by Bowen, Peter
I shook my head. “No, same for me.”
“Business is closed for the day, and I will join you in that drink, if any can be found here that is made of vegetable matter.”
The station agent brought us a bottle of bonded whiskey and waved away our money. We invited him to join us but he said it was against Company rules, and he set to fixing dinner in pots that had been washed in living memory.
La Farge out of the office was a garrulous sort, and he told me a lot of funny stories about his days as a railroad agent, how he shot or hung them as wanted to rob the trains, and his days as a Union officer, hanging spies and saboteurs in New Orleans. The man was soaked in death, and I couldn’t tell whether he had chose it or it found him. (It was to get him in a little over two years, a double charge of buckshot in the back. His killer was never found.) But La Farge that night was gay, and his assistants, too, Luke and Billy, learning the killer’s trade.
Since the station was so spotless I bunked there that night, and I had no sooner put my head on my saddle than the door come banging open and two of them tall hats I hate so much come in yelling for the station agent.
The agent come out of the back yawning and scratching his head.
“Have you seen either of these people?” the lead Mormon said, in a raspy voice sounded familiar.
The agent shook his head.
“How ’bout him?” said the Mormon, holding up another handbill.
La Farge was walking fully dressed except for the sawed-off shotgun, over to where the agent and the new folks stood.
“Interesting,” said La Farge, “what do you want him for?”
“Luther Kelly for murder, and Palmyra Young and Jim Belding for theft.”
“Ain’t seen any of them,” said the agent. La Farge nodded sympathetically.
There was a fair hullaballoo outside, many riders. I thought I’d just lie where I was and let someone else look. La Farge went outside, floating along on those tiny feet.
After maybe fifteen minutes the Mormons rode off. They was mighty hungry for the three of us, if they’d be risking their horses on a dark moonless night.
I just waited, for they might well have left one or two behind to watch. My mind was racing. I didn’t know how exactly to warn Mountain Jim and Palmyra. One thing for sure, it wasn’t no passel of ignorant, crazy McMullinses out there. There was some hard men there. I wasn’t worried about them tracking Jim and Palmyra down, I was worried they’d split up and drive my friends the one into the other.
La Farge come back in and walked over toward me and he sat down at a table and looked off from me.
“Just stay there. Luke and Billy are looking to see who might have got lost and stayed behind. Now, no one here will betray you, but the stable hands are Mormon boys and they’ll be here at dawn. What do you wish to do?”
I didn’t know. Best would be to ambush all the mounted men who had just passed, but that would raise a bigger stink than we already had.
So I told La Farge the truth. He put his head down on his silk-gloved hand and listened, nodding every once in a while, and I was only about half done when Luke and Billy come back.
“Please start over,” said La Farge.
I did. I told them about Palmyra, her blindness, Mountain Jim, the McMullinses, Ouray, and how that passel that had just flown into the night was bent on murdering them over the letters they didn’t even have. Worse yet, Palmyra was standing up to her own father and somewhat taller, by my reckoning. I had to get those letters or my friends wouldn’t ever be safe. I didn’t know what to do.
“Only one thing I can see to do,” said Billy, drawling. Luke nodded beside him.
“We’ll do what we can to break that mob up,” said La Farge. “And I think I know where I can take them, a good place, one that I once thought I would retire to, but I am afraid my life is not going to ... allow me to do so.”
We packed up and got ready to go our ways, me to “stick my head in the lion’s arse” as La Farge gleefully put it, and Jules, Luke, and Billy to stand between two people they’d never even met and death.
“Do you have anything that would be recognized as coming from you?” said La Farge.
I thought hard, and then I remembered the quilled and beaded bag Ouray had given me for Elder McMullin’s head. I dug it out, and added a note I scribbled on KC line paper with a stub of a pencil.
We split up then, and I never saw La Farge again, though I’ve run on to Luke and Billy time to time. Those three went after them Mormon cutthroats like real cutthroats, and they stalked and harassed them—there was forty blasted Sons of Dan when they passed the stage station. When they got out in the desert Jules, Luke, and Billy’d get a couple every other day. Ouray watched some and decided he’d like to meet such public-spirited folks, so Owl-Walks-West slipped into camp one evening—almost getting shot, it had been a rough day on Jules and Company.
The Sons of Dan was scared out of their hair by then, and Jules quit killing them and just killed their horses. Not a one of the Sons of Dan came back, not even a horse with an empty saddle.
Then Jules and Company took Palmyra and Jim to a hanging valley hidden in the Colorado Rockies. You could get up to it only by going up a narrow goat trail—had to blindfold the horses—and once you came through the cleft in the rock a huge valley opened out, one with a small river—and here’s the most curious thing—this river came up within a quarter mile of the cleft, and then it dived into the earth and where it came out no one knew. Sharp hornlike mountains stood clear around it, and the grass was rich and deep.
There was no way into it except that narrow trail, and one armed man could defy an army, the cleft was so narrow. Sheep would make it up there easy.
The Lost Cloud Valley, is what it’s called. (Palmyra and Jim are still there as I write this, there in some ways.)
Me, I had an even less restful time of it, I’ll tell you.
I went riding on toward Salt Lake City. No one bothered me all the way there. So I canters up to the porte cochere and the hedges and bushes and windows suddenlike was all pointing guns at my vitals. A couple of oxlike fellers in them copious hats drug me off my horse and sort of bounced me in the door to Brigham’s study where they practiced their knots and glares and grunts for some time before lifting the chair that was now an intimate item of my apparel and dropping it from three feet up in front of the Prophet’s desk so I could have a good view of him.
Brigham scowled at me and I scowled right back. He then motioned to his lackeys and they all stomped off leaving me all alone with this bloodthirsty madman, although truth to tell I wasn’t no slouch in that department anymore either.
“Did my slut of a daughter give you the letters?” he hissed. He seemed to swell, like a scared cat.
“No,” I says. “There ain’t no letters she knows of.”
“Lies,” Brigham screamed. “Damned, dirty, blasphemous lies! I will by God have those letters! I’ll have them, you Gentile shit!”
“There ain’t no goddamn letters and I shot that bastard McMullin for you. Now let me go, I don’t much like it here.”
Brigham was wound up pretty tight. He come round and I thought for a moment he was going to smash me in the face. He glared for a while and then he pushed a lever on his desk.
The two oxen who had brought me in here came and untied me and picked me up and hauled me away. They opened a thick door with a key and I smelled the musty smell of basements. Something else, too, I couldn’t quite place.
They bounced me down the stairs and into a big cell. As they slammed the door I caught a whiff of unmistakable stink and heard the thunderous murmurations of bowels could belong to only one man in all the world.
It was dark as the inside of yer pocket there, but I knew the farting lump on the damp straw pallet had to be my old chum the sutler, God’s Own Atmospheric Disaster, Klaas Vipsoek. I wondered what chance I had that they’d burned his banjo.
“Wal wal wal,” says a thick Southern voice.
“What in Hell’s Balls took you so damn long?”
“Mulebreath?” I said.
“At yer service, yah Yankee turd,” said Mulebreath.
Klaas let off a great ripple of wind.
Mulebreath belched.
Here I am, I thought, touring the Golden West and I’m home with my kind of folks.
17
KLAAS, MULEBREATH, AND LUTHER was let set a couple of days. Someone came by with a water bucket and dipper and they took the slops pail and brung it back, but there warn’t no food delivered. I figured Brigham wanted us weak before making us dead.
After the first four hours Klaas’s farts had numbed my nose and I couldn’t smell anything. It kept the cell right free of vermin and the guard as far away as he could get without actually deserting. Mulebreath sang stirring martial airs and when he warn’t doing that he refought the battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in which he had heroically charged a Yankee ambulance and made off with the medicinal brandy. Single-handed. When I asked him if he shared it round he looked at me like I was daft.
Klaas woke up and scratched himself and stood up. He still had them spectacles upside down on his nose.
“Mulebreath,” I says, “how did you and this fat Dutch bastard end up in Brigham Young’s basement?” I had business here.
“It’s a long damn story,” Mulebreath said. “I could use a drink.” He fished around in his possibles sack and came up with a big bottle of stump blower.
Mulebreath swigged mightily and passed the bottle to me. I choked and gagged but I got some of it down. It was a lot like drinking hot worms. My eyeballs began to dance in their sockets.
Mulebreath wiped his beard and moustache. It seemed that he and Klaas had arrived in the City of the Saints and they went in as partners on a small house nearly to the edge of town. Klaas saw possibilities in selling things no pious Mormon would touch but they would certainly buy. Mulebreath had thought the drivers who plied the Parley Canyon route were not much good with a mule.
Mulebreath had slept off much of the day’s drunk on the roof of their humble dwelling. Klaas was sitting on the stoop playing the banjo. Two missionaries approached.
Klaas did not wish to leave off playing the banjo, largely because if he didn’t he couldn’t hear the missionaries blather. So one of them foully grabbed Klaas’s banjo and jerked it away. The other began to read from the Book of Mormon. Klaas rolled up his sleeve and knocked the banjo-grabber halfway to St. Louis. Then he thrust a fearsome uppercut at the one reading—painfully and slowly as they do—which put out his lights. The slumberers were parked out in the mud for the hogs to root at and Klaas went back to his banjo.
A flying wedge of missionaries burst in and demanded Klaas quit playing the banjo. Klaas’s slow temper was gone by now and he defended banjo and hearth and then he unbuttoned his flies and pissed on such Books of Mormon as had fallen near.
“So I looks up the street and there’s this mob all wavin’ Books of Mormon and they come up and was working on Klaas pretty good so I hauled out the frightful hawg and pissed on all of them but good. Then there was a general sort of a riot and when we come to here we was. Sort of seems unfair. I mean, they had every chance to stay away and not bother us. Yankees. Shit.”
Mulebreath had another snort and so did I. Klaas scratched and farted and rubbed his sore jaw. He held out his hand for the bottle. Mulebreath gave it to him.
“Man out here can’t tell a lie good ain’t got many friends,” I said. “Now will you quit lyin’ to me and tell me why Brigham tossed a sutler and a teamster into his dungeons?”
“Iss tha truth,” said Klaas.
“Bullfeathers,” I said. “They come down on you because you knew me.”
But how? We headscratched for a while and came up with not one good reason for them to be down here. Pissing on a few of the pesky missionaries would hardly have Brigham in the rage he was in. He was scared, and it made him angrier and angrier.
“Ah think these here Mar-mans is mighty strange fer the love of their God,” said Mulebreath. He had a Southern accent so thick catfish could swim in it.
“I tink lots unmarked graves,” said Klaas. “Also these bastards break my banjo.”
“First useful act a Mormon done,” I snarled. “Call the newspapers.”
The light was pretty bad in our rathole, but I thought if I could get a rock somewheres and sling it in my shirt I could club a guard and we might be able to escape. More I thought on it the worse the idea seemed. There was at least twenty armed men up there and us three and Klaas was stove up some.
All of the time I was thinking I was running my fingers along the back wall, absentmindedly, and I come on a stone that moved a little. I worried it out and worried my ideas down to a nub and sat down on the pallet with the rock in my hand. I was far gone mopeful.
Another rock fell out of the wall. I got up and rushed to the opening and I could smell fresh air. I grabbed at the rocks and pulled a hundred pounds of them out at once. They crashed on the floor, but the guard didn’t seem to hear.
“Boys,” I hissed, “I think we got a maybe here.” They come right quick. I stuck my hand through and waved it round and found nothing. There was a considerable draft of cool fresh air coming now.
Mulebreath stuck his paw through the hole and waved it so damned long I finally asked him what was he doing?
“Reachin’ for Maggie’s Lost Drawers,” says Mulebreath. His trade whiskey breath caused my whiskers to stagger and fall.
We tore down more rock, getting it wide enough to let Klaas through.
“We could just leave him here to slim down some,” I said. “It’d do him a world of good.”
Klaas made foul suggestions for things I might do in the way of entertainment, once I got out and was next to bats, goats, and stumps. He punctuated his speech with an enormous blast of wind.
“We got to git him to where we can kill him goddamn good and proper,” Mulebreath gasped. I was leaning on the wall for support. It fell away in front of me, with a crash I’d thought could be heard in Wyoming. The guard didn’t come. Mulebreath padded off and stuck his head through the bars and came right back.
“He seems to be passed out halfway up the stairs,” said Mulebreath. “Prolly ’cause of Klaas’s last explosion. Maybe I was hasty. Maybe we shouldn’t kill him.”
Klaas rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I vondter vat happen to my banjo,” he said.
“We’ll find out,” I says, crawling through the hole. I went along cool, sandy earth on my hands and knees and when I’d look up I could see some cool, gray light far ahead. I struggled toward it and soon I was going along behind shelving filled with rows and rows of canning jars.
I could hear Klaas wheezing and Mulebreath cussing sort of steadylike, just keeping his tongue in shape.
Canning jars. The light such as could make it down this far came from a cobwebby window fairly high up. The window looked big enough for me and Mulebreath to get through and I am such a noble character I thought even Klaas could make it if he starved down for a couple months and we greased him up real good. The others were coming on. Well, goddamn it, I didn’t stuff all them pickled pig’s feet down him nor them barrels of beer and sides of bacon.
The three of us stood there blinking in the soft new light.
“If she be sunny our eyes won’t work,” said Mulebreath. “We be blind as moles for fifteen minutes.”
I carefully moved about forty jars of canned stuffs out of the way and slithered out and stood up. My forehead was running blood so I scrabbled in a corner and got a handful of dusty cobwebs and plastered them on the cut, which quit bleeding just like that.
Klaas struggled through and lay like a beached dolphin on the dirt floor.
“Kick in the ribs help ya up?” I inquired, my voice concerned as an undertaker’s.
Klaas struggled to his feet and Mulebreath came through in a moment. He stood up and dusted off his buckskins and painted his tonsils with more from his jug.
“How’d you get that in here?” I asked.
“Them plumless fellers got tard a me crackin’ there heads together, I said I’d walk peaceablelike if they left me alone.” Mulebreath had developed a powerful personality in his trade and it stood him good in all weathers.
The light brightened and we got a good look at each other for the first time. We was filthy, stomped, bloody, battered, and half dead. So we laughed at each other.
“If our mothers could see us now they’d say I told ya so,” I said. We hooted and then remembered we was sneaking out and cut off quick.
“Wal?” says Mulebreath.
“I need a big crock of chokecherry preserves,” I said.
“Klaas’s farts simple ya?”
All I said about it was that Brigham would perish of the apoplexy if he knew what was in that there crock. So we found it quick enough, and sure the crock had been moved recent and there was fingerprints in the dust.
There was water running over in the corner and when I went to it I found a slate table and sink, for washing the jars before taking them upstairs. I dumped the preserves in the sink and fished out an oilskin packet and washed the stickiness off with a bar of soap I found on the floor. I put the packet in my shirt and thought how much fun I was going to have with that bastard Prophet shortly.
There was a shadow pass the window, and I started. It must have been a guard.
Suddenly a door opened upstairs and we heard a foot step down. There was several women chattering away. We all took to what dark we could find.
Four Mormon ladies come down the steps one by one, blind in the gloom, and we bound and gagged them quick, Klaas getting his hand bit pretty good by one who was determined to scream. They was all wearing them tentlike plain blue dresses they favor, and Mulebreath and I slipped one each over our heads and we pinned the other two front and back on Klaas. The bonnets fit perfect.
We went bold as you please up the steps and through a short hall and outside down a servant’s staircase and out through a gate in the hedge.