by Peter Bowen
Which is how I met Klaas Vipsoek. I look back on that black December day when I met Custer, Cody, Doane, and Vipsoek and though all of them was to cause me trouble Klaas was a real special case.
He had his wagon opened up and his wares displayed in piles here and there. Pants, thread, needles, whiskey, patent medicines, pans of gingerbread baked six months before in Chicago with glycerine in the recipe instead of water, vermilion for the Injun trade—all that kind of truck. The proprietor was missing. There was the sound of a hatchet thunking softly behind the wagon, ripe curses in a heavy Dutch accent, and blatts and pops and explosions, which was Klaas farting, which he did all the time. (His Injun name was Father-of-Bad-Winds.)
It was downright musical. Thump gaddumph focking fraaaappp blunk splash Rphreeeebipbipbip sinofabotcher whack blaaaaatttt and so forth.
I peered round the wagon, my eyes and nose was assaulted with a fearsome stench, and I hurried upwind to watch this here interesting spectacle.
Klaas had on a bright green Robin Hood hat with a filthy feather—might have been ostrich once—hanging down off it, a yellow-and-red-checked coat that was fairly new on account of you could still tell that it was yellow and red, green-and-white-checked pants, high yellow leather farmer boots, and a twisted pair of spectacles upside down on his nose.
He was one of them big men looks fat but isn’t. He had twinkling bright blue eyes hid back of rolls of fat red cheek and one or the other or both of the cheeks had quids of tobacco in them. Tobacco juice flew off in any old direction, faithful as a leaky faucet. His beard and hair was blond in some places, except where the tobacco juice had dribbled down or he had wiped off some black axle grease in his hair.
“Focking sonopitching blaaattt phreep whonk,” him and the hatchet said variously. He was hauling what appeared to be clean sausage casings out of a gut tub and cutting them into lengths about a foot long.
Making a note not to buy no sausage, what with this big old scabbly hound pissing on the pile of cut casings, I set down to watch an artist at work. I’d no idea what he was doing, but whatever it was he was good at it.
The guts slithered out of the tub and become lengths, which made no sense at all, since you stuff sausage in the whole gut and then tie it off.
Klaas stopped to catch his breath. He introduces himself, as did I, and when we shook hands a glob of fatty soap come off on my hand. I wiped it on his wagon cover, and I was not the first.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said, pointing to the piles of cut guts.
He tried several explanations in his fractured Dutchy English, accompanied by farts and gestures, and the last couple gestures I figured it out and laughed so damn hard I fell on the ground.
Klaas was makin’ French hoods for the soldiers. Cock covers. Tomorrow was payday, and the boys would first run for a few stiff drinks, and after that the whorehouse. Them fifty-cent whores was poxy as hell, and the soldiers could protect themselves some with Klaas’s wares.
I’d spied a medium-sized glass barrel out front with a few of these gut lengths floating in it, but it hadn’t remarked much to me. Klaas finished up chopping the guts and started tying an eight-inch piece of stout thread on each one. Feller could slide on as much as he needed, tie it off, lay it on the table and whack off the overage with a bayonet or axe. I was impressed. The West is full of unexpected delights.
Klaas wiped his hands off and come round to the front of his wagon and took my money for some few possibles I’d found. There was a banjo stuck in a sheepskin case by the driver’s seat and Klaas hauled it out and proceeded to make the godawful noises them things do. Klaas planked and twanged and farted and between the noise and the stench I made my escape right smart.
His wretched banjo music followed me all across the wagon camp, fading, finally and mercifully. On the way I stopped and bought some new duds—Strauss denims from San Francisco and a heavy wool shirt and a bright yellow silk scarf to needle the cavalry boys with. A hatter put a wooden sizer over my head and then he steamed and poked a new custom Monarch of the Plains to my every size. I bought some seegars and a tooled leather case for them. I’d smoked a pipe or two of tobacco and sort of liked it.
The officers’ mess had white linens, silver, china, nigger waiters, and fresh flowers for the grand occasion of having Custer and Buffalo Bill dining with them. I didn’t amount to spit but I was grateful for the entertainment.
But Gus Doane caught me on the porch and we got to talk before the hysterics began.
“Saw an ad in the Omaha paper for a Luther Kelly,” said Gus. “It said all is forgiven, whatever that means.”
“Oh,” I said.
We went on in to dinner. The food was horrible, fresh flowers or no, like army food everywhere or food anywhere in England. Boiled, bland, tasteless, and sort of True Regulation Gray.
I really wanted to leave and send a telegram to my mother. Then I thought suddenlike that it could be a trap. Be easy to put an ad in the paper, for the law.
“I can see those wheels turning,” said Gus. “I’ll check on it for you. Okay?” I nodded, thankful. Well, I didn’t know.
After the godawful dinner there was godawful speeches, and the worst was Custer’s. He was the most overblown actor ever carved from a hog’s butt. I was embarrassed to even watch, but me and Doane seemed to be the only ones present who weren’t just moved to tears by him. We also were probably the only two men in America who knew his generalship was of the same high order.
After we toasted the flag and the seegars came out I tried to bolt and would have made it but for Gus who had a grip on my arm like a bull terrier. He hauled me outside and Gus being Gus I found myself volunteered to guide Goldilocks and his wife on a buffalo hunt. Some had been sighted near the Little Cheyenne River.
“Why don’t Cody take him?” I said.
“Bill’s got two bad teeth he’s havin’ out right now by the post surgeon,” said Gus, “and he ain’t going to be in any shape to do anything but lay back, drink whiskey, and wait for his gum to heal.”
Well, I owed Gus a lot, so the next day Custer, his wife, his teenage cousin Boston, a few soldiers, and me took off toward the northwest. A herd of journalists followed, George would have been uncommon lonesome without them.
Custer dashed here and there, looking noble, while I hoped his horse would find a prairie dog hole. By God if it didn’t, shattering a leg so it had to be pistoled. We had a few spares with us and Custer had the soldiers strip the tack off the dead horse and put it all on another. Up swung our brave soldier, and the horse looked back at the rider and wrinkled his lips and bucked like a raw, mean old wild horse. I liked to think that the sight of this ridiculous ass caused the horse to do this. Anyway, George landed hard in a rosebush and the horse bucked on away. While the soldiers caught it, Mrs. Custer plucked thorns from George’s parts.
Then someone up ahead hollered that there was buffalo in sight. George dropped to his knees and begged his wife for her horse. He would shoot a buffalo in her honor, with a pistol. I kept a respectful distance, trying not to throw up.
Well, this wet-brained clotheshorse took off on his wife’s expensive Thoroughbred mare, and he was easy to see on a long rise over a little creek, chasing after the biggest bull in the herd.
Now, buffalo can swap ends faster than you can blink, and they are damn hard to foller and hard to get up beside so you can take a good shot. George got close in and gaining, and me and the scribblers were close and watching him when he suddenlike aimed his gun at the dodging buffalo and blew the brains out of his beast.
The one he was riding, I mean.
George flew in a long arc down to the yeller prairie grasses and he plowed a deep furrow for about forty yards with his nose. Many would have been spared much if he’d broke his fool neck, but luck warn’t with us that day.
I galloped up quick to him and could have run my killing blade into his throat—he was bleeding so bad no one would have noticed—but I didn’t and it shames me.
There was life in the body, so I turned it over and poured out my canteen on his face and he coughed and spluttered and sat up looking even more stupid than he usually did.
“Bloody hell,” he said. He was in one of his British moods, it often happened, I’d heard, when he’d done a lot of heavy labor with his face.
“Did I get him?” said George, eyes lighting up.
“No,” I says. “You did manage to blow the brains out of your wife’s horse, though.”
“Do I know you?” he said suddenly, peering at me suspiciouslike.
“No,” I says, standing up. I watched his wife dismount and run to him, uttering little cries.
I loped on back to the fort and told Gus the thrilling events of the day, snarling that Custer hadn’t the brains of even so low a form of life as a soldier. Gus took it all in good part. He’d sent a telegram and received one and said I had no warrants out for me in New York.
“I’ll see it soon enough,” I says. I’d promised to take over from Bridger, and so I would.
I headed north, wishing to get as far away from Custer and what passed for civilization as I could.
The next morning, when the sun had got up high enough to warm the air a little, I come by three freight wagons down in a creek bottom. The lead wagon had a broken rear axle and the three teamsters was setting at a makeshift bar they’d put together out of battenboards from the wagons, flour barrels, and a bright red-and-white-checked cloth to give it some high-type class. They had a small keg of whiskey in a stand.
The West owes a great deal to drunken mule skinners, I will have you know.
I climbed down off my horse and nodded to the three.
“I’ll buy a round for the house,” I says, putting a ten-dollar gold piece on the tablecloth.
“What’n I tell you,” says the mule skinner behind the bar. “An’plass in this beshitten territory’s good fer a saloon. We only been here an hour an’ we got a custom ... er.”
One of the fellers in front stood up. He was dignified, like drunks get just before they fall over backward.
“I’m Bart and that’s Pete,” he said, pointing, “and the barkeep thar is Mulebreath.”
I got handed enough whiskey to pickle Mrs. Custer’s ex-horse, and I sipped it slow. I’d not much experience drinkin’ whiskey or much of anything else.
“Luther,” I says. Bart’s eyes rolled into his nose and he fell off the stump he’d been setting on.
“Ya got no manners,” said Mulebreath, “ya Yankee pismire.”
Mulebreath still proudly wore the rags of his Confederate uniform. He could have been one of the shoeless men in that damn stockade I’d soldiered around.
“If we hadna run outa whiskey we’da won,” says Mulebreath proudly.
“No doubt,” says I.
Mulebreath started tapping on the whiskey keg, and then he marked where the level of the liquor was.
“We’ll be a week late ta Kearney,” he said, smiling.
They’d hobbled their mules who was grazing in a meadow maybe a hundred feet away. The mules got jittery all of a sudden, and a whiff of the wind from the trees near the creek brought me a scent of bear.
“Come on out to the medder and fight like a man ya goddamn skulking hairball!” Mulebreath yelled. “I’ll rip yer balls off an use ’em dried fer buttons.”
Mulebreath staggered toward the mules and the meadow.
“Sergeant Mucklebreech to the rescue,” said Pete. He wasn’t drunk, just laughing.
“Mucklebreech?”
“Of the West Georgia Mucklebreeches.”
We looked up toward the meadow where Mulebreath and the bear was now squared off. The bear would take a swipe at Mulebreath, and Mulebreath would take a poke at the bear.
“He do this often?” I says.
“Yup,” said Pete. “Only usually there ain’t nothing there that anyone can see but Mulebreath.”
The bear was a good-sized black, but it was showing signs of disbelief turning to fear. Finally it run off, Mulebreath staggering after it hollering for it to come on back and settle this once and for all.
I said my thank-you’s and left three seegars for the teamsters.
Mulebreath was waving his hat when I looked back.
10
I GOT, AS YOU see, real disenchanted with the military early on and this is a very good thing for a young man. Oh, we got to have armies and navies, but you’d best remember that the leadership is drawed from them as likes to take orders so that someday they can give them. George Armstrong Custer was last but one in his West Point class. He made general faster than any of his classmates. I rest my case.
Still chuckling from time to time at the remembered happy sight of Custer plowing up the prairie with that monstrous hooter of his, I ambled on up the trail to Fort Phil Kearney, wondering why they wanted a scout at all. The whole idea when you are fighting primitives is you get them to attack you at a place of your choosing, and mow ’em down with massed volley fire. Most of our soldiers couldn’t hit the wall of the mess with their dinner plates, let alone shoot straight.
I was damn sure that all the Sioux and Cheyennes were off making winter meat, so I whistled as I rode careless down the trail. Well, there was several hundred warriors watching me as I dawdled along, admiring the last touch of fall and how handsome my shadow was and like any true fool I had a guardian angel. This here angel was the unlikeliest one imaginable, my chum Spotted Tail of the Jesuit-gobbling Brule Sioux. (He told me later that day he spared me only because he wanted to see Bridger’s face when he described how easy his apprentice had been caught.)
I wandered here and there and found a pleasant place to camp and smoked a seegar even though they still made me want to puke, and I lazed back against my saddle looking at the stars coming out.
First inkling I had that something was amiss was eight or ten people dropping on me out of the damn sky. They grabbed me by the arms and legs and then they rolled me up tight in a buffalo robe with just my head sticking out. They propped me up against a convenient tree so I could have a full and uninterrupted view of them chopping a soldier up into bloody rags, which they tossed off into the bushes.
All of a sudden Spotted Tail’s zebra-striped face appeared in front of mine, smiling that warm, horrible smile, like he’d just et twelve nestfuls of live baby bluebirds.
“I’d shake hands,” I granted, “but I’m a bit tight.”
Spotted Tail’s smile disappeared and he stuck his nose about a foot from mine and spat in my face.
“I have a use for you,” he said, “but I should kill you for being taken so easily. Big Throat would be shamed. You learned nothing from him.”
This was the very last spot in life when I ever trusted the land I was moving through again.
“You are a complete bastard,” I says, getting hot and not caring. Several of his chums unrolled me and then tied my hands behind me tight to the point of gangrene.
They jerked me upright. One foot had gone asleep and I hobbled around trying to make the feeling come back to it.
There was this mean murderous little runt called Little Big Man who was hollering that I ought to be served just like that poor soldier, and all whites should suffer the same death. His whole family had been massacred at a meat camp in the Sand Hills, and I couldn’t really blame him, but I still wasn’t overfond of his suggestions.
Him and Spotted Tail yelled at each other for a while, and finally Little Big Man went off, there were tears in his eyes. All of this was a dirty damn business and no mistake.
“You have some books in you, Stands-in-the-Fire-and-Argues,” said Spotted Tail, “now tell me what did the Iceni do when they defeated an enemy?”
“They always left one alive to tell the tale,” I said. They left that there messenger without hands, feet, eyes, or nose, and I sure hoped whatever translation old Tail had read had been deficient as to footnotes.
“Tail,” I says, “I may not live much longer. Where in the hel
l did you get your education?”
“My father and grandfather who were also called Spotted Tail presented me with a beautifully erudite English governess when I was four. I got her days, and they ...”
“I see,” I said. “Where is she now?”
“Making meat with the Brule. Living in the clean air. No corsets, no boredom, no hateful shrews or stuffed shirts. Sleep with my grandfather and father, the line is well-hung. Women are lawless, Stands-in-Fire. They tolerate us men. We amuse them. But don’t ever be so foolish as to think you know what they want.”
Well, that explained the old blond squaw with the pince-nez I’d seen in the Brule camp. I thought of Eats-Men-Whole and a hot green flame of jealousy run up my spine and set my ears to smoking.
Spotted Tail spun me around and slashed the thongs away from my wrists.
“You owe me your life,” he said. “You will not run. If you try you can become like the soldier.” He looked at me for a long time, and then he said, “Shit,” and walked off. I knew how he felt.
We moved north pretty rapidly, and no one paid much attention to me and I suppose I should have tried to run. But I owed my life to so many people I was feeling overbought.
After three days’ pretty hard riding we come on to a wide valley about ten miles to the north and west of the fort. And all them Indians Carrington and everyone else thought was out on the plains hunting buffalo was there, nearly three thousand of them. For their war leader they had chose Crazy Horse, and that eerie, quiet man had a plan that was simple and soon to be put into effect.
The fort was in such a terrible position it sort of passed belief, to those who hadn’t much experience of the military, and the siting of the fort led to all that came after. To get firewood the woodcutters and infantry detailed had to be protected by artillery and cavalry.
It was better than five miles to the timber, and the cannon fire had to rake through the forest before the cutters would even go into the shadows of the trees.