by Peter Bowen
“Brap you, Kelp,” said Teethadore, still mushmouthed with the fish parts in his works. He hacked and coughed and struggled up, shedding tinkling bits of glass and bleeding from about twenty small punctures in his cheek.
“Long get off all right?” I says, trying to bridge the awkward part of the conversation.
“Express to Lake George.” said Teddy. “He’ll be gone a whole week!”
“Why, you could have us fighting the Rooshians, the British, and the Bolivians by then. All of them at once,” I says. “I think I’ll go wire Secretary Long and say please come back. Urgent.”
“This is not time for your blasted levities,” pouted TR. “I could carve a better government out of a meringue.” I took that to mean if the goddamned fools would have listened to Teethadore he’d right now be entering Madrid at the head of a conquering army.
“Come along,” said TR. “You will find this interesting.”
Some folks snap when their gods are ill-spoken of, or their mothers, but I go berserk when anyone in command says “interesting,” and I do that for excellent reason. I have fifty-six visible scars in my hide I got in the course of going someplace that these bastards called “interesting.”
Teddy was built solid, like a sand-filled barrel with feet, but I got a good clamp on his windpipe and I roared, “I DON’T LIKE THIS AT ALL WHATEVER IT IS YOU ARE GONNA DO YOU ARE GONNA DO IT WITHOUT ME THIS TIME YOU INSANE DUTCH PECKERWOOD ...” and other endearments. Teddy nodded an eighth of an inch, grinning at me all the time.
I relaxed my grip.
“While you were choking me I thought of how hemp must feel ...” he said, still smiling.
I follered him glumly down the corridor to a guarded elevator and we went down and down and down. The door opened and TR led the way past eight guards to the Code Room. TR motioned me on past a couple of Marine sergeants and came along behind me.
A shaky—malaria, I suppose—captain come up to TR and he saluted. Teddy nodded in a practiced, condescending sort of way—hell, he couldn’t have enlisted in the Army with his eyesight—and he looked around the dark room at the bustle and scratch.
“I have a message for Admiral Dewey,” said Teddy. “Who, I do believe, is in Singapore.”
“Yes, sir,” said the captain.
Teddy carefully wrote out his message to Dewey, in big block letters, and he grinned hugely while doing it.
He showed it to me.
COAL PROCEED MANILA WAR
IMMINENT ROOSEVELT
ACT SEC NAVY
I was shocked into speechlessness. I knew we would mix it up with the Spaniards, but I thought it would take months or years of sashaying and flannelmouthing by diplomats who all the while would protest they was trying to avoid that horrid circumstance.
“Come along, Major Kelly,” said Teethadore. “We have our duties.” I follered along like a broke old dog.
Up in TR’s office, I jangled the coins in my pockets while Teethadore wrote out his resignation from his high position. He tucked it into his coat.
“Major Kelly,” he said, “I will even buy you a drink.”
“Uncommon decent of you,” I said. I had a few words I could have said on all this but they was of no moment, like me.
We walked on over to Ollie’s.
I had about twelve fingers of sour mash in a posh saloon that was nearby, and then I had a seegar. Teddy sipped bottled Saratoga water.
“I am going to form a division of picked troops,” says TR. “And I am going to call them the Rough Riders. Those fine specimens who breathe the free air of the Great Plains and the High Rockies will make splendid solidiers!”
“Yer drunk on gaddamned Saratoga water,” I said. “You can’t tell those sonsofbitches to do anything. They’ll shoot you.”
“Cowboys, hunters, scouts, trappers, wranglers, muleskinners, the hardy sons of our Great West.”
“Christ,” I says.
“Officered by the manly graduates of our finest schools,” he went on.
“Meaning them fellers you went to Harvard with?”
“Oh, we’d take Yale men and some from the other lesser schools, and I will require your services, Major Kelly,” said Teethadore, and all teeth at the moment. “Quit trying to cravenly steal away from this priceless test of your valor.”
“How about I boldly steal away from this here priceless test?” I snarled, rising. “And I don’t know if ‘valor’ is dyestuffs or bolt goods anyway.”
“This simply won’t do,” said Teddy, looking sad.
“Send one of them Harvard brave boys you’re always gassing about. I’m old, I have gout and bad dreams.”
“I will need a stout recruiting officer to assemble and sign up the men for the Rough Riders,” said Teethadore.
“West Point,” I said. “Finest kind of officers. I pay taxes to train the ninnies.”
“You are correct,” said Teddy. “They wouldn’t really understand one another. I need to send ... one of their own.”
“Own what?” I says, goggle-eyed. “Me? Me? I might have shot their brother or third cousin twice removed or something and you want me to go sit behind a damn table all day? Where they will know where I’m at?”
“Surely they would not take such rude advantage?”
Theodore and I had had this conversation before. He thought war was chivalry and that the West’s famous gunfights was fought fair. As a rule, you shot for the back and took ruthless advantage every little chance you got. Or you were dead. I did not waste my breath.
“Where do you want me to go?” I said wearily.
“West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
These was all fine places to run if you had plumb wore out the patience of the forces of law and order. My friends and acquaintances of the last forty or so years were pure and simple the scum of the damn earth, and proud of it. I about wanted to go to West Texas like I wanted to go to Devil’s Island.
I whined and begged and mewleypuked and sniveled and moaned and pleaded and wept and blubbered while Teddy sucked down soda water and said “tut-tut, couldn’t I be more manly?”—which meant do as I was told.
Teddy bade me farewell, clapping a fat hand on my shoulder and bidding me buck up, smile, think on the flag and glory, keep my upper lip stiff, and catch a train the day after tomorrow when he would meet me at the station to assure I was on the train along with ten thousand recruiting forms and a few Regular Army noncoms to fill them out. Also twenty thousand recruiting posters, and a lot of gold—I perked up—to pay bounties with if the posters didn’t bring the recruits in fast enough.
“Theodore,” I said, to the empty space beside me, “if you offered two hundred in gold and a pardon, they’d come here.”
I ordered another drink. In it again, goddamn it.
Gussie was waiting on me.
She was a wonderful actress I had known and liked for years, a fine girl from a little town in Ohio who had left there probably without shoes and who had finally married her millionaire who had shortly expired, of heart failure, in bed. Gussie planted the feller and then she scandalized all New York and all Washington (a mansion in each, you see) by tossing the accumulation of her dead millionaire’s life out on the ashheap and redoing both castles in lovely things and not a lot of them. Then she went back to the stage, exploding half the hemorrhoids of the leering socialites intent on her delicious scandals.
The brighter ones among the swell set grasped that Gussie did not give a fig for their opinion. That was about four out of four thousand. The rest had the vapors regular-like, thinking on her.
All invitations to dinners and balls and swell parties ceased, which was fine with Gussie, who said that the rich ate very badly, smelled worse, and were so stupid that they needed metronomes to breathe. That was the gist of it, though what she actually said I wouldn’t even write down, since Gussie’s command of language common to harbor towns and cow camps far outstripped my meager talents. And my talents was sufficient to have once caused Sha
nghai Pierce to reach for a Bible to ward off lightning bolts from a blue sky. Shang being afraid of anything was news to me, and here I had forced the old boy to reveal himself.
We met at a restaurant and et oysters and drank champagne and went to her mansion bold as hell, with all the neighbors’ eyes on us, and I didn’t leave until late afternoon the next day, fucked to a standstill.
I had a couple belts in the hotel bar and went up to my room and I hadn’t been in it five minutes when one of TR’s jolly Harvardlings banged on the door and marched in, his teeth gleaming so bright in the gaslight it gave me a stabbing headache. He handed me a packet of sealed orders.
Then the Harvardling handed me a train ticket. He handed me a huge wicker hamper. I opened it and picked out a jar.
“Christ,” I said. “Take a note.”
“What? How?” said the Teeth.
“I’m gonna call off the labels on this mess of jars in this hamper, you asshole,” I roared, “and you will write down what I say. And it’s Major Kelly to you, you damned wet pup.”
All Teddy’s little pets carried notebooks and pencils in case they spotted the last survivor of some once multitudinous creature, so they could note critter, date, time, and place and give Teddy a leg up on shooting it. I suppose. (Perhaps I am being harsh. Maybe he just wanted to drag the critter home, cage it, and put it on a strenuous weight-lifting program.)
The Harvardling handed me the list, and I signed it. “Thanks ever so much I don’t know what I would do without all of your help. God, am I sorry I shot that grizzly, the one in your office.”
Teddy was in a hunting mood once and his guide got crippled by a mule, and I happened to be wandering near and was pressed into duty after a lot of whining on Teethadore’s part and the laying of much gold in my large sweaty hand.
Teethadore hunting was a triumph of will over blindness and idiocy.
I wasn’t keeping a close watch on him—how was I to know?—and Teddy spotted a mountain goat on a high cliff above him and he shot it dead and it fell on him. It knocked him off his perch and he slid and bounced down a hundred feet or so and caught a handy juniper bush. I laid down a rope. He indicated he would tie the rope to the tree he was on, slide down it, and let go the end and drop into the river, which would still be a good hundred feet below.
The river was sharp black rocks sticking up through white foam, so I talked him out of that idea. I damn myself every time I think on it.
I couldn’t pull him back up right away, because the edge of the cliff was very sharp. With Teddy hollering about all the good hunting time we was wasting because I wasn’t game, I made a crude windlass out of lodgepole and drug him up fast with the horse. It was a cheap grade of cliff and he only got scraped up a little.
“Invigorating! Bully!” he said.
I was beginning to grasp I was dealing with a mental defective and thought I might go back to the cabin and see if I could coax the mule into a repeat performance.
We found a grizzly in an hour or so. The bear was sleeping, but when he smelled us he went wooooooffff! and hightailed it dead away.
The future President shot it in the ass. It is all you can see of a bear so headed.
The bear stopped cold, turned 180 degrees, and come running back right at us.
Teethadore stood manfully, Winchester to shoulder, and he shot a whole lot and the bear was still heading our way.
I stepped out in front of Teethadore with my four-gauge shotgun and forty-aught-size buckshot and hit that bear, stopped him like he’d hit a glass dam.
“Unsporting,” said Teddy.
“Go to hell, you perfumed ninny,” I said.
Now, at that time I could have quiet-like scrambled up a tree, but I didn’t. I’d taken the man’s money. I couldn’t see the future. I could have been the man who saw Teethadore et before he got big enough to be dangerous. I have no excuses.
As so often in life all that I had to do was nothing at all and I would have spared myself and others grief, pain, and scars. (Well, the only time I was ever a main attraction at a wedding, I stood mute, causing the bride’s kin to throw me through a stained-glass window, one dedicated to the fallen boys in Union Blue, which, that day, I sure was.)
2
ME AND TEN SERGEANTS who could read and write (the entire supply the Army had, I suspected) arrived at Fort Sedgewick to recruit soldiers. War hadn’t been declared yet, but Theodore’s confidence and the big sack of bonus money—gold coin, collected from them of Teddy’s friends as wanted to see him President, a thought which gave me the staggers and jags—guaranteed a turnout.
Fort Sedgewick was named after my favorite Civil War hero, one John B. Sedgwick, whose last words were, so help me, “Don’t worry, boys, they can’t hit an elephant at this dis ...” That is the sort of optimistic exit a feller can only hope for. I will never be that lucky.
Of course, the military misspelled his name, but you can’t have everything and fame, too, as Bill Cody was to never quite learn.
All along the railroad route there was militias drilling beside the tracks, and bandstands in every town square, and all the passengers was enthusiastic about the coming war which everybody seemed to think had already started. Or would have if them yellow-bellied Spanish had any sand. Enthusiasm for things that is military usually lasts till breakfast the second day and I have myself seen countless young boys go off to battle with heads high and chests puffed out. They don’t come back that way, and all the ones left on the field are either too bad wounded to move, and crying for their mothers, or still.
Right then I did believe that if I went down the center of any town all the townfolk and most of the dogs would foller right along to whatever carnage I had to sell, long as I had a flute to tootle and a couple square yards of cheap cloth in the good old red-white-and-blue.
First night the recruiting sergeants went round the saloons and tossed about the rumor that Teethadore was looking for a few hundred good men and true, stalwart, brave, superb horsemen, crack shots, tough as oil-tanned leather, and like that and the drunken saloon telegraph carried this priceless piece of horse shit to the farthest and most desolate places of Texas, which is all of them.
(When Phil Sheridan said that if he owned both Hell and Texas he’d live in Hell and rent out Texas, he was standing in the most beautiful part. I don’t know where it is.)
On the eleventh of April war was declared on the Spaniards and we was able to properly open the doors for business. Well, the fellers as wanted to fight the Spaniards with Teddy came to Fort Sedgewick in the thousands. Not a few hundred. Thousands. They fought each other for places in the lines, and several of them died of gunshots or knife wounds. There were so damn many the garrison could only watch.
The ten sergeants sat at trestle tables—the damn gold got shipped back entire, no need to bribe ’em—and took hard looks at the recruits, most of whom was a lot harder-looking than the sergeants.
I stood behind the sergeants, whittling.
A couple gents come up whistling and I looked up and almost took off a finger with my pocketknife.
The gents allowed as how killing Spaniards was a line of work they had long admired and felt that they would do right good at it.
The gent in front was a sandy-haired feller with a beard to match and merry blue eyes and he was dressed like a dude hairbrush drummer save for the custom riding boots with four-inch heels and a pair of silver-chased-ivory-handled Colts in well-worn tooled holsters. I warn’t sure it was who I thought until I spotted the thumb he’d once caught between the saddle horn and rope, long ago when he was being a fair to middling cowboy at forty a month and found. This was long before he commenced into making life miserable for E. H. Harriman’s railroads and for E. H. Harriman himself by robbing his trains. His sidekick was a tall feller with flat pale blue eyes that never changed with the light or seeing that they done. This customer had habits of rolling coins across his knuckles and pulling a gun and shooting so fast the eye could not follow.
Like all good gunmen, he carried talcum powder for his holsters. I saw Harry shoot three men in the head in Silverton, Colorado, once, so fast they was all dead before I heard the noise.
Bob Parker and Harry Longabaugh, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid if you were some other places.
Butch looked up from the sergeant, saw me, and grinned and winked. I grinned back. He was a likable feller, sure enough; hell, he even liked the people he robbed. He drove E. H. Harriman near on to crazy sending him postcards and chatty notes from here and there, like twenty-four hours after he’d robbed E.H. of a pile of money.
I decided a julep or ten would taste nice, and I headed away from the crowds in front of the recruiting tables toward the little town and beat the rush to the saloon. I went on in the first one I come to still had glass in the windows and had the barkeep fix me a big one with plenty of ice and I went back out on the porch and found a nice place on the bench didn’t have too many splinters in it. Butch and Sundance come along presently, chaffing each other like schoolboys. They had a sort of running vaudeville routine didn’t seem to be rehearsed even.
“You boys got faces sorta familiar and names I can’t recall,” I says. “So what are them names I can’t recall? You tell me them names and I’ll practice them while I go and fetch you some drinks. Can’t remember them drinks you used to drink neither.”
Butch allowed as how they was stout Mormon lads named Nephi and Hoopoe.
“Mormons don’t drink or smoke,” I says.
“Jack Mormons drink and smoke,” says Butch. “I’sa raised Mormon but it didn’t take.”
Me and Nephi and Hoopoe sat there for an hour or so talking about the coming war—I didn’t wish to bring up anything in their past that I knew about which might embarrass them and they was equally tender toward my feelin’s on similar subjects. Good manners makes the world a bearable place, I always say.
There was a lot of us out west in delicate circumstances and it accounts for our discreet ways. For instance, it is considered most impolite to ever ask anyone their name. You can get shot for your poor breeding and worse manners.