by Lin Enger
“How much more?” the tall one asked.
The money was in a pocket sewn to the inside of his coat, and Ulysses reached for it now, wishing he’d tucked the notes and silver into a sock, or hidden them someplace on the wagon. On the other hand, it was better to keep things simple, to do whatever was required to avoid trouble. He opened his coat and removed the money, all of it, and then turned the pocket inside out to prove it was empty. He laid out the money in front of him, on the floor of the wagon.
The men glanced around at each other, as if trying to understand this man’s lack of compunction about letting them see his wealth. The tall one reached forward and with his index finger counted and sorted. Then he said, “Thirty?”
Ulysses agreed.
“Or is there more someplace?”
“No, that’s all I have.”
The man’s turtle eyes widened enough to show bright black pupils. “Our rent this time is thirty dollars. And we let you keep the ox and wagon. Is that a fair price?”
“It’s fair if you say it is. Of course I will have to charge you for the meal of eggs. And I suppose you have wives at the agency.” He aimed a thumb in the direction from which he came. “I gave them some of the best jerked beef you’ll find, after your friend Adams tried to steal my potatoes from me. How about this. I’ll give you these”—he separated a dozen silver dollars from the pile and pushed them forward—“and I’ll keep the rest for myself. Then we part as friends.”
“Adams,” the big man grunted from his perch on the buckboard. Then he spoke for a moment in his own tongue.
“He says you should have done like the women do when Adam tries stealing from them,” the tall one declared. “Kick him in the seeds.”
“I’ll remember that next time.”
“We’ll take these, too,” the man said, sweeping the rest of the coins—seven silver dollars—back into his pile. He yanked the brim of the campaign cap down over the dark slits of his eyes and added, “You keep the paper ones.” He gathered up the coins and put them into the side pocket of his coat, then pushed to his feet and swung over the edge of the wagon to the ground.
“Time to let our wealthy friend go his way,” he said. “He must have bones to gather.”
The other two followed his lead and climbed down off the wagon. They all watched as Ulysses hitched up the ox and prepared to leave, filling his canteens with drinking water from the rain bucket, folding up the tarpaulins, and taking his time to squeeze some grease into the wagon’s wheel housings, just to show the men he was not in a hurry to leave on their account. Finally he climbed up on the buckboard and released the hand brake. The air smelled good after the rain. And it was cooling fast as evening came on.
“You’ll need a fire,” he said to the tall one, who’d taken a cottonwood stump and sat there with his rifle on his lap. “Dry out those wet clothes.”
The man looked up at him, squinting.
“I was wondering,” Ulysses said, watching the man’s eyes. “Have you ever heard of a Magpie?”
The man sighed and looked away. “Sometimes they’re mistaken for crows, but they’re not the same bird. The magpie has white shoulders and a white belly. And is smaller than a crow.” His mouth turned down at the corners, as if the idea of mistaking one bird for another disturbed him.
“No, I’m saying Magpie as the name of a man. He’s Cheyenne.”
“I’ve heard that name, yes.” He leaned forward, elbows dropping to his knees. Then he raised his head and called out, “Bull Bear, Leather Top, do you hear this?” and spoke for a few moments, rapidly, a fast stream of words, Magpie being the only one Ulysses recognized.
The big man with graying hair, standing behind the wagon now, brushing out his wet pony, grunted and nodded. He answered in a low voice.
“Bull Bear said Magpie is part of the southern tribe, that he knew him in better days, but can’t say where he might be found. Down in the territories, probably. Or up north in the breaks. He wonders what you want him for.”
“I’d like to talk with him. I have some questions.”
“Questions.”
“Yes.”
The man shook his head. He looked tired suddenly, face hanging down between his wide shoulders. “Where do you come from?” he asked.
Ulysses pointed east. “Minnesota.”
“And why are you looking for him?”
“I read about him in a newspaper piece on the Custer fight. The writer claimed to have spoken with him.”
“Ah.” The man tilted his head to the side and blinked. His eyes were neutral, and his hands had begun to clean the Henry rifle with a soft red cloth, moving with speed and grace as if all on their own. His face was hard but serene, his jaw sharp in the slanting light.
“My brother was there,” Ulysses said. “He was killed there.”
“Many were killed.”
“In the newspaper story, he told about a watch he picked up off the ground when the fight was over. It had a name engraved on the inside. Peter, my brother’s name.” Ulysses started to reach for his own watch, to make the point, but remembered that he gave it to the liveryman in Miles City, for collateral.
“You want your brother’s watch back?”
“I want it for his wife, who gave it to him. Of course, it might not be my brother’s at all. Peter is a common name.”
“How will you tell?”
“I remember what it looks like.”
“I don’t understand. You said you came out here with questions. Now I hear you talking about your brother’s watch. Which is it?”
“Both, I suppose. We got nothing of my brother afterwards—no remains, of course, because he was buried out here. None of his personal things, either, and a watch is something. But it’s more than that too. I want to speak with somebody who was there, who can tell me how things went that day.”
The man’s hands had stopped moving, and his gaze was steady on Ulysses, his eyes narrowing as if to say, Of what use would that be? He straightened a little on the cottonwood stump and asked, “Why should he talk with you?”
“Why shouldn’t he? He didn’t seem to mind talking with the newspaperman. And who knows, he might want to sell me the watch, make a few dollars.”
The tall man stared at Ulysses for another moment or two then looked away and laughed. “If we run across him, we will tell him to shine it up good. We will tell him you’re a man of great wealth and he should make you pay.”
Ulysses took up the driving lines and whistled for the ox to start out. The ox did no such thing.
“Tell me,” said the man from his stump. “Did this brother of yours have a son?”
“He didn’t. Why?”
“No reason,” the man said, and lifted a hand to let Ulysses go.
A snap of the willow switch produced an effect whistling could not, and the ox stepped forward with surprising liveliness, pulling northeast toward Miles City. In falling dusk the trail ahead looked unwelcoming, even treacherous. It was easy to imagine washout gullies, hills breaking off into scree, steep declines with hidden rocks to snap his axles. Ulysses wondered what he ought to believe—whether there was any reason at all to think these men had been honest with him. And he wondered if he’d already had his chance, if he’d already found his man and lost him, and if so, how he might have handled things differently.
“Damn,” he said.
As night deepened and the cold settled around him, Ulysses drove on, looking for a place to pull off and sleep, telling himself he was not going to fail in this search, trying to persuade himself that he was doing exactly what he must do. And before long the tightness across his shoulders had loosened a bit, and he started working out tunes with his mouth harp, indulging himself meanwhile with memories of the years when his sons were young and liked to hear him play—insisting on it before bed, in fact, as if his poor rendering of “Oh! Susanna” or “Amazing Grace” was a prerequisite to sleep.
13
The Smoot’s
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sp; It wasn’t easy, getting out of Bismarck. They had to wait and be sure that Danny had dodged the headache. And of course they had no interest in being caught and sent home by the sheriff, either. On that first afternoon Eli had stolen into town for something to tide them over—apples, bread, and Danny’s favorite, honeycomb. Then after waiting all through the next morning and afternoon, they walked west out of town in darkness, found a skiff along the riverbank, and used it to cross the Missouri. The rail tracks led them to the depot in Mandan, where they waited till sunup in a shack at the back of an overgrown weedlot. At seven o’clock, after a westbound had screeched and ground to a stop, the boys made claim to a vacant car, whose jouncing floor had rattled their teeth all the way to Dickinson, and here, as in Bismarck, they’d found a place to hide until they were ready to try the rails again, after dark. By Eli’s calculation they had been gone four days and four nights, not counting the night they left, and time was starting to blur.
The abandoned livery stable, out back of a brick hotel, had a dry dirt floor, a tack room with old harness leather, a box of rotting oats, and piles of hardened lime in burlap bags. Settling in, they lunched on biscuits scavenged from the hotel’s rubbish bin and played a two-hand faro of their own invention, using for chips the copper rivets they found in a cobwebbed drawer. Finally, around suppertime, they gave in to exhaustion. Danny had been dead to the world for hours, but Eli was only half asleep, not quite willing to let go. All evening he’d been listening to the murmur of distant voices—men carousing in the saloon—the occasional shout or laugh rising above the drone, and now he heard the crunch of boots. He came fully awake and sat up to peek out through a splintered siding board. He could make out a compact man wearing a neat white hat, an open coat that came to his thighs, and a white shirt with a stiff collar. The man strode forward and stopped a yard or so away from the wall. Eli was able to see only his boots now, which shone in the moonlight. Then came the rustle of cloth, and before Eli could turn away, a stream of urine splashed into the dirt not a foot from his face and splattered against the outside of the wall. A hot bead of it caught him in the corner of one eye, and Eli swore beneath his breath.
The man pissed for a long time, sighing. Then as he finished, a coarse voice cut through the silence: “Take your time there,” it said. “Finish up nice and proper. Then put it away and turn around, slow.”
Through the crack in the wall, Eli watched the boots pivot as the man turned. “What do you need, friend?” the man said.
“Whatever you can give me in the way of cash money. You’ll need to pull your wallet from that fancy coat of yours and toss it over. And you’ll want to be nice and smooth about it to show me what a cooperative sort of fellow you are.”
“Maybe you should put that away first.”
Eli lowered his face close to the dirt floor and was able to see the men from the waist down. At thigh level the second man held a knife with a long blade, curved just a bit, a skinning knife. The other man’s hands were empty, his fingers not clenched but open and loose next to his thighs.
The man with the knife said, “You came in this afternoon on the train. Saw you in the hotel. You got a nice room there, and you bought yourself a nice meal. Tell me, where’d you get that pretty hat you’re wearing? New York City?”
“Washington, D.C.”
“The capitol. No shit.”
“No shit.”
The voice of the first man, the one with the hat, reminded Eli of his father’s voice at times: careless, to the devil with the consequences. He remembered the night the banker came to visit, not long after the meeting in which Ulysses spoke up in favor of the girl from the whorehouse being buried behind the church. The banker, who claimed to speak as a friend, told Ulysses that he ought to start keeping his opinions to himself. That if he didn’t, it might get hard to find people in town who wanted to pay him for his work. To which Ulysses had replied, “I’ll say what I think when it pleases me, and I guess folks will do with their money whatever they like.”
The .32-caliber Smoot’s was loaded—all but the firing chamber—and Eli needed only to reach inside his coat, rotate the cylinder one click, and pull back the hammer. Then he crawled along the dirt, careful not to drag the toes of his boots, stood up, and placed a hand on the door. He recalled how badly it was warped and how tightly it fit in the old frame and told himself not to get stuck halfway out. The advantage of surprise was something he needed. He laid his shoulder against it and shoved with the force he used on the milk cow back home when she stepped on his foot. The door sprang wide and Eli nearly went down, catching himself as he stumbled and then leveling the Smoot’s at the man with the knife. The man leapt backward and crouched, blade held low before him. He was younger than Eli had thought he was, a boy in fact: his face in the moonlight thin and pitted with scars, his hair lank on his shoulders, his body frail inside a coat and pants too large for him.
Arm extended, Eli sighted along the top of the small barrel, drawing a fine bead at the center of the boy’s chest. No one moved or spoke. With a rush of pleasure and fear, Eli thought, They’re all waiting on me. He wanted to tell the boy to drop the knife, but he didn’t trust his voice. Or he could shoot the boy down and be done with it. He lowered his aim so as to take him in the leg, up toward the top where there might be some meat. And then the man from Washington broke the spell, his voice quiet and self-assured.
“Now, Sir, is the time to leave,” he said, and plucked off his hat and leaped forward, sweeping the air with it. The boy stumbled backward in his oversize boots, went down on all fours, then got up and ran away down the alley.
The man brushed his hat with his fingers, then set it back on his head. Eli lowered his gun and released the hammer. As he put the little weapon back in his coat pocket, Danny’s voice called from inside the livery, uncharacteristically pinched. “Eli? Eli?”
“I’m here, it’s all right. Come on out.”
Danny’s white face peeked around from behind the door. Eli motioned to him, and his brother came forward cautiously, as if he were moving on river ice and afraid of falling through.
“Hey.” Eli put an arm around him. “Sorry that had to happen.”
The man put out his hand to shake and Eli took it.
“Who are you?” Danny asked him.
“William Hornaday,” he said. “And your brother here just saved my bacon. Or I’m guessing it’s your brother.” He patted the front of his coat and reached inside for a cigar, which he planted in his mouth. When he struck a match to light it, the flame shook in his hand and went out. “Lord, I hate knives,” he said. “Are you boys hungry?”
Probably on account of the gnawing ache in his stomach, Eli did not think to question this man’s intentions. Nor did he pause to consider what sort of help he might be in a position to offer. He and Danny ran back into the livery for their bedrolls then followed Hornaday up the alley, cutting through between the saloon and hotel, and climbing the steps to the lobby.
It was a fine building, with a bronze bust of Lincoln on a marble pedestal and a high receiving desk. Red carpets were scattered across the glistening oak floorboards. They followed Hornaday all the way up to the third floor, to a quiet, high-ceilinged room that was lit with oil lamps in every corner. There were two beds, each with a nightstand and a china washbasin.
“Leave your bedrolls here and we’ll find out if there’s anything left for dinner.”
In the dining room Hornaday ordered a meal for the boys: game hens, boiled potatoes, yams, late-season cob corn, glasses of milk. “And make sure they’re generous portions,” he instructed the waiter. “Make certain the cook understands.”
“Yes, sir. Can I get anything for you?”
“Whiskey, straight up. An Irish blend, if you have it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Eli tried to be polite when the food arrived. For a minute or so he resisted picking up his fork, but soon he bent close to his plate and went to work, Danny likewise. They made fast work
of the hens, stripping the wings and thighs and neck to get every last fiber of the greasy meat, then turned to the corn and potatoes before finishing up with the yams, which were cooked in brown-sugar syrup so sweet it made Eli’s eyes water. He was aware of Mr. Hornaday across the table, sipping his whiskey and stroking his black beard, eyes glittering behind his spectacles.
“Why don’t you boys tell me what brings you out here, all on your own, to this godforsaken end of the world,” Hornaday said after the waiter had taken their plates. “Then I’ll tell you what brings me. I’m guessing your parents don’t know what’s become of you.”
Eli’s stomach went cold, and he glanced at his brother.
Hornaday tapped the table with his fingers.
“They know where we are,” Eli said. “But you don’t have to believe me.”
The man lifted a hand, his signal to the waiter, who spun on his heel and came nearly on the run, weaving through tables, his hair shining with oil, a curving wet loop of it falling in his eyes.
“Is there any dessert in the kitchen?” Hornaday said.
The young man rattled off a list as he stared at the upper corner of the room, as if the menu were printed there. Pumpkin cake, pumpkin pie, apple cobbler, baked custard, bread pudding.
“What strikes your fancy?” Hornaday asked the boys.
Eli glanced at Danny, who looked almost sick, his eyes bulging from everything he had stuffed into himself. There was a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“Well?”
“Pumpkin pie,” Eli said, knowing his brother’s taste for it. “For both of us, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Danny?” Hornaday asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Danny said, nodding.
“Very good then—two pieces. And I’ll have the custard,” he added, shooing off the waiter. He took a jackknife from his pocket and began trimming his nails. Eli expected the questions to start in again, but Hornaday only smiled, his white teeth shining behind his drooping mustache. “I didn’t mean to pry,” he said.