Wolves (33 page)

Huxley leans down, helps Jay drag the body in and slam the door closed, and then he spins back on the naked men, hoping that one of them hasn't gone for a weapon and been more successful than the last guy. “Where's the other guard, Jay?”

Jay is breathless. “He must've gone through the front of the building.”

One of the men leaps up from the couch, his chest puffed up, though his erection has gone flaccid. “You know who the fuck I am?”

Huxley shoots the man in the chest with the muzzleloader. There is a flash of smoke and a belch of flame. He actually hears the lead ball striking the man's chest and it sounds like a wet smack. When he lowers the gun, the man is writhing on the couch with a huge hole in the very center of his chest, squirting out streams of arterial blood.

“You're a fucking dead man!” Huxley yells, then drops the now-useless muzzleloader. He turns to the other side of the room where the other men are sitting, along with their hired lovers. They have their hands up, eyes wide, not wanting what their friend got.

Jay holds his empty revolver in one hand, the guard's nearly empty revolver in the other, and he keeps that one trained on the two men. “Your guns. Real gently. Toss them over.”

Both of the men have their gunbelts hung on the side of the couches that they are occupying, and they both reach with one hand, very slowly, and pull the guns from their holsters, holding them with two fingers, like a soiled linen, and then toss them to the floor.

“Your horses,” Huxley says. “Where are they?”

“We ain't got horses,” one of the men says thickly. “Well, we got two, but they's hitched to the wagon outside. Mister, I don't want to end up like Mikey on the floor over there, but I gotta tell you, man-to-man, you don't wanna take that wagon. And it ain't me you gotta worry about.”

“I'm not worried about anybody,” Huxley says, swiping up one of the revolvers from the ground. He checks the cylinder, sees that it is fully loaded. He pulls the hammer back, shoving his empty revolvers back into his waistband. “We're taking the fucking wagon.”

The concerned man is shaking his head. “Everything in that wagon belongs to the Nigger King. He'll pull off your balls when he finds you.”

Huxley squints at the man. “I wonder what he'd think if he heard you call him that.”

The man swallows. “Oh Jesus.
Overman
. They belong to
Overman
.”

“Well, that just makes it even better, doesn't it?” Huxley looks to Jay and nods, pointing for the door that Huxley assumes leads into the front of the brothel, or tavern, or whatever business this is. “Let's get the fuck out.” To the still-breathing two, he waves the revolver. “Now you boys just sit tight right there and don't move. That'd be a bad mistake.”

Jay catches his arm. “Let's go out the back. If the other guard went around, he'll be on the other side of that door.”

Huxley doesn't have time to think it through. Any action is better than no action at all.

Jay opens the door, peaks out.

Huxley keeps his revolver trained on the men on the couches, but glances over his shoulder at Jay. “Is it clear? Can we go?”

“Yeah.” Jay reaches back and smacks Huxley on the shoulder as though to spur him. “Come on.”

The two of them slip through the door, Huxley keeping his revolver on the men and their whores until the very last second, then he turns and sprints down the alley. It still smells of gunsmoke. At the mouth of the alley, strangers have gathered around the two bodies and they look up to see Huxley and Jay running at them, weapons in hand. Most of them jump back. One stays a half second longer, as though considering challenging them, but no one wants to just throw themselves on the tracks in front of a hurtling locomotive.

My, what big teeth you have … 

“Everyone get the fuck back!” Jay shouts at them, waving his weapon.

Around the corner and onto the main drag.

There, in front of the whorehouse they have just come out of, there is a wagon hitched to a team of two horses. It is guarded by a single young man.

Too old to be called a boy, but not by much.

He stands at the side of the wagon, a scattergun in his hand, looking toward the main door of the whorehouse. The front door has been flung open, and a steady stream of people are exiting, whores and patrons alike, some of them dressed, some of them not.

Huxley and Jay cut through the flow of people, making a line for the wagon.

At the last second the young man guarding the wagon looks in their direction, sees their eyes fixated on him, sees the weapons in their hands.

But by then it's too late.

Huxley smashes him with his revolver, right across the temple, sending the man sprawling onto the ground with a little cry of surprise and pain. Huxley kicks the scattergun out of his hands and jumps atop the wagon.

The young man writhes on the ground, clutching his face. He rolls onto his back, looking up at Huxley, and Huxley can see that he has broken the bones on the side of the man's face, the eye already swelling and bloodshot. “I can't see!” the man is screaming. “I can't see!”

Price of doing business.

Huxley grabs up the reins of the wagon as Jay bounds onto the great wooden contraption with him. Jay points his pistol at the crowd around them.

“All you fucks get back!” he bellows. “Everyone look at the fucking ground! I'll shoot the next motherfucker that looks at me!” And for good measure, he fires a shot, though Huxley can't tell if it was aimed at anyone or not.

The horses whinny and stamp in their harnesses, but they are not strangers to violence. Huxley yanks the reins, swinging the horses in a tight turn and pulling them onto the main drag, people trying desperately to get out of their way. Leather reins in his hands, clumsy as his fingers work around the revolvers he refuses to holster.

The other guard with the white armband emerges from the whorehouse, weapon up.

Huxley wings a shot at him, but doesn't have time to see if he hit. He faces forward and snaps the reins, hunching over as he anticipates the crack of incoming rounds. He glances over his shoulder, but the guard is not in the doorway anymore.

The horses churn forward, their shod hooves striking loudly against the old pavement, the wagon wheels spinning faster and the momentum beginning to build, the whole heavy burden speeding up as they charge down the street.

North. Out of the city.

Up ahead of them, two guards stand at the side of the street, but they seem unsure of what to do.

Huxley and Jay and the stolen wagon roar past them. They don't make a move to intercept.

They crest a hill—that long, steady rise that leads away from the riverbank—and Huxley can see the gate ahead of them, guards standing about it, but they have no way of knowing that this wagon is anything more than a fast-moving delivery. Huxley and Jay don't even look at the guards as they pass. Huxley just keeps snapping the reins, yelling at the two horses to go faster.

The wagon bursts out of the northern gate of Shreveport. The sound of the wind. The sound of the hooves on concrete. The sound of Huxley's own breathing. And … 

Huxley looks to his right and realizes that Jay is laughing.

Laughing hysterically.

His eyes are bright and dark at once, they are catching the light of the sunset and they look like burning coals, like something made of fire. And it scares Huxley for the briefest of moments until he feels that same manic laughter rising in his own throat, and he can't keep it down, he can't deny the reckless, cathartic, violent joy of it all.

You showed them
, Huxley's mind bubbles over.
You fucking showed them.

And he begins to laugh with Jay.

Chapter 5

Lowell's mind is a scattered mess. Every thought inconsistent with the last. He is fighting with himself, even while he maintains a calm demeanor.

They have moved quickly through the edges of the city. The man named Rigo and the woman named Brie, they are the oldest among them. They carry the guns openly. Rigo walks in front, Brie in the back. Between them, a column of eleven of the slaves from the barge, plus Lowell. Chained together, but only for show—their manacles are not bolted. But the feel of the iron on Lowell's wrists is peripheral to what is going on in his mind. They pass guards at the gate, and maybe they give Rigo and Brie an odd look, maybe they seem suspicious of all these slaves walking when they are generally carried on wagons, but they say nothing, and they allow them to pass without question. None of this even registers with Lowell. He is elsewhere.

He is picturing the man, Don, drunk off the liquor stores he found stashed in the crew quarters, and the way he had looked at Lowell. The fear that Lowell had felt, but also the rage. This memory is followed by one from before: the memory of Don on Mother, even as she died. The way her body moved only because he was moving it. Like a dead animal. Like the dead dog that he'd skinned.

A glimpse, a piercing glare in his mind, some recollection of
before
, the
before
that came before Mother and Father … 

A woman. Her hair is dark, almost black. She has a tan complexion. The same coloring as Rigo. He can barely see the blood pouring out of her head, except for when it trickles across her brown skin. She is looking at him with terror in her eyes and she is holding his face in hers so that he can feel the callouses on her hands, her longish fingernails biting into his skin.

She speaks in Spanish. Even the memory is in Spanish.

The language that he didn't know he spoke.

“Run, Lowell. Run away from these men. Don't ever let them catch you.”

He pulls back from that memory, recoils from it. Hurls himself into another. Very recent. So recent he can still feel the stickiness of the blood caught in the webbing of his fingers … 

Don. Lowell's left hand pulling his head back, his drunken head, loose with alcohol and the bitter stinking breath that pours out of him. The knife is in Lowell's right hand. The knife that Mr. Huxley had given him. And he is terrified, but he put it to work, one cut, not knowing how it would feel, remembering the bitch in the trailer that he'd skinned and thinking it would be so hard, but then remembering how human skin is so soft. He doesn't know how he knows that. He can't remember. But he feels it again when the blade goes in, just slides in so easily that it surprises him, makes his cut short and hesitating.

I know this feeling. I don't know how I know. But I do.

He cuts again, angry this time. This one goes deep. He can feel the easy parting of the flesh, the hard resistance of the windpipe, the gush of blood. The sound that Don made—he remembers that very clearly … 

“Stop here.”

A voice in Spanish again.

Lowell looks up, out of the world of memories and into the world of the present. The here and the now. Rigo had spoken in Spanish. He understood it perfectly. The language slides into his mind with surprising ease, just like knives go into people's skin oh-so easily.

Lowell looks around. They have stopped. The stinking city of Shreveport is gone. They are on a road, but it is not a big road. This one is some overgrown side road, surrounded by houses. More houses than Lowell has ever seen. Everything is dilapidated and falling apart. Nature here is more insistent than on the other side of the Red River where Lowell comes from. Everything here is green. It climbs over houses and old cars. It reclaims what it owned before.

The girl named Brie is going down the line of slaves, pulling manacles off their hands. Rigo has a big, heavy satchel and he sets this on the ground and upends it. What topples out is a collection of edged weapons, revolvers, and scatterguns. Brie has a similar pack. They'd taken all the weapons they could carry from the slave barge.

Rigo kneels over the weapons. He grabs two revolvers, but he already has two revolvers strapped to his person. He looks up at Lowell and nods his head. “You. Boy. You speak Spanish?” he says in their shared language.

“Yes.”

“Come here,” Rigo waves him over. The man's face seems like it's built to be kind. But his one good eye tells Lowell something else. Just speaking the language, just being around Rigo, it pulls all those old memories from
before
up a bit more from where they went, deep inside of Lowell. He still can't access them at will, but like the image of the Mexican woman who told him to run, he is remembering more frequently now. Little bits and pieces. He doesn't want to remember. Every time he remembers he feels angrier.

Lowell goes to Rigo, stands over him.

Squatting, Rigo has to look up at Lowell just a bit. His one good eye is expressive. The other just hollow and dead. But that one good eye … it can be cold. Or it can be kind. He looks at Lowell like a friend, and for some reason Lowell is filled with relief. “Where'd you learn Spanish?”

Lowell shakes his head. “I don't know.”

“You can't remember?”

“I don't remember things from before.”

Rigo nods, slowly. “Okay. You wouldn't be the first.” He pushes one of the revolvers into Lowell's hands. “That's for you. You know how to work it?”

Lowell looks at it. He remembers Father's revolver. But Father never shot it. Never reloaded it. Lowell didn't know much about them. He shakes his head. “I don't think so.”

Rigo hastily points at the parts. “You pull the hammer back, then you pull the trigger. It's that simple. You got six shots. It's already loaded. I'll teach you how to reload it later, okay? If you need it now, it's pull the hammer back, then pull the trigger. Understand?”

Lowell nods. “I understand.”

Beside Rigo, Brie has knelt down to help distribute the weapons.

Rigo gives her a glance over his shoulder, then rises, taking Lowell by the shoulder and pulling him away from the others.

When they are a few yards from the others, Rigo asks him, “Where'd you come from?”

“I was … I was in my home,” Lowell says, a little unsteadily. “Then they came.”

“Huxley, you mean?” Rigo raises an eyebrow.

“Yes. They killed Mother and Father.”

Rigo's gaze intensifies a bit. He lowers his chin, holding eye contact with Lowell. “Listen to me. All of that's done and over with now, okay? You can't go back. No one can go back.” He puts his hands to his chest. “I can't go back either. I lost people too. But this thing? This thing that we're doing?” His lips pinch together a bit, a stern look. “This is what needs to be done. Okay? These people out here. These so-called Riverlanders … they're bad people Lowell. I don't know your history and I don't know where you came from, but I'd bet money they were the ones that hurt your other family—the ones that taught you Spanish. I bet they were traders, just like my family. I bet they got attacked by slavers, just like my family. And somehow you got away. Just like I got away.”

Run, Lowell. Run away from these men. Don't ever let them catch you.

“You and me, we're like brothers,” Rigo says, his eye softening. “These people we're after … those are the ones that destroy everything. I don't know what happened to that family you can't remember. I wasn't there. I had my own problems to deal with. But I will tell you this: Huxley saved you for a reason. He saw something in you. Maybe he saw in you what he saw in me. Maybe that's why we're both here.” He slaps Lowell's shoulder. “Trust Huxley, okay?”

Lowell nods. “Okay.”

Trust Huxley
, Lowell says.
Trust him because he knows who you are. He knows what's inside of you.

Lowell feels a strange sense, a feeling he hadn't felt in a very long time. A feeling of familiarity. A feeling of … belonging to something. He wasn't weird to Rigo. He wasn't weird to Huxley. He wasn't just an Animal Child to them. With Huxley and Rigo and Brie, Lowell was normal.

They were all alike.

They were all Animal Children.