The Winter Family (30 page)

The Apache weaved their way toward him from all sides, appearing and vanishing around the rocks and cacti. The Mexican fired his pistol a couple of times. He was shot in the back and knocked to his knees. Perhaps the wound was not fatal, but he had no intention of being taken alive. He kept shooting until they killed him.

Reggie had no such opportunity. The breath was knocked out of him, and it was a struggle to roll over onto his side, and then another to get onto his knees. By then they were all around him. He could see their shadows, hear the chatter of their alien language.

“Are you Winter?” someone asked him in a deep and serious voice.

Reggie grinned. Blood was smeared all over his chin and his teeth were slick with it. “When you meet him,” Reggie said, “you ain’t going to need to ask that.”

Reggie pressed his hand to his chest to stem the bleeding but it kept squirting through his fingers.

The Apache all wore white men’s clothes and wielded rifles and pistols. They looked dirty and tired.

A younger man was waving what looked like a wet rag in the air. Reggie eventually identified it as the Mexican’s scalp.

The Apache parted and an old man with long hair stepped forward. He was small and looked a little like Reggie’s grandmother when she was angry. He spoke in Apache, and a tall, earnest-looking Apache translated.

“He said you white men are like soldier ants.”

The old man spoke some more.

“Big swarms of you, big streams, like a river, no real home, just eating everything you see,” the translator said.

“I don’t like where this is heading,” Reggie said.

The old man said something else and the Apache laughed. This time, the tall Apache did not translate.

“So you’re not going to kill me straight,” Reggie said, contempt in his voice. But then he raised his handsome eyebrows and an expression of bemusement wandered onto his face. “What the hell am I talking about? I wouldn’t do me straight if I were you neither.”

The young man translated this to the others. The Apache did not laugh. Instead, they nodded and looked oddly respectful.

“Let me tell you this, though,” Reggie said. “You know what’s good for you, you’ll surrender to the U.S. Army up here. Don’t you go back to Mexico and don’t you let Winter catch you neither.”

“We know a safe place,” the tall Apache said. “We will never surrender.”

“There are no safe places for you people no more,” Reggie said. “How the hell do you think this is going to end?”

It was a rhetorical question, but the tall Apache dutifully translated it. The old man with the long hair smiled. It was not a nice smile. He made a broad gesture with his hand. Reggie did not know if he meant to encompass the men standing here, the desert, or the whole world.

“He asks you the same thing,” the tall Apache said. “He asks you: How do you think this is all going to end?”

Something was a little off about the first confectioner to set up shop in the newly incorporated city of Phoenix. His features didn’t line up in some subtle way. When he laughed it was either too early or too late or too loud, or just at the wrong thing entirely. He tended to stand too close and his accent was unusual and he smiled too much.

His best feature was his hair, which was long and thick and jetblack and always combed slick back against his head.

His name was Homer De Plessey. He was from New Orleans and he was a man of substance. Principally he traded in dry goods, which he sold from a small and tidy store on Center Street near the outskirts of town, but he had a fairly profitable side business in chocolates and
candies. Children could press their faces against a fine glass counter in his store and goggle at peppermint sticks and peanut brittle, ropes of red licorice and tins of marshmallows, fizzy powders in paper packages and clear glass jars. In the evenings the smell of melting sugar drifted through the air.

The good people of Phoenix were accustomed to the terrible violence of the wild frontier. But Phoenix was a small, new town and its citizens were of limited imagination and unprepared for De Plessey’s careful and metropolitan brand of evil. So it took three days after his daughter’s disappearance before Bobby Proudfoot kicked in the door to De Plessey’s home, holding an ax in one hand like a toy and bellowing the name of his baby girl.

Sheriff Thomas Favorite was in his office, leaning back in his chair and chatting with the antiquarian who’d come from Boston to study the canals. Tom could feel the commotion slightly before he could hear it, like a hand brushing over the back of his neck an instant before the shouts became audible. He listened, still and patient, and then he stood up and took his Winchester rifle off the gun rack and cracked it to make sure it was loaded.

“Is something wrong?” the antiquarian asked.

“Go back to your hotel,” Tom said before stepping outside into the desert sunlight.

It always seemed to him like the devil’s own country this time of the day, with the sun setting and everything blood colored and the air hot and dry. You could see a long way in every direction along the straight streets, all built within a few years. Between the houses on every side the desert stretched on and on.

Homer De Plessey was running down Center Street with a mob at his heels. Bobby Proudfoot was leading the pack. Tom made the connection, and then spat on the dry road and lifted his rifle.

Homer saw Tom and skidded to a stop, his ugly and expressive face contorted with some strange emotion (not fear, or not fear alone anyway). But Tom made a brief motion with his head, as if gesturing behind him. Homer saw and bolted forward again, flailing his arms,
tilting his head back, and gasping for air, until he collapsed at Tom’s feet and scurried around behind his legs. Tom felt a hand touch his ankle and he jerked it free, disgusted.

Bobby was outpacing the rest of the mob by a fair margin. His long hair streamed behind him and he was brandishing the ax over his head in a roughly circular motion. His eyes never moved from Homer’s cowering form.

Tom pointed the rifle slightly above Bobby’s head and fired it. Then he pumped the lever and pointed the rifle at Bobby and told him that was the only warning he’d get.

Bobby slid to a stop, kicking up a little wave of dirt that skittered over Tom’s pants and boots and struck Homer in the face.

“Sheriff,” Bobby said, out of breath from the exertion and his emotion. “Step aside.”

“I can’t do that, Bobby,” Tom said.

“Sheriff,” Bobby said, “that cocksucking Frenchman killed my Jenny. Now step away. We’re a-going to hang him.”

“Not without a trial, you won’t.”

“A trial?” Bobby said. “A fucking trial?”

The rest of the mob had now caught up. Standing next to Bobby was his brother, Hank, who looked like Bobby, only smaller and meaner. Behind them, but in front of the others, was Bobby’s hired hand, a freedman named Kendron Parkins, who was lean and had gray streaks in his curly hair and beard.

Sheriff Tom Favorite was average height, but built big and solid all the way through. He was well over forty and he was starting to go to pieces: bags hung under his eyes, his fine yellow hair was thinning and had mostly turned gray, and his wrists, waist, and ankles were thick. More than this he gave the unmistakable impression of having passed over some peak and knowing himself to be on a slow, steady decline that he would never be able to reverse. And yet in spite of this (or because of it) he seemed unyielding and implacable, as if he would never give way, never give ground, never allow himself to be pushed aside while he was still breathing.

“Yes,” Tom said. “A trial.”

“There’s not going to be any fucking trial!” Bobby said. “We don’t need a trial.”

“Sure we do, Bobby,” Tom said. “That’s how you make sure he’s really the one that done it.”

“We know he’s the one that done it.”

“Then you shouldn’t have any problems proving it,” Tom said. “Right, Bobby?”

“Get out of the fucking way, Sheriff,” Hank shouted. “Get out of the fucking way.”

“I would rather die,” Tom Favorite said.

“Maybe you will,” Parkins rumbled.

“I would rather die,” Tom repeated, “and do you know why?”

The members of the mob glanced at one another, not wanting to listen, feeling that by listening they were losing something, but none of them wanting to take the first step and risk being shot.

“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because I was in Georgia when Sherman’s bummers rolled through, stealing and murdering and ripping up railroads out of plain meanness. I was in Cotton Gin Port in 1871, right after the Ku Klux Klan Act was passed, when the night was lit up with Negro homes on fire and dozens of common thieves and rapists draped in white sheets were out settling their private scores. And I was here in Phoenix to bury my brother after he was shot and killed by John Chenoweth in a duel, and them two both running for sheriff at the time. So what I reckon I’m saying is that I’ve spent the better part of my adult life watching the bestial things men get up to in the name of higher ideals that don’t leave them no time to worry about the law. And I’ll be goddamned if I see it going on in this town. And so I won’t let you kill this man without a trial. I’d rather die. But you’ll die first, Bobby. You take so much as one more fucking step.”

“He killed my daughter,” Bobby said. “He killed her!”

“Bobby, I’m going to put him in the jailhouse. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Oh god,” Bobby said. “And you’d give him a trial? Let him try and talk his way out of it? Not everything is just talk.”

“Why don’t you get back to his house and turn it inside out,” Tom said. “I’ll send Dick Moore to help out. This one ain’t going anywhere. I got him. You can trust me, Bobby.”

Bobby wiped his eyes with the back of one meaty forearm. A look
of dumb despair and betrayal was on his face, like a loyal dog that had been kicked for no good reason. Something had gone out of the crowd, and they didn’t seem likely to charge. Tom backed up and pointed his rifle at Homer’s crouching body.

“Come on. Get a move on.”

Homer hurried toward the sheriff’s office, watching the mob over his shoulder. Tom didn’t look back. He didn’t want to catch Bobby’s gaze and wonder whether he was doing the right thing. He’d been down that road and he knew exactly where it went.

“I suppose you’re it,” Tom said.

“You suppose correctly,” Matt Shakespeare replied.

Matt Shakespeare and his younger brother, Austin, sat in wooden chairs facing the sheriff’s desk. Tom moved around the office closing the shutters, shutting out the red desert light. The darkness grew.

“I’m sorry,” Austin said. His hair stuck up in the back and he had an overbite. Now he was chewing on his lip, like he’d been caught cheating on a test. “Benjamin wouldn’t answer the door. Patrick told me, well, he said no.”

“The judge?” Tom asked.

Matt just laughed. He was young too, they both were, but with his orange beard and the cynical lilt of his laughter, he was like a grizzled old man compared to his brother.

“Jesus,” Tom said. “You told him I’d calmed them down?”

“Calmed them down?” Matt said. “Tom. They ain’t even started to drink yet.”

Tom peeked outside before he fastened the last set of shutters and he saw Kendron Parkins sitting directly across the street, his rifle laid out across his knees. No drinking for old Parkins; his wife was a religious Indian and she didn’t hold with it. His body was bent almost double by the labors of freedom and slavery alike, but he was justly renowned for his skill with a rifle, being known to bring down a rabbit on the run at fifty paces. And if Big Bobby Proudfoot told him to train his rifle on Sheriff Favorite, would he do it? Would he.

As Tom walked back to his desk, he passed the cell holding Homer De Plessey. Something deep inside him told him to keep his head straight, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked.

Homer was staring at something he was holding in his hands, and a series of grotesque expressions was marching across his face. They seemed to be poor simulacrums of grief and fear, too clumsy and exaggerated to be convincing, like a frown painted on the face of a clown. But more alarming than this procession of masks was the look on Homer’s face between each one. It was calm and sly, but mostly it was empty.

Homer glanced up at Tom and their eyes met. Homer’s face abruptly produced an unconvincing look of anguish. A wink of light flashed from Homer’s hands and Tom thought, A mirror, he’s looking into a shaving mirror.

Tom walked over to the Shakespeare brothers. It was not his imagination; he could feel Homer’s gaze resting between his shoulder blades.

“Well, all right,” Tom said. “What has Bobby got on De Plessey anyway?”

“Jenny Proudfoot told one of her friends she was going to the candy store after school on the day she disappeared,” Matt said.

“Anyone see her actually go there?”

Matt shrugged.

“Oh hell,” Tom said.

“Sheriff, you know there’s something not right about him.”

“Well? You can’t just hang someone who’s got something wrong with him every time something bad happens.”

“Well, all right,” Matt said. “I’m just curious: Where do you see this one going? How’s it going to end? No one wants a goddamn trial here. The judge don’t. Bobby and his friends don’t. The town don’t. Even your French friend in the cell there don’t, because you put him up in front of any twelve men living in this town in the morning he’s going to be swinging from a tree in the evening. The only one who wants a trial here is you.”

“It ain’t about what I want,” Tom said.

“But it is. Don’t you see that? That’s exactly what it is.”

“No, it ain’t. It’s about not giving up on what’s important the first moment things get a little tough. We don’t want to be living in a world where you can get hanged without good cause. Trust me. We don’t. Because I’ve lived in that world. Are you with me, or not?”

Matt grinned. He was very quick to smile. “Shit, Tom, you know you can count on me.”

“All right. What about you, Austin? How do you feel about getting deputized?”