by Bowen, Peter
I was unused to Victorian ladies had mouths on them like that. Ah, the hell with it, I thought.
“Lucretia,” I said, “I’ll tell you something and deny I did if you repeat it. I enjoy it. I like it out there near off the edge. Chance will get me one day, not foolhardiness.”
“You and I are going to my summer house, up in the mountains where it’s cool,” she purred. “And from there I can put you close to any of the Filipino guerrilleros you want to talk to. I have just found you. Don’t think of going away. I’ll shoot you.”
I was full of the perplex. Usually they offer to shoot themselves for careless love. This is unsporting, says I, this one is dangerous. When I meet a woman who is a good deal smarter than I am—there are plenty, let me tell you—I strive to get to the window and then I jump. No good for this one, she’d be waiting down below with a pitchfork.
She come up to me, where I was by the window, and folded her long body into mine and found my lips with hers. For someone as cool gold and frozen sapphire as she was, her body was uncommon hot, and it made mine the same.
Afterward we lay in each other’s arms while the day’s heat rose upward. The birdsongs fell silent and the air got dead still and every little sound was magnified—the creaks of the old timbers in the house, the distant sound of a servant washing—all stuck out, not noisier, but alone. You could separate them sounds easy.
We dressed and after a breakfast of melon and coffee I made to go when Lucretia stopped me.
“For your luggage?” she said, teasing.
I had what I was wearing and that was it. She rang for a servant and sent him to fetch a Chinese tailor and bootmaker, and after a couple of for-show shrugs I gave in. It was easier than having it rammed down my throat.
Also I sent a short note to Taft telling him I was in the way of making contact with the rebels and I added a postscript suggesting he should learn how to ride two horses at once.
I was measured in about two minutes flat by the Chink tailor, who went off saying the things would be ready early the next morning, and then the messenger boy who’d taken the note to Taft showed up again with a note from Taft to me.
“Are raffling off chance to tug on your feet at your hanging. Do come. Black tie. WHT.”
“He is a nice man,” said Lucretia, “unlike that pompous horror of a general.”
“You have contacts and ways of reaching the rebels?” I asked, sorry the words were flown instantly.
“I could hang you from a beam end over the garden, and someone would be round to see about it,” she said. “The insurrectos are everywhere. They want their country to themselves. A not uncommon urge among peoples. Not to be condescended to. Not be taxed to support those who they don’t want there anyway. Not to have murder a national sport. Those things.”
The best thing to say at times like this is nothing. I doubted that she’d buy my holding that we was here because if we weren’t it would be the Japanese or the Germans. (Diplomacy is easy, all you have to do is follow the money.) Nations don’t have moral principles, they can’t afford ’em.
Anyways, I would a sight rather take off from her mountain house than from here, since I figured only about half of Manila was full-time spying on whatever went on for someone or other. I didn’t feel exactly right going up to Lucretia’s house feeling as I did, and then I thought the hell with it, don’t piss against the wind.
The servants was around but you never saw them. A cart with meals and whatever arrived shortly after the order was placed and we were sort of like honeymooners, lost in each other’s flesh and asking silly questions with sillier answers just to hear the other’s voice.
I was just getting up from one of our protracted bouts of screwing when I turned and saw a curtain bulge where it ought not to. My Colts were on the floor by the bed, and no sooner did I grab one than there was a fearful great beller behind me and a Malay with a sharp cane knife come at me. He was yelling and charging and I squeezed off a shot took him square in the chest—I crossnotch all my bullets, makes ’em dum-dums—and I whirled and shot another feller holding a sword. They was both dead ’fore they hit the marble floor and I quick picked up the cane knife and poked the other curtains to see if they had chums, but nothing there.
Lucretia didn’t scream or nothing, just gathered the bedclothes around her and stayed out of the way. I admired that.
There was distant cries and hollers and in a few moments a couple military policemen came busting in and they looked at the bodies and at me and wanted to know what in the hell happened. I told them what I knew and ordered them out of the room, for Lucretia was still in the bed and had had enough rudeness for the moment.
Some Filipinos in khaki come in, rolled the bodies up onto stretchers, and off they went quick-time; I supposed they was practiced at getting them in the ground in a hurry on account of the climate.
I waited while Lucretia dressed—I was not to let her out of my sight after this—and I talked hard to the two American soldiers for a bit but they didn’t know any more than I did. They was filling up Bilibid Prison with belligerent folks but it didn’t seem to slow it down any.
There was bloodstains all over the walls and floors and a couple of chairs would have to be put back together—them dum-dums pick a body up and carry it quite a ways, no matter how hard they are charging.
“They slipped in while we were in the bath,” said Lucretia. I didn’t know, it would be hard to think of them standing behind those suffocating drapes all night listening to us fuck.
Well, they weren’t after Lucretia, she’d been here living the same for a long time, it had to be me. But who would know I was here and want me dead on behalf of the insurrectos? I had nothing they wanted, my report was already wrote—get out and do it now—and I began to get hellishly angry at whoever wanted me dead without even a proper introduction.
The servants was all being lined up in the main hall and the two American military police were trying to shout at them through an interpreter. I had enough Spanish to get on with, and I listened and then I walked up and down the row and when I got to the end of it there was something bothering me and it took a moment to grab on to it.
The servants’ feet, they was all good honest peasant feet that lived in sandals but there was one pair of feet belonged to a slender feller—I can’t tell age on these people—about halfway down the row. I grabbed the nearest military policeman and he whispered to his chum and they walked back down the row casual-like and when they was to him they grabbed and he was up in the air with a giant American on each arm ’fore he knew what the hell happened.
“Who’s this one?” I said to Lucretia. “When did you hire him?”
She shook her head. She’d never seen him before.
I trussed him up good and tight with sash cord and hauled him up under one arm like a haybale and went to the bath. There was still bathwater left in the tub, so I dipped him in it and held on while he struggled and when he went limp I lifted him out and asked a few questions but he warn’t ready with the answers I wanted so I ducked him again.
Finally he allows as how he’d like to tell me anything I cared to know. I asked him questions I purely cared to know. Well, it was the Germans, they was afraid I might get too knowledgeable on the matter of the Philippines since I had been giving them fits elsewhere, like South Africa.
And how much did it cost to buy an assassin?
Ten dollars U.S.
I thought the chances of this skinny kid causing further trouble was slim, so I cut him free and told the soldiers that the man knew nothing.
If the Germans wanted me dead they could have had that a hundred times in Africa and no one the wiser. It made me wonder.
“What’s this summerhouse of yours look like?” I said. Lucretia drew a crude layout of the place, up on a ridge of a mountain to capture any breezes, and not so awfully big as this place. I figured it a fair go for three men to hold ’gainst all comers didn’t have cannons in their dittybags. Only proble
m was where did the other two come from.
I explained to Lucretia how I planned to keep us safe. She nodded and went to packing, saying that my clothes could be sent on when the tailor reappeared.
We spent that day packing and every hour on the hour a cart would pull up and another load would go on up to the mountains near Baguio. It was getting on to late afternoon and we would have to leave pretty damn soon. I still hadn’t come up with how to get the other two fellers we’d need to sleep sound.
Then a lieutenant come up on a lathered horse and says to me please come there is an awful problem which needs me. I says that’s terrible, but I just had a couple fellers try to murder me and I wasn’t going and leaving the lady unprotected.
The kid calmed down some as we walked down to wherever his problem only I could solve was, with Lucretia riding sidesaddle on his horse.
What this problem was was there was some drunks barricaded in a saloon and they threatened to shoot anyone who come in. To let everybody know they could, they kept throwing bottles out the door and shooting them before they hit the cobbles.
A local priest had gone in to pray with them and come out so staggering drunk he didn’t walk, he poured from place to place.
“Why at a time like this are you on a fool’s errand to a couple drunken soldiers,” Lucretia bitched. “Isn’t that a matter for the military police?”
“They keep demanding Luther Kelly by name,” said the military police lieutenant.
“By name?” I says.
“Yessir,” said the boy. “They said they saw your name in the newspaper. They claim to be old comrades-in-arms. If we can get them to disarm ... they were apparently excellent muleskinners once, before they ...”
“Got bored and decided to stir up the town a little,” I says, “As cowboys is wont to do, they being easy to bore.”
“I understand that,” said the looey.
“I think that I got a good guess about these here drunks,” I says. “Was they by any chance reciting poetry?”
“Uh ah uh yes,” said the shavetail.
“Anything like ‘he was dirty and lousy and full of fleas and his terrible tool hung to his knees’?”
“Yes, sir, exactly,” said the lieutenant.
“Lucy,” I says to Lucretia, “I do believe our problems is solved.”
There was a couple half-moons of people on the outer quarters of the front of a cantina which had all manner of chairs and tables piled up as barricades and a lot of busted glass out front. I heard feminine squeals and more verses of the Bastard King of England.
I let out my best wolf-whoop and everything went quiet. I allowed as how I was born on the Powder River and I slept in a rattlesnake den at night ’cause it made me feel warm and cuddly. My arm was longer than a Kansas well-rope and my fist hard as a banker’s heart. I saddle-broke grizzly bears and et my hay from the top of the stack. Picked my teeth with spud bar and milked the moon for my whiskey ... and I went on a lot longer than that, for I was getting cheers from the inside.
I walked over to about a battalion of military police.
“I’ll be responsible for these men. Go away. If they see one of you when they come out they’ll shoot ya. I take all responsibility. Git. And it’s Major Kelly to you.”
They cleared off in a hurry, and I walked back by Lucretia and she reached down and grabbed my shoulder.
“Drunks?” she said. “We don’t need drunks.”
“We need these drunks.”
“You know these people?”
“I hope so,” I said. “If I’m wrong piss on my grave once a year in memory of our love.”
I walked slow back toward the cantina and kept my hands out where they could be seen. All the hoo-rah inside cut down, and I stepped into the cool dark and blinked for a moment.
“Kelly,” says Butch, “what the hell are you doin’ here.”
“Yah,” said Sundance, “whassa doin’ here?”
“I need you bastards for some help. I got my lady out there and someone’s trying to kill us.”
“Why the nerve of the sonsabitches,” says Butch. “They can’t do that, can they, Sundance?”
“Nope,” says Sundance. They had both gone cold sober like that. I led them back out to Lucretia, and they doffed their hats.
“This here’s Smith and that’s Jones,” I says to her.
“And I am the Queen of the May,” says Lucretia.
“Lo, May,” they chorused.
“You know these people,” said Lucretia, pointing.
“Well,” I said, “yes, and they are just what we need.”
“We’ll be sober tomorrow,” they chorused.
“You’re out of your goddamned mind,” said Lucretia.
“Sundance,” I said. “See them pigeons?” There was a flock on the wheel and coming our way.
“Tschup,” says Sundance, staggering away.
The birds come on and when they was about overhead Sundance drawed and began firing. I never seen anyone so fast ever. Twelve pigeons fell to the cobbles, and Sundance walked round to them and shook his head disgustedly at one. It wasn’t nothing but a strip of skin and the wings.
“Luther,” says Sundance, “I apologize. I’m off my form today—didn’t get the head on this one.”
We rented a cart and a cab and put our drunken warriors in the cart, all bundled down with the straw, and went back to her house.
“Jesus,” said Lucretia. “If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it.”
I nodded.
“What do we do now?” says Lucretia.
“Have some supper. Bed these boys down in the room we was in—there is another room in this pile got a bed in it I’m sure—and get under way first thing in the morning.”
We feasted on lobsters and cold white wine and salads and piles of shrimp cooked with flaked red pepper and told stories on each other. Lucretia let rip with a couple raunchy tales very artfully constructed and Butch actually blushed, he didn’t know whether to laugh or go blind.
Sundance was getting more and more vague, and his face seemed about to slide right off his head and into his baked Alaska.
Lucretia and I saw the boys to the room we had so lately been much one with another in, and they fell down any old place, but I did notice that each of them drawed a gun and had it close to hand.
When we were in a big room on the next floor up—had no way to it but the one door in the hall—Lucretia dropped her clothes off and stood outside on the balcony, naked, to feel the evening’s breeze. I soon joined her. We could see the far-off lights of Manila’s square and the cathedral. The land below us was dark, and there was no movement in the shadows.
“Are those really the bank and train robbers?” she asked. “The outlaws that gave such trouble to E. H. Harriman?”
“Yup,” I said.
“How do you know them?”
“Well,” I says, “there ain’t that many folks in the West and so you tend to meet them if you are in any way a convivial person.”
“And how did you meet these two?”
“Them two? Oh, I was, ah, I sort of forget, back in the middle eighties I was ... it must have been a saloon.”
Lucretia was looking at me out from under one eyelid and tapping her bare foot on the parquet.
“Ah, I don’t see why I got to dredge up embarrassing things from my past,” I whined. “We robbed a bank.”
“Well, thank God,” she said, “for a moment I thought it might be something shameful.”
“They’s good boys,” I says. “It’s just they aren’t much at ranching or ordinary work. They’ll have to keep on headed to raw places as can stand ’em.”
I didn’t like what that last meant. It wasn’t that it touched me, for I’d get by, but them other two would go on being bright and murderous children till folks killed them in self-defense.
I was getting more than some interested in Lucretia, who was as fine a woman as any I’ve known.
In the dead dark middle of the night all hell broke loose downstairs, a quick rip of gunfire and shouts, and then silence. Lucretia slipped on a long robe and I pulled on my pants and down we went, me with a Colt in each hand.
Butch and Sundance had killed six fellers and winged two more—whoever was after me was some serious.
All the dead carried cane knives, machetes, and weren’t a one of them looked over about fifteen.
“They are pretty serious about this,” I said. “Maybe you ought to ship home for a while.” I was looking right at her. Her blue eyes flared up and she said she was going with me, and that meant into the jungle, too. And no mistake.
“Well,” I says, “everybody’s up, so let’s us pack and go, we can figure this out off in the mountains.”
So we did, and was on our way within the hour.
14
I NEVER WAS SURE just what kind of business Donald Sams was in, but he had a room lined with metal in the basement just full of modern weapons, all oiled and gleaming, and the cases of ammunition that feeds them. Butch and Sundance was soon festooned with bandoliers and grenades and big Luger pistols that fitted into the wooden holster one way and the holster made a stock for it the other.
Lucretia had a line of carts and buggies fetched, each one with a smiling driver, and the household help was busily stuffing most of the mansion into the carts.
“They’ll finish,” said Lucretia, climbing up beside me. A policeman came up and bowed and handed her a flower. He wished her a pleasant journey. No mention of the six dead and two mostly there in the house. It seemed that this was old hat, and nothing to get in a lather over.
I was in a lather over it. I am used to being shot at at range, not having to wonder if the next shrub or drapery is full of assassins waiting on a chance to leap out and make kebabs out of poor old Luther. It occurred to me that maybe I was getting old for this. Then I thought of what I might do otherwise and then I figured I’d die when I’d a mind to.