Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  Laughing easily with the sudden flush of companionship, he identified himself. “It’s me, Titus!”

  “Good for you, Titus,” Root bellowed. “Now, just get on with what you’re about and leave me to my honey-daubin’.”

  “Just don’t you go falling asleep with that whore, Reuben!” Titus replied every bit as sternly as he had been told, then giggled as Nina came over to him to begin pulling off his jerkin.

  She guided him over to her pallet on the floor all of the three steps it took to get Titus there, then nudged him backward. On his back, head dizzied, he sensed her pulling at his wet moccasins, then the bottoms of his canvas britches. His head felt lighter and lighter, as if it might just screw itself off his shoulders and go floating right up through the low roof he fixed with a stare as he fought down the rising intimidation of his troubled stomach.

  Just about the time he felt her cold, fleshy hands wrap around his penis, Bass tried rolling onto an elbow, growling, “I’m gonna be sick.”

  She flew off him so fast he was amazed, struck at the way she moved for being so large. Nina reached over, snatching up the chamber pot that sat nearby, and stuffed its fragrant opening right under his face. It was there she held his head as he screwed up his face at the horrendous stench that filled his face and mouth. Titus emptied his stomach in one explosive lurch.

  “That’s a good boy,” she cooed to him, running her fat, oily fingers over his forehead. “You just go ’head and fill that up if’n you need to.”

  His belly knotted up another half-dozen tries at wrenching itself free from its moorings in his gut, and then he was done. As he rocked uncertainly atop that single elbow, Nina took the chamber pot to set it in the corner, turned, and got back down on her knees over him, her hands wrapping around his softening flesh once more.

  He looked up at her and smiled, gradually collapsing backward while the world slowly went warm and black.

  Unable to part the blackness that enveloped him like a suffocating hood, Titus instead let his head hang as he shuffled blindly beside the one who was dragging him along, lunging forward beside him a step at a time. As much as he wanted to wake up, he couldn’t. For all he knew, the big whore was dragging him off—maybe it was even one of those who had hollered at her from the bar a while back. They’d get him to the other side of the flatboat, away from the wharf, stab him—then throw his body into the harbor.

  He wouldn’t be able to swim—wasn’t all that good at it anyway. Hell, he wasn’t even walking for himself right now, getting pulled along as he was. And if they pushed him into the Mississippi, he was bound to die. Sober, he might well fight his way through most any water if he had to. But not like this. Titus knew he’d sink like a boundary stone, struggling only a little before he sank all the way to the bottom of the river—unable to stroke and paddle. Hell, he couldn’t even open his eyes!

  It was still black. As black as it would be on the bottom of the river where these killers hid the bodies of the men they robbed. They stumbled over something. A man grunted. Then Bass was wheeled suddenly, his shirt ripping.

  If he was lucky, Titus thought, they’d slit his throat first, maybe shoot him in the head. No, they wouldn’t do that. Too much noise. Just slit his throat, and then he’d never reach St. Louis to see if Levi Gamble had made it there last summer.

  “What the hell business is it of yours?”

  He felt the rumble of angry speech in the chest of the man who held him against his side.

  “That’s my friend you got there.”

  Titus wondered about that. Who was this friend of the one who slung him around again and took a few steps back toward the far voice? Sounded just like Root’s.

  “I seen you afore, ain’t I?” the one holding him growled.

  “Maybeso,” the far voice said. “S’pose you put that boy down and come on over here in the light. Then you can take a good look at me.”

  The one carrying him lurched forward another step, then stopped. “Say, now—lookee there. Just what you got in mind to do with that big sticker, you ugly son of a bitch?”

  “Told you, put that boy down.”

  “He a friend of yours? Whyn’t you say so in the first place?”

  His senses all firmly dulled, Bass nonetheless felt his body flung toward the far voice, tumbling, colliding with a man who tried to step out of his way as Titus hurtled past, limp arms and legs akimbo. When he struck the hard-planked floor, it was with enough force that his eyes blinked open in shock at the sudden blow.

  Above him for a long moment he watched a candle lantern sway precariously, its dirty-yellow corona swishing this way and that above the two shadows grappling between the two dark walls at his feet. Then he remembered: this was the narrow canvas hallway strung between the half-dozen cribs. The grunting pair rolled through the foot of one of the walls, gouging at eyes and pulling at hair for all they were worth.

  Within that invaded crib a woman’s falsetto shriek rose above a man’s low, angry curse as the combatants tumbled back from the canvas wall, rolling toward Bass.

  He blinked, wanting to see, make sense of it all, slowly clawing his hands up the canvas wall, pulling himself to his bare feet.

  One of them was yelling names, sprawling atop the downed man, holding his opponent with one strong hand gripping the throat and the other raised above his head in a cruel fist. But the other arched his back violently, unseating his enemy to immediately begin hollering out for help of his own. Names that, though muffled in his foggy mind, snagged a familiar chord within Bass:

  “Ovatt! Kingsbury!”

  Titus knew them. Ungainly, he lunged forward a step, stood there wobbling, ready to take another when the voice ordered him:

  “Back off or I’ll gut you like I done a hunnert afore you!”

  Bass pitched to his hands and knees again.

  “Christ a’mighty, they’re gonna kill the boy!”

  Someone was behind him as suddenly as he tried to pull himself up once more. Whoever it was grabbed hold of Titus, tearing his old shirt nearly off his shoulders as they dragged him aside and lunged past him into the fray. Now he wasn’t sure how many there were as another kicked him aside and hurtled into that heap of grunting, cursing bodies … when the whole mass of them reversed direction in a blur, wheeling over him in cries of pain and gasps of exertion, that great roiling beast of many arms and legs careening this time toward the parlor, where women shouted and screamed in hysterics.

  In that distance wrought of fog and the spiderweb of time distortion made sticky by his drunken stupor, Bass heard clay shattering—its aftermath echoed by the high-pitched, feral screech of a man’s voice—sounds of some frightened, cornered animal. More and more hard body blows delivered against muscles and bone, each like a maul cracking against the tough, tight grain of newly felled hickory. At each blow came an accompanying grunt of pain.

  Then the sudden, blinding flare of a muzzle flash, brightening the whole of that end of the parlor where the first pair of cribs began. Someone screamed, and a body crashed through the canvas siding with a great ripping of coarse cloth. The man scrambled and attempted to rise—but sank slowly back, crumpling to the floor.

  Root’s voice thundered down upon him, “Watchit! That bitch’s got a gun!”

  Lurching to his knees, Bass felt his head complain, blood throbbing against one temple, then the other, side to side like Mississippi trashwood adrift inside his skull—battering this temple with shrill pain before tumbling for the other. He grew thirsty immediately: his mouth tasted as if he’d been sucking on the bitter contents of a hog’s gallbladder as he tried to speak, desperate for the attention of the shadows lumbering back and forth before him.

  “I’ll slit your throat, whore—you don’t drop that gun of your’n!” Kingsbury threatened with a snarl.

  Gazing up, with all his strength struggling to focus on the lunging shapes of lamplit shadows, he found them: Annie Christmas—all six feet eight inches of her—swinging a big horse pi
stol about, clutched in both hands, that skinny Hames Kingsbury clinging to her back like a tick on an ox, his wiry arms locked around hers as she careened past Titus, headed wildly toward the mahogany bar, and toppled against the wall behind it. As she came closer, all Titus could think to do was to lash out with his feet. He tripped Annie, the pistol flying into the dark as she pitched forward against the bar, toppling it against the wall behind with a crash and clatter of glass and clay and tin.

  Kingsbury stuck to her like a cocklebur as they landed in a tangle. With a grunt she lay still beneath the boatman, groaning.

  As those two had landed, Titus’s wide, fleshy whore burst from the shadows to straddle Kingsbury, starting to pummel the sides of his head with her big, soft fists. Back and forth Nina rocked the river pilot as Bass painfully dragged his legs under him, put his hands out to steady himself, and laid one atop something round. Bringing it up before his eyes for all of a heartbeat, not consciously recognizing what it was. Yet in some dim, primal way realizing he held in his hands Kingsbury’s fate.

  Unsteadily Bass rocked backward, his head feeling like a burlap bag loosely filled with a load of stream-washed rocks. Righting himself, he rose to one leg. Closing one eye seemed to help him keep the fat whore in focus as he shakily got to his feet and careened forward, his hand swinging that leg busted from one of the broken chairs back and forth before him. Over his head he raised it, then brought the leg down across the woman’s shoulders. Time and again he struck her on the back, with no effect but that she turned and cursed him, trying unsuccessfully to grab him with her left hand.

  “You li’l pissant!” she screamed, fending off the chair leg with one fleshy arm while she choked Kingsbury beneath the other. “I’ll cut your no-good pizzer off when I’m done here!”

  In that instant he hated the mocking cruelty in her eyes, the angry curl to the folds of skin around her mouth. And struck out at them blindly, sneaking in beneath her arm to lay the hardwood leg against the whore’s cheekbone with a smart crack. Her face immediately opened up in a long, dark line that spurted a glistening spray over the yellowish lamp-lit paleness of her skin. He dragged the lathe-turned hardwood leg back behind his head for another blow.

  Spitting blood from the corner of her mouth, her eyes became even more menacing as she turned on him, rising from Kingsbury’s body. “Now I’m gonna chop your balls off and feed ’em to you while I cut your heart out!”

  As she was lumbering to her feet, he swung, connecting with the top of her skull just above the ear. Nina’s head snapped to the side, she rocked unsteadily, stunned as Bass brought the chair leg to his left and swung it back at her head with even more force. She growled at him, both her arms held out in his direction, hands opening and closing like claws before her eyes began to glaze. A third blow—this time driving it under her chin. Blood darkened her lips as her eyes half closed. Nina weaved atop Kingsbury, both arms still outstretched to grab at the youngster, fingers clutching, releasing, clutching again, with nothing caught between them but the smoky air.

  Bringing the chair leg over his head, Titus brought it down on Nina’s skull as her eyes rolled all the way back, their sockets showing nothing but whites. With a loud snap her neck popped backward, and she toppled her great bulk into a heap beside the river pilot, like a forest slug spilling off the stem of some ground ivy.

  Trudging forward one step, then another, Bass wobbled over to her, holding the chair leg high all the time, suspended there as he stared blearily at the whore sprawled on the floor … when the room erupted again with women’s screams.

  One of them screeched right in his ear, “You killed Nina!” just as she landed on his back and they both went down in a heap against the overturned bar.

  At their feet Kingsbury clambered slowly to all fours, gasping for breath, dragging it in noisily, labored and wheezing, as would a drowning boatman who was just pulled from certain death beneath a turbulent river. Hames pulled his knife as he came up, clutching one arm against his side with a pasty grimace.

  “Get off him!” Kingsbury ordered.

  Immediately the whore riding Titus’s back stopped pummeling Bass with her fists, whirled, and lunged for Kingsbury, baring her teeth like a fighting dog’s. As she flung herself at the river pilot, the whore fell against the long blade of his belt knife—stumbled suddenly with eyes wide, her mouth moving without a sound—then stared down at his hands gripping that knife pressed into her belly, up to the hilt.

  With a grunt of great exertion, Kingsbury dragged the blade to the side, splattering the youth beneath him with the whore’s warm blood, then quickly snapped his head forward, cracking it against the woman’s forehead smartly. She lurched back, only then pulling herself off the knife blade as the front of her dirty dressing gown darkened like the underbelly of a thunderstorm.

  “Let’s get!” Root hollered.

  As the dying whore crumpled beside him, Bass turned slowly, numbed, to find Reuben holding down the Negro bartender, a knife at his throat. The slave’s white eyes muled angrily as he glared up at the boatman, his great coffee-colored hands spread in surrender, but his face bearing nothing but undisguised scorn for the victor. Backing slowly away before he inched the blade from the glistening black skin of that muscular neck, Root finally straightened as Heman Ovatt limped over, having held a pistol on two of the women through the last minutes of their whorehouse fight. Kingsbury hobbled up beside Reuben, half-bent at the waist, his left arm wrapped around his middle as he wheezed in pain with each shallow breath.

  “Get up,” the pilot ordered Bass, his voice strangely hollow. It reminded Titus of how a person might sound if cast down a well. Hames turned to Ovatt and Root as they all three surveyed the scene. “Any of you know who them two was?”

  With a nod Heman answered, “Think I seen ’em afore, yeah.”

  “I thought so—first they came in here tonight,” Kingsbury replied, pointing at the white man’s body sprawled half in the parlor, half in the narrow hallway. “They was on the crew what took Mathilda to their boat last summer.”

  “I cain’t be sure as you, Hames,” Reuben said as they stood huddled together, their eyes moving over the scene of blood and death, tattered furniture and broken clayware. “You two was what seen ’em in the Kangaroo afore Ebenezer took off on his own to break Mathilda loose.”

  “I’m sure of it,” Kingsbury answered quietly, stonily. “They come in here tonight, looking us over—I got more sure of it. Can only be the two Ebenezer said jumped the boat afore he kill’t them other two.”

  “All that over a whore,” Root moaned, wagging his head as he kept the knife held on the big slave. “And now this—with some more goddamned whores.”

  “There’ll be others comin’ soon,” Ovatt warned.

  “You best take me to the boat,” Kingsbury said as Root dragged Titus to his feet.

  Ovatt asked, “You hurt bad?”

  “Dunno,” and Hames swallowed down some pain that grayed his face even more. “Just get me there now!”

  “What we gonna do with these whores?” Root asked.

  “Take ’em up back there in them cribs. Have ’em tie each other up and gag ’em,” Kingsbury snapped, his eyes clenched fiercely. “Just do it quick—dunno how long I can stay on my feet like this.”

  Bass and Ovatt did just that. While the pilot and Reuben held a pair of Annie Christmas’s big horse pistols on the whimpering prostitutes and that big, bald-headed bartender, Titus and Heman tore dressing gowns and petticoats into strips they forced the whores into tying around ankles and wrists, as well as knotting a tight gag around each mouth.

  “Get outta here ’fore I shoot you!” Kingsbury snarled.

  Bass poked his head out of a crib to find two men standing at the door flap. Their eyes flew around the parlor’s clutter, then back to that pair of wide muzzles Kingsbury and Root held pointed at them—before the pair turned and fled like frightened quail, bellowing like gored hogs.

  “The fat’s in the fi
re now,” Root grumbled as the other two emerged from the cribs.

  “Don’t worry ’bout gagging her now,” Kingsbury said, pointing his pistol at Annie Christmas, who, for the last few minutes, had been unleashing her wrath on her slave-bartender. “Just get that son of a bitch tied—every last damned body Under-the-Hill gonna be crawling over here in a shake of a bear’s tail. We gotta get when he’s tied down.”

  “Where?”

  Kingsbury glared at Ovatt. “You idjit! Back to our goddamned boat!”

  “With them sonsabitches atween us and the boat—all of ’em coming this way to see what the ruckus is?” Root asked in a high pitch.

  Titus didn’t know how the idea ignited in his mind of a sudden, but it was there—with a certainty that startled him. Something so sure and surprising, it damn near frightened him.

  “We can make it back through the woods,” Titus suggested in a whisper so none of the whores would hear. When Annie Christmas stopped cursing the barman, Bass was frightened. Root held up one of the pistols, and the gunboat madam backed off while Titus looked at the Negro bartender, finding fear in the man’s yellow eyes. He immediately turned his black face away, then stared down at his hands bound in whorehouse rags.

  “Bass got him a fine idea,” Kingsbury whispered, wheeling about to shove Ovatt ahead of him with a jab of his elbow. “Go! Go!”

  Shivering in the shreds of his torn shirt, Titus stood there a moment in the wake of the others as they ducked out to the deck. Root stopped at the canvas flaps, whirled about, and leaned back in to snag Titus by the arm—hauling him right out to what there was of deck between the brothel’s canvas wall and the gunnel’s grayed wood.

  “You’re leading us, god-blessit!” Root growled, back to his normal ill-tempered self.

  As Titus vaulted off the gunboat and landed on the wharf beside the others, Kingsbury pressed his face in close, staring intently at Bass’s eyes, flicking his gaze back and forth. “Know where you’re headed?”

  Titus pointed.

  Nodding, the pilot asked, “Your head clear enough to get us through that timber and away from any crowds?”