Outlaw Train (14 page)

Percival Raintree stood beside the railroad car that housed Gypsy Nick Anubis’s rolling embalming chamber, and studied the sky. Dark and roiling clouds dominated, and the air felt thick with the threat of rain. The downpour would begin within fifteen minutes, Raintree estimated. As a traveling man usually separated from the natural world only by the thin walls of a railroad car, he’d become proficient at reading the weather, and was seldom wrong in his predictions.

Raintree looked at the shallow ruts left by Anubis’s wagon when he’d left for Wiles earlier. Despite his partner’s assurances, he was still uncertain it was a good idea to actually parade one of their main displays into the heart of town. Sure, it had worked elsewhere, enticing customers who might otherwise have never attended…but it was also a dangerous move, inviting uncomfortable questions from the local law. There were plenty of people out there who just couldn’t shake off the notion that there had to be something wrong, morally, legally, or both, with displaying actual corpses or portions thereof. Never mind that there were museums all across the country and world displaying the mummified
remains of ancient Egyptians, South American natives, American Indians, and others. Still, Raintree had been in his line of work long enough to conclude that sometimes it was best simply not to invite controversy in the first place. Come into a locale, hang a few advertising flyers around town, welcome the crowds, and move on quickly to the next stop.

The problem was, it simply wasn’t working as well as it had at the beginning. Some years ago, when Perkins Ironwood, a part-Cherokee member of an acting troupe and habitual collector of oddities, had transformed himself into Percival Raintree, tattooeared showman of unspecified exotic origin and traveling displayer of outlaw relics and even dead outlaws themselves, the process had been simple and efficient. A simple covered wagon, highly decorated, had borne his collection of grim collectibles from town to town, and by help of his posted flyers and word-of-mouth, plenty of viewers had turned out night after night.

Raintree couldn’t account for why it was no longer that way. The decline had started about a year and a half before, inexplicably, and had slowly but steadily worsened since then. Raintree wondered if the world simply was changing, and outlawry was losing its fascination in the public mind. Why would such a thing happen?

By the time of what, in his mind, he called “the change,” he was working with Nicholas Anubis. Not that he held Anubis in any way accountable; in fact, Anubis’s contributions to the show were equally as significant as their improved mode of travel. Gone
was traveling by wagon. The wagon, sans its former cover, now was used merely for transport, and by Anubis whenever he made advertising forays into whatever town they happened to be nearby, as he had into the town of Wiles tonight.

Anubis. Raintree had mixed feelings about the man he had drawn in as a subordinate partner. Anubis had been a faithful and supportive associate, yet Raintree felt vaguely threatened by him. The hard truth was that Raintree’s Outlaw Train operation, as it now was, needed Anubis much more than it needed Raintree himself.

It all had to do with Anubis’s specialized skill and knowledge, knowledge he would not possess if not for Raintree. It was Raintree who had conceived the idea of moving beyond typical criminal relics such as guns, items of clothing, and so on, and adding actual bodies and body portions of dead outlaws, if such could be had.

There was an obvious problem, however, in the notion of hauling around corpses for an extended time: decomposition. And so Raintree had begun thinking, then researching, trying to find an answer. In that process he’d discovered he had a propensity for such prowling, information-gathering work; he’d discovered that, in Chicago, a very old man resided who purportedly possessed secrets that had enabled the ancient Egyptians to preserve the dead in a way that lasted for centuries. Raintree meticulously sought that man out, and after careful and delicate blandishments won his friendship. That process was made easier by the fact that the old man, Samuel Zuka, was near his own death and
desirous of having his own remains preserved after death by the methods no one but he knew. Because a man could hardly mummify himself, Zuka at length agreed to Raintree’s proposal to teach his art to an appropriate student, on condition that that student mummify and honor Zuka’s corpse after he was gone.

Initially Raintree himself sought to be that pupil, but soon it became obvious he lacked the rudimentary embalming knowledge needed to understand adequately what Zuka had to teach. So Raintree had begun a search for an appropriate pupil, and found him in the person of David Akers. Akers was a Southerner who had learned the basics of embalming in the most rigorous classroom possible: Civil War battlefields. After the war, Akers had moved north to Illinois, seeking better opportunities. He was working as an embalmer’s assistant in Chicago at the time Raintree located him.

Raintree followed Akers for days before a good opportunity to actually meet him arose. After making the man’s acquaintance in an alley behind a Chicago saloon, he recruited Akers. It proved a good move. Akers was an apt pupil of Zuka’s ancient arts, and by the time the old Egyptian finally passed away, the former undertaker’s assistant had taken on his “Anubis” persona, was identifying himself as of Egyptian rather than Cherokee descent, and was thoroughly devoted to the life of a traveling showman.

The biggest challenge facing the “Outlaw Train,” apart from maintaining an adequate supply of certain rare salts and drying agents used in the body
preservation process, was, naturally, obtaining bodily relics of the criminal dead. Raintree proved himself capable in this regard, managing to purchase, from the family, the corpse of a lynched small-time criminal from Missouri named Fred Parks. “You want to pay for him, you got him,” Parks’s father had said. “The boy has brought naught but sorrow to his mother and me all his living years; maybe he can recompense for it a bit now that he’s dead.”

Under the hands of “Gypsy Nick Anubis,” the rapidly declining corpse of Fred Parks was turned into a leathery, but decay-proof, display laid out on a slab that folded down from the interior back wall of the museum car like a prisoner’s bunk in some dungeon. The imagination of Percival Raintree concocted for the insignificant criminal a fictional biography to rival that of the James brothers, and soon Fred Parks was being gaped at by hordes of small-towners and rural rubberneckers across the West.

The late Zuka himself, who had indirectly made the entire thing possible, soon went on display as well, fictionalized into an “Indian Mummy” of an ancient Choctaw chief who had died half a century before after a life of bloodthirsty carnage against the white race. Thus the skilled mummy-maker who had asked only that his remains be honored instead had them become a kind of insider’s joke between Raintree and Anubis. He lay there in quiet indignity, across from Fred Parks, to be examined by those willing to part with a few cents for an afternoon or evening of unsophisticated and morbid entertainment.

Leaning back against the second railroad car that
was part of his little kingdom—Anubis’s rolling mummy factory, an embalmer’s laboratory on wheels—Raintree watched the clouds build and wondered if Anubis would find a shelter somewhere in town under which to keep the Tennessee Kid from getting soaked by rain. Raintree didn’t really know whether a cursory dampening would hurt a corpse that was as dried up as a tin of saltpeter, but it just made good common sense, in his mind, to keep such a thing dry.

Raindrops began to splatter the ground. Raintree headed for the freestanding little flight of stairs between the two sidetracked railroad cars. At the platform, he cut left into the museum car, the only one of the two cars open to the public. The other car, a converted boxcar, though labeled Traveling Cabinet of Infamous Preservations, was a work location, not a show car for public touring. It also doubled as sleeping quarters for Raintree and Anubis, though Raintree often opted to sleep under the stars, or under the wagon, to avoid the smells of the salts and other chemicals Anubis used in embalming. Anubis, unlike Raintree, didn’t seem to mind them.

Restless and unhappy, Raintree looked around the cluttered railroad car. Over months of effort, he and Anubis had filled the mobile museum with a visually impressive array of displays, quite varied but all having the common factor of connection with criminality. Weapons dominated: pistols, rifles, shotguns, knives, even a couple of sabers. Mounted on a plaque were three flattened, misshapen bullets that had been dug from the body of a bank clerk shot down during a robbery.

There were, of course, photographs and journalistic sketches, newspaper accounts preserved behind glass, and several images of slain outlaws propped up in slanted coffins, surrounded by lawmen and townsfolk who looked every bit as stiff as the dead. There was a Bible with a bullet hole penetrating half its depth, the questionable story being that it had saved the life of a camp meeting preacher from Texas whose exhortations had roused the ire of an outlaw in the crowd named Stanley Horton. Horton supposedly had stood and fired his pistol from the crowd. The preacher, seeing him rise and draw, had held up his Bible as a shield, and the bullet had struck at an angle, lodging somewhere in the book of Nahum. Raintree had examined the Bible, naturally, and read the verse that the bullet had nudged up against. That part had worked out well, from the perspective of a showman; the verse read “The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.”

On the signboard that went with the displayed “bullet Bible,” Raintree had written out the story, embellishing it slightly by declaring that the miraculously rescued-from-death preacher had gone on to preach an entire sermon from that verse while lawmen at the camp meeting wrestled away the shootist and “restored peace amidst the congregation of the righteous.”

Raintree moved slowly through his exhibit, looking at each item closely despite his familiarity with them. He was looking at one particularly gruesome item, a raggedly severed hand, minus two fingers,
still attached to a portion of a forearm, when a noise behind him, back at the door, made him turn.

A thirtyish man, a little rumpled and dirty at the moment, clothes drooping as if he’d been in the rain a good deal that day, opened the door and stepped inside. Raintree turned and faced him, and noted the badge on his vest.

“Hello, sir,” Raintree said, smiling fulsomely. “Welcome to the Outlaw Train. But I’m sorry to tell you the exhibits are closed tonight.”

“Closed? How can you make money if you don’t open your exhibit?”

“Bad weather today, sir,” Raintree replied. “I’ve been at this long enough to know that people simply won’t come out for entertainment when the weather is unstable. And I’ve traveled this part of the country enough to know that this weather, this time of year, can turn to something far worse. My name is Raintree, by the way. Percival Raintree.”

The other came forward, hand extended. “Luke Cable. Marshal of the town of Wiles, which lies over that direction.” He pointed vaguely.

“Marshal.”

“Well…acting marshal, technically speaking. The appointed full marshal left the area sometime back and hasn’t returned.” He paused, remembering the figure seen earlier on the ridge. “Or if he has, he hasn’t showed himself.”

“Interesting,” Raintree replied. There was much more he could have said about the missing marshal of Wiles, Kansas, but certainly he would not. “I am familiar with Wiles,” he went on, deflecting the line of the conversation a little. “In fact, my business associate
is there this evening, carrying one of our display items on a wagon. A form of advertising to draw out crowds to see the rest of the show.”

“Interesting concept you’ve got here,” Luke said. “But I have to tell you, I’ve heard little talk of it in town. Have you been seeing good turnout?”

Raintree sighed and his smile went sad. “Not here, no, just to be fully truthful. I can’t account for it. Normally we get a better response.” It wasn’t entirely true; public interest had been declining well before the Outlaw Train came to Wiles.

Luke said, “There’s been some competition in Wiles from a woman claiming to be able to communicate with the dead. Maybe she’s cut into your business.”

“Maybe so, sir.”

Luke looked around, then said, “I know you are not open for business, but since I’m here, might I receive a tour? I’ll gladly pay your admission price.”

“No need for admission, sir. In that you are a peace officer, I am glad to provide you a tour free of charge.”

“Very obliging of you, sir. And this gives me a chance to give you a word of warning I believe you are due.”

“Beg your pardon? What have I done to create any need for warning?”

Luke took a slow breath. “Do you have here any relics related to a family named Nolan? I’m speaking of the outlaw Nolan brothers who have become rather infamous.”

Raintree lifted his brows high. “The famous Nolan Brothers Gang, eh?” He paused, weighing something.
“Yes, yes. We do indeed have something here related to the Nolans. A part of one of them, in fact.”

“Part of?”

“You know how Billy Nolan died, Marshal?”

“An accident involving blowing up a safe, I think.”

“That’s right. He lost part of his arm, and what remained of the hand on that arm was lacking some fingers.”

“Sounds gruesome.”

“Would you like to see for yourself?” Raintree smiled and waved toward the display he’d been examining when Luke entered.

Luke looked it over and whistled softly. “How did you get
that
?”

“I have a talent for finding and for acquiring,” Raintree replied. “At the outset of my work, I had the support of a wealthy benefactor in St. Louis, a man obsessed with the collection of criminal relics. He provided me a rich supply of funds with which to obtain the curiosities he wanted. So initially I was a collector for a purely private museum collection, kept in his home and never open to the public. When at length he died, I was operating my traveling cabinet of curiosities on a small scale, out of a wagon. When I learned of my benefactor’s passing, I contacted his son with my condolences, and was surprised with the gift of many of the best relics I had collected for him. The son had no interest in his late father’s ‘morbidities,’ as he termed them. With an additional inheritance of cash from my late friend, I was able to outfit this railroad car and present my exhibitions on a far grander scale. When I added my partner Mr. Anubis, I obtained a second railcar and
outfitted it for his own special work, which makes much of what you see here possible. Meanwhile, I continually procure relics. When I learn of one, I track it down and find a way to obtain it.”