The Outcasts (25 page)

T
he boy took them to a shotgun shack on Pirate’s Alley, saying that Duverje’s men had taken up spying positions around the Buffalo House and along Canal. It was rumored that the men had orders to shoot Nate on sight, but the boy assured him that they would be safe in the house until the morning.

Nate sat by the door, unable to rest fully, and he jerked awake whenever his head began to nod into sleep. At times he watched Lucinda, lying on a nearby pallet, wearing a clean day dress brought by Alger. But her eyelids remained closed and motionless, like a person gone from the world. He had seen her eyes dim following the shooting, and he suspected she was not truly sleeping but rather retreating from the knowledge of her lover’s death, shrouding her awareness in the dark like a coal sled being shoved down into a mine.

Alger sat next to him, keeping the hours by whispering a story he had been told of Jean Lafitte’s time in New Orleans and of how he had hidden gold coins within the bricks of the very buildings lining Pirate’s Alley.

Nate asked the boy if he thought the stories were true. The boy regarded him with his young-old face and answered that it hardly mattered whether they were true or not. That people would trail after the merest rumor of gold, cleaving to their worst inclinations, like the inevitable and uncontrollable shakes following a strong fever.

After that, the boy was quiet and Nate spent the remainder of the darkened hours listening to the night’s thunder and rain, rolling like bands of siege artillery in the far distance, and counting the number of miles he had traveled, beginning in Franklin months ago, and the number of bodies given to the earth in search of a treasure that most likely didn’t exist. That he should spend his last night in New Orleans in a place called Pirate’s Alley was a thing he was sure Dr. Tom would have appreciated.

Dr. Tom had once told him that no matter how purposeful a course a man chose for himself, time and circumstance would choose their own path and would, like unseen authors, rewrite a man’s life to suit their own designs. Like Dickens, he had said, pulling Pip out of a perfectly good bed and into a graveyard at night, onto the path of an escaped killer.

From the moment Nate stepped onto the pier, he had certainly felt stripped of his intentions and placed in a narrative that had already been written. Even lying at McGill’s feet with his own pistol being pointed at his belly, he had been confounded by happenstance outside of his control, terror-filled and paralyzed by McGill’s rant of the nothingness following death.

Alger disappeared at dawn to alert Gorman’s men, who would take Nate and Lucinda to the steamer at the docks, but Nate knew that even a regiment escort would not prevent a well-placed shootist on a roof with an unobstructed view from putting a bullet into his skull.

When it was full light, he took hold of Lucinda’s arm and shook her awake. Her eyes opened and she sat up, and Nate wondered how much resistance she would put up to their leaving. But she remained seated at the edge of the bed, waiting to be told how and when to move.

Within the hour Alger had returned with Gorman’s men in a wagon, and Nate sat next to Deerling’s daughter with Alger at his feet, surrounded by armed men. They rumbled down Tchoupitoulas Street towards the pier and they were almost to the docks before he realized that the warehouse workers had collected in the open bay doors as they passed and were watching their progress silently.

A crowd had started to gather, lining both sides of the narrow lane to the steamer docks, and Nate recognized some of the street denizens from the rooster shoot a few days before. The attending pickpockets and thieves were straight-faced and leaden, their necks craned warily towards a cluster of men holding shotguns, blocking the lane, and Nate knew them to be Duverje’s.

Someone from the gathering shouted, “Don’t worry, we got your back.” And another man called out, “Yeah,
waaaay
back.”

There was laughter from the crowd until Duverje’s men moved forward, halting the wagon’s progress, and the driver pulled up on the reins. Nate looked to the ready steamer in its dock not a hundred paces away and recognized Captain Pascal standing on the open deck, watching the crowd.

A small prim man in an expensive, tight-fitting suit stepped to the front of the cadre of armed men and smiled. He pointed at Nate and said, “You and I have something to settle. You destroyed some very valuable property, property that took a lot of time and expense to acquire, and you will repay me. One way or another.”

Nate looked towards the docks and then over the swelling numbers of bystanders; he calculated that the crowd had grown to more than a hundred. He turned to one of the men in the wagon. “Where are my horse and rifle?” he asked.

“Mr. Gorman had them placed on the steamer, as promised.”

Nate looked again at Duverje and the growing mob of spectators and, pointing to Lucinda, shouted, “I’m a policeman, appointed by the governor of Texas—”

“You are not in Texas now,” Duverje interrupted.

Nate stood up. “This is my prisoner and I’m taking her to that steamer. Anyone who obstructs in this will be shot.”

“Not if you are shot first,” Duverje said.

Nate then removed the Dance from his holster, cocked it, and waited.

The men in the wagon shifted nervously, and then, one by one, they got out and stood some distance away. Duverje’s smile began to fade and he moved behind the protective press of his own men.

Nate scanned the surrounding faces again. Gorman had told him that the demimonde had made him one of their own. But the men and women watching him were wary, and no one had made a move to come to his defense.

To the resounding quiet, he dipped his head for a moment, gathering in his mind the roan’s epic swim and agonizing climb out of the surf, and then announced, “I’m going home now.”

Nate stepped from the wagon and held his hand out to Lucinda. She stood and was helped down by suddenly solicitous men, awkward with rifles in hand. Holding her wrist with his left hand, he walked purposefully towards the dock, calling for Duverje and his men to move aside. He swiftly approached the lead man, whose gun was leveled, hoping that the man’s protective instincts would take hold and he would back away defensively, but the leader just cocked his rifle and raised it to his shoulder.

A sudden shotgun blast sounded from the dock, and the crowd turned as one towards the
Annie Gillette
and the captain on the elevated steering deck, who was holding a rifle leveled at Duverje’s men. Pascal called out, “Duverje, I see you, you little coon-ass. You can’t hide from where I’m standing.”

A single full-throated, harrowing yell, like a lone battle charge, erupted, and a man began pushing his way violently to the front of the crowd. Shirtless and deeply muscled with a scarred torso shining darkly with animal grease, the man broke ranks and came into the open. He bellowed his ancestry of snake, gator, and river dog, pointing the tip of his knife at Duverje’s men. He wore a frayed turkey feather in his cap and paused in his pronouncements to give Nate a nod of recognition.

The docks were still except for the multitude of eyes tracking from challengers to challenged, and an expectant sighing from the crowd began, a collective excitement like heat lightning building along the fringes of the gathering as men and women pressed forward to better see.

“Duverje,” the turkey-feather man yelled, pointing his knife like an accusing finger. “Go on back to Algiers. This is
our
city; your cock-rooster is gone. I’m the only bayou bully here and we say this man can leave when and how he chooses.”

An ear-shattering blast of the steamer whistle sounded then, and from every throat came a frenzied cry, and the excited crowd surged together across the lane, engulfing Duverje and his men, building a protective wall of swirling bodies.

For a moment, Nate glimpsed Alger straining angrily against the press, shouting something Nate could not make out, but the boy was soon hidden among the taller men and he never reappeared.

Nate was passed from person to person like a log in a swirling eddy, but he and Lucinda were both heaved by the street people onto the boarding ramp, and the steamer soon jerked away from the dock. Nate climbed the stairs to the captain’s deck to watch the turkey-feather man circling within the ring formed by the crowd, his knife arm rising and falling, sweeping vertically and diagonally, threatening the largest of Duverje’s men, who had drawn his own knife.

The growing distance soon erased the individual features of the dueling men and the crowd surrounding them, turning the scene into a prosaic tableau, one without blood or bones or sweat, reducing death to the smallest speck on the horizon.

T
he rain had cleared away, leaving the Gulf waters calm, and the steamer made good time towards Galveston. The captain had food and drink brought to Nate and Lucinda, but he left them mostly alone, asking Nate only if he had gotten his man. Nate nodded but offered no more of the story, and the captain went back to his wheel.

 Later, during the night, Nate came out on the deck, and the captain asked Nate if he should see to Lucinda, who was sitting motionless on the lower deck, staring out at the passing water.

Nate glanced at her once and answered, “I don’t give a damn one way or another.”

The captain opened his mouth as if to say something, but then seemed to think better of it and took it upon himself to cover her shivering form with a blanket.

In the early-morning hours, the steamer passed Pelican Island, and Nate raised the Whitworth and peered through the scope to scan the beach. He saw the roan standing in a small stand of trees cropping at the sea grass, and the horse raised its head at the whistle’s blast. Nate watched for a while and for the first time began to shed, like a snake’s skin, the dire anxiousness that had plagued him for weeks, and sensed in its place an expectation for a course of life not seated in fear.

He jumped when he felt someone touching the rifle and saw that Lucinda had come on quiet feet to stand with him. She tugged gently at the barrel and he realized that she wanted to look through the scope. He frowned but gave her the rifle and she raised it in one graceful motion to her shoulder and sighted through the scope towards the beach. He watched the dark flow of her hair curling into the wind and saw the mole beneath her right eye, a lone punctuation mark on a clean page. A scent from her like Mayhaw grapes filled his nostrils and he stepped abruptly away, as though she had struck him. She smiled shallowly, her eye still focused on the island, but her brow soon furrowed and she handed him back the rifle and returned wordless to her place on the deck.

In Galveston, Nate took Lucinda directly to the jailhouse, where he found Thoreau eating at his desk. Thoreau paused, a forkful of food halfway to his mouth, his eyes all worry.

Nate motioned for Lucinda to sit in a chair. “This is my prisoner, Lucinda Goddard,” he said. “I’m taking her to the mainland as soon as I’m able.”

Thoreau set his fork down. “And your man McGill?”

“Dead.”

Thoreau looked at Lucinda briefly. “And where exactly are you going to say you apprehended your prisoner?”

“Right here.” Nate crossed his arms and waited for Thoreau to weigh the consequences of refuting his story to the officials in Austin.

Thoreau picked up his fork and began eating again. “You say you apprehended her here. Then that must be where it happened. The island is a big place. Do me the kindness, though, of being on the train tomorrow morning.”

Nate assured him that they would, but he left Lucinda in a cell at the jailhouse for the night while he walked to the telegraph office next to the Republic Hotel.

The first cable was to police headquarters in Austin: Lucinda Goddard apprehended Galveston. McGill rumored dead New Orleans. Returning to Austin with haste.

He had only a moment’s flush of conscience about the lie; that the arrest be considered legal for a trial in Texas was the important thing. He didn’t care what Lucinda said. He doubted her word would count for much, if anything.

The second cable went to Harrisburg, to Marshal Prudone, and contained only a few words: McGill dead. Texas law coming.

The third and final cable went to his wife: Leaving Galveston for Austin with prisoner. Will write soon.

After a moment’s hesitation he added, my abiding love to you and Mattie.

In the morning, Thoreau accompanied them to the station, and he stood on the platform watching the train depart with relief showing plain on his dark face.

Lucinda sat next to Nate on the swaying train, leaning briefly on his arm in sleep, and he would have rolled his shoulder to wake her but for the woman across the aisle, who smiled at him knowingly, as though witnessing a lovely thing, his sweetheart resting so close to his bosom.

It made him feel low and mean, this revulsion for a woman that his partner had loved and taken for a wife. He tried to call up a feeling of connectedness to Dr. Tom through her presence and to remember the overwhelming, rushing joy that had taken him while riding the engine, but it felt like a year since the first trip to Galveston, the only things left to him a profound sense of loss of fellowship and direction and a building anger that was fueled by the limp body resting against his. It seemed impossible to him that she would not have known McGill was a killer from the very first, and his hostility towards her swelled like a canker.

He let her sleep but pulled her roughly from the train at Harrisburg. He carried the Whitworth in one hand and dragged Lucinda stumbling behind him with the other, moving through the dust towards the jailhouse, steeling himself for the confrontation with Prudone. He had practiced what he would say to the marshal, his warning to him that it wouldn’t be that day, or the next, but that someday Nate was going to shoot him dead for the murder of Deerling and there wouldn’t be a goddamn thing anyone could do to stop him. He could stand in the next county, aim, fire, and take the top of Prudone’s head off, and no one would be the wiser as to who had done it.

But he found only one young deputy in residence—not more than nineteen or so—nervously jangling a ring of cell keys, looking like nothing so much as a kid holding a rattle.

“Marshal Prudone only recently left town,” he told Nate. “Rode south yesterday tracking cattle thieves. And I have no idea when the marshal will return. He said it might not be for a good while.”

Nate considered this for a moment. He had thought about dealing with Prudone so many times that it had never occurred to him that the man wouldn’t be there. In Nate’s mind, Prudone was somehow as immutable and fixed as the clock tower over the station. But he was tired, and he looked at Lucinda and realized that his exhaustion was due in part to the hours spent in her company; her passive, hollow presence threatened to sap away his anger like vinegar sucked into a sea sponge.

Nate stepped back into the street, leaving Lucinda behind with the deputy, who awkwardly stood and offered his chair to her instead of placing her in a cell. Nate carried the rifle to the beer hall and found the same barkeep behind the bar that he and Deerling had spoken to weeks before, the barkeep, and former sheriff of Goliad, who had warned that someday someone would settle harshly on Prudone.

Nate laid the Whitworth across the bar. “Do you remember me?”

The barkeep nodded. “You were here with that ranger. Looking for McGill. Did you find him?”

“Yes. I found him. He’s dead.”

The barkeep exhaled through his teeth. He set two glasses on the bar and poured whiskey for both of them.

Nate emptied the glass and gestured to the rifle. “Would you be willing to trade this for that gold coin? I don’t know how much the coin is worth, but this gun is easily worth a thousand dollars.”

The barkeep looked at him in surprise. “Why would you want to do that?”

“A lot of people gave their lives for that coin. The ranger I was with is dead. So is his partner. I want it as a reminder of what I’ve lost.” He stuck out his hand to strike the deal, which the barkeep, after some hesitation, took in his own.

“I need a promise from you, though.” Nate’s grip tightened on the barkeep’s hand. “Did you mean it when you said you’d be glad to see Prudone settled with a bullet in his head?”

The barkeep looked briefly over Nate’s shoulder, but the hall was empty. He nodded once.

“McGill killed a dozen people, two of them children. The marshal aided him in those murders. Prudone personally killed that ranger I was with. I’ll trade you this rifle, but I need your promise that you’ll find someone to settle on him. I’d do it myself, but I’m transporting a prisoner to Austin.”

The barkeep frowned but asked, “How far will she shoot?”

“Nine hundred and eighty yards.”

The barkeep gaped. “That’s far enough.” He pumped Nate’s hand twice and then took possession of the Whitworth, immediately going to hide it in a back room. Nate placed the remaining hex bullets on the bar, and the gold coin was retrieved from its hiding place and placed in his hand.

He thanked the barkeep and walked from the beer hall feeling relieved, not because he didn’t have to kill Prudone, but because owning such a rare and expensive weapon had become a burden. It had been a spontaneous decision, trading the gun for the coin, but in truth, the rifle had never felt truly his. It had belonged to Deerling, and in Nate’s mind, it always would.

He spent the rest of the day buying supplies and an old mule and spent the night in the livery. In the morning he retrieved Lucinda from the jailhouse, set her on the mule, and rode for Austin. He had briefly contemplated taking her to the cemetery north of Houston where Deerling and Dr. Tom were buried but felt in the end that it would serve no purpose. Upon hearing that Dr. Tom was dead—shot by McGill—Lucinda had turned her face away, but he heard no crying.

From the first night’s encampment she wordlessly took upon herself the task of cooking, expertly singeing the coffee grounds in a pan before boiling them in water with a handful of sugar, frying the cornmeal in fatback with a practiced hand. She even gathered the wood and set the fire, leaving Nate to service the weapons and see after the animals.

But contrary to the seemingly peaceful nature of her face, distant and grave, lit by the coals into a fiery porcelain so that she looked like the Madonna he had seen in a Mexican church, her hands trembled as she held her cup or plate. She wiped her palms repeatedly on her dress or flexed her fingers against the tangles of her hair, snapping at the wisps caught floating into the updrafts of cold evening air.

By the third day, she had begun speaking to herself, toneless and indistinct, her lips in constant motion, her head shaking randomly from side to side, arguing with the unseen.

After dusk, she stood up from the cook fire, holding his dinner and coffee in both hands, and turned to face him. But she remained fixed, only her chin moving in jerking spasms against her neck. She opened her hands, dropping the cup and plate, and he sprang up and moved towards her, arms out to catch her if she fell.

They faced each other, both in rigid confusion, and then she sank down in front of him, clasped her arms around his knees, and buried her face in the creased denim Y of his lap. “Please,” she cried, thin ribbons of saliva trailing from her mouth. “Please kill me. If you have any kindness or compassion left in you.” She lifted her face for a moment and looked up at him. “You’d shoot an animal beyond redemption.”

He stood briefly with his arms out like a man free-falling and then he leaned down to pull her hands apart, to remove her arms from around his thighs, but her grasp was uncannily strong, and as her face pressed again into his thighs, the workings of her jaw agitated him to twin states of arousal and a rage so potent that he thought for an instant that he could remove the Dance, palm her face away with his other hand, and shoot her through the temple.

He raised up a knee, planted it into her chest, and heaved her away from him. She fell, then curled into a ball and wailed the way Nate had heard women giving birth wail, in frantic bursts, ejected half-words and panting breath.

He grabbed up his pack, pulled out the big bite—the buffalo-rifle cartridge packed with cyanide that Deerling had given him—and tossed it to the ground next to her.

“Here!” he yelled. “You want to die, you take care of it yourself. I’m not going to have your murder on my hands because you can’t abide the idea of spending your life in a jail cell.” He tried to slow his breathing, wiping flecks of spittle from his lips, and fought the impulse to kick the dirt over her head. “Or because you have the morals and conscience of a bitch come into heat, living with a killer of women and children.”

She rolled onto her back and became very still, looking up at the sky. Her back began to bow upwards, and her hands clenched; her arms came out straight and beat a tempo-less rhythm on the ground. Her eyes rolled to white, and at first he thought it was just her womanly outburst grown more hysterical, but her lips stretched away from her teeth and she began to foam at the mouth and choke.

He moved forward and then back, his feet shifting in an aimless circle. He knelt down next to her thrashing body, uncertain what to do, thinking she would die after all. He put a tentative hand on her arm, but it was twitched away, and he got his canteen and wet a cloth and pressed it to her forehead. The fit went on for a good half hour in violent waves and then ebbed away slowly, leaving her dress stained dark with sweat.

He straightened her skirt, which had been twisted around her knees like a rope, and when he looked at her face, she had focused her gaze on him, though her body was still in rigors. He had seen that rolled-eyed look once before on the Steel Dust ranch when a yearling got into a green field and foundered himself and he writhed in agony, his guts bloated and crimped up with ballooning air. He had shot the horse out of necessity, and he knew that in her fit, she was gripped in a bodily pain that he couldn’t imagine.

He got a blanket when she began to shiver and covered her over and built up the fire again. He felt her eyes, sunken and bruised, on him, following him around the camp, but it was an hour before he could gather the courage to hunker down next to her with some water. He lifted her head so she could drink, and she looked at him gratefully.

He rolled himself into his own blanket and tried to sleep, but he heard her weeping. She quieted after a while, and just as he was about to sink into sleep, he heard her voice, plaintive and indistinct.

“What?” he said, not certain what she was asking.

“The horse on the island. Do you think it will live?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He turned his head and could see her form, bundled like a corpse. “If it has no predators.”