man?”
She looked at Will who was looking at her and she
knew that the only thing more dangerous than having
a madman come around would be if she allowed Will
Bird to stay with her there alone.
“No,” she said. “I’ve got my gun and I can shoot as
good, and maybe better than Will can. You all go on.”
She saw the disappointment on Will’s face but he
didn’t say anything. Instead he just looked off toward
the distance as though distracted by the emptiness. He
still had Fannie waiting for him, he reasoned.
She watched them go with some little regret. It
seemed ages since she’d known the comfort of a man
in her bed and it was all that damn Toussaint True-
blood’s fault and if he ever showed his face around
her again, she’d by damn sure let him know how she
felt.
21
“Well, what the guddamn hell are we to do
now?” Zeb said to his brothers.
“Storm’s coming,” Zack said.
“Where?” Zane said.
“Yonder.” Zack pointed off to the northwest where
a wall of brooding clouds seemed to be advancing like
the Devil’s army.
“It hits, we’ll be wet as dogs without no horses to
outrun it.”
“Who the hell was supposed to watch them cayuses,
anyway?” the elder brother said. Zeb could be more
ill tempered than the other two combined. He was al-
ways the one quickest to fight and once even knocked
a tooth loose from a prostitute’s mouth in a Goldfield
bordello because she giggled when he took his off his
pants. He got thrown in jail for it, too. The local law-
man had not taken kindly to having his wife’s tooth
knocked out, said: “You just lowered her going rate—
who’s going to want to pay her five dollars without a
front tooth?” The lawman did more than jail him. He
took him out back of the jail with the assistance of a
couple of deputies and pummeled him good, breaking
several ribs and knocking out one of Zeb’s own teeth.
“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, ain’t
that what the Bible says?” the lawman said, rubbing
his bruised and scraped knuckles. Zeb doubted the
lawman had any Bible in him.
Zeb spat blood and said, “ ’At fat bitch ought not to
laugh at a man’s fireworks,” and the lawman hit him
again so hard he thought he’d been shot dead. He woke
up tied to the back of his own horse, it running wild
with bean cans tied to its tail so it would be spooked
and run till exhausted. Riding slung over its back like
that, every step was pure hell from the broken ribs Zeb
suffered from being stomped by the deputies after the
lawman knocked him cold. He coughed up blood for
nearly a month after and swore vengeance on the law-
man, but his brothers talked him out of it.
“We go back they’ll kill us all,” the youngest, Zane
said.
“Hell, I’d rather be dead than humiliated by that
big-nosed bastard and his ugly wife.”
“Ain’t worth it,” said Zack.
Truth be told, Zeb was a little afraid of the man af-
ter what he’d done to him. Confronting him again
wasn’t really something he wanted to do but said he
did out of false bravado and so had let his brothers talk
him out of seeking revenge, knowing they were proba-
bly right: the lawman would kill him and them, too.
Now the trio stood in the waist-high grass with a
chill wind snaking through it and the bruised sky
closing in on them.
“Well, unless we grow wings, we ain’t going to get
nowhere but we walk there,” Zeb said.
“Which way?” Zane asked.
“Hell, does it look like it makes a difference? Any-
where but in the direction of that storm seems to be
about right,” Zeb said.
“Let’s head the way we were going when we met
that wagon full of whores,” Zane said at last, leading
out, his brothers falling in a sober line behind him.
Zane was the youngest and the most impatient.
By dusk the first few raindrops struck them in the
face.
“Guddamn, but that’s a cold rain,” Zane said.
“Guddamn, but it sure is,” said Zack.
“Stop your whining,” Zeb said. “You sound like
wimmen.”
By the time they saw the light of the house, they
were soaked through to the skin. The rain so miser-
able cold and bad it felt like it had reached down into
their bones, like their very blood had turned to rain,
and every step was one of misery. Rain sluiced off
their hat brims and down their faces and down the
back of their necks and Zeb cussed his brothers for
not being vigilant and letting a fat Indian steal their
horses.
“One guddamn Indian!” he kept repeating. “One
fat guddamn Indian snookered us!”
Then Zack said, “Hey, they’s a light.”
