News of the World: A Novel (11 page)

He said, I am going to get Mrs. Gannet. We will settle up in half an hour.

Hour, said the stableman. He sat up in his blankets where he had been sleeping in an empty stall with his handkerchief, for some reason, tied around his head and an empty bottle clinked on the nailheads in the floor. Half. Damned hurry. People running around middle of night. Then he fell back in the straw.

The Captain trotted down the dark streets of Dallas and then turned on Stemmons Ferry to the hotel. A few dim-lit windows here and there and they seemed sinister and spying. He ran upstairs and went to his room and packed the carpetbag. He hefted it and went next door. He rapped hard and fast.

Mrs. Gannet opened it in a nightgown that must have had eleven yards in the hem, her dark brown hair undone. He could smell the sulphur of a match; she had quickly lit their lamp. She wore a forest-green wrapper over the nightgown and her hair hung down her back and shoulders in shining planes. Her mouth was open. Behind her Johanna sat up out of her bed, fully awake, and planted both her square feet on the floor.

Mrs. Gannet was both calm and alert. Captain? she said.

Quick, he said. We have to leave tonight.

BEFORE HE STEPPED
up on the foot plate he removed his hat to Mrs. Gannet and expressed his thanks. She was outraged and shocked at what Almay had said. She did not know Almay but she would know him now. Her eyes sparked in the light of the lantern she carried in one hand. She was furious. It gave her a bright and animated look and he was felled on the instant. He
took her hand; it was short and strong and on her wrist was a bangle of silver and some sparkling red gems.

I hope I may do myself the honor of calling on you on my return? said the Captain. He smiled. I was thinking of picnics on the banks of the Trinity.

First, return, she said. And take care, my dear man.

He hesitated and then bent and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

When they pulled out into the nighttime streets she stood holding the lantern, and in its light motes of hay sifted around her like fireflies.

THEY SET OUT
down the Waxahachie Road to the south because Almay and his friends would expect them to take the Meridian Road southwest. Then later in the night they could cut west and get back on the Meridian Road. He hoped that when Almay and Company saw no fresh tracks or sight of them on the Meridian Road they would turn back and look for them elsewhere. Maybe he and Johanna could gain three or four hours on them.

They trotted into the chain of hills that lay southeast of Dallas. They were called the Brownwood Hills. Before daylight they should come to a country cut up by the Brazos River into ravines and sliding red-rock cliffs, covered by live oak which had never been logged out. Some of them were as big around as millstones. He wanted to reach the river by daylight and pull off the road, up high, and watch for their pursuers. It would not take them long to bribe the stable hand for information. The man was a drinker. Drinkers were easy.

The rain had cleared and so they went at a good round trot. The sky was washed with clouds in one rainy line after another and the moon at three-quarters full seemed to be rolling backward. The road before them was indistinct and without perspective. It was difficult to estimate distances in moonlight. The Captain intended to put as many miles as possible between them and Almay and the Caddos before daylight.

The Captain was not averse to a fight but he was poorly armed. He took out the revolver and stuck it in his waistband on the right side, butt forward. He needed a holster. The shotgun was a twenty-gauge bolt action, a single shot at a time, and all he had was bird shot. He had only one box of cartridges for the revolver. He thought there might be close to twenty rounds. There had been no money to buy another box or a holster when first they came into Dallas and now late at night the town was shuttered and closed and those who were about were not people he wanted to meet.

The shotgun lay at the Captain’s feet under the dashboard, longways, loaded, the little lever on safety and he worried about it. The lever was too easy to shift. It was loose. He could grab for it and fire off a shot right into one of the horses before he could bring it to bear if he were not careful.

It was March 5 and cold, his breath fumed and his old muffler was dank with the steam. Above and behind them the Dipper turned on its great handle as if to pour night itself out onto the dreaming continent and each of its seven stars gleamed from between the fitful passing clouds. After several hours he found a track going west and took it and within two hours they were
on the Meridian Road. The country here was sparsely settled and only occasionally policed. Indian raids out of the north were a given. They pressed on.

The girl sat in the wagon bed behind wrapped in the thick red and black
jorongo.
There was no method by which he could explain anything to her but she did not need explanations. Her family and her tribe had fought with the Utes, their ancient enemies, and the Caddos. They had conducted a long guerrilla warfare with Texas settlers and Texas Rangers and then with the U.S. Army. Often enough they had faced the howling, striving demons of the open plains: hunger, tornadoes, scarlet fever. She didn’t need to be told anything except that there were enemies in pursuit and she had already figured that out.

The road was open before them, a two-track stretch in the pale of the moon, rolling over the lifts and falls of the prairie country of central Texas. They passed a farmhouse set back among trees. The farm buildings appeared to be great dozing animals that had gathered near the house in the night. There was a light shining in a window. Somebody was waiting up for somebody. Pasha tested the air for the scent of a mare. Had there been one he would have called out, making promises he would never be able to fulfill, but since all he could smell was a donkey and another gelding he held his peace and trotted on. Here and there were copses of post oak holding up wiry armatures of limb and twig, rattling with old brown leaves, and in the cold night air a hissing swift shape passed in front of them.

The girl cried out.
Sau-Podle!
She bent herself forward and carried the red wool up around her nose as if she would not
breathe the air. Sau-Podle brought news of a death; soon, here. It cut the air like a blade and trailed plump legs like a child’s in fluffy pantaloons.

Great horned, said the Captain. Ignore it, Johanna. Pretend it was a night hawk.

ELEVEN

A
T FIRST LIGHT
the Captain and Johanna were only a mile or so from the Brazos. As they went on they came to the little road that ran alongside the north bank. Then they came to a place he remembered as Carlyle Springs. The spring fed down out of a bluff of red sandstone into a ravine and then into the Brazos itself. It sparkled all the way down, jumping in transparent streams from pool to pool. The Captain looked up and thought he saw a way to get up there; a faint wagon track zigzagging up the slope.

He turned Fancy off the road and went uphill. After a hundred yards he had to get down and lead the mare through agarita and spiky young live oaks that tore at the underside but all he could think of was
Get under cover, get under cover.
He felt like he was pulling the load of the world behind him, Fancy and the girl jolting around in the driver’s seat and Pasha scrambling behind. Everything was dripping wet and bedewed and soon he was soaked to the knees.

At the top he found the only flat place to stop. There were
trees and thickets of sumac to give them some concealment. Some stumps; somebody had been up here cutting fence posts. From a layered stack of red sandstone, crenellated and thick as a barbican, he could see the road below.

He bent over with his hands on his knees to relieve his back muscles. He was stiff from the long night’s drive. Everything hurt. He straightened up and turned to her with the wrapped bacon in his hand. She took it from him, dropped the tailgate, and laid it down.

I cook! She smiled up at him. Then she held out a piece of divinity candy. Good horse lady, she said. Eat, Kep-dun. Her little face was round as an apple.

He returned the smile. Yes, very good, he said. He ate the piece of divinity and the sugar hit his bloodstream in a rush. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his white hair. His coat hung open to the morning wind. He felt in his pockets for his pipe.

The girl collected dry wood in her skirt as if happy to discover that skirts were good for something after all. He handed her the match safe and she started the fire in the little cookstove. With the butcher knife she expertly carved the bacon. She sang to herself. This was life as she knew it, and it was good. No roofs, no streets. Her new-washed taffy hair flew in loose ribbons in the morning breeze. Every so often she lifted her head to run her gaze over the live oaks around them and listen for an enemy presence. Then she went back to slinging rashers into the skillet.

The Captain stuffed tobacco into his kaolin pipe. And here he was in his mild and mindless way still roaming, still reading out
the news of the world in the hope that it would do some good, but in the end he must carry a weapon in his belt and he had a child to protect and no printed story or tale would alter that. He considered the men who must be following them and also that the smell of tobacco smoke carried far and wide, far more than meat smoke, so on second thought he laid down the pipe.

He unharnessed Fancy and tied her beside Pasha and rubbed them both down with a rice-straw brush. If the Captain and Johanna had to run for it they would do better on horseback than in the wagon. He paused over the saddle and blankets. Not yet. But he found Pasha’s riding bridle in the heap of tack and laid it over a wheel where it would be ready to hand.

He pulled on his riding boots with the undershot heels and then his spurs and shoved in the toggles to fix them and keep them from ringing. From his pockets he took out his gold watch and some pennies and his penknife and laid them on the tailgate. He wanted nothing about him that would clink, make a noise. He took out the revolver and once again made sure every chamber was full. He put it back into his waistband. The eight-inch barrel made it feel like he was carrying an axe handle. Whitewing doves sat up in the oaks and shifted from one pink foot to another and bobbed and sang because they wanted to come to water at the spring but were afraid.

The Captain wished he could go back down to the road to see how much of the wagon was visible from there. He guessed probably the top boards. He did not know how soon Almay and his friends might have started from Dallas after them. Probably at about seven-thirty, eight in the morning when he did not show up at the Tyler Stage Roadhouse. When they saw no
tracks on the Meridian Road, he hoped they would have doubled back to the Waxahachie Road and stayed on it. With luck they would be far away to the east bumbling along and crying out, Where did they go? Where did they go? But they would wise up soon enough and they were on horseback and therefore faster.

He did not go down. They might catch him down there on foot with a long climb back up to the wagon among the rocks. He lay on his stomach and watched the road. It was red dirt, two tracks with a strip of mullein and Indian grass in the middle. He could see two sections through the trees, one about a half-mile away and another piece just below.

He wiped at his tired eyes and then took up his guard duty again. In the increasing light of day the Captain thought he saw the moving and reflective slash of a horse’s tail. The doves became silent. Hm, he said. He climbed up to the wagon seat for a better view.

It was perhaps fifty degrees. A thin watery sun laid its gunmetal shine on the country below. The hills were ridges widely separated from one another in great tree-covered waves, as if they were drifting apart from one another across the stone underpinnings of the earth. On the horizon of cedar-covered hills, a thick billowing of smoke rose into the sky. Somebody was burning slash or stubble about three or four miles away.

The little stove erupted in a singing clatter of broken pipe and scattered coals. The hurtling skillet lid sailed away over a wave of flying hot grease. Another earsplitting
Bang!
Bacon and coffee spun into the air.

The girl was under the wagon in less than a second. The
Captain fell sideways off the seat. He landed on his left side. It was quicker and safer than standing up to climb down. He scrambled under the wagon. Another round hit the sideboards above him and splinters sprayed into the air. He thought of the flour keg with the .38 ammunition in it.

They won’t want to kill the horses and they won’t want to take a chance on killing the girl.
He lifted himself on his elbows and made a reassuring gesture. She was flat on her stomach and her face was turned sideways to him, keeping her eyes on his square old hawk’s face. They were lying among rocks and small spiny agarita; a lizard fled in a running of dark chevrons.
They’re firing up from the ravine. They have rifles.

The Captain crawled from under the wagon to the edge of the caprock and found a notch in it. He pulled out the revolver. Another shot from the right, different place. They had both been from the right. So where was the third man? He spat on his hand and then smeared it on his revolver barrel and then sifted dust over it. The Smith and Wesson with its long barrel was accurate but nowhere near as accurate as a rifle. And it didn’t have the range. Their rifles were good for two hundred yards or more. They could stay out of range and blast away at him till the cows came home.

The shotgun was good only for close work; he had only fifteen shells of light Number Seven, what they called turkey shot or dove shot, which would at most pepper somebody’s face with a permanent tattoo unless you jammed it right up against them at face-to-face range and that was a situation he would not be likely to survive. In the shot box were powder and caps and hulls to make up more shotgun shells, as if it mattered. He lay
still and felt running tremors in his belly. Fear for himself, for the girl.
Help me.