The Book of Lost Friends(117)

“Ssshhh,” I whisper to Missy and Juneau Jane. Maybe they’ll think the wagon’s empty. The thought’s gone quick as it comes. I know better.

“Come out!” a voice orders. “Some of these soldier boys might live to fight another day, you come on out peaceful.”

“Your choice,” another man says. It’s low and plain, and my ear knows it in a way that turns me cold inside, except I can’t put a place to it. Where’ve I heard that voice before? “You want four dead soldier boys, plus a dead deputy marshal on your conscience? Ends the same, either way.”

“Don’t—” one of the soldiers hollers. There’s a crack like a gourd getting split, and he goes quiet.

Juneau Jane and me look back and forth to each other. Her eyes are wide and white-edged. Her mouth trembles, but she nods. Beside me, Missy’s already getting up, I guess because the man said to. She don’t understand what’s happening.

I feel for the pistol again. Feel for it everyplace. “Coming out!” I holler. “Might be we’re shot already.” I’m scrubbing the floor with my hands. The pistol…

The pistol…

“Out now!” the man hollers. A shot fires off and tears through the canvas not a foot from our heads. The wagon jerks forward, then stops. Either somebody’s holding the mules or one’s dead in the harness.

Missy scrabbles over the gate.

“Wait,” I say, but there’s no stopping her. No finding the derringer, either. Don’t know what’ll happen now. What kind of men are these, and why do they want us?

Missy’s on her feet and moving away from the wagon by the time Juneau Jane and me get out. My mind slows, takes notice of each thing—the soldiers on their bellies, one bleeding from the leg. Blood drips from the head of the wagon driver. His eyes open and close, and open again. He tries to wake, to save hisself or us, but what can he do?

The sergeant lifts his head. “You’re interfering with a detail of the United States Cavalry in—” A pistol butt comes down hard.

Missy moans like it was her that got struck.

I glance at the one holding the pistol. He ain’t much more than a boy, might be thirteen or fourteen.

It’s then I look past the boy and see the man come out from the brush. A rifle rests comfortable over his shoulder. He moves in a slow, easy stride, satisfied as a cat that’s got its next meal cornered. A slow smile spreads under his hat brim. When he tips it up, there’s the patch on his eye, and the melted scars on one side of his face, and I know why his voice caught me. Might be this is the day he finishes the job he started at the river landing.

Missy growls in her throat like a animal, gnashes her teeth, and chomps at the air.

The man tosses his head back, laughing. “Still a biter, I see. I thought maybe we’d worked that out of you before we parted ways.”

That voice of his. I sift memories like flour, but they fly away, carried off by the storm winds. Did we know him before? Was he somebody Old Mister knew?

Missy growls louder. I reach up and grab her arm, but she strains away from me. I try again to place the man. If I can call his name, maybe it’d catch him by surprise, throw him off long enough the troopers could get at the boy that’s closest, grab his gun.

I hear horses splash through the water and scrabble up the bank behind us. But I keep my eyes on the man with the rifle. He’s the one to worry about. The boy with him looks crazy and blood hungry, but it’s this man who has charge of it all.

“And you.” He turns to Juneau Jane. “It is a shame to dispatch a perfectly good yellow girl. Especially a fetching one who has…a certain sort of value. Perhaps it is a fortuitous turn of events that you’ve managed to survive, after all. Perhaps I’ll keep you. A final recompense for all the loss I’ve suffered at your father’s hands.” He holds up a left glove with missing fingers sagging down, then he passes across the eye that’s gone.

This man…this man believes Old Mister’s to blame for his disfigurings? Why?

I let go of Missy, scoop Juneau Jane round behind me. “You leave this child be,” I tell him. “She ain’t done nothin’ to you.”

He cocks his head to see me better, looks at me for a long time through the one good eye. “And what is this? The little boy driver Moses told me he’d done away with? But none of us are what we seem to be, are we?” He laughs, and there’s a familiar sound to it.

He steps in closer. “I might just keep you, too. A good set of slave irons, and you’ll be no trouble. Your kind can always be broken. The infernal Negro. No better than a mule. No smarter. All can be broken to harness…and to other uses.” He studies me in pure meanness, but that’s familiar, too. “I think I knew your mammy,” he says and smiles. “I think I knew her quite well.”

He looks away toward the men coming up from the river. My mind tumbles back, and back, and back. I see past the scars and the patch on his eye, take in the shape of his nose, the set of his sharp, pointed chin. I grab the memory, see him crouched beside the wagon where we’re curled in the cold with Mama. His hands catch her, drag her out, her arm still chained to the wheel spokes. The sounds of her suffering bleed into dark, but I don’t see. “You keep down under the blanket, babies,” she chokes out. “You just stay there.” I push the blanket hard against my ears, try not to hear.