A Congregation of Jackals

Chapter 4

“It was just him.”

“What did Burt’s prick feel like? Bigger than Mr. Lowell here’s? Got a lot of veins or hair?”

Charles felt Jessica’s fingernail dig into his tongue and realized an instant later that he was biting her. Wincing, the woman shut her eyes.

“Stop biting your wife, Mr. Lowell. She don’t much like savages.”

The talker looked at the Arizonians pointedly.

Embarrassed, Charles nodded minutely and muttered past Jessica’s finger, “We understand your point.”

“Good. But that don’t necessarily mean that you learned your lesson.” The talker turned to Arthur, who shook his head in denial. “He says you ain’t learned it.” Again, the twin eyed the woman. “Was Burt’s prick bigger than the one dangling between Mr. Lowell’s legs? Don’t lie.”

The gentleman attempted to ignore his wife’s response.

“I’m not sure,” said Jessica. “It hurt because it was the first time.”

“The next time you done it, it feel good?”

“It didn’t hurt as much, though I didn’t like copulating with him.”

“But would you go back looking for old Burt if your husband got himself killed?”

A silence like winter dawn settled upon the quartet. Charles felt Jessica’s pulse race through her captive digit. Arthur yawned, saliva glinting upon his swollen gums and the stubby remainder of his tongue. Tears rolled freely down the cheeks of the Arizonians.

“I plan to spend the rest of my life with Charles.”

“So you’ll forgive him then?”

“For what?”

The talker slammed a fist into Charles’s chin, and his jaw snapped shut. The tip of his Jessica’s pinky and a gout of crimson that tasted like copper and honey flooded into his mouth. The woman shrieked and fell from her seat as the gentleman vomited upon the table.

The sun-bronzed siblings stood up. Metal glimmered, and guns extended from their right hands. Jessica started sobbing as Charles wiped bile from his mouth and knelt to offer her comfort. The shadow of the twins fell upon the Arizonians, but neither of them looked up at their persecutors. The gentleman wrapped his wife’s shorn finger with a handkerchief to stop the bleeding and thought about Jesus Christ for the first time since his wedding night.

“It’s never hard to locate you boys,” declared a man whose raspy voice has a thick Irish accent. “Let’s go.”

“Yessir,” responded the talker. Without preamble or delay, the twins turned from the Arizonians and strode toward the door.

Charles and Jessica looked up and saw that night had fallen on San Fortunado. Against its blue-black sky and beyond the reach of the saloon’s oil lanterns, stood a tall, extraordinarily lean man who had a curved back and wore a charcoal colored suit, a gray hat, and a matching scarf upon his face. Through the tears in the Arizonians’ eyes, this man looked like a tree that had been struck by lightning.

The twins exited the saloon and disappeared into the night, but the slender man in gray remained. His Irish brogue was deceptively cloying when he spoke to the Arizonians. “Don’t take this to the sheriff.”

Emboldened by the absence of the twins, Charles righted himself and replied, “I most certainly will—those men attacked us!”

“Both of you are alive. Your wife still has her clothes on. Nothing serious transpired.”

The tall gray shade turned away.

Charles opened his mouth to respond, and Jessica squeezed his shoulder with her good hand. “Please. I don’t want to be a widow.”

Humiliation replaced the anger that burned within Charles, but he said nothing. The gnarled gray wraith twisted weirdly and was welcomed into obscurity by the night.

CHAPTER TWO

Troublesome Boots and Telegrams

The rancher remembered a time not so very long ago when he could remove his boots without sitting down. Even as recently as his early forties, he had been able to place the palm of his left hand upon a wall or a tree or a calm horse for support, twist a leg up at the knee, and pull off the lifted boot with his right hand. He currently found that—in addition to forty-seven years—the dexterity and flexibility required to become shoeless while standing was also behind him.

The strong, hard man sat upon a flat rock beside the creek and removed his left boot and the right one—a low grunt accompanying each endeavor—and set the pair upright on a nearby rock, as if awaiting a spectral inhabitant to step into them. Arching his back, he elicited a dozen cracks and inhaled the moist sweet air that only blew in this dell at the edge of his property line. He removed his socks, set them on the sun-baked stone to dry, and then plunged his callused feet into the running water.

Even though he was not a tall man, within this private sanctuary he was a giant, and the animals of his ranch and his house and his wife and his children were but thoughts. The rancher loved all of these things deeply and thoroughly, but he had lived a very different life for many years and still required time to be a solitary titan, time during which the only world that existed was a simple, wordless place.

Leaning back upon the warm rock, he observed his surroundings. The shadows of dragonflies slid across the creek; the water broke in foaming complaints as it struck protuberant stones; the leaves turned in the moist wind, caught sunlight and illuminated like emeralds. The aches in his feet dissolved in the cool water; his face warmed in the golden twilight sun; his back melted into the stone. For an instant, all of his mundane concerns, all of the names he knew and treasured, as well as those he would prefer to forget, were borne away by the wind and he simply was.