Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  How he needed a breath of air. Just one breath more. Sensing his supper rise against his tonsils, Bass gasped, sickened by the dank sour-milk odor of her as he drew back the butcher knife and plunged it into her chest.

  Too low!

  But instead of drawing it out, with both hands clamped around the wet, sticky, warm handle, he sawed the blade to the side savagely. Hearing her grunt with each new plunge of the blade within her gut.

  Feeling the rumble of each of her battle cries, feeling each of her painful groans as they reverberated within her chest and rattled against his cheek, he even sensed her cries shake the handle of that weapon he gripped with white knuckles. Then he himself echoed the sow’s dull roar that shuddered beneath his eye pressed deeply against her stinking fur.

  The bear hooked a claw around his hip and raked back. He felt the sudden cold as the legging gave way and the breechclout with it—his hide laid bare to the bone across the top of his hip.

  He heard a shrill cry coming to him in the midst of that muffled, dark hole of her massive being where she had herself wrapped around him—just as surely as if she had swallowed him whole. And he realized that inhuman cry was his.

  Then, as the cry faded, Scratch heard a new, strange sound.

  One thunderous thump echoed through her body, and he listened to her whimper like her cubs when she had batted them aside in fury. Pulling back one mighty arm from the grip she had on him, Bass could suddenly see shafts of rosy alpenglow, slivers of trees and brush suspended against the sky overhead. And smell glorious air.

  He shoved back against the other paw for leverage and yanked the knife free of her. Swinging it up in a short arc, Bass buried the long blade right below her jawline. She nearly shook him free, nearly tore his grip from that bloody handle as she shivered and whipped her head from side to side to rid herself of the torment.

  Scratch attempted to saw the knife to the side but encountered bone. Instead he yanked the weapon free once more, rocked back, and plunged it in. Back out and in again. Out once more, just enough to give himself some leverage against that grizzly foreleg that gripped and raked and pummeled him—then back in with all the strength he could muster. Sensing his will seep out of him with each new thrust. Turning, twisting, screwing the blade brutally an instant before he jerked it back out.

  Waugh-gh-gh-gh!

  With her roar garbled by her own blood, Bass felt the beast falling, pitching forward with him beneath her. Helpless, he twisted and screwed at the knife’s handle as his face was buried again. Sealing out all light, suffocating him. Shutting off the rest of the world.

  She had swallowed him whole.

  The grizzly had won, and now she was devouring his soul. Not just what wreck was left of his body. But feasting on his very spirit. Like an evil specter come lunging out of a ragged tear between his world and its own—lunging through to devour him and drag his soul back to its world of eternal despair.

  Better to be dead than seized and hauled back through that crack in the sky by this evil spirit.

  Suddenly he felt his leg being pulled, yanked. The wounded, bloody hip yelped in pain as his ankle was twisted brutally.

  Certain it must be the cubs, feasting on his flesh now that their mama had killed him. Believing these last few seconds of his life would be even more torture than those last painful moments of their battle—for now he realized he had lost to this demonic creature. Now he knew the cubs were going to gnaw on his bones, and the sow would ultimately drag his soul back to where her evil seed was whelped.

  Of a sudden he felt the cold air slap his face, sneak in to tickle his bare flesh where the long, curved claws had raked the buckskin shirt to ribbons at his back. How cruel the breeze was to brush over the riven muscle across his hip. So cruel to tease him with its cool, fresh breath here the moment before he would breathe his last, the moment before his heart would stop and he would be no more than wounded soul.

  Knowing he had lost and was now a captive of that evil beast come through the sky to his world seeking new prey.

  She was picking him up, seizing his head, peeling his upper body out of the sand, ready to hurtle with him back across the grass and the sandbar and through the willow, back to where she had emerged right out of the twilight, right out of the air itself…. He blinked at the sand tormenting his eyes—how he wanted to stare this beast in the face, look it in the eye as she seized dominion over his soul.

  One last look—

  “Mr. Bass!”

  Swimming right above him, the great creature’s face spewed its fetid breath down across his cheeks. Hot breath—unlike the cool touch of the evening breeze.

  “Mr. Bass!”

  A dream this was. Feeling himself shaken by the creature, believing it was all part of the great evil to see McAfferty’s face swimming above his.

  “Arrrghgh!” Scratch groaned, flailing his arms helplessly at the beast.

  His arms were quickly pinned and the face came right over his once more. Shaking his shoulders. “Mr. Bass—it’s Asa! Asa!”

  Again he tried to fight the evil of its lie.

  “For the love of God, Mr. Bass … the bear is dead! We killed it. I killed it. God knows you killed it too.”

  Somehow he managed to sputter the word, “A-asa?”

  “Yes. It’s Asa, Mr. Bass. Praises be to heaven for your deliverance!”

  Whether it truly had been heaven’s intervention as Asa believed, or it had been the two rifle balls McAfferty deftly fired into the base of the sow’s head at close range, along with those savage blows the white-hair delivered with Bass’s own tomahawk found beside that pile of unpeeled willow limbs … there were times in those next few days when Scratch wasn’t all that sure he was grateful for that divine deliverance.

  As much pain as the simple act of living on brought him, it might well have been better to go under then and there to that sow grizzly.

  Had it not been for his fear of losing his mortal soul to something monstrously evil, something he knew he could never fathom—simple man that he was. Were it not for his fear of a life everlasting wherein a man whimpered helplessly before the great unknown … he might well have given up and crossed over that last divide in those next few hours.

  “Damn, but this ain’t good,” McAfferty muttered again and again as he hovered over him on that sandbar, down on his knees inspecting Scratch’s wounds up and down. “This … this ain’t good. A bear … chewed up like this … it ain’t no good, Mr. Bass.”

  He had passed out with the pain when Asa had attempted to free his other leg from under the grizzly’s carcass. Then he came to again, groaning in pain to find McAfferty pulling off his capote to lay over him.

  “Damn them evil abominations gathered round us!” Asa growled.

  Titus closed his eyes and listened for a moment as McAfferty trotted away up the sandbar, moving off from the cutbank in a hurry; then all was quiet.

  It was full dark by the time the white-head nudged him awake as gently as he could, snagging Bass under the armpits and raising him off the sand, painfully dragging Scratch a matter of yards to the crude travois he had hurriedly constructed back at camp from some strips of rope and rawhide and a buffalo robe. Despite the curly softness of the thick hair, Bass felt the hard pinch of the hemp rope beneath his ripped and torn flesh at his back, across his hip, behind one ear as Asa laid him out on the Crosshatch web and pulled a blanket over him.

  Without a word Asa went thin-lipped with determination, then turned aside as Bass’s eyes fluttered closed and he passed out again. How merciful unconsciousness can be at times, giving a man relief when he has reached a point where he can no longer bear up under the pain. How blessedly merciful.

  In those next few days he tolerated the brutal bathing of his crusty, grit-coated wounds, as well as surviving the constant chatter from the partner who had saved his life this second time. Now he was beholden to McAfferty. No longer were they square. Bass listened to what he could of the man’s preaching, to hi
s praying over him, to his rambling fire-and-brimstone cant.

  “‘And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath into you, and ye shall LIVE!’”

  And in the midst of those terrible days Scratch heard Asa try to explain to them both what that run-in with the sow meant in terms far too theological for a simple man like him to understand, much more metaphysical than anything he had ever heard Asa McAfferty preach before.

  “You done right with that she-bitch of a grizzly.”

  He kept his eyes closed. “Right?”

  “Leave’d your knife in ’er.”

  “Damn! You’re hurtin’ me—”

  “Gotta keep some of these here wounds open,” McAfferty interrupted unapologetically, “or they’ll grow shut with the p’isen inside.”

  “What p’isen?”

  “’Nough evil already around us for a man to worry over that you don’t wanna have evil shut up inside ever’ one of your wounds, Mr. Bass.”

  “Asa.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I … I took the knife out.”

  “Knife was in ’er when I pulled you free,” Asa grumbled as he continued his ministrations with that water he heated at the edge of the fire. “That’s all that counts. Leave the knife in the bear: it’ll bleed ’em out inside.”

  “Leave the knife in,” Scratch repeated, his puffy lips so swollen and dry from fever that they had cracked. “Leave knife in.”

  Bass remembered how day after day it seemed the man talked of nothing much more than the same topic. Instructing his wounded partner on the two places where you could place a lead ball certain to kill a grizzly.

  “There be jest two places where a nigger can put his ball into a devil beast such as that to know his lead’ll do the trick certain. One be just under the ear. T’other—why that be just back and down of the front leg, Mr. Bass. Where the evil heart beats in that beast. Hide so damned thick, can’t allays count on the ball going in nowhere else to any account. I killed that she-bitch with two balls to the head, just under her ears. And I finished her off with your tomahawk. Nearly got her head cut clean off afore she fell over with you still wrapped in her arm.”

  In addition, the white-head muttered in and out and roundabout, speaking of that Ree medicine man who wore a grizzly’s head for his own powerful headdress, wore a cluster of grizzly claws around his neck, even performed his incantations with his two hands stuffed inside a pair of dried and shriveled grizzly paws, which he swiped at the air to invoke the bear’s spirit when he came to demand McAfferty’s Bible. Came to steal Asa’s personal medicine.

  “Leastways—that’s how I knowed that son of a bitch was a hand servant of the devil his own self,” McAfferty growled. “He come to me to make his grizzly medicine on me—and when I didn’t just hand over me Bible to him … he made more evil medicine on me, called the grizzly spirit to come fetch me.”

  From time to time Bass awoke to find McAfferty talking still, talking to no one at all—Scratch supposed—for Asa was standing, slowly moving this way around the fire, then turning to walk in the other direction. The way the white-head hunched himself over at times, arms held out from his body, fingers clawed before him, growling like a bear, then muttering or shouting in fury. Moving again, sputtering his fireside sermons on and on through the dark of night or the light of those late-spring days as Bass slept, gathering strength.

  “A evil omen, this,” McAfferty mumbled one of those starless nights as the rain smacked the broad leaves overhead.

  So thick was the cottonwood canopy that little of the mist reached them here in this copse of trees. Like hailstones striking rawhide, Bass believed he could hear each and every drop hit the leaves.

  “We been trouble for each other, Mr. Bass,” he explained another time as he helped Scratch eat, pulling the broiled meat apart with his fingers and laying small fibers of the elk tenderloin on Titus’s tongue.

  “Trouble?”

  “The bear—it’s only the latest sign, don’t you see?”

  Scratch chewed on the meat, sensing his strength slowly returning after enduring days of nothing but broth and bone soup. “I figger ary a man gonna run onto Injuns, Asa.”

  “Them Apache stalked us like demons. They wasn’t human.”

  “Then it was demons I killed aside the Heely, McAfferty,” he argued. “And I kill’t me a lot of ’em to save your hide. To save us.”

  McAfferty measured him with an appraising look, then stared back down at the meat he was tearing apart with his fingers. “Those greaser soldiers too—”

  “They was looking to get some gal forked around ’em,” Bass snorted. “Weren’t no demons there.”

  “Taos used to be a good place,” he reminded. “I went there times afore and it was a good place, Mr. Bass.”

  “You ever have you a spree and look for a woman, there in Taos?”

  “No. I never laid with no whore. ’Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.’”

  For a moment he felt stung by Asa’s condemnation. But then—every man here in the mountains was entitled to live in his own way. Long as no man passed judgment on him, Titus Bass would abide by that man.

  Then Scratch said, “I’m a man what wants to lay with a woman, Asa. I need that. And it’s all right that you don’t—”

  “‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.’”

  “Don’t you see I love the feel, the smell … I love the taste of a woman.”

  “Maybe we’re come of two different worlds, Mr. Bass,” he finally declared.

  There. It was said. No sense in asking the white-head what he meant by that. Pretty plain to see Asa’s thinking, to grasp just what he had come to across the last few days as Bass lay-in and out of this world. Hell, it was easy enough for a man all on his own to talk himself into most anything. All the easier for that preacher to see the bear as something more than a bear.

  Finally he took the small piece of meat from McAfferty and began to slowly pull slivers off for himself. “Mayhaps you’re right. So you figger to lay all our troubles at my door?”

  “Never in my life have I suffered such tribulations as I have with you, Mr. Bass,” he admitted quietly, almost apologetic for speaking it. “But don’t get me wrong: the trapping’s been good with you. I admire any man what’ll go where you gone with me to trap beaver.”

  “We made us a pair,” Bass agreed, knowing the tear in this fabric would never be rewoven. “But you’re of a mind to go your own way.”

  “Ain’t you ready your own self? Ready to go your own way ’thout me?”

  He couldn’t admit that he wasn’t ready.

  Yet Titus knew he wasn’t the sort who could go days and weeks and much less months without some human contact. Be it a partner, or an outfit of free trappers, even a wandering band of Indians who spoke a language he hardly understood. How precious was just the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice, the possibility of some human touch.

  But instead Scratch said, “I reckoned on it a time or two in the last year.”

  “Been paired up almost that long, ain’t we?”

  “Almost a year. Ronnyvoo’s coming.”

  McAfferty nodded. “Soon as you’re able to travel, we’ll mosey south. Trap along the way if we find a likely place. Soon as you’re strong enough, Mr. Bass.”

  He didn’t figure there was a lick of sense in beating a dead mule. How’d you figure to change a man’s mind when it was his heart already made up? Why waste his breath when Asa McAfferty believed Titus Bass was the cause of all his tribulations? When Asa refused to even consider that it was his belief in evil and spirits and the Ree medicine man that brought him to tear apart the best partnership in these mountains?

  Was there any sense in trying to talk to McAfferty about it come a month from now? Perhaps when he had more st
rength to argue with the white-head. Maybeso days and weeks from now, someplace on down the trail. Somewhere closer to rendezvous. Someplace away from this river valley where he had made the mistake of bumping into the sow grizzly and her cubs.

  Somewhere much, much farther away from this low-hanging, evil patch of torn and sundered sky.

  22

  Spring was all but done anyway. And with it the good trapping too.

  Time for a man to be making tracks for rendezvous.

  Time for him to be sorting through just what he would do when company trappers and free men gathered in the valley of the Wind River. Soon he’d have to decide if he would throw in with Mad Jack Hatcher’s boys … or if he would set off on his own hook now. Alone against the mountains.

  Maybeso this was the season to set his own direction. Just as he had six years before: leaving behind St. Louis and the east and all that he had been. Proving to himself that he could reach the high mountains on his own.

  But even then Bass remembered—just as he was beginning to believe he had beaten the odds stacked against him, he was suddenly forced to stare failure in the eye … about the time the three of them had shown up. To his reckoning, events never had allowed him the chance to succeed, or let him fail all on his own. Back then Silas, Billy, and Bud had come along to save his hash.

  And ever since then it seemed that every time he had chosen to steer his own course—why, his fat had tumbled right back into the fire. Damn the fates if it hadn’t.

  Only God knew how Titus Bass had tried to make it alone after his first three partners had disappeared down the river, getting themselves rubbed out in the bargain.

  For all his trouble trying to set his own course, he went and got himself scalped.

  It took Jack Hatcher’s bunch to yank his fat from the fire that time.

  Then shortly after deciding to pull off from those fellas, he and McAfferty had come a gnat’s hair from going under down in Apache country, close as he ever wanted to come again in his living life. Only bright spot in that whole dank memory had been the fact that he had saved McAfferty’s life along with his own in reaching that river in time to end their thirst, in time to prepare for the Apache.