twenty pounds heavier for it.” He couldn't help breaking into a little dance, a sort of a heel-to-toe jig to the music of his own whistling. Rollins knelt close to the gold and repeated its worth several times, until interrupted by Dunlop's forlorn voice.

“It's not worth the lives you took to get it,” he mumbled, just loudly enough to be heard. He looked off into the distance, toward the East, as he had done since they arrived at camp. His expression was so vague and distant that one might have doubted he'd even spoken, except that he spoke again. “And it's sure not worth the time we'll all spend burning.”

All eyes turned to him, then cautiously moved back to Marshall, who found no insult in the statement but in fact seemed glad to hear it, saying, “That's an interesting point, Dunlop, the whole question of God and Satan and punishment and that. Problem for me is that if I'm damned as a sinner, then I'm damned as a sinner and that's that. If I'm damned, I was damned a long time ago. I've been living a damned life now for thirty-some years, and I can't do a thing about it. If I was to drop down on my knees and pray, I'd be making God out a fool. I'd be trying to pull the wool over his eyes, so to speak. I'd be kowtowing to the Almighty just to get a bit of the good stuff in the hereafter. Now, wouldn't that make me bout the biggest hypocrite you ever seen? If there's one thing I hate, it's a hypocrite. I'd rather share a mescal with an honest man in hell than drink wine with some brown-nose saint in heaven.” He seemed annoyed for a moment, bitter, as if he knew exactly whom he spoke of when he mentioned this saint. “Anyway, the world's too damn complicated for any one son of a bitch to have made it up.” He stood up and heaved the brick onto Dunlop's lap. “Here, feel the weight of a man's soul.”

Dunlop convulsed away from it, scrambling to his feet and looking back at it as if the metal were a living creature capable of great harm. He looked ready to lash out, but he didn't find his voice again, and any words he might have uttered would've been drowned out by the men's laughter. Dunlop sat again, turned his back, and continued his contemplation of the east.

Marshall bounded over and snatched up the brick. He held it close to the back of Dunlop's head, and for a moment Gabriel thought he was going to hit him with it. But instead he knelt behind the man and spoke close to his ear, with the soft voice of a friend.

“Careful there, Dunlop, you gotta keep control of that temper of yours. Don't go all soft on me and get yourself in trouble, you hear? I like you. We've blood of Scots, you and I. But don't think I'd hesitate. I'd take you out of the world faster than your daddy shot you into it, and I'd enjoy it just as much.”

Dunlop didn't move. He showed no sign of even having heard, but Marshall backed off, satisfied. Gabriel felt James's gaze hard on him, but he avoided the other boy's eyes.

Dallas spat in Dunlop's general direction, accurately enough that a few flecks of the spit touched the man's boots. “Never knew you were such a damn twat anyway,” he said. “Should've known, though, seeing's how the so-called Scotchmen don't even wear trousers.” He turned back to the group, having suddenly found humor in his loathing. “Did y'all know that? Dunlop told me so himself. Said they used to go to battle the whole lot of them half naked, nothing but a piece a cloth wrapped around their jewels.”