The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “He has left the People,” Mouse Road said.

  “And gone back to the vé’hó’e,” Speaks While Leaving murmured.

  Mouse Road’s dread returned, stronger now, and reinforced by the braid of pale hair in her sister’s hand. Her beloved had cut away a part of himself and left it behind, heading not to his home but into the heart of his enemy’s territory. The last words she had said to him were cruel ones.

  When will you be a whole man? she had asked him, wanting him only to be as other men, to stay with the People, to hunt buffalo, to raise whistlers, and to love her. But he had not stayed; he had gone away again, to the City of White Stone to meet with his father, Long Hair, in the hopes of building an alliance that would save the People and their lands.

  And now, driven away by those words, he had gone back to those who had tried to kill him.

  “What have I done to you?” she asked his spirit.

  “Mouse Road?”

  She turned to her sister, her course decided. “I must go and bring him back. You will have to go home alone. We can hunt for a few days and then you can head north. The Cloud People will be—”

  “No,” Speaks While Leaving said.

  “Yes! My sister, I am going to the vé’ho’e place. You will go north without me.”

  “No, I will go with you.”

  Mouse Road stared. “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “You have your daughter to think of.”

  “And I am thinking of her. I cannot take her all the way home, not by myself.”

  Mouse Road was in agony. “But I can’t leave him there. I won’t just abandon him to them.”

  Speaks While Leaving held up a hand to calm her. “I am not asking you to do that. I am saying that together, we can do it. Together we can find him. I will not let you abandon him any more than I will abandon you. Together, we are stronger.”

  Mouse Road did not know whether to cry in grief or shout with gratitude. And though the dread still growled at her from the depths of her mind, her heart was strong. She was going to find him, and she was going to bring him home.

  Chapter 10

  Friday, April 11, A.D. 1890

  New Republic

  Unorganized Territory

  George took the last swallow of liquor from the bottle, feeling its warmth creep down his throat like a lizard of fire. He tasted nothing of it—probably a good thing considering its raucous quality—but it did help to subdue the sour foulness of his mouth.

  He leaned back against the building’s rough-sawn siding and tossed the empty bottle under its floorboards, where it clanked against those that had come and gone before it. His mind swam a little, but that might have been the sun that had emerged from behind the clouds this afternoon.

  The sun. He grinned up into it, even peering at its insolent face, so bright that it left little streaks of blue and red across his vision. But he was glad it was there. After so much rain—days it seemed, even weeks—he was thankful for its attention. It warmed the skin of his face, the backs of his hands, his knees, even his throat and chest when he leaned back. Warm. Drawing his skin tight around his bones. Warm. But his rear was still cold. His rear and his feet, too. He looked down.

  He was sitting in mud. Leaning against the building—what building he wasn’t sure—he was sitting in mud. Dark mud and green-cast manure and swirls of other stuff he recoiled from identifying. His feet were submerged to the ankles, and his leggings were caked with it. He lifted one foot, wondering if he wore shoes. Scraping one foot with the other, he found that he wore calf-high moccasins. Wiggling his toes, the mud squished and gurgled inside the mocs. His big toe found its way through a hole and George laughed at it.

  “What’s so funny,” someone said.

  Wobble-headed, George looked and discovered a man sitting next to him. It was Red Arrow, a man of the—George tried to remember—yes, of the Cut-Hair People, though he had allowed his hair to grow long and his vé’ho’e clothes were in just as poor a shape as George’s native dress. His deep-set eyes were red-rimmed and his face was as puffy and unwholesome looking as boiled meat. They had been working together for a while now; the two of them and another man. Where was he?

  George turned his head—too fast—and the world slewed in a sickening manner. A gurgle of liquid bubbled up his gullet and added its acid taste to the curdled mash in his mouth. He swallowed against it and took a breath to clear his head. When his vision leveled off, he found sitting at his other side the last member of their trio, a vé’ho’e they both knew only as Ploppy.

  Ploppy was snoring, his long mouth hanging open, his last few teeth jutting out crazily from ulcerated gums. His skin was a field of dark pores that gave him a grey appearance, and his nose was a fiery carbuncle veined with blue spider webs. His clothing, too, was stained, torn, and layered in mud, muck, and worse.

  George turned slowly back to Red Arrow. “Are we drunk?” he asked, surprised to find the English words difficult to pronounce.

  “I cannot say for you,” Red Arrow replied, “but I am not drunk.” He closed his eyes and let the sun beat down on his swollen face. “I am dead.”

  “He’s lyin’,” Ploppy said. “We’re drunk. All three of us.”

  George reached under his breechclout and scratched himself. “How do you know?” he asked, blinking and testing the muscles in his face. “I’ve been like this so long, I can’t tell anymore.”

  “Naw,” Ploppy said. “We’re drunk.” He reached down and scooped up a handful of filth. “There’s no other earthly reason for the three of us to be sitting here in this, ‘cepting that we’re just too drunk to care.” He flung the mud to the ground where it made a sound much like his name. “And I could do with another drink, too. Either of you have any money?”

  “No,” Red Arrow said.

  George absently patted at non-existent pockets. “No,” he said, knowing he had none. He tried to remember how he knew that, but his head was filled with a haze that made remembering as treacherous as slogging through thigh-deep snow in a blizzard. Images rose from the drifts, were swept away by the wind. Dark shapes, bright shapes. He reached for them but they were fluid, amoebic, slithering out of his grasp.

  He remembered having money, remembered walking into town with his hair in his eyes and murder in his heart, but murder not toward any man. No, his fury was not directed toward any living thing, unless a man’s dreams were alive; for it was the dreams and hopes that lived in him that he came to kill.

  In a small shop, he met a large man with a long beard who bought and sold, loaned and collected. The man regarded George as he would a mad dog; an insult that George forgave, considering his appearance. That day, he sold his rifle, his whistler, and just about everything else he owned in order to build a war-chest for the battle he had chosen to fight. The money had turned the trick, too, keeping him well whiskeyed and able to batter down the memories and dreams that tormented him. Whenever they regrouped and charged him again, another silver coin bought another bottle of brown liquor to defend the ramparts of his mind. With every drink, he saluted a memory. He drank to Mouse Road, who gave him love before banishing him from her heart. He drank to Storm Arriving, who gave him friendship before turning away from him in envy. He drank to the unwavering Three Trees Together, who gave him respect, hope, and the dream of a family. And he drank to his father, whose distant, rigid, commanding, abstemious regard had filled George with a loneliness that he had never been able to shake. But most especially, he drank to himself, pouring the liquor on the fire within.

  The battle waged, back and forth, between man and phantom, using up every dollar and peso he could scrounge. For weeks at a time, he would have the upper hand, remembering nothing, but when the money ran out, when he was left with his knife, his rotting clothes, and the small medicine bag that hung around his neck, he began to lose ground. Without drink, the memories returned, the dreams advanced, and hope—damnable hope—turned him on its spit.

  Red Arrow and Ploppy had found him th
en and, recognizing him as a fellow brother-in-arms, inducted him into their tiny troupe. In their company, George begged for coin, spending the last of his dignity for a swallow of backwashed swill. They took work where it was offered—shoveling dirt, shoveling coal, shoveling shit—and kept themselves in a miasma of drink, each to fight his own foes.

  Ploppy drank against tragedy born of a dead wife and children, all taken down by yellow fever like wheat before the scythe. Normally, this would have been a deep sadness, but to Ploppy, it was the work of God, a punishment for having treated his wife so ill, and for having dragged her to the Frontier on a long and arduous journey that ruined her health and destroyed the last shreds of love she ever felt for him. He drank against a God whose retribution was overwhelming, and whose cruelty at having thrown Ploppy’s children into the hazard had utterly broken him.

  As for Red Arrow, neither of them knew what he drank against, though George thought it might have something to do with the dollar-sized patch on his scalp where the hair would not grow. George had heard of men having been scalped while alive, and could imagine the shame that surviving it might bring. But Red Arrow gave them no other clues.

  “Do we have to find some work, today?” he asked, hoping they would not. He looked up toward the end of town.

  New Republic was one of the sloppy gathering places that had sprung up like toadstools after an autumn rain. It was little more than a mudded track toward which faced several buildings of various size, shape, and quality. There was a stablery and smithy with barns and corrals for the upkeep of animals, and a wainwright and a carpentry shop where settlers came for all their building needs. There was the moneylender’s shed, which listed to leeward when the wind was up, and there was the dry goods emporium, standing two stories tall and boasting a loft and glazed windows on both floors. There was a telegraph office—neat and tidy and manned by an officious man with a head like a bean—and then there was Haffner’s, the drinking place against which the three of them leaned, an odd establishment that, due to its unbridled success, had grown from a small saloon into a rambling inn. Already in its short life, it had been added onto so many times that it appeared more like a collection of tossed boxes and crates than a building. Along the street, both townsfolk and settler strolled or stood or leaned against roofposts to chat. A wagon trudged past, pulled by two mules lashed by a shouting driver while at the stable’s hitching rails horses stood, their fetlocks heavy with caked mud. George even saw a whistler at the far end of town, ridden in by one of the settlers who had realized that if the Indians could ride them, there was no reason he couldn’t do it, too. It was a busy day in New Republic, and there was the chance that someone needed some stalls mucked out or some of the prairie sod busted to make way for a lettuce patch or a small crop of rutabagas.

  George didn’t want to work, though, not when the sun was out, but as he stretched in its warmth, he felt the small bag that he wore around his neck move against his chest, and that awoke a strong memory filled with the scent of smoldering sage, the ruddy light of a hearthfire, and the image of an old man, his bony fingers toying with the bag as he considered the fate of his People. He shrank from the memory, and reconsidered what ammunition a day’s work of mindless toil followed by a few coin’s worth of whiskey might provide.

  Before he decided, though, the front door to Haffner’s place creaked open and heavy heels descended the steps toward the planks that gave respectable folk a cleaner passage across the mud puddles between buildings. George looked up as two men stepped down onto the boards, but from his vantage, he could only see one of them.

  The man was tall—or appeared so from George’s ground-based seat—and had dirty boots as did every man in New Republic. Above his boots, however, he was dressed in the plain dark suit of a man who was accustomed to conveyances and not to horseback. As George looked farther up, squinting against the sun that glared behind his head like a saint’s halo, he could only make out the man’s white collar, dark moustache, and wide-brimmed hat. The man spoke over his shoulder to his companion.

  “Watch this,” he said. He reached into his vest pocket and retrieved a bright, five-dollar half-eagle, its golden rim glinting in the sunlight. George, Red Arrow, and Ploppy gaped as the man flipped the coin high up into the air, its edges flashing as it spun in a tall, narrow arc, bright against the sky, and came down edge first to bury itself in a clump of manure.

  The three of them stared at the shitpile, then scrabbled and leapt on it with outstretched hands, each pulling the other back, shoving the other off, laying full length in the muck. Ploppy got the coin first, but it was slippery and spat from his grip like a watermelon seed, landing even farther away. Crawling forward, they tried for it again. George felt his hand touch it, then lose it when Red Arrow slammed against him, then found it again at the edge of his fingers.

  “Leave off!” Ploppy yelled, pulling at George’s hair.

  George jabbed back with an elbow that connected, probably costing Ploppy one of his few remaining teeth, and then pushed forward and grabbed the coin.

  “I got it,” he cried, and pulled his hand close so that Red Arrow could not pry the coin from his fingers. “Ha! I got it,” he said again as he sat up. Red Arrow glared through tired eyes, laboring to breathe. Ploppy held a hand to his mouth, sulking with failure and pain. But George was triumphant. He took the coin and wiped it on his sleeve, which only served to thin the mud that coated it, but it didn’t matter. It was his, and it meant a good, long drink; long enough to share with his sullen fellows.

  He smiled at the coin, and then up at the man who had tossed it to them.

  “I thank you, sir,” he said. “That was most generous of you.”

  But the man, whose enjoyment had lasted only as long as the fight had continued, looked down on George with a revulsion that bordered on the cruel.

  “Trash,” he said, and spat a thick glob into the mud. “Let’s go.” He turned and headed toward the dry goods store, walking past the other man, whose face George now saw for the first time.

  Memories descended upon him, a screaming horde of memories. Memories of spring-leaved glades, summer meadows, and hard winter paths. Memories of digging in the pungent earth, of soil, rock, and bright gold. The gentle scent of slow-match and the acrid smoke of fast fuses. The ground lifting up, rising, unable to contain the force they had exploded beneath it. More gold, a long vein of it, shiny beneath the prairie sun. Pounds of it. He remembered the weight of it in his hands, the heft of the full bags, the stretching of his muscles as he and the other Indians of their mining team lifted a chest heavy with raw gold into the back of a wagon.

  He looked up into that face, saw the old man’s eyes, the grizzled chin, and the long teeth in the crooked smile, and he remembered the only other time he had gotten drunk. That time, it had been to celebrate months of hard toil and the purchase of weapons for the People. That time, George—who had followed his father’s example and eschewed drink all of his life—relented amid a convivial mood and in the knowledge that this transaction was of mutual benefit. But that one bout of drinking, that one moment of weakness, had cost him a cracked head, a betrayed trust, and a fortune in gold.

  And now the man who had exacted that price stared down at him with a look of bemusement. Vincent D’Avignon put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

  “Tabarnaque,” he said. “If it isn’t young Custer. Why, the last time I saw you—”

  George pulled his knife and surged up from the muck, but his inebriation stole his balance and he went down on one knee, nearly skewering himself in the leg. His heart was a moth in a bottle, battering itself within his chest. He swallowed against the sourness that rose in his throat, focused on his target, and slowly got to his feet.

  “You filthy, lying”—

  “Now, hold on there,” Vincent said with a backward step.

  —”cheating, foul”—

  “Let’s talk this over.” Vincent held out his hands to protect himself.
<
br />   —”festering, maggot-ridden asshole.” George felt the antler-grip of his knife rough in his hand, felt the mud smooth beneath his feet, and saw Vincent’s tea-colored eyes white-rimmed with fear. “I’m going to spill your guts, Vincent D’Avignon. I’m going to slosh your shit in the mud and piss on your gizzard.”

  “You’ve expanded your vocabulary since our last meeting,” Vincent said with a nervous laugh.

  “I’m going to use your ball-sack as a coin purse. I’m going to use your prick as a chess-piece.”

  Vincent looked past George. “Hey, you leave that coin alone.”

  He turned and saw Red Arrow and Ploppy fighting over the coin the he had left behind in the mud. Then his knife went flying and stars exploded on the right side of his head. He fell backward into the mud, and Vincent came forward. With a booted toe, he kicked George in the ribs, then in the gut as George rolled into the pain. His breath left him and stayed gone as with a few menacing steps Vincent sent Red Arrow and Ploppy running for cover.

  George lay there, back down in the mud, struggling to breathe as Vincent picked up the antler-hilted knife and walked back toward him. As breath began to flow in and out of his lungs once more, his gorge reacted to Vincent’s kick. He contorted and regurgitated its contents in a spurt of thin, sour puke.

  “Sacré Mère,” Vincent said as he looked down on George. “What a sorry sight you have become, mon ami. I wouldn’t have known you but that you have uncommon good manners for a drunk. Psh. What have you done to yourself?”

  It was too much. George lay there in his own vomit, his head reeling from liquor and violence, unable to do any more.