Chapter 16 #2
He reversed the rifle and drove the butt of it down on the dog’s spine, once and again and a third time, until something gave in it and it let go with a yelp and dragged its hindquarters back scrabbling through the dirt.
The third one had gotten its feet back under it and was rising, dazed. Abe kicked it hard under the ribs and roared down at the both of them, a sound that came tearing up out of his own chest without his deciding to make it, raw and animal and bigger than the pain in his leg.
And the dogs broke. All of them that could still run, ran. They went streaking off into the black timber with their tails clamped flat to their bellies, the survivors of a thing they had not been bred or beaten to expect, and behind them in the firelight one dragged itself and one lay still.
The two men behind the tree were running now too.
He let them run. They’d have had to cross a stretch of open firelit ground to reach him, and they plainly hadn’t the stomach left in them for the crossing, and running them down through the dark meant leaving Samson kneeling there in the dirt, and Samson was the whole of why any of it was happening.
He put one round high over their heads to put a little extra speed into them and listened to them crash off blind through the brush, the sound of their flight dwindling, and after them came Flores’s voice, raw and shredded with the pain of the ruined hand, promising in Spanish that they would all be made to pay for this night’s work, that he would see to it personally, that they would pay and pay and the whole of this country would pay with them.
Then Flores himself was up off his knees and gone too, lurching off one-handed into the dark with the wreck of the other arm clutched to his chest, blundering through the brush with none of the ease he’d carried in the firelight, just a hurt animal making for its den.
Abe let him go. A man running away into the night holding his own life in against his shirt with one hand was not a man Abe needed to spend another bullet on tonight, and the bullets might yet be wanted before this was through.
There was a deeper reckoning owed that man than a quick ball in the dark, though Abe didn’t yet know its shape.
The fire popped and settled. The man who had gone down into it had begun to burn, and the smell of it came drifting across the clearing thick and sweetish and terrible, and Abe breathed through his mouth and kept his eyes off it.
The wounded one had crawled off into the dark while Abe’s attention was on the dogs, leaving a dark smear across the dirt, and Abe let him go too.
The clearing emptied out into quiet by degrees, the fire and the burning man and the one still dog and the kneeling one, and then it was only the two of them left upright in it, Abe and the thing on the ground he’d come for.
He came out from behind the oak with the rifle up, the bitten leg taking his weight grudgingly and sending its fire up the bone, and crossed the open ground to Samson, who had thrown himself flat to the dirt the instant the shooting started, the one sensible thing a bound man could do in it, and who now lay there with his bound hands working behind him and his eyes showing white all around in the dying firelight.
“It’s the man from this morning,” Abe said, low, so the man would know him and not fight. “Hold still now. It’s done.”
He cut the bindings at the wrists with his knife, two strokes, and Samson brought his freed arms around in front of himself slow and clumsy, the way a man moves them when the blood comes flooding back into them and the pins of it are an agony, and he looked at the dead and the burning and the wrecked door of his ruined hole and the whole smoking firelit clearing, and then he looked up at Abe, and something came up in the ruined face that Abe had seen come up before in the faces of men hauled back off the very lip of a thing.
“You came back,” Samson said.
“I told you I would.”
“Men say that.” Samson got himself up onto his feet, swaying, and put a hand flat against the oak to keep from going back down.
“All kinds of men say that. I’ve heard it said by men who meant it down to their boots when they said it, and not a one of them ever came.
” He looked at the glistening ruin of Flores’s hand lying in the dirt by the dead fire where the fingers had landed. “You took the man’s hand clean off.”
“I aimed for it.” Abe got a shoulder under the man’s arm and took his weight, and the leg complained under the doubled load and held. “Can you walk.”
“I can walk as far as a horse. Whether I can keep my seat on one once I’m up is a thing we’ll find out together.” He leaned into Abe and let himself be turned toward the dark edge of the clearing, away from the fire and the smell of it. “You’re hurt. The dog had your leg.”
“It did. We’ll see to it later. Walk now.” They went a few steps, slow, the two of them propping each other up, two damaged men crossing a clearing full of the men one of them had killed for the other. “Where is it we’re going, you’re going to ask.”
“I was. Where is it we’re going?”
Abe thought of the house a mile off and the lit yellow window of its kitchen, and of Irine Vaughn sitting at the table with her hard clear eyes, and of Marielle, who had hunted the shadow of this man two years without ever once knowing the face that cast it.
He thought of the thing he hadn’t told this man yet, the dead brother he was carrying still, that he’d been near enough to say in the hole and hadn’t, and would have to before this was through. The weight of it hadn’t gone anywhere. It only waited.
“Somewhere you can sit down at a table,” Abe said, “and there’s people there who’ve been a long time waiting to hear you talk.”
“People.” The fear came straight back up into Samson at the word, fast as a struck match, and his hand tightened on Abe’s shoulder. “What people. Who. There’s nobody waiting on me but a rope and you carrying me to it.”
“People who knew Emmett Vaughn.”
Samson stopped trying to walk. He stood there swaying in the firelit clearing among the men Abe had just killed for him, and looked at Abe, and a grief came up in his face so old and so total and so long carried that for the one moment Abe saw the whole two years stand up plain in it, every day of the hole and the running and the failing, the whole sum of what the man had spent himself on and lost.
“He’s dead, then,” Samson said. It wasn’t a question. “Emmett. They got him after all. I always knew it down where you know a thing for true. But I told myself otherwise, the long nights. Told myself a man like that doesn’t die easy and maybe he got clear.” His face worked. “He didn’t get clear.”
“I don’t know that,” Abe said, and it was the truth, and he gave it to the man straight because the man had earned that much.
“I don’t know it any more than you do. They’ve got a daughter and a wife who’ve spent two years not knowing it either, and would give a great deal to, one way or the other.
And I think you know more about how it went than any man left living, which is the whole reason there’s a table waiting on you instead of just a rope. ”
Samson was quiet a long moment. The fire burned itself lower behind them. Somewhere off in the dark timber one of the broken dogs was still whimpering, a thin sound that wouldn’t quit.
“I know enough of it,” Samson said at last, “to have wished two years I knew less.” He put his weight back onto Abe’s shoulder, and the two of them started together for the dark edge of the trees and the horses beyond it.
“Get me to the horses. And get the weight off that leg before it stiffens on you and you’ve two cripples to nurse instead of one. ”