The Amarillo Trail Page 9

  Jared raised his wet face to the sky and shook his fist.

  “Damn you,” he yelled at the top of his voice, but the wind snatched his words away as if they were birds swept off a tropical limb in a typhoon.

  Chapter 15

  Joadie Lee Bostwick had an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. A man had died in that place. His blood still stained the earth, but the man was gone. One of the Gallegos brothers, he didn’t know which one. Doc had shot him and now the tracks around the spot where the man had died told some of the story.

  Doc and Curly Bob Naylor sat their horses several yards away. Curly had rolled a cigarette and was smoking it. Doc chewed on an unlit cheroot, his eyes full of an almost incomprehensible sadness, that same look Joadie Lee had seen on his face after they had hanged the horse thief. Now he felt some of that sadness in himself. He rode over to where Doc and Curly Bob waited.

  “His brothers come and took him away, looks like,” he said to Doc, his voice soft and whispery, rough with the gravel of the sadness he felt.

  “So they came back,” Curly Bob said.

  “Looks like,” Joadie Lee said. He pulled the makings out of his shirt pocket and flipped open the small container of papers. He began to roll a cigarette and noticed that his hands trembled. In some ways it was easier to take when he saw the body of the man Doc had shot. There was a reality to that which he could understand. The man had tried to kill Doc and Doc had shot him. Joadie Lee had seen dead men before, in the war, and since, when his cousin drowned in the Nueces when they were both young boys.

  “It gave me a funny feelin’,” Joadie Lee said, “seein’ where that boy died.”

  “I know what you mean,” Doc said. “I used to get that feelin’ when I was in the war. Seein’ where a man had died, sometimes good friends, it, well, it kind of changes the land. The wildflowers lose their colors and the dirt gets real drab as if someone had sprinkled poison on an ant colony. Something goes out of the land in those spots, something you can never get back.”

  Both Joadie Lee and Curly Bob seemed surprised at what Doc had said and they both went silent.

  “Let’s get on home,” Doc said. They all heard the rumbling thunder in the distance, and when the dark clouds moved in and blocked out the sun, they rode in near darkness, with the light playing tricks on their eyes. Jackrabbits jumped up and raced off, startling the horses, and lizards slid off rocks that suddenly turned shady. Lightning crackled in the clouds with a sizzling of silver streaks that set off more thunder and lit the land like a photographer’s flash powder.

  “I never should have hanged that Gallegos boy,” Doc said after a while. “I should have just given him a good larrupin’ and sent him on home.”

  “You didn’t do nothin’ wrong, Doc,” Curly Bob said. “That boy stole your horses. That’s a hangin’ offense most anywheres.”

  “I could have shown some mercy,” Doc said. “Might have been best to let the boy live.”

  Neither Curly Bob nor Joadie Lee made any comment, as if each man had his own thoughts about horse stealing, justice, and what that hanging had brought down on all of them.

  The wind surged up out of the northwest and blew down on them. A few minutes later, the first smattering of rain pocked the dirt and stung their faces. They broke out their yellow slickers and donned them just before the drenching rain struck. The drops clattered off their raincoats and stung their horses’ eyes and their own. The wind blew sheets of heavy rain at them until the trail and all the hoof prints were washed away as if none had ever passed that way.

  It was near nightfall when Doc rode up to the house with its windows glowing with yellow lamplight. He waved to the boys in the rain as they rode off toward the bunkhouse and stables. He put Sandy up in a three-horse shelter next to the house, stripped him of saddle, bridle, saddlebags, and bedroll, grained him, and forked hay into one of the slatted bins. He poured water into the trough and spoke to the two other horses, which whickered at him and Sandy. He put his gear inside the small tack room in the stable and shut the door, slipping a wooden peg in the latch. He walked to the house and entered by the back door. He hung up his slicker and slapped the water off his hat brim before he went into the kitchen, where the smell of food made his stomach jump.

  “I knowed it was you, Doc, when you rode up. I seen your shadder and the boys, and just knowed you had come back.”

  “Smells good in here,” he said.

  “You hungry?”

  “I could eat the south end of a northbound polecat right about now,” he said.

  Ethyl laughed, as she always did at her husband’s jokes.

  “Well, you just set yourself at the table and I’ll get the vittles. You can wash in that basin there on the sink, and I laid out a towel for you.”

  “Ethyl, what in hell would I do without you?”

  “You’d have to shine your own boots—that’s what,” she said, her voice jovial, a smile of satisfaction flickering on her lips. The sound of the rain on the roof made the kitchen seem cozy and warm and neither of them minded the husky howl of the wind against the clapboard exterior of the frame house. The wind keened in the eaves and whistled as it sniffed at their windows like some prowling beast.

  “I do shine my own boots,” he said as he laved his hands in the bowl of soapy water. He rinsed them off and dried them with the towel Ethyl had set out.

  “Not always,” she said.

  “Yeah, on Sunday-go-to-meetin’s or funerals.”

  “I’m glad you’re back home, Doc. You made good time. I didn’t expect you until maybe late tonight or early in the mornin’. Jared doin’ all right?”

  “He was fine. He’ll make the drive. I left Roy with him. We lost a few head.”

  “Anything else happen?” she asked, and there was something mysterious about her question that made the hackles rise on the back of his neck. But he knew she couldn’t know what had happened on the drive up to Jared’s. Nobody knew, except he and his men.

  “Nope,” he lied.

  He didn’t want to tell her about the run-in with the Gallegos boys and, especially, he didn’t want her to know that he had shot and killed one of them. Oh, he would tell her sometime, but not now, not when he was hungry as a bear coming out of hibernation and just getting back home and all.

  “You sure?” she said as she took plates from the cupboard, then opened a drawer and splashed silverware atop them with a tinny clatter.

  “Real sure, darlin’.”

  She looked at him. And he knew she knew that he was holding something back. She wasn’t a mind reader, but she knew him, knew his ways. She could, in fact, read him like a book.

  But she said nothing. She just smiled at him with that knowing smirk of hers and tossed her head as if to shake off his lie.

  He saw her carrying plates into the next room, and his eyebrows arched. They hardly ever ate supper in the dining room. They mostly ate there when they had company.

  “Where you goin’?” he asked. He walked over to the kitchen table in the center of the room. “Kitchen’s fine with me.”

  “We got company,” she said, and vanished through the doorway.

  “Company?”

  “You come on in, Doc, and try not to say anything until you hear all I know.”

  Doc followed her into the dining room and was surprised to see Caroline sitting at the table. She was slumped over and he could not see her face. But there were bandages on her arms and another wrapped around her head like a turban. There was blood on the bandages.

  “Christ,” he said. “What happened to Caroline?”

  “Now, Doc, you just sit down while I get our vittles and I’ll tell you all about it. I’m going to set the coffee on to boil now that you’re here and if you need some brandy after you’ve et, I set a bottle out in the front room.”

  Doc sat down in a daze.

  “Caroline?” he said as Ethyl set out three plates and put the silverware beside each pewter plate. She left without spe
aking to carry in the supper she had prepared.

  Caroline moaned and tried to raise her head.

  “My God,” he said, “what happened to you, girl?”

  Ethyl came with platters of roast beef, boiled potatoes, red beans, and collard greens. She set the food on the table.

  “I didn’t make no gravy, but they’s butter if you want it for your taters,” she said as she sat down. “You can pour your water out of that pitcher there. Coffee’s on the stove.”

  Doc shook his head.

  “What happened to Caroline?” he said.

  “Fill your plate, Doc,” Ethyl ordered, as if Caroline were not there. She put a small cut of beef and half a boiled potato on Caroline’s plate and filled her water glass.

  “Ethyl, damn it, are you going to tell me what’s wrong with Caroline? She looks like she’s been in a fight.”

  Ethyl ignored him. She reached over and tilted Caroline’s head up. Doc reared back in shock. Her face was covered with welts and bruises. Both her eyes were blackened as if she had been mauled by a prizefighter. One cheekbone was swollen and red with the blue outlines of veins streaming into her jowls. Her lips were puffed and split, the cracks a bright crimson.

  Caroline opened her mouth and winced from the pain. Ethyl spooned a small piece of meat into her mouth.

  “Now, you try and chew that meat, Caroline,” Ethyl said in a voice that she might have used on a baby or a small child. “You need to build up your strength.”

  Caroline made a sound. It was a guttural noise that sounded to Doc like something coming from an animal’s throat. It was half moan and half groan and it tore at him, rattled his senses since he could feel the pain in her voice. Hell, he could see the pain on her face. Pain painted her face into a hideous mask that was all crooked and warped and twisted into some grotesque caricature of a living person.

  Caroline did not chew the piece of meat, but it fell back in her throat and she began to choke. Ethyl rose from her chair and slapped Caroline on her back. Caroline gagged, but drew in a breath and the blue pallor fled from her face as the meat went down into her stomach.

  “My God, Ethyl, she can’t eat. She’ll choke to death if you try to feed her.”

  “I gave her broth a while ago. She ain’t been here long, about a hour or two, I reckon. Poor thing.”

  “I can’t eat a bite of this damned food until you tell me what happened to our daughter.” He almost choked on the last word, because he had long since stopped calling her kin because of the rift Caroline had caused between their two sons.

  “You’d better eat, Doc, because you’re not going to like any of it. This poor girl’s been knocked senseless and I mean senseless. I tried to talk to her, but she just babbles like some idiot in a madhouse.”

  “You think she—she’s mad?” he gasped.

  “As a hatter, Doc.”

  Caroline’s head sagged and lolled against her shoulder. She looked up at him with a crooked smile. But her eyes were empty. There was nothing in them but smoke and vacancy, as if her soul had been sucked out of her and all that was left, sitting like a scarecrow in that chair, was a shell, an empty shell of a person.

  Caroline was still breathing, but she looked to Doc as dead as those soldiers down on the Gulf, dead men with empty eyes, staring into nothingness, into an eternity that he could never understand.

  Chapter 16

  Jared braced himself when the first strong gust of rain-borne wind drenched him. He struggled to stay on his feet and reached out to grab Roy’s shoulder to keep from falling. Roy was leaning into the wind and had trouble keeping his footing. The driving rain stung both men’s eyes and blinded them until they bowed their heads and turned away from the onslaught.

  Jared drew Roy close so that he could shout into his ear and be heard above the roar of thunder and wind, the thick curtains of rain that swept over them.

  “A hell of a way to start a drive, Roy,” Jared yelled.

  Roy turned his head to answer Jared. “This is west Texas. What did you expect?”

  “In Kansas this could be a twister,” Jared shouted back, and the two men staggered toward the chuck wagon to escape the brunt of the wind. Cookie, with the help of some other hands, had driven stakes in the ground and tied ropes to the wagon. The horses were also roped tight to iron stakes so that they wouldn’t run off to escape the storm.

  Lightning flashed and thunder pealed in mighty rumbles across the black sky. Other men appeared out of the darkness and crammed themselves against Roy and Jared. There was Becker, Morris, and James.

  “Where in hell is Paco?” Jared asked Becker.

  “Him and Al are movin’ some of the cattle to higher ground,” Becker said. “I mean it’s runnin’ rivers out there.”

  “There ain’t much high ground,” Jared said.

  “You know where them live oaks is all clumped up on a hill? That’s the high ground in this mess.”

  A hand lifted the side flap on the chuck wagon. Cookie, whose actual name was Vincent Oliphant, peered out.

  “I thought this was high ground,” Cookie said.

  “On wheels, it is,” Jared said. “You’d better just hope this wagon floats.”

  “I made sandwiches, if anybody wants them,” Oliphant said.

  “They’ll get soggy,” Becker said.

  The flap closed and they all heard, dimly, the clank of pots and pans as Cookie settled himself onto his bedding.

  “If this is as bad as it gets, we’ll be all right by morning,” Roy said.

  No sooner were his words out of his mouth than they heard bellows from the cattle. The horses whinnied in high-pitched ribbons of bloodcurdling screams. The canvas on the wagon shook with drumlike tattoos. The men all bent down under the onslaught of hail the size of mothballs. They hunkered down and duck-waddled under the wagon to escape the pelting of hailstones.

  The hail did not last long, but the ground was covered with white balls. The wind howled for another hour or two and began to abate before morning. When the men walked out to mount their horses, the rain came down in torrents. The ground was littered with dead crows and prairie chickens, jackrabbits, drowned rattlesnakes, and field mice. The groggy cows stood in disconsolate bunches, silent as lambs as the riders rode among them.

  Paco and Al rode out from the grove of oaks to greet them, shadowy drenched figures on horseback, their yellow slickers barely visible through the rain and darkness.

  “No flash floods that I could see, Jared,” Paco said. “Hail tore a lot of leaves off them trees.”

  “We lose any cattle that you know of?” Jared asked.

  “None run off, far as I know.”

  Jared and Roy made a quick head count as they circled the bunched cattle, streaming in and out of their ranks and humming off-key tunes to reassure the animals.

  “I reckon we got better’n two hundred and fifty-five head,” Jared said.

  “I make it two sixty,” Roy said.

  “Close enough.”

  The rain swept past them in the early hours before dawn and there was a creamy fissure in the eastern sky when they got the herd moving. Cattle and horses sloshed through mud and puddles, skirting small rivers that coursed through gullies and arroyos and gushed out of them in murky, muddy gushers that petered out as the water spread and sank into drier ground.

  The Canadian was over its banks, roaring past them as they traversed its northern bank. The waters were full of dead animals, tree branches shorn of leaves, deadwood, and clumps of dirt torn from the banks that bobbed and sank until they were decimated into shards of grass and disintegrating dirt.

  The sun was a feeble glow as it rose to a precarious position behind streamers of dark clouds and finally disappeared as the black clouds of night rolled on into the day far to the east.

  The chuck wagon rumbled along behind the herd, its wheels occasionally sinking into mud, then jerking loose as Cookie rattled the reins and cracked the buggy whip. Riders came and went, taking sandwiches from a
side cabinet that Cookie had filled before setting out. The rain let up and a drizzle set in that was dissipated by noon. The cattle trudged on, following Paco’s lead, eyeing the river with baleful eyes, sometimes stopping to drink from a stand of leftover rainwater.

  Late in the afternoon, Paco saw something not far from the banks of the Canadian that disturbed him. He called to Al, who was riding flank some hundred or so yards behind the head of the herd.

  “Al, go see what that is over there. Looks like one of our cows.”

  “Can’t be,” Al said. “Less’n some broke loose last night and run on up ahead.”

  “Check it out,” Paco said.

  Al rode down to the river and disappeared from sight. The herd kept moving now that the land was drying up, and grass, beaten down by the hail, had sprung back to life. Cows grabbed clumps of grass as they passed, barely pausing to jerk the shoots loose, and chewed on the fodder while they continued to move forward.

  Paco noticed something else while Al was gone. The ground was chewed up, moiled into a mash of loose earth for yards on either side of the herd behind him. The damage was far worse than the hailstorm or wind could have caused and there was little sign of water washing over the hardpan.

  Every now and then he saw what looked like a large hoofprint that was too big to be a deer’s. More like an elk’s, he thought, but he knew there were no elk in that part of Texas, nor any in Oklahoma or Kansas.

  Puzzled, he rode on, and the herd followed obediently, urged on by the flankers.

  Al returned in a few minutes and told Paco what he had found.

  “You’d better ride back and tell Jared,” Paco said. “I’ll hold the herd until he rides up.”