A Congregation of Jackals (4 page)

The wheel slowed, and after a desperate hop, the roulette ball took up its place of residence in black eleven, changed its mind and skipped back to red thirty.

As Alabama said, “Red thirty,” the weird light of greed dulled in the eyes of the porcine gentlemen. Dicky looked at the table. The woman had placed her bets upon red and even and was a winner twice over. The croupier stacked progeny upon her half dozen chips and looked at her; with an index finger twice tapping the air, she indicated for him to replace her bet; he nodded. Dicky was about to advise her differently when a hand landed upon his left shoulder so heavily that it raised the opposite one in an inadvertent shrug.

“Your name is Dicky.” This was not a question, but an imprecation. The handsome man recognized the enervated, sullen tone and the loathing that roiled deep within it. This was the voice of a cuckolded man or an outraged father.

“My name is Oswell,” Dicky said without turning around. He placed a chip upon the green felt and slid it toward the number box; the fingers tightened upon the sinews of his shoulder.

Dicky said, “You’ve mistaken me for somebody you may touch without consequences.” He swatted the man’s hand from his shoulder and continued to slide his chip across the green felt, a round blue barge across a tranquil sea of green.

“Turn around, Dicky. I’m not one for games.”

“A strange comment to make in a casino. And let me reiterate: my name is Oswell, and I’m playing roulette.”

The croupier looked up at the man behind Dicky and said, “Sir, we are about to play. I cannot allow you to disturb my customers. Make a wager or step away from the gaming area.” The man sat beside Dicky. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late fifties with a silver beard, white hair, a blue long coat over his striped blue suit, a tall white hat and humorless narrow eyes on either side of an aquiline nose that could cut the air with a sneeze. Dicky’s furtive appraisal told him this man was an outraged father (one who originated in Maine).

“You are supposed to remove your hat when seated beside a lady.” Dicky motioned to the woman beside him.

The father placed his hat upon the table; the croupier asked for final bets; the father disinterestedly tossed a chip onto the felt; the Alabamian spun the wheel and dropped the silver ball; the sphere danced across a game of checkers with a clacking tattoo. As the ball hopped along the dial, the man from Maine reached into his blue vest and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

He looked at the pretty woman beside Dicky and asked, “Are you here tonight as a companion of the man seated to your left?”

“I am not.”

“Then I would like you to witness this.” The hairs on Dicky’s neck tingled.

The Alabamian admonished the father with a glare and said, “Quiet.”

The father accepted the warning and silently unfolded his paper. Upon it was the drawing of a man’s face—Dicky recognized the visage as the one he shaved every morning. The ball hopped along the inner rail.
The porcine men leaned forward. The pretty woman glanced at Dicky. The father flattened the illustration with his meaty palms. The roulette wheel slowed. The ball clicked like a slowly dripping faucet.

Dicky stood up and walked away.

Rain poured onto the cobblestone streets of New York City; the only carriages upon the drear avenues were covered ones guided by soggy drivers bearing persons not too troubled by thoughts of an employee catching pneumonia. Dicky emerged from the doors of Callington’s onto a deck protected from the deluge by a two-yard overhang. He stepped beside the door, pressed his back to the wall and waited.

The door shut and summarily reopened; the father burst upon the deck and ran to its edge; he stared out into the rain for his quarry. Dicky rushed him from behind and pushed him into the downpour; the man spun around, his hat falling to the cobblestone; Dicky punched him in the jaw before the rain even had time to flatten the man’s wiry white hair.

Standing beneath the cover of the porch, looking at the dazed and wet man, Dicky said, “Do not pursue this.”

“She’s with child! You lied to her and took advantage of her, and now she’s swollen up with your leavings. You’re going to do right by her, yessir!”

Dicky did not impregnate women. Even when they requested (or begged) for him to spill his seed deep within their loins, he denied them without exception. (Additionally, he treasured the slow deliberate movements they made when they—with warm, moist towels—slowly wiped the white ichor from their bellies or thighs or buttocks.)

“What is her name?”

The father was aghast; water pooled inside his agape mouth.

He spat the fluid out and yelled, “How many women have you spoiled this way, you wretch?”

“What is her name?”

“The woman you dishonored—my daughter—her name is Candace.”

Dicky remembered Candace. She was a brown-haired woman with breasts a fellow needed two hands to hold and a bottom that wore his handprints very well, and she was ten miles from virginity the first time he had wedged himself in between her pale thighs. Apparently, one of her other lovers had been far less careful with his seed than he.

“Candace lied to you. That child is not mine.”

Rage flared in the eyes of Candace’s father; he reached his hand into his jacket; Dicky threw his right fist into the man’s nose; his knuckles cracked the cartilage. The man grunted and stumbled back; tendrils of crimson swung pendulously from his nostrils. Dicky returned to the porch, sheltering himself (and his suit) from the rain; the deluge hissed between the two men like a serpent with limitless lungs.

Candace’s father spat blood into the rain that had filled the gaps between cobblestones and the cylinder of his overturned hat. He looked up at Dicky as if awaiting a coup de grâce.

The handsome New Yorker said, “I know why you are upset, but I know for certain that that child is not mine. I can tell you things about your daughter that you would rather not know, but I would like to keep this encounter polite, brief and, most importantly, singular.”

As if he had suspected his daughter’s wayward nature all along, the man nodded his head and sighed.
His blue jacket, now three tones darker with absorbed rain, clung to his heaving chest. His hand came away from his crooked, purpling nose slick with blood.

“Go home.”

Dicky reseated himself beside the pretty woman at the roulette table, hiding his bruised knuckle from view. The Alabamian spun the wheel.

The woman looked at Dicky and asked, “What did that gentleman want from you?”

“He is my great-uncle’s retainer. He came here to inform me of my inheritance. I just now learned that I own a mansion in Connecticut.”

Later that evening, Dicky returned to the brownstone in which he rented a room, the taste of Francine Bouchelle’s tongue upon his own, warmly pondering the date they had set for the coming Thursday. He was startled when the clerk—a sullen and ugly young man who must have been related to someone influential—called to him.

“Richard Sterling,” he said.

Dicky stopped and turned.

“You have a telegram. Delivered this morning.” There was no person from whom he wanted such correspondence. No woman from his past belonged in his present, and he had not been in touch with his sisters (who now lived in Connecticut with their husbands) since their mother had passed away six years ago. With trepidation, he approached the wooden counter behind which the surly youth sat as if it were a fortress.

Dicky asked, “From whom?”

The youth behind his lacquered ramparts said, “A man named Lingham. Montana Territory.”

Dicky’s blood ran cold.

He took the proffered telegram and read it as he walked toward the stairwell on the far side of the lobby. He pondered the phrase “all old acquaintances will be in attendance” as he climbed the steps, passed by German immigrants on their way to the pantry, put the key in his door, twisted the lock, walked inside and isolated himself. He thought about how his dad had died with only forty-four years behind him and how he was now exactly that old.

Oswell kissed his daughter’s forehead, pulled the blanket up to her chin, walked to his son’s bed, patted his shoulder, walked to the oil lantern that hung upon a door hook and twisted the key in its base, ushering darkness into the room.

“Have a peaceful slumber.”

“Good night, Daddy,” Loretta said.

“Good night, Pa,” Benjamin said.

The rancher walked into the hall and shut the door behind him, acutely aware of every detail as if he were a bug observing enormous minutiae. Tomorrow morning he would meet Godfrey at the station, take a train north to Pennsylvania, meet Dicky there (the New Yorker had wired him yesterday) and then board the continental rail and ride it to the western horizon,
where his past awaited him like a dark room filled with bear traps.

As Oswell traversed the hallway, he found the house unusually still and quiet—perhaps because the unexpected chill that night had caused him to shut the windows, or perhaps because of the heightened awareness he had experienced ever since receiving the telegram. He walked to the sitting room, wherein Elinore, seated upon her mother’s divan, repaired one of the quilted blankets that they threw upon the colts in winter. She still had some suds on her shoulder from when she had put the scrub brush to the children two hours earlier.

“Elinore.”

“Yes?” She poked a needle into the wool.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I’ll be gone a while.”

Elinore nodded; she pulled a red thread up through the seam.

“When should I expect you back?”

“A month,” he said. He had never been away from her for more than a week in the fourteen years that they had been married.

The redheaded woman’s sewing stopped; she stared at the sliver of light imprisoned within the needle and then looked up at her husband, her eyes filled with an apprehension to which she would not give voice.

“Okay,” she said.

“I asked Harper to come over and deal with the cowboys when they come for the beeves. I know you’re smarter than he is, but it helps to have a man around when you negotiate a price with other men. I told him to listen to you and that your word is final.”

“Harper is respectful. And he always gives the kids taffy.”

Oswell was pained by how selflessly, how bravely his wife handled her life being thrown into complete upheaval. He wanted so very, very badly to put his head in her lap and tell her all of the things he had never told her, all of the things that he had done and why he and Godfrey and Dicky had put the entire width of the United States between themselves and those events (and Lingham had skittered all the way north himself).

The rancher knew that his wife would not abandon him if he confessed his misdeeds, but he also knew that she could not love a man who had done all of the things he had done. Their marriage would become a partnership, a loveless agreement in which they ran a ranch and raised two children, an agreement in which she would close her eyes when they made love as she had the first few times (though then it was simply because she was shy). Oswell did not know whether his reticence was a selfish act or a gesture of kindness, but he knew one thing for certain: he was not strong enough to risk the love, the sanctity, the escape and the peace he had found with this woman and this life that they two together had carved.

For a moment, Elinore watched him silently ruminate; she turned her eyes back down to the colt’s quilt draped across her lap.

The needle moved again and she said, “There’s one thing I need to know, to make this—your leaving—a little easier.”

“Ask.”

“Is there . . . ?” She paused, considering her words. “Does this trip somehow involve . . . another woman? Someone you knew—someone you were with before me?”

“There’s no other woman. You’re the only one I’ve ever said the words to.”

Her apprehensions faded; she nodded and said, “Then you take care of what you need to take care of. And be careful.”

“I will. I’ll see you in bed in a bit.”

Oswell kissed his wife on the mouth and walked out of the room; he loathed himself with a violence he had not felt in years.

The moon was a clipped fingernail adrift in a field of cotton, illuminating the rancher and the porch he knelt upon with blue light. Oswell slid the grooved claw of his hammer around a raised nail head, adjusted his grip and pressed his hands forward. With a creak like a fat man sitting upon a wooden cot, the old nail rose from the plank. The rancher put it beside eleven others pulled from the wood and set the hammer down. He dug his fingertips around the six-foot-by-one-foot plank and pulled; the slat came loose, revealing a rectangle of cool opaque midnight cracked by occasional cobwebs.

Oswell placed the plank in the grass, removed the adjacent one, set it aside, took a box of matches from his shirt pocket and struck a phosphorous head on grit. He set the flame to the wick of an oil lantern hung upon the porch post, illuminating the swath of exposed soil two feet below the deck.

The rancher stabbed a trowel into the earth and began to dig. He shoveled the dirt onto the porch in a neat pile so that, when finished, he could replace it beneath the house.

Oswell dug for fifteen minutes, and though he had many doubts about what he was doing, his right hand did not. It inexorably plunged, repositioned and scooped up the soil, ladling it like gravy onto the growing pile to his left. The beads of sweat that dripped from
his nose momentarily hosted pinpricks of red and blue light from the lantern and moon before falling into the soil below.

Like the prow of a ship striking a reef, the trowel clunked and halted as it struck wood. He set the tool down and reached into the dirt below the porch with his right hand. His fingertips burrowed into the soil until they lit upon a rope handle. He set his knees, braced his left hand on the opposite side of the rift and dredged up his past.

The crate rose from the dirt, far heavier than he remembered it being when he had put it there more than a decade ago. As the dirt fell from the wood, he grabbed the left handle and, with both hands and a grunt, lifted the heavy burden from the soil and set it upon the porch. Benjamin could fit inside of this box, Oswell thought as he looked at the exhumed relic.