by Win Blevins
The chaps liked her. They called her, as she asked, Cotton Tail. That was because her hair was so fair, almost white. And the color was, well, it was her true color. Bit of bawdy humor there.
Rawl Cooke drifted back into a fantasy of the naughty things Cotton Tail did with him, and to him, and sometimes all over him. His bottom rocked gently in his saddle and in his mind he rocked raucously between her thighs.
Probably the whore who called herself Cotton Tail would have been pleased, fleetingly, to know that the last fantasy that cute limey soldier ever had was of her own white tail.
“Stop. Stop right there!” came the voice. The sergeant turned toward the rocks. Shit, a slug! Seemed to whine by just in front of the sergeant’s hand holding the reins.
Aw, shit! The sergeant’s horse shied. Crow-hopped clear off the road. Gawddammit! Lost his feet and went over sideways!
Thumped there onto the ground, the breath knocked out of him and his boot pinned under the damn horse, Sergeant Brock made a field command decision. He was pissed off, and he intended to fight.
Before he got the carbine all the way out of the scabbard, a .44 slug entered Sergeant Brock’s chest cavity and pierced all the way to his guts, destroying vital organs and life willy-nilly.
Private Cooke might well have survived. He exercised control of his horse. But he hesitated, coming out of a reverie. When he saw the sergeant go for his rifle, Cooke reached for his sidearm. It was the last movement he made alive. The slug blew out his heart. He stayed in the saddle for several long seconds, dead, swaying, before his boots levered out of the stirrups and his thoughtless body thumped to the earth.
The horses, well trained, stood still.
Smith stood over the sergeant, angry. Goddammit, why had they gone for their guns? He’d made up his mind not to kill anybody. Looking at two slaughtered human beings, he felt sick. Nauseated.
He got onto his knees, slipped an arm under the sergeant at the waist. Then he had to back away and wait to see if he would retch. He didn’t.
He made up his mind to it and lifted the sergeant off the ground at the waist. The big man was amazingly heavy and cumbersome. But he had to get them away from the road, where no one would find their bodies for a while.
Fifteen minutes later he was changing clothes. He took the written orders from Sidney Barracks. Then he collected their weapons. He felt like a thief, and he hated it. All right, yes, he would take the sergeant’s field glasses. And naturally the horses.
Goddammit. Goddammit.
Randall Halstead was a little drunk. Not drunk enough to be happy, nor to be falling down. Just enough to be mean. More important, to be cunning.
Also drunk enough for his scar to itch. Whenever his face got flushed, the white scar alongside his nose itched like the devil. He rubbed it.
“Let’s whip the tiger!” he rasped loudly. Diphtheria had left his voice a permanent rasp. He put a Chinese coin on seven to lose. He’d bet every card to lose tonight, and had talked his newfound companeros into going against the tiger on losing numbers. In faro you could bet any card to come up winning or losing. They called the game the tiger because of the fancy tigers painted on the faro boxes.
Tonight was a night to bet on all cards on the losing side, Randall told his gambling buddies. Losing was in the air. The damn soldiers who came for the Injun were going to lose that nigger, and the Injun was going to lose his wretched life. Randall had been from soda to hock a half-dozen times now, and he was consistently losing. His fellow gamblers felt a little irked at losing at faro, but that was fine and dandy—irked was what Randall needed them.
He just wished those soldiers would show up while everybody was primed. Where the hell were they, anyway? He’d given that towheaded kid four bits to watch and let him know when they came for the prisoner. It was already dark now.
Randall figured his drunkenness was just about right. If he was normally half horse, half alligator, right now he was all alligator, and he meant to bite somebody’s ass off. Anybody who got between him and his new companeros and that Injun.
He’d fixed his mind on the Injun yesterday while he and Ned, his brother, were burying Ben on the bench above the house. Ben, the last of Randall’s family. Killed dead by that sneaking, slinking, knife-wielding Injun bastard.
All day yesterday Randall felt numb. He moped around the place and stared at the cattle and didn’t give a cow pie and even got into a Texas-sized argument with Ned. He wondered whether he wanted to raise cattle anyway. He and Ned could do it, but when you didn’t have a son, what was the point? He sat on his bed and looked at the picture of his wife Moira, his daughter Amy, and Ben in front of the Texas house—all of them gone now—and asked aloud, mournfully, “What’s the point?” He was so numb his lips would hardly shape the words.
The truth was, everywhere he looked that day Randall Halstead saw Ben, seventeen years old, lying there in the barnyard, his guts splayed out into the dust. He didn’t want to see it, he hated seeing it, but he couldn’t stop.
So he decided, this morning, to scourge his mind of that picture. He decided that the way to get rid of the picture forever was simple: he would kill the little Injun with the knife. And the little Indian was in the Ogallala jail, where Eric Sunvold took him. That idiot Sunvold.
Now Randall knew that the little one had got away. He would deal with Sunvold about that later. He thought maybe Sunvold deserved a horsewhipping. The big ass thought he was a hell of a hand, but he couldn’t hit the ground with his hat in three throws. But right now the old Injun was in the jailhouse down the street, and the goddamn army was coming after him, and half the town was riled about it, and Randall Halstead knew how to take advantage. Unless the army boys sent half an army. And this fine edge of drunk would only help.
Randall walked to the bar, not even having to navigate carefully, got another bottle, and brought it to the faro table. “Come on, boys,” he growled, “let’s enjoy ourselves before the tiger eats all our money.”
He scratched the scar alongside his nose.
It went slick as an eel on ice for Smith. The sheriff’s office was closed, but a towheaded boy lounging around in front told Smith he knew where the deputy’d gone for a drink. The boy disappeared into one saloon, came out with a little man who must be the deputy, and ran across the street into another saloon.
Smith thought he looked fine for the white folks. The uniform jacket he’d taken from the big sergeant covered the .44-caliber hole in the blouse. No part of the uniform fit, but none would have if Smith had really been in the army either. The government just didn’t accommodate men six and a half feet tall. Smith’s stolen orders looked fine, too—they just said to turn the prisoner over to Sergeant Brock. They didn’t even mention a second soldier.
The deputy was a small, bent fellow with an oversized head and a sweetly misshapen smile. He might have been eighteen or thirty, and Smith wondered if he was retarded. He offered Smith his hand and introduced himself in a light, girls voice, “I’m Ramsel, the deputy.” His handshake was squishy. Smith wondered if Ramsel was the fellow’s first name or his last. He took the orders from Smith, looked at them, and moved his lips as though reading them, then unlocked the jailhouse door. Though Smith was prepared with a story about a soldier back there twenty miles so drunk he couldn’t sit a horse, sleeping it off, Ramsel didn’t ask why the sergeant was alone.
“What tribe is this buck?” asked Smith, deliberately using an offensive word.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a Sioux from a Comanche,” the deputy answered in his high, soft voice.
They strode through the sheriff’s office—Smith didn’t glance sideways at the wanted notices—and into the back. Here was a room with some tack and weapons, off to one side a room that was probably where the deputy slept, and off to the other the lockup. The deputy looked through the little window in the heavy, wooden door, then turned the key and opened it.
Sings Wolf was stretched out on the bunk, perhaps asleep. He loo
ked across the room when the door opened, but showed no particular interest in Smith. He was wrapped in his blue blanket coat for a cover and wore the look of tranquillity Smith supposed came with age and wisdom. The young man felt a pang of love for his grandfather.
In the Crow language, not Cheyenne, Smith said, “Pretend you don’t understand me.” He barked the words to make them sound harsh.
Sings Wolf didn’t move.
“From his moccasins, he’s a Cheyenne,” Smith told the deputy, “and this child don’t have no Cheyenne words.” Maybe if he left a few false trails, it would take the army a little longer to catch up with him. “Ramsel, why don’t you keep a weapon on him while I get him mounted and headed out?”
The child-man gave Smith a big smile and what may have been a lopsided wink. Evidently he thought a gun was an unnecessary precaution. But he reached for a side-by-side without complaint and broke it at the breech to make sure both barrels were loaded.
Smith got Sings Wolf’s hands tied in front of him, for show. Then he pushed his grandfather ahead of him toward the street roughly, like the worst sort of malefactor.
Smith stepped out the door and saw his mistake.
A crowd of men circled the horses with the brand of the army, which were tied at the hitching bar. Several men in front had rifles or shotguns, which meant they were serious. They were half lit by the lamps of the hotel next door. A dark-faced bastard with a very white scar alongside his nose stood in front, rubbing the scar and smiling the most malicious smile Smith had ever seen.
Smith’s mistake was that he’d pushed Sings Wolf out ahead. Now Smith and his grandfather were vulnerable, and the deputy was in back of them with the shotgun. Smith reached for the sergeant’s revolver. The scar bastard raised a shotgun to his shoulder. Smith eased the pistol out anyway, keeping it at his side. The man behind the scar bastard flipped a heavy knife, maybe an Arkansas toothpick, in his hand, playing with it. That seemed peculiar.
“Back off, Sergeant,” the scar bastard said in a loud rasp. “We don’t have any quarrel with you.”
Just then Ramsel came pushing out between Smith and Sings Wolf with the shotgun leveled. Good fellow, thought Smith.
“Sammy, get the sheriff,” yelled Ramsel.
The towheaded kid took off down the street running hard as he could go.
“That boy’s right handy, ain’t he?” growled the scar bastard. So that was how they knew Smith was here for the prisoner. Damned kid. “But that sheriff is surely going to be too late.” He smirked at the deputy. “You cain’t stop us, Ramsel. Even a defect likes to live, don’t he?”
“Men,” hollered Smith, “taking a prisoner from the U.S. Army is a crime for the firing squad.” He didn’t know whether it was or not. “Back off and let us head to Sidney Barracks. This Injun will get a fair trial.”
“He will,” rasped the scar bastard. “Just like my boy Ben got.”
Then Smith understood. And just as he understood, he saw the glint of the knife blade in the half-light. He saw it just as the knife hit him in the head. Falling, he heard a shotgun blast. Losing consciousness, he almost had time to think that it wasn’t blasting in his ear, so the shotgun wasn’t Ramsel’s.
Sings Wolf hung from the hay hook attached to the loading beam jutting out from the livery. He was still tied in his blue blanket coat, and the edges and belt whipped in the gusty wind. Sings Wolf’s body rocked in the wind and twisted on the long, thick hemp, rocked and twisted back and forth restlessly.
Smith took the wet rag on his forehead and wiped his whole face. His head felt like it had been stepped on by a horse. He was still stretched out on the boardwalk.
“Got a sad one here, we do now.” Irish pranced in the voice. Smith looked at the speaker haunched down beside him. A stalwart man of maybe fifty with gray hair, a mustache of indecently bright red, and eyes that looked like they saw a lifetime’s worth of grief right then.
“I’m Sheriff Galway. Ramsel is dead here.” He jerked his head to indicate behind him. “The Injun’s dead yonder. The bad ’uns are fled away. You’d be a corpse, too, if you weren’t a soldier. They be not afraid of the sheriff, but they are afraid of the colonel. This mick will make them afraid of the sheriff in future. Maybe none will testify agin ’em, but a sheriff with his dander up can make life prickly.”
“What did they get me with?”
“A rascally lad name of Lawrence Byrne cracked your noggin with the handle of his Arkansas toothpick. He’s a handy one with that knife, is Lawrence. Too handy. He can hurl it to do ye with the blade or the handle. Double-jointed evil, that lad. Your head’s going to hurt mightily for a day or so, and you’ll have a lump you could use for a hat rack.”
Smith sat up. The world made a quarter turn, slowed down, and stopped. “I’d best take the Indian back,” Smith said. This time he said it in three syllables, In-dee-un. “The colonel will give the body to his people if they want it.”
“You want to get started now?” asked the sheriff. “You want to eat first? Sleep?”
“Ramsel got any family?” asked Smith.
“I’m his family,” said the sheriff. That was why the grief. “Townfolk think he’s my son, but he’s a foundling. I’ll say any words need saying.”
Smith nodded his head, and nodded it again, thinking and keeping control. He was obliged to keep up the pretense that Sings Wolf was none of his kin. Seemed like being around white people was a lot of pretending.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get the one cut down and the other one in the ground.”
The sheriff stood up and brushed off his hands. “Kind of you to help,” he said.
Smith got to his feet. The world stood still this time, but lightning flashed in Smith’s skull. He wiped his forehead again with the wet rag. A knot had risen smartly, for sure.
“Where’s the boot graveyard?” asked Smith.
Sheriff Galway reached down into the grave as far as he could without falling in and set Ramsel down gently. The lad was just a lump in canvas now. The Injun was wrapped in canvas, too, and tied onto the extra cavalry horse.
Galway slipped a copy of Mother Goose out of his coat pocket and tossed it onto the lump in a gesture meant to look casual to the sergeant. Ramsel never would have learned to read even a little bit without that book. He loved to say its jingle-jangle poems out loud in his singsong way, grinning all the while.
When they started pitching dirt in, Sheriff Galway couldn’t remember which end was Ramsel’s head. He was glad, for he didn’t think he could stand to shovel earth onto the lad’s face.
When the hole was filled, the sheriff held his hat at his belt, looked down at the mound of dirt, and began to chant musically. The sergeant stood at attention. He wouldn’t know what the sheriff was saying, but it didn’t matter. The words were Gaelic, their meaning a wail of grief and a prayer for safe journey to the other land. Sheriff Galway’s grandfather had taught the chant to him, and he was sorry that no one would remember enough Gaelic to speak it over his grave when the time came, to ease his way.
When he finished, the sheriff saw that the sergeant was crying. Tears just streaming down his face.
Funny, a hard man like that, in tears for a man-boy he didn’t even know. Well, it must be the conk on the head. Or the music of the Gaelic. Gaelic is a beautiful language, the language of grief, thought the sheriff for the thousandth time, for the Lord God has sent the Irish so much grief over seven centuries. Such a language will make a grown man weep, now, won’t it?
Chapter 9
Elaine absolutely hated them. She wanted to throw the cursed things across the lawn. Or the scruffy patch of dirt that the Wockerleys pretended was a lawn. Which she was probably going to fall down on any moment and break her other leg so she couldn’t clump about at all.
She banged the crutches out in front of her, leaned forward, swung, and planted her good left leg. She teetered forward and then sideways and nearly fell. The left leg was weak, she was weak, and she had poor ba
lance. Too long in bed. But she was determined to get stronger and get mobile and get out of Dodge City and on with her life. Her life, by God, with Adam. It was fierce in her, a surge, a need not to be struck and stagnating in this house of strangers, this town of gamblers and whores.
She wondered where the people were. She didn’t know Dodge City, actually, but she didn’t want to. No one came to see her but the fatuous Dr. Richtarsch, the stiff Dr. Wockerley, and the pallid Fran Wockerley. Fran and the doctor were so absorbed in their marital dance, he dominatingly proper, she cringingly lonely, that they had no room for anyone else. At least, though, Elaine could give the poor creature some company.
Elaine did see the town’s habits, and she didn’t like them. It woke up not at dawn but at midday. Many of the town’s businesses didn’t open for business until the afternoon. Even Dr. Wockerley had office hours in the afternoon only. And the morals! Wasn’t the town’s mayor, Dog Kelley, living openly in sin with one of its ladies of the night, a creature called the Great Easton? Wasn’t the sheriff himself a notorious gambler? Mocking the laws so flagrantly symbolized something for Elaine, something smart-aleck and crude, something she hated.
She clopped on ahead, making her tight little square on the small plot of earth outside the porch where she slept. This was the third day since Dr. Richtarsch brought her these crutches, and her sixth episode of clumping around in the little yard, all six painful. She had wishes: she wished she could do her practicing in the house, where she would not be seen. But she had never so much as seen its interior, and she was sure Fran was not the one keeping her outside. She wished she felt free to ask Fran to help her into one of her dresses. She was wearing only one of Fran’s wraps over her nightdress, which she’d lived in for weeks, and she didn’t feel presentable enough for outdoors. The truth was, though, that she’d fallen several times, twice catching herself against the house but once crashing all the way to the ground and making her stump hurt like the dickens. It made no sense to get one of her dresses dirty or torn.