The Winter Family (34 page)

Homer glanced back at Tom and their eyes met.

“I’m sure that I can get some sort of amusement out of you, Sheriff Favorite. That’s why I’m keeping you around. But if it’s any consolation to you, I doubt it will be very much.”

Homer laughed, his weird face twisting with his stunted emotions, as they passed a narrow path that wound up the side of the mountain. He did not hear the Apache as they crept up. The first sound they made was when they shot Homer’s horse.

The shots fired by the Apache carried across the desert:
crack, crack, crack
. The argument stopped, and Dick’s head whipped to the east.

“He’s heading to the mountains,” he said.

Hank ran back to his horse, mounted it while it was shying away from him, and then wheeled it around.

“You sons of bitches can stand around and hold your dicks if you like,” he said. “I’m going after them.”

With a cry he spurred his horse and raced across the desert.

The rest of the men separated without speaking and hastened to their horses and rode east in a loose group, eyes straining in the darkness, hooves beating out a rapid rhythm over the dry ground as they swerved around cacti.

After about twenty minutes, when they were almost at the foot of the mountain, with its tall dry trees and enormous rocks, split and worn by the hammer of time, Hank yelled, “I see him! He’s up ahead!”

Dick drew his pistol. In his heart he was calm. This was it. God would never allow a man who had done the things that Homer De Plessey had done to escape punishment. This was the proof.

He squinted in the darkness and he saw the man running ahead of them. Dick’s eyes were not good, but he could tell something was wrong. The person running was too small to be Homer De Plessey, and Dick saw that it wasn’t a man at all, but a young woman, an Indian.

The Apache began to shoot. The slopes of the mountain were all lit up with gunfire, blinding, deafening, the sound enormous in the empty and silent wasteland. The first blast blew three men from their horses. Others were left dying in the saddle, or wounded and knocked to the sand.

Dick hauled on his horse’s mouth and took off toward the north, listening to the guns fire behind him, not thinking about anything except fleeing as fast as he could. In that moment he was no more intelligent than his horse. Puffs of breath escaped his mouth with little terrified noises.

Just once he risked a glance over his shoulder and he saw a young man galloping after him on a roan pony, with long dark hair streaming out behind him, whooping and firing a pistol. At this sight, Dick began to scream and strike his horse with the reins. Before long he had lost his pursuers, but he kept fleeing as hard as his horse would bear, into the dark.

Homer wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and looked down the slope, back the way they’d come, with the rolling eyes of a spooked horse. The path was steep and narrow, cut between boulders and jagged rocks, almost like a dried riverbed. Pebbles bounced downward in a noisy but gentle avalanche. He had
been keeping up a running fight with the Apache as they chased him up the mountain.

Below him he heard the Apache firing their weapons at some new arrivals, but it was too dark to see anything, so Homer resumed his sprint up the path, half carrying and half dragging Tom. The sheriff’s face was bruised and bloodied from being clipped against the rocks. All Tom could think was that he had to wait, wait patiently, for his moment to escape.

Eventually the shooting slowed, except for a few isolated pops. Every now and then someone would scream in pain, or one of the Indians would start to whoop and cry, sounding like any other wild thing of the desert, free and deadly.

The path ended in a little plateau, covered in short grass and dotted with large rocks. On one side of the clearing the mountain rose up, as sheer as a cathedral wall. On the other it dropped away steeply. There was no way out other than the way they’d come.

Homer grinned at Tom.

“Well, Sheriff,” he said, “looks like we’ve found a place to make our stand.”

The confectioner knelt down and wrapped his arms around a tremendous stone, almost a yard across, and he put his shoulder to it and strained and heaved, so that the tendons on his neck jumped out like the rigging on a ship in the wind, and rolled it to the mouth of the path. Ants and scorpions struggled madly in the spot where the rock had stood unmolested for generations. A rattlesnake gave off its warning buzz from a crevice.

Tom looked at the snake coiling and coiling over itself, the rattle dancing in the air, and thought of all the terrible things you uncovered once you had a mind to change things from the way they’d been.

Homer dropped two pistols and a bowie knife in the dust next to the rock and then pulled a handful of bullets from his pocket.

“How many do you think there were down there? Forty? Sixty?” Homer asked. “We’re in a lot of trouble, Sheriff.”

Homer stamped down on the rattlesnake, hard, so that its back broke and it thrashed wildly, kicking up sand. Then he grabbed Tom and dragged him over to the rock, leaving him a few feet from the
collected weapons, so that Tom could just barely peek over the edge of the plateau.

Tom looked down upon the whole slope of the mountain. A crowd of Indians waited down in the desert, half hidden in the darkness. The shooting was over, but a lot of different voices were yelling in Apache, and he could hear movement, people and horses. Eventually the voices fell silent.

“Go away,” Homer whispered. “Go on, get away. Don’t come up here.”

But after a short time the Apache began to let out war cries, one after another, long and high and almost mournful, and to fire their rifles into the air, and then they charged, one by one, up the path.

“No!” Homer shouted.

He raised the pistol and fired once, twice. The Indians fired back. Bullets whined overhead. Homer kept shooting, and eventually Tom heard an Indian scream.

The Apache melted back into the darkness. All was silent except for the faint sound of someone shouting in Apache. Exhorting, in a deep, hoarse voice, like the mountain itself was speaking to the Indians, driving them up to their deaths.

“Go back!” Homer yelled. “Go away!”

The Apache surged up again, while others fired from cover near the bottom of the mountain. Homer leaned over the top of the rock, but a bullet smashed near his head and he dived back with a squeal of terror.

And then he looked into Tom’s eyes and grinned. He picked up the bowie knife and the blade winked in the moonlight.

“Well, Tom,” he said. “I suppose it’s time.”

Tom watched the blade come down toward his back but didn’t feel it cut. His hands and legs were suddenly loose, although numb, immobile, and agonized with the rush of blood.

“There’s the pistol, Sheriff,” Homer said. “Shoot whoever you like.”

Dick saw the riders coming from the south and he pulled up his horse, planning to bolt. But the riders wore long dusters and proper hats, and so he turned his horse toward them, glancing once over his shoulder to make sure he was not being followed.

“Hey!” Dick cried. “Hey, over here!”

The riders were coming on at a leisurely lope. There were about twenty of them, armed with rifles and pistols.

“Hey!” Dick called.

The riders slowed to a trot and then a walk. They were streaked with dirt and mud, as if they’d been riding a long time, but none of them looked tired. One of them, a little man with fine features, called out to Dick.

“You, sir,” he said, “have the air of a man who has just seen a large number of Indians.”

“What?” Dick said. “Yeah! There’s a whole pack of ’em back there. They shot up my party at the foot of the mountain.”

“Dreadful,” the little man said. “And you’re the sole survivor?”

“I don’t know,” Dick said. “I guess I am.”

“You see an old man with them?” another one of the riders asked. This one’s skin was as pale as milk, and his eyes were golden, or so it seemed in the moonlight. He was not wearing a dusty greatcoat, like the others, nor did he have a beard. Instead he wore a linen suit that was surprisingly clean. There was even a withered desert rose in his lapel. “A little one, long gray hair, looks almost like a squaw.”

“No,” Dick said. “I didn’t see any of ’em too closely. Look, I’m not sure there’s enough of you boys, there looked to have been—”

And the pale man drew his pistol, slapped its hammer with the palm of his hand, and pulled the trigger, all in one smooth motion. Dick’s head blew apart and he fell to the desert as his horse bolted riderless to the east.

One of the riders laughed, a deep, devilish, moronic sound, and then they spurred their horses and rode on.

To the east the sky was lightening with the dawn.

Tom slapped his nerveless hand down on the pistol and dragged it toward him. His first thought, his first overwhelming desire, was to blow Homer’s head off. But he could not immediately move his stiff fingers, and so he had time to think.

The Indians were rushing up at them. They were divided into two groups, a pack of young men charging and firing wildly, and a group of older men farther back, crouching behind the rocks, firing at Homer’s position in order to provide cover.

There were so many of them. There could be no doubt that if they got up here Tom would be killed. He felt better with the gun in his hand.

Three young men had broken away from the pack and were closing on the rock. Homer, cursing, was reloading his pistol with shaky hands.

Tom leaned around the rock and fired one, two, three times. The first two bullets each knocked down an Indian. The third one whistled overhead. The charge was broken and the Indians stumbled backward, knocking into the men behind them.

A bullet kicked up the dirt inches in front of Tom’s face and filled his eyes with sand. He took shelter behind the rock and found himself next to the confectioner.

Homer grinned and said nothing. Which was wise. If Tom had heard his voice he wouldn’t have been able to keep from shooting him. Instead Homer popped over the top of the rock and squeezed off a few shots. Then he sank back down.

“How many bullets do we have left?” Homer asked. “They’re under you.”

Tom put his free hand underneath himself and swept up a handful of bullets. Homer took two and cracked his pistol and reloaded and snapped it shut and glanced over his shoulder down the path again.

“God damn,” Homer said. “They’re coming again. Cover me, and I’ll get them.”

Tom rolled away, flat on his belly, and aimed the pistol down the
side of the mountain. Bullets whined past on all sides. One buzzed by his shoulder and he felt a sharp pain. He took his time and aimed carefully and squeezed off a couple of shots at the Apache providing the covering fire. One of them struck home and a man stumbled back from the rocks and fell down, bleeding, while the women screamed.

Homer came back over the top and started blasting, and once again the charge was broken and the Indians retreated back to relative safety.

“Die, you savages!” Homer howled. “Die!”

Both men reloaded.

“Are there any more bullets under you?” Homer asked.

Tom arched his back and felt underneath him. Homer put his hand down as well and their fingers touched. Tom jerked away and in so doing came out from behind the cover of the stone. Instantly he felt a pain across his forehead and a moment later heard the sound of the bullet. He fell back on Homer’s arm.

“Fuck off, get away from me,” Tom cried.

“Where are the bullets?” Homer said. “I thought there were more!”

“Well, you thought wrong,” Tom said.

“I don’t understand,” Homer said. “Why don’t they leave us alone? Why do they keep trying to get up here? Who do they think we are? What do they think we have?”

Tom was bleeding from two bullet wounds and his legs and arms still felt as if they were being jabbed with needles. His heart was racing and he was out of breath and he hadn’t taken the time to stop and ask himself this question. Why
were
the Apache charging up this path, again and again, at people they had never met before?

“They don’t care about us,” Tom realized. “They’re just trying to get up here.”

“Why are they trying to get up here?” Homer said. “There’s nothing up here at all.”

Then they heard the shooting from below.

The riders had dismounted a mile off and snuck through the cacti and underbrush, silent and invisible. They came upon the sentries and killed them quietly. And then they were among the sick and the elderly and the young, with their bloody knives out, and those misfortunate souls began to scream and scatter. The riders killed all they could before the bullets began raining down on them. Then they sheathed their knives and took shelter and began to return fire.

“Don’t let that red whoreson give us the slip!” the pale rider bellowed. “I ain’t going back to Sonora empty-handed again.”

The riders were outnumbered but they were hard men, veterans of a thousand gunfights, and they had surprised the Apache, who had sheltered themselves from gunfire from above, not from below. It was not long before the riders slaughtered their way to the path leading up to the plateau and the Apache were trapped.

Homer put his head over the rock. “Rescuers!” he cried. “We’re saved!”

Homer pointed his gun at Tom, but Tom was faster. He caught Homer’s arm and twisted it into the rock and then bashed his pistol into Homer’s face. Homer cried out and struggled, and he was very strong, bucking like a horse, but Tom had him pressed up hard where there was no room to work and kneed him in the body and then finally knocked him to the ground with a heavy blow to the back of his head. Homer’s grip on the pistol relaxed and Tom jerked it away and stood.

The riders were making rapid progress up the path. Most of the Apache were dead but a few were desperately fleeing upward toward the plateau. Tom glanced down at Homer, saw that he was curled into a ball and clutching the back of his head, and trained his weapons upon the Apache.