by Bowen, Peter
“Here,” said the Hartford Rodent, placing three tumblers on the table. He resumed his notebook and tried to straighten his pince-nez.
“Now, Mr. Kelly, could we have some of your comments upon the recent desperate and gallant attempt by our Army, ably led by you and Colonel Miles, to capture these savage fugitives?”
“Sure,” I says, filling his glass to the brim with Irish, “just as soon as you get that down.”
The Rodent gulped air and then he gulped Jameson’s, and the five ounces went down as smooth as water.
The Rodent coughed. “Well?”
“Colonel Nelson Miles is a farina-faced glob of puke who would be better suited as a pickpocket or senator, both being about the same in the morals department.”
“Sir?” said the Rodent.
“Colonel Nelson Miles would make a fine senator,” I says again, filling him to the brim. “Drink that, and then the next question.”
I had drug the little two-shot derringer out of my waistcoat pocket and was sort of idly pointing it between Rodent’s eyes. The Rodent slid another five ounces of Irish down his wee throat. Sufficient unto the day.
“Now about the last desperate battle,” said the Rodent, “in which so many of our gallant men lost their lives ... tell me, sir, what part did you play in it?”
“I was atop a nearby bill. I saw Colonel Nelson Miles needlessly sacrifice twenty-two soldiers because he was afraid the glory he so wanted would be snatched away from him by General Howard or General Terry. Like I said, the farina-faced glob of puke would make a great senator.”
The combination of the Irish whiskey and my venom done overcome the Rodent. He glanced at his notes, and then at me, and his eyes looked puzzled, and he slid beneath the table as easy as mud flows down a hill. He didn’t even make a teeny thud.
Jack looked at me, twinkling.
“C’mon, Luther,” he says. “A friend of yours asked if I should see you to bring you on over. There’s a great little old gooseberry farm a couple blocks from here. I don’t think poor Hanks will be noticed until they sweep the floor.”
We left the foggy bar and rising voices and crossed the lobby, with the soft pile carpet—dark brown, so as not to show the tobacco stains of them that doesn’t care where or what they spit on.
“What day is this?” I says. “Day of the week, I mean.”
“Friday. Don’t make much difference out there, does it. How hot or how cold, dry, rain, or snow, how long’s the fur on the worthy peltries. But not the day of the week. I’m gonna miss it,” Jack said. He was beginning to weave a little—he was one of those men who can be holding a half bottle or four full ones and he goes right on doing whatever with nary a sign that he’s drunk. Sometimes he can’t remember what happened the night before—how he got them teeth-shaped cuts on his knuckles or what the name of the chippy he was sleepin’ with might be.
We walked four or five blocks and made a couple turns and come up to a big five-story house looked like a wedding cake I once saw, only this was black and brown with a red tile roof. We walked up and Jack knocked on the door. There was gaslight ablaze in the porte-cochere and a little light come out from behind the curtains.
A peephole slid open and I saw an eye that was dark brown and the white part was a deep tan. The peephole slid shut. The door opened and we went in. A chippy took our hats and coats. The eyeball at the door was one of a pair owned by a nigger who was seven feet easy, any measurement you want to take—height, width, and I figured depth, too. But when he turned a bit to pat down Jack I saw he was a mere three feet through.
“Evening, Tusco,” says Jack. The blackamoor rewarded the greeting with a rumble sounded like a bad stampede a ways off. He patted me next, and removed my derringer and gave it to the chippy with our coats.
We walked through some gilt doors standing open to our right and saw a good two dozen chippies and three or four men sitting on stuffed chairs, drinking champagne or whiskey and running their eyes over the chippies, who were looking either bored or coy.
“Rumor has it,” says Jack, jerking a thumb in the direction of the monster nigger, “that he once broke up a fight between two sports here by eatin’ ’em—sports, clothes, hats, boots, hardware, and armament and argument. I’d not like to get into a scrap with him myself.”
“I’d druther trade punches with a mad she-grizzly,” I says, “though, to be humane about it, Tusco probably wouldn’t take near so long.”
I had just got the words out when here come Sally Parmenter bearing down on us. She was dressed in a frilled and flounced dress, and her bodice was framed and upheld what was for my money the most splendid tits in Creation. Oh, I’d about half-guessed where we were going—for one thing she’s the only whore in the world ever owed me anything.
“Luther, Jack.” She swept us both close to her considerable breasts and showered us with kisses and ear-nibbles and the like. Then she threw back her head and laughed.
“Come with me,” she says, taking one each of our hands. We take an open-front elevator up to the fourth floor, and Sally shoves Jack through the door on the right and me through the door on the left.
“Must go tend my garden,” she laughs and pulls the doors shut, one-thunk, two-thunk.
It was dim in the room, after the bright gold gaslight, and it took a half minute for my eyes to adjust to the lesser light. A soft hand grabbed mine and I looked at the girl. She led me to a chair and pulled off my boots and unknotted my tie. She seemed to emerge from a mist, so filmy was the shift she was wearing. She sat in my lap and kissed me, and then she laced her fingers behind my neck and leaned back. An Irish redhead, with the cinnamon-speckled skin and the green eyes. I told her to get up, and I took off my clothes, and when I stood up she let the shift fall. She was beautiful, slim, full-breasted. I dragged her to the floor and punched her right then, for I’d not had a white woman since I could remember. We ended up on a bearskin rug, and I shot off like a roman candle.
“You’ve not had any for a bit, then?” she said, and laughed. She pulled me up and put me on the bed and then walked to the other side and got in. There was champagne and brandy and such in the headboard.
“I’ll have brandy with champagne in it,” I said. She mixed them in a tulip glass and gave it to me. I must have fallen asleep, for the last thing I remember was her hair brushing across my belly.
11
I WOKE UP A couple of times and the chippy made me drink more champagne, and then we went at it again till I could feel the last of the kinks go out of my parts and body and mind. I slept deep, which I had forgotten how to do, and it wasn’t till after noon the next day that I woke up. Sally was in bed with me, doing her have-you-ever-seen-a-snake-swallow-an-egg routine, which is better than any you’ve ever had, I can assure you.
“You like it out there, don’t you, Luther,” she said softly, and smiling. She was a good friend to me, and me to her. It didn’t matter to either of us, come to think of it, what it was we were doing—we was friends and I have never had another woman friend. Well, she saved my head a few years later, though it cost her a lot of the money she’d saved to be old on. She was afraid of being old and alone and poor and nothing else. I’ll tell you another time.
It was too early for any trade in the place, and Sally and me breakfasted downstairs in a huge dining room—hell, dining hall, walls all covered with them whorehouse paintings of naked women painted by some feller who had heard of a naked woman but never seen one. It was a good breakfast, and I stuck to coffee. There was a red velvet swing coming down from a brass ringbolt in the ceiling, and when I looked at it and laughed, Sally laughed too, and said a good deal of Chicago’s political business was transacted here and having a naked chippy swinging overhead was thought to oil the wheels of democracy. Seems like a good idea, don’t it?
“I have one customer, very, very rich, who pays to lie in the center of the table, naked as a jaybird, and have one of my high-yellers piss on him. Politician, wouldn’t you know it.�
� She laughed, and when Sally laughed the crystal went ting.
“Remember when you saved me from Red Hand?” she says. “And then you were so mad when the map told you where to dig and the river had changed?”
“Map could’ve been wrong.”
“Tell me about the Bear Paw fight.”
I did, and I told her about the soldiers following us down the hill to be closer to Chief Joseph.
“Where are they now?” she asked.
“Indian territory. They were promised that they could return to their lands and be ruled by the laws of the country. Instead, they are in a desolate place, which no one has a use for. When a use has been found, they’ll be shoved out of there.”
Sally had taken to smoking those little seegars the upper-class Mexican women smoke—crooked and black and thin. I had one and it was good, smooth and rich.
The toast was getting cold and we sat at right angles to each other, at one corner of the slab made of four full-growed mahogany trees.
“Luther,” Sally said, stubbing her cigar out in the yolk of an unwanted poached egg, “Luther, what are you going to do?”
“Do?” I says. “I’ll do what I have always done. Go where folks is scarce and look for gold or furs or gems.”
“Luther,” says Sally, “you go for the sake of goin’. Here.”
She poured me a tulip glass full of what looked like the juice of oranges. I drank it. That is what it was, along with a lot of champagne. Sal called it a mimosa.
We got to talking politics and then we got to talking whether the Oregon Trail could have been at all if it weren’t for the Erie Canal. We talked until late afternoon, and Sal excused herself to prepare for Saturday night—busiest of the week, last good sinnin’ day before you repent with fur on your tongue and a stomach just dicey enough to keep you countin’ the words of the sermon.
I went for a walk back to my hotel. Sal had offered me a cab to the train station in the mornin’, and I saw no point in trying to get drunk with the greasy lot of speculators in the hotel bar. Truth of it is, I don’t like folks much and I never have. I went up to my room and paid my bill and packed my two Gladstones. I looked out on the city, building after building, most in the construction stage, pigs rooting in the streets, gangs of orphan kids who live like rats in the cellars and tunnels, houses so damn big you’d never find all of the rooms. It depressed me, it was too much and too fast.
I carried my bags back to Sally’s brothel. Tusco must have been at a window, for I was just setting the bags down when the door swung open. I stepped inside and Tusco shut the door. He plucked the bags from my hands and escorted me to a different room. This one was on the fifth floor, and was painted in cream and pale blue, had a canopied bed, and a lot of flimsy-lookin’ furniture it must have taken a lot of Frog years to whittle out. The view from the window went out up Michigan Avenue, with the fancy carriages and the starving kids and the drunkards in the doors and hedges. I drew the drapes.
There was a decanter and two glasses on the little table by the bed. I had a dram—old and well-cured brandy—and I took off my boots and lit a seegar and stared at the cream and gilt ceiling.
There was a tap at the door. I grunted and Sally slipped in. She was about half dressed for her evening. She took off her half and I took off my whole and we screwed in every position we could think of, some so absurd that we would laugh and fall flat on our backs.
She put herself up on one elbow and smiled at me.
“Luther, don’t let us say good-bye. I’ll see you the next time. Your dinner will be brought, you can have your pick of the girls, there’s gambling on the third floor, and if you go out the back way to the carriage house, there will be cockfighting on the second floor.”
“The next time may be tonight, Sal.”
“To hell with you, Luther Kelly,” she said, and flounced off. Jack joined me for dinner, and after the first couple of whiskeys his appetite and his eyes got a little luster. We was served by two chippies didn’t have enough on to wad a shotgun with. Neither Jack nor me is interested in parties of more than two, so he hauled his one off to his room and I shook my head. The girl frowned and then shrugged and left the room, dragging the dinner cart with her.
I wandered around, sat for a while in the gaming room which had whist and poker tables and roulette wheels, and finally bought into one game and was several hundred dollars ahead when I decided to get some fresh air. I bade my partners a fond thank-you. (Their contributions would more than defray my expenses for the trip—gifts and telegrams, tickets and tips and all—to Oneida and back to Fort Buford.)
There was a fire escape in the rear of the house and an iron catwalk which went across the yard to the second floor of the carriage house. I moseyed across, my city boots slick and gripless on the cast-iron grates. I let myself in and watched the fights. There was a pair of reds in first, a short quick fight, with the smaller pock kicking lucky and piercing the other’s heart. I watched about fifteen fights—I have always liked cockfighting, ever since I looked into a chicken’s eye.
I drank too much, but for a man in my position quite sparingly, and picked the Irish girl to spend the night. I went to sleep, and woke to the sound of the church bells ringing—which made me laugh.
As I was finishing my breakfast, Texas Jack hove into view, and he looked like hell on the half shell.
Texas Jack held his head in his hands, and I finally had the girl waiting on us bring him a concoction of raw eggs and tomato juice and gin in a huge mug.
“Quit moaning, you stupid sonofabitch. Tell you what. You drink that without comin’ up for air, and keep it down—no practicing, hear—and I’ll come on your next summer’s Nob explorations.”
Jack looked up, complexion all ruddy again, and said, “Why, Luther!” Poured down the goddamn drink, wiped his face, hollered for a beefsteak and some whiskey, and said we’d meet in St. Louis on the twentieth of June.
“Put ’er here, Kelly,” he says, thrusting out a paw.
I shook hands. “Omohundro,” I says, “I will not rest until I nail you for this disgusting trick.”
Stalking to the door in what shreds of dignity I still had, I made the mistake of pausing.
“Keep your trap civil-like around the boss, Kelly,” he said.
All right, Texas Jack Omohundro, you coyote, you ... You want to play, we’ll play.
I didn’t stop shaking with rage until the train pulled out. And I thought and thought and thought all the way to my mother’s home.
12
I’D NOT BEEN HOME in more than a decade, and I got a mite more uncomfortable with each passed mile that brought me closer to the place I was fetched up in. I hadn’t wired ahead. It ain’t my nature to wander into any ambush, and believe me the past can be a patient bushwacker. I wanted to be a small target or none at all.
You can imagine my joy when I saw half the goddamn town, a brass band, and a large banner welcoming Yellowstones (sic) Kelly (well, they got that right). I suspected the black hand of Texas Jack Omohundro—and about forty others of my chums. All them long nights staring at the stars whilst listening for snapping twigs and the like seems to put in us an urge to play practical jokes upon one another, and if life or limb is lost, the laughter is even harder.
The mayor was there with a key made out of pine and painted with gilt, and my doting family with their assorted spouses, brats, infants, in-laws, out-laws, and hangers-on wasn’t much above a couple hundred folks. They had newspaper reporters and a medium-sized Salvation Army band trying to match tootle for tootle and clang for clang the brass band of the local Odd Fellows.
My mother was standing a bit forward, smack in the middle of the red carpet. The engineer of the train got caught up in the festivities and tooted his horn and whistled his whistle. This was a signal for all of the menfolks in the crowd to whip their revolvers out and fire a raggedy-ass salute.
I stepped down on a gilded cast-iron railroad step, with the conductor reaching for my hand as if I
was some goddamn debutante.
The mayor waddled over to hand me the key to the city (when I had left there was one general store) and beneath the undulating rolls of fat was the face of that goddamn lardy little weasel Arthur Tooele, whose block I had knocked off so many times it was beginning to look spherical from rolling—you know the type, the fat kid whose one talent is sweating and smelling bad. Must have inherited the General Store. Gave me a hand felt like a pint of oysters in rancid grease.
I graciously took the key and walked to my mother, straight as a young birch, hair all white now, and the same deep gray eyes. I bent to kiss her on the cheek, and as I did so she whispered:
“Luther, you behave yourself, for I have seen that look upon your face before. Starting at about two years of age.”
“Yes’m,” I whispered back. Then a tide of my brothers and sisters engulfed me. Two stout lads who resembled faintly my snot-nosed four- and five-year-old brothers lifted me to their brawny shoulders, and I was borne triumphantly down the street, waving and smiling and thinking I was going to nail Texas Jack Omohundro’s balls to a fatwood stump and set the stump on fire.
Folks started hollering for a speech, and I am good at nothing but a mumble-and-grunt (one of my nicknames was “The Sphinx”), but nevertheless was deposited in a sort of temporary pulpit nailed to the side of a chestnut tree. I get eloquent when I get mad, and so with Jack Omohundro’s face dancing in the back of my mind, I beamed and smiled upon the crowd and held my arms out to my sides (wishing I could fly) and grinned back at the throng like a damn ninny.
The whistles, claps, and hoots died down and I cleared my throat and knotted my hands behind my back (thinking of Jack’s neck) and smiled like a loon, vowing never to set foot in this goddamn place ever again.
“Friends, family, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply touched by your warm welcome (why can’t you mind your own damn business). When I left here twelve years ago I never dreamed it would be so long before I was back among you (and you ain’t seen nothing in the way of absences yet). It warms my heart (and I will warm Texas Jack Omohundro’s balls) and gladdens me that you would remember me (and when I find the bastard or bastards who sold you this pack of lies ...) and turn out today to welcome me. It has been a long journey but a worthwhile one and I must repair to my mother’s home and the bosom of my family and listen to what has transpired in my absence. (How many god damn nieces and nephews am I hung with?) The Plains Indian Wars are over (we poisoned and diseased ’em out) with the capitulation of Chief Joseph.”