Ride the Man Down, page 19
“Stay,” she said.
“I can’t.”
She sat up, wiped the tears from her eyes, and said: “Then I will not cry for you any more.” She stood and walked into the kitchen and resumed her watch over the mutton stew.
He donned a slicker that was hanging by the door and tugged his hat down tightly on his head before taking the valise and going out. Mud was to the top of his boots and it sucked at them as he crossed the yard to the lean-to where he kept the spring wagon. It would take longer going to Tulsa by wagon than by horse, but he needed the wagon to bring back his friend. He was hitching the horse into the traces when he saw the ghosts in the rain, sitting there astride played-out ponies. And somehow he knew that they were the men who had killed his friend.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“What will we do now, John Henry?” Anna asked when she’d regained her composure.
They were sitting in a café having coffee, watching the rain, and the rain and the gloom seemed appropriate for the way they were feeling. “I need to get you back to Talaquah, then go look for those boys before it’s too late.”
“How do you know it’s not already too late?”
“I don’t. But I’m hoping it isn’t.”
Cole saw the look of despair in her eyes as she stared at her reflection in the rain-slicked glass. He thought about the times of their lives, the directions they had taken, the secrets kept, and how it all put this strange sense of uneasiness between him and Anna. He loved her still, and he thought she still loved him, but everything that had transpired in the last few days had changed them in ways they couldn’t fix any easier than they could turn back those days to a better time.
“Look,” he said, “this wasn’t your fault.”
“Then why does it feel that way?”
He rolled a shuck and smoked it and asked her if she was up to a return trip so soon.
“I feel weary,” she said.
“Maybe you should stay in Ardmore a while and rest, let me go on and see if I can locate them.”
“No. I will go back with you to Talaquah. I will go with you as far as I can, as far as you’ll let me ....”
There was a stage line across the street, and Cole walked over and asked if they had a run going to Talaquah, and the man said one was leaving in an hour. Cole bought a pair of tickets, then walked down to the livery and sold the horses and saddles. He knew Anna wasn’t up to another long horseback ride.
“It’s a straight-through haul,” Cole said when he told her about taking the stage. “We’ll be back in Talaquah tomorrow night. You sure you don’t want to stay over for a while?”
She simply looked at him, her sad eyes full of anguish.
An hour later they were aboard the mud wagon in close quarters with a Cherokee farmer, his large, bosomy wife, and their two children and an infant who suckled at the woman’s breast. The farmer looked at Anna and Cole, saw the difference in their color, and showed his disapproval without saying a word. But Cole no longer cared what anybody thought about them.
They rode like that, rocking over the rutted, mud-slathered road from stage stop to stage stop, halting only long enough to change horses and for the driver and his partner to relieve themselves. They bought coffee and hardtack at one of the stage stops, and the farmer and his wife and children ate sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper that the farmer took from his coat pocket. They drank from a single canteen.
After hours of riding, cramped as they were, the stopping for the change of horses was a relief, allowing them the small pleasure of stretching their legs and backs. Cole knew it was hard on Anna, but he also knew her mind wasn’t on the journey as much as it was on where the journey led and what lay at the end of the line.
During the night she slept, her head leaning on Cole’s shoulder, and the farmer’s children whimpered like restless kittens as they tried to sleep, too. Rain and darkness and a rocky road made miserable traveling companions.
Cole’s mind kept turning over the possibility that the boy he’d shot back at Greasy Junction might well have been his son. How the hell could he have known that? He’d been weighing telling Anna about it ever since the witch woman had told them the story. But not knowing for certain whether it was Thomas he’d shot or not only seemed a cruel lash to lay on Anna at this point. The odds were one in four that he could have been the boy he had shot. The thought made his temples throb painfully. He dozed on and off from sheer weariness, and several times he had fitful dreams of a dead boy reaching out to him with a look of wonderment and pleading in his eyes, and Cole would wake with a start to the darkness of the interior of the mud wagon, wake to the snores of the farmer and his wife and the whimpering of their children and, his hands cold as ice.
Daylight came over the land in soft shades of increasing grayness. The rain had stopped and soon sunlight filtered through a crack in the sodden clouds that lay off to the east as they pulled into a stage stop. It seemed for several moments that they were still moving, the motion of the journey still riding in their blood.
Cole stepped down, helped Anna down, and then the farmer’s children, as the farmer helped his wife, who was carrying the infant. The driver announced they could wash their hands and faces at the pump and buy breakfast inside the way station and that they’d be changing drivers for the next leg of the journey.
Anna and the farmer’s wife and children headed off toward the privy. The farmer pulled a plug from his pocket and cut off a chew and pushed it inside his mouth, then chewed on it for a time before saying: “Some god-damn’ ride, huh?”
Cole nodded, rolled himself a shuck.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said.
Cole looked at him, shook his head. “Can’t say I do.”
“You used to be a deputy marshal out of Fort Smith,” he said.
Cole nodded.
“You still?”
“No.”
“Got tired of arresting poor-assed Indians?”
“Got shot,” Cole said.
“Well, that’s as good a reason as any. I guess a lot of you deputies get shot over here in the Nations.”
Cole ignored the comment.
He rubbed his hands together working some heat or blood into them. “’Member who it was that shot you?” he asked.
Cole looked at him, saw something familiar in the broad face. “Lucky?”
“I put on a few pounds since you seen me last,” he said.
“That gal with the infant,” Cole said. “She’s not the woman who shot me.”
He shook his head. “No, that ain’t the same wife I had back then ... the one that shot you. That was Alice. She died of tainted whiskey a month after she plugged you with that musket.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I told her a bunch of times not to drink so much, but she was hell on liquor. A cross-eyed white son-of-a-bitch come through with snakehead liquor and was selling it cheap. Three, four others died besides Alice. We caught up with him and dragged him by his heels from our horses until he wasn’t fit for dog food.” He leaned and spat just as his family was coming back up from the privy
“You ain’t still sore at me ’cause she shot you, are you? I din’t ask her to or nothing.”
“No, Lucky, that was a long time ago and I’m sorry Alice ended up dying from tainted whiskey.”
“Me, too,” he said. “She was a pretty good screw. Hope you have better luck with your wife than I did with mine. Least you was smart enough to marry an Indian gal.”
Cole didn’t bother to tell him that Anna wasn’t his wife.
The mud wagon made Talaquah by midnight. Cole said to Anna: “Do you want to ride out to see Bone tonight, or should we take a room and go in the morning?”
“Let’s take a room,” she said. “I’d hate to disturb him at this hour.”
That night she lay, stiff and silent, in Cole’s arms and he knew they’d been changed forever, and his heart was heavy as a stone in his chest because they had. He listened to her murmuring sleep and thought it sounded like the most lonesome wind blowing across the most lonesome prairie, and wept silently to the sound of it.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Bone Blue moved with stealth back toward the cabin, but the riders saw him and spurred their mounts forward, cutting him off like a pack of gray wolves cutting out a deer, and he retreated back toward the lean-to. The rain blurred his vision, but he didn’t need to see their faces to know who they were and what they wanted. “Murderers!” he called, hoping Rudina would hear his voice in time to look out and see the trouble sitting horses in her front yard and take refuge in the summer cellar. They sat there, looking in his direction through the veil of rain.
He had that big Schofield pistol and his Henry rifle and a box of shells for each and he swore an oath to himself he’d fire every last round into them. But as soon as he brought up the rifle, they were gone—like ghosts, like they’d never been there. What to do? Make a run for the house, or sit tight? His heart thumped so hard he could hear the blood beat in his ears.
How the hell did they come to be here? he wondered. Then he heard something moving, saw a shadow sliding along the north wall of the cabin, another slipping around back. Oh, holy Jesus, they’re going to get Rudina! His shot seemed to shatter a world that, until this moment, had been stillborn, and he heard Rudina scream and thought: My God, I didn’t shoot her, did I? He squatted there, fear gripping his gut, twisting inside him like a knife blade.
He heard the roar of a shotgun, then silence. Saw two shadows moving back from the cabin’s walls in retreat. Good for you, old girl, give ’em hell! She hadn’t retreated to the summer cellar—she’d taken up the shotgun he kept just inside the rear door. He snapped off three, four, maybe five shots at the retreating shadows. Then sat for a long time, listening to the rain. He was breathing hard, his chest felt full of fire. Too god-damn’ old for shoot-outs, he told himself.
It was maybe a hundred yards from the lean-to to the cabin. A hundred long yards with nothing in between but the rain. He could go running up and crashing in through the door but with Rudina in there with that Hamilton double-barreled shotgun, she’d blast him to dog meat before she realized it was he. He could call out to her, but then they’d know he was coming and pick him off like a wild turkey. He thought about it a moment longer. Hell, if I’m going to get shot, I’d just as soon it be my wife done it as those god-damn’ bastards. I’d just as soon die in my own house instead of out here in the rain. He hitched up his pants and made a run for it, bracing himself against the unseen bullets that would come out of the rain—a rain of bullets—and sloughed his way toward the cabin as fast as his legs could carry his bulk. He slipped in the mud once and fell and lost the Schofield, didn’t bother to look for it, got up, and kept moving. Just as he hit the front porch, he shouted—“Don’t shoot, woman, it’s me!”—and burst through the door and landed hard on the floor in a heap. He rolled over and looked up into the twin black holes of the Hamilton. Rudina was shaking so badly the barrels were doing little circles like a double-headed snake ready to strike.
“You OK?” he said, fully out of breath.
She nodded. “You?”
“Hell, I don’t know, do I look shot any place? They could have shot me and I didn’t know it.” He felt around on his person.
“Who are they, Bone?”
“Them god-damn’ renegades!”
“They’ve come to kill us!”
Bone reached up and took the shotgun from her hands, afraid she might pull the triggers and blow his head off. “Jesus, woman!”
He eased himself to the window and looked out, didn’t see a thing except rain, said: “I think maybe you run them off.”
They waited in silence for a long time. Bone found himself a chair and sat in it, facing the front door, ready to kill anyone who came through it, the shotgun in his capable hands, fire racing through his blood like in the old days when he was young and skinny and full of piss. He found himself praying they’d come, hoping and willing for them to come
“Why’d you scream earlier?” he said, after an hour of sitting there waiting like that.
“I didn’t know I did.”
“I’ll have to replace that back window you blowed out,” he said. “Won’t be hard to do if they got any glass at the hardware when I go in.”
Rudina sat on the floor where Bone had told her to sit, her mind racing wildly and fretfully at the turn of events.
“Have to get some hinges, too, for the door,” he said, trying to calculate the cost in his mind of new glass and hinges. “I wish now we’d quit this place a long time ago. Now I just got to put more money into it.”
“Are you crazy?” she said.
“Hell, I must be. But crazy is all I got to go on right now. Crazy and this here god-damn scatter-gun.”
Rudina fell to a closed-eyed silence, and Bone willed men to come through his front door so he could kill them. The rain fell heavily for the next several hours, then he stopped wishing so hard when he heard a bird singing somewhere amid the trees. A bird or a wild renegade, he didn’t know which, his mind was so full of crazy thoughts.
Sun pierced the busted window and lay in slabs across the floor. The shattered glass lay twinkling in the sunlight like precious stones. Bone felt stiff in his knees and hips from sitting so long, waiting for the men that never came. When he finally did try to stand up, he faltered and nearly fell back again.
The noise of his movement stirred Rudina and she opened her eyes and said: “I had a dream we were attacked by strange men and I shot out the windows and it all seemed so real.” Then she looked around and saw that it wasn’t a dream after all. “What time is it?” she said.
“I don’t know, but it’s sometime late afternoon, judging by the way the sun is angled,” he said.
“Are you hungry, Bone?”
“You know, I think I could eat a preacher’s mule.”
He walked to the windows and looked out and saw nothing but sunlight on the rain-slick grass. The grass looked so brilliantly green that it hurt his eyes to look at it and that feeling welled up in his chest and brought tears to his eyes. He knew then how close they’d come to having been murdered. Had he left half an hour earlier, Rudina would have been alone. He knew from Jimmy all the terrible stories about what the renegades had done to women, especially women of police officers. He wondered if they had known he was a policeman and a friend of Jimmy Wild Bird’s, or had they simply come upon the house by random, looking for some easy pickings? It caused him to go light in the head, that thought, and he leaned a hand against the doorjamb to steady himself. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened and forced himself to concentrate only on what did happen. And the thing that happened was that he and Rudina had run off those sons-of-bitches, and he felt for once like a man instead of some fat old fool investigating the theft of stolen horses and breaking up marital spats.
He walked out into the yard to look for blood traces. Maybe he or Rudina had hit one of the renegades. He walked around and around the house, trying to see droplets of blood amid the raindrops clinging to the grass. He saw nothing. Then he looked up and saw a man astride a horse and was about to blow him out from under his hat when the man touched the brim of the frayed straw sombrero and said: “Señor, I’m looking for some men who might have come this way. Maybe you seen them, huh?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
John Henry Cole rose early and dressed and went to the window and looked out. The sky was as blue and perfect as he’d ever seen it, but his mind was filled with thoughts about imperfect things in an imperfect world. Anna stirred amid the bedcovers, and he crossed the room and sat on the side of the bed.
She opened her eyes and looked at him and he could see she’d been crying. Cole remembered waking during the night to her stifled sobs.
“I have to go see now,” he said.
“I want to go with you.”
“OK, but only as far as Bone’s. I’ll see about renting us some horses to ride out there while you get dressed.”
He started to stand. She took his hand. “I’m not blaming you,” she said.
“Nobody’s to blame,” he said. “Bad things happen.”
He left the room and descended the stairs and walked out into the brilliant morning. He was halfway down the street when he saw Bone Blue and Rudina. The buggy they rode in was rocking to and fro down the rutted street. Bone pulled up short when he saw Cole.
“Those renegades,” he said. “I found ’em.”
Something sharp caught under Cole’s ribs. “You kill them?” he asked.
“No. But they damn’ near killed me and Rudina.”
“They found you?”
“Yeah. Whether they were looking for me or just looking to get lucky, I can’t say.”
“Anna’s at the hotel,” Cole said to Rudina. “Wonder if you’d mind going over there and being with her?”
She looked at Bone, and he nodded. She climbed down and crossed the street.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Bone.”
He wiped his upper lip with the back of his sleeve. “Something I got to tell you, too,” he said.
Cole told him about Thomas being one of the renegades, about the possibility that he might have killed the boy back at Greasy Junction but couldn’t be sure one way or the other.
Bone leaned off to one side and spat, wiped his upper lip again and said: “God damn, one of ’em’s your and Anna’s boy?”
Cole nodded, and Bone dismounted and tied up at a hitch rail, and said he needed a drink of something. They walked inside a restaurant that had freshly whitewashed walls and red-checkered tablecloths and the thick sweet smell of fatback frying.
