Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  So it went all day. His roundel was unsatisfactory— it would take him a few days, perhaps, to hit his stride as a poet. In the meantime, why not take a walk? He might shoot a rabbit, or some other small beast, for his supper. With luck he might get an antelope; he found the meat most flavorful.

  Unfortunately, Clam saw no antelope, though he strolled in a great circle around the pool with its fine surround of cottonwoods. As he walked he swished around a bit with his saber, even practiced a few lunges. He was headed back toward the trees when he began to have the uneasy feeling that he was perhaps not entirely alone. The plain seemed quite empty, and yet something did seem to be with him—an unseen presence might be drawing near.

  Clam tried to shake himself out of this feeling, which, after all, was absurd. Men imagined things. In his time with the Grande Armée he had been prey to dark imaginings. But why would this feeling come on him now, when he had merely been enjoying a quiet stroll?

  Suddenly, impelled, Clam whirled and saw the bear, a huge bear with a great brown head, not twenty yards behind him. Clam, so shocked that his hair stood up, froze—and the bear froze too. Clam looked at the bear, the bear looked at Clam, and then, very slowly, Clam raised his rifle, thinking that a bullet in the brain would soon settle the hash of this bear. It was only as he was lifting the gun that an awkward fact forced its way into his attention: his rifle was not loaded. When they killed the second palfrey, Clam had been the one to shoot the loyal beast, his own palfrey. And he had forgotten to reload his gun. Now here was this bear, an easy target, only there was no bullet to hit it with.

  Clam knew a moment of intense chagrin. He had always been a disciplined man, and yet he had not had even the elementary discipline to reload his gun—a sign, indeed, that he was finished, just as he had insisted to the company.

  Looking at the bear, Clam decided that he felt perhaps a little less finished than he had the day before. The bear had stopped when Clam stopped. He didn’t seem angry—perhaps he was merely curious. Probably he had never seen a Frenchman in red pants before, a famous journalist. In his confusion Clam allowed himself to believe that the bear knew he was a famous man, a man of reputation: why else was he being spared?

  At once Clam turned and began to walk rapidly toward the spring. He scarcely dared look back, as he walked, but he felt again that a presence was near— when he did look back, he found that the bear was still following him. He was not gaining, but neither was he falling behind. Clam considered speaking sharply to the animal but instead continued to walk on toward the pond. When he reached the water he looked behind him and saw that the bear was rather closer than he had been—he was no more than ten paces back. Clam decided on a desperate strategy—he walked straight into the pond until the water came to his knees; then he turned and presented his saber to the bear, who had stopped just at the water’s edge. He thrust out the saber and just pricked the bear with it, right on the end of his black nose.

  Startled, the bear sneezed twice, then at once turned and loped away, a response so unexpected that Clam could not quite trust it. All the mountain men had talked to him about the vicious fury of wounded bears. Whole teams of hunters were sometimes put to flight by one enraged grizzly. And yet he had merely pricked the grizzly on the end of his nose and the beast took to his heels. Clam could still see him, far out on the prairie, loping away.

  It was a miracle—a wave of relief swept over Clam, relief so powerful that he could hardly command his limbs. He waded out of the water and abruptly sat down, rather muddying his pants. In his mind’s eye he replayed this very strange event: he felt a presence, he saw the bear, he walked away, the bear followed, he walked into the pond, he pricked the bear, and the bear turned and fled.

  For a few minutes Clam merely sat in the mud, numb with relief. His notebook was in his pocket—it occurred to him that he could write up this extraordinary event, yet, when he went to the small trouble of pulling his notebook out of his pocket, he found that he had no interest at all in writing the adventure up. Clam saw at once that it was far too incredible to be believed. Conquer a grizzly bear by pricking his nose? His editors would guffaw. He would look a fool. The bear had not even snarled, he had put up no fight, there was nothing to write up. If the bear had at least growled viciously, there might have been a possibility to be exploited. A clever journalist could do much with a vicious snarl. But the bear had been a complete disappointment. A story had been lost, even though he himself had been spared.

  Clam’s relief was great, but also confusing. He was weak in the legs; he could barely walk. He would have loved a bit of cognac, something with a bracing bite, but of cognac there was none, and besides, a chill was falling. Last week it had been hot, this week it was cold. Winter was coming. He gathered a few sticks of firewood and built a fire. As the sun set and the moon rose Clam stared into his fire, a blanket over his shoulders. He did not remember sleeping but he must have slept, because when he awoke his fire was out and the new sun just coming up. It was very cold. There was frost on his blanket, ice at the edges of the pond. The plain was so white with frost that it hurt his eyes to look at it. Though he was shivering and hungry, Clam de Paty felt a sudden, surprising surge of happiness. In fact he had made a mistake: he was not finished, after all. He was alive, the sun was rising! The indifference he had felt only the day before—indifference to life, death, starvation, the departure of the company, everything—had left him while he dozed. His encounter with the cowardly bear had changed everything. The bear that might so easily have finished him but chose not to reminded him that there was a value to life— indeed, a very great value. He had been a fool to send his servant away—if he had Amboise he would soon be enjoying a good breakfast, but Amboise, after all, was only a few miles away. The company had been gone less than a day. Without a moment’s hesitation Clam gathered up his kit and set out to catch it. The wagon would leave tracks, Amboise would drop things—the company would be easy to find. Already he could imagine their joy when he reappeared. It would be a lesson for them: never count out a Frenchman, a man who had won medals and gone to banquets, a man who had fought with the Grande Armée, a man well known to the actresses of Paris, some of them far better known than poor little Thérèse, with her black, crooked teeth and her lisp.

  39

  . . . if she was a girl yet, with a fine, springing bosom . . .

  “IT’S as if we’ve found eternity and it’s very flat,” Tasmin said to Father Geoff, as the two of them trudged along, well to the rear of the company. “I don’t even feel that I’m in a place anymore. Places have boundaries or borders, and this goddamn place has neither.”

  “I like to think of eternity as having a constant temperature, though,” Father Geoff replied. “In the great peace of infinity there should be neither hot nor cold—one can’t say that of Nuevo Mexico.”

  “But are we in Nuevo Mexico?” Tasmin asked, looking about her irritably. In the very far distance a cloud hovered over an indistinct horizon—otherwise there was nothing to be seen.

  Tasmin, bored, had taken to nagging Father Geoff unmercifully, as she had once nagged Kit Carson, but she had grown tired of abusing Kit, who would rarely fight back.

  “Do you see a Mexican?” she asked. “Do you see a hut? What announces to your keen intelligence that we’re in Mexico?”

  “Your husband announced it to me—please don’t be so shrill,” Geoff said. “He thinks we may soon be arrested.”

  ’Arrested? But where’s the jail?” Tasmin asked.

  Monty, hanging in a pouch on his mother’s back, began to fret, as he often did when his mother sounded angry. Talley too had been pouched. Lord Berrybender had announced, haughtily, that he didn’t care to have a nursery in his wagon. In his state of enforced sobriety, Lord B. had become shaky and petulant, striking out at anyone who displeased him, though, when firmly opposed, he was apt to blubber helplessly.

  “Your husband is not given to idle apprehensions,” Father Geoff told Tasmin. “If he
says we’re to be arrested, then very likely we will be.”

  The weather had turned abruptly from hot to cold. Twice a wind had come singing out of the north, a wind so chill that the women could only huddle in their blankets. Once it drizzled all day and then froze—a sheet of ice covered the prairies, which made for painful walking. Twice it snowed; the women crowded all night around inadequate fires, their fronts warm and their backs freezing. Then the sun returned, melted the snows, and turned the prairies atrickle, so that the women had to flounder through mud and slush.

  So unvarying were the prairies themselves that Tasmin had stopped believing that there could ever be an end in sight. Santa Fe, the rich city they were traveling to, came to seem as chimerical as Camelot. Would they ever get there? The mountain men assured her that they would, but the distance remaining to be traveled seemed hardly to shrink. It seemed to Tasmin that it might always be as it was at present, days of walking across endless space, a baby hanging on her back and another growing in her body. The journey they were making seemed almost insanely illogical, based on nothing at all except her father’s inclination to pursue blood sports. When pressed to put a time for their arrival in Santa Fe, the men were so vague in their reckonings that Tasmin wanted to slap them.

  “Six weeks, I’d say, if the Arkansas ain’t in flood,” Tom Fitzpatrick guessed—Jim and Pomp thought they might be there a week or two sooner, if Indians didn’t impede them.

  “Ox travel is slow travel,” Jim reminded her—the statement was so obvious that Tasmin wanted to kick him.

  “I know ox travel is slow travel, Jim—I indulge in it every day” Tasmin reminded him. “I just wanted to know how much farther it is to Santa Fe.”

  “Getting to Santa Fe always takes longer than folks think it will,” he told her.

  “I just want to get there before I have this baby” she said. “Four walls and a roof are a great comfort when one is giving birth.”

  “We’ll be there way before then,” Jim assured her. “You’ve got nearly half a year before that baby comes.”

  “I know—it seems that we’ve a great deal of time,” Tasmin agreed. ‘And yet one day to everyone’s annoyance, Vicky and Buffum and I will be screeching and screaming as we deliver up our bloody brats. I’d just rather not be outside when I’m doing the screeching.”

  She realized that such a comment could mean little to Jim Snow, who had spent his entire life outdoors. He could not be in a room—even a large room—without becoming restless. Due to lack of opportunity, indoor life was beyond Jim Snow.

  “If we don’t make Santa Fe we’ll at least make the Bents,” Jim assured her—the Bents being a company of several brothers who were said to be building an immense trading post near the Arkansas River. Nightly the mountain men allowed themselves to speculate about all the money they could make if the Bent’s big trading venture succeeded. Some were of the opinion that the Bents had paid the Mexican authorities a lavish bribe in order to secure their concession.

  “What I like about Santa Fe are the seftoritas,” Jim Bridger announced one night. “It’s been a dern long while since I’ve danced with a seftorita—or done anything else with one.”

  “Bravo, Jim!” Tasmin said. ‘And while you’re dancing with your dusky seftoritas, perhaps we ladies can find some handsome caballeros to dance with. There are handsome caballeros in this great capital, aren’t there, Kit?”

  Kit felt embarrassed—Tasmin’s unexpected questions always left him feeling tongue-tied.

  “Oh, the Mexicans are always dancing,” Kit said vaguely.

  “Well, and what about these Bents?” Tasmin asked. ‘Any dancing to be had at their establishment?”

  “St. Vrain, maybe,” Tom Fitzpatrick remarked. “He’s their partner—flatters all the Mexican ladies. I expect St. Vrain can dance.”

  “If you’re such a dancer, how come you’ve never asked me for a turn?”

  “Well, we ain’t had a fiddle, I suppose that’s why,” he said.

  “I suppose a cello is not quite the same,” Tasmin admitted. Through thick and thin, despite many abandoned goods, Vicky Kennet had insisted that they must make space for her cello, and they had.

  At night Tasmin had taken to sitting up late with the mountain men. Reticent at first in her presence, they soon relaxed and went on gossiping and cussing into the small hours. Jim was at first uneasy about Tasmin’s penchant for late hours but he didn’t attempt to restrict her. Usually, at night, he was the one to keep Monty, spreading their blankets as far as possible from the sounds of carousing.

  Persuading Jim to keep Monty afforded Tasmin her only chance for a little time alone with Pomp—the latter would usually be standing guard just out of camp. Tasmin could sometimes manage a word with him while on her way to join her husband and her child. Pomp was usually cool on these occasions, so cool that Tasmin felt like pounding him with her fists in frustration. His responses were more brotherly than not, a thing that infuriated Tasmin—yet she refused to give up. She loved the man and wanted him. What was wrong? Sometimes, leaving Pomp, she didn’t make it back to Jim and Monty. She would sit alone on the prairie all night, crying, confused, tormented. Why couldn’t she give up? Pomp didn’t want what she wanted—probably he never would. All the wanting was hers. It left her feeling hopeless.

  One morning Mary Berrybender, who was often out early seeking specimens for Piet’s various collections, found Tasmin sitting listlessly in the grass, not crying, merely looking into space.

  “Why, Tassie, Monty is squalling for the teat,” Mary said. “Why are you sitting way out here?”

  Tasmin lacked the energy for any sort of quarrel with her sister, a girl in many ways so perceptive.

  “You’re wanting Pomp, I suppose,” Mary told her. “Buffum and I and Vicky all think so.”

  Tasmin shrugged.

  “You’re a highly professional trio, when it comes to matters of the heart, I’m sure,” she said. “If you have all concluded that I’m wanting Pomp, then I suppose I am—it hardly means I’ll get him.”

  Monty’s hungry cry, faintly heard, increased her dull irritability. She had once had a fine, springing bosom, and yet now Monty had hung on it for months, with another child soon to take his place at the same milky fountain. Was that the problem? Would Pomp have wanted her if she was a girl yet, with a fine, springing bosom, instead of the mother she had become, whose nipples sometimes dripped with milk?

  Somehow she didn’t suppose it would matter much to Pomp. Such thoughts were idle. Her husband didn’t find her lacking in appeal. Why was she not content with Jim Snow’s lively virility? Why had she been obliged to seek another? And why had it to be Pomp, a man too sensitive for his own good?

  “Poor Tassie,” Mary said. “I suppose it’s always hard for great beauties to be happy.”

  “Great beauty indeed! Don’t flatter me,” Tasmin said. “I was rather beautiful once, but America has quite scraped that away. Now I’m just a peeling, scratched-up wife and mother. We’re all scratched up things. Does no good to dwell on what a beauty I was.”

  “You’re young, though,” Mary reminded her. “What’s lacking is our gentle English climate. You’d soon be beautiful again if we were in a place that wasn’t so dry.”

  “We’ve another day’s trudging to do—why yap about beauty?” Tasmin asked.

  “Because you seem sad,” Mary said. “I do believe that Buffum and I are luckier. She’s very happy with High Shoulders, and I’m most companionable with my Piet.”

  “Then my discontent must be my fault,” Tasmin said. “My Jimmy’s an excellent man—he ought to be enough. What’s wrong with me?”

  “It’s that you don’t have an accepting nature, Tassie,” Mary replied. “I don’t believe you accept anybody. Even I put up with my Piet’s trifling limitations.”

  At this Tasmin put her face in her hands.

  “What I mean to say—it’s that you want more than there is,” Mary went on. “You want more than the
re is.”

  “That’s right,” Tasmin admitted. “I don’t have an accepting nature, and I do want more than there is. How am I to go about correcting these awkward faults?”

  “How could I recommend?” Mary said, looking puzzled. “You’re my big sister. Buffum and I look to you as to a paragon.”

  “Rather a muddled paragon, this morning,” Tasmin told her. “I used to believe that I was really a de Bury, you know. Mama and Lord de Bury were said to have enjoyed a petite liaison before Papa came along. It’s hard to imagine Mama doing much copulating without a brat resulting. I used to suppose I was that brat.”

  “Why shouldn’t you suppose it? Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I no longer think so—I’m too much like Papa,” Tasmin said. “He also lacks an accepting nature, and I’m sure you would agree that he wants too much. If he didn’t want too much we wouldn’t be here.”

  “He’s rather had his comeuppance, though,” Mary said. “Vicky’s got the upper hand now, physically. Papa spends his day cowering, hoping she won’t bloody his nose.”

  “He’s greatly altered by a lack of claret,” Tasmin pointed out. “Wait till we get someplace where there’s liquor—he’ll soon be the one doing the bloodying again. Vicky had better enjoy her dominance while she can.”

  “What will the Sin Killer do if he catches you with Pomp? The thought worries us extremely,” Mary said.

  “Oh, stop worrying,” Tasmin told her. “Pomp’s not interested—he’s too pure for me. I am going to try to learn not to assault him, if I can.”