Whiskey Kills

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Whiskey kills, and it will keep on killing unless we outlaw this demon liquid killer across the continent, unless we remove the blinders that keep us from seeing, unless we forget the sadness in the face of a broken-hearted grandfather named Teepee That Stands Alone.

  How much longer will we let whiskey kill? Someone in the Indian Territory is striking back. These “Whiskey kills” are righteous, some people say. Maybe these “Whiskey kills” will make the leaders in Washington City take notice. Maybe The Great White Father will see the light.

  Maybe these attacks against whiskey runners is the beginning of a new Indian War. Do our leaders in Washington, in Austin, in Topeka and Denver, want another war? Can they blame peaceful Indians fighting to protect their granddaughters and grandfathers against men who kill with poison whiskey? Would you do anything less than these Comanches are doing?

  His Will Be Done. Comanche will is being done.

  If I were a whiskey runner in the Indian Territory, I would fear for my life. Especially were my name Dakota.

  * * * * *

  Daniel lowered the paper. Leviticus Ellenbogen, face flushed, fists clenched, snarled. “Read the editorial, Killstraight.”

  “I think I just did,” Daniel said.

  A hand struck at him. Daniel closed his eyes, expecting a blow, but the agent ripped the paper from his hands. “I despise a smart aleck, Killstraight. Almost as much as I hate being made a fool of.” He turned the page. “Here, let me just find a section. Yes, here. ‘We do not know the temperament or philosophy of the newest agent in charge of the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches, but we do know that the last such agent is now serving a prison sentence for collaboration with whiskey runners!’ She implies that I am as corrupt as my predecessor. I shall sue the wench for libel.”

  He wadded the first edition of The National Temperance Leader into a ball and threw it at Daniel. “Frank Striker, my interpreter, brought this from Dallas this afternoon. He was down there at my request, trying to raise funds from Texas churches of all faiths to help you people! Needless to say, once they read that paper, the priests, the preachers, and the rabbis were all hesitant to donate any funds to help you! To help me! And this . . . this . . . Patty Mullen, curse her soul, she was not content to print this inflammatory prose in Dallas County. She wired her story to various papers in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Detroit, and Washington. Even before Mister Striker galloped back here, I was being delivered telegrams by the score.”

  Ellenbogen stopped only to catch his breath.

  “The Secretary of the Interior wonders what I am doing here. President Cleveland is questioning the judgment of putting me in charge. Reporters from Washington and New York want to know the same. On the other hand, a Dallas editor wired to ask why I have a renegade Indian policeman running around killing white men!”

  “I haven’t killed anybody.” Daniel rose, his own anger building.

  “No? I’m starting to wonder. I’ve tried to help you, Killstraight. I’ve tried with all my might, within all my means. But this has gone too far.”

  “It had gone too far when Sehebi’s life was snuffed out,” Daniel said. “It had gone too far when Seven Beavers was poisoned. I did not ask this woman to write such an article.”

  “She’s a firebrand.” Ellenbogen’s shoulders sagged. “Like you. We don’t need firebrands.”

  He would get nowhere fighting with Agent Ellenbogen. So Daniel walked away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Some of what Patty Mullen had written disturbed him. For one, she had suggested that Daniel might be the one running around avenging Comanche deaths by murdering and mutilating whiskey runners. More importantly, Daniel feared that Carl Quantrell would not let her attacks on him go without retaliation. On the other hand, Daniel had never seen his name in a newspaper before, and that made him feel, well, important, although some of her phrases irked his pride.

  More boy than man . . .

  Shorter and more rotund . . .

  Handsome, she had described him, but then had to add in an Indian sort of way.

  What had she meant by that?

  He took the newspaper with him when he left Ellenbogen, and rode home, read the Leader again, including the editorial this time. After that, he tried to translate what he could for Rain Shower, Ben Buffalo Bone, and their uncle. Cuhtz Bávi, however, listened only a few minutes before yawning and saying that such Pale Eyes stories bored him, and he retired to his teepee for an afternoon nap. At least Ben Buffalo Bone and his sister listened until Daniel had finished, and let him read without interruption.

  Once he had finished, he folded the crumpled paper, and looked at his friends for a reaction.

  Ben Buffalo Bone’s yawn matched that of his uncle’s. “I am hungry,” he told his sister.

  “That’s all you have to say?” Daniel said. “What do you think of this woman’s words?”

  He shrugged. “Pale Eyes words. They mean nothing to The People. My uncle is right. This story, it is good, I think, and I am glad you like it, that you enjoy how she is writing about you, but The People tell better stories. Stories with buffalo and ravens and bears and wolves. Stories about counting coup and stealing horses and killing Mexicans. I do not think many people will pay Pale Eyes money for such a thing as that. It is not hard like a Pale Eyes book. It will not last long. It will not last as long as the stories The People tell.” He pointed at the paper, then shrugged again. “Have you told this story to Teepee That Stands Alone?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It is hard to believe that he would talk to a Pale Eyes woman. There is his power to think of.”

  “He just talked to her,” Daniel said, “through me. He did not touch this woman, did not use anything made by any taibo. His puha remains strong.”

  “I am still hungry.” Ben Buffalo nudged his sister.

  “Why don’t you find a wife?” Rain Shower snapped. “I tire of making food for you.”

  “Why don’t you take a husband?” He grinned at Daniel.

  She rose rapidly.

  “What do you think of this story?” Daniel blurted out.

  “She finds you handsome.” Rain Shower glared at him. Daniel swallowed. In his translation, he had edited out in an Indian sort of way. “Why does she say this?”

  “Haa!” Ben Buffalo Bone laughed. “Pale Eyes woman does not speak the truth. My brother is not so handsome. Not as handsome as Teepee That Stands Alone, at least, not according to this teller of stories. Don’t be angry at my brother, Rain Shower. The Pale Eyes woman who tells this story likes that old puhakat more than she admires this Metal Shirt. Is that not right, Bávi?”

  Big mistake, Daniel thought. I never should have read this article to them. He felt a little hurt, maybe angry, at their response, Ben Buffalo Bone’s indifference, Rain Shower’s anger. What would they know, anyway?

  “News-pa-per,” Rain Shower said in English, then returned to her own language. “My brother is right. What good are such words? What good is such paper? It makes your hands dirty with black dye. It is good to help start a fire, but not as good as wood. Such pa-per is good only to stuff in a chimal to protect a warrior from the arrow of an enemy. I do not think much of this story. It does not tell you anything that you did not already know.”

  Daniel stared. Except for the death of Toyarocho, he thought. He’d have to send a wire to Vaughan Coyne about that suicide, find out what his lawyer knew, or would say, about the death. In fact, he had plenty of questions for Vaughan Coyne. His lawyer claimed to be his friend, a protector, but Daniel was starting to think otherwise. Maybe he should write Hugh Gunter or Harvey Noble, instead. Maybe he should write all of them.

  After they had arrived at the reservation, Gunter said he had to return to Muskogee. Noble had decided that he wanted to nose around some more. The federal deputy hadn’t exactly said where he intended to do this nosing, but he had ridden west. Toward Greer County, Daniel expected. Still, Daniel could send word to Noble at Fo
rt Smith. Maybe it would be there when he returned. He could definitely write Gunter. And Coyne. But what should he say to Coyne? What . . . ?

  “You like this Pale Eyes woman?” Rain Shower’s voice brought him out of his deep thoughts.

  “She saved my life,” Daniel explained. “Stopped Quantrell from killing me.”

  Rain Shower snorted. “Did you ask this Pale Eyes woman if she was called Da-ko-ta?”

  Daniel laughed. “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe you should!” she barked, and ran for the teepee.

  Ben Buffalo Bone laughed. Daniel didn’t find anything amusing. Shaking his head, he balled up the newspaper and pitched it into the fire.

  “My sister is right. It burns good,” Ben Buffalo said. “But not long.”

  “I need to write the lawyer in Wichita Falls,” Daniel said, staring at the blackened ball slowly crumbling in the flames.

  “More Pale Eyes words.” Ben Buffalo Bone yawned again. His stomach growled.

  “Toyarocho is dead,” Daniel said.

  His friend straightened, suddenly somber. “You should not speak the name of he who is traveling to The Land Beyond The Sun.”

  “I know.” Daniel sighed, eyes fixed on the remnants of the newspaper in the fire. “What do you know about the slash of an enemy’s thigh?”

  “Ah. Yes, I have never done such a thing. But I have never taken coup. I am too young. I was too young, I mean, when we rode free as the wind. That is a question for someone older, wiser. Quanah or Teepee That Stands Alone. I asked my uncle, but he says it is not the way of The People.”

  Impressed, Daniel looked away from the fire and into the eyes of his best friend. “You asked this?”

  “Haa.” Tapping his badge. “I am a Metal Shirt. We are to ask questions. Is that not so?”

  “It is so.”

  “I told Agent Elbow. Did he not tell you what my uncle said?”

  Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “No. He did not.”

  Shaking his head, Ben Buffalo Bone leaned forward. “I do not know what to think of this agent. He should have told you. I told him while you were visiting the Tejanos. He should have told you. I thought it might be important.”

  “It is important. You tell me.”

  “I will. It is a sign. That is what Cuhtz Bávi tells me. It is the mark of a Papitsinima.”

  “Papitsinima,” Daniel repeated. Lakota. Sioux.

  Nodding, Ben Buffalo Bone said: “There are no Papitsinima here. Papitsinima dare not come to the land of The People.”

  Daniel agreed. “They are penned on their own reservation,” he said sadly in English, then, head bobbing, spoke to Ben Buffalo Bone in Comanche. “These marks were not made by Papitsinima. No, but there are people who would have seen that sign. In Dakota Territory.” He rose. “Dakota,” he said again, and went to his cabin to read his pencil tablets.

  * * * * *

  “Do you believe in visions?”

  The voice, Patty Mullen’s voice, wakes him. He rises, uncertain, lost in the gloaming. Above him, he hears the cry of a hawk. The wind blows, pushing toward a garden on some small hill. Long Knives have planted trees, but they are young, and he does not think they will survive. The wind bends them like the blades of grass.

  He hears the death song of a Kiowa.

  He walks through a field of yellow flowers, up the rise, to a stone house. The Kiowa, Tséeyñ, stands in front of the house. His chant stops. The wind blows harder.

  “Why do you sing your death song?” Daniel asks.

  “I don’t.”

  Daniel steps back. It is no longer Tséeyñ, but Coyote Chaser, the ancient Yamparika.

  “Why are you here?” Daniel asks.

  “I am old. It is the way of The People. I die alone.”

  “It is true,” Daniel says, bowing his head. The People would abandon the old. Men or women; it did not matter. When a Comanche became too old to help, too big of a burden, The People cast them out. Harsh. Too harsh for some taibo to understand, but The People lived in a harsh land.

  “You are no better than Maman-ti of the Kiowa!” a voice cries out. The voice is that of Teepee That Stands Alone, but it is a marsh hawk, sitting on the stone building, that is talking. “You are lower than Maman-ti.”

  “What happened to Coyote Chaser?” Daniel asks the hawk.

  Laughing, the hawk flies away.

  “Look inside,” the bird calls.

  Daniel looks. The yellow flowers are now wooden crosses, and marble stones. A graveyard. Yet the house of stone remains, only the building is small. White and gray stones set in dark mortar, a smooth roof of stone, and a door of iron, but the door is secured with a padlock.

  “Come out,” Daniel says, and steps away.

  The wind blows the padlock away, and the door swings open. Seven Beavers, the dead Penateka, crawls out of the house. No, not a house, but a tomb. Worms have eaten his flesh. His eyes are gone.

  “Why am I here?” the dead warrior asks.

  A kitten, lying on Seven Beavers’s shoulder, mews. It spits out blood.

  Daniel steps back. “You are dead,” he says. Eyes locked on Seven Beavers, and the baby cat. “You are both dead.”

  Seven Beavers lifts his right hand. He’s hold a ceramic stoneware bottle. He drinks. Crimson pours from both corners of his mouth. He is drinking blood.

  The dead kitten mews.

  The bottle falls, but the wind blows it away.

  “Remember,” the hawk cries from above the wind, “Maman-ti.”

  * * * * *

  His eyes opened wide, and he unclenched his clammy hands. It had been a nightmare. No. He realized he was sitting up, an Echo pencil tablet in his lap. He hadn’t been dreaming. He had been wide awake.

  The People had never been what Daniel would call deeply religious, certainly not as devout as the school fathers and school mothers back at the Carlisle Industrial School, not even as religious as Agent Leviticus Ellenbogen. Yet all of The People held magical dreams and visions as sacred.

  Not that what he had just experienced was a vision, but it sure felt like it. Sweating, he shook his head, gripped his pencil, and began writing what he could remember, what the people had said, everything, before his recollections of the nightmare or vision quickly vanished.

  He was still writing when hoofs sounded, and someone shouted his name. Daniel closed the tablet, stuck the pencil on his ear, and scrambled outside.

  Twice Bent Nose dropped from his saddle as Ben Buffalo Bone darted out of his teepee.

  “It is Coyote Chaser!” Twice Bent Nose yelled at Daniel. “The medicine man at the soldier fort says for you to come quick. Coyote Chaser is dying.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Guilt rocked his stomach like waves in a gale. He stood at the cot in the post hospital, staring down at the pale features of the old Yamparika. Coyote Chaser’s breath rumbled, his eyelids lay heavy, Roman nose prominent on a slackened face, silver hair wet from sweat, plastered on a dingy pillow. No longer did the cocky chief look arrogant. Instead, he seemed feeble, ancient . . .

  A dying old man.

  Dying alone.

  Just a few weeks ago, Daniel had ridden to Huupi in the southern edge of the reservation trying to gather evidence that would prove Coyote Chaser had poisoned the Penateka named Seven Beavers, but Daniel knew better now. He wondered why he had even suspected Coyote Chaser of such a crime.

  “I am told he has no family,” Major Becker said behind him.

  Nodding, Daniel sighed. “No one.” Thinking: Not any more. His wife, his family, they will not help him now. It is not The People’s way.

  He recalled the words of Twice Bent Nose: Do not grow old.

  “Patrol found him at the confluence of West Cache Creek and the Red. Sergeant Andrews probably would have left the old man there, but they found this with him.”

  Daniel turned to the doctor, saw the bottle in his hand. “That’s why I sent for you, Sergeant.”

  He took the bottle, s
haking it, finding it empty, turning the cold piece of stoneware in his hand, looking at the letters chiseled into his brain.

  Coursey & Cox Bottling Works

  Home Brewed

  GINGER BEER

  Dallas, Texas

  “Bad whiskey?” Daniel asked. “Poisoned?”

  Becker shook his head. “I don’t think so. He won’t eat. Won’t respond to any treatment. He just lies there, wasting away. Like he’s willing himself to death. His lungs are in wretched condition, and I can only guess his age, but he could be near or even past eighty. He has just worn himself out.”

  “Yes.” Daniel handed the bottle back to the surgeon. He remembered the trip to Fort Worth. “He should not have come with us to Texas. He was too old for such a trip.”

  Yet he suddenly smiled, picturing Coyote Chaser sitting in the Queen City Ice Cream Parlor beside Quanah Parker, licking the peach ice cream with the relish of a young boy. He had looked fine then, hadn’t turned sick until later. The smile disappeared. He remembered how Teepee That Stands Alone had lost his temper in the parlor. Daniel saw the marsh hawk from his dream, and his dark eyes narrowed.

  Major Becker was talking. “Sergeant Andrews brought him to the agency, but Mister Ellenbogen wasn’t there, and Frank Striker didn’t know when he would return. So he came here.”

  “I’m glad,” Daniel said.

  “Well.” Becker tossed the bottle onto a nearby cot.

  The hospital was crowded again, windows open but failing to cool off the building. Soldiers complained, sweating, cursing their ill luck and their maladies, a few of them staring silently at the doctor, Indian policeman, and dying man.

  “I can’t keep him here, Sergeant,” Becker said apologetically. “There’s nothing I can do for him. He’d be better off among his own kind. And I’ll need every bed I can get. We’re seeing a rash of malaria and dysentery, which comes like clockwork this time of year.”

  “I understand.” Although he didn’t.

  “Sergeant Andrews’s patrol found a case of those bottles,” Becker said. “Most of them were empty. Trooper Brinkerhoff asked me to tell you that, when you came in. They rode off back south after they got fresh mounts and more rations. Brinkerhoff said he needed to tell you something, too, something about a man named Dakota.”