Damnation Road

by Max McCoy

  “What’s your name?”

  “Aw, you don’t know who that is?” Dray asked. “That’s Temple Houston, youngest son of Texan hero Sam Houston, and the most famous lawyer from the Indian Nations to the Rio Grande.”

  “Shut up, thief. I want to hear it from him.”

  Houston smiled.

  “The boy has correctly stated my name,” he said. “As to my reputation, I leave that determination to others.”

  “And he’s a fast draw and a dead shot,” Dray enthused. “Why, let me tell you that he and his buddy Jack Love are unbeatable! A few years ago, when I was just a kid, I was playing roulette at this dive over on Harrison Avenue and getting taken pretty bad by a rigged wheel when Mister Houston and his friend came in for a beer. Mister Houston shot the place to hell with his Colt and then threw the owner in the street and whipped him like a redheaded stepchild.”

  “That true?” Gamble asked.

  “Substantially.”

  “Damned shame the kid didn’t learn anything,” Gamble said. “Thief, let us be for a spell. It seems me and the defense attorney have some things to talk over.”

  Houston called for a stool, and one was provided. Then the door to the cell unlatched when a lever was pulled by the guard in the receiving area, and Temple pushed the door open and sat on the stool next to Gamble’s bunk.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling, so it beats the alternative.”

  “They tell me you were damned close to dying from loss of blood.”

  Gamble shrugged.

  “All right, let’s get down to business,” Houston said. “Do you have any money?”

  “Now I believe you’re a lawyer.”

  “Doesn’t matter if you don’t. Your case intrigues me and I’ll defend you anyway. But my family has to eat just like anybody else’s, so it’s always better when I get paid. But to make this proper, you need to give me something of value.”

  “I don’t have a dime.”

  “It doesn’t have to be money.”

  Gamble hesitated. “There are only two objects of any real value in this world,” he said. “One is my father’s fiddle, and it is in a pawnshop in Caldwell, Kansas. The other is an old Manhattan revolver which is being held in safekeeping for me by the boy Andrew Farquharson at the hardware store on Oklahoma Avenue. I could send word that it should be given to you as collateral on my debt.”

  “I would not ask you for anything of such sentimental value,” Houston said. “Besides, I have many fine revolvers, and am in no need of a curiosity from the war. It can be anything of value, even little value, so that I can duly report that you have retained my services.”

  “I have this,” he said, and pulled the picture postcard of Doolin from his shirt pocket. “I paid twenty-five cents for it. It is smudged now with my own blood and is worth somewhat less, I would think.”

  “That will do,” Houston said. He took the card and examined it briefly before slipping it into the inside pocket of his black coat. “It is, also, I should say, a fitting reminder of what is at stake.”

  “Take the pawn ticket as well,” Gamble said. “For safekeeping, if nothing else.”

  “All right,” Houston said. “If you insist.”

  “I’ve never had a defense attorney before,” Gamble said. “Never got close enough to a jail or a courtroom to have a trial. How is this supposed to work?”

  “You are going to tell me what happened and I am going to defend you to the best of my ability, within the confines of the truth.”

  “What is there to tell?” Gamble asked. “I killed two of the bounty-hunting cousins—one up on Cottonwood Creek and the other in the middle of Oklahoma Avenue. They seemed determined to kill me.”

  “They had that right, because you were a fleeing felon and they had a writ for your arrest,” Houston said. “In 1872, the United States Supreme Court gave bounty hunters the power to cross state lines, to kick open the door of your house without a warrant, to make arrests on Sunday, and to kill felons if necessary in order to bring them back.”

  “Splendid.”

  “You knew the cousins were attempting to serve a writ?”

  “Of course,” Gamble said. “Why else would I run?”

  “You were outnumbered four to one,” Houston said. “If there was some misunderstanding, then we could argue that you feared for your life from unknown menacing parties.”

  “But that would be a lie,” Gamble said.

  “I understand. So, there is no defense.”

  “Am I going to swing from the end of a rope in the capital of Oklahoma Territory? I don’t even like Oklahoma. I didn’t think there was a state worse than Kansas, but I was wrong.”

  “The odds of your execution in Guthrie are rather long,” Houston said. “This isn’t the old days of Hanging Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith, where capital punishment was a form of mass entertainment. These are modern times, Mister Gamble, and there is much populist feeling. There has never been an execution at this prison. I doubt that you will be the first. Life in prison is a more likely sentence.”

  “I would rather be hanged.”

  Temple brushed his hair back from his forehead and looked at Gamble quizzically.

  “There’s every chance that you’ll be extradited to Kansas to stand trial for the murder of Lester Burns. Kansas has the death penalty, but nobody’s been hanged for twenty-eight years. Under law, the governor must sign off on the execution, and since 1870 no governor has. But the man you killed was the governor’s brother-in-law. He might make an exception. If not, then you’ll be returned to Oklahoma Territory for the murders of the German cousins.”

  “Sounds tiring.”

  “Why did you kill Lester Burns?”

  “Because the bastard deserved it.”

  “Tell me about the events that led up to the killing. Did you know this man Burns?”

  “Not until a month ago. After hocking the fiddle, I found myself on the prairie near Caldwell, at a tent city of dope peddlers, whores, and gamblers. Anywhere cards are dealt, whiskey flows, and love is for sale, there’s money to be had. I aimed to have a little.”

  SIX

  The tent city where Jacob Gamble had met Lester Burns was on the side of a red limestone bluff called Lookout Mount. In the halcyon days of the Chisholm Trail it was where the girls from the brothels in the wide-open cow town Caldwell would sit and watch for the next group of Texans coming north. Now that the proliferation of railroads had shut down the cattle drives and ended the era of the cowboy, Lookout Mount had become a crossroads, a watering hole for the lowest elements of two worlds, a shadowy place where a man, white or red, could get a drop of whiskey or buck the tiger or know something strange before crossing into the Nations or heading back to the States.

  The townsfolk called it Hell’s Front Porch.

  Gamble arrived on foot late one afternoon on the next to last day of 1897, a carpet of snow on the ground, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his black coat, a north wind stinging the backs of his ears. The fingers of his left hand were touching the few silver dollars he had gotten from the fiddle.

  From a distance, the Porch looked like every other gamblers’ hell that Gamble had known during his thirty-five years in the West, a cluster of tents and shacks thrown up from whatever had been scavenged from abandoned cabins and barns nearby. But as he neared, he could see what appeared to be an old-fashioned round circus tent in yellow and black, with a rainbow of silk ribbons whipping from the apex. As he got closer, however, he could see that the cone-shaped structure wasn’t a circus tent at all, but a large old Plains Indian lodge.

  The lodge was a tilted cone that must have been forty feet in circumference at the base, and narrowed to a point at the smoke-darkened top some fifty feet above the ground, from which lodge poles bristled. Bits of bright colored cloth and rags were tied to the poles. A long slit down one side of the top was the smoke hole, with the smoke flaps opened like wings on either side. Sm
oke flowed from the top, and the upper two-thirds of the lodge glowed like a Chinese lantern from the firelight within.

  The black-and-yellow bands covered half of the lodge, the half facing town, while the other half—facing the Indian Nations—was covered in paintings depicting dozens of historical events in the history of whoever had owned the lodge. Gamble walked around the lodge in wonder, looking at primitive depictions of many battles with other tribes and with the blue-coated soldiers, sacred birds and animals, and stars falling to earth. There were holes in the story, however, because in places the buffalo hide was ripped, or chunks had rotted away, and these offenses had been patched with whatever had been at hand—canvas, burlap, blankets, and even portions of a quilt or two.

  On the far side of the lodge were several horses, picketed. It was a sorry lot of animals, except for one chestnut mare. Her dark eyes followed Gamble as he made his way past.

  When Gamble had trudged all the way around again to the east-facing entrance of the lodge, he encountered a thin white man in a full-length elk robe. He was bald, and an earring dangled from the lobe of his left ear. When he smiled, a gold front tooth caught the light of the winter sun.

  “Welcome, friend.”

  “Welcome to what?” Gamble asked.

  “Whatever you want it to be,” the stranger said. “My name is Burns and this is my place. Something, ain’t it? Used to belong to an old Kiowa warrior by the name of Laughing Bear. Now it’s mine.”

  “Laughing Bear?”

  “The old fool never accepted the terms of the Medicine Lodge Treaty or defeat after the Red River Wars,” Burns said. “For thirty years they have tried to keep him on the reservation down at Fort Sill, and for thirty years he kept jumping the reservation, coming up here to this old buffalo hunting ground he knew as a boy. But come on in out of the cold wind, friend, where we can talk and warm our old bones by the fire.”

  Burns held the shieldlike buffalo skin door aside and Gamble ducked in, then fastened the door after him. Gamble parted the tattered ozan, an inner partition that helped keep out the cold and prevented incautious shadows from being cast on the outer lodgeskin.

  The lodge fire was well-banked. On the stones around the fire were pots and pans, cups, and food—beans and bacon, sugar and salt, a can of Arbuckles coffee, canned peaches. On the other side of the fire was a line of wooden crates turned on their sides and stacked to make shelves, and the shelves were filled with whiskey bottles. On top of the crates were three or four lacquered trays which held opium pipes, bowls, and other paraphernalia. The bowls were ceramic, and were about the size and shape of doorknobs; most were decorated with dragons, lotuses, or Chinese characters.

  At the edge of the firelight, near the ozan, were a half-dozen flickering opium lamps. Beside each lamp was a shadowy and furtive figure, humped beneath blankets or reclining with their pipes cradled in their arms. Most were asleep. Two of them stirred as if in a dream, fidgeting with their pipes.

  One of the opium smokers was a woman of indeterminate age, with pallid skin and a tangle of chestnut hair. Around her waist was something that looked like a snakeskin. Her dull eyes lingered on Gamble, then she skewered a ball of opium with the tip of a steel needle and thrust it over the chimney of her lamp. Once the pill was heated to an orange glow, she transferred it to the bowl of her pipe and then wrapped her lips around the stem, sucking the vaporized opium into her lungs. Her eyelids quivered in the kind of ecstasy that Gamble had only seen before when a woman achieved sexual gratification.

  He forced himself to look away, and followed Burns.

  Sitting beside the fire, absentmindedly tending it with a hickory branch, was an Indian girl of thirteen. She was wearing a Chinese robe in vivid red silk and a Mandarin hat of the same color was perched on her head. Her legs were drawn up beneath her, revealing a pair of slender feet with bright pink soles.

  “What’s with the getup?” Gamble asked.

  The girl’s dark eyes flashed.

  “Couldn’t find a real Celestial outside Denver or Oklahoma City,” Burns said.

  Gamble glanced cautiously around before taking the wicker chair that Burns indicated. He kept his coat on, even though it was warm by the fire, to hide the Manhattan in its holster on his left hip.

  Burns shrugged out of the elk robe, threw it on the ground, and settled into an identical chair beside Gamble. The girl picked up the robe, smoothed it, and hung it from a deer antler tied to one of the lodgepoles.

  “Warmer than any damned tent I’ve ever slept in,” Burns said. “I feel sorry for those other fellows out there, freezing their butts off in the middle of a Kansas winter. Now, how about some whiskey?”

  “Or dope?”

  “I provide it as a public service,” Burns said. “Since they outlawed it in Caldwell, I had to set up here on the prairie so these fiends could get their heads dosed. They’d go to pieces without it. And friend, I didn’t offer you dope because you don’t look the type.”

  “You’re right,” Gamble said, removing his hat and placing it upside-down on the deer hide between them. “I’d prefer some coffee now. Whiskey later. And I can pay for the whiskey up front, if you like.” Gamble took a silver dollar from his pocket and tossed it into his hat.

  “No offense, friend, but whiskey would warm you quicker than Arbuckles,” Burns said. “But you can get whatever you want here, that’s what I always say.”

  He spoke a few words to the Indian girl, and she threw some grounds and water in a gallon-sized tin can. As she leaned over to place the can on a hot stone just inside the fire circle, Gamble watched the flames reflected in her eyes.

  “What are the games of chance at the Porch?”

  “Old Buell runs a crooked poker game in the shack across the way,” Burns said. “Faro, sometimes, but it’s the old-timers who mostly want to buck that tiger. The young ones want poker, and are freer with their money. Me, I prefer craps. Do you play the bones, friend?”

  “Sometimes,” Gamble said, still watching the girl, who had the affect of someone much older and infinitely sad. “You were going to tell me the story about Laughing Bear.”

  At the sound of the name, the girl looked up. She held Gamble’s gaze for a moment, then turned back to the fire.

  “Indeed,” Burns said. “He was so old he claimed to remember a time before the Spanish came, but that’s absurd. He would have had to be more than four hundred years old. But that’s how Indians are—they tell themselves the damndest stories and believe them.”

  “Perhaps he meant Jedediah Smith. Some of the old ones make no distinction among Spanish, Texans, and other whites.”

  “Could be. Jed Smith was killed out here someplace on the Kansas plains, but they never found his body. Hell, it was the Kiowa that might have killed him. That would put Laughing Bear in his eighties, which would be about right.”

  “So why did Laughing Bear come back here?”

  “Damned if I know,” Burns said. “The last time a buffalo was seen in Sumner County was 1884. They can’t even have the Sun Dance anymore because they can’t get the buffalo head to hang up on the altar. He did the Ghost Dance back in 1890 to drive the whites away and bring the buffalo back, and he took the peyote, and he believed everything old Wovoka said about if you just danced hard enough, the earth would swallow up the whites. But then the soldiers from Fort Sill busted the movement all up and ending up shooting the old bastard in the chest.”

  “So Laughing Bear is dead?”

  “As old as death and twice as ugly,” Burn said. “But no, not dead. Survived the bullet. Claimed his ghost shirt saved him, just like Wovoka promised. He’s asleep over there, out of his mind on opium and alcohol. Now that he can’t get his fix of peyote from the Rio Grande valley anymore, he had to find some substitute to enter the dreamworld where he can talk to his ancestors. I was happy to oblige.”

  “And the government?”

  “Leaves him alone now. The agency at Fort Sill reckons it would be a wasted trip if th
ey sent the soldiers after him—figure he’d be dead of old age before they got here. But, it’s going on six months now, and the old bastard is still breathing. He keeps his medicine bundle always within reach and won’t let me see inside, guarding it like it’s his tribe’s Ark of the Covenant.”

  “How’d you get the lodge?”

  The girl looked up at this, and Gamble thought she might say something, but she bit her lip instead.

  “Traded for it, fair and square,” Burns said. “You see, Laughing Bear has found a new messiah, a blind old charlatan by the name of Afraid-of-Bears. He’s a peyote-gobbling, war-dancing troublemaker who claims that the second coming of Jesus Christ will take place at noon on Friday, July 15, 1904, at Saddle Mountain on the Kiowa Reservation.”

  “That’s a peculiar prophecy for a Kiowa medicine man.”

  “Well, it kind of makes sense when you take into account that Afraid-of-Bears says that Christ will be accompanied by all of the buffalo the whites have killed, and that the old way of life will be restored. Like a lot of heathens, the Kiowa aren’t particular about where their power comes from—Jesus has been good medicine for the whites, so why not the Kiowa? Power is power.”

  The coffee had boiled and the girl used a pair of pliers to grasp the side of the gallon can and fill two blue enamel cups.

  “I’d like to hear what the old man has to say,” Gamble said, taking the hot cup from the girl and nodding his thanks. “In the morning, when he wakes up.”

  “If he wakes up,” Burn said, taking the coffee without looking at the girl. “Anyway, he doesn’t speak a word of English. You have to ask his granddaughter here to translate, and the little squaw bitch is as notorious a liar as he is.”

  Gamble held the cup in both hands and blew across it.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Something unpronounceable,” Burns said.

  “Tsat-Mah,” the girl said.

  “See? Gibberish.”

  Gamble swirled the coffee in the enameled cup.

  “What’s it mean?”