Chapter 9 #2
“Rifles, in the main. Repeating rifles, by the length of the crates, not the cheap single-shot trade guns. And the powder.” He held the cup in both hands and looked at her over it.
“Tonight was the third run I’ve watched come across.
They carry it north off the bank and into town, every time, and every time it goes the same direction. ”
“To whose barn?”
He looked at her steady. “Who runs this town?”
“Nash.” She looked down into her coffee. “And his name doesn’t surprise you any.”
“I didn’t have the name until you put it in the air just now.
But the goods were going to a man with room to hide them and the standing to keep his neighbors from wondering why he wanted them hidden.
In a town the size of this one, that’s not a long list of men, and the one at the top of it is generally the one with the biggest house. ”
Her mother made a sound low in her throat that wasn’t a word so much as the start of one she thought better of.
“Mama.”
“Nash.” She said it the way she’d have named a sickness she’d watched carry someone off. “Emmett said it. Years back, before there was a thing anyone could point to. He said that one would be a problem before he was through with this town, and the town would be the worse for not seeing it coming.”
“Who’s Emmett?” Abe said.
“My father.” Marielle set her cup down. “Twenty-eight years a Ranger working out of this town and the country around it. Two years gone he put on his good coat and walked up the road to a dinner at Nash’s house, and he didn’t come home, and he hasn’t come home since.”
She let it sit a breath in the warm kitchen.
“Nash told the whole town, that very first morning, that my father never came to the house at all. Said he never arrived. But a boy out by the Aldecoa place saw him a quarter mile short of Nash’s gate that same evening, on his feet and having words with somebody, and a man like my father doesn’t walk a quarter mile and then vanish off a road he’d ridden ten thousand times. ”
Abe was quiet a moment, turning that over behind his eyes. “Your father’s full name.”
“Emmett Vaughn.”
He looked at the table, and something passed across his face and was gone before she could name it.
“You’ve heard it,” she said.
“I’ve heard it.” He turned his cup a slow half turn on the wood and stopped it. “The man I’m after rode with your father. Before he quit the Rangers. Samson Jennings.”
Her mother’s head, which had sunk toward her chest, came up off it.
“Samson Jennings is no good,” she said. Her voice had the flat hard clearness it found sometimes when the liquor burned the slur off the words and left only the iron underneath them.
“He was no good when he rode at Emmett’s stirrup and he was no good the day he quit and slunk off, and whatever became of my husband out on that road, that man knows the shape of it. You can lay money on it.”
“He may,” Abe said. He didn’t argue her down and he didn’t take it up either. He set it where she’d put it, plain on the table, and left it lying there, and Marielle marked that he’d done it, because most men either fought her mother or flattered her and this one did neither.
“Why are you after him?” Marielle said.
“His people have been moving men and guns for an outfit that calls itself Nuestra Tierra. Running them up out of Mexico and into the southern states and back, the men and the weapons both.” He looked at her without a blink.
“The paper on him is federal. The charge is treason, and they hang men for it.”
The word settled over the table and stayed there like a fourth guest nobody had invited.
“Nuestra Tierra,” she said, getting the shape of it in her own mouth.
“The men at the river answer to it. Or to the same masters it answers to.” He paused. “The one I pulled you back from in the brush. Flores. He runs their business along this whole stretch of the border, the crossings and the storage and the killing both.”
“Samson cleared out the day after my father did,” she said. “I’ve turned that over two years and never could settle whether the two were tied together or whether it was just two bad things that happened to fall in a row.”
“In my experience,” Abe said, “there’s not much that’s only a coincidence, once you take the trouble to pull on the thread. Most coincidences are just two ends of a thing you haven’t found the middle of yet.”
Her mother set her cup down on the wood with a care that took both hands. “Find him,” she said to Abe, and there was nothing in it of the woman who’d been three days in the bottle. “Whatever it costs you to do it. You find that man.”
The rain had eased back off the hard drumming into the long patient pour that meant it had set in for the night and would still be falling come morning.
The lamp pushed its light out into the corners of the room and pulled them back, and the coffee steamed, and for a stretch nobody found anything that needed saying.
Marielle looked at Abe. “Samson left a woman behind him in this county. There’s a child by him, a girl, two years old now and never laid eyes on her father. Elizabeth Reyes. She’s a mile southeast of town, on her father’s place.”
“You’ll take me to her,” Abe said.
“Tomorrow. When the rain’s quit and the road firms.” She got up and crossed to the high cabinet and brought down the bottle she kept up there for the rare guest, the good bottle, not the one in her mother’s hand, and set it on the table between them. She looked at it a moment and then at him.
“Against my better judgment,” he said, and almost smiled.
“Mine’s been gone since the river,” she said. “Yours can keep it company.”
She poured.
***
They sat over it a good while longer than the drinking strictly called for.
David started off quiet, the way she’d already learned he started off, sitting back and taking the measure of the room before he’d spend a word in it.
But the whiskey loosened something in him by degrees, and he began to talk, careful at first, picking his way, and then less careful.
Marielle found herself listening to him the way she hadn’t listened to another living soul in longer than she could rightly say. Not for what she could pull out of it and use. Just because the man was worth the hearing, and there had been a long drought of that in this house.
Abe watched the two of them more than he talked. He drank slow and said less than half what either of them said, and when he did set a word into the room it came out as a question, and his questions had the trick of opening a thing wider rather than closing it off.
She marked that in him too, alongside the silence in the brush and the way he’d let her mother’s hardness lie. The questions that didn’t land like questions, that a person answered more of than they’d meant to before they noticed they were answering at all.
Her mother had gone to her bed an hour back. David had risen and walked her down the hall with an arm under hers, gentle and unhurried, without being asked and without making a show of being asked, and that had set Marielle back on her heels further than she let cross her face.
She’d half-framed a thing to say about it, and by the time David came back down the hall and folded himself onto the bench again she had decided it kept better unsaid, the way most things did.
The rain hadn’t let up when she banked the stove down to coals and went looking out what bedding the house still owned. David on the floor of the front room, on the good rug, with the better of the two blankets. Abe on the sofa, which gave out a good eight inches short of the length of him.
“It’s what there is,” she said.
“It’s a sight more than I had last night,” Abe said, “and last night I slept fine.”
She carried the lamp back to her own room and lay down in the dark in her clothes and listened to the water running off the eaves and beating on the tile.
She thought about her father, and about Samson Jennings starved down to a shadow somewhere out in the rain, and about the men working the bank in the wet with their crates of rifles, and about the plain astonishing fact that for the first time in two years a thing had begun to move.
Where it was moving, she couldn’t yet say.
Toward an answer or away from one, toward her father or only toward the cold place where the truth of him lay.
But it had quit sitting dead still under her hands at last, and that by itself was more than she’d carried to bed with her any night in two years.