The Creed of Violence

TEN

HE SKYLINE WAS settling out, the blue softening away till there was only the marked approach of nightfall. John Lourdes sat in silence near the headway of the plat. Rawbone approached and stood near, scanning the moonless world to the road below.

"You have any idea how you intend to make this fight?"

John Lourdes was staring up that street of crumbling foundations to the meeting house. "What was this place? Do you know?"

Rawbone ran the back of his fingers along his cheek. "You never heard and you're from El Paso?" He set the derby back. "It was one of those ... utopias. You know what they are, right? Well ... this one was different. There was only women. Women from all over the world. Anglo women, Mexican. Women from India. China. Even Africa. They lived like a tribe. And they had ceremonies where they went about naked. Naked, Mr. Lourdes."

The son now looked upon those forgotten remains and tried to imagine—

The father threw his head back laughing. "Mr. Lourdes, if ever I saw an expression of pure and ridiculous gullibility." He shook his head in comedic despair.

The son was forced to accept the moment and he took it stoically, but not without a smile that he was had. "By the way," John Lourdes asked, "did you retrieve the gun?"

Rawbone cocked his head. "Excuse me?"

"The automatic stashed under the chassis. I checked the damn vehicle early this morning."

Rawbone pulled up his shirt where the gun had been tucked away. "Mr. Lourdes, the tide of opinion about you has just risen some." He pulled the weapon and held the black .32 just so in his palm and, mocking, added, "Bat Masterson swears by this gun. Or so says the ad. And another promises ... it's a housewife's best friend against burglars." He tucked the shirt back in his pants and slipped the weapon down into his belt sash. He paused to set his derby right. "Mr. Lourdes, it's a right-thinking world when they start running ads with guns and women in nightgowns."

The son went back to considering how a fight was to be made. The father stood watch. And so the night went about its workings.

"Mr. Lourdes, do you come from a good Christian family?"

The son looked up at the father and in a pointed quiet said, "In part."

"Well, you better pack that good Christian part away for a while ... because they're here."

John Lourdes rose. He looked down into that banded decline of shadows but saw nothing. Rawbone stepped behind him and pointed, his arm resting just over the rim of the son's shoulders. There was a narrow slit of brightness, not even really a light, for one moment. "Far, far down the canyon. There! Did you see it?"

"No."

"I believe it's one of those flashlights with the sliding bridge slip. You know. And they're keeping it near to the ground so all you see is a bit of wash from the light."

The father was so close now the son could feel the weapon he had tucked away pressing against his back.

"You can't look right at a thing at night that far to see it, Mr. Lourdes. The trick is you have to look off just a bit. Use the outer ring of your eye."

The son did as the father said and in the space of a minute there was a singular emanation so minute as to be barely made out.

"Yes," said John Lourdes, "I see it. You're right."

"That's a trick you learn from years of being on the hunt."

The son turned. "You mean being hunted, don't you?"

"That too, Mr. Lourdes. But when they're as close as you and I are now, hunter and hunted, it's all the same."

John Lourdes studied the man he was born of. "Is that a threat, or a word of advice?"

"I leave it to your good judgment, sir. But either way, the clock is about to expire on the quiet around here."

THE PLAT WHERE the settlement had been was akin to a darkened lake that night. Father and son crouched on elbows. Men appeared in slow and hunched silence from the foothills. The father rose three fingers and the son agreed.

They approached low behind their guns, totally unaware their souls might well be swallowed up. A wind sprang from nowhere and sent dust across the broken terrain. The father whispered to the son, "How well do you hear?"

"Why?"

The father touched his ear and held up one finger and pointed toward the rocks beyond the meeting house. The son understood.

"I'll give that one a hello for you." Then Rawbone snaked up the ravine from where they lay in wait till there was only the faint movement of loose shale where he had just been.

John Lourdes now stayed rigid against the earth. He had never killed before and this would be something else altogether. Those figures of the night reached the adobe foundations. They must not be thought of as men. They are just vestments really. Blackish shapes there to extinguish life. They started their slow and deadly trek up that once-upon-atime street. The night had not grown colder, yet John Lourdes was shivering. The wind moved through his clothes like the ghost of something insidious and horrible.

These men will kill without so much as a reckoning. They will fire down till you're not even one whittled breath. One of the men put out a hand for the others to stop. He took a few cautious steps forward and John Lourdes recognized the bowed and partly lame stride as belonging to the gent at the roadhouse with the stiff mustache and cheery smile. He had seen something. John Lourdes hoped it was the bedrolls laid out like sleeping men within the meeting house walls.

They moved ahead again with the steady assurance of those who had imperiled men before. He watched their stalk play out like a ritual. There was a stark grace to their configured tactics, a calm John Lourdes did not possess.

The meeting house stood against the night sky. Its hollowed windows and huge gaping frame that once housed double doors the epitome of emptiness.

John Lourdes scanned that rutted wash where Rawbone had gone. He listened with dire intensity, but there was only the wind through dry brush like flintstrikings. A vein in his temple pulsed vengefully.

When they reached the meeting house door the men fanned out. They pressed in close to the adobe wall and near blended away. The one from the roadhouse raised a hand to make ready and as he did John Lourdes also reached out his hand where it hovered in dead space just above a detonator. He could feel the hand trembling all the way up into the sinew of his neck.

Even though John Lourdes was waiting and ready, their charge into the hollows happened so fast he froze. The walls flashed with the thunder light of their weapons. Arterials of smoke and powdered cloth leapt from the bedrolls. But there was not a cry, not a breath of movement that declared life was being taken.

The bedrolls lay there like the lifeless bait they were. The men understood immediately and scattered. It was only then, at the last, before all advantage had been lost, that John Lourdes found himself. With the flat of his hand he drove down the plunger.