Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Near the river he got into some terrible sticky mud. His hands sunk deep into it when he tried to crawl over it. The water was not far—he could hear the song of its flowing, but his strength was almost gone. Night had come; the mud was cold. Soon he began to shake from fever, shivering one minute and burning the next. Every time he rested it became harder and harder to raise himself onto his hands and knees. The mud was a dreadful obstacle; he could only crawl a few yards before collapsing. At one point, on the slick slope, he slid a few feet and almost rolled onto his back. That wouldn’t do: on his back he would be as helpless as a turtle who had been flipped over by a raccoon. Feeling that he was going to be too weak to reach the water, the Bad Eye put all his strength into one last effort, and he did reach water, but it was not the river, it was only a shallow pond near the river’s edge. The coolness of the water made him shiver so violently that he felt death might be shaking him. With his hands he raked the water of the little pond, hoping to touch a fish, a little fish, who might nibble the poison out of him. But the only fish in the pond was a dead one, who lent the water a stagnant smell. The Bad Eye felt keenly disappointed. He was in water, but not the right water. He knew he must try again, and he did try, but this time his weight was greater than his strength. He could barely even hold his face out of the water of the pond, even though the pond was only a few inches deep. He tried to crawl out of the pond but water lapped into his mouth and nose when he failed to lift his head. Frightened and bewildered, he began to sputter. His face had never been in water before— except perhaps long before, in boyhood, when his mother had taken him into the river in hopes that it would cure his blindness. All his life he had heard the sound of the river, and yet now he couldn’t reach it.

  When he lifted his head above the water he could breathe the humid, smelly, fishy air, but when he tired, when his neck could no longer support the lifting of his head, his face fell into the water, causing him to choke and splutter. He thrashed, but he could not advance: then he began to drink, swallowing the filthy water, gulping as fast as he could so that it wouldn’t cover his face when he rested. Perhaps if he swallowed enough he would finally float, as he had floated in his dream.

  It was there, in the misty dawn, still fifty yards from the channel of the great river he had been trying to reach, that the Partezon, riding with Fool’s Bull through the camp of the dead, found the great prophet of the Mandans drowned in a puddle so shallow that the water hardly came above the hocks of the Partezon’s white horse. A frog sat on the drowned man’s head; it leapt into the water with a plop when the two horses came to the edge of the pond.

  “Look, there he is,” the Partezon said, to Fool’s Bull.

  “So what? He’s just a dead man, let’s go,” Fool’s Bull urged.

  But the Partezon was not to be hurried; he sat on his white horse, looking at the swollen corpse of the Bad Eye for what seemed to Fool’s Bull like a long time.

  “He was supposed to be the greatest man in the world,” the Partezon remarked. ‘And now look: frogs jump off his head. He’s just dead, like anybody else.”

  “Yes, dead—like we’ll be in two or three days if we don’t get out of here,” Fool’s Bull remarked bitterly.

  “You’re always in too big a hurry,” the Partezon remarked, but he finally turned his horse and rode downstream.

  20

  Far out on the prairies . . .

  FAR OUT on the prairies, a day or even two days out from the river, the Partezon and Fool’s Bull had begun to come upon dead people: Mandans, Rees, a few Otos who had fled in hopes of saving themselves from the great sickness that seemed to hang over the river. They were now half eaten; they had failed to save themselves. As the two riders came closer to the river they saw more and more dead—so many that Fool’s Bull would have much preferred to turn back, hunt a little more, enjoy the summer prairies. But the Partezon refused to listen—he always refused to listen. The last thing Fool’s Bull would have chosen to do was ride through a country where everyone was dead or dying. It made no sense. This plague had already destroyed the people of the river. Why go where people were dying? The sickness might leave the river and follow them onto the plains, in which case even they would die too.

  Fool’s Bull had said as much to his stubborn companion, but such sensible considerations didn’t interest the Partezon at all. He just kept riding east, ignoring, with his usual rudeness, every sensible thing that Fool’s Bull brought up. Over and over Fool’s Bull vowed to himself that he himself would turn back and leave the Partezon to his folly; but he didn’t turn back.

  Mainly he kept riding east because he didn’t want to give the Partezon a chance to call him a coward, which the Partezon would certainly do if Fool’s Bull pulled out of this strange quest.

  “We’ll die ourselves if we’re not careful,” he said several times. They were on the edge of what had been the largest Mandan village, and yet they saw nothing but abandoned lodges, some of them with dying people laying half inside and half out, too weak to go farther. Old people, young people, warriors, babies: all were dead or almost dead; the few who clung to life looked at them indifferently as they rode past. They were too far gone to struggle.

  “I expect to die someday,” the Partezon remarked. “I don’t know why you think you ought to live forever.”

  “I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t want to die right now, either,” Fool’s Bull argued. “I have two young wives, remember. If you had a few young wives, instead of your cranky old wives, you wouldn’t be so reckless with your life.”

  “I am too old for young wives,” the Partezon argued—it amused him to see what lengths Fool’s Bull would go to avoid certain tasks.

  “Your young wives look bossy to me,” he added. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they wear you out pretty soon.”

  Conversation with the Partezon was rarely satisfactory, mainly because the Partezon scorned what seemed to Fool’s Bull a sensible, simple, reasonable approach to life. Common sense should have told the man that it was foolish to come into a place where all the people were dying of a horrible sickness; and yet, there they were. Only after they had ridden all the way to the river itself, and seen the drowned body of the Mandan prophet, did the Partezon seem satisfied.

  “It’s a poor prophet who can’t even save himself,” the Partezon commented, once they had watered their horses and turned back to the prairie.

  The Partezon had heard about the Bad Eye for many years; he had hoped to see him and perhaps converse with him a little. The Mandans had always seemed to him a gullible people, easily tricked by the white traders. It would have been interesting to see what kind of prophecies the fat prophet would have come out with.

  Fool’s Bull, for his part, was horrified by the state of the dead people he had seen. He was long accustomed to seeing men die in battle and had witnessed many captives being tortured; those deaths had seemed clean, in a way: they were honorable deaths, involving defeat but not shame. The dead in the Mandan camp were different: they were foul deaths, putrefying deaths; and there were so many dead that proper burial was out of the question. He didn’t want to see any more such scenes.

  “I hope the sickness doesn’t follow us,” he said, several times.

  “You should listen when I tell you something,” the Partezon scolded. “The minute I saw those two whites fly up in the air, where only birds are supposed to go, I told you that the time of the People was ending. Now that you’ve seen it with your own eyes, perhaps you’ll pay attention when I tell you something important.”

  “I saw it, but I don’t understand it—how can a whole tribe suddenly die?” Fool’s Bull asked.

  “The whites made the plague, that’s why,” the Partezon answered. “Maybe they dropped it out of the sky. If they can fly, then it must be easy for them to sow plagues. Maybe they fly over at night and drop the poisons into cooking pots or onto blankets. I don’t know how they spread this pox, but I’m sure they do it.”

  “W
hat if they drop some on us?” Fool’s Bull asked, suddenly fearful—the Partezon had voiced an awful thought.

  “Then we’ll die, as the Mandans died,” the Partezon told him. “Only I don’t plan to be as foolish as that fat prophet—I won’t crawl into a puddle and drown.”

  “It’s all very well for you to be calm about dying— you’re old,” Fool’s Bull reminded him. “I’m a young man with two wives to sleep with. I don’t want this pox dropped on me.”

  “What you are is a liar,” the Partezon told him. “We were born in the same summer—they put us in our cradle boards together—it’s nonsense to say I’m old and you’re young.”

  Fool’s Bull realized he had spoken carelessly. He and the Partezon were the same age. And yet he wanted to live a long time and the Partezon seemed indifferent to the prospect of immediate death.

  “Even if the whites can fly, it doesn’t mean the time of the People is over,” he argued.

  “You’re wrong—that’s exactly what it does mean,” the Partezon told him.

  Of course, he himself did not mean to die shamefully, half in and half out of a lodge, as so many of the Mandans had. He had had a full life, killing many enemies, stealing many horses. When it came time for him to pass into the spirit world, he meant to do it in a dignified way. He meant to go alone in Paha Sapa, the sacred Black Hills, and find a cliff high up, where the eagles nested; there he would fast and pray and chant a little until the spirit left him and passed on to the Sky House, the place of spirits, higher than any white man could hope to fly. He had supposed that the life he had always known would last forever, season following season with the old ways unchanged; but that was shallow thinking. Things changed for everything: for the eagles, for the Sioux, for the buffalo.

  Even as he was thinking these thoughts he happened to see some dim brown shapes on the far horizon and at once put his horse into a gallop. The brown shapes were buffalo—the Partezon wanted to kill a few more, while his arm was strong and his heart high. The sight of the buffalo excited Fool’s Bull too—he forgot to complain. Soon the two men who had hung in cradle boards together, many summers before, were racing full out, bows ready, eager to kill a few more buffalo, in the old way, their way, the fearless and noble way of the fighting Sioux.

  21

  It was well past noon . . .

  IT was well past noon when Amboise d’Avigdor finally caught up with his impatient masters, Benjamin Hope-Tipping and Clam de Paty At once, of course, they noticed that he now had only one ear, and jumped—as he had feared they would—to the wrong conclusions.

  “What? You clumsy young fool! You cut off your ear?” Clam exclaimed. ‘And I suppose you used my razor to do it—an instrument far too fine for your clumsy hands.”

  “No, monsieur . . . no, I didn’t,” Amboise protested, “though I did just borrow your mirror for a few minutes, to inspect my head.”

  “Rot, I’m afraid, Amboise—it’s rot!” Ben Hope-Tipping complained. “The fact is you now have only one ear, and how else could you have lost the one you’re missing?”

  “I don’t know, sir ... I swear I don’t . . . it’s a great embarrassment to me, I assure you,” Amboise pleaded. “The palfreys were recalcitrant, you see, so that I was unable to catch up with you. So I just lay down to rest for a few minutes and when I awoke I was all bloody— quite offensively so—and I am exactly as you see me now, a man with only one ear.”

  “Now, now . . . stop lying, monsieur,” Clam began.

  “Ears do not simply remove themselves as one sleeps. Ears are well attached, I might add. Quite firmly attached, I insist. One can box them sharply, as I am inclined to box yours, and yet they do not fall off.”

  “Well, Clam, accidents happen,” Ben said. He saw no point in berating this shivering boy who had at least arrived with their kit intact. “Never mind about the ear—the thing to do now is shave and get into some decent clothes.”

  “This wasn’t an accident,” Kit told them, looking carefully at Amboise’s head.

  “Not an accident—explain yourself, monsieur?” Clam insisted. “You mean this foolish boy cut off his ear on purpose?”

  “He didn’t cut it off, the Ear Taker cut it off,” Kit said.

  There was silence on the prairies.

  “Excuse me? The Ear Taker? Who is this Ear Taker?” Ben inquired.

  Talking to these men often made Kit feel as if he were traveling in circles. Wouldn’t it seem likely that the Ear Taker was just what his name implied: a man who takes ears?

  “Nobody knows who he is, but what he likes to do is cut off people’s ears,” he explained. “White men’s ears, mostly. He slips up on people while they’re sleeping and when they wake up they’re one-eared, like this fellow.”

  “I believe there’s a story here, Clam,” Ben remarked at once. “I believe I’d like to get my notebook and jot down a few particulars, if Mr. Carson will oblige us.”

  “Certainly there’s a story—what does this fellow look like?” Clam asked.

  “I don’t know and neither does anybody else,” Kit said. “Nobody’s even seen him. He works at night and he’s so quick with his slicing that he’s gone before the victim even wakes up.”

  “But why haven’t the authorities done something?” Clam asked. “Catch him, garrote him! Rid us of this menace!”

  “Who’s supposed to catch him? There are no authorities out here,” Kit reminded them. “He used to work around Santa Fe mostly, but I guess he’s moved.”

  “But that’s most disturbing,” Ben told him. “You don’t suppose he has designs on our ears, do you?”

  “Probably,” Kit allowed.

  “Then we will have to post a guard in future,” Ben told him.

  “Where would we get a guard?” Kit asked.

  Ben and Clam exchanged glances.

  “Well, there’s Amboise,” Ben suggested.

  “I can’t guard very well, sirs,” Amboise admitted. “Can’t seem to stay awake.”

  “If you nod off I expect the Ear Taker will just slip in and take your other ear,” Kit announced.

  The two Europeans weighed their prospects in silence, looking apprehensively at the long plain and the waving grass. Clam’s blood had begun to boil at the thought of this criminal threat. Nothing of the sort would be allowed if they were in France.

  “I’ll shoot him on sight,” he declared.

  “There won’t be a sight—he works in the dark,” Kit reminded them. “You won’t see him.”

  “What must we do, then, Mr. Carson?” Hope-Tipping asked. “I’m afraid neither Clam nor I can afford to lose an ear—we’re much in society, you know. It would not be acceptable in the chanceries, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, we can hurry up and join the Berrybenders,”

  Kit suggested. “Some of the mountain men are probably still with them—they’re pretty fair guards, if they ain’t drunk.”

  “We shall have to insist on sobriety, then—won’t we, Clam?” Hope-Tipping said. “If you’ll just excuse us while we make a bit of a toilette, we can be on our way.”

  “You better patch that balloon up, if you’ve got anything to patch it with,” Kit suggested. “It might come in pretty handy.”

  He had not given up on the notion of a dramatic entrance via balloon, once they located the company—Tasmin would be mighty impressed, if she looked up and saw him flying. The two journalists were thoroughly aggravating—it would serve them right if the Ear Taker got one of their ears—but that didn’t mean he was ready to give up on a flight in their fine balloon.

  22

  Tasmin, primed and ready . . .

  TASMIN, primed and ready, deeply in the mood to enjoy her new love, would cheerfully have spent all her time alone with Pomp Charbonneau; but thanks to the myriad vexations of travel, the Berrybender party had been proceeding east for more than a week and she had so far spent no time alone with Pomp at all, a situation that vexed her very much. With Jim Snow gone; Kit Carson gone; Lord Ber
rybender newly besotted with his bride, Venetia Kennet; Buffum Berrybender in constant shy attendance on her tall Ute; and William Ashley and Eulalie Bonneville, nominal leaders of the mountain men, departed for the north, it fell to Tasmin and Cook—herself the object of a circumspect courtship with Tom Fitzpatrick—to manage the day-today affairs of the expedition. Tasmin found herself saddled with so many duties that she would have had little time for love even if her lover had been assiduous in pursuit, which he wasn’t. This too vexed Tasmin extremely. She had given herself to the man and knew that he had been pleased; and yet, instead of coming back for more, Pomp rode off every morning with Jim Bridger to scout the day’s route, and sometimes did not return until after dark, by which time Tasmin had her child to feed and the camp to more or less administer. Of course, it would merely have been prudent to wait and come to Pomp well after dark, when they could have enjoyed one another in secret—but Pomp didn’t allow her even this. Often it was late when he returned—he usually just rolled up in a blanket and slept by the campfire with the other men.

  Tasmin, never one to be passively thwarted, would soon have developed her own strategies for seduction; she would have intercepted Pomp and cajoled him into making love had she herself not been ground down by the exigencies of camp life, which were constant and mostly negative.

  First Monty wandered into a bush and was stung nearly a dozen times by wasps. Despite Little Onion’s dexterity with poultices, the little boy ran a high fever; he sobbed fretfully whenever Tasmin left him. Then Coal’s little boy Rabbit, managed to bounce out of the wagon, which ran over his foot, causing him to add his wails to Monty’s. Were that not enough, Piet Van Wely while attempting to chip a fossil out of a rock, was bitten in the calf by a rattlesnake; while the babies whined, Piet groaned and sweated. Hugh Glass made a cut in the calf and sucked out most of the poison, but Piet languished for three days, a stricken Mary Berrybender in panicky attendance. Finally Little Onion made Piet a bitter concoction which purged him thoroughly, after which he soon recovered. Mary held the Dutchman’s sweaty head as she cooed to him. Intolerant of children at the best of times, she felt no compunction about kicking Monty or Talley or Rabbit if they crowded into Piet’s space.