Holly Messinger - [BCS293 S01] - Scapegoat (html) Read online

It had all been so strange—the unreasonable whip-sawing of thoughts and emotions through his head and guts. He knew it was Trace, and yet he’d seen him as a stranger, and a despised one at that. Had read all the worst motives into his words and actions. Had hated him, in fact.

  Boz had met plenty of people he disliked in his forty-four years, but there were few men he could say he actually hated. Three, to be exact. One had been a white boy who had killed his dog when they were both twelve. He still hated that sonofabitch. Number two was Captain Lyon of D Company, St. Louis, who had promised to help find Boz’s wife after the war and then disappeared without a backwards glance once his post was decommissioned. The third was Ned Johnson, the white cracker whose farm had butted up against Boz’s in Illinois, back in ’58 when Boz was newly married.

  Johnson had been short, squinty, and bandy-legged, with four or five nearly grown sons or nephews or strays who hung around his place and took delight in making trouble for Boz and his family. They had filched from the henhouse and the coal pile, trampled the beans and tomatoes, tormented Sarah whenever she passed them on the road. One night they broke into the forge—Boz was running a smithy at the time—and tipped over the anvil, breaking the nose off it.

  Boz had taken to sleeping in the smithy after that. The second time they tried to break in, he shot two of them in the backside with rock salt. It didn’t damage them much, but it provided material evidence to the sheriff.

  Luckily for Boz the county sheriff had been one of his best customers and sympathetic to a hard-working man who just wanted to be left alone. He warned Ned Johnson to keep his boys under control or they’d be arrested.

  About a month after that, Sarah had gone missing.

  And that was a time he did not think about—ever. Which was the most disturbing part of this whole day—he’d woken up dreaming about his baby girl, and that had left his memory ajar to Sarah’s disappearance. All of which was undoubtedly the reason why, for that brief instant in the store, Trace’s leering had reminded him of shit-kicker Ned Johnson.

  “Stop here,” Trace said suddenly, low in the darkness.

  It was a good idea. They had come to a sort of bow-shaped clearing in the trees, and Boz could hear water rushing close by. There was probably a bluff dropping off to the river just ahead.

  Trace dismounted and dropped to a crouch. It was very dark among the trees, but he seemed to be running his hand along the ground.

  “What’re you doin?” Boz said, disturbed. Trace was a decent tracker, but there was no way he had spotted anything in the dark. Which meant he must have sensed something, and after the day’s events Boz guessed it could not be anything good.

  “There’s been blood spilled here,” Trace said, sidling away through the grass and leaves. “Light the lantern.”

  Despite his forebodings Boz did; it was better than blundering around in the dark. He got down and found the candle lantern in his pack, and a safety match. And in short order he saw what had made Trace stop.

  Someone else had camped here, and recently. The grass and brush in the clearing had been trampled flat by many feet, human and oxen. Tracks of two wagons. Nearer to the tree line they found a day-old campfire, the logs kicked apart rather than burned down, and a slopped-out pail of beans charred among the ashes.

  Trace knelt and touched the grass again. “More blood,” he said, in that weird, sleepwalker voice he used when he was seeing something uncanny. “This one had a gun—they shot him right away.”

  “Oh hell,” Boz said, thinking of secondhand goods sitting on bare shelves, the ill-fitting and too-fancy dress on the girl Chloe. Their open hostility toward Trace.

  “Run away, run away...” Trace muttered, still casting across the ground like a bloodhound. The low monotone of his voice, as much as the words it spoke, made the hairs lift on Boz’s nape. “Round ‘em up, run ‘em down. Take ‘em alive, as many as you can...”

  The wind picked up then, and out of the rush of night sounds there seemed to be one that did not belong. A baby’s cry, thin and fretful. Boz felt more than a prickle of gooseflesh then—he outright shuddered in uncanny superstition that was not like him at all. If he hadn’t been holding the lantern he might have put his hands over his ears.

  By the look on Trace’s face he felt the same way. “Please tell me you heard that.”

  “Did you?” Boz countered.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did we hear?”

  “A baby,” Trace said. “Or a banshee.”

  Boz snorted then. “I don’t believe in no banshee.” He lifted the lantern higher as he headed into the tree line.

  The trail through the underbrush was easy to follow once he found it, branches broken and bent before the flight of a heedless body. He had not got ten yards from the campfire before he spotted something white, stretched full-length on the ground, and a wailing small lump alongside.

  Boz set his lantern down and reached for the infant, who launched himself into the adult arms and clung like a squirrel on a tree trunk. Trace knelt beside the woman’s body and reached to sweep cornsilk hair from her face.

  “Are you sure you wanna—” Boz began.

  Trace stiffened as soon as he touched her forehead. “Oh Lord, O Lord!” he said, in a strangled voice—a woman’s voice, shrill with panic. “Take the baby—take him! Run!”

  “Don’t do that!” Boz said, aghast.

  Trace’s cheek spasmed and he lifted his hand with a twitch of his fingers. Boz handed off the baby impatiently and stooped to turn the girl over. She was younger than Boz had expected, not much into her teens. Her face was flat where she had been lying on it, and bits of forest litter stuck to the bloody froth that had dried on her chin and throat. There was a large dark stain on the front of her dress, aligned with the smaller hole on her back.

  “Shot her as she was running away,” Trace said. “Went through the lung. She fell forward and lay still to hide the baby. Died slow and quiet.”

  “In the dark they didn’t see she had a little one.” They both looked at the boychild in Trace’s arms. It made a persistent wailing; now he was no longer frightened, only hungry. “Let’s get him some grub, ‘fore someone else hears him.”

  The baby, placated with a bit of biscuit and then fed to the gills with a gruel of flour, tinned milk, and sugar, slept soundly in Trace’s lap, one pink chubby thumb plugged firmly into his mouth.

  “We’re a week from Fort McPherson,” Boz said, low. “And he’ll slow us down. Kid that age can’t live on cornmeal, and that was the last of the milk.”

  “How old you reckon he is?” Trace asked.

  “Bout a year.” Boz poked the fire with a stick, feeling unaccountably angry. “Bout the same age my little girl was, last I seen her.”

  Trace said nothing to that. There was nothing to say. Boz was just angry. He could see the scene as it must have played out—the good citizens of Hamilton, lacking money and goods—probably no other towns around here willing to trade with them—seeing a well-heeled party of white emigrants roll by one day, with their overloaded wagons not long out of St. Joseph, and the idea traveling from one set of eyes to the next like a telegraph message: Take what’s been denied us. No one will know.

  Maybe they just started out to trade. Extract a toll. A little robbery. And it got out of control, driven by lifetimes of hate and injustice.

  Horrifying. Offensive to the depths of his soul.

  He hated that he knew exactly how they’d felt.

  “There were other children,” Trace said, breaking into his thoughts. “Families. Probably a couple of wagons.”

  Boz clenched his jaw and poked more viciously at the fire.

  “You heard what that girl said in the shop. How they’d been down there all day and night without water, and the little ones were cryin.”

  “I ain’t goin back there.” Boz’s voice lashed out like a whip. “If I go back there, somethin bad’s gonna happen.” He met Trace’s eyes across the fire. “Prob’ly to yo
u.”

  Trace smoothed a hand over the sleeping baby’s head and did not disagree. “What was it you saw? When you looked at me?”

  In the store, he meant. Which meant Trace had seen something, too. Probably a lot more than Boz had.

  Boz looked away, into the darkness. “Pig-shit Johnson.”

  “The one took your wife?”

  “That was the rumor.” Sarah had taken a bundle of sewing to Mrs. Curzon’s house that morning. Boz knew she’d made it there; the maid told him so. But she’d never made it home. A group of Negroes in the city lockup told him that a woman of Sarah’s description had been brought in as a runaway the day before. When she’d insisted she was free, the jailer had beaten her senseless. And before nightfall she had been loaded onto a wagon and driven away.

  “I saw soldiers,” Trace said, as if Boz had asked. “You-all looked like my dead company-mates. The ones who fell down on top of me and kept the ambulance bearers from finding me for three days. And I knew that wasn’t right—all the years I’ve had this curse I’ve never seen the ghosts of anyone I knew. So I knew it had to be somethin else making you look at me like you wanted to kill me.”

  “What, then?”

  “Demon, I expect. We’ve both seen how they influence people—”

  “Or maybe just the demon whitefolks. And a town of people who came out here to be left alone.”

  Trace went rather still. He was not angry, Boz saw, but he had turned cautious, as if Boz were a wolf he had come up on unexpectedly.

  “And I’m not seein things, Trace, I’m just seein ‘em different from you.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m seein maybe this isn’t our business and we should just ride on!”

  Trace’s brow furrowed. “They’re killin people, Boz. At least they’ve killed one, and got the rest locked up somewhere—”

  “And it counts cause it’s white folks that’s locked up?”

  Trace looked at him like he’d lost his mind. It wasn’t a fair accusation, and Boz knew it. But the anger in his craw would not allow him to take it back.

  “So what then?” Trace said. “Try to make Fort McPherson, send back the cavalry?”

  “You know what’ll happen if you go tell the army there’s a town of black folks bushwackin white emigrants.”

  Trace said nothing. There was nothing he decently could say.

  “And they probably won’t get here in time to save the emigrants,” Boz went on testily, “if they’re even still alive, since we passed through. They coulda decided we was too much risk and they’re cuttin their throats right now.”

  Trace just looked at him, with that constipated, hangdog look he’d been wearing for the past three months.

  “I know! You can’t let it alone, you gotta do somethin about it, and I gotta fall to heel because I’m your partner and I won’t let you go alone.”

  “You do what you feel is right.”

  “Fuck you,” Boz said, and felt the sting of it on his own cheeks.

  Trace sighed hard. “Look. I know things’ve been hard on you since I went to work for Miss Fairweather—”

  “Everything’s different since you met her! It’s like she set you on this holy mission or somethin—”

  “But you knew what I was when you met me. That pack of bone-hunters we took out to the Yellowstone. You knew then what I was—that I saw things you didn’t. That there’s somethin in me that draws me to evil things like a magnet. Because God put this thing in me to help—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Whatever you say,” Trace said, calm and maddening. He stood, lifting the baby to his shoulder. “You can go on and take the kid and ride on to Fort McPherson. I’ll meet up with you there, if I can.”

  Boz ground his teeth and shook his head. “They’ll skin you alive. Besides, it ain’t enough just to get the people. You gotta find their oxen and wagons, too, if you got a hope of gettin them out of Kansas alive.”

  “All right,” Trace said. “So what’s our plan?”

  Boz tied the baby in a sling, hung from Blackjack’s saddle, and left him untethered near their camp. They packed everything for a hasty getaway and put it on Blackjack’s back, then Boz mounted Nate and Trace got up behind him.

  They rode to within sighting-distance of the town, just close enough to distinguish starlight from the lamp-glow in the windows of the church, and then Trace slid down and went on foot.

  “Don’t tell me where you’re goin,” Boz warned him. “I’ll find the cattle and meet you back at the camp. You get the settlers. If I don’t make it back there by dawn you’d best go on without me.”

  Trace didn’t argue. He slipped away into the darkness and was soon out of sight over the rolling prairie.

  Boz rode on into the center of town. Part of him thought he ought to be more cautious about it, maybe ride around south of the buildings, but that part was distant as a dream. Since he’d made up his mind to come back he’d felt a sort of fatal inevitability to his path, as if he were not entirely in control of his decisions.

  Besides, there was only one place big enough to store a couple teams of oxen and the wagons, and that was the big livery barn at the east end of the settlement. There was only one reasonable place where the emigrants might be, too, if you stopped to think about it. The girl Chloe had said down there, and there was only one way to get down there on the prairie—there must be a storm cellar. Probably in a central area, too. Most likely under the church.

  He was just riding past that building now. It glowed like a barn fire in the dusk—for a minute Boz thought it was on fire, there was so much light and leaping shadows within. But as he passed the open door he saw that there was a brazier of some kind in the middle of the floor, as if they were having a barbecue, and the shadows were the townsfolk leaping and dancing around the fire—

  Nate snorted and side-stepped in the street. Boz looked down to see the girl, Chloe, standing there in her too-fancy dress, almost at his stirrup. Of course she was. People cropped up in dreams all the time.

  “Hey,” she said softly, and her eyes shone in the starlight. “I was hopin you’d come back.”

  “I came back,” Boz said. She really was pretty. That long neck and sloping shoulders, like a queen.

  “You lookin for your partner?” Chloe asked. “I saw him back behind the church a little while ago.”

  “Actually I’m lookin for some cattle,” Boz told her. He never thought of not answering. “I figure that party y’all bushwacked must’ve had some oxen, figure they must be up in the livery, there.”

  “Oh they are,” she told him. “You want me to show you?”

  “That’d be most obligin of you,” Boz said.

  She took Nate’s bridle and led him along the street, stepping easily in the dark. They passed no one, though here and there Boz heard the occasional yip and whoop, as if coyotes had taken to the streets.

  Two doors further down, to the big barn. The side door was open and it was dark inside, but Chloe walked in fearlessly and stopped just inside the shadow of the door. Nate seemed perfectly at ease there, and Boz could smell and hear the oxen standing and chewing placidly. It was a safe place.

  He got down from the saddle. Chloe stayed where she was, so they were quite close to each other, close enough that he could smell her, softer and sweeter than the smells of hay and barn.

  “Where you and your partner headed?” Chloe asked, tilting her head just so.

  “Wyoming,” Boz answered. “We’re gonna start a horse ranch.”

  “Are you now? Don’t it take money to do that?”

  “We got money. We got some work back in St. Louis this spring, some rich white lady payin my partner to hunt demons.”

  “Demons?” Chloe sounded surprised and then chuckled. “What’s he know from demons?”

  “Oh, he knows every damn thing. Where they are, what they’re up to, most of all what to do with ‘em. Thinks he’s the god-damned sword of the Almighty, or somethin.”


  Chloe tsked for shame. “Sounds like he ain’t a very good friend.”

  “He is,” Boz protested. “He’s just got—I dunno, now he’s got some holy mission that’s more important than our plans...”

  “Oh you poor baby.” Chloe took both his hands in hers. “Don’t you know, you can’t ever trust ‘em? Their needs is always gonna be more important than ours.”

  “Nah, Trace ain’t like that...”

  “What about when you get to Wyoming?” She moved closer and raised a hand to his cheek. “Who’s gonna look after you then? How long’s it gonna be before he heads back to his rich white lady and leaves you alone?”

  Boz swallowed—for one thing her nearness was affecting him shamefully; for another she had hit on his fear exactly. “What do you know about it, girl?”

  “I hear they got silver mines out in Wyoming,” she said, moving closer still, her hands sliding inside his vest and down along his ribs. “I hear Cheyenne’s got hotels and shops that shame St. Louis. I hear they gave Negroes and women the vote. A couple could walk down the street in fine clothes or drive a fine carriage and no one fit to interfere with ’em.”

  Boz ran his fingers along the shoulders and neck of her silk dress. “You got a taste for fine clothes, do you girl?” Somehow she had backed the two of them into a stall, and there was a bale of hay to boost her onto, and her knees had spread to embrace his hips. She was nuzzling at his jaw and undoing the buckle of his gun belt.

  “I got a taste for a man who can make his way in the world,” she said. “A man who knows who he is, who knows how to take care of his woman.” She hiked up her skirts while her heels hooked behind his thighs and drew him closer.

  Things got kind of strange after that—her breath was sweet but sort of meaty, and his lust was queasy, seasick, as if he were having a wet dream in the middle of a fever. Her nails drew blood from his neck, and when he came it was like she bit off a part of his soul and swallowed it down, leaving him feeling weak-kneed and not quite in his skin.

  Next thing he knew he was wandering the dark hog-wallow Main Street of Hamilton, with people—or coyotes—darting across his path and around the back of the buildings, and then he was walking the streets of Cheyenne—not that their streets were any better, frankly—arm-in-arm with Sarah, and she was wearing a fine silk dress like she’d never owned while they were married and he had on good shoes and a frock coat, and white men were nodding their heads and saying, “Good evening, Mr. Bosley,” and a fellow in livery was bowing and opening a door to the Cheyenne club and ushering him right inside, only inside it seemed to be on fire as if they’d walked into a furnace or Hell’s front parlor. There were a lot of people in there, blacks and whites both, although the blacks were mostly dancing in their finery—some were waltzing but others were leaping and cavorting like the dances Boz had seen when he was a boy—while the whitefolks were sitting motionless, gray as catfish and glassy-eyed. They weren’t looking too good.