The Winter Family (35 page)

“So close,” he whispered to himself, “just do this, and you can set this as right as it can get.”

Five Apache were coming up the hill, five survivors out of how many? Fifty? Sixty? Three were young men. The fourth was middle-aged, big and powerful, with broad shoulders, but limping and bleeding. The fifth was a little old man, with gray-black hair cut to about
his shoulders, and a wizened, humorless face, as if he’d bitten into something sour. They were all firing at Tom.

Tom shot the three young men quickly, aiming and firing one pistol after another. The big one was shot from behind and dropped on his face without a sound. That left only the old man, who dropped his rifle. Tom didn’t shoot him, thinking he was surrendering, thinking that was odd, because there was something about the old man’s face that gave you the feeling he wasn’t the surrendering type.

The old man dropped to his knees and dug his hands into the sand and threw two fistfuls up the path, shouting out something, loud and unafraid, in Apache.

For a brief, weird moment the little rocky path seemed to be filled with a sandstorm. Tom coughed as the particles got in his mouth, nose, and ears. He was blinded, and his ears seemed full of wind.

The old man barreled into him and knocked him flat on his back, so that his head struck the ground, then kicked the pistols out of his hands. Before Tom could even blink, before he could sneeze and get the sand out of his sinuses, the old man had run past him and jumped off the cliff.

As Tom sat up, coughing, another Indian sprinted past him to the edge of the cliff and raised his rifle and fired three times.

“You fucking shoot him, Billy,” another man was bellowing as he charged up the path. “You shoot that cocksucker dead! You hear me?”

As the man ran past Tom their eyes met. The man was heavyset, with a stupid and cruel countenance. Tom could not escape the feeling that they had met somewhere before. The man had joined the Indian at the edge of the cliff. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“I’d say that I might have winged him,” the Indian named Billy said. “Only, I didn’t wing him.”

“Son of a bitch! How the fuck did he get down there without breaking his fool neck?”

“He has his ways, Charlie,” Bill said. “He has his ways.”

Tom got to his feet and brushed the sand away from his face and mouth. A great deal of it had gone down his shirt. Bill looked even more familiar than this Charlie. And Tom could tell that Bill felt the same way about him. They both stared at each other, waiting for the spark of recognition to catch.

Billy, he thought. Bill. Why does that sound familiar?

And then all of a sudden he knew.

“Oh my god,” Tom said.

He dropped to his knees and snatched up one of the revolvers and lifted it and fired.

The hammer came down with a click.

Empty.

Bill had raised his rifle and pointed it at Tom.

“Hello, Captain,” Bill said. His voice was very sad. “Small world, ain’t it?”

Tom looked down at the other pistol, calculated a second too long, and Charlie swept in and scooped it up.

“Do you recognize him, Billy?” Charlie said. “Damned but he looks familiar.”

“Look closely,” Bill Bread said.

Charlie’s eyes widened and he began to bray with laughter.

“Captain Jackson!” he laughed. “Well I do declare! Fancy meeting you here.”

“You’ve got me mistaken for someone else,” Tom whispered. “My name’s Tom Favorite.”

“Right,” Charlie said. “Whyn’t you get over there with your friend, Captain. We’ve got a whole pack of people who’ll be tickled to say hello.”

Tom didn’t move. He asked Bill, “He really jumped over the edge?”

Bill didn’t reply. Charlie fired at Tom’s feet.

“Get a fucking move on,” he said.

Tom turned around. In the dawn light he could see a few of the riders were running after the scattered women and children at the bottom of the mountain. The others were expertly scalping the corpses of the fallen Apache, jerking on the hair, stabbing with their knives, carefully removing all the hair and both the ears, then dropping their gory trophies in burlap sacks that hung from their hips.

Charlie kicked Tom hard in the back of the knees and he stumbled.

“I thought I told you to get!” Charlie Empire snarled.

Charlie threw Tom in the dirt next to Homer and stood over them with his pistol.

“Hey, Quentin!” Charlie shouted down the hill. “Get on up here! There’s someone who’s looking to meet you.”

“Who are these people, Sheriff?” Homer whispered.

Tom looked at the dirt.

“You ever hear people talk about Lukas Shakespeare in town?”

“Some. He was an outlaw, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

Tom gave a deep shuddering sigh. He was shaking, trembling, like a newborn kitten in the cold. The riders were coming up the hill. The scalped corpses of the Apache looked naked, violated, harvested.

“Well,” Tom continued. “These are the boys he used to run with. This is the Winter Family.”

“My good captain,” Quentin Ross said. “What a surprise to see you!”

Quentin wore a heavy oilskin greatcoat and a broad hat and idly twirled a silver revolver on his left index finger. The gun would spin, catching the faint daylight coming in from the east, then it would slap into Quentin’s palm and stop. Then it would spin again. Spin, stop. Spin, stop.

Behind him, the riders were putting wads of chewing tobacco in their mouths, lighting pipes and cigars, taking swigs of whiskey, and regarding Tom and Homer, who were kneeling side by side, with varying degrees of interest. All of them were splattered with blood, except for Augustus Winter, who was dressed in a neat suit and leaning on a cane of polished wood.

The sacks of scalps rested at their feet with blood leaking through the burlap and soaking into the greedy earth.

Farther down the mountain, a few men were still reaping their murderous harvest. The faint sound of screaming, begging, and gunshots rose on the air.

Tom could feel Charlie Empire and Bill Bread lurking behind
him and he knew the killing blow could fall at any moment. Still, he kept his eyes on Quentin.

“It’s a shame that our reunion has been sullied by the escape of our quarry,” Quentin said. “But Geronimo’s eluded better men than us. And although it represents a pecuniary loss to our company, I must admit I feel a strange sort of relief. I admire Geronimo. I feel a kinship with him. Just as we, in this company, turned our backs on civilization, so did he. I wish that things could be different, that history had not placed us on opposite sides. But so it has. And at least we won’t be going back to Hermosillo completely empty-handed.”

Quentin gestured at the bags of scalps.

“For that we have you to thank, Captain Jackson. If the Apache had dug in up here I don’t have the faintest clue how we’d have dislodged them. And so, on behalf of our company, I’d like to extend to you our deepest gratitude.”

A low, rumbling chuckle rose up from the men.

“Deepest,” Quentin said, grinning.

“Well, think nothing of it,” Homer piped up.

Quentin, who had given no sign of being aware of Homer’s existence, turned his bright eyes upon him. And then he looked back at Tom and said, “May I ask the identity of your traveling companion?”

Tom didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. Charlie grabbed him by the hair and jabbed the point of his knife into Tom’s right ear. Tom said, “He’s my prisoner.”

“Your prisoner?” Quentin said.

“I’m the sheriff of Phoenix,” Tom said.

“You?” Quentin said. “You?”

A few of the riders, the oldest ones, laughed again.

“I was falsely charged,” Homer said. “I’m innocent.”

“He’s guilty as sin,” Tom said.

“That’s not true,” Homer said. “That’s not true. In fact, Sheriff Favorite was bringing me down to Tucson to save my life. The townspeople were going to lynch me without the benefit of a trial.”

Johnny Empire threw back his massive head and bellowed. Dusty Kingsley slapped his knee. Charlie let go of Tom’s hair and laughed as well. Quentin stood grinning, amazed, as if he could not quite
believe what he was hearing. Of the riders Tom could see, only two were silent. Fred Johnson, who looked as if he would spit, and Winter, whose expression never changed.

“He was concerned you’d be lynched?” Quentin finally cried, to another gale of laughter. He turned around to face the riders. “No lynching in Phoenix while Tom Jackson is sheriff.” And they laughed some more.

Tom looked at his hands. They were shaking. He had a very clear realization that he was now experiencing the worst moment of his life, that there had been some unexpected ruling in a trial he had never known was taking place, that he had been judged by God or the universe and found wanting. And He or it had shattered his dreams and dragged up his past and left him alone, here, on a mountain in the desert at dawn, not just to be killed but to be utterly destroyed.

“Very concerned with legal process, is our sheriff?” Quentin said to Homer. “Hmm?”

Homer looked like he had no idea what was going on or what he should say.

“Well,” Homer began, “the sheriff spoke of his experiences and how they’d instilled in him the importance of the rule of law.”

“Oh, I see,” Quentin said.

“For instance, he’d been in Georgia during Sherman’s March to the Sea.”

“Indeed!” Quentin said. “As were we. And yet here we are. Isn’t it fascinating how men can draw such diametrically opposed conclusions from common experiences?”

“And,” Homer continued, “he’d witnessed the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi after the war.”

“You fucking son of a bitch,” Johnson said.

The riders laughed again.

“Indeed he did witness them,” Quentin said, laughing, “from a very, how shall I say this, intimate point of view? His view of those excesses only slightly impeded by the white sheet draped over his own head.”

He turned back to the riders, laughing wildly at his own joke, and they laughed too.

Tom could feel all their eyes on him as they laughed.

“My dear Mister …,” Quentin began, and then paused. “I don’t believe I caught your name?”

“Homer De Plessey, at your service.”

“Monsieur De Plessey, your sheriff was once a captain in the Confederate Army. After the defeat of the secessionist cause, he refused to lay down his arms. In those days, your sheriff was entirely unconcerned with due process and murdered those he considered to be carpetbaggers or scalawags. In particular, he harassed, threatened, and killed those Negroes who sought to exercise their newfound political freedoms.”

Quentin accepted a silver flask from Dusty and took a drink and handed it back. Then he spoke again, keeping his amused eyes on Tom all the while.

“In his time, he killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of freedmen who sought to vote, to teach, to run for office. However, your sheriff was just a little bit ahead of his times. By 1877 the tide had turned and the Reconstruction came to an inglorious end. But in 1870? Too early, too early. We, as good Union veterans, were employed to put an end to your sheriff’s insurrection. And put an end to it we did. His men were butchered from behind as they sought to burn a school for Negroes in Cotton Gin Port, Monroe County, Mississippi. The good captain himself escaped by a hair and was never seen again.”

“Is he crying?” Johnny Empire shouted. “Look at him! He’s crying!”

“Not long after the skirmish in Monroe County,” Quentin continued, “our little company’s relationship with the federal government deteriorated sharply. Our methods, while effective, were impolitic. We were forced to fend for ourselves. In subsequent years, we rode with former members of the Klan, and the White League, and the Red Shirts. Never with Captain Jackson, though. At the time I wondered whether he’d died. Seems he’d only had a change of heart.”

“He’s a hypocrite!” Homer cried. “He’s a lying hypocrite!” Homer laughed, the sound of it out of tune, jangling. The riders fell silent. “He’s a rotten hypocrite! Who is he to moralize about us? Who is he?”

Tom’s head was sunk between his shoulders. The tears were
squeezing out from between his closed eyelids. His hands were dug into the dirt. He tried to tell himself he had nothing to be ashamed of before these men, that Homer was a lunatic and the Winter Family was a thousand times worse than he was. But he was seeing the faces of the ones he’d killed. At the time he’d barely noted their faces at all. Now he could remember every detail: the look in their eyes, that soft look, paralyzed by the horror of those last moments, the profound violation.

Of course he owed them something he couldn’t repay. But he’d been trying. He’d been trying so hard. Everything had been for them. Maybe there was only one last thing he could do.

So he lifted his head and looked at Quentin and blinked back tears and said in his trembling voice, “Do your fucking worst, Ross. You go on and have your fun. I’ll be judged, maybe for the worse, but not by you. It won’t be by you.”

“Oh,” Quentin said, turning back to wink at his audience, grinning, before looking back to Tom and Homer. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think what we’ll do is let each of you give us a little talk on why we should spare you and not the other. And then let one of you live.”

At this there was a particular, knowing shout of laughter from the riders.

“What?” Fred Johnson said.

“Oh come now,” Quentin said to Johnson. “Let’s give them a sporting chance.” And he winked again.

Homer was up on his knees with his hands held forward, as if he were praying, with an idiotic look of hope on his face.

“The sheriff and his prisoner,” Quentin said. “The lawman and the criminal! Who deserves to live, and who to die? Please be assured that although we are outlaws ourselves we shall give you both a fair hearing. And then we will judge you, Captain Jackson. You and all your works. From Georgia to Mississippi to the Arizona Territory. The good and the bad. The good and the ill.”

“This is bullshit,” Johnson muttered. He looked at Winter. Winter was staring at Tom with a peculiar and violent intensity.