by Bowen, Peter
Telegram: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? LUTHER KELLY
Telegram: YES. UTAH. BEST USG
Telegram: HOW DO I KNOW ITS YOU? LUTHER KELLY
Telegram: TRUST ME. USG
I had always wanted to see Canada and I just enjoyed the hell out of being the national shuttlecock and being hung in Utah is considered a better fate than having to live there. There was something awesome in the casual way the President had gone and set ol’ Luther up. I had no doubts about him being quite ready and able to have me hung.
It sounded like him. Grant never gave back an inch of territory once he had it. I believed him, yes I did.
My view was reinforced by the sudden arrival of William Tecumseh Sherman, who stepped off a steam packet, marched up to the saloon where I was oiling my tonsils, and kicked my arse into the street and down to his stateroom to check on his soldier and to look me up and down like a prize hog before bracing me good and having me recite my orders.
“I will hang you,” says Sherman, “with great pleasure. Do not fail us. If you bugger this up, your best bet is to head north and live out your days with the Eskimos.”
Then he frog-marched me out and kicked me down the gangplank. There was a grizzled old sodden loafer who looked at this little drama and said, “It were the General Sherman.”
“I know,” I says, picking myself up out of the mud.
I tracked down Gus Doane and whined at him for a while and he offered the peculiar comfort that perhaps it was all for the best; no one could quite figure out whether to shoot me or hang me and this venture seemed to be a guarantee of one or both.
Full of the sorrows and a lot of old Tanglefoot I commenced into riding north, with no clear idea where I would be going. I was soon out of range of the army patrols watching the trails, up in the last great hunting ground pretty much untouched by the whites. There was deer thick in the coulees and buffalo and antelope on the plains, flights of ducks and geese numbering in the thousands. I could collect all the sage hens I could eat for a month with an hour’s work with a throwing stick, and the plovers covered the ground in packs. Them plovers was wonderful eating, they are all gone now, not one survived. The sandhill cranes was a treat, stuffed with the wild rice that grows along the little streams.
John Wilkes Booth or whoever seemed an easier task than the Sioux or Cheyenne nations, so I elected to swing up north toward the little crossroads where Booth was thought to be storekeeping at.
I had some real qualms about just going up and shooting a citizen of Canada. It was a lot tougher job up there as the Mounted Police was a dedicated lot and they never give up. Down here in America the law usually gave up half a day’s ride from the closest saloon.
(Americans don’t hold grudges like them damned Canucks. They still holler for my head on a quarterly basis.)
There ain’t no markers on the border between Canada and the United States, and just when I crossed over I’ll never know, but the rolling plains of Alberta was just like northern Montana. The grass waved like a sea and brushed my horse’s shoulders, there was the same wandering buffalo trails—cut through the grass on a zigzag, hundred yards to the left, hundred yards to the right.
I made camp and got to bed early and woke up at a noise and I grabbed for my rifle and had it trained on Liver-Eatin’ Jack’s heart. He had snuck up on me and dropped a large fishbowl on the rock nearest my head.
“Mornin’,” says Jack. “You ain’t no better at stayin’ alive; try as I did to make you learn you just won’t do it.”
I put down the rifle and propped myself up on one elbow and commenced dusting the shards out of my hair. I invited Jack to go breakfast on himself. I put my head in my hands and moaned. Not only was I on this murderous fool’s errand, I was going to be watched every inch of the way. I couldn’t run nor hide nor fight fair.
“Washakie sends his best and wanted me to tell you that both his wives is pregnant,” says Jack.
“He got any idea who the father is?” I snarled.
“Washakie don’t care,” says Jack. “After all, the children is the point. Hell, he even likes you!”
I sighed. Well, what the hell.
“This Booth feller,” says Jack, “he ain’t going to be like you think.”
“I don’t got to think on him,” I says. “I just got to kill him quietlike. I don’t understand any of this.”
I wondered suddenly why Jack knew any of this. He read the question in my face.
He just shook his head and looked toward the far horizon.
“Time I think it’ll quiet down along comes somethin’ worse’n ever.”
It occurred to me that I didn’t even know who Jack was, or what he’d been before the mountains got him. It also occurred to me that the reason Jack wasn’t to kill Booth was if something went wrong it would be hard to sweep a seven-foot-two five-hundred-pound carcase under the rug. There wouldn’t be too many could fit Jack’s description. There were a lot of folks who could easy fit mine. Well, boys, there you have it.
I packed up and we moved north. After a little sleep we went on in darkness. The Cree could read our sign, and the Chippewa, too, but with Jack’s draft horse and my two geldings, we could easy be one of the Metis going back to a homestead. (The Metis was half Injun, half French and they used carts to haul in. They was all Catholic, sort of.)
We backed and filled for a day near the trading post Booth was supposed to be working at. I went on in that evening, and the gent behind the counter matched the picture I’d been given, and he limped on the broken ankle he’d got jumping from Lincoln’s theater box to the stage.
What happened next? Well, by God, Booth was syphilitic. The syph had got to the stage where it was eating his brain and he twitched and staggered and hopped and drooled. He had a couple of retired soldiers to watch him. Her Majesty’s government was keeping its hands clean by letting the syph kill him, whereupon he would be dissected and pickled along with the sixteen pages of Stanton’s diary. All placed along with other such relics of empire in a special room at Westminster.
I tucked my possibles in a saddlebag and rode back to where Jack was keeping himself.
“Why in the hell didn’t they just send you?” I says.
“I’m mortal tired of this kind of work, Luther,” says Jack, “I won’t do it anymore, so I had to find a replacement. That’s you.”
“Do I have to kill the guards, too?” I asked, knowing the answer.
Jack nodded.
“What if I don’t? What if I just say no. Ride south,” I snarled. “Refuse to be dragooned into this.”
In a second Jack’s Green River knife was at my throat.
“All you had to do was ask,” I says, more cheery than I felt.
“I’m askin’,” says Jack. “You got a real talent for this work. I seen it, and so did Washakie. A real talent.”
“Can’t be no favor,” says Jack. “Yore pecker is in Ulysses’s pocket and no two ways about it. Sentiment is noble but hangin’ is sure.”
“How’d you get into this?” I asked.
“Volunteered,” says Jack.
“Volunteered like me?”
Jack looked even more mournful. “No,” he says finally, “I ain’t as smart as you, Luther. I offered. You’ll be better at it than me. You say you don’t believe in nothin’, but you do. Don’t matter anyway, boy, you been chose.”
So that night I did in the guards, easy work, the trading post was well out of the way and over the months they’d got slack and careless. Washakie had taught me how to slip a knife into a man’s neck so silent you wondered if it happened at all. So I had been in school all of this time, so to speak. I wondered what they could have seen in me, or perhaps it was something in myself I didn’t want to look at at all.
Booth screamed when I padded up to his bedside—he had to be tied in at night, his twitches was so bad. I smothered him, so I’m a hero sure enough.
Booth’s emaciated body being such a big prize Jack chopped it up and smash
ed the teeth in. We tossed the contents of the store outside, and found Booth’s diary—made interesting reading later—and we hauled the two corpses of the guards inside and set fire to the place. We headed south that night, and the store burned like a beacon we could see from every rise all that night, and part of me was burning in it, too. I felt the less after Booth, and I was not to get it back easily.
About fifty miles north of the border I heard an unmistakable sound—plank plonk dreedle plong twang—rand there was a whiff of sauerkraut and sewage on the breeze. A high, desperate female trillings and a dog coughing itself near to death.
Yup.
Up the trail come Klaas Vipsoek, M.D. these days, in a fancy Conestoga followed by two Democrat freighters and a buggy behind with the female assistants and a cage for the geek.
The sideboards of the Conestoga proclaimed Chief Moo-tay-tun-tun’s Stump Water, which cured malaria, yaws, tuberculosis, cancer, gangrene, blood poisoning, gunshots, dandruff, and psoriasis. It also was a sovereign remedy for warts, tree stumps, and crop blight.
“SHIT!” says Jack and me simultaneous. Here we’d been off on the lonely Road of Empire and here come Klaas right behind like a stubborn case of clap.
“Skelly! Shack! How glad!” says Klaas. He still had on them checked pants, though what color they was eluded me, and a fine watered-silk waistcoat and a creamy big hat mostly pale save where Klaas had fingered it after greasing his wagon axles.
“SHIT!” says me and Jack again, shocked plumb out of inventiveness.
“I play blugerss,” says Klaas, taking a mighty whang at the banjo on his fat knee. “You coming to medicine show tonight?”
“SHIT, NO!” we says.
“Oh,” says Klaas, looking hurt. “You want to say hello to Mulebreath? He’s in the geek cage.”
“Well goddamn,” I says, “finally found a job for the old boy that’s fitten.”
There was an explosion of feathers coming off the surrey. I could hear Mulebreath pronouncing maledictions upon foul Yankee poultry.
Jack and me was both fond of Klaas; the atmosphere aside, he was the soul of kindness and the father of ill winds, and we couldn’t no more stick to our first resolve than we ever did. Klaas and Mulebreath had a way of becoming catastrophes, never having the slightest intention of doing so.
By and by we wanders into a Metis town, Saint Something or other. The Metis had been the mainstay of the Gentlemen Adventurers of Hudson’s Bay, both as trappers and as voyageurs. They still lived with many Injun ways.
The town was three crude stores and a clabber of huts around them and a muddy street full of dogs and pigs and mud. There was a nice little clapboard mackerelsnapper church with a grim gent in a black cassock peering out, alert for signs of approaching sin. The medicine show had been some advertised, for a nice crowd awaited Klaas and Company, and trestle tables had been set up with food and drink for the asking. Nice women in white aprons starched enough to turn arrows handed out sandwiches.
Klaas and his assistants set up the folding stage and then the assistants went around back to dig a pit for Mulebreath, and as soon as that worthy was installed and an iron grille placed over his pit Klaas commenced into selling his stump water. His claims was as utterly preposterous as any other doctor’s and since they was delivered in that cheese-thick Dutchy accent no one had the faintest notion what he was saying anyway. No one much cared as there was two dancing girls wearing not much doing snakey wiggles and the men was all panting like old dogs in August. Their wives was glaring beadily at them, and watching for any sign the menfolk might slip away.
There was an occasional cloud of feathers reaching well over the top of the stage.
The assistants passed among the crowd with trays of little cups had a sample of the stump water in them.
It was terrible what commenced happening then. The formula for the stump water was secret, but a whiff of it had me thinking it had opium, red pepper, spirits of hartshorn, wormwood, and bulk Oriental spices of the, uh, rejuvenating sort. All who had partook of the stump water got this beady glaze in their eyes and began to paw the earth and scratch some here and there.
“Make fer the high ground!” yelps Jack, spotting a particularly strapping wench headed his way and hitching up her skirts.
We dashed for our horses, Jack’s new lady love eating up the ground in twenty-foot leaps, and I made it up into the saddle and sunk in my spurs and the horse dashed away about twelve feet before the rope sprang taut to the stump I’d hitched the skittish son of a bitch to.
I took such velocity as I had as the horse went ass over ears and I hit the ground running and never mind the breathy cries behind, and Jack’s pitiful wail, “Luther, I cain’t hit no woman! Luther! Help, Luther!”
I did not look back.
Fortunately, there was a canoe left untended, and I leaped into it and commenced paddling right smart, about twice the speed of the Delta Queen trying to make New Orleans before the whorehouses all closed.
I cannot describe the scene, like so many other massacres I have escaped words fail me. Also I never look back, because it might slow me down.
I could hear, however, an atmosphere rent with lustful cries, tearing cloth, Dutchy bellers of pleasure, assorted squeals and snorts, Jack’s gratifyingly terrified yelps, all these sounds of catastrophe receding as I paddled like hell.
Once again sheer speed had saved me. I gathered nuts and berries for my supper and laughed in the ripening dusk.
28
SAINT-SOMETHING-OR-OTHER LOOKED A LOT like one great bridal suite after a shivaree. I had snuck up close at dawn to find that the celebrations was still going on, though greatly reduced in velocity. I poured the last of the stump water down a privy. Folks could get hurt with that stuff.
I noticed something swinging from the church steeple—it turned out to be the priest, his cassock somewhat torn and tattered. Whether he’d done himself in at the thought of some of the confessions he was going to hear or he had simply been lynched for making ill-mannered protests at the general debauchery I couldn’t say, by dawn’s early light. The sight of a priest swinging in the breeze is near as pleasing to me as a lawyer in the same fix.
There was a few setting hens in a coop that Mulebreath hadn’t been given, so I had eggs fresh and raw for breakfast and I rustled up some trade coffee and since the ground was littered with household goods must have shot out when the cabin roofs blew off it was a small matter to find utensils, a few of which warn’t even sticky.
There were shreds of buckskin where Jack had gone down, and the ground was tore up something awful. Looked like a twenty-mule team had got stuck there.
I was sorting through the wreckage of Klaas’s Conestoga in hopes of a seegar when a moan caught my attention. There was a feeble scrabbling under a big chokecherry bush and a flash of human flesh never much out in the sun. I walked over to see if I could possibly be of assistance.
Klaas was shoved back in there sort of like a fish took a wrong turn at the waterfall and landed in a thicket. He was all over bruises and contusions and looked, uh, spawned out. He was moaning and pointing to my right boot. There was his blue china teeth still bravely buried in the whalebone of a bustle. I couldn’t recall any bustles on the Metis women but then I was only there a minute.
I handed Klaas his teeth and he gratefully took them and scraped off the few stays still stuck in them and popped them into his swollen lips.
“Skelly,” says Klaas, “less go back to Utah, the Mormons iss less dancherous.”
“Maybe for you,” I says. “All you did was piss on that book. I shot a lot of them. Also recall the rude messages you tattooed on the missionaries.”
“Yess,” says Klaas, “between us there is difference.”
“This sort of thing ever happen before?” I says, looking at what was left of a peaceful and thriving community of simple farmers and trappers.
“First time I sell this stoomp vasser,” says Klaas. “Would they prosecuite for stoomp v
asser?”
“Good thinking,” I says. “You could have tried it out on a dog or Mulebreath or something.”
“Did zat,” says Klaas, his teeth slopping around his gums. “Terrible old hound, near death, goes after wife of mayor of St. Joseph. Big scandal. She leaves husband, buys the dog blue velvet coat with brass buttons.”
“Oh, horse shit,” I says, amused.
“Mayor shoot dog, she shoot mayor,” says Klaas.
After this touching rendition of careless love, which, fer Chrissakes, turned out to be true, Klaas picked himself up to his full and ponderous height and he began picking through the rubble for a bit of clothing.
I got my horse and left, figuring that Jack wouldn’t be able to straddle anything for a few days.
Heading south, I covered as much ground as I could, eating only a little jerky and drinking sparingly when I did. I was looking for Red Cloud, because Grant was calling him in with a simple message. Come in now, or we will hunt you down, and leave not one in ten alive.
Grant made that kind of war. He would send whatever Sherman felt he needed in the way of troops, and then they would take the field and not come back till the last Injun was dead or shipped to a reservation.
The first day I thought I might be close enough to Red Cloud to see a scout or two, I got captured by a little river as I watered my horse.
That had been my plan all along, but not to be captured by Little Big Man, who loudly told me he still thought all whites should be exterminated. One brave, feisty little bastard, was Little Big Man, though a bit single-minded about certain things, at least for my tastes. For one thing, he proposed that what I taste with be torn out at the roots, and the real unpleasantries would then commence.
We come on to Red Cloud’s lodges soon enough. Little Big Man delivered me and then he threw an absolute blue boomer over having had to do this at all.
Red Cloud got his hair up and reminded Little Big Man that the Sioux was pretty much in Canada and he, Red Cloud, had promised to keep the peace.
(The Canadians are Brits, of course, and unlike us once they run the Union Jack up the pole, everybody around best abide by the laws, or they’ll hang you right smart.) There was a good militia and some troops and the Mounties here and there.