Chapter 5
The blood trail went left at the big oak and then angled down toward the creek.
Abe had expected the creek. A man carrying a gut shot went toward water by instinct, like the body was negotiating on its own regardless of what the mind had decided. He’d seen it before and he didn’t hold it against Jeremiah Jennings. He just followed.
He walked without urgency, the rifle loose in his right hand, picking his way through the undergrowth.
He was whistling “Sem Sorok” low in his throat, the way his mother had sung it in the kitchen on Friday mornings, working through the melody from the top each time he lost the thread of it and starting again.
The woods were thick, canopy knitting the light into small moving coins on the ground, and the air was wet and close the way Arkansas in summer always was, heat that didn’t pass through you but accumulated on you, hour by hour, until by afternoon you felt you were carrying the day’s whole weight.
He found blood on a leaf and crouched to look at it. Dark. An hour old or close to it. Jeremiah was still moving, which meant he had more in him than Abe had estimated.
He’d shot him at the house. Jeremiah had come to the door with a rifle already in hand, which said everything about his state of mind when Abe knocked, and they’d exchanged fire in the yard and Jeremiah had run into the woods.
The rifle complicated the arithmetic. Abe had caught him with a pistol shot, center mass, left of center, and Jeremiah had kept running, which was more than most men managed.
The fact of the running was itself information.
A man with nothing to hide didn’t go out a side window when a stranger knocked on his front door.
A man with nothing to hide didn’t keep a loaded rifle by the entrance like he’d been expecting the wrong kind of company.
Jeremiah Jennings hadn’t seen Abe before and didn’t know his face, which meant the running wasn’t about Abe specifically.
Jeremiah had been waiting for someone to come.
He filed that and kept walking.
He was a tracker for hire and had been long enough at it to be good.
He was patient and he could read terrain and he didn’t get emotional about the work, which was the quality that mattered most. He was following the Jennings trail for reasons that would become clear to whoever needed them to be clear.
Right now the trail went toward water and he followed the trail.
He heard the river.
He came to the tree line at the bank’s edge and stopped and looked down.
Jeremiah was at the waterline on his hands and knees, head down, his shirt soaked through and dark.
Two men stood on either side of a canoe pulled up on the clay bank.
Both of them had bandanas up over their faces.
Both of them had been looking at Jeremiah until they heard Abe’s boots on the dry ground above them.
They moved fast.
Abe moved faster. He had the rifle up before the one on the left had cleared his belt and he shot him at the base of the canoe and the man sat down and the canoe went sideways into the water.
The one on the right had more time and used it better, putting himself behind the drifting canoe and coming up with a rifle across the gunwale.
Abe dropped behind a river birch and heard the shot pass through the leaves to his left, close but not close enough, and he leaned out from the left side of the trunk and put two shots at the canoe and the second one went where he wanted it and the man behind the canoe went down.
The river kept moving. Everything else was quiet.
He reloaded at the tree and then came down the bank, checking the two men as he passed. He didn’t rush it. One was finished. The other had enough left in him to be breathing but not enough to do anything about it, and he stopped breathing before Abe reached the waterline.
Jeremiah had made it to the shallows. He was on his back with the water running over his chest and around his shoulders, looking up through the canopy with the particular focus of a man whose vision had gone internal.
“Your brother,” Abe said, crouching at the edge. “Where is he?”
Jeremiah’s eyes moved to him. A slow pull, like they were attached to something heavy.
“Go to hell,” he said. Quiet but distinct.
“You’re going to want to tell me before you can’t.”
“I haven’t seen Samson in two years.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“I don’t care what you think.” He coughed, a sound that had liquid in it. “He left. Didn’t say where.”
“And you’ve heard nothing since.”
Jeremiah closed his eyes. His hands moved at his sides in the current, drifting, purposeless.
“I’m done answering questions for men I don’t know,” he said. His voice had gone thin.
Abe looked at him for a moment. He recognized the particular setting-down that was happening, the way a man’s face changed when he’d decided to stop. He’d seen it before. There was no reasoning past it.
He stood up and walked back to the two dead men and crouched next to the nearer one and pulled the bandana down from his face.
He’d seen this face. He worked backward through the last eight months, placing it. Matamoros. Outside the customs house while he was inside working through a description of Samson Jennings with a bored federal clerk.
This man had been across the street, leaning against a wall, doing nothing notable. Abe had registered him the way he registered most things, a background detail filed and left. He hadn’t thought about him since.
He pulled the bandana off the second man. The face was unfamiliar but the hands weren’t. Small crosses tattooed across the knuckles, the same on both hands, done in the rough method of a needle and ink.
And on the inside of the left forearm, where the sleeve had ridden up, a small brand mark. A circle with text running around it, the letters blurred from sun and time.
He’d seen the design before, in San Antonio, on a pamphlet handed to him by a Ranger named Deerfield who was tracking something along the border that kept moving faster than his jurisdiction allowed.
Nuestra Tierra. Our land. The phrase was the gentlest part of what they did.
Deerfield had told him about them over bad coffee in a San Antonio hotel, spreading a hand-drawn map across the table and tracing their movements with a blunt finger.
They’d started as a political organization, he said, men who believed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was a theft that hadn’t finished being paid for, who wanted the land back by any means that presented itself.
They’d moved from pamphlets to action eighteen months ago. Wire cut, horses run off, a granary burned outside Laredo. Two Rangers shot on the Nueces in the fall. A postal rider killed near Eagle Pass in February.
They were growing, Deerfield said. Getting organized in a way that informal groups usually didn’t.
The interesting thing, Deerfield had said, folding his map back up, was that they weren’t working alone. Someone was funding them. Someone with access to information that went beyond the border counties.
Abe looked at the dead man’s forearm.
He turned back to the river.
Jeremiah had pushed off from the shallows while Abe was occupied and had gotten himself into the main current, face down, the water taking him. His arms weren’t moving. The current turned him once, lazily, and carried him around the near bend and out of sight.
Abe stood on the bank and listened to the river.
Two Nuestra Tierra men in the Arkansas woods waiting to move Jeremiah Jennings. Not to kill him. To move him. Which meant they wanted him somewhere other than here. Which meant Jeremiah knew something they needed kept.
Jeremiah was past being useful to anyone now.
The canoe was hung up on a root fifteen feet downstream. The two men were where he’d left them on the clay bank. Somewhere upstream the bird that had been complaining about the noise had gone quiet.
Abe had three threads left. Two were names given to him by the Arkansas state marshal, men who’d served alongside Samson Jennings in some capacity the marshal had been vague about in a way that suggested the vagueness was deliberate.
Both names pointed to Laredo first and then farther south, to a town on the river called Colinas Rojas. The third thread was the town itself.
He shouldered his rifle and walked back up the bank and into the trees.
He’d confirmed the spelling with the marshal’s clerk, a young woman who’d written it out for him on a slip of paper without asking why he wanted it. He had the paper in his coat pocket. He’d find someone with a current map before he got too far south.
Texas was large and the border country was its own particular geography and he’d learned not to trust what men told him about distances down there. Everything was farther than they said.
The trees closed around him. The river faded behind him. He walked west through the heat and the birds started back up again, one and then more, and the woods went back to whatever they’d been doing before he passed through them.