The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  Rather than stay there while the leeches piled on twelve deep, I waited till all that was visible was a shavetail looey and then Major Luther Kelly, USA, on a mission for Governor-General Taft, emerged from the swamp and faced the kid down while El Tigre #5 scooted across and signaled his safe arrival by trilling like a honeycatcher.

  At my abrupt farewell the lieutenant saluted and I did, too, sloppy like as befitted my irregular status, and I found my tiger-striped pard across the way tapping his foot.

  “Plenty soldiers in here,” he whispered, “we go slow, eh?”

  We went slow. This was the real jungle, never been cleared, it was hot and close and sticky and full of mosquitoes, but the forest floor was bare. Everything that fell off above got et ’fore it hit the ground.

  That eerie unreal play of light and sound that is the mark of jungle everywhere took hold, a dream-like fever. I swear that we passed six terrified troopers but we seemed to agree not to see one another and didn’t.

  We soon passed the troops flung farthest in and took up a good fast pace, getting close enough to the Bay so we would be on the Peninsula late tomorrow afternoon.

  Why after a lifetime spent genteelly snuffing out the lives of folks less heavily armed than we was I got so flaming angry is like most of them things, a mystery. After all, the Igorotes was prepared to dress me out and make walkway decorations out of me—no tattooes but lots of scars—and normally I would take implacable offense at that, but I was mad clean through and at my country, government, that Dutch Dwarf Teethadore, Taft, and I could go on for days.

  I wanted all this dirty business over and done with so I could go to California and raise rutabagas or some goddamned thing, with Lucretia to wipe the sweat from my brow and tumble on the grass at night when the stars was big and clear.

  Not much of an ambition, but I am a modest man.

  I had turned fifty sometime recently, and since I wasn’t at all sure of today’s date I had no idea when my birthday had been but I felt a lot older.

  We camped up close to the road that cuts all around the Bay to the Peninsula and I went shopping in a little village, buying barbecued goat and trade rum, seegars and tobacco, and even a loaf of bread. I had got out of the habit of bread so long away from a bakery that I had to recall how good it was before I’d think to eat it.

  A close-ordered group of soldiers came quick-timing by our little camp—we’d no fire and were careful of noise—and a half hour later there was a spatter of rifle shots and not long after that the soldiers come trudging back, skylarking and telling jokes, so no one had shot back.

  There was maybe a hundred of them, and they wasn’t much past us when there was a rip of rifle and shotgun fire and the crump of grenades, and the long orange and blue muzzle flashes cut up the night.

  “Go with God, Kelly,” said El Tigre #5, laying a gun butt up alongside my skull, the thin part. I reeled from the pain and passed out and I’d no idea how long I was there before I woke, bleeding from the head wound, and stiff from the funny way I laid fallen.

  I groaned and sat up and looked around and saw several pairs of soldier legs.

  “Get up!” one of them yelled, kicking me. I grabbed his foot and separated his damned ankle for him. The others started in for me but I bellered my name and rank and managed to stand up. One soldier reached for my guns, I brushed him off like you would a fly.

  “Get me to Taft,” I says. “Any a you shitheads get cute I’ll see you patrolling the back of this stinking jungle all alone and painted white so they can’t miss you.”

  They was just privates and so they walked me up the road—I set the pace—until they come to a captain who looked at me a moment and said he recognized me from a Wild West Show playbill of Cody’s.

  “But you weren’t there, as I remember,” said the captain.

  “Bill time to time would do that to try to shame me into joining, him having advertised it, but I told him to go to hell.”

  They’d taken seventy casualties in about as many seconds, four big patrols coming in at once, and the guerrilleros had waited till their fire could plow through soldiers three and four deep. Many wounds of four men were from one bullet, and then the soldiers of Aguinaldo, of the Philippines, melted back into the night and were gone. The place where the fire had come from was searched, but there wasn’t a single Filipino body.

  The captain, a ’Point man, was slamming his fist into his palm, seething with fury over how badly they had been cut up without a single enemy corpse to show for it. They took roll and counted bodies and came up one short, so back into the black they went, in case it was a wounded man. Someone stumbled over the body, the count was full, and the survivors carried the wounded with them, some on stretchers, as they retreated, because that is what it was.

  I walked with Captain Martin, whose jaw muscles looked like they might burst out the skin over them. He’d politely asked me to empty my sidearms—he could have put me under close arrest, so I was only too happy to oblige.

  “The damned thing about it is we don’t even belong here,” he snarled. “If Washington is worried about the Krauts and the Japs, then garrison Manila because this is one of two places they can land troops, and let the Filipinos do the rest. Christ. Forty dead for nothing at all.”

  He kept on like that—God knows he couldn’t have talked that way in front of the men. Sickening, that almost none of this has to happen, not anywhere. Sure, the Igorotes would have to be told piracy and banditry were things of the past, but slaughtering four hundred women and children was not going to bring them round to Bible camp, let me tell you.

  I half heard him. I was seeing Lucretia, hoping she was well and waiting, hoping that we could make it to California, by God I’d shoot the first interloper who threatened the dull calm of my little spread. The second one, too.

  We had a ways to go to Manila, and I was full of the itch to get there. Leaving her bothered me. I thought of Eats-Men-Whole, so long ago, more than thirty years. I still flinched at that wound.

  The captain was the best of American professional soldiers—a humane man, who would not obey illegal orders (shooting noncombatants is illegal, and in poor taste, too) and who was most concerned with the plight of his men. He had a wry humor that I liked, and he didn’t have to raise his voice to give orders.

  About dawn we could see Manila some miles off, and picked up the pace a little.

  I told Captain Martin that my wife was in the hospital, it was too early to talk to Taft, and after I saw her I would hotfoot it to Malacañang Palace.

  “Your word, sir?” he said.

  “My word,” I said.

  “Then there will be no problem,” he said, holding out his hand. I shook it warmly, and loped off, my hunger to see Lucy lengthened my stride. I had a sick feeling that she had died and I ran faster till I gave out and wheezed along till my heart quit galloping.

  She wasn’t there. The doctor on duty said she had left me a note.

  “Am home and waiting, L” it said. I had to ask the doctor for the address, and hire a cab, but when I got there she had heard the horseshoes on the cobbles and was standing in a gown on the balcony, with the wind plastering the silk close to her lovely body.

  “Kelly,” she said, “you need a long bath. I’ll scrub your back.”

  I took the stairs three at a time and hit a rug on the top landing and went flat on my ass and slid to the feet of my love.

  18

  FOR THREE DAYS WE hardly stirred from the bed, and slept fitfully, and et there, and let the world go hang. I had nothing of importance to say to Taft or General Merritt—at least they wouldn’t think so.

  Arrest soldiers for the murder of Igorotes? Preposterous. Bad for morale. They’re brown, and you don’t try white men for murdering brown ones.

  I told Lucretia all about my years scouting and how I was only hip-deep and to-the-elbow stained with several thousands worth of blood.

  Lucy run her finger over one or another of my scars and come o
n the bump where the Cheyenne arrowhead had lived for twenty-five years, and I told her about the fight in the Sand Hills. The arrow had been shot at me by Crazy Horse, and it ain’t every feller can point to a gen-u-wine Crazy Horse arrowhead in the hide of his back.

  Our lovemaking took a long time each time and we rocked like a boat in the chop.

  Finally I sent a letter to Taft describing my sojourn with the Igorotes and recommending that they be left alone, as when they got modern weapons they’d whip just about anybody. I told of the families of the warriors buried alive and said warriors who have lost their families is the most dangerous of all.

  I didn’t hear from Taft for a long time—hoped that maybe he had forgotten me—but it seemed the guard had tossed the Filipino messenger into a dungeon and forgot him for five days, and my letter, too.

  Taft had his note delivered by soldier and the note summoned me and ordered me to be damned quick about it.

  “I’d just as lief not go,” I said, looking at the friendly scrawl, “but Bill’s one of them affable men who always seems to get his way, affably. He has a chortle of iron.”

  Lucretia laughed—one of her best qualities was she laughed at my jokes—and I bathed and dressed in cool tropical linens and sandals. I’d always hated the heat but found like cold it was bearable if you were dressed for it.

  There hadn’t been any rumor of the guerrilleros, so I just supposed that they was waiting on some big piece of nefariousness, one that would kill a lot of Yankees and embarrass the ones who survived.

  Malacañang was ringed with gun positions and sandbagged revetments and there was five hundred soldiers on duty around the clock, protecting Taft and his lackeys from their just desserts. There must have been fifty freighters in the harbor being loaded down with sugar and rare woods. The Sugar Trust had come in and drove sugar prices down so far the plantation workers had to harvest the cane to starve.

  I waited out front with a small band of soldiers, bayonets fixed, of course, while them as was inside figured on whether or not I had a landmine up my ass and was just a clever ploy by Aguinaldo to get at fat old Bill Taft.

  Finally a couple guards patted me all over to search for hidden broadswords and boar spears and satisfied that my hands was too small to go round Bill’s neck they led me into the palace and past yet more soldiers in sandbagged rifle pits and finally to the office of the Great Expanse His Own Self Yes Sir.

  “Luther, you rascal,” said Taft, coming round the desk and beaming at me like some long-lost brother. “How did you fare on your journey?”

  “I got shot at a lot and almost skinned alive,” I says. “And I am too damn old for this business.”

  “But no permanent scars! Come, have a drink.” He waddled to the sideboard and began tucking ice cubes in a glass.

  “The scars is permanent, Bill,” I says, “they’re just where you can’t see them.”

  I told him of the Igorotes and Aguinaldo and that I’d seen some bad country to fight a war in but this was the worst on the damn earth and the Filipinos would win anyway—it was their country and they knew the jungle very well.

  “MacArthur dealt them some very smart defeats,” says Taft. “Drove them right back on their line of march.”

  “Aguinaldo made the mistake of fighting the U.S. Army like he was another U.S. Army. He won’t do that again. He’ll gnaw and peck and set off bombs in the city and pick off unwary soldiers looking for a whorehouse with a skinful of rum. He won’t line his men up and charge again. He’ll bleed us to death.”

  “Kelly,” says Bill, his eyes flat and gray, “we are here to stay. However many Filipinos killed it requires to make that point, we will manage. You might comfort yourself with this: the Germans and the Japanese would only be worse. I don’t have to explain Manifest Destiny to you, do I? That is a euphemism. The strong nations of the world feed upon the weak. It is a natural law. If not us in the Philippines, then it is another. Don’t bore me with trifles. The Igorotes can be crushed, Aguinaldo killed or captured, El Tigre hung, a common murderer. Fifty years hence no one will remember, not even the grandchildren of the slain.”

  I looked at Bill, who apologized for the speech.

  “I ain’t going back out there,” I said. “I am fifty. I won’t do this anymore. I got Lucretia, I want to go raise turnips.”

  Taft shrugged and said it was hardly up to him.

  True enough. Don’t let the smile blind you, Teddy was as ruthless a character as ever was hatched.

  I found my own way out and walked toward Lucretia’s house, some miles away, and I come upon a street bazaar and bought some cheap jewelry from India, full of jangles, and a big armload of flowers.

  I come close on to her house and she was out on the balcony smiling down at me.

  “Hey, sailor,” she said, “want to come on up?” Jorge, the gatekeeper, let me in. There was so much theft and thuggery in Manila that the well-to-do had watchmen—armed, of course—and huge iron fences topped with razor-sharp spikes and barbed wire. Soldiers lost in the poorer quarters were murdered for their shoes. For poor folk America had nothing to match this.

  Trailing blossoms, I went up the outside staircase and into the bedroom and Lucretia got a batch of vases and filled them and the scent was so sweet in the room it near on to made you light-headed.

  “I’ve told them I have had enough,” I said. “I’ve told them that before, but I fair enough mean it this time.”

  Lucretia nodded, and said the sooner the better.

  “You want to pack this and send it?” I said. “I got a house and all.”

  “No,” said Lucretia. “Let’s just go with a couple of suitcases and start over. All this is is money, and I don’t care about money.”

  I sent Jorge out to the steamship offices and he found us passage on the Warnecke to San Francisco, leaving in two days time with the high tide at nine in the evening. We should be on board by five. I sent Jorge back with the money and me and Lucretia lolled around the bed in the flower perfume and had idiotic conversations meant nothing even to us but we didn’t care.

  That evening we packed the few things that Lucretia valued—two paintings, some letters in a pigskin lettercase, and a few photographs of her family.

  I’m always itchy to get going anyway, and my worries about being frogmarched out to the war again was real enough. Taft was shrewd enough to know I would be more dangerous than helpful out there, but I wasn’t so sure about him taking on Teddy. He was only the Vice President, to be sure, but McKinley had “no more backbone than a chocolate eclair” to quote Tom Reed, and I was fair sure McKinley did the ornamental appearances and Teethadore did the imperial duties.

  Taft invited us to supper and we went and had a fine time with the man. He was a wonderful teller of stories and most of them on himself, and General MacArthur’s son Arthur was a guest, too—he was a lieutenant on the battleship Texas, which had come to wave its huge useless guns at the guerrilleros.

  We were pretty drunken and merry and as we got out the front gate headed home I got one of them prickles on my neck said we was watched, so I had the horsecab take us to the biggest hotel in the city and I rented three rooms under my name and a fourth under “Holtz” Krupp S. A. and when we finally slept I did so with a gun under the pillow, and I kept snapping awake all the night but it was just the unfamiliar city sounds.

  We had a breakfast on the hotel terrace and I had sent a feller off with a note for the luggage, to take down to the ship.

  We were still sitting there drinking champagne when the feller who’d gone after the luggage come on back jabbering about murder and fire.

  I dropped Lucretia off at Malacañang Palace, leaning on my budding friendship with Taft, and much over her loud protests which I didn’t listen to even when they got ripe about my parentage.

  The Samses’ house was blackened and there was seven corpses laid out on the sidewalk waiting on the cart from the morgue. The police were mystified and so was I, until I come on a sword-
tip in a hard to see place on the gray marble flags. It was Japanese; I could see the laminations made when they fold the sword blank over and over and over, sometimes as much as a thousand times.

  I shrugged and slipped the piece in my pocket. I’d no idea why the Japs were after me, or if it was someone unlikely, like maybe the Swiss leaving sword shards to foul the scent. I’d soon have us aboard the Warnecke—an honest tramp steamer with six staterooms—and I figured I could keep us alive till we cleared the harbor and after that it was up to the ship’s captain. The pigskin letter case and the paintings had survived—the fire was just furnishings, since the house was stone and stucco—and I carried them down and back to Malacañang where my lady love had been working on her pronunciations of ball-jointed cusswords. She run them by me and I grinned and she came close and said she was worried and if anything happened she wanted it to happen to both of us.

  Taft and Captain Martin asked me for my opinion on both the Igorotes and the guerrilleros and I told them that my opinion was that we ought to leave, they didn’t want us here and the country was theirs. Having wasted my breath on that I said that the only way to fight them was like they was fighting us.

  “We plan to move the inhabitants of the plain into fortified villages,” said Taft. “This will give them security against the bandits.”

  Faced with such imbecility I smiled and wished them luck.

  Lucretia and me went down to the dockage with four soldiers that Taft insisted on sending—I always do like being conspicuous—and I hurried Lucretia up the gangplank and into the cabin—the few things from her house were in it already, and then I ran down the captain, one l’Heureux, a Cajun, who turned out, not surprisingly, to be a cousin of Deleage. Only one other cabin was rented, by a pair of missionary ladies whose husbands had been turned into decorations by the Igorotes. The ladies seemed to be very happy.