Walking Wolf (6 page)

Before I left on my first solo journey to the store, the Reverend lectured me at length on how important it was for me not to set eyes on the “palace of trollops,” for fear of my mortal soul. However, since the general store was two doors down from the saloon, it was hard for me to avoid seeing it, either coming or going. As I was leaving the general store laden with groceries, I noticed Marshal Harkin seated in a bentwood rocker outside the saloon, rocking gently back and forth. Without missing a beat, he glanced over in my direction and beckoned me to come closer.

Although I was fearful the Reverend might be using the all-seeing eyes of God he was always talking about to keep track of me, I was curious as to what he might want. Since my arrival in Vermilion, the Reverend had kept me sequestered from its other citizens, assuring me it was for my own good, as the town was—in his own words—a “hotbed for all manner of sin and unnatural vice.” I was to speak to no one, and this included Marshal Harkin, who was not only Vermilion's resident lawman, but also its pimp.

“You're that White Indian boy the Reverend took in, ain't you?” he drawled, pushing back the brim of his derby.

“Yes, sir.”

“He treatin' you good?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You look like a right enough young feller to me, Billy. Whenever you get your fill of hearin' about Jesus, you come see me. I'm looking for a boy to sweep up and empty the spittoons and slop jars. I'll pay you a dollar a week. Good hard cash. You think about it, hear?” He leaned forward and tucked a piece of candy into my pocket, winking broadly.

That was my first genuine interaction with Marshal Harkin, better known as “Gent” on account of his passion for fancy eastern headgear. During my brief time in Vermilion, I would come to know him far better than I would the Reverend.

Gent was an open, straightforward cuss. He owned the Spread Eagle Saloon, where five rather tired-looking “dance hall girls” worked the clientele, taking them upstairs for two-dollar sex of the boots-on variety. He was fairly easygoing when it came to the cowboys who rode into town to let off steam during the roundup season. After all, they were his bread and butter. Gent was willing to overlook drunken cowpokes hurrahing the town—riding up and down the streets, firing six-shooters aimlessly into the air (and the occasional window)—but he was merciless when it came to saloon brawls. And more than one hapless cowboy found himself colder than clay after shorting one of Gent's girls.

On the whole, Gent saw the Reverend as a nuisance more than an upstanding member of the community. As far as he was concerned, the only reason anyone came to Texas was to get away from their past. The frontier was a place where a man could reinvent himself from the ground up without having to worry about phantoms from the old days coming back to haunt him. And it was clear to anyone with one eye that the Reverend was hiding out from a damn big spook. But the real reason Gent distrusted the Reverend was because he occasionally made forays into the Spread Eagle, attempting to sway the working girls from their lives of debauchery and sin. He had yet to win any converts, but Gent still took a dim view of anyone trying to stir up trouble in the henhouse. He knew Vermilion was still too young and poor to succumb to respectability, but he realized that it was only a matter of time before its citizens went from being rough-riding pioneers to civilized townspeople, and he sure as hell didn't like the idea of Reverend Near getting a jump on making Vermilion a decent place to raise your kids up.

He needn't have worried, though. Assuming Vermilion had a future at all, the Reverend was hardly destined to be its midwife. Besides, he didn't fool the whores one bit. They knew a sinner when they saw one. But not even they realized how bad off the Reverend really was.

Which leads me to the little girl. I don't recollect her name—it's possible I never knew it in the first place. All I remember is that she was one of the children that belonged to an immigrant sodbuster who lived on a farm just outside of town. Every now and then the Reverend would ride out there on his mule and try to convert the half-dozen or so families scattered about the countryside from Catholicism, but with little success. Most of them barely spoke enough English to buy seed and sell their eggs and butter, much less understand the gospel according to Deuteronomy Near.

The little girl disappeared one evening around suppertime. Apparently a rather boisterous child by nature, she had talked out of turn at the dinner table, incurring the wrath of her parents. Her punishment was to stand on the front porch until the rest of the family had finished eating. When the mother got up to tell the little girl she could come back in, she was nowhere to be found.

At first they thought she was playing a trick on them, but when several hours passed and the little girl still hadn't returned, the father rode into town and reported her disappearance to Marshal Harkin. Gent rounded up a search party. I asked the Reverend if I could help look for the missing child, but he refused to grant me permission.

When the first day of searching did not turn up any sign of the missing girl, Gent became convinced that one of two things had happened—that either she had been kidnapped by wild Indians or carried off by wolves, possibly a bear. When the farmer translated the Marshal's suspicions to his wife, the poor woman became hysterical.

They found the little girl on the second day. After searching the surrounding gullies and washes, it turned out she was in her very own front yard—in the well. She had a burlap bag over her head and she was missing her knickers. The Marshal arrested the hired hand, who was a touch feebleminded and had gotten into trouble the previous season for fucking some of the livestock where the neighbors could see it. After a trial of sorts, they hung him. They never did find the little girl's knickers.

The Reverend, being the only man of the cloth in the county, officiated at the burial, even though the dirt farmers couldn't speak a lick of English and were Catholic to boot. I was there to help, although all I did was stand to one side of the Reverend and pretend to look sad. Since I didn't have anything else to do, I studied the grieving family.

The mother was a stout, round-faced woman who probably wasn't as old as she looked, her eyes red and swollen from crying. The father's face was unreadable as he tried to comfort his wife. His eyes remained fixed on his daughter's coffin, suspended over the open grave by a couple of planks. There were five other children, some older and some younger than the dead girl. One or two of them cried, but the others simply looked uncomfortable in their Sunday best, squirming and pulling at their starched collars. After rambling on about innocence, sinners, lambs, Jesus and a better world beyond, the Reverend at last shut up. The grave diggers removed the planks, lowering the small coffin into the ground with looped ropes.

A week later, I found the little girl's missing knickers wadded up and stuffed behind one of the loft rafters. They were stiff with dried blood and semen. I didn't know what to do about what I'd found, but I knew what it meant. But it did make it easy for me to decide to break with the Reverend. The only reason I'd put up with his madness in the first place was the belief that he might have the wisdom to teach me how to control the killing wildness inside me. But now I knew for certain that the Reverend lacked the ability to curb even his own bestial tendencies, much less mine.

That night, while he was passed out, I packed what few belongings I could call my own and trudged over to the Spread Eagle. Gent was playing solitaire in the saloon, a bottle of rotgut at his elbow and a foul-smelling hand-rolled dangling from his lower lip.

“You get enough Jesus, son?”

“Yes, sir. I come to see you about that job.”

Gent grunted as he lay down another card. “Figgered you'd be comin' round sooner or later. Like I said, I pay a dollar a week, plus what you can roll off the drunks.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“Now get to work! I got slop jars that need scrubbin'!”

I must have scrubbed every slop jar in Vermilion that evening, and considering that most folks crapped in tin cans instead of porcelain chamber pots back then, that was probably a fair bet. After I finished with the thunder mugs, I had to clean and polish the spittoons, then sweep and mop the front saloon. By the time midnight rolled around, I was so tired I couldn't raise my arms over my head to take my shirt off.

The bartender showed me my room—little more than a storage closet next to the backdoor, but at least there was a mattress on the floor. I'd been sleeping on nothing but dirty straw in the Reverend's half-loft, so it looked fairly ritzy. I collapsed into a sleep so deep I didn't even dream.

The next thing I knew, there was a crashing sound coming from outside, and a familiar voice raised in anger.
“Where is he?”

A growl slipped from between my clenched teeth, and I had to fight to keep my fur from rising to the surface in self-defense.

“Where is that thankless heathen bastard?!?”

“Hey! What the hell do you think you're doin'?” yelled the bartender. “Somebody go fetch Gent! The Reverend's gone loco!”

The storage room door flew open and Reverend Near's frame filled the threshold. The stink of Mug-Wump Specific and madness radiated from him like heat from a flat rock. I scrambled to my feet to avoid being kicked in the ribs.

“There you are, you ungrateful piece of shit!” he growled. “I go to sleep for a few hours, and what do you do—? You turn on me and embrace mine enemies!” He shook his head sadly, and for a moment it looked as if he was about to cry. “I thought I could
save
you, Billy. I really believed that God had a plan for you. But I was wrong—horribly wrong! You're just another sinner, given over to base fornication and intoxication!”

Sweat began to pour off my brow. Being so close to the Reverend's insane rage was making me twitch. If I didn't get out in the open soon, I would shapeshift involuntarily. I tried to move past the Reverend, but he surged forward, grabbing me by the shirt, lifting my heels off the ground as he slammed me into the shelves lining the tiny room. His face was inches from my own, and I could see that one of the lenses in his smoked spectacles was cracked.

“Honor thy father!”
he bellowed.
“Honor thy father, you little shit!”

I lost control then for a second. But it was enough. For the first time in months I let the fur bristle and fangs sprout. And the Reverend Near suddenly found himself nose-to-muzzle with a snarling wolf.

He promptly screamed in terror and let me drop. As my butt came into rough contact with the floor, I was shocked back to my senses and I quickly reverted to my human self.

The Reverend staggered backward, clutching his heart, his skin suddenly the color of tallow.
“Demon!”
he gasped.
“Foul demon of Hell!”

Gent, looking bloodshot and none too happy to be ousted from bed at such an ungodly hour, shouldered his way into the already cramped room. He clamped a big, calloused hand on the Reverend collar and yanked him out the door. “What in tarnation is goin' on here? Jesus on the cross, Reverend—didn't I tell you to keep outta my saloon?”

“You're harboring a fiend from the very Pit itself!” The Reverend warned, waving an arm in my direction as Gent frog-marched him out of the saloon. “That boy is a murdering beast!”

“What the hell are you goin' on about
now
?” Gent snapped.

“The boy is a minion of the Devil! I have seen him turn into a wild beast before my very eyes!”

“Go sleep it off, Reverend,” the marshal growled, delivering a swift kick to the raving minister's pants that propelled him through the saloon's swinging doors.

Near fell into the thick muck that comprised Vermilion's main street, floundering and flailing like a drowning man. A couple of the whores had come out to see what the to-do was about and were having themselves a good laugh at the Reverend's expense.

“Trollops! Harlots! You shall not escape the Lord's judgment!” sputtered the Reverend, wiping the mire from his smoked glasses with as much dignity as he could bring to bear.

“Come along, boy,” Gent grumbled, leading me back into the dim interior of the Spread Eagle. “It's over.”

I cast one last glance over my shoulder at the Reverend, struggling to extricate himself from the mud, and followed him inside.

Later that same day, Gent arrested me for the murder of the little girl. I was sweeping up the front saloon when he walked up and, without any warning, pulled out his six-shooter and pressed its barrel right between my eyes.

“Hate to do this to you, son, but your under arrest.”

Turns out the Reverend went home, got himself cleaned off, and returned with the pair of knickers I'd found up in the loft. They'd disappeared soon after I first discovered them, so I assumed the Reverend had burned them in the potbelly stove. Turns out he just moved them to a better hiding place. Near turned over the missing knickers to the Marshal, complete with a story about how he'd found them in my belongings the day after the little girl's funeral. Obviously, I had been hopelessly tainted by years amongst the Comanche—I was no more than a murdering savage, inflamed by the sight of womanly flesh to the most horrific acts of rapine.

Gent hadn't been too thrilled about this key bit of evidence suddenly making its appearance—after all, he'd already hung a man for the crime—but the Reverend wasn't about to let it drop. So off to the pokey I went, manacled hand and foot.

Vermilion's “jail” was an airless adobe hut divided into two rooms. The front room, theoretically, was Gent's office, although he preferred lounging outside the Spread Eagle to spending time in that sweat-box. The second room was a tiny closet of a cell, with a wooden plank set on sawhorses for a bed, and a rusty coffee can for a slop jar. The door to the cell was made out of iron, with a trap at the bottom for meals to be pushed through, and there was a single, narrow barred window set above the makeshift bed. The cell itself stank of tobacco juice, vomit and old shit, since Gent rarely had occasion to use it for anything but keeping rowdy cowboys in check until their trail bosses came to round them up.