The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  Marked Face ignores his nephew, quickly showing the white man the rudiments of the game. It is a simple thing.

  “Now hang on, Bill,” the white man says. “We’ll just play the one and then your uncle here will leave, right? That right, partner?”

  Marked Face keeps his face impassive. “We will play one game tonight, yes.”

  “See, Billy, let’s be polite. We’re gentlemen, right? Of a sort, anyway. What’s the bet, then, sir? I ain’t got much in the way of money, so what are we betting?”

  Instead of answering the white man, Marked Face looks over at his nephew, still standing stupidly by the open door. Like a dog needing a piss. “Here is the wager, Sagiistoo,” he says, slowly, in the real language. “We will cast these bones, your pet white father and I. If I win, I will leave this room and find those men that are looking for you. I will say to them: Here is where my nephew, Sagiistoo, stays with one of the ones for whom you search. Why you want him, I neither know, nor do I care, but there that man is, with my disrespectful dog-spawn of a nephew.” He nods. “Maybe I will also tell them: White men, when you go to them, make sure to beat the shit out of my disgraceful kin, although probably he will like this. Even as he cries like a woman, he will like it, thinking that if you beat him enough he’ll become one of you, finally, that you will beat the color from his skin and the sweetness from his blood.”

  Sagiistoo stands in the doorway, breathing in and out through flared nostrils. Marked Face can see the tendons creaking in the boy’s knuckles.

  “Maybe you wonder, still, why I would do this, hey, Nephew?”

  “And if Sol wins?” Sagiistoo asks.

  Very good, Marked Face thinks. Enough talk. Even the language of the People can only go so far to make another understand. Certain things, the strong things, need to be felt with the liver. Maybe little Sagiistoo is finally starting to feel the bite of the lesson there. Feel the gnawing of things to come.

  “If your white man wins, Nephew, I will give him whatever he wants. Whatever is in my power to give, and then I will leave.”

  Sagiistoo shuts the door, letting loose a hard laugh. “Whatever’s in your power to give, hey? Shit.” He shakes his head.

  “Here’s the wager, Sol,” Sagiistoo says in English, then. He walks past his uncle, sits down on the bed. “Here’s the wager: if he wins, he’s going to tell everyone where we are. He’s going to tattle on us, tattle like a little girl whose dolly got stole. That about right, Uncle? But here’s the good part, Sol, here’s the good part: if you win, right, he’s just going to leave. Poof, gone. That’s good enough for me. Go on, then. Let’s just get the old fucker out of here, as quickly as that can be done, so we can get some fucking sleep.”

  Marked Face shakes his head. Perhaps the lesson isn’t biting yet, after all. For a moment, he feels sorry for little Sagiistoo, and then hardens himself to his purpose.

  Holding the bones in his hand, feeling their heat, Marked Face stares into the eyes of the old white man until he understands what the man wants, right now. Not what he thinks he wants. What burns in his heart.

  “You sure you don’t want to sweeten the bet?” the white man says, reaching out for the bones and shaking them in his hand. “I feel my luck coming on, I’m not afraid to tell you that, partner.”

  Marked Face keeps his face blank. The greed of these people, always. He nods. “If you win, yes, I will give you what you want. Within reason.”

  “Reason is a broad word,” the white man says, smiling.

  “I will give you what you want,” Marked Face says, his own smile coming now. “Now, let us play.”

  With great ceremony, and unnecessary flourishes, the white man tosses the bones. He picks them up and tosses them again. Picks them up once more and, on this last throw, one nearly perfect, he shouts, as if he’d done a great thing and not that which was simply ordained, long ago. The arrogance of these people, always. Twigs floating on a stream, who think they direct the course of the waters.

  “Let’s see you beat that,” the white man says. “Let’s see you, son.”

  “Truly you have thrown the bones before,” Marked Face says, his true feelings hidden. “What skill you show.” He takes the bones back, relishing the feel of their warmth on the skin of his palm. He feels more complete with them in his hand. Quickly, he makes his throws, knowing the outcome even if some small part of him wishes the result could be different.

  The white man, his hand raised in victory.

  “You have won,” Marked Face says. “Yes, yes, you have won. Tell me now, what is it that you desire from me? Within reason, recall.”

  “Well, how much money do you have in your pocket, son? Let’s start there.”

  Marked Face is already reaching for the coins he carries. The stack of worthless gold he’d picked up long ago. Money, always money with these people. The greed, again. He sets the coins on the floor in front of him, watching the white man’s naked want. I am not your son, you stupid old man, he thinks.

  “Where the fuck did you get those, Uncle?” Sagiistoo says, leaning down to examine the metal.

  Marked Face shrugs. “I have many things, Nephew. More worthless things like this, yes. Other, more important possessions.” He doesn’t have to look at the white man to hear the snare close.

  “You say you have more of these, partner?”

  Marked Face shrugs again. “Of course.”

  The eyes of the white man gleam with avarice. They are such simple people.

  “How about you want to bet some more, then?”

  “Sol–”

  “Now, Billy, now, let’s just think here. Your old uncle won’t turn us in, will you sir? That was just talk. We’re all friends now, hey? Just having a game. So how about we change the bet, maybe? What do you want that I have, up against more of that gold of yours? Within reason, of course,” he says, bending forward, grinning, eyes bright.

  There is only one thing that Marked Face desires.

  “I will bet with you again, yes, but you are too skillful with the bones,” he says, putting them back into their pouch. “Perhaps, though, there is another thing we can gamble on.”

  “Son, I’ll bet on any game you like. My luck is sitting up with me, I’ll tell you.”

  “Sol–”

  “Damn it, Billy, just pipe down. You’re a goddamn wet blanket sometimes. It’s just a fucking game.”

  Marked Face stretches his arms out in front of him. “Take my hands,” he says. After a pause, the white man does, an odd expression on his face.

  “Look into my eyes,” Marked Face says, gathering his medicine inside him. “Look, Solomon Parker.”

  Deep in his chest, he starts to sing. The song swells and builds, growing stronger with every breath.

  The world drops away, the room falls into his medicine.

  And then:

  The sound of men yelling. Of fists, hitting flesh, a hollow thumping.

  The smell of smoke and spilled beer.

  Heat and sweat and greed.

  Marked Face sees the eyes of the white man widen, feels him try to pull away, and tightens his grip. No, it is too late for that. Sagiistoo reaches toward him, his movements slow and stretched.

  The medicine burns around the song in Marked Face’s chest. The bones in their pouch are fiery against his skin.

  The room falling away and a sound, then, as of a great bird, pecking at a branch.

  A shout, faint, from a long distance away: “Goddamn it, get your fucking hands up–”

  A KIND OF DANCE

  – 1917 –

  Butte, Montana

  1.

  “Goddamn it, get your fucking hands up, Nancy!”

  Fist meets flesh with a hollow, meaty thump. Big Nancy folds over into the follow-up punch that tears across the stub of his ear, is lifted back up upright with the left to his chin. Sol sees Nancy’s legs start to buckle and rubs his hands across his own face, gritting his teeth and squinching his eyes shut. Come on, not yet! Third
fucking round.

  There’s an affronted shout from the crowd as one of Nancy’s huge fists slams into Nick Faraday’s groin. Faraday backs up, wavers for a second, heeled over and looking like he might puke.

  Jesus Christ, Nancy, what the fuck are you doing?

  “Goddamn it, Nancy, hands up!” Sol shouts. He glances at his watch again, studiously avoiding Sean Harrity’s gaze from across the room. Stay on your feet and keep fighting, Nick. Sol gives a quick look around the crowd, looking for a path to the exit, just in case. He glances back at the fighters just in time to see Faraday plant his forehead into Nancy’s already broken nose, bellowing incoherently.

  For a second Sol’s thoughts seem to hitch and stutter with something, a memory, out of place. There’s a word for it, something French that Elizabeth had once told him meant that feeling of reliving a moment that had never happened. It’s been happening to him lately, a feeling of I’ve been here before; sometimes it’s like the aftershock of a dream, just out on the edge of his mind where he can’t quite catch it. I remember that, I dreamed it once. Other times, like now, it’s as if his perception of a few seconds of time is out of sync with itself, like the ghostly afterimage on a photo, one of those things that Spiritualists show to claim proof of the soul. Maybe it means his own soul is loose inside him, can slip free of his body and look around. Lord knows that there isn’t much holding it there any more. After Elizabeth, after Owen, there’s no one but Sol himself to lay claim to it, and he isn’t even sure how much he wants the thing.

  An image, for a moment.

  An old man, holding his hands. A noise, a tapping becoming a banging becoming a booming. A sensation of falling.

  The image, gone then. Another remnant of a dream maybe. He’s out of sorts, is all it is, with everything that’s happened, with the reminder that the anniversary of the Penn fire is coming up. All Sol wants to do on that day is to go find a bottle and make deep acquaintance with it, but he’s promised Quinn and Frank he’ll speak at the fucking memorial.

  Another shout from the crowd brings him out of his reverie. Nancy is taking punch after punch, weaving woozily backwards; the stutter in Sol’s thought cuts free and he begins to shout again.

  “Hands up! Up, goddamn it!”

  Billy winces as Faraday’s knobby head cracks into Nancy’s face. He’s broken his own nose enough times to know that Nancy’s eyes will be streaming tears, that he won’t be able to see the rain of fists that are now following, landing one after another, rocking his head from side to side on the pivot of his neck. Nancy’s backing up, frantically, finally appearing to hear Sol’s shouts to get his arms up, although the boy looks too dazed to be very effective at following the instruction. Nancy stumbles backward into the crowd; a heaving shove pushes him forward again, propelling him mouth first into another oncoming fist, snapping his head back once more.

  If this continues, there’s no way that Nancy will make it to the fix in the third. The sick feeling Nick Faraday must have in his guts from the fisted insult to his balls has sent the man into a frenzy, making the idiot forget his own part in this charade. Left, left, left, right, left, left. It’s no longer a boxing match but has devolved into an alley brawl. Only Nancy’s capacity for absorbing punishment is keeping him upright.

  Billy’s head feels thick and rummy and his own guts are sick; there’s an echo in his ears, whistles and men shouting. He’s felt off all day, since waking up before dawn to half-remembered nightmares that had left him in a sweat, bedding twisted around him like a shroud, throat hoarse as if from yelling. Something about violence, a bird at a window. He must have a cold, some kind of flu maybe. He doesn’t want to be here now: he wants to be in bed, maybe with a hot whiskey, trying to sweat out whatever has gotten into him, which has done nothing but get worse since he woke up. It’s to the point, now, where he isn’t sure how long he himself is going to last on his feet, never mind Nancy. But Billy had told Sol that he’d be here, so here he is.

  “Nancy! Don’t just fucking stand there and let him hit you!” Sol is apoplectic, looks like he might step into the circle himself. Flynn must be thinking the same thing, as he reaches forward and grabs the old man’s shoulder, which Sol shrugs off. “Jesus, Nancy! Hands!” he shouts.

  Everything feels distant to Billy, almost serene, filtered through his rummy head as it is. Dreamlike, as if he’s watching from underwater. Each movement slow, disassociated from the rest. He sees Sean Harrity, eyes tight, leaning over and muttering to fat Mickey Doyle; Sean’s lips open and smack shut, chewing each word as it comes out, taking an age to say whatever it is he’s saying. No doubt he’s as concerned as Sol that the fight last another few minutes. Two men on the far side of the crowd have their arms around each other’s shoulders, and look to be singing, swaying as lazily as dry windblown stalks of summer mullein. Peaceful and quiet, mouths moving silently, like trout sipping at flies on the surface of a lake. A man over by the bar drops his glass: it floats slowly towards the sawdusted floor in flashes of gold as the beer spills out in a rain of perfect globes, before splashing upward in an explosion of dust.

  Billy thinks of Imiinatssi, from the stories, who once had run so fast he’d outpaced his shadow; he’d spent the rest of his days trying to put it back on, but it no longer fit and would drop off at inopportune times, causing mischief. Now, for Billy, sick as he is, the world isn’t fitting quite right. Like Imiinatssi’s shadow.

  All the while he’s looking blearily around, trying to take in this ill-fitting room, Billy feels more than hears the pounding of Faraday’s fists into Nancy’s head and body. Each blow thrums Billy’s chest until his heart is pounding to the rhythm of the punches. Left, left, left, right, left, left. Slow, hard, methodical, like the steps of his father’s dancing that he, Billy, had watched as a boy, before he was sent away to the government school. He’d tried to mimic it, but never got the knack. Left, left, left, right, left, left, each foot raised deliberately, placed down with equal precision to a rhythm like a heartbeat. His own dancing nothing more than a stumble.

  Nancy takes a hard shot to the temple. His legs cross and he staggers a long, uneven step sideways, another, looking like he’ll finally fall. Billy, in his fevered haze, remembering his father and the other men, thinks to chant the boy upright with the old songs that keep the dance together, left, left, left, right, left, left, the dancers carried and buoyed by the rhythm, slick with sweat and panting for air, like Nancy is now. A fight is a kind of dance, after all, an abbreviated story: action standing as shorthand for a more complicated thing, told with movement and breath and the sound of men in motion.

  Sagiistoo, Billy hears. Sagiistoo!

  He comes back to himself for a moment, head clearing briefly. He looks around, sees only the room full of shouting, drunken men. He’s dizzy and wants to puke out the nausea in his guts, get some relief. Billy can see that Nancy has somehow kept himself up, with the help of the crowd, and is now being shoved back towards Faraday’s fist again. This isn’t going well.

  Sol is shouting something back over his shoulder, words that Billy can’t understand. Shit, he’s sicker than he thought. Maybe he should find a drink.

  Sagiistoo! he hears again.

  “Drink!”

  Without looking, Sol reaches backwards into the crowd, yelling, until someone’s pint is put in his hand. He takes a long pull of the warm, sour muck that Heaney passes off as beer, knocks some of the dry from his throat.

  “Get your FUCKING hands UP, Nancy!” he shouts, although he can tell the boy is past hearing, his heroic talent for taking abuse notwithstanding. Even Nancy has his limits, though, and he’s going down now, swaying, lurching to one knee as that excitable idiot Faraday continues to ring his skull with lefts. Sol looks at his watch, screaming “Time! Time! Time!” He steps into the circle, trying to push himself between his fighter and Faraday’s fast left hand.

  “Time!” Harrity agrees, elbowing Mickey Doyle forward, who grabs Faraday’s arm, taking a wild right cross
for his trouble. For a moment it looks like the fight will continue with Doyle standing in for Nancy, but the blood fury drains out of Faraday’s eyes in the face of Doyle’s shouting, to be quickly replaced by indignation.

  “He hit me in the fuckin bollocks! Right in the fuckin bollocks!”

  Sol shakes his head, looking down at Nancy, who Flynn and Michael have helped drag onto a stool in the corner. Michael’s barracking Nancy about his stance and Sol tells him to just shut up, shut the fuck up. That boy, the mouth on him.

  One of Nancy’s eyes is swollen shut and he’s huffing out of his broken nose like an animal, raking in air through a bloody mouth. Sol passes his beer to the boy, which Nancy sucks down in one long gasp. Nancy belches mightily and then, weaving on his chair, leans over the side and spits out blood.

  “Few more seconds, Nance,” Sol says quietly, hunkering down with a crack of tired knees. “Just a few more seconds is all and you go down and this is all fucking over. You done good.” For some reason, even as he says the words, Sol feels uneasy. They’ve done what they came here to do. What they had to do; what he had to do, really. He feels lower than a grasshopper’s asshole, putting the boy through this. A fight to fight was one thing, but this is just brutality and, the shit of it is that it’s by proxy, that Sol can’t take it on himself.

  It’s his own mess, after all, the long series of fuckups and his disrespect to Sean Harrity that’s brought him to this pass but, instead poor, good-hearted Nancy Mallon is taking the medicine for him. A man should wear the punishment for his own sins, no matter how much the garment pinches.

  Sol’s belly is tight and there’s a pounding behind his eyes that maybe rivals Nancy’s. He’s felt strange all day, really, ever since Billy had woken him up in the dark, screaming in Indian, fit to wake the dead. Sol had calmed him down but never got back to sleep himself and has spent the day stuck in that space one gets caught in sometimes, when awoken at the wrong time, not fully awake and with the leftover flavor of an interrupted, unremembered dream clinging like smoke.