Chapter 6
Catfish wasn’t so low that he forgot to reload his old .44.
At least he remembered to do that. Well, actually, it was automatic as he walked barefoot back to his shack in the lush grass growing in the center of the two-track trail. He limped along, wincing at the pain in his big toe.
The magic had been taken out of the day. First by Bubba Jones and then by the two harpies and the two popinjays from town. Ah, heck, Miss Julia wasn’t a harpy. She was just concerned about Catfish Charlie. He might have been a head-breaking town tamer in his day, but there was a softer side to him, and the non-criminals had quickly found that out. They liked that about him. The contrast between his dark side and his light side.
A few years back, when he was better-looking and in better shape—a good fifteen, twenty pounds lighter—he and Miss Julia had come close to being an item, despite the twenty-year difference in their ages. Back then, she’d never looked at him as she’d looked at him just now. Back then, she’d looked at him with warmth and admiration. A few times, she’d even kissed him on the lips.
It had never gone further than that, however. Catfish Charlie had been wedded to his job, just as Miss Julia had been—and still was—wedded to hers. Besides, it hadn’t seemed right to either one of them.
Being in love and all that.
Oh, Catfish had been in love a few times, but nothing had ever come of it. He wasn’t the settling-down kind. At least he wasn’t the settling-down-with-a-woman kind. He was more the kind to settle down to fish and to drink himself pie-eyed every afternoon and continue through the evening while frying up his catfish and potatoes on a cookfire in his yard.
Something really stuck in his craw now as he climbed the three steps to his rickety front porch, looking down to see his mouser, Hooligan Hank, staring up at him to the right of the hemp rug fronting the rickety front door, a dead, half-eaten mouse between Hank’s paws.
“Ah, Hank,” he said, setting the empty jug down beside the hide-bottom chair to the left of the door. The hide sagged deeply from all the time his considerable bulk had spent in the chair. He sank into the chair now, the chair and his old bones creaking wearily and in unison. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and entwined his hands together. “Ol’ Abel Wilkes is dead, and Frank Thorson has Abel’s daughter. He’s doing God only knows what to poor Beth right now. And I’m too dang old and fat and just plain too no-good-anymore to do a blame thing about it. What do you think about that, Hank?”
The cat regarded him dubiously, canting his head a little to one side. Hank gave his tail a single whip. Then he seemed to shake his head.
“You too, eh?” Catfish said with a dry chuckle. “Ah, heck—you too.” He placed his hands on his knees and heaved himself up out of the chair—the chair and his own ancient bones creaking as one again. “Stay there. I’m gonna fetch me a fresh jug.” He turned to the door. “When you’re down this low, you can’t get any lower.”
He went inside and tramped over to the shelves he’d built into the cabin’s back wall, beyond his crude, knife-scarred eating table and to the left of his sheet-iron stove and dry sink. He still had five stone jugs lined up there.
He dragged one down off the shelf, chewed the cork out of it, spit it onto the floor, and caught sight of himself in the mirror hanging over the washstand.
Nah. That’s not me.
He moved closer, slowly crouched, until a grizzled old man stared back at him through drink-bleary eyes. Long, unkempt salt-and-pepper hair hung down past his collar. His beard was long and scraggly; crumbs from both breakfast and lunch clung to it.
He stretched his lips back from his teeth and scrunched up his face as rage climbed up from behind him like some spectral, sharp-fanged bear to give him a big, brutal hug. He clenched his fist and shouted, “You haggard old fool!” He smashed his fist into the mirror; the glass broke into a hundred shards and dropped to the floor.
He hooked the jug over his right shoulder and took a deep gulp . . . another . . . another . . . and another.
He lowered the jug. A slow smile spread across his face.
“There. Now that’s better.”
Hating himself, but still feeling better, he tramped back out onto the porch, sat himself back down in his chair, and planted the jug on his thigh. Nothing like a pretty, sun-dappled afternoon spent with a jug of his own good wine.
He stared at the dusty mesquites, the cedars, the sotol cactus sprinkled in among them, and tried not to think about Abel Wilkes. It was impossible not to, of course, but the more liberal pulls he took from the jug, the duller the teeth of those memories became.
The more he hated himself as well.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when distant thunder rumbled, and a chill breeze rose. A meow sounded out in the brush to his left and Hooligan Hank came running out, meowing softly, anxiously, the noise deep in his throat. Catfish hadn’t realized the cat was gone until he reappeared, thumping up the porch steps and then sitting in front of the door, turning to Catfish and giving another commanding meow as he shifted his weight from one right front paw to another.
“Storm blowin’ up,” Catfish said, glancing at the northern sky. “A West Texas corker. Ol’ Hank knows one, for certain-sure. He’s more Texas than I am!”
He hauled himself up out of his chair and opened the door for Hank. The cat ran inside.
Catfish closed the door and sank back down in his chair.
The storm came, lashing rain, thunderclaps that sounded like detonated powder kegs, lightning that would light up the whole sky, and then, three or four seconds later, jagged streaks of the stuff like glowing giant bowie knives rending the sky from the outside.
Catfish usually enjoyed a good summer storm. He even enjoyed the start of this one. But then, the longer the storm wore on, the rain cutting straight down from the porch roof’s overhang to cut a deep trough in the West Texas caliche . . . and the more chugs he took from the jug . . . the darker his mood grew.
“You’re sixty-two years old, Catfish, you old scudder,” he sobbed at the intermittently lit-up sky. “You’re six-four, an’ you’re fat, you’re lazy, you’re a drunkard, and you ain’t even all that great of a catfish fisherman despite you’re bein’ called CATFISH!”
He sobbed, took another pull from the jug, and sobbed some more, until he was sitting there in the chair, the jug almost empty, head down, bawling like a three-year-old toddler wanting his blanket. He didn’t know it, but ol’ Hooligan Hank was sitting on the shelf in the window flanking him, peering out from between the open flour sack curtains, regarding his lord and master—if any cat can have a lord and master—bewilderedly, Hank’s eyes glowing like molten copper in the storm’s dimming light.
“Hang it all, anyway!” Catfish raged, pushing up out of his chair and throwing the nearly empty jug out into the night. It crashed faintly to the ground, the sound nearly drowned by another peal of window-rattling, ground-jarring thunder. “One of your best friends is dead and his daughter’s bein’ molested by one of the blackest devils this side of Hell, an’ all you can do is sit here and chug your busthead and simper like a whining child. Just a gallblasted whining child!”
Catfish stepped up to the front of the porch and bellowed loudly into the storm, shaking his fists at the unseen gods in the stormy firmament who had allowed him to become such a low-down, dirty, drunken, catfish-fishing dog.
Lightning flashed to his right—a wicked crash of thunder and jagged, razor-edged blue light that struck a big cedar not thirty feet away.
KA-BOOOOMMMMM!
The entire cedar was lit up like a Christmas tree. It seemed to swell and pulsate inside the halo of smoking blue light. Suddenly it exploded and broke in half, the top half jackknifing over the bottom half. Bright blue and red sparks shot out from the jagged break.
The concussion hammered against Catfish with the force of a runaway lumber dray. He was hurled straight back against the cabin, between the window and the door. Badly dazed, he dropped straight down the worn adobe bricks to the rotting porch floor. He sat there for a second or two, blinking his eyes, trying to clear them, to no avail, bells tolling in his head.
Then he gave a fateful sigh and slid down the wall to fold up on his left shoulder and hip, out like a doused flame.
His head and back ached, but he was hardly aware of it for most of the night.
He woke only when he felt the morning’s warm light bathe his face. He jerked with a start, staring at the sun-silvered floor of his stoop. He groaned at the ache in his head and shoulders and in the small of his back.
He’d slept a good six or seven hours in that uncompromising position, twisted over on his left side, the bulk of his weight on that shoulder and hip. The position of a passed-out old sot. He tried to move, but felt as though his limbs had hardened into that ungodly arrangement.
Ungodly for a man his age and in the shabby shape he was in.
He groaned, dug his fingers into the porch floor, and tried to heave himself onto his back. It took several tries, and by the time he’d rolled onto his backside, sort of half sitting up with his head and shoulders resting against the shack’s front wall, he thought he’d broken his neck.
He canted it slowly to each side, gritting his teeth, feeling the bones in the back of his neck grinding together.
“Dang,” he said. “Dang, dang, dangit, anyway. Why do I have to be such a blasted drunk?”
When he was satisfied that neither his neck nor back was broken, just aching like the devil, he turned onto his right side, planted his hands and knee beneath him, and heaved himself slowly to his feet, feeling as though rusty railroad spikes had been driven into every joint in his body. Breathing hard and still flexing his neck, shoulders, and spine, he peered into the window before him.
Hooligan Hank stared back at him, looking not one bit happy. He was an early riser, Hooligan Hank was. It was a nice, clear morning after the storm, the air smelling clean. Puddles dotted the yard fronting the cabin, but they’d dry out fast. Everything dried out fast in West Texas.
Walking like a man a good ten years older than he was, his feet and ankles aching right along with the rest of him, Catfish made his way to the front door, threw it open. Hank bolted out with an indignant meow, thumped across the porch, down the steps, and made a wild dash into the brush around the side of the cabin, tail raised angrily.
He was late for the hunt.
A horse’s whinny rose from the stable and small corral flanking the cabin. That would be Jasper wanting his oats and hay. Good Lord—how late was it, anyway? Catfish glanced at the sky. The sun was well up.
“I’ll be hanged if it ain’t almost midmorning.”
He sighed and moved on into the cabin.
He filled his speckled black pot from his rain barrel on the stoop. The pot still had the bullet crease across its side, near the handle, compliments of the bullet that had been hurled through a window of his office when he’d manned a Texas Ranger’s station in Abilene. He’d snuffed the wick of the jasper who’d fired the bullet—Arniss “Hog” Tatum, who’d done some time in the pen for selling whiskey and rifles to the Comanches, compliments of Catfish himself.
“I’ve had a helluva life,” Catfish grumbled as he built a fire in his stove, moving around stiffly on his sore feet and ankles. “There’s only so much that can be expected of a fella . . . Heck, I’ve taken over a half-dozen bullets to my ugly hide, and I still got one in my consarned back! You know it’s true, Abel!” he said as though his old friend were sitting at the table like they all three used to do—Catfish, Abel, and ol’ Brazos, before heading out in the morning to keep the lid on the churning, bubbling pot that had been Wolfwater ten years ago. “When I was a much younger man!” Catfish added, sitting down now to the coffee he’d brewed and which sent up several curls of aromatic steam.
He looked at Abel sitting across from him. His old friend didn’t say anything. Just regarded him dubiously, turning his own stone mug around in his big, Texas-weathered hands.
“Oh, hell,” Catfish said, rising suddenly and shuffling over to the door, holding his cup and staring out.
He felt as bound up as a mountain lion trapped in a hay barn.
He couldn’t look at Abel anymore. There was cold, bitter accusing in his old friend’s eyes, and it had every right to be there. But then Catfish, trying to look at his old friend—surely the man’s spirit come to plague him, to chide him for his uselessness, his drunkenness, his cowardice—became aware of young Bethany staring up at Catfish from where she sat on the hide-bottom chair just a few feet to his right.
Staring at him with those large, round, dark brown eyes.
Her mother’s eyes.
“Oh, for the love of God’s bitter brown earth,” Catfish complained, not able to hold the girl’s gaze any longer than he’d been able to hold her father’s. “Not you, too!”
He glanced at her once more.
He glanced away.
He glanced at her again, and she was no longer in the chair. He turned to stare into the kitchen, at his battered, square, wooden table. Abel was gone now, too.
It was only Catfish here now. Just Catfish and his consarned conscience.
He turned again and stared into the sunbathed yard fronting the cabin and down the two-track trail that cleaved the trees as it rolled off down toward the backwater pond in whose depths Catfish’s nemesis lolled, fat and satisfied.
Everything was an affront to Catfish this bright, fresh, new day: his cat, his horse, Bubba Jones, his dead friend, and Abel’s daughter, who was by now likely dead as well. None of them, however, were as much of an affront to Catfish as Catfish himself.
He held his cup up in front of him, the elbow of the hand holding it propped against the doorframe. He stared out hard toward the pond. “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you, you old reprobate.” He chuckled dryly. “I’ll be hanged if you ain’t really gonna do it.”
He stared along the two-track toward the pond and nodded. “Yep, you’re gonna do it. Because, even though you’re a low-down, drunken, dirty, shaggy-headed, pale shadow of your former self, you’re not dead. And as long as you’re not dead, you have to kill Frank Thorson and that little coyote firebrand brother of his, Skinny. Yep, you have to kick ’em both out with a cold shovel or die tryin’.”
Catfish sighed fatefully, took another deep sip of his coffee.
“Best get started, you old scudder,” he told himself, and tossed the rest of his mud out over the porch steps into the yard. “You’re burnin’ daylight.”
He returned to the kitchen, heated water, stripped down, and washed himself at the washstand over which there was no longer a mirror. That was all right. He’d had enough of that old fool staring back at him.
Once he was relatively clean, he combed his hair, his beard, and mustache. He knew he probably didn’t look much better than before—he needed a visit to a proper tonsorial parlor—but he was beginning to feel better, anyway.
At least part human now.
Once clean and groomed, he started the process of rummaging around for his old duds. Soon he was wearing a fresh pair of balbriggans, butterscotch corduroy pants, a red shirt with a bib-front top boasting a gold button, his worn brown leather vest, and his high-crowned brown Stetson, which, like him, had seen better days.
He pulled on wool socks and his brown leather boots into the tops of which he tucked his trouser cuffs.
He put the cabin in order, stuffed trail supplies, including two boxes of .44 cartridges, into his war bag and saddlebags, slung both over his left shoulder, and pulled his prized 1866 Winchester “Yellowboy” repeater down from the hooks above the mantel of his small brick fireplace.
He froze when the rataplan of horse hooves sounded outside, growing louder.
One rider coming fast.
Catfish frowned. “Now who in holy blazes . . . ?”
Friend or foe? he asked himself, then gave another bitter laugh. Who was he kidding? He didn’t have any friends left. Not on this side of the sod.
He pumped a live round into the Yellowboy’s breech and clomped to the door. Holding the rifle’s brass butt plate against his cartridge belt slanting down over his right hip, he jerked the door open quickly and took one long step onto the porch. He tightened his hand around the Winchester’s neck, aiming it straight out in front of him.
The rider was just then reining in a fine, long-legged, chestnut gelding to a skidding stop in front of the stoop. The man, clad in a long black duster and a billowy red neckerchief, lifted his head so that the broad brim of his black hat pulled up to reveal his face—as black as mahogany and carpeted in a thick, curly black beard peppered with a whole lot more gray than when Catfish had last seen his old friend.
Once his friend.
His foe now?
As the dust settled around the newcomer, that handsomely chiseled face, with broad, high-tapering cheekbones and coal-black eyes, regarded Catfish without expression.
Catfish’s heart hiccupped. For a minute he couldn’t catch his breath, he was so taken aback. Then, finding his voice, he exclaimed:
“Brazos!”