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

  The master of ceremonies was peculiar, too. It was a goat. It stood in the middle of the banquet table and chewed, wattles wobbling. It wore a crown of twigs and its muzzle was stained dark as if it were eating blood. Chloe introduced Boz to the goat, and Boz could have sworn it said Pleased to meet you, not with its mouth but direct to his mind, the way dream-speech sometimes went, all the while baring teeth that were better suited to a pig’s mouth than a goat’s. Long tusks sticking out above and below.

  “How’d you come to meet him?” Boz asked Chloe, in what he meant to be a whisper but came out in a loud blurt.

  Chloe laughed. The goat laughed. Several of the people around them laughed—Top Hat and the shopkeep were there, Boz saw, and he recognized one or two others from the store. Several had on pieces of ill-fitting finery, like Chloe, and they toasted the goat and each other with crystal glasses that Boz would bet a summer’s wages hadn’t come from that tired old general store.

  “Never mind them,” Chloe was saying, tugging on his arm. “We’ll leave in the morning, be well away before they’re sober enough to notice.”

  “That shopkeep’s your pa, ain’t he? You gonna leave without sayin good-bye?”

  “Let him rot,” Chloe said. “He’s the one brought me to this shit-hole. Dance with me.”

  They danced. Round and round the burning brazier in the center of the room, over slick spots and sticky pools, past the glassy-eyed whitefolks sitting in the one pew leaning against each other and staring—were they drunk or dead?—and the goat bleating for someone to bring him another round.

  “Never heard a goat talk before,” Boz said to Sarah, who laughed.

  “And I thought you knew from demons,” she said.

  “Not me,” Boz said. “That’s my partner.”

  “Well, we’re gonna take care of him,” Sarah-Chloe said.

  Just then there was a cry and a whoop, and everyone turned expectantly to the front of the church, where Top Hat and several other men were ushering in three more whitefolks, a woman and two men, who they forced to their knees in front of the pew of their brethren.

  One of the men was Boz’s neighbor. Or his partner. He wasn’t sure which. But he knew him, knew him like his own skin, and he hated him.

  Trace-Johnson had been stripped down to his shirtsleeves and his arms bound behind his back. There was blood in his hair, and his head was lolling.

  “We caught him down in the cellar,” Top Hat said to Chloe-Sarah, “tryin to pick the lock on the chains.”

  “I said he would, didn’t I?” She stepped forward and raked her fingers through Trace’s hair to lift his head. Trace was obviously dazed, but his eyes had that sharp look at the same time—that haunted strain, as if he were staring into the sun and finding it too fascinating to look away even while it burned his eyes out.

  The other two whitefolks were crying, and the woman was calling to Jesus to save her. Her cries got caught up by the townsfolk, who called out praise and thanks in His name. To Boz, who had had little truck with Jesus before his wife was taken and absolutely none since, it was all so much noise.

  But he heard Trace’s voice, near and low under the ruckus: “Just tell me this—did you call to it, or did it whisper to you first?”

  Chloe’s pretty face twisted nastily. “Don’t matter to you, do it?”

  Behind them, the hosannas of the townsfolk raised to fever pitch and then hushed; in the silence there was the white woman’s sobbing and then a sound like a melon being split open, and then the whoops of the crowd calling out Praise the Lord! Praise His Name! and the goat gurgling Good, good children! Blood is good!

  It all seemed very irregular to Boz. The heat of the brazier and the stink of burning flesh and hair began to fill the air.

  “What do you think happens when you run out of white folks?” Trace-Johnson said to Chloe-Sarah. “It’ll start in on your people.”

  “That’s nothing to me,” Sarah said, with a hard little laugh. “I mean to be long gone before that happens.”

  “And you took him for your ticket out of here, huh?”

  “Mm-hm.” Sarah turned to Boz and took his arm, fondly. “We’re going to Wyoming to start our new life together.”

  Boz was beginning to resent being talked about and around. But then Johnson’s squinty pig eyes shifted to Boz. “Hey Boz. You know this woman’s a witch, right? She’s the one called down the demon in the goat.”

  Boz was confused. They’d left the witch back in St. Louis. Sarah had sometimes been called a witch because she’d been a Voudou believer, but anybody could see that the goat was the master of ceremonies.

  “You got no call talkin about my wife like that,” Boz said.

  Bring him here, the goat said to Boz. I’ll show him the truth.

  So Boz and Top Hat scooped up Shit-kicker Johnson under the arms and hauled him through the pool of spilled gore beside the brazier, around the bare blackening feet of the white woman burning up in its great bowl, and dropped him to his knees before the goat.

  The stupid cracker didn’t even have the sense to look scared—he locked eyes with the goat, and it bent its head until their brows were almost touching. They looked like they were about to butt heads—which was exactly the kind of thing Trace would do with a demon. Had done. Several times.

  And where the hell was Trace? Boz wondered. Wasn’t he supposed be here by now? Or was Boz supposed to meet him somewhere?

  His head was beginning to ache.

  What are you? the goat said to Ned. Holy man?

  Somethin like that, Ned agreed. Enough to know you’re a piss-poor excuse for a demon. I’ve met some that could move into rocks, machines, bodies of men, and you’re stuck there in a GOAT?

  One body is as good as another in your world. I just want the blood. Your kind are always eager to kill each other.

  I know what you are. I can fight you.

  The goat laughed; a rotten, clotted sound. Fight with what? You’re tied up and you don’t know how to use that power in your head. It’ll burn you up from the inside one day. Kinder if I kill you now.

  Yeah, but you can’t, can you? You need one of them to do it, because you don’t have thumbs.

  Now how, Boz wondered, could a goat look so confounded? But the wondering only lasted a second because the goat turned its amber eyes on Boz and said KILL HIM so loud it made Boz’s vision turn red.

  Next thing he knew Top Hat was standing there pressing an axe-handle into his hands. The business end of it was clotted with blood and hair.

  “Do it, brother,” Top Hat said. “Make the sacrifice.”

  “How’s it a sacrifice if I don’t like the sumbitch anyway?” Boz demanded. “What’s that gonna get me?”

  The crowd, which had gone semi-quiet during the meeting of man and goat, began to murmur, prayers and pleas.

  Kill him, the goat-thing whispered. Kill him and your wife will come back. You can go find your child together.

  Boz’s hand tightened on the axe-handle.

  Chloe sidled up to Boz and took his free hand, raised it to her cheek. “Kill him, John,” she whispered. “Do it for me. You don’t know what he did to me... how he shamed me...”

  Boz?

  He remembered that stinking cell where the runaways had been held. No, man, she’s gone. Pateroller beat her down and they carried her out in a rug after dark. Yeah, one o’ them called the other Johnson—

  Boz!

  “Huh?” Boz looked around.

  Boz, you’re listening to a goat.

  There was Trace, finally! “Damn, what took you so long?” Boz looked around at the brown sweat-shining faces. “Where you at?”

  I’m in your head, Boz. Well, I’m in the gray space, but I’m talking in your head.

  Goddammit, Trace! Can’t a man have some privacy?

  Well, you wouldn’t listen to me any other way!

  What’s got into all these people?

  The goat, Boz. It ain’t a goat. It’s a damn demon.
/>   You’re shittin me. Not another one!

  “Do it, brother,” Top Hat said. “Be a man. No white man can make you free. You have to break your own chains.”

  “Shit,” Boz said in disgust. He shrugged off Chloe, hoisted up the axe handle, and wheeled, swinging in a long descending arc that cracked against the goat’s horns.

  Chloe screamed. So did the congregation. The goat staggered, bleating, baring its long tusks. Boz hit it again, the dry wood bouncing off bone with a vicious crack. Everyone clutched their temples, except for Trace, who fell to his side and writhed.

  Boz brought the axe handle down again, and the goat gave a violent spasm and vomited up a long gush of red. The spray launched itself toward the brazier and poured over the hot coals. For a second the flames flared up, obscenely greasy and bright, and then collapsed in on themselves.

  The goat exhaled once and went flat.

  Boz flung the axe handle to where Top Hat was kneeling and panting. “I was never no man’s slave.”

  He whipped a knife from his belt and sawed through Trace’s ropes. Trace got heavily to his knees and had to hang on Boz’s shoulder to stand—his color was bad, and the cut at his temple had run down into his collar.

  “You okay?” Boz asked him.

  “I’ll live,” Trace said.

  Now that the scales had been dropped from his eyes, Boz saw the true horror of what had been going on here—four dead, one of them a teenaged boy, and the townsfolk standing around staring, glassy-eyed and whimpering as they awoke from the collective nightmare. A woman dropped to her knees, calling on Jesus for forgiveness. The shopkeeper’s scarred hand rose shaking to press against his mouth. Top Hat had lost his hat; it sat upside down in a cooling pool of blood.

  Suddenly a shriek rose out of the crowd, and Chloe flung herself at Boz, flailing with her fists, calling him names no lady should know, much less speak aloud.

  Boz shoved her off him. She fell hard on her bottom. The crowd gasped, and he drew his left-hand pistol and trained it on her while she screamed hatefulness at him, called him a whoreson and a pimp and a dog.

  “What have you done to us, girl?” the shopkeeper whispered.

  In the pale gray dawn, five corpses lay in the grass, covered with shawls and old quilts.

  Five of the townsmen dug shallow graves, while the emigrants—an old Mormon named Montrose, his wives, remaining son, and daughter-in-law—busied themselves loading the wagons. Five oxen and two horses were returned to them, along with most of their belongings. These items had appeared on the porch of the general store, shamefacedly delivered by the townspeople, who crept away as silently as they had come and did not make eye contact with anyone.

  Trace oversaw the loading of the wagon, at the west end of town. Boz oversaw the digging of the graves, to the north. From that position he could also see the back of the church, and the storm-cellar doors that led beneath it. He saw the shopkeeper coming up through those doors now, weighing something in his hand, and gesturing toward the men standing guard that they should close the doors and put the bar into place.

  Chloe’s scream of rage carried to Boz on the wind.

  The shopkeeper came toward him through the rippling grass, looking older and more stooped than he had the day before. He stood beside Boz, both of them squinting into the wind, and held out the palm of his hand, flat. There was a small cloth bag in it, daubed with paint.

  A witch-bag. Hoodoo, maybe. When Boz squeezed it he felt something fibrous inside, like feathers or hair, and some little hard bits, like teeth.

  “Her mother was the same way,” the shopkeep said, as if in apology. “Wanted all the fine things she saw, didn’t care how she got them. She died spitting up spiders and needles.”

  “Chloe learnt the witchcraft from her.”

  The shopkeeper gave a grunt of agreement. “I took Chloe out of Cincinnati so she didn’t get hanged for murder. There was talk she poisoned the mistress of the house she worked at. I didn’t want to believe it, but—” The man seemed unable to go on.

  Boz gave it a moment before he said, “If you want, me and my partner can take her to Fort McPherson. Turn her over to the law there.”

  The shopkeep raised his chin at that. “Whitefolks’ laws got naught to do with us.”

  “No,” Boz allowed.

  He thought about that the rest of the time the bodies were being put in the ground, as he turned to mount up Nate, as he rode back to the west end of town. Blackfolks had always taken care of their own, as much as they were allowed. Whatever punishment they set to Chloe, it would be kinder than what the white army would do to her. Maybe kinder than she deserved.

  He remembered her legs wrapped around his waist, the blood-sweet scent of her breath, the seasick feeling of being trapped in a dream while people were being murdered in front of him and him finding it perfectly reasonable—

  He leaned out of the saddle and retched into the grass.

  Nate, confused by the sudden weight shift, huffed in annoyance and danced sideways until Boz straightened up and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.

  “You all right?” Trace asked, as Boz rode up to where the Mormons were fixing to flee.

  “You askin me?” Boz said, eyeing the wide purple bruise across Trace’s brow and the fresh bandage around his head. He’d had to put three stitches in Trace’s scalp to stop the bleeding. “Not even sure you should be ridin.”

  “Better than lyin in a wagon gettin jounced to death,” Trace replied. He had a whiskey bottle nestled at his crotch, and he took a pull off it before passing it over.

  Boz took it gratefully. He rinsed the bile taste out of his mouth and watched as one of the younger women hefted a baby onto her hip—the boychild they had found in the woods. Boz still hadn’t sorted out whose child it was, or which wife was whose, but he supposed it was none of his business. “They ready to go?”

  “Just about.” Trace took another pull off the bottle before tucking it away. “They declined our offer to take ‘em to McPherson. They say they’re goin on to Salt Lake City.”

  “They’re damn fools, then.”

  Trace did not disagree. “World’s full of ‘em,” was all he said. He wheeled Blackjack to look back on the gray little town, the threads of woodsmoke, the five raw mounds on the prairie. “Town won’t be here next time we pass through.”

  “You can see the future, now?”

  “No.” Trace nestled his hat down gingerly over the bandage. “Not yet.”

  “Is that why it didn’t get you? The demon?” Even saying that word put a bad taste in Boz’s mouth. “Cause of this power you got?”

  “It did get me,” Trace said. “At least at first. Thing is, I don’t think I was its preferred flavor. Miss Fairweather said demons tend to favor a certain type of victim, and a certain way of reelin ‘em in.”

  He’d said as much, before. “So what’d this one favor?” Boz asked.

  Trace shook his head. “Restitution.”

  They turned their horses west.

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