by Blake, J
“What’s this?” Edward said when the graybeard tossed the packet in the pot. The old man told him to open it up and have a look. Edward untied the ribbon and opened the flap and his breath caught at the sight of the top photograph, grimy and much smudged, which showed a wholly naked young woman lying on her side with her back to the camera and smiling over her shoulder. Edward looked and looked at her full round buttocks.
The graybeard laughed and had a coughing fit, then managed to get out, “It aint no drawings, boy. That there’s the real thing, by Jesus.”
Edward had never before laid eye on a photograph. The reality of the girl was stunning. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard and looked at the rest of the pictures. He saw the same smiling woman reclining on her back with legs apart and knees raised and one hand between her legs on her great hairy nexus and the other over a breast. Saw another completely naked young woman of fairer face and lighter hair recumbent on her left side and with her right leg raised straight up in the air as gracefully as a gymnast’s to expose her vulva fully to the camera’s infallible memory. Saw a side view of this same woman kneeling and grinning into the camera as she gripped the erect phallus of a standing man visible but from the shoulders downward. And this same woman kneeling before perhaps the same man with her eyes closed and both hands around his erection and her mouth over its glans.
“Yeeow! It’s one a them Frenchy picture cards!” the man to Edward’s right said, leaning over in his chair to have a look.
The graybeard leaned over the table and snatched the photographs from Edward. “I said have a look, boy, not do no memorizing!” He coughed harshly and pimpled the tabletop with pink spittle. “They worth plenty more than a damn dollar. Twenty dollars be more like it. But I aint looking to let ye buy the pot by raising ye and letting ye raise me right back again. I’ll say them pitures are worth a dollar and call ye right here and now.”
The other men at the table clamored to have a look but the graybeard told them to go to hell as he carefully replaced the photographs in the packet.
Edward yearned for the pictures but affected only the barest interest. He pursed his lips and shrugged indifferently and said all right, he’d allow them as a dollar. The graybeard grinned and tossed the packet in the pot and called him and turned up a ten as his hole card to go with the two tens he had showing. But Edward showed three jacks and the old lunger had such a violent fit of coughing his face turned purple and it seemed the veins in his forehead might burst. Edward took the photographs off the table and put them inside his shirt.
Keeler had lost all his money in the first twenty minutes of play and had since been standing at the bar, drinking and half-listening to Allenbeck belabor the details of his episode with the redhead whore upstairs. Allenbeck was directing his narrative as much to the barkeep across the counter, but the barkeep’s trade had over the years made him privy to more tales of erotica than he cared to listen to anymore, and he barely attended the riverman’s account as he cursorily rinsed beer mugs. Keeler kept a close eye on the game’s progress and smiled broadly every time Edward pulled in a pot, since by agreement he was entitled to half of Edward’s winnings. No other player now at the table had been there when Edward joined the game.
The din of conversation and laughter now dipped noticeably and much of the room’s attention turned toward the front of the room. Edward looked to the doors and saw a band of a half-dozen men who stood there and glanced about the big room with expressions of amused disdain. Two of the men were uniformed U.S. Army officers but the unmistakable leader of the group was a man with an imperial beard and black hair to his shoulders, resplendent in a suit of green broadcloth and matching cape, a wide-brimmed hat with a gray plume, a white stock around his throat, a lace handkerchief dangling from his sleeve. His gloved hand held a silver flask and now he took a drink from it but made no offer to his fellows. The other three were all young men in identical black jackets, white silk shirts, red scarves that hung to their knees, and high boots shined to gloss. They wore rapiers and flintlock pistols on their belts. The man in the green suit said something sidelong to the others and they all laughed loudly, and then he turned and went out and they followed after.
“Who was that?” Edward asked the player to his right, a sallow ragged man named Desmond whose bearing and diction bespoke a past in which he had occupied higher station than his present.
“That, my boy,” Desmond said, “was Marcel DeQuince, one of the city’s supreme maitres d’armes. Perhaps the great Pépé Lulla is more adept with a broadsword, but not even Gilbert Rosiere himself is his equal with a rapier. They are rather a rogue royalty in this town, the maîtres d’armes.”
“What’s a matter darms?” Edward asked.
“Maitre d’armes, young man, maitre d’armes. A master of arms. Rapier, dirk, broadsword, pistol, any weapon meant for the hand of man. DeQuince has killed some six or seven men in duels these past two years. So they say. Say he’s making a fortune teaching American officers to fence with sabers. I expect they’re set on giving a heroic account of themselves dueling the Mexicans in Montezuma’s fabled halls. Those other fellows were his students as well. You can always tell them by those red scarves.”
Edward wanted to ask who Montezuma was but he was smarting from Desmond’s correction of his pronunciation and did not want to further display his ignorance.
He folded after the third card on the next two hands, then got into a betting war with Desmond and a paddlewheeler cook after the last faceup card was dealt. The pot swelled to thirty-seven dollars before the cook called and Edward showed a full house of nines over deuces to take the hand. “Kee-rist!” the cook said, and shoved his cards away. Desmond sighed and gently threw in his cards.
Edward had been sipping beer since sitting down to the game and now told the table he was going to take a piss and to not let anybody fill his chair while he was gone.
“Hell, boy, why bother to go outside?” said a man with raw sores on his face who’d been in the game for over an hour and had been losing steadily. “You kindly been pissin on us all night.”
Edward laughed and slipped the sheathless bowie into his belt, marveling at the huge weapon’s balance, at its comforting heft. He put the folding money in his shirt pocket and scooped up the specie and the gold tooth and the pocketwatch and stuffed it all in his purse, then took his beer bucket to the bar and told the barkeep to fill it.
Keeler was grinning crookedly. “We doing real good, eh?”
Edward gave him a look and smiled. “Yeah, we doin just fine.” He looked around as he handed Keeler the purse and said, “Hold this while I go out and water the flowers. Where’s Johnny at?”
“Aint seed hair of him since he went up to sample the fillies. Probly still at it. Wish this one here was still up there too so I wouldn’t have to keep hearing about how he did this and that and the other with some gleety redhead. He’s bout paralyzed my ears with his bullshit.”
Allenbeck made a rude hand gesture at Keeler. “Aint bullshit and she aint gleety. You just too old to cut into the hair pie but once a week anymore, grandpa.”
Keeler put his face up close to Allenbeck’s and scrutinized his features intently. “You know, I just might be your grandpa. I believe I knew your grandma real well.”
“You gutterborn bastard,” Allenbeck said. “Everbody on the river knows your momma”
The friends exchanged such dire insults regularly and were still at it as Edward went out the front doors. Lightning quivered to the south and thunder rolled lowly from the Gulf. The sky was crowded with heavy cloud. In the dim light of the streetlamp a pair of oxcarts loaded with cypress planks was rumbling past, one behind the other. From the other side of the wagons came voices and a staccato metallic clash but Edward’s straining bladder would brook no further delay and he hastened around the corner of the building, unbuttoning as he went. The jakes stood in the alley but only a man desperate in his bowels would do his business in the dark and miasmic foetor
of its rotted and ratcrawling confines. The pissers simply let fly against the side of the building as Edward now did, being careful how he set his feet in the slickness of the urine-sopped mud.
Emerging from the alleyway he saw a small crowd looking on as DeQuince’s two officer students crossed sabers in the street, shuffling to and fro, thrusting and parrying as the master stood by and observed them, sipping from his flask. Abruptly he barked, “Non!” and the swordsmen stepped back from each other and gave him full attention.
DeQuince handed the flask to a red-scarved student and gestured for one of the officers to come to him. He took the soldier’s saber and softly discussed with him some point of technique and then he stepped out to face the other officer and said, “En garde.”
The officer saluted with his blade and assumed the ready position. The maitre d’armes’ own garde posture was languid, the saber drooping loosely in his upraised right hand, his left hand on his hip almost girlishly. He seemed bored. He showed a small smile and asked something and the officer nodded curtly and worked his fingers tightly on the hilt and his aspect was utterly serious. Thus poised, the officer began circling DeQuince slowly. The master moved with him as smoothly as if the ground itself were revolving under him, smiling easily. And then he yawned hugely and the onlookers laughed. Even in the streetlight’s weak illumination Edward could see the flush on the officer’s face and the angry tightening of his lips. The officer thrust and DeQuince parried with the barest flick of wrist and no change of posture or expression whatever. He made a remark in French that drew laughter from the other students and the officer flushed more deeply still. Another intent thrust glanced off another casual parry.
The officer feinted and DeQuince laughed aloud and the soldier’s face clenched in fury. He lunged in a thrust meant to skewer DeQuince’s heart but the master sidestepped easily and his brightly blurred blade entwined itself around the officer’s saber and snatched it from his hand and sent it arcing through the air, turning end over end. The spectators were applauding as the sword clattered to the ground at Edward’s feet.
As the officer stalked over to retrieve his weapon Edward bent to pick it up with the intention of handing it to him but before his fingers touched the hilt the soldier roughly shoved him aside and snarled, “Get away, you damned river trash,” and stooped for the saber himself.
Reacting without thought Edward backhanded him in the side of the head with the heel of his fist. The officer staggered sidewise and fell to all fours and Edward kicked him in the stomach, knocking him onto his side, and then kicked him in the head, spinning him over on his face. The officer lay still and breathed wetly against the cobblestones.
The crowd stared at Edward in slackjawed silence. He cursed himself for his stupidity as he stood facing them. It’s a bunch a them and you got no gun, you damn fool! His only arms were his knives—the bootknife, the snaphandle in his pocket, the big bowie flat against his belly.
Now the other officer said, “You snipjack bastard,” and went for his pistol but DeQuince slapped his blade against the man’s belted flintlock to stay his hand. The officer stared at the maitre d’armes in confusion. DeQuince shook his head and then advanced on Edward with an air of indolence, smiling easily, the saber dangling at his side.
The fallen soldier lay on his pistol and Edward sensed that if he tried for it the maitre d’armes would run him through on the instant. DeQuince closed to within easy sword thrust and there paused, his smile remote, his eyes as devoid of malice as of warmth, bored eyes, indifferent to whether they looked upon rain or blood or sparkling wine. Edward had not seen eyes like them before.
DeQuince addressed him softly in French. Edward shrugged. The master at arms smiled and tilted his head and looked at him with slitted eyes as if trying to see him in clearer focus, then spoke again, more loudly, and the onlookers all laughed.
“He had no call to put hand to me,” Edward said. He did not know if the maitre d’armes spoke English. The bowie in his belt felt far from his hand.
DeQuince again spoke in French and the rising inflection of his words suggested he was making inquiry. Edward shrugged and said, “Shit, I don’t talk Frenchman.” The master of arms pulled a mock-serious face and shrugged hugely in exaggerated mimicry and the spectators laughed. A rush of anger burned Edward’s ears. He turned his head and spat and in the same moment DeQuince’s saber flashed up and flicked away the top button of his shirt. The crowd laughed more loudly yet. Edward backed up a step and without seeming to move at all DeQuince kept the same distance between them. The saber tip rested lightly on Edward’s chest just under the second button.
Edward raised his hand to push the saber away and in a move faster than the eye DeQuince slapped his wrist with the flat of the blade and with a backhand flick took away the second button and the sword tip now dimpled the cloth under the third. Again Edward backed up a step and DeQuince moved with him as effortless as shadow. The crowd applauded.
“You son of a bitch,” Edward said through his teeth. With the barest sidelong turn of his head DeQuince said something loudly and pricked the crowd to laughter again. He flicked away the third button and the saber tip dropped to the fourth.
Something batted the plume in DeQuince’s hat as it sailed past his head and shattered on a wall. A bottle flung by Keeler who stood drunkenly grinning from the entrance of The Hole World Hotel with Allenbeck swaying alongside him and yelling, “Hey, you fucken monsewer bastard, try that on me why doncha!”
In the instant DeQuince’s eyes cut to the saloon doors Edward snatched the saber blade tightly with his left hand and ignored its burning incision into his palm as DeQuince’s hold on the hilt tightened reflexively and Edward yanked the blade sidewise and pulled him off balance and the bowie was now in Edward’s right hand and he thrust it to the hilt in DeQuince’s belly.
The master of arms’ eyes went very wide and white and were not at all bored now and his lips puckered as if for a kiss. Blood gloved Edward’s hand as he shoved down hard on the haft and the razorous blade slid easily through gut and organs and gristle and struck bone and he leaned harder into the knife to cut through it and the blade sliced through DeQuince’s crotch and came free in a great hot rush of entrails. He released the saber and jumped back and DeQuince stood wavering and staring down horrified at his viscera unraveling to his feet with a soft hiss and he sank to his knees and fell forward into the spilled ruin of his life.
For an instant everyone stood in mute tableau—and then Edward turned and ran. He heard behind him Allenbeck’s shrill battle cry and then a pistolshot and a yelp and he turned the corner as more shots cracked one behind the other and a round ricocheted off a wall behind him. He ran the length of several dimly-lighted blocks as people jumped aside of his headlong flight. He turned into an alley and in the blackness crashed into a pile of broken crates and fell and scrambled up again and dashed out onto a high-curbed cobbled street and recognized it and knew now where he was and where the river lay and he headed that way but not directly, instead threading his way through alleys and narrow back lanes, not running now but moving fast along the shadows close to the walls, hearing no sounds of pursuit. He rounded yet another corner and a knot of men on the walkway before him was passing a bottle among themselves and they saw him coming and broke clear of his way and he realized that he still had the bowie in his bloodstained hand and his pants were sopped with DeQuince’s blood and his left hand was dripping red from the gash opened by the saber blade and his aspect was surely demonic.
By this roundabout route he arrived at Tchoupitoulas Street and made directly for the dark end of the block and the livery where they’d housed their outfits. The bowie was now under his coat and his bleeding hand balled tight in his coat pocket. He attempted an air of casualness wholly unnecessary on that roistering street where he was twice obliged to step over men on the sidewalk who lay dead or insensible with drink, who could say which, to the utter disregard of the passing world.
The liv
ery boy went bigeyed at the sight of him but hastened to follow orders and saddled his mount while Edward checked the loads in his rifle and pistol and then bound his hand tightly and scribbled a note to John saying he’d wait on him at Mrs. Bannion’s house in Nacogdoches. He pondered a moment, then thoroughly blacked over the names of both town and madam and wrote “at Aunt Flora’s in N.” There was no telling who might get a gander at the note. He slipped it in with John’s possibles and gave the boy two bits to tell John the same message if he happened to see him.
The boy gave him directions for the quickest route to the western road and Edward thanked him and rode off into the night as the sky lit white with lightning as thunder blasted and the rain came crashing down.
2
Two days west of Dixie City there struck a hard norther. The trees and bushes shook in the icy wind and then frosted white. The land went hazy and blue with cold. Breath plumed palely from horse and rider. Edward’s thin jacket and slicker were of little effect. His ears rang with the cold, his fingers cramped, his feet ached to the marrow. He draped the reins loosely round the saddlehorn and hugged himself tightly and let the horse follow the trail.
He made camp early that evening and built two large fires and though he’d not eaten since morning when he’d killed a rabbit for breakfast his appetite was blunted by the cold. He let the lee fire die out and spread a layer of dirt over the smoldering ground and there made his bed. He recharged the other fire and with the heat of it wafting over him he wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep. Two hours later he woke in frozen darkness with all muscles stiff against the icy night. He blew on the coals and fed them kindling and revived the flames and huddled so near to them that next thing he knew he was afire.