“I’m here, Wylie. Go back to sleep. It’s all taken care of,” says McAdoo soothingly.
Wylie sinks back down on the bed. We listen to the slow steady breath of sleep move like a sweeping broom in the pauses of the wind.
McAdoo turns his face back to me. “I’m taking him to Canada with me. It’s his best chance. I been to Canada,” he says. His voice changes, as if he is speaking out of a cavern. A cavern of regret, or sorrow. “I went Indian up in Canada.”
“You mean you lived with Indians there?”
For a minute, he doesn’t speak. I sense the dumb misery of an animal gnawing its leg in a trap.
“Here’s where you go Indian.” He puts a finger to his temple. “Up in your head. Indian is a way of thinking. Lots of them Eastern boys riding at the studios play at cowboys and Indians. They learned Indians reading those boys’ books – maybe same kind of book you asking me to help you write – books tell you how to do sign language, show you how to chip an arrowhead with a deer horn, make a war bonnet out of turkey feathers. Books don’t make an Indian. It’s country makes an Indian.”
“How does country make an Indian?” I ask quietly. “Tell me.”
He reaches out with his boot and closes the door of the stove. The light in the room shrinks to a few bright slivers threading through the dampers. The glowing end of the reefer travels up to his face and flares there. The cavernous eyes, the stark cheekbones. His voice hard, deliberate, distant. “Five months I went alone out there. Never spoke a word to a soul. Kill your meat and find your water. No coffee, no tea, nary a lump of sugar. Ever know a white man went five months without bread, or biscuits, or beans? I done it.
“I’d soured on folks, wanted shut of them, but lonesome country breeds lonesomeness. I sung every song I knew trying to drown out the Indian talking in my head. Every day I heard him plainer and plainer. The country done it to me. The sky was Indian sky, the wind was Indian wind, every last thing I laid my eyes on was cut to fit an Indian.
“I taken myself away from my own kind; I’d sickened on white folks. I seen a sign of them, seen bull teams, seen freight wagons, I hid. Only trail I followed was animal trail. I seen a hawk, I followed the hawk. Hawk passed me on to a deer, I followed the deer. Deer tipped his horns to the sun, I followed the sun. I rode forty miles some days, east, west, north, south, I wasn’t bound for any particular place. Watered my horse in the Frenchman, the Saskatchewan, the Oldman, the Bow, the Big Muddy. I covered some ground. Kept moving.”
My pencil is moving under cover of darkness, too, scratching out a story offered under cover of darkness. I turn the pages of the notebook quietly, marching my shorthand across the paper by feel. My eyes grow accustomed to the dark; I dimly make out the old man on his chair, head held upright, the reefer steady now, its bright point hung down the side of the chair.
“Lived that way for a month, went sick. Suffered the bone ache and fever, the bloody shits. One day I found myself squatting by a buffalo wallow, buck naked and white as peeled willow. Looked up and saw a four-o’clock sun, didn’t know how it got there. Didn’t know where my clothes was. Heard myself… singing. Next I knew, it was night. Standing out in the bare prairie in the middle of the most godawful storm you ever seen, but now my clothes had climbed back on me. Thunder booming and the sky cracking like a bad plaster wall, booming so hard your ears near bleed, yellow-green cracks of fire running ceiling to floorboards, whole world shaking and burning like a house falling down around your head, timbers snapping, floor giving way under your feet, roof buckling.
“Two balls of ground lightning come rolling towards me, skipping and flaring over the short grass, crackling, jumping like drops of water in a hot skillet. The hair on me jumps up straight all around my head, I lift my hands to cover my eyes to shut out what’s a-going to blast me to Kingdom Come… there’s a hovering blue light all around them hands… like sundogs circling round the sun. I feel myself lifting, boots dangling above the ground.
“Sky opens up. Rain drives me back down, knocks me side to side, pounds me so hard it’s going to tear the rags I’m wearing right off me, shred and peel them off my bones like wet newspaper. Can’t catch my breath the rain’s driving down so hard, I’m breathing rain. She’s like standing in a fast-running river, white water boiling over my head, and on the banks of this here stream, big old green tree trunks of lightning are waving in a white wind, forking their roots down into the ground to reach the very hubs of hell.
“Of a sudden I’m stinging all over, cold bees are at me. Hail. She’s making a sound like a scythe cutting grass, blood roaring through your head. There ain’t no cover but my horse. I throw my coat over his head and duck under his belly. The stones are drumming on him and he begins to squeal like a stuck pig, you never heard the like of it.
“God knows how long I listen to that squealing. I squat under him with my arms wrapped around my head to shut out the sound of it, just rocking back and forth. Then, all of a sudden like, she’s hushed, dead quiet. The scythe’s done cutting, the blood’s done roaring. No more lightning, no more thunder. I can feel the cold rising off the ground, see the pale ice steaming. I come out from under that horse on all fours. I crawl. Don’t know where I’m going, don’t care. Hail’s crunching like broken glass, biting into my knees. Everywhere’s white and frozen, mist smoking off the ground and me creeping through it, sweating fever and fear, bawling like a baby. I creep and crawl, looking for a hidey-hole to worm myself into, some place to curl. Then my limbs won’t carry me no more and down I drops on my face in the hail, me mumbling into the ice and the thunder muttering off in the distance.
“I wake round dawn, the sky apple-green and me nigh right in the head, but wet and chilled and shaky. I suspicion laying in the hail drew the fever out of me. Only now I ain’t laying in hail I’m laying in melt-water. Slathered in mud. I pick myself up out of the muck and look for my horse. No horse. He’s made tracks with my saddle and my rifle.
“There’s a blow of black despair for you. I sink back down into the mud, can’t pick myself out of that wallow. I’m whipped.
“The sun keeps climbing, the mud dries stiff on my face, my hands, my hair, my clothes. And I just sit, can’t rouse myself. Until I hear horses. Good Lord, maybe I been saved. I look up from studying the mud caked on my trouser legs and what do I see? Three Indian bucks making towards me on their ponies.
“I shake myself up then, by the Jesus, shake myself up and go for my pistol. But there ain’t no pistol to hand. All that capering the night before jogged it loose and it’d gone missing somewheres. I cast about every which way but all I see is puddles with sunshine slanting off them, hail-beat grass, and mud-holes. No Colt. The only weapon stands between me and those Indians is a knife.
“They’re on me now. Rein their ponies up in my face and investigate me Indian-fashion – poker-faced and solemn. I must’ve been a study. Raggedy-ass white man in clothes a beggar of a fort Indian wouldn’t wore. Hair all matted and twisted up in mud like a mop, rest of me crusted over with a acre’s worth of God’s good earth.
“They was right handsome boys, all done up for a party, paint and feathers. The one I figured for the leader of this expedition was straight as a gun barrel, a fall of that blue-black Indian hair hanging down to the small of his back, half his face painted yellow and the other half red, necklace of brass bells hung round his neck that went tinkle-tinkle every time his horse pawed the ground.
“He points to me, says something to his friends in Indian gab. The way they laugh ain’t encouraging. He shoulders his pony into me and taps my hair with his quirt. In a big, loud voice he puts what I take to be a question. I’m guessing something along the lines of, What you doing spoiling my air and my scenery?
“By the Christ, thinks I, by the Christ. These lads are Blackfoot. I’d heard plenty of how they done woodhawks and hunters along the Missouri. They didn’t leave no pretty corpses. Lot of dead men with their own dicks stuffed in their mouths.
“Red
and Yellow Face gives me another flick with his quirt and makes some remark to his boys that sets them laughing fit to bust a gut. I suspicion what’s funny is me plastered in hog muck. Man’ll do most anything to save his precious skin and I did. Down I goes on hands and knees, sticks my rump in the air, lets loose a squeal to wake snakes, and starts rooting like a pig in his pen. Lord, the look on those Indians’ faces. They’d never seen the like. But when the surprise slid off them they howled with laughter. That was a favourable sign. Nobody likely to murder you when they’re laughing at you.
“Old Red and Yellow Face was pointing at me and saying the same word over and over. The other two kept nodding their heads yes, yes, every time he said it. I speculate Old Red and Yellow Face was a man of the world, been to the white man’s forts, seen his pigs. Every time he said the word, I nodded and grinned and grunted all the louder. I even pitched myself in a good-sized mud-hole and rolled for him, wriggled on my back, all four trotters up in the air. Your Indian’s got a natural contempt for the pig, but this was right up their alley, watching a white man do pork proud.
“What they didn’t know I was up to, rooting through the slop on my hands and knees, wiggling my hams, was I was looking for that revolver of mine. Playing pig got my snout close to the ground. And when I found that Colt, I aimed to knock Red and Yellow Face and his brethren off their ponies like they was turkeys setting on a rail fence.
“So I kept oinking, and praying, Please God let me lay hands on that gun. Once or twice I thought the boys might be losing interest so I sat up on my haunches like a fat old boar and made windy, wet farts with my lips, or flopped my hands up alongside my head like they was pig ears. When they was roaring with joy I’d get back on the hustle again, covering ground looking for the Colt, the Indians heeling their horses behind me, not wanting to miss nothing.
“My spell of sickness had weakened me considerable though. Wasn’t long before I was feeling mighty dogged out, but I says to myself, Keep moving, you got to keep moving until you get that gun. Over and over I said it. And that’s what I done, went on sinking my wrists in gumbo, the mud sucking the strength out of me, leaving my arms so wearisome heavy it was all I could do to pull them free. Keep moving, I said, you got no hope but that gun.
“Everything squeezing in, your eyes begging for a flash of shiny metal, and this noise in your head like a saw whining through wood. And that’s the sound of your own breath, but you got to keep moving, keep moving. Your eyes start to haze, like blood dripping into water, one drop at a time, each drop spreading, and the water going misty, then cloudy, then bright, until there ain’t nothing but bright blood, and then you get a new notion – that that noise is the sound of a saw chewing through your heart, the blood spurting deep down in you with every stroke, slowly inching up in you until you drown in it, drown in your own heart’s blood.
“And I did. I drowned. Keeled over. Sank. I had strength but for one thing, fumble for that knife in my boot top. Pick away, pick away went my fingers but they wouldn’t close on it. Then I knew it was all over. Just lay there panting, hog waiting to be butchered. Lay with my face in the mud and waited for them to come, do what they done to those woodhawks on the Missouri, cut me down to size one piece at a time.
“It was unholy still. A still kin to the still of an empty house, but bigger and stranger. Empty world, it said. I waited. Nothing come. I rolled over, staggered to my feet. I’d have swore there weren’t another soul in a hundred miles. Indians was gone, like smoke in a wind.
“Couple of hours I walked in circles looking for my pistol. Where there’s three Indians could be more. Found my hat. Found a dead prairie chicken laying where the hail had killed it. Sight of that, hunger came over me so fierce I pulled the feathers off it, ate it raw where I stood. It’d been one long stretch since I’d took food.
“Found my hat, found the chicken, but never found the Colt. When candle-lighting come, I turned south and tramped for the border. Walked like a dead man. Walked all night. Sun rose and I found the third thing, my horse stepping south too.”
There is a long pause. I hear him suck at the reefer but no light shows; it has gone out in his fingers. I lift my pencil from the paper but he starts to talk again, his voice no longer deliberate and hard, but mournful and echoing like it had begun.
“Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so’s to find their creature spirit,” he says. “That’s where they learned it, in the wilderness.”
I ask what he means by creature spirit.
“Creature spirit,” he reiterates. “Spirit they shared with some creature – grizzly spirit, elk spirit, coyote spirit, crow spirit. Hardship and the country taught them it.” There is another pause. “What you make of mine?”
“Your what?”
“You ain’t been listening, have you?” he says.
The next morning I type up a transcription of the interviews. In the end, I send only the last one because it has about it the ring of naked honesty that Chance is after. I believe it marks progress, shows how McAdoo, under my prompting, is slowly moving nearer and nearer to what we are seeking – the truth.
That night as I am getting ready for bed a knock comes at my door. There is a note from Chance by messenger. The note reads:
Dear Harry,
A picture about a lunatic lost on the plains is not what I had in mind. Press him about Indian wars.
Sincerely,
Damon Ira Chance
16
Chance’s curtly dismissive note about the McAdoo interview recounting the thunderstorm on the prairie and his playing pig for the Indians leaves me feeling idiotic and abashed. It worries me even more when the next week’s worth of transcripts is passed over unacknowledged and uncommented upon. I am not pleasing Mr. Chance.
I berate myself for my stupid assumption that words on the page can convey what I have learned about McAdoo. Which is that he has something he needs to tell. What this is I can’t say, but I sense the weight, the pressure of it behind everything he said that night. Words on the page are not capable of communicating this. It had been the burial, the drawing in of night, the incessant wind, the way McAdoo held himself in the chair, the flick of the boot slamming closed the stove door, the sudden darkness, the voice playing scales in the darkness, beginning flat as dictation, then growing troubled, self-questioning. All this I suddenly see as more important than what he said; the feel of the night was its meaning.
That’s why what I’ve given him seems to Chance inadequate, pedestrian, a labour of diligence rather than imagination. But I am not just an unimaginative stenographer. I am not. To use Chance’s favourite word, I have intuited whatever is to be got from McAdoo will not be got for the asking, simply, easily. It will have to be won.
Shorty McAdoo is no braggart. Chance could find a hundred cowboys here in Hollywood who, in a few hours, could tell enough colourful lies to fill any number of movie screens. But Chance’s ambition is to go beyond entertaining lies, to make a great film, a truthful film. That is what he has set his heart on. And I want to tell him only delicacy and patience will extract the truth from Shorty McAdoo.
I have my pride. It galls me that Chance might have written me off, that I might be underestimated, unappreciated, misunderstood. I need to meet with him face to face and explain all this, or at least talk to him on the telephone.
The problem is I can’t reach him. When I phone his office, his receptionist says he is busy and can’t speak to me. I’m beginning to suspect Fitzsimmons has given her orders not to let me talk to Chance.
I need some kind of breakthrough with McAdoo. So I buy the pistol.
“What’s this?” demands McAdoo.
“What does it look like?” He refers to the revolver I bought in a pawnshop in L.A., hoping it would be useful in coaxing a revelation out of him.
“That ain’t what I mean. What I mean is, why you showing it to me?”
“I want you to teach me to shoot.”
&nbs
p; “Put that away before somebody gets hurt.”
“Come on, Shorty. You know about guns. That first day I came here, the day you went back to the bunkhouse and put your jacket on – I saw the pistol in the waistband of your pants.”
“You wouldn’t have, I didn’t intend you to. And in case you didn’t I showed it to you. Remember?”
“So it was a warning?”
“I’m a careful man.”
“Teach me to shoot.”
“I ain’t a shootist. Never was.”
“You said you intended to knock those Indians off their ponies. What did that mean?”
“Means I was in fear of my life.”
“Sounds like fancy shooting. Sounds like a shootist to me.”
“That close, you just point and squeeze. It’s much of a muchness to pointing your finger.” He points his finger at me by way of illustration.
I proffer the revolver to him. “Show me.” For a moment, I’m sure he is going to refuse point-blank, but he takes it, weighs it in his hand. Then he sweeps the muzzle up and down in broad strokes, like a painter running a brush up and down a picket fence, smooth and calculated. Repeating this action several times he says, “Wait here,” and strides off. It is obvious from the length, the deliberation of each step that he is pacing off a distance. I begin to count to myself, seven, eight, nine. McAdoo halts, swings back to me. “Don’t you move now, Harry,” he warns me.
The sharp, flat crack, the spray of dirt pattering on my right pant leg seem simultaneous with the movement of the pistol barrel. Again, the glint of the barrel travelling through the hot sunshine, the loud pistol report, the eruption of dirt by my left boot.
I stand locked to the spot, a weightless sensation in my bowels, my head dizzily adrift. His voice snaps me back into focus. “Just point and squeeze,” he says mildly. “Point and squeeze.”
The Englishman’s Boy Page 17