The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  “I ain’t no fairy, Mr Parker. Drunk is all I was. Just fuckin drunk.” Nancy’s head sags.

  Oh Christ. Sol steps out from the bag, reaching a hand up to Nancy’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “Son,” he says, “don’t much matter if you’re queer or not. Thing is, people are going to think that about you now. If it was a mistake, well, it’s been made, and you got caught at it, more’s the pity. You ain’t the first boy to get liquor in him and take a pleasure that ain’t quite the usual. Hell, I knew a man once got caught with a horse. And you know what they say about them Basques down Boise way, the shepherds. Lonesome, right? Just like you Irish.” He gets half a quick grin, maybe. “But son, if you’ve got inclinations that aren’t necessarily towards women, that’s your own business, just like I said. You don’t let no one tell you how to live your life, OK? Maybe it was a mistake or maybe it’s a phase or maybe that’s just the way you are. Life is fucking hard enough, so why quibble over shit like that? You keep your chin up, hey?”

  Nancy nods, back to looking miserable. The boy already knows, Sol can see, knows that he’s different. World isn’t kind to those who are different, after all. Sol wonders at what point Nancy came to terms with it all, before, because this conversation had sure never happened, first time around. Maybe there’d been someone standing in, playing Sol’s part, or maybe Nancy had just figured it out on his own. But Sol doesn’t want to think about that first time, before, any of it. Not this, not the rest of it. Didn’t happen, didn’t matter. Just focus on the here and the now and get this boy to the point where at least the punters will take a chance on him. Make some money.

  Sol gives him a slap on the arm. Much as he doesn’t like it, doesn’t want the reminder, it’s comfortable, though, being around Nancy again, callow as this one is. “OK, kid, now listen: I want those punches to land hard, hard, hard. Big as you are, you’re never going to be quick, so you need to make your punches count. Man told me once that every punch had to land with the weight of a baby dropped off a building. So you think about that when you’re dropping those big hambones of yours: baby falling off a goddamn building. Bam. OK?”

  “That’s a awful thought, Mr Parker.”

  “Goddamn it, son, you know what I mean.” Sol steps back behind the bag, snugging his shoulder and ribs against it to keep it still. “Now fucking hit me like you mean it, Nancy.”

  “Kid looked good tonight, Sol,” Sean says, pouring them both generous shots of whiskey from the bottle he keeps in the drawer in his desk. “Sláinte.”

  “Cheers, Sean.” They knock the glasses back and Sean refills. “But were you watching the same fight I was, tonight? That boy is terrible, can’t box a goddamn bit. All he did was stand there and soak up that old rummy’s fists until he got lucky and dropped a haymaker. Come on, Sean, bullshit.”

  Sean shrugs. The big poof was no boxer, for sure, but at least he’d won tonight’s fight. He’d been knocked right out of his first fight not a minute into it, dropped his guard and caught a cross to the chin, out like a light, and from a man more than twice his age. But still, the kid was huge and had shown he knew how to take some punches. If he could be taught to keep himself covered he’d do all right. Men always liked to bet on the big boys. They’d get the kid into some more fights and maybe he’d make them some money; if not, well, there were ways to encourage that. The fight business was just a hobby anyway, these days. It reminded Sean of his youth, the brutal affairs they’d put on in Dublin, where men would half-kill one another – if not finish the job by accident from time to time – in the squalid little holes where he’d come up.

  Looking around his office, Sean knows full well where the real money is: sucked straight from the Company’s tit rather than peeled away dollar by dollar from the lowliest of their employees. Still, though, he loves the spectacle of the fight, the sounds and smells of it. Maybe at heart he’s still just a Dublin gutter rat in a nice suit.

  Thinking of money reminds him. He reaches into his jacket and removes an envelope, tossing it on the desk in front of Sol, just far enough away that he has to reach for it.

  Sol takes the envelope, hefting it in his hand appraisingly, frowning. He opens it, riffles the stack of bills inside with a thumb, the frown deepening. “Bit light, hey?”

  Sean shrugs again, knocks back his whiskey and refills the glasses once again. “Business has been a bit light, hasn’t it?”

  “Jesus Christ, Sean, no, it ain’t light. You know the take from my places just as well as I do, and my places are solid.”

  “Hey now! I won’t have it with the blasphemy. You fuckin well know that.”

  Oh Jesus fucking Christ’s hairy ass, Sol thinks. By the sweating balls of the Virgin fucking Mary, go fuck yourself, Sean. His employer likes to pull this bullshit from time to time, play the devout, aggrieved Catholic, Mass every morning, saints’ days, all that. Sean is about as devout as Sol is – not at all – and probably hasn’t seen the inside of a church since he’d last robbed one. It’s just another in the series of constant, aggravating tests Sean puts his underlings to, more fucking bullshit to illustrate just who the boss is and who is the goddamn servant. The higher up Sol’s gone in the enterprise, the more he’s been tested until, now, damn near every little thing had to have some jab in it. Same as Sol does with Mickey, he supposes, but it fucking rankles, this way of doing things. That’s the way of the world, though, isn’t it? The strong and the weak. There’s always someone stronger than you out there.

  But this light fucking envelope. Sean damn well knows every penny that comes in and goes out of his places, knows that those Sol minds are as profitable as ever, more so. But what is Sol going to say? Call Sean a liar, a thief? That’s exactly what he is, but Sol can’t say a goddamn thing, but just scoop up his meager earnings and thank the master for his generosity.

  Sol looks around the office, willing his teeth to unclench and his heart to slow. Sean isn’t any smarter than he is; a bit more of a bastard maybe, but Sol can likely hold his own there, any more, after plenty of practice. Wasn’t no reason why Sean was the only one who should be sitting there like that, grinning like a cat with a broke-winged bird under his paw. Wasn’t no reason that Sol shouldn’t be on that side of the desk, with a string of businesses and properties and a bank account the size of a fucking barn. He meets Sean’s eyes, holds that smiling gaze as long as he can. Uncomfortably, he’s reminded of Billy’s old Indian uncle, just then, that flat black look that hits you with weight. Eyes like dead babies. There’s always someone stronger, isn’t there.

  “Problem, Sol?”

  You bet there’s a fucking problem, Sean. “Nah,” he says. “And yeah, guess maybe business has been a bit light, lately. I’ll get it turned around, hey?” He swallows something hot and bitter, keeping his face as placid as he can.

  Sean winks, pours them another shot.

  7.

  Things at the hospital have finally settled into something of a relaxed rhythm, lately. The weather has cooled off some, though it’s bound to turn again; the break in the heat has made Billy’s work easier, the patients seem a shade calmer, hell, even the cows seem to be shitting a little less. It’s almost pleasant being at the place, some days. Sometimes it seems more like a slightly gone-to-seed hotel, with the garden in bloom and the flowerpots full, men and women idling away the hours in rockers on the big veranda. If you don’t look too close, see the crazy eyes and wild hair, the piss-stained pajamas. If you don’t listen to the muttering and occasional weeping, Warm Springs could pass as something other than a lunatic hospital, on these cooler summer days, the sky huge, blue as a robin’s egg, clouds like fat sheep grazing lazily overhead.

  And then Bad Bird runs off. One day to the next, vanished. Poof, gone. That old goddamn bastard is nowhere to be seen, and Billy is the one who has to go find him.

  “Be quick about it, Bill,” Dr Rideout says, a severe, fatherly hand on Billy’s shoulder. “It doesn’t look good for us, having patients just strolling away li
ke that. I know it’s not your fault but, still, it doesn’t look good at all. We’re supposed to be looking after these people, keeping them safe.” Keeping the community safe, is the unspoken addendum to that. Some of their patients were dangerous. Bad Bird, well, enough said. “It’s not your fault, Bill,” Dr Rideout says again, frowning, “it’s our shared responsibility, all of us.”

  Yeah, it’s not my fault, Billy thinks, not my goddamn fault at all. I don’t even want to be here any more. I’m trying to work up the sand to quit this place, and then this happens. Damn sure won’t be able to quit for a while, after this, now, not in good conscience. Goddamn it.

  His father is just one old man, though, right? He can’t have gotten far and there’s one place he’s going to be headed: back to the reservation, back to his little shithole cabin. Like a badger to his den. He won’t have gotten too far.

  It takes Billy most of two days to make it back to the reservation on the old horse he’s borrowed, two days where he’s expected to come across Bad Bird every minute and instead comes up with nothing. He doesn’t fool himself: he’s no tracker, not some old chief wily with woodcraft, who can glance at the ground and immediately know who passed, when, and what they’d had for breakfast. But, shit, there are fucking roads right up to the rez and he can’t imagine that his old father – who is one of those old chiefs, but he’s also lazy – would have elected to skip cross-country when there’s a nice, easy path to where he’s going, where he can maybe even beg a ride from some passerby. It’s been an irksome couple of days ambling along on this swaybacked, stumble-stepping horse not far away from the glueyard, playing Injun. Him go-um that way. That goddamn old bastard of a father of his.

  It’s late on the second day when he reaches the cabin, his ass and lower back screaming from the unaccustomed effort of riding, particularly on a broken-gaited horse like this old nag. From a distance he can see a light in the one window, which hangs oblong and out of true in the wall. The whole place looks like a good fart would tear it down, the walls rough-boarded and splintery, grey with age, the entire structure listing to several angles at once. Billy is hot, tired, greasy faced and irritable; he just wants to round up the old fucker and, after a night of sleep, start making the long way back.

  What the hell was Bad Bird thinking, anyway? He wasn’t in the hospital voluntarily: Billy had filed the papers, got the signatures, put his father away for the man’s own good, after that last fracas when he’d nearly stabbed the census taker come to count him. He’s lucky he wasn’t in jail. But who knew just how much Bad Bird understands these things, even lucid; he’s the product of another time and the white man’s ways – The White Man’s Ways, Billy hears, those implied, ponderous capitals whenever his father says something like that: The White Man’s Police, The White Man’s Money, that kind of thing – he’s the product of another time and probably just assumes that if his own two feet will let him go somewhere, he can follow them. Even after years of reservation living, Bad Bird still thinks himself a free man. Billy doesn’t know if that’s admirable or not.

  Right now it’s fucking irritating, though, deeply, truly irritating and, as he loosely ties the horse to the post in front of the house, promising to come back in a minute to get the saddle off and rub him down, Billy is composing his aggravation into something akin to a coherent speech, translating it laboriously into the old tongue to lend it some weight to his father’s ears. With a bowlegged, sore-assed limp, he walks up the couple of porch stairs that are angled like bad teeth, and pushes himself through the door. “Father…”

  “Sagiistoo.” Marked Face smiles back at him from where he lounges on the frayed, stained cot that serves as Bad Bird’s bed. He raises an old, worn bag made out of a bison’s scrotum. “Tobacco, Nephew?”

  There’s a long and slow moment as Billy tries to pull back in the breath that’s gone out of his chest. Marked Face here like this, just like that, after all these years, after all that his uncle has done, twisting and folding Billy’s world up into something that’s almost unrecognizable now. He hears his father’s words.

  “Now I will tell you about Marked Face.”

  He hasn’t seen his uncle since the diner in Butte, years ago, years from now. A very different life from now. Bad Bird had just shaken his head, when asked. He’ll turn up, in his own time, the old man said, he always does. Looking at his uncle now, the things his father has told him about the man don’t seem real, even though he knows them to be true. Marked Face just looks like any other old Indian, Billy’s own fear of him notwithstanding: white-haired, weatherbeaten, shabby. But that look in his eyes, the feeling of presence, that can’t be ignored either. Particularly given what Billy knows now, about the terrible things his uncle did, to get his medicine. The things that crouch behind those dead, smiling eyes.

  When we were boys, Sagiistoo, Bad Bird had said, falling into the sing-song chant he used when telling stories, the People were still strong and the whites few on the ground. This was before their big war, and there were not many of them, in those days: there were the trappers and the traders, some occasional passers-by. But then that gold was found by the water to the west, and more and more of them came. They crossed our lands with impunity, they hunted our game. Sometimes they shot at us with their rifles, raped our women from time to time. And it wasn’t always rape, because the traders brought whiskey with them and, in many of our kin, a powerful thirst was kindled, such that they would trade their women for a time – or the women would trade themselves – for that medicine water.

  And it got worse, and worse, and worse.

  Seeing the force arrayed against us, most of our chiefs counseled patience, diplomacy, but some of us, like my brother – and, for a time, myself – wanted to drive all of the whites out of our lands, kill every one we encountered, in terrible ways, to dissuade others from coming. The old men – who were more like old women, we thought – these old men were merely afraid. They were dried out and used up by their years, but we, the young and the strong, we would drive these intruders back whence they came, with the force of our own arms. And so we tried: we attacked any group of whites we could find, provided they were in small enough numbers. We killed some of the traders and trappers who had become our friends, betrayed their trust and cut them down, knowing that, because they were of the whites – that empty, hollow, hungry race from the stories – they would eventually betray us too, so best we do so first.

  It was a terrible time.

  We killed men. Women. Babes at the breast. We roasted them on fires, we sliced off the men’s stones, we gave them the slow, cutting death, making it last as long as we could. It sickened me, but I joined in this because I thought it was the right thing to do.

  But we were fighting a losing fight, and we knew it. Even then, we knew, in our dark, nighttime thoughts. The whites were simply too strong, with their long guns, with their sickness, and the numbers that only increased, no matter how many of them we killed. Even more of the chiefs began to counsel appeasement, compromise, giving up our rights to the land where we had lived for a thousand thousand years, letting our deer and our bison fall to the bullets of the whites. Our women went hungry, our babies died, so that the whites could find their gold, take our hunting and then our land.

  But you know all this. You know it. These are the sad stories we tell now, when the older stories have been forgotten. These have become the true stories of the People.

  Listen, though, and I will tell you how my brother got his medicine.

  Marked Face was a handsome man in his youth. Forget the scar, forget the white hair and age and you can see it, even now. He was handsome, he was strong, fierce in the fight; my brother was the kind of young man the rest of us aspired to be like, in those days of hopeless war. And, because he was the man he was, he took for his first wife the most beautiful girl in our band, maybe the most beautiful of all the People. Dove was tall, like a pine, slender like a cat-tail, curved as, well, I am no poet. Just know that she was lovely.
Men’s heads would turn when she walked by, their voices go quiet. That was the power of her. She was graceful, humble, all that a man of the People could want. Her father was of lowly station but a good man, proud and protective of his daughter; still, he was honored when Marked Face bartered for her hand, and accepted the overly-gracious gifts my brother made for her. She, for her part, saw my brother’s handsomeness, his fierceness, the honors that were accruing to him, and she welcomed him, whispering to her father to make the compact.

  So it was: my brother, possibly the best of the young men, took the most desirable of our young women to wife. Soon enough, she was fat with a son. As it should be.

  But my brother, ah, my brother was seething inside, all this time. Even then, newly wed to a beautiful girl of sixteen summers, what should have been at least a brief spell of happiness, he was possessed by thoughts of the whites. We all were, all of us, by the callousness of that greedy people, by the insult to our lands and our way of life. But, in my brother, it had become a madness, bringing him to a dark place in his soul and then back again, to us. He left our band, without a word, merely going absent one morning; for many weeks, he was gone, seeking something he’d seen in those black dreams, leaving a young wife growing large with child. We said that he’d had a medicine dream, that he was bringing back something that would help us against the whites.

  Oh, but we were wrong.

  The brother that came back from that vision quest was not the brother who had left. Like Siinatssi from the stories, who had died and come back from the Other Lands a mad, broken man, so had my brother Marked Face, though we didn’t see it then. “Brother, I have found a strong medicine,” he said to me, taking me aside soon after his return. “I have found that which I sought. I have been tested and deemed worthy and, now, the Above Ones have shown me what I must do.”