Although I was fearful the Reverend might be using the all-seeing eyes of God he was always talking about to keep track of my comings and goings, I was curious. Since my arrival in Vermillion the Reverend had kept me sequestered from its other citizens, assuring me it was for my own good, as the town was—in his own words—a “hotbed for all manner of sin and unnatural vice”. I was to speak to no one, and this included Marshal Harkin, who was not only Vermillion’s resident lawman, but also its pimp.

  “You’re that white indian boy the Reverend took in, ain’t you?” he drawled, pushing back the brim of his derby.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He treatin’ you good, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You look like a right enough young feller to me, Billy. Whenever you get your fill of hearin’ about Jesus, you come see me. I’m looking for a boy to sweep up and empty the spittoons and slop jars. I’ll pay you a dollar a week. Good hard cash. You think about it, hear?” He leaned forward and tucked a piece of candy into my pocket, winking broadly.

  That was my first genuine introduction to Marshal Harkin, better known as “Gent” on account of his passion for fancy Eastern headgear. During my brief time in Vermillion, I would come to get to know him better than I would the Reverend.

  Gent was an open, straightforward cuss. He owned the Spread Eagle Saloon, where five rather tired-looking “dance hall girls” worked the clientele, taking them upstairs for two-dollar sex of the boots-on variety. He was fairly easy-going when it came to the cowboys who rode into town to let off steam during the round-up season. After all, they were his bread and butter. Gent was willing to overlook drunken cowpokes hurrahing the town—riding up and down the streets, firing six-shooters aimlessly into the air (and the occasional window)—but he was merciless when it came to saloon brawls. And more than one hapless cowboy found himself colder than clay after shorting one of Gent’s girls.

  On the whole, Gent saw the Reverend as a nuisance more than an upstanding member of the community. As far as he was concerned, the only reason anyone came to Texas was to get away from their past. The West was a place where a man could reinvent himself from the ground up without having to worry about phantoms from the old days coming back to haunt him. And it was clear to anyone with one eye and half-sense that the Reverend was hiding out from a damn big spook.

  But the real reason Gent distrusted the Reverend was because he occasionally made forays into the Spread Eagle, attempting to sway the working girls from their lives of debauchery and sin. He had yet to win any converts, but Gent still took a dim view of anyone trying to stir up trouble in the hen-house. He knew Vermillion was still too young and poor to succumb to respectability, but he realized that it was only a matter of time before its citizens went from being rough-riding pioneers to civilized townspeople, and he sure as hell didn’t like the idea of Reverend Near getting a jump on making Vermillion a decent place to raise your kids up.

  He needn’t have worried. Assuming Vermillion had a future at all, the Reverend was hardly destined to be its midwife. Besides, he didn’t fool the whores one bit. They knew a sinner when they saw one. But not even they realized how bad off the Reverend really was.

  Which leads me to the little girl. I don’t recollect her name—it’s possible I never knew it in the first place. All I remember is that she was one of the children that belonged to an immigrant sodbuster that lived on a farm just outside of town. Every now and then the Reverend would ride out there on his mule and try to convert the half-dozen or so families scattered about the countryside, but with little success. Most of them barely spoke enough English to buy seed and sell their eggs and butter, much less understand the gospel according to Deuteronomy Near.

  The little girl disappeared one evening around supper time. Apparently a rather boisterous child by nature, she had talked out of turn at the dinner table, incurring the wrath of her parents. Her punishment was to stand on the front porch until the rest of the family had finished eating. When the mother got up to tell the little girl she could come back in, she was nowhere to be found.

  At first they though she was playing a trick on them, but when several hours passed and the little girl still hadn’t returned, the father rode into town and reported her disappearance, as best he could, to Marshal Harkin. Gent rounded up a search party. I asked the Reverend if I could help search for the missing child, but he refused to grant me permission.

  When the first day of searching did not turn up any sign of the missing girl, Gent became convinced that one of two things had happened—that either she had been kidnapped by wild Indians or carried off by wolves, possibly even a bear. When the farmer translated the Marshal’s suspicions to his wife, the poor woman became hysterical.

  They found the little girl on the second day. After searching the surrounding gullies and washes, it turned out she was in her very own front yard.

  They found her in the well. She had a burlap bag over her head and she was missing her knickers. The Marshal arrested the hired hand, who was a touch feeble-minded and got into trouble last season for fucking some of the livestock where the neighbors could see it. After a trial of sorts, they hung him. They never did find the little girl’s knickers, though.

  The Reverend, being the only man of the cloth in the county, officiated at the burial, even though the dirt farmers couldn’t speak a lick of English and were probably Lutheran to boot. I was there to help officiate, although all I did was stand to one side of the Reverend and pretend to look sad. Since I didn’t have anything else to do, I studied the grieving family.

  The mother was a stout, round-faced woman who probably wasn’t as old as she looked, her eyes red and swollen from crying. The father was tall and rawboned, his face unreadable as he tried to comfort his wife. His eyes remained fixed on his daughter’s coffin, suspended over the open grave by a couple of planks. There were five other children, some older and some younger than the dead girl. One or two of them cried, but the others simply looked uncomfortable in their Sunday best, squirming and pulling at their starched collars.

  After rambling on about innocence, sinners, lambs, Jesus and a better world beyond, the Reverend at last shut up and the grave diggers removed the planks, lowering the small coffin into the ground with looped ropes.

  A week later I found the little girl’s missing knickers wadded up and stuffed behind one of the loft rafters. They were stiff with dried blood and semen. I didn’t know what to do about what I’d found—but I knew what it meant. It also decided something for me.

  The only reason I’d put up with the Reverend’s madness in the first place was the belief that he might have the wisdom to teach me how to control the killing wildness inside me. But now I knew for certain that the Reverend lacked the ability to curb even his own bestial tendencies, much less mine. That night, while he was passed out, I packed what few belongings I could call my own and trudged over to the Spread Eagle. Gent was playing solitaire in the saloon, a bottle of rotgut at his elbow and a foul-smelling hand-rolled dangling from his lower lip.

  “So—you get enough Jesus, son?”

  “Yes, sir. I come to see you about that job.”

  Gent grunted as he lay down another card. “Figgered you’d be comin’ round sooner or later. I pay a dollar a week, plus what you can roll off the drunks. All yours, Billy.”

  “Thank you, sir!”

  “Now get to work! I got slopjars that need scrubbin’!”

  I must have scrubbed every slopjar in Vermillion that evening, and considering that most folks crapped in tin cans instead of porcelain chamber pots, that was probably a fair bet. After I finished with the slopjars, I had to clean and polish the spittoons, then sweep and mop the front saloon.

  By the time midnight rolled around I was so tired I couldn’t raise my arms over my head to take my shirt off. The bartender showed me my room—little more than a storage closet next to the back door, but at least there was a mattress on the floor. I’d been sleeping on nothing but dirty straw in the Reverend’s half-loft, so it looked fairly ritzy. I collapsed into a sleep so deep I didn’t even dream.

  The next thing I knew there was a crashing sound coming from outside and the sound of a familiar voice raised in anger.

  “Where is he?”

  My eyes flew open and I had to fight to keep my fur from rising to the surface in self-defense. A growl slipped from between my clenched teeth.

  “Where is that thankless heathen bastard?!?”

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” yelled the bartender. “Somebody go fetch Gent! The Reverend’s gone loco!”

  The storage room door was jerked open and Reverend Near’s frame filled the threshold. The stink of Mug-Wump Specific and madness radiated from him like heat from a flat rock. I scrambled to my feet to avoid being kicked in the ribs.

  “There you are, you ungrateful piece of shit,” he hissed. “I go to sleep for a few hours, and what do you do—? You turn on me and embrace mine enemies!” He shook his head sadly and for a moment it looked as if he was about to cry. “I thought I could save you, Billy. I really believed that God had a Plan for you. But now I was wrong—horribly wrong. You’re just another sinner, given over to base fornication and intoxication!”

  Sweat began to pour off my brow. Being so close to the Reverend’s insane rage was making me twitch. If I didn’t get out in the open soon, I would shapeshift involuntarily. I tried to move past the Reverend but he surged forward, grabbing me by the shirt-front, lifting my heels off the ground as he slammed me into the shelves lining the tiny room. His face was inches from my own, and one of the lenses in his smoked spectacles was cracked.

  “Honor thy father! ” he bellowed. “Honor thy father, you little shit! ”

  I lost control then—but only for a second. But it was enough. For the first time in months I let my bone and skin shift and twist, let the fur bristle and fangs sprout. And the Reverend Near suddenly found himself nose-to-muzzle with a snarling wolf.

  He screamed in terror and let me drop. My butt coming into rough contact with the floor was shock enough to bring me back to my senses and I quickly reverted to my human self. The Reverend staggered backward, clutching his heart, his skin suddenly the color of tallow.

  “Demon!” he gasped. “Foul demon of hell!”

  “What in tarnation is goin’ on here? Jesus on the cross, Reverend—didn’t I tell you to keep outta my saloon?” It was Gent, looking bloodshot and none too happy to be ousted out of bed at such an ungodly hour as seven in the morning.

  Before the Reverend could respond, Gent clamped a big, calloused hand on his collar and literally yanked him free of the storage room. The bartender and a couple of the girls peeped in to see if I was alive then hurried after Gent, who was frog-marching the Reverend towards the front door.

  “You’re harboring a fiend from the very Pit itself!” The Reverend warned, waving an arm in my direction. “A murdering beast that serves Satan as its master most high!”

  “What the hell are you goin’ on about now?”

  “The boy! The boy is a minion of the Devil! I have seen him turn into a wild beast before my very eyes!”

  “Go sleep it off, Reverend,” Gent growled, delivering a swift kick to the raving minister’s pants that propelled him through the saloon’s swinging doors. Reverend Near fell into the thick muck that comprised Vermillion’s main street, floundering and flailing like a drowning man. A couple of the whores had come out to see what the to-do was about and were having themselves a good laugh at the Reverend’s expense.

  “Trollops! Harlots! You shall not escape the Lord’s judgement!” sputtered the Reverend, wiping the mire from his smoked glasses with as much dignity as he could bring to bear. Even though I knew the man to be a killer and a lunatic, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “Come along, boy,” Gent grumbled, leading me back into the dim interior of the Spread Eagle. “It’s over.”

  I cast one last glance over my shoulder at the Reverend, struggling to extricate himself from the mud, and followed him inside.

  Later that same day Gent arrested me for the murder of the little immigrant girl. I was sweeping up the front saloon when he walked up and, without any warning, pulled out his six-shooter and pressed its barrel right between my eyes.

  “Hate to do this to you, son, but your under arrest.”

  Turns out the Reverend went home, got himself cleaned off, and returned with the pair of knickers I’d found up in the loft. They’d disappeared soon after I first discovered them, so I assumed the Reverend had burned them in the pot belly stove. Turns out he just moved them to a better hiding place.

  The Reverend turned over the missing knickers to the Marshal, complete with a story about how he’d found them in my belongings the day after the little girl’s funeral. Obviously, I had been tainted by years amongst the Comanche—I was no more than a murdering savage, inflamed by the sight of white woman flesh to the most horrific acts of rapine.

  Gent hadn’t been too thrilled on this key bit of evidence suddenly making its appearance—after all, he’d already hung a man for the crime—but the Reverend wasn’t about to let this go by. So off to the pokey I went, manacled hand-and-foot.

  Vermillion’s “jail” was a airless adobe hut divided into two rooms. The front room, theoretically, was Gent’s office, although he preferred lounging outside the Spread Eagle to spending time in that sweat-box. The second room was a tiny closet of a cell, with a wooden plank set on saw horses for a bed and a rusty coffee can for a slop jar. The one door was made out of iron with a trap at the bottom for meals to be pushed through, and there was a single narrow window set with bars. It stank of tobacco juice, vomit and old shit, since Gent rarely had occasion to use it for anything but a drunk tank, keeping rowdy cowboys in check until their trail bosses came to round them up.

  As I sat on the rough plank, studying the heavy manacles that hung from my wrists and ankles, I realized my time as a citizen of Vermillion had reached its end. I knew what I had to do, and there was no joy in that knowledge. I had come to this place in hopes of learning how to tame the darkness in my heart, only to be forced farther from the light than before.

  Shortly before dusk Gent pushed a dented tin plate of red beans and corn bread and a cup of cold coffee through the trap. He did not say anything, but I could feel him looking at me through the observation slit as I ate what was to be my last meal in Vermillion. I pushed the empty plate back through the slot and remained crouched by the door, listening to the clock-clock-clock of his bootheels as he walked away, locking the front door behind him. I waited until it was well and truly dark before shapeshifting.

  The heavy manacles dropped from my transformed wrists with a shake of my hands. I stepped out of my leg shackles, my paws scuffing the floor in ritual dismissal. I could have made a symbolic show of force by literally snapping the chains that bound me, but I had neither the time nor interest in such foolishness. Although my kind are stronger than a dozen men, our natural state is deceptively slight, with long, narrow hands and crooked legs that would make us seem ill-equipped for running at high speeds and bringing down prey with nothing but our claws and fangs. One should never rely on appearances.

  Once transformed, it was relatively simple for me to yank the bars out of the window and squeeze myself through to freedom, leaving behind only empty manacles and my discarded clothes. The night was dark and windy, with lightning dancing on the far horizon. My pelt prickled and my nostrils twitched as I caught the scent of distant rain.

  I slid through the shadows towards the edge of town, careful not to be seen during the brief stutters of lightning. I needn’t have worried—most citizens were already sound asleep, and the few that were still awake were busy whoring, gambling, and drinking themselves insensate at the Spread Eagle.

  The front door was unlocked—as usual—and the Reverend was passed-out, face down, at the kitchen table, an empty bottle of Mug-Wump Specific at his elbow. Next to the bottle of patent medicine was an open Bible and a pair of drawers. Judging from the color of the stains, this pair was considerably older than the ones he’d taken off the little immigrant girl.

  The Reverend made a slurred grunting noise when I tickled his left ear with the point of my claws, then screamed like a woman when I tore it from his head. He sat up with a violent spasm that nearly sent his chair toppling backward. Without his left ear to support them, his smoked spectacles dropped away, revealing eyes bulging in their sockets like hard boiled eggs. He grabbed the Bible with a trembling, bloodied hand and held it as if he meant to swat me across the muzzle with it.

  “Child of evil! I command thee; get back Satan!”

  I snarled and knocked the book from his hand, grabbing him by the throat as I pulled him out of his chair. As I slowly crushed his windpipe, the Reverend opened his mouth wide, gasping for air. He issued a muffled shout, his body bowing upward, as I shoved the pair of knickers down his throat. The Reverend thrashed under my grip for several seconds, and although he was a very strong man, there was never a chance of him breaking free. And he knew it.

  I left him there for the others to find—his mouth filled with a dead girl’s underpants. No doubt the whores down at the saloon wouldn’t be surprised.

  I crept from the Reverend’s shack, pausing to warily eye the approaching storm. Weather on the plains has a tendency to be sudden and violent, quickly metamorphosing into the fierce devil-winds the Mexicans called tornado. And something told me that was exactly what was brewing out on the prairie.

  I stood there for a long second, studying the sorry cluster of buildings that comprised Vermillion. Pricking my ears forward, I could make out the Spread Eagle’s piano in the distance, along with the occasional shriek of whore laughter. Maybe they knew there was a storm coming. Maybe not. Buffalo Face had been right. Whites were crazy, although some seemed crazier than others. Wherever the knowledge I needed to understand and contain my beast-nature might be, it certainly did not lie in Vermillion, Texas. I turned my back on the town and headed into the surrounding night.

 

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