Washburn screwed up his lips a bit around that snag of a fang, admitting, “I didn’t wait to see what come of it, Glass’s work an’ the Lord’s vengeance. Likely I’ll never forget what that child said over an’ over again to me from the time we tramped south from Henry’s post: tellin’ me how it was to wake up looking at buzzards flyin’ overhead, roostin’ on branches nigh within reach—to find his own grave scooped out aside him. Naw, Titus Bass—first chance I had I come on down hyar to St. Louie. Set on having me a real spree arter all that Injun trouble an’ starvin’ times I had me on up that goddamned river. Man what has him Injun trouble deserves a spree, don’t he?”
“I had me some,” Bass declared, “not near as bad as you had. Chickasaw it were.”
“Chickasaw?”
“They ended up killing a friend of mine. Nearly got the rest of us too. On the Messessap.”
“That yer kentry down thar’?”
“It was then, I s’pose.” No, he thought better of that answer. “That ain’t no white man’s country, Isaac. I been through there on foot—like you coming down from the Yellowstone. Walked back through that Choctaw and Chickasaw country on foot, following the Natchez Trace.”
Washburn stood, stretched some kinks out of his back as if he were the one who had been pounding on trap springs that cold spring morning. “Sounds to me you put some kentry under you, Titus Bass.”
His hammer came to a halt, the last ring fading in the damp air. “I have, I s’pose, at that.”
Scratching his nose, Isaac spit into the pile of hay again, then looked Titus squarely in the eye to ask, “Like ye said t’other night—ye still hanker to put some more miles under ye?”
For a long moment Bass could not answer, his throat seized up with what import he sensed in those words. When he finally found his tongue, Titus asked, “Serious?”
“Isaac Washburn never been one to waste his wind, son.”
His heart was pounding as he replied, “What you got in mind?”
The trapper toed the dusty floor below him with a worn and patched moccasin, saying, “Head west with me. I figger to see me them moun-tanes out thar’ west on that Platte kentry. That’s land I only got a wee peek of, comin’ down the Powder with Glass. Maybe the two of us throw in together—if’n yer of a mind to—we can turn right at them Stonies—head up north to meet up with Major Henry, maybe some of them others, out thar’ on the Yallerstone. What say ye?”
Bass realized he was gripping that heavy hammer tight enough to squeeze the hickory handle in two as he formed the words. “You … you saying you want me to throw in with you?”
“Yer a likely sort, Titus. Ain’t a young lad no more—but I figger that runs in yer favor. Yessir, way I see it—ye got the makin’s of a partner. Allays better to travel with ’nother, ’cept when that ’nother man ain’t the sort can be trusted.”
Lord, how his head was pounding, his eyes almost ready to swim with such tears of happiness. “Isaac, you just told me you barely lived to make it to that Kiowa post. But here you are, saying you’ll head out again. Maybeso to lose your fixings and eat prairie dog again.”
Washburn slapped his thigh with a snort and a grin. “Ain’t it the truth? So—what d’ye say, Titus Bass? Aye? Ye got the makings to come to them moun-tanes with me?”
“I … I got a old horse,” he stammered. “I mean—I’ll get me ’nother horse. Like your’n.”
“That’un?” Washburn asked, thumbing back to the animal tied outside a far stall. “He ain’t no horse, Titus. No more’n a rabbit-eared, jug-headed Injun pony.”
“Where you come by him?”
“Happed onto a band of Omaha north of Fort Osage—maybeso ’nother tribe,” he snorted in glee. “Be fittin’ if it were a Pawnee pony, don’t ye figger?”
“You just took him?”
With a devilish grin and twinkle to his eye, Washburn shrugged and said, “Needed me one, Titus. So I took him. I ain’t got a pot to piss in an’ no window to throw it out of, so how ye figger I’m gonna buy myself a horse an’ outfit now that I come to St. Louie?”
“I … I dunno—”
“With what, Titus? What I got to buy a horse? I lost near all my fixin’s too. Takes a man money to make a new outfit.”
“I got money, Isaac.”
His tired old eyes lost their devilish twinkle and took on a serious light. He leaned close to the younger man. “Ye … said ye got money … money ye let me have to buy me fixings?”
“To buy us fixings,” Bass corrected.
Straightening, Washburn appraised the younger man once again, this time more carefully than ever, and eventually shook his head. “If that hoss don’t take the circle.”
“Take the circle?”
“You gonna throw in with me, are ye? Puttin’ up yer plews to buy our outfit?”
Bass glowed with a fire inside—few things had ever felt so right. “I got the money—you got the country. Right?”
“That’s right. I got the kentry, fer damned sure,” Washburn answered, tapping his forehead with one finger. “Fer the both of us, Titus Bass—I got the hull consarned Rocky Moun-tane kentry, right up here.”
23
“Arr! Arr! Arrrggggg! God … goddamn!”
Bass bolted awake with a start at Washburn’s roar.
Isaac thrashed in his blankets, struggling to free his legs—then as suddenly the trapper awoke. Sat up. Drew his legs up against himself and wrapped his arms around them. He began to rock back and forth, staring blankly at nothing while he mumbled.
“You all right, Isaac?” Titus asked, scared at what he saw on the older man’s face.
When Washburn did not reply, Bass inched closer, crawling on his hands and knees across that clay floor where he lived back in the corner of Troost’s livery. Slowly, he reached out, laid his hand gently on the trapper’s shoulder.
Isaac nearly jumped out of his skin at the touch, swinging an arm wildly at Bass. Titus fell back against his own blankets sprawled on the pallet of fresh hay.
“Isaac?”
“What the hell you want?”
“You … it’s me. Titus,” he tried to explain.
“I damn well know who it is,” he snapped, finally turning to look directly at Bass. “What’s the matter with ye—don’t think I know who ye are?”
“You was screaming—sounding wild … wild as you would if’n that grizzly that got Hugh Glass was after you.”
For a moment Washburn tried to glare Bass down, then gave in. The anger, the bravado, drained from his face, and he buried his face in his arms he had looped over his knees.
Titus asked, “You want I get you something?”
“Some of that whiskey maybe,” was the mumble.
From one of the empty cherrywood pails Titus retrieved the green bottle, the glass cold against his skin. Putting the cork in his teeth, he worried it from the neck, then nudged the bottle against Washburn’s hand. Isaac looked up from his arms, recognized the bottle for what it was, and took the whiskey. As Bass turned away to pry open the small stove’s door, he listened as the potent liquid spilled down the old man’s gullet in great, ravenous gulps.
“It were the horse, that goddamned horse again,” Washburn growled low, almost under his breath.
Bass turned from punching up the fire, asking, “What horse?”
“The white one, goddammit!”
Titus tossed a last piece of firewood into the stove and latched the iron door as the tiny cell began to warm almost immediately. A little smoke leaked from that chimney—but he decided he could stuff some more chinking in it come a warm day when the whole of it cooled off enough for him to get up there and work on it.
“I don’t know what white horse you’re talking about, Isaac,” Bass admitted as he settled before the man, watching Washburn’s throat work greedily at the whiskey again. “Slow down on that a minute and tell me ’bout this here white horse of your’n.”
“Same white horse. The one it’s allays been,�
� he repeated, his tone angry as he swiped amber drops off the hairs of his mustache that hung over his lips like a worn corn-bristle broom.
“Cain’t be your white horse,” Bass said finally, wagging his head slightly in confusion. “That pony you brung in weren’t—”
He whirled his head on Titus to interrupt with a warning growl, “I damn well know that son of a bitch jug-head pony ain’t white. You blamed idjit—I ain’t talking about it, cain’t you see?”
Titus eyed the green whiskey bottle, saw that it was less than half-full already. “Tell me what you want me to see, Isaac.”
Then Bass glanced over at the piggin between their pallets, noticing they had only another two bottles of whiskey out of all of that they had bought last week. They had been drinking a hell of a lot of the stuff, ever since he had been on the mend and Washburn had taken to teaching him all that he knew about life in the Indian country.
“Ain’t ye ever heerd tell of the white horse, Titus? Surely ye have. I tol’t ye ’bout it, ain’t I? Must have—many, many a time.”
“I … can’t rightly remember—”
Isaac’s eyes were glazing already in stupor. “Glass said he seen the horse once’t too. Tol’t me hisself. See’d it fer nights in his dreams afore he bent over to take him that drink at the river.”
Bass started feeling his skin go cold. “On the Grand?”
Washburn nodded. “Saw that thar’ horse in his dreams, he said—many a night afore the sow grizz chawed on him.”
Swallowing hard, Titus watched Washburn gulp down more of the whiskey from the bottle’s dull-green glow in the orange firelight. Titus’s tiny cell smelled of fresh hay and cold sweat—from the both of them. It was the smell of fear. Nothing less than pure fear of the unknown, the unseen.
“Glass saw a white horse in his dreams?”
Washburn took the bottle from his lips, licked them with the tip of his tongue as he stared at Bass with eyes that seemed as black as cinders. Deep circles of liver-colored flesh sagged beneath the man’s eyes. Made them look almost like sockets in a skull. He sucked on that snaggletooth a moment, then said quietly, “I see’d that horse too, Titus.”
“W-when?”
“Yest now,” he whispered, belched, and stared down at the bottle in his hand. It began to tremble at first. Then the more it shook, the more frightened Washburn became until he grabbed hold of the bottle with his second hand and with both of them held it out for Bass to take.
Seizing the whiskey from Isaac, Titus welcomed a chance to swallow some for himself. When he had that satisfying burn coursing all the way down his gullet, Bass finally asked, “This ain’t the first time you seen it neither, is it?”
“Said it wasn’t.”
“Damn,” Bass muttered.
“Damn right, damn” Washburn echoed. “Know what that means?”
What should he say? What could he say? All he did eventually was shrug a shoulder and try to grin as he replied, “Means you and me’ll just have to stay out’n the way of bears, I s’pose.”
Washburn snorted, wagging his head. “It ain’t yest the b’ars, Titus. That white horse … it’s an ol’, ol’ legend. B’ars don’t mean shit in that legend.”
Titus squirmed uneasily, his eyes flicking out to the doorway’s darkness. “All right—s’pose you tell me the legend.”
At first the trapper eased back on his pallet, stretching out on his back, one arm crooked over his forehead, covering his eyes. “A man what sees a white horse in his dream … that man gonna die.”
Bass let it sink in as he stared at Washburn for a long time. Then he eventually tried to cheer his friend. “We all gonna die sometime, Isaac.”
Washburn rolled up on an elbow and glared at Bass angrily. “Means a man’s gonna die soon.” He plopped over onto his back once more.
“Glass didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“He didn’t die,” Bass retorted. “Not after he saw his white horse. Shows that’s just a bunch of bunk.”
For some time it appeared Washburn thought on it; then from beneath his arm he said, “He came no more’n a ha’r away from dyin’, Titus. That close.”
“But he didn’t die, Isaac. So forget the white horse—”
“It’s differ’nt: Glass didn’t die ’cause the Almighty wanted him to take his revenge on them what left him!” Washburn blurted in interruption. “The Almighty’s the only thing what saved Glass from dying when the white horse come to call him out.”
“That what you think you seen? A white horse called you out?”
He snarled, “My time’s comin’, goddammit.”
“You stay out’n them whiskey houses, now, Isaac,” Bass suggested. “We’ll keep clear of the Injuns once we head west on the Platte—”
“It don’t matter, Titus.”
“You can damn well make sure none of it matters ’bout that white horse, don’t you see? Just be careful and watch out—”
“It don’t matter—none of what I try to do. My time to go is my time,” Washburn grumbled. “These here dreams mean to tell me I lived out my time an’ the white horse is come to call me out.”
“A man don’t have to—”
“I told ye!” Washburn bellowed, then went on in a quieter voice as he turned his back on Bass, facing the wall, and yanked his blankets up to his shoulders. “It don’t matter if’n I’m here in St. Louie … or if’n I’m out thar’ on the prerra. It yest don’t make a good goddamn no more now.”
For the longest time Bass stared at the man’s back, what he could make out of Washburn’s form in the fire’s dull light emitted from the grating on the stove door. He took himself a long, last drink of the whiskey, snugged the cork back in the neck, and settled it in among the other two in the piggin against that back wall of his cell.
Easing back, he rerolled his old blanket coat into a pillow for his head. Closed his eyes. Letting images swim before him. Conjuring up how that white horse must look. But the creature simply refused to take shape.
Instead, what swam behind his eyelids were images of the last few weeks with Isaac Washburn. What revelry they had shared! Haunting the grog houses, watering holes, and those stinking knocking shops where all manner of delights to the flesh were to be found—they roamed the back streets and alleyways down close to the wharf, where life lay closer to the earth—with little hope of sanctity. In those cold hours before dawn they would stagger home in the drizzle to collapse upon their blankets and sleep until Troost came in at sunrise to angrily kick Bass’s foot.
“You went out an’ done it again,” the livery owner would grumble. “Get rid of that son of a bitch, Titus Bass—or he’ll be the end of you.”
“You gonna throw me out’n my job?” Bass always asked, bleary-eyed.
“I thought about it,” Troost would reply. “But not yet. Get up and put in your day. And then we’ll see.”
So he did. Young enough that the whiskey tremors and the hard-liquor hammers in his head were not near cruel enough to keep him prisoner in that bed after a long night of chasing numbness, a long night of seeking release buried deep within the moistness of some faceless other who bit and clawed and screeched with her delight at his utter ferocity.
None of them knew. Not a one of those whores had any idea it wasn’t she who made him such a beast. Whatever it was, Titus didn’t know. Only that the longer he waited to be gone, the more he felt like some caged animal, trapped there in St. Louis. As if his leg were snared in one of those square-jawed traps he crafted for the two of them, caught and held as he strained to be gone, to be out there, to be reaching for the horizon.
“Not yet,” Washburn always said, drunk or sober, when Bass prodded him to be about leaving. “Not yet we go.”
So they drank and whored, and they fought—back to back many times. Fists up in those ear-biting, eye-gouging contests to which Titus was no stranger. A healthy letting of blood, he always figured. A good row only made them all the thirstier for the whis
key and apple beer, hungrier for a skinny one of an evening, perhaps a big and fleshy one the next night. Over the weeks Washburn had even developed his own favorites, and of them—one in particular.
“A young one,” he called her, “barely old ’nough out of her schooldays.”
Titus knew better, for the whore had been working one brothel or another for better than ten years now. But what mattered was that Isaac was content with her, happy to consider her but a slip of a child—no matter that she weighed that much more than Washburn himself.
“I like havin’ all that sweet, slick hide on a woman to grab on to when I’m ruttin’,” he would explain to Bass. “When she gets to goin’ under me, less’n I got some of that hide to grab on to, an’ a lot of it too—that damn li’l girl’s bound to heave me off!”
Isaac wasn’t alone in finding a favorite. For Titus she was a recent arrival: a quadroon imported upriver from New Orleans, her skin the palest brown, almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the lower Mississippi itself.
First time Titus saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine, she wore tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair dark as a moonless midnight, a velvet choker with a whalebone brooch clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her quickened pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, it was no wonder Titus came away from her so many nights wearing the tiny blue bruises and teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, from shoulder on down to the flat of his belly. After swearing she was his favorite early one morning as Washburn pounded on the door and hollered that he was ready to head back to the livery, she reached up to pull a scarf down from a peg in the wall beside her narrow, shortposted muley-bed.
“You take this,” she commanded as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.
He knew not what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”
“My scarf,” she said, taking it from him to unknot. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”
Dance on the Wind Page 62