Authors: Clifford Jackman
The Winter Family (29 page)
“The police?” Johnson said, letting out a bitter laugh.
“I don’t know what you mean by the truth,” Quentin said. “I mean, what I told you was true. It was my understanding of what happened. But reasonable people can disagree. And that’s why I think …”
“Quentin,” Winter said. “Did you fuck us? Or did he fuck us?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Quentin!” Noah cried, weeping, squirming in Johnny’s grip.
Quentin looked at his brother. “I warned you,” he said sadly, but his face was weirdly lit up, like a lamp.
“Quentin!”
“I did warn you,” Quentin said.
“Oh Jesus,” Jan said.
Winter nodded and Johnny dropped Noah down among the pigs and the shit and held him there with one hand while he attached a chain to Noah’s ankle.
“Still think this world is governed by the laws of reason?” Quentin said to Noah, and smiled. “You still think there’s nothing stronger than your institutions?”
It ought to have been his final triumph. But instead, Quentin’s words seemed to remind Noah of something that he had forgotten in all the excitement, something that took away his fear. Noah’s face grew solemn.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Yes. You’ll see.”
He turned his gaze to Winter.
“You’ll see,” he said.
The chain jerked and Noah was raised howling into the air. The clasp on his ankle was seamlessly transferred to the rail hanging from the ceiling and Noah rushed down toward the floor, where Charlie was waiting with a tremendous knife. Noah came to a stop and had a chance to scream out one last plea before Charlie plunged the knife in and out of Noah’s throat. Blood spurted into the gutter, and then Noah’s body plunged farther down the rail to where he dropped, still living, into the boiling water.
“Hoooo-weeee!” Charlie screamed.
“I tried,” Quentin said. “My own brother.”
Winter looked at Quentin, and in that moment, Jan realized that Winter knew that Quentin had lied. Maybe, just maybe, Winter had
known for a long time. And then Jan fell to his knees, among the startled, scampering pigs and began to throw up.
When he looked up, he knew that his face was giving him away. Quentin and the Empire brothers and Winter all looked at him with varying degrees of malice. Johnson had backed up to the ramp leading down to the pens. Only Bill was calm, but he was looking at Jan with the same kind, weary, sad expression with which he had regarded the Indian boy he had shot upon Jan’s orders.
Jan stood up and straightened his back. “I have to go.”
“Go where?” Quentin asked.
“I have to go my own way. I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”
No one said anything.
“I can’t follow you. You should just kill me now if you won’t let me go.”
“Jan, Jan, Jan,” Quentin said, smiling like the lunatic he’d always been. “My old friend. What kind of talk …”
“I am not talking to you,” Jan said.
And indeed he was not. Jan was staring right at Winter. So were they all, except for Quentin, oblivious, secure in his egotistical belief that the world revolved around him. A look flashed across Quentin’s face like a hot desert wind, powerful but empty and alien. No one saw it, because everyone was looking at Winter.
Winter cocked his head.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Jan said, and now his voice broke up. “I can’t do it. I can’t go with you. I have to stop.”
Winter walked over toward Jan. The sunlight hit his face and his eyes shifted to an inhuman golden hue. How clean and neat Winter’s suit was, how little of the pig shit seemed to stick to him, as if it slid right off. Jan stiffened like a deer that couldn’t think which way to run. He tried not to close his eyes.
“I didn’t mean what I said,” Jan said. “About nothing to live for.”
“Well I meant everything I said,” Winter said. “We are building something here.”
“I know you are,” Jan said. “But I have to get out. I can’t. I can’t.”
“I ain’t going to hurt you if you stay,” Winter said. He came all the way up to Jan. His breath smelled like candy.
“I am not afraid you will kill me,” Jan said. “I am afraid, one day, I will be like you.”
Winter looked at Jan for what seemed like a long, long time.
“I won’t ever trouble you,” Jan said, tearing up again.
How hard Winter was, how cold, how closely sealed against the outside world.
“Winter, I swear,” Jan said.
“Everything out there is a lie,” Winter said. “Can’t you see it? It was them behind us in Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi. It was them behind us yesterday. And then they just pretend. They just talk. ’Cause they can’t face this.”
Winter made a gesture that encompassed the blood, the flesh, the clattering steel and steam, the darkness, the herds of terrified pigs.
“Jan,” Winter said. “This is what’s real. This is how the meat you eat gets on your plate. This is how everything works. Everything they tell you is just a lie to hide it.”
“I know.” Jan wept. “But I can’t bear it. I just can’t bear it.”
Winter’s mouth twitched a little and Jan knew that his mind was made up, but didn’t know how.
“Go on then,” Winter said. “I better never see you again.”
“Thank you,” Jan said. “Thank you.”
Jan turned his back on the Empire brothers and Quentin and looked at Johnson.
“Fred,” he began.
But Johnson looked away.
“Fred, think.”
“Fuck you, Müller,” Johnson said.
“Fine,” Jan said.
Jan turned to Bill. He did not ask Bill to come with him. Instead he said, “I don’t know what to say.”
“There is nothing to say,” Bill said.
“You tell yourself that because you need to believe it,” Jan said. “That there’s no help for any of this. Because you knew all along. I’m a trusting idiot, and Freddy is a nigger without a friend in the world. We didn’t know. But you did. And if you could have done something, then you ought to have done it. So you say you couldn’t have. But you
are lying to yourself, Bill. You are telling yourself what you need to hear.”
Bill smiled. “We all do that,” he said. “Every one of us.”
Jan descended the ramp back down toward the living pigs.
In his life he had attended hundreds of funerals. In his death thousands attended his.
For the funeral of Mickey Burns, the Great Mourner, the streets were lined with stricken men and women and children, wearing black clothes or black armbands, trooping in solidarity behind the procession. The casket was borne in a massive carriage in a series of massive carriages. One corpse seemed like such a small thing to have stirred up such a fuss.
It was the largest funeral in Chicago since Lincoln’s, an irony not lost on any of the Democratic luminaries who delivered the eulogies, though they were tactful enough not to mention it.
Honest Jim Plunkett’s speech was the best received, especially his stories of how Burns had, when the violence appeared to be growing out of control, favored avoiding further conflict. This story caused raptures of grief even though it was believed by precisely no one. Burns was remembered instead for virtues he had not possessed.
One small part of his legacy:
There was a man in a train on the slow path west, to California, as far from Chicago as possible. The man had a certificate of citizenship in his pocket that read “Jack Miller.” After a considerable passing of time and a significant price this man had finally been made into an American.
They rode out of that black abattoir into broad daylight, reeking and smoking with the blood of pigs and men. The whole country was in a fury, like a smashed hive of bees. They hid in Morris for a week and then took the train west, through growing Iowa to Nebraska, only five years a state, and still largely ruled by the Sioux and Pawnee and other warlike Indians who would not submit to the hordes of the east
.
Herds of buffalo stampeded over the plains, miles and miles of them, as far as the eye could see, the benefice of an insanely generous elder god. Philadelphia tanners had recently perfected a method to transform buffalo hides into leather, and at the outskirts of civilization they passed mounds of corpses, some skinned, some left to rot with their skins on by inexpert butchers. Farther from the cities the herds still ruled, powerful and stupid and helpless, and Winter and his men were able to feed themselves until spring
.
Civilization changes when it abuts the wilderness. When any man might cast it aside and walk off and be out from under its eye. In those days the triumph of civilization seemed an uncertain thing. It seemed weak, impermanent, a novelty, soon to pass and fade. And perhaps it will, but only after it has run its course all the way to the end
.
Men were carried by boats across the ocean and then pumped by trains across the country, but for a year the Winter Family (for so it was then called) lived with Indians, trappers, hunters, and traders outside of the grasp of the modern world. They roamed north to Canada and south to Colorado, where a mineral boom caused an explosion in population, saloons, whorehouses, and violence
.
The sparsely settled West was lawless and chaotic. Men dueled, drank, poached, grazed their cattle and cut trees on the land of others. They sold whiskey to Indians, raped and whored. Banditry was endemic. Men took what they wanted and disappeared
.
The Winter Family entered what might be called its golden age. It ranged in size from ten men to thirty and it committed every crime
under the sun. They robbed the mail, the stagecoaches, the railroads, the banks. They murdered the inhabitants of isolated farms and homesteads, letting the blame fall upon Indians. They killed men for their mining claims. They broke strikes and stirred them up, sold protection to successful ranchers and then stole their cattle. They fought in one range war after another
.
It was the age of the outlaw, but the Winter Family were not like other bandits, who hit soft targets for money and then hid with those who would hide them. Other bandits carefully crafted a romantic image, courted the newspapers, and dispensed largesse like Robin Hood. The James Gang cast themselves as Confederate partisans, while the Reno Gang started out as bounty jumpers, accepting money to enlist in the Union Army and then deserting. The Winter Family never gave a damn what anyone thought of them, and if men gave them shelter, they did it out of fear
.
More than once the Winter Family came under the protection of some powerful local figure. They were useful men to have on retainer in that dangerous age. But it never lasted. However it began, it always ended the same way: screams, fire, robbery, death. And then men disappearing into the night, swallowed up into the endless wilderness of plains, forest, and mountain, subsumed by the great god Pan
.
They roamed south across the great salt flats and deserts of Utah and Nevada into Arizona. There Lukas Shakespeare left the group to join his brothers, Matt and Austin, who had moved with their mother to Phoenix. The Winter Family traveled farther south to Mexico. A new trade had opened up in those bloody twilight days of the West, as civilization tightened like a creeping vine, choking the life out of a great oak, and there was work for them to do. There always was, it seemed, no matter where they went, no matter what they did, no matter how many people died. The work never seemed to be done
.
But the spread of civilization was exponential, not linear, and as such it hid itself like a crocodile under the surface of muddy water. Ready to explode out after its prey when the moment came
.
The sun was setting as the two bounty hunters crossed the border into Arizona. The desert glowed with the evening light and the cacti and scrub stood silhouetted against the bruised sky. Colorful flowers stood out from the dull red sand and rocks.
The tracks were easy to follow, as they had been left by well over a hundred Indians: men, women, and children stampeding north into the Arizona Territory, making no attempt to hide their passing. The Mexican bounty hunter pulled the reins of his horse and dismounted. He stooped to pick up a roughly made doll from the dirt and he turned it over in his hands.
“We should go back,” he said.
His companion was a handsome blond man with an air of unconcern. Though he was no longer young, he was called Babe.
“Winter said to press on till we laid eyes on them,” Reggie said. “He ain’t going to be satisfied with a doll.”
“It’s dangerous,” the Mexican said. He was a squat, competent man. Unafraid but pragmatic. “Easy for some of them to double back in all this mess.” He gestured toward the trail in the sand. “Especially now that it’s getting dark. Plenty of places to hide.”
“I know it’s dangerous,” Reggie said. “It’s just less dangerous than disappointing Winter. Trust me on that.”
The Mexican shrugged and remounted. They loped on for less than a quarter of an hour, and then Reggie was shot clean out of
his saddle. He landed hard on his back, spat blood into the air, and looked extremely surprised.
The Mexican did all the right things. He crouched down low in the saddle, turned his horse to shelter his body, and drew his pistol while the sound of the shot was still echoing across the desert. But two more shots rang out and his horse stumbled to its knees and threw him into the rocks and sand.