A Congregation of Jackals (15 page)

He prompted the New Yorker. “Dicky?”

“I don’t know what I am likely to do if my life is imperiled, but I have no intention of running toward a bullet.”

“That’s why I put you far off. But I want to hear you say you won’t throw bullets into a crowd, trying to get at Quinlan and his. I need you to say this.” There was
menace in Oswell’s voice that carried a threat with it the same as if he had drawn his revolver. He hated when Dicky was obstinate.

“I will not fire into a crowd.”

“Good,” Oswell said, though he did not fully believe Dicky. He resolved that he would shoot him down himself if the need arose—better they all go under than one innocent person.

The four men continued east until Lingham pointed north, in which direction they guided their horses and rode for ten silent minutes.

From the distant moonlit grass arose a crucifix, and then two more crucifixes, and then the steeples of the church, and then the square bulk of the edifice itself. The four riders drew near the building.

“Nice church,” Godfrey said.

“It’s not big enough for this town anymore—they’ve gotta hold three services on Sunday to get everyone a turn with God. We’re gonna build another one soon.”

Oswell surveyed the lot surrounding it and was pleased to see that it was clear for many acres in all directions.

“It’s good that the landscape is so open,” he remarked.

The horses continued toward the church, the edifice continuously rising and expanding before them. Oswell noticed a small building rise up in the east; the structure was an open one with support beams that upheld its triangular top.

He pointed to it and asked Lingham, “What’s that?”

“The gazebo. I built it.”

“What’s it for?”

“We have dances and socials out here sometimes. That’s a place the kids or old folks can sit when they get tired.”

“Is the dance tomorrow going to be there?”

“No. That’s at Big Abe’s.”

“Is anybody going to be at that gazebo during the wedding?”

“Shouldn’t be.”

Oswell looked at Dicky and asked, “Does that look like a good place for you to set up with your binoculars and special rifle?”

“It should work.”

The horses closed the distance to the church, the structure lit from the west by the lowering moon. The four stained-glass windows in the facade above the double doors winked like eyes.

“Quinlan could put a grenade through those,” Oswell said, pointing to the colorful oblongs.

“There’s metal holding the glass together,” Lingham said. “I think they’d get bounced back out.” The tall man grew visibly uncomfortable at the thought.

“Does this place have other windows?”

“Small ones like those—up high and reinforced with metal. The twisters out here scare folks from getting too elaborate with exposed glass, even in God’s house.”

“Good.”

Oswell reined in his horse, grunted at his aches, slammed his left boot into his stirrup, flung his right boot over the saddle and pounded upon the dirt. The other men climbed off of their horses.

“Help me with this trunk,” the rancher said to his brother.

Godfrey scratched his red beard and walked around to the back of Oswell’s mare. He put sand on his sweaty palms, slapped them together and gripped the straps of the trunk; the rancher curled his fingers around the handles on the other side. Lingham walked over and undid the belts that tied the container to the horse’s haunches.

The Danfords grunted as they slid the trunk off of the horse; the mare’s tail flickered into Godfrey’s eyes and nose, eliciting a sneeze. The brothers set the vessel down.

Oswell fished for the key in his denims, found it with coarse fingertips and drew it forth. He knelt beside the trunk and undid the lock. He lifted the lid, revealing the contents. Inside lay the four repeating lever-action rifles wrapped in sealskin; four boxes of ammunition, each with one hundred fresh rounds; eight cases of seven-shot magazines and a dark bundle, within which Oswell had placed all of the knives and two pairs of binoculars.

“Get the shovels,” Oswell said to Lingham, who was glaring at the weapons from his past. The tall man went over to his horse and unfastened the knots that bound the tools across the rear ridge of his saddle.

Oswell fished out one of the pairs of binoculars, handed it to Godfrey and said, “Put it in your valise.”

Dicky reached into the trunk and withdrew one of the rifles. He pointed it at the ground and flung the trigger guard forward; the clack of the shifting chamber startled one of the horses.

“I cleaned and oiled them back home. They’re good.”

Dicky leaned into the trunk and took a box of one hundred rounds for his rifle and a dozen magazine tubes. Lingham, carrying the shovels to Oswell, saw the ammunition in the New Yorker’s hand and mouthed a silent prayer. Dicky slung the rifle strap over his shoulder, put the cartridges and magazines in his saddlebag, remounted his horse and rode it toward the gazebo.

Lingham handed each Danford a shovel and kept the third for himself. The trio walked toward the entrance of the church; Dicky shrank to the size of the gazebo and continued to shrink further.

Oswell looked at the double doors and then at Lingham.

“These open in, or they open out?”

“They go in.”

Oswell pounded the doors with his left fist. The concussions were deep thuds that echoed dimly within the enclosure.

“Thick,” Oswell remarked, pleased by the solidity of the portals. That wood could take more than a few shots without shattering apart. He looked at the ground immediately to the right of the doorway and indicated it with his chin. To Godfrey he said, “That’s a good place?”

“Looks fine.”

With the tip of his shovel, Oswell drew a rectangle the size of the trunk into the dirt. To the immediate right of this, Godfrey unfolded and set down a large canvas tarp.

Into the circumscribed space, the three men plunged their shovels, leaned on their handles and scooped up the flesh of the earth. They emptied the soil onto the tarp.

“Be neat. This needs to look natural when we’re done.”

They dug. At one time during the dig, when Oswell’s mind wandered and all he heard were the sounds of his brother and Lingham breathing and grunting and metal cutting the earth, the rancher vividly felt that he was nineteen again and that all the wickedness to come could still be avoided if he could just learn to get along with cowboys and not mind the things they said. If he and Godfrey and Lingham rode beeves with the other vaqueros, they would never rob banks or shoot bank guards or get involved with a man like Quinlan. Oswell’s hands continued to plunge his shovel
into the ground, but his mind was no longer attached to the meat.

The pile of dirt upon the tarp grew into something that was vaguely the weight and shape of a woman.

Godfrey said, “That should be deep enough, right?”

Oswell dumped more soil onto the dirt lady they had exhumed and then paused to consider the hole.

“Looks good,” he said.

The Danfords leaned their shovels against the church; Lingham immediately snatched the tools and set them on the ground nearby. The brothers walked to either side of the trunk, lifted and carried it to the hole; they slid it inside.

“Good.” Oswell opened the trunk, reached in and withdrew one of the bayonet-tipped rifles. He looked at Lingham and said, “Get that rope.”

The tall man nodded. He went to his horse and from the saddle-horn pulled off a coil of rope.

Oswell shut the trunk, gripped the rifle by its stock and stabbed the blade down into the lid, closer to the side that opened. The point of the bayonet stuck into the wood. Oswell twisted the rifle one full circuit and then a second. He withdrew the bayonet, leaving behind a hole a little over one inch in diameter.

Godfrey cut off a three-foot length of Lingham’s rope; he tied a thick knot at the end of it and a second one just a little higher up, each over two inches in diameter. He knelt beside the trunk, lifted the lid and threaded the rope through the hole until it came to the knot, which was too big to pass through. He tugged on the cord to make sure it would hold; the knot thudded against the wood, unable to transgress.

Oswell removed the other guns, put them on a separate blanket his brother had laid out, withdrew the ammunition and magazine tubes and with them sat
down. Lingham and Godfrey seated themselves beside him.

The men slotted seven bullets into each long, spring-loaded magazine and summarily set the filled cylinders on the blanket; the rapid clicks and clacks and metallic squeaks made the area sound like a casino. They did not speak or look up from their munitions until forty-two seven-round magazines had been filled.

“Let’s do it all the way,” Oswell said as he slid a magazine into the aperture at the rear of the gunstock; the cylinder clicked home. He twisted his other hand, flinging the trigger guard forward—the mechanism clacked loudly and pulled a bullet into the chamber. Godfrey inserted a tube in his rifle and flipped the lever, loading the gun with a clack. Lingham reluctantly loaded and engaged the other weapon.

They placed the live guns and filled magazines inside the sunken trunk.

The rancher closed the container and put a blanket over it. He sealed up the interstices between the trunk and the edges of the hole with the fabric. Godfrey cut an aperture in the cloth and pulled the rope through. Oswell and Lingham then ladled dirt onto the blanket, covering it completely over with eight shovelfuls.

Godfrey laid the rope in a spiral that Oswell and Lingham covered with more dirt. They then patted the soil smooth with the backs of their shovels. With errant pebbles and twigs and footprints, they decorated the ground so that it looked the same as the areas nearby. Godfrey placed a small flat stone on the dirt to mark where the rope was buried two inches below the surface.

Lingham walked beside the large mound of dirt they had excavated and said, “Let’s dump this.”

The Danfords lifted the tarp upon which laid more
than a hundred pounds of dirt. They walked it thirty yards from the church; Lingham scattered the soil like ashes across the ground.

The rancher folded up the tarp as they walked toward their horses. He looked back at the church entrance: the place where they had hidden their guns was indistinguishable from any other area. Even if the rock was kicked away, he was confident that he and Godfrey could accurately approximate the location of the buried rope.

Oswell looked at Lingham and asked a question he had not at all looked forward to asking. “You want something . . . a pistol hidden . . . for inside?”

“I ain’t of a mind to throw no bullets at anyone in a church full of Christians. We already talked about that.”

Oswell looked over at Godfrey, who had understood the implication of the question and now looked morbidly at the ground, silent.

“I know,” Oswell said, “I’m talking about if he gets through . . . so you’d have . . . an option. So you could end it yourself instead of being at his mercy and letting him do whatever he’s got planned to do to you.”

Lingham contemplated the scenario and shook his big head, his cyclopean shadow cleft in half on his horse and the church facade.

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Okay,” Oswell said. He climbed upon his mare, unable to look Lingham in the eye.

For the span of two heartbeats, Dicky wondered if the man was a ghost. He did not believe in apparitions (which was helpful, since once a scornful woman had claimed that she would return from the great beyond to haunt and torment him—if she died before he did), but the ancient man’s pallid skin had a weird sheen that made him look rather spectral in the lantern light of the hotel lobby. The elder’s hair blended perfectly with his pale dermis, and the white suit he wore only further added to his ghostly appearance. Currently, the apparition just stared at a dark window on the east wall of the hotel lobby, blinking far less frequently than most men did. He had not yet noticed the newly arrived New Yorker.

After two hours of lying awake in his room, Dicky had decided to get dressed and come downstairs into the lobby of the hotel. He did not intend to find company (the chances of happening upon the kind of company that interested him were marginal in Trailspur). He had just needed to leave his diminishing, solitary enclosure.

It was nearly four o’clock in the morning, which was late even by New York standards. The night attendant slept on a cot in a tiny room behind the front desk, his sock-covered feet visible through the partially opened
door, past which the metallic solicitations of a small bell could rouse him whenever he was needed. On a green couch sat the other denizen, the white ghost.

The oldster turned his head to Dicky; the New Yorker started when he saw the blind eyes that stared up at him from the man’s rugose visage like red-veined eggs.

“Did I doze?” (The New Yorker thought the man’s accent indicated that he was from Ohio.)

“It is five minutes to four,” Dicky replied. He then added, “In the morning.”

“Dawn is taking her time tonight.” He pointed to the sofa and said, “You sit.”

Dicky sat on the couch beside the old man.

“You’re one hundred an’ seventy pounds.”

“I am. How can you tell?”

“I sit this couch a lot. It sunk a half inch and a little bit more when you got on. The half inch is one hundred and fifty pounds, the little bit more is the other twenty.”

“You are very astute.”

“It’s good to know the size of people—’specially if you needs to go up against them.”

The old man looked back at the dark window; despite the fact that Dicky knew he was blind, he looked over to see if something was there. Within the dark square, ephemeral imagined shapes swam before his eyes, but nothing substantial. The floorboards creaked overhead and the attendant with the exposed socks coughed in his sleep. The night seemed heavy.

The old man asked, “Had a quarrel with your wife?”

“I am not married.”

“You sound like you’re forty. Older maybe.”