by Peter Bowen
There was yelps and two happy sausage dogs clamped on my ankles.
Alys was helping Libretta get the eagle to let go of Stefano.
I shuffled off sneakily with murderous intent. There was a big tub of soap and water out by the car, from when it had been washed. I lifted one and then the other goddamned hound carefully as I moved along, and then I got to the tub and lifted my right foot, savored the moment, and plunged the nasty little beast into the washwater. And then I got the other foot in.
Them dogs was so determined that it was a minute before they got it through their tiny Kraut brains that they was underwater and in soap to boot. The little bastards surfaced, hacking and choking. The tub was three foot tall or so and it was a good foot from the water to the rim, and I stood by watching them claw at the wooden sides, occasionally slipping beneath the surface.
I found a seegar in my coat and I lit it and puffed happily.
I was so satisfied with my work I got careless and didn’t even hear Libretta sneak up behind me. She whacked me a good one with a chunk of lumber and I sprawled face forward on to the platform and she scooped up them goddamn dogs and held them to her breast and she wiped soap from their eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” she says, “you hurt them.”
Not much to say to that.
It occurred to me that perhaps it was not a real good idea to be lying flat, as them dogs would be on me soon as the soap was out of their eyes, and I scrambled hastily to my feet.
Then it hit me. I ain’t the smartest feller you ever knew, and at times I can be uncommon thick.
“Mulligan,” I says.
That little bastard was behind this. He’d been helping Stefano and Libretta get the eagles and he was a cool hand who’d wait a long time for that one shot.
It seemed I was sentenced to a good two weeks of scrawks and stinks and Stefano’s arias, which was hard pay for giving that little Irish bastard a bath.
I begun to run around the car, my Navy Colt out, raging.
He had to be here somewheres.
I poked about handy hiding places and then I run up the street to the lowest saloon in Laramie and sure enough Mulligan was at the back and he dropped his glass and shot out the back door with me in hot pursuit.
One of his friends stuck out a foot as I ran past and I went facefirst into the wall and time I got up and outside Mulligan had a real good start, on that big black horse of his. I loosed a couple shots, not wanting to hurt his feelings by ignoring all his efforts, but he was out of range anyway and soon out of sight.
A crowd of friends and acquaintances had come out to enjoy the fun.
I had to laugh, too, and I wondered what Mulligan had done to the other hands scrubbed him down so good when we give him the first bath he ever had in his life.
Bob and Will was there, looking a bit chewed.
“Jake’s over at the bathhouse,” says Bob. “He done got a package done up nice with a ribbon and all, and ... well ... there was a skunk in it.”
I nodded.
“Lou was in the whorehouse taking his bath,” says Will, “and when he got out of the tub and was drying hisself off he noticed his clothes was gone.”
I nodded.
“And his money was gone.”
I nodded.
“And you know how Rosie is about money,” said Bob.
She had not one speck of mercy for the poor, that woman.
“Let me guess,” I says. “So Lou had to make a mad dash for the rooming house....”
Bob nodded.
“But when he got there....”
Bob nodded.
Sir Henry had not taken part, keeping his cold eye on Alys.
And me, I had two mad Eye-talians and a bunch of birds for company for more’n two thousand miles.
I walked back to the railroad station and saw a mess of people standing around one of the piles of boxes covered with a tarp that waited on the right train.
There was a body on the ground and the coroner was kneeling next to it.
Sir Henry. I walked on over.
“Got a single bullet right where the spine joins the skull,” says the coroner. “Some little belly gun, hardly made a hole.”
Sir Henry, whoever he really was, dead in Wyoming, and about the best hand with a gun I ever knew. But there he was dead, one shot, when he was feeling safe and careless.
“Nobody saw nothing,” says the coroner. “Clerk come out to load some of this ...” and he jerked a thumb toward the boxes.
Hell, it could have been a ten-year-old kid, all I knew.
Sir Henry had died of the careless.
34
I’D BEEN A CAPTIVE in trying conditions, awaiting having my balls cut off by angry women. I’d been held in the basement of Brigham’s Lion House and escaped, due to the good agency of Klaas Vipsoek’s farts. I had suffered. But being stuck in that damn parlor car with a menagerie of hawks, eagles, and them insane sausage dogs still gives me the whips and jangles.
Animals is animals and they are what they are but I couldn’t help wondering if Stefano and Libretta was lacing their grub with hashish. Them ornery little dogs had but one aim in life, and that was fastening on to my ankles. So I painted my boots with pepper sauce and the next time they happily clamped on they both got a funny look in their eye and soon departed howling to Libretta who accused me of being mean to them.
“What about by goddamned ankles?” I hollered.
Libretta ran off a lot of Eye-talian cusswords whilst holding her mutts close to her breast, and them pawing at their eyes which was dumb because the pepper sauce was on their lips and soon they was screaming and rolling around on the floor.
This got the feathered brigade all stirred up and the screams and the shit flew.
Alys listened to Libretta’s Eye-talian insults and said none of them was repeatable except she did have to tell me that according to Libretta my pecker was a disgraceful thing wouldn’t do for a woman and she recommended further I go and fuck hedgehogs.
“Hedgehogs is in short supply here,” I says. “See she’s got another suggestion.”
There was also this baby gyrfalcon, barely three weeks old and mostly white fluff and bad temper. Stefano let the little bastard out and it looked at me and then twisted its head upside down and screamed and waddled over and leaped and sunk talons into my leg.
I yelped and was about to kill the goddamned thing when Libretta and her sausage dogs dived at me and thwarted the killing blow I was taking with the barrel of my Colt.
Alys was having the most fun of her entire life laughing at me. She came over and blew smoke from her Spanish cigarette in the fledgling’s face and it let go and I limped off to tend my wounds. I was dabbing iodine on them when Alys came in roaring with laughter and she informed me that Libretta had said the young gyrfalcon thought I was its mother.
Alys was having laughing fits. I shot a glance at her would have peeled the paint off an Apache but she just choked and put her hand over her mouth and enjoyed herself more.
For some reason, likely there was a bet on amongst the three of them how much of the sausage dogs and crazy birds I could take before snapping and leaping off the train on a bad curve.
I went to the bedroom and slammed the door and went into the loo to take a piss and some of the pepper sauce had got on my fingers and first my privates was warm and then they felt like they was blistering up and so I started jumping up and down and hollering as my dick caught fire and Alys rushed in to help but my circumstances merely caused hysterics and she was out on the bed paralyzed by laughter. Me, I am scrubbing away with soap which felt worse at the moment and I finally sat in one of her goddamned silk velvet chairs pouring cool water slowly on my aggrieved member, which was doing much better, thank you.
My hollers had also brought the rest of them, all stuck in the doorway, Stefano, Libretta, hot-eyed sausage dogs eyeing my pecker hungrily, and that goddamned little gyrfalcon waddled through the legs and determinedly stomped toward me,
twisting its head around.
“Enough!” I bellers. “Out or I’ll shoot the lot of you!” and I aims my Colt and they musta known I meant it because Stefano darted in and scooped up the goddamned bird and Libretta ran, clutching her damn mutts and Stefano slammed the door good and tight and I looks balefully at the woman exhausted down to giggles on the bed.
“I’m sorry,” says Alys.
“The hell,” I says. “You haven’t had this much fun since the hogs ate your little sister.”
“Oh, Luther,” she gasps. “You poor thing.”
This here solicitude made me real suspicious. I was a tad bit gun-shy, what with everything.
Seems that things can’t possibly get worse and then they do, the gods got their fingers stuck in the affairs of men places you never dreamed of.
It had always give me an attack of the curious as to just why Stefano and Libretta hadn’t been attacked and killed by the Indians, what with their habit of wandering around alone and by the bye carrying enough grappa in the wagon to keep a fair-sized camp drunk for a month.
As I sat there trickling water on my pecker there come from the zoo in the guest room the most god-awful screeks, frawps, and miseries I ever heard. It sounded like a passel of cats was being slowly gutted by Comanches, who, above all other tribes, study on and take pride in their torturin’.
Alys had to roll over on her face with this and sob into the comforter.
Opera. Mad birds attacking and shitting. Sausage dogs whose single aim in life was my ankles.
Now a violin.
“If you thinks,” I says, with as much dignity as I could summon given the circumstances, “that I am going all the goddamned way to Boston with them guests of yours and their disgusting pets, do think again, as I’D DRUTHER JUST GET OFF NOW.”
The train was going about fifty I supposed, miles per hour that is. If you’ve spent your life on horseback it was a downright terrifying speed. I looked longingly out at things that would break my neck and end all this fun.
Alys snuffled and tried to compose herself.
“I’m sorry, Luther,” she starts.
“You ain’t a bit sorry,” I says, “and I might point out that you do have an interest in my member and its unfortunate accident.”
Alys choked.
The burning had stopped, and other than the goddamned violin I was more or less back to normal. So I pulled up my trousers and buttoned my flies and straightened my collar.
“I’ll meet you in Boston,” I says. “I got a terrible temper and the thought of murdering the lot of them makes me feel all warm and cuddly inside.”
“But Luther,” says Alys, “they’re delightful.”
“Better yet,” I says, light dawning, “since you no doubt plan to have Stefano and Libretta and their vermin as guests at your poor Uncle Digby’s, why don’t I just get off at the next station and go back to Wyoming, as it is safer and very quiet.”
Alys changed just like that. Soon as she knew I was serious she was all regrets and tears and promises.
Them women when they think they gone too far turn to apologies and coos. It generally works, so I can’t blame ’em, but in this case I was damned I was going to spend the next week bein’ gnawed and follered by some dumb bird thought I was its mama and be driven mad by Stefano’s musical efforts. I longed for a nice quiet pitched battle someplace, preferably with cannon.
Alys had typical woman’s practicality. We was once out with shotguns hunting sage grouse and three was scooting along the ground thirty yards in front of us and I was crouched to swing when they flew.
Alys blasted the running birds and when I complained she looked at me like I was a half-wit and said well, I thought this was to be our dinner.
She draped herself on me and kissed me and of course we ends up in the bed and we has a nice romp and how grateful I was to know damages to my parts had not been permanent.
“I’ll talk with Libretta and Stefano,” she says.
I grunted.
“Really,” she says.
I grunt.
“Poor Luther,” she says.
I nodded.
“He needs some peace and quiet.”
I nodded. A lot.
So we got up and I made my way up the train to the saloon car, which was full of fat drummers and cigar smoke and I had a triple whiskey looking out at the green fields—we had crossed that line between not enough rain and enough rain and it was clear to the eye. I was glad for not enough rain, it would keep the farmers here.
After I had my nice sulk I walked back through the cars to Alys’s and things was quiet. Alys was looking vexed.
“The servants got off at the last stop,” she says, “without a word. Even Mrs. McGinniss.”
No fools they.
“Libretta offered to cook,” says Alys.
“How ’bout fried fowl,” I says. “Never have tasted eagle.”
Whatever Alys had said stuck, for the vermin was caged and draped, the violin stayed in its case, the sausage dogs was stuck in a portable kennel, and Libretta cooked up Eye-talian food which I will take any day over that overblown Frog stuff.
We was in Chicago only long enough for Libretta to shop and then we was hooked up to an express.
35
ALYS’S UNCLE DIGBY WAS a kind man. A generous man. Brave, courteous, and exquisitely mannered.
“I’m going to kill him anyway,” I says to Alys as we sat in the cab in the porte cochere, watching a pinto elephant uproot a nice tasty tree.
“Stefano. Libretta. Vermin. Prince Masoud. That goddamned elephant. I want to go home where I can be killed and scalped in peace,” I whines. Digby’s house was monstrous, and I figured that Stefano and Libretta could be walled off in it someplace, but if Masoud was a houseguest, too, what with his harem and guards and elephants and horses, well, that damn house wasn’t that big.
Digby come out all happy to see the two of us, and Alys got down and hugged her uncle. They really loved each other.
“Quick,” I whispers to the cabby, “to the train station! I’ll give you a double eagle!”
The cabby turns and looks at me a moment.
“Sorry sorr,” he says, “but the lady thought you might want to do that and she amply ree—moonerated me to guard again such a possibility.”
“I’ll double it,” I says.
“No use, sorr,” says the cabby, “she also pointed out that if you wasn’t gentleman enough to stick it, you wasn’t gentleman enough to pay me neither.”
“Rot in hell,” I says pleasantly.
“Beggin’ your pardon, sorr,” says the cabby, “but that is the kind of woman any man would kill to keep.”
Digby and Alys quit grappling so I come down off the coach and I shook hands with Digby whilst Alys beamed.
“I laid a bet with her you’d escape,” says Digby.
“Not a chance,” I says, “and you know it.”
“Well, well, come in come in, I’ve had a light supper laid on and you must be tired from your journey.”
“Oh, no,” I says, “it was most restful, what with being attacked by dogs and them kind of birds eat other critters and it was all full of the high culture what with Stefano sawing away on his goddamned fiddle and you wouldn’t have a half gallon of laudanum? It’s time to end it all.”
“Oh,” says Alys, “how he suffered.”
Another elephant trumpeted out in back. Digby had about forty acres behind the mansion and a carriage house and a lake and what-all. Plenty of room for Masoud, if he stuck to his tents.
We went on in and back to the orangerie stuck to the house, all wrought iron and glass. There was them ornamental citrus trees in pots, with lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruits on them and there was a supper on a glass table—first one I’d ever seen, just a thick slab on black wrought iron, a frame and legs feathered like one of Stefano’s goddamned birds, claws holding brass balls at the feet.
Masoud’s two tents was back there screened some by t
rees. There was journalists in packs the other side of the high wrought-iron fence and a few preachers waving Bibles and bellering, I suspected, about the heathens and their ungodly ways, which meant Masoud’s yellow tent, every man’s dream.
I must have kept my eye on that tent too long for Alys hauled off and kicked me hard in the shins and I yelped and come down to earth.
“What?” I says, collapsing in a chair.
“What,” says Alys levelly.
Digby was staring hard at something on the ceiling that was so terribly interesting he couldn’t rip his eyes away from it.
“I’ll give you what,” says Alys. “It was the long strings of drool hanging off your mouth when you were looking at the yellow tent, my foot just ran away with itself, so to speak.”
I made a note to inquire of Masoud if he might need a broke-down scout in his home country, which was safer, I suspected.
“The prince is a fine fellow,” says Digby. “Cambridge man. So I pretty well had to invite him to stay.”
“Fine,” says Alys. “Luther and I had this conversation in Laramie, and I expect to have many like it in future.”
Hell of a thing when your woman understands you.
“Ol’ Masoud’s got the right idea,” I says, courting death. “I doubt his shins is banged up.”
“Oh, God,” says Digby. “Run, Luther.”
“Indeed?” says Alys. “I take it you feel that women are better thought of as chattel goods.”
“I was just funnin’, Alys,” I says.
“I,” says Alys, “was not.”
This is one of them conversations, I thought, that ends only the one way. God knows what she’ll do, but she’ll do it.
Then a sight I purely could not believe occurred out on the back forty.
Mulligan. Mulligan was there, riding a big white horse and looking almost clean.
“Jaysus Kay-rist,” I says. “What is Mulligan doin’ here?”
“Who,” says Digby, “is Mulligan?”
“He is a smelly little bogtrotter whose head is mostly adenoids and a right fine scout,” I says, “and he don’t like civilization at all, which is why I am surprised to see him here.”