by Win Blevins
She gawked at him.
“The son of a bitch will be waiting for us.”
Lei put the horse back on some grass and wondered what to do. She sat cross-legged near the dead fire and started drawing flowers in the dust with a stick. She drew an elaborate pattern of stems, leaves, and blossoms.
Sam looked toward the low mountains in the east. “I got no question he’s set an ambush for us.”
“Don’t talk about it,” she said. “It makes my bowels crawl.”
She devoted herself to her drawing. She had brushed a circle clear several feet across. The flowers grew almost like living things.
Sam stood and stared off to the east. “This is gonna drive me crazy.”
“I know where he’s going,” Lei said again, her eyes on her moving hand. “It won’t be hard to find him. Could be hard to do something about him.”
“He’s clever.”
“He likes to hurt people.”
Sam grabbed the Celt and started toward Paladin. “I better get us some fresh meat,” he said.
Lei looked directly at him. “Don’t leave me alone,” she said.
“Don’t . . . ?”
“How do you know he’s not watching us right now?”
Sam fidgeted and sat down at her side. “He must have been watching us right along.”
“He knew where we were going. His buddies told him we were taking the herd to Oregon City. We made no secret that we were going straight on to California. There’s only one trail.”
Sam got the willies. Watching us right along. Watching Esperanza. Seeing when she rode along with her mother or rode ahead with Papa Sam or on either flank. Watching when she led her pony to the river to drink, morning and evening. Watching when she peed. Watching very closely when she was alone. Figuring out when she would be alone. Waiting for the right place and the right time.
Boy could have killed her easily. Could have killed any of them. But that wasn’t his point. He wanted to inflict pain, lots of pain. Torture, then kill.
“Clever bastard.”
Lei looked at Sam like, “What’s up with you?”
“He’s smart,” she said. “He’s strong. He’s wild as can be. Plus all the way crazy and all the way mean. Don’t underestimate him.”
Sam took it in and then shut his mind off that track. He made himself watch Lei draw. He needed some time to get used to Lei instead of Jay. He needed some time to get used to the idea that she was not a man, boy, or ba’te but a woman.
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t want you to treat me any different, now you know what I am.”
“I was just thinking about that.”
“We have a way we are around each other, you and me. You’ve pissed right in front of me. Carry on with that. You cuss, that’s fine. Treat me like your sister.”
Sam got it. She was worried about sleeping next to a man who might want to touch her.
“You’re an attractive woman,” he said in a kind tone. “I wish I’d known all along that you are a woman. But the way we are together is set. No trouble.”
“You sure about that?”
“Maybe not,” Sam said. “I’m uneasy about chasing a killer with a woman, any woman.”
“Watch me,” she joked. She pulled the pistol Hannibal had loaned her out of her belt. “I managed to hit a big, fat cottonwood from three paces the other day.”
Sam chuckled.
“That was using Hannibal’s shoulder to rest my hand.”
She mock-aimed the pistol and said, “Bang!”
He squatted beside her and studied the drawing. It was beautiful, really, the way she made a stem open into a leaf, a leaf give birth to a blossom. The whole pattern looked like an opening up of itself, an emerging.
“I like to do these,” she said. “One of the few things about the desert where the camp is—the only thing, really—is that there are a lot of different-colored sands and soils. I gathered them. I would spend a whole day making a drawing like this and then fill it in with lots of colors.”
Like a Navajo sand painting, Sam thought. He said, “Where is he headed, exactly?”
Without looking up, she said, “To his main camp on the Owyhee River near the mouth of the Little Owyhee.”
“What’s the route?”
“We came across to trade whiskey at Coos Bay. Give me a minute to remember.”
She thought it out by sketching it very roughly in the dirt. “From here over to Tule Lake, about four days. Beyond the divide it’s dry, but there’s an old trail. Then around the south end of a big mountain range, drier. Can’t make it without carrying water.
“Then the hard part—you cross the Black Rock Desert. You have to know the springs. That brings you to the Humboldt, another week. Up the river about three days, then straight north to the Owyhee. About three weeks altogether, traveling steady the way men travel, not families. Most of it is old trails. Just on the Black Rock Desert you have to know the springs.”
“Do you?”
“No way to forget. It’s the driest place on earth. My tongue remembers.”
“You sure he’s going to the main camp.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“He wants to give Esperanza to the men.” She looked directly into his eyes. “To use.”
Neither of them spoke.
“I saw a Digger woman die from being used that way, all those men in a row.”
Sam huffed a hot wind out of his gullet. He twisted the words as they came out. “He’s using her himself every night.”
“No, he’s not.”
“He’s not?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She took a moment to put the last touches on her drawing.
“Now I’m going to tell you why he hates me. I’m his wife. I was.” She waited a moment for Sam to get that and be ready for the next. “He raped me, and he gave me to his men to rape.”
Sam looked into her eyes for a long while. They were steady. He understood some things about Lei but not why she was willing to go up against Kanaka Boy again. And not whether, when the moment came, she would cave in.
“The way I got even was, I cut his nuts off.”
“You what?!”
“I got him out of his mind on laudanum—he loves that stuff—and cut his nuts off. I have them with me, right here.” She touched her belt bag. “In this pouch.”
Sam went for a short walk. When he got back, Lei was halfway finished with another completely different drawing. This one was all swirling stems and tiny leaves. Instead of peace it was rage.
“He’s headed for the Humboldt?”
“No water any other way.”
“Then we don’t need to track him.”
Lei looked up and took his meaning. “Actually, we don’t.”
“He can’t hurt her.”
“He can hurt her. He just can’t engage in sex with her.”
Sam parsed his breath in and out. “He has to cross the Black Rock Desert.”
“For sure.”
“Using springs.”
“That or die, most especially this time of year.”
Sam ran it through his mind again, to be sure. For Esperanza, he had to be very sure.
“Then let’s get there first and wait for him.”
Forty-six
THE WAY THEY treated each other in fact didn’t change. Sam and Lei made good traveling companions.
During the day they were all business, finding a good route. They didn’t dare use the Indian trail. Maybe Boy was waiting behind them in ambush, but maybe he wasn’t. They stayed a couple of divides south of the trail and traveled rougher country.
They made camp without fires—a high level of caution—and munched on dried meat. The packhorse carried plenty of meat and four kegs of water.
The first night out Lei got Sam to tell her his story. How he ran away from home because of Hannibal’s advice. Sam could still quote it exactly: “Everything worthwhile is crazy
, and everyone on the planet who’s not following his wild-hair, middle-of-the-night notions should lay down his burden, right now, in the middle of the row he’s hoeing, and follow the direction his wild hair points.”
Sam told how he made his way to St. Louis and went west with the Ashley beaver brigade. Spent the winter with the Crows. Got caught in a prairie fire and would have died if he hadn’t crawled inside a buffalo carcass. Which earned him his Crow name.
The second night she told how she got infatuated with Kanaka Boy, a Hawaiian who had the sand to stand up to the Brits and outdo them at their own game. How the new bride had been disappointed by the camp, made nervous by the loose women, fearful of the rough men, and then shocked to see how the men and women got drunk and fornicated every night.
Over several days Sam and Lei became friends. And part of what friends did, the way Sam saw things, was steer clear of questions that made the other one uncomfortable.
Lei brought up one tender subject herself. She told him how she’d been horrified at the attack on the Diggers, killing all the men and the elderly and the very young, capturing all the others as slaves. How she ran away, Kanaka Boy caught her and administered the lesson of multiple rape. How she tricked him and got away. “I didn’t want to pretend to be a man. However, I wanted no one, absolutely no one, to be able to report seeing a woman to Boy.”
“You’re tough.”
“No, I’m not. I’m soft inside. I just have to act tough, for now.”
Another night she spoke of something else that was hard for her. “At first it was good to be a man. Horrible to be a woman. So . . . vulnerable. I became a man so no man would touch me. I never wanted to be touched again. But during the winter at Walla Walla . . . It was a such long winter, so much training of horses, so much trading, so much ordinary life. . . .
“When we got to Walla Walla, Julia told me she and Esperanza knew my secret and promised to keep it. Before the winter months passed, though, I lost most of my fear of discovery, and got very tired of my disguise. Especially, I chafed against it—that is the word, no, ‘chafed’?—because one man especially appealed to me.”
“Appealed to you?” Sam was flabbergasted. He hadn’t caught one sign of this.
“Your friend Hannibal. He is very kind and very intelligent.” Sam could see her smile at the darkness. “With his coloring, half white and half Indian, he might even be Hawaiian.
“It was . . . tricky. I couldn’t look at him in, you know, that way. Think of his reaction. Poor fellow, put off, very put off. If I did look at him, though, I knew he would see it in my eyes. . . . So I spent the winter working alongside him with my gaze downcast.”
Sam couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed any of this byplay.
“Do not be deceived, though. I do not dream of Hannibal, nor of anyone who might be the so-called right man. I no longer dream of family and children. I feel . . . ruined for that.
“What I dream of is home. I want to go back to Kauai. I’ve never even seen Hawaii—so much a beautiful name compared to ‘the Sandwich Islands’—but my father used to tell me about them. They are the most beautiful . . . Everything verdant, trees always leafed out, flowers always blossoming. I dream of home. I will put flowers in my hair every morning. . . .
“The English brought my grandparents here, however, half as slaves. I will never have the money to pay one of their ships to take me home.” It was the first time he’d heard bitterness in her voice. “You go to your dream, California. No matter where I go, I am a stranger.”
THE BLACK ROCK Desert looked as far from verdant as anything Sam had ever seen. He knew deserts, from greasewood country like the Mojave to redrock and cedar landscape like Navajo country to the high, sagebrush alternations of basin and mountain between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. He had walked with Jedediah across a stretch of desert west of the Salt Lake so dry that he’d persuaded Jedediah to bury him to the neck in sand and leave him to die. But the Black Rock Desert was something from the human race’s nightmares.
Around it were high, barren mountain ranges. The foothills grew the usual desert foliage, sagebrush, saltbush, rabbitbrush, greasewood, and even a few grasses. No doubt if he scouted around, he would find a little animal life in the hills, some deer, and coyotes, and plenty of reptiles.
Yet Sam had never imagined a desert like this. A dry lake bed, black as tar, flat as a slab of polished marble, and absolutely devoid of any sign of life.
He lifted his field glass and studied it. Black and flat, black and flat. “How far across?”
“You start at sunset, carry water, and get to the hot springs over there by sunrise. They’re right below that notch in the hills.” Sam couldn’t make out any foliage from this distance. “Maybe twenty miles. Hardpan all the way, plenty hard, there’s a blessing.”
They had three and a half kegs of water from the last stream they’d seen.
Sam glassed to the north and the south. Twice as long as it was wide, he estimated.
“He could be ahead of us.” The route they’d taken had been longer and rougher than the trail. On the other hand, they’d pushed like hell. “Is there a way to check?”
“The Indian trail comes over the ridge about there.” She pointed. “If we go back up this wash to the rise, we can see the spring. There he will fill up, and that’s where the trail goes onto the hardpan. From there you couldn’t miss tracks.”
They rode back. Sam glassed the dry lake bed to the northeast carefully, microscopically. The trail came to the lake about two miles north. No tracks. He made sure, no tracks.
The picture of Esperanza’s face flickered into his mind again, and he shoved it away. All week he’d been hard with himself. Don’t think about her. Don’t imagine what she may . . .
Then he saw it, off to the southwest, black, ugly, and way too close.
“Let’s go!” he said, and put the spurs to Paladin.
THE SANDSTORM SLAMMED them quick and hard. Sam figured they were less than halfway to where the packhorse was hobbled. They absolutely had to get back. That horse bore what they would need to survive, blankets and water.
They fought their mounts down the wash. If the route hadn’t been a wash, they would have gotten hopelessly lost. Only the two sides of the gully and the downward slope told them which direction to go.
Lei’s gelding stumbled and refused to get up. Coughing, hacking, and eyes stinging from grit, Sam could hardly see to wrestle the animal onto his feet. When Sam got it done, he decided they’d have to lead the horses. After a dozen steps the gelding lay down on the downwind side of a boulder and refused to budge.
Sam fought him, heaved on the bridle, screamed at him, and kicked his hind end. When Sam finally got the horse on his feet, he couldn’t find Paladin. Then he saw her lying flat in the lee of the next boulder, bigger.
All right. No choice.
He grabbed Lei’s arm, pulled her to Paladin, and sat her on the prone horse. In one motion he snatched Lei’s hide shirt off. Automatically, she covered her breasts with her hands. He wrapped the shirt around her head and used the arms as ties. Then he pushed her down between Paladin’s back and the boulder.
He wrapped his own head in his shirt, snorting to get the damned sand out of his nostrils, rubbing it out of his eyes but only making things worse. Then he wedged himself next to Lei, kicking and squeezing his way down. He’d never been closer to another creature. Sometimes he couldn’t tell what was himself, what was Lei, and what was horseflesh.
He tried not to breathe. If he breathed, he would suffocate.
Slowly, bit by bit, he sipped in little bits of air. He found that if he pulled air in very shallowly and pushed the gritty breath out hard, he might not suffocate. He did this a hundred times. A thousand times. More times than the sky had specks of light. Almost as many as the damned wind had flecks of sand.
He did nothing but breathe and tell himself to do this same damn thing over and over and stay alive.
An hour later, a da
y later, a week later—who knew?—the wind eased. It didn’t stop blowing completely, but it eased.
Sam muttered to Lei, “Give it a few minutes.”
In about half an hour they got to their feet, and so did their horses.
Sam had never felt worse in his life. He had a bad cold in his nose, but the mucus was sand. His ears were clogged with the stuff, and he couldn’t hear. He had entire dunes behind his ears. His white hair could be combed and the yield used for potting soil. There was sand under his belt and in every fold of his privates. It was in the wrinkles behind his knees and between his toes and was threatening to pry all twenty nails right off his fingers and toes. His butt crack felt like someone had caulked it, and his next shit would probably be sand.
Without thought or self-consciousness they both stripped off every stitch of clothing and gear, brushed themselves off, and shook their clothes out. Then they dressed, which was painful, and rode to the edge of the lake bed.
By a miracle the packhorse was alive—flat on the ground but alive. Without hesitation Sam and Lei dipped water out of one of the kegs, swilled it around their mouths, and spat it out. They sniffed it up their noses and snorted it onto the ground. After about five minutes of repeating this wastefulness, they grabbed blankets, shook them out, dunked them in the keg, and gave themselves sponge baths. They used water extravagantly, indecently, absurdly. Not a drop of booze, but they got drunk on water.
When dark fell, they soaked clean blankets, wrapped up in them, and slept like the dead.
Sam was pleasantly surprised to wake up alive.
Lei seemed to be alive as well, and all three horses.
“We’ve got to go back to the last spring,” he said.
She nodded.
Neither of them wanted to waste words, because the sand in their throats still scratched.
At the spring they played in the water like tadpoles. Two human beings were dunked like doughnuts most of the day. The innocence of yesterday’s nakedness, though, was gone. Sam wore a breechcloth, Lei a long shirt. They would have been sexless anyway—that was just their way. Sam wondered whether, after Lei’s rotten experiences, she had just turned that part of herself off. He wouldn’t blame her.