The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  Lucretia and me walked around the deck—for some reason my seasickness had forgot to take hold this one time. We didn’t have too much to say. I stopped to look at a big frigate bird cutting close to the freighter.

  “What will happen to them?” said Lucretia. “Those sweet, funny madmen?”

  “Shot down or hung,” I said. “And they know it.”

  “Did you ever rob a bank?” she said.

  “Once,” I said.

  “A train?”

  “Twice.”

  “Why so few times.”

  “I just didn’t care for it.”

  Well, it was true, damn it, I did not care for all the fuss, the women screaming, the clerks soiling themselves, and then to ride like hell far enough fast enough so that the outraged citizens whose money you had did not come string you up or fill you full of buckshot.

  “I always wanted to be a cowboy,” said Lucretia. “I once told my father I didn’t want to be a lady. I wanted to rob stagecoaches.”

  “I hope your father spanked you,” I says.

  “No,” said Lucretia, “he just laughed. He was a banker so he said he was grateful that I didn’t want to rob banks.”

  “Where?”

  “Baltimore.”

  “How did you ...”

  “I married Sams for his money, he needed a beautiful young wife, and I went to Manila and that was that. He ... uh ... likes Chinese boys.”

  Well, no goddamned wonder, I thought, you’d have to be a pederast to leave this woman for a moment.

  “Are your parents ... ?”

  “Very much alive. Don’t worry. My father’s no fool, and my mother has a tongue like a longshoreman’s. It will be one more scandal to our account. Hooray.”

  Butch stepped out of the bridge and come over waving a piece of paper.

  “He did it!” said Butch. “He did it. I gotta go kiss him!”

  We follered along, back to where Sundance was shooting.

  “Sundance! It worked.”

  “Course it worked.”

  “What the hell are they doing?” said Lucretia.

  “Sundance plotted our course south and I checked it and we are going south.”

  Lucretia started shaking from laughter.

  “He’s getting better!” said Butch. “You just got to be patient with these here Princetonians.”

  “Butch,” I says, “do you have someone who can navigate up there on the bridge?”

  “Yes,” said Butch, “but don’t tell Sundance, he’s jealous of his knowledge. He keeps saying that in the country of the blind the one-eared goombaw turns left. I don’t know what it may mean, I never got to go to college, but where the hell else but a place like Princeton would you hear such bullshit?”

  And on he went.

  The steward come to us and motioned for us to follow. He pointed at another freighter coming across our bows and he said it was an Australian ship bound for San Francisco and they would signal presently.

  Flags was run up and presently the freighter hove to and we steamed for it. Lucretia and I didn’t have anything to carry on board, for sure, my money belt had enough to bribe one captain if he weren’t too greedy.

  Butch and Sundance piped us down the ladder, joking as they always did. (I never saw Sundance again, he died in a shootout over cards somewheres on the Pampas. Butch stops by to see me every now and again; he had his face altered in Paris and he lives on “income from a good gold strike in South America,” which is one way of putting it.)

  The Aussies leered at Lucretia—they have funny habits about women—until I paid the captain a couple hundred in gold and said there would be more in San Francisco—if his crew of morons kept the hell out of our way.

  Six days of bad food and a cramped and airless cabin later we lurched through the Golden Gate and it took the whole damned night for the tugs to berth us. We went down the gangway and off up the street to the hotel.

  The clerk didn’t even glance up and I took my key and the porters brought up the three trunks with my clothes and such in, and I sent a note out for a seamstress to come by and take Lucretia’s measurements. She would have to be redudded top to bottom.

  After the seamstress left and the boy from the bank brought money I thought that Lucretia and I could spend a week or so here and then maybe go off to the Colorado Rockies and laze around Glenwood Springs or something.

  There was another knock at the door and a porter brought the customary silver tray piled high with all my mail. I’d have stuffed it in the fireplace if I had one.

  Lucretia laughed, came over, put her arms around me, took a short look at the pile, and opened her eyes wide.

  “Who the hell is Gussie?” she said.

  “A professional dowser,” I said. “Thought I’d have him site some wells on the ranch.”

  “Paulonia?”

  “She’s a refugee Baptist Russian keeps a borscht pot boiling, little place down near the docks, I eat there sometimes.”

  “I can fucking well imagine,” said Lucretia. “You are a terrible liar.”

  “I’ll swear off,” I says. “You come along unexpected-like.”

  “Umm hmm.”

  She sorted through the mail, unerringly tossing the letters from old lady friends into a pile.

  “You going to burn them?” I says.

  She shook her head.

  “What?”

  “Write them thank-you notes,” said Lucretia.

  “Thanks for what?”

  “They’ll know.”

  I gave up and went to bed. I wasn’t alone for long.

  20

  LUCRETIA AND ME HAD an idyllic couple of days in San Francisco—there was a pretty good earthquake at midnight on the second day and it broke a lot of glass and made the chandeliers swing and the peacocks in the park screamed all night.

  The uneventful passage across the Pacific had rested us so much we was in the habit of sleeping about sixteen hours at a stretch, and what with being in my own home country that I have served so ... served, anyway I had an attack of the stupids and thought myself reasonably safe.

  Lucretia and me was locked in unwedded and illegal bliss when there came a fearful pounding at the door and bellers of welcome and while Lucy dashed to the bathroom to hide and dress I got up naked as a jaybird and walked across the carpet to admit the President of the United States to my suite. Before he kicked the door in.

  I flang the door open and Teddy, in soup-and-fish and a top hat yet, bounded in, scattering felicitations like shit in a hen coop. “Marvelous work,” said Teethadore. “Marvelous, marvelous.”

  “It is six goddamned o fucking clock in the morning, you walrus-brained bastard,” I yelled. “Come back at noon.”

  “I ordered coffee and croissants,” said Teethadore, “for we have much to discuss.”

  I slammed the door in the faces of a couple of Secret Service fellers, who were right in thinking I was dangerous to the President.

  Teddy tossed his hat on the bed and unbuttoned his vest and stuck his hands in his pockets and grinned.

  “Capital work you did, capital,” said Teddy. His eye fell upon a feminine undergarment and his right eyebrow rose accordingly.

  “I ah uh,” said Teddy.

  “Cousin Theodore,” said Lucretia, coming out of the bathroom wearing a tightly wrapped blue velvet dressing gown, “You sound just about as obnoxiously bullheaded as when in the good old days you tyrannized us on the tennis court.”

  “Lucretia?” said Theodore. “Oh, my God. Lucretia, ah um ...”

  “Do you still pull the wings off flies and shoot cats with an air-gun? Put firecrackers in beehives? Steal those awful Ned Buntline books from drugstores?”

  The President was shrinking before my eyes, and I had hopes that Lucy would keep it up till he disappeared entirely.

  “Lucretia ... Lucretia?” Theodore piped, sounding forlorn.

  “So get your fucking carcase out of here and send a letter or I’ll tell all the wo
rld about ...”

  Theodore was making tracks in his spats. I threw his hat after him. The door closed and I shot the bolt.

  “I stand in awe,” I said. “I have been kicked around the entire globe by that ivory-bearing bastard and you run him out flat in four sentences.”

  “I’ll tie that twerp in knots,” Lucretia muttered. “Nerve of the man.”

  There was a soft knock at the door and a bellman wheeled in a tray with the coffee, croissants, and newspapers. I tipped him good and he went out.

  We sat in the bed like the swells we was having a decent breakfast—the raw flying fish and rubber-tasting rainwater was still good and fresh in my mind.

  My eye fell upon a news item.

  Entire ship filled with cattle and carrying a sizable shipment in gold went down, apparently with all hands, in the great typhoon three weeks ago ...

  “Maybe Butch and Sundance,” I said, showing her the paper.

  We wondered, and went on. Nothing to be done.

  “Teethadore wants something,” I said. “I don’t know what. I had better find out.”

  “We’d better find out,” said Lucretia.

  “He’s actually afraid of you,” I said.

  “I have a hell of a right cross,” said Lucretia, “and no scruples.”

  Every time I looked at my darling she seemed more wonderful than formerly. I also made a note not to cross her.

  There was a meek knock at the door and when I opened it a Secret Service feller handed me a letter from Theodore, in his spiky manly masculine script.

  “Critical need for your thoughts on situation South Africa and Philippines,” said the note.

  “Critical my corns,” I snarled. “Leave them all alone.”

  “His trouble was always that he enjoyed doing things,” said Lucretia. “He never was much good at them and he never has believed that the bad consequences are his fault.”

  I nodded. Theodore had always seemed to me to be about age six.

  “He can toss me in prison and have me hanged,” I said.

  “Not now he can’t,” said Lucretia. “Let’s just go up to your ranch and I’ll take care of Cousin Theodore.”

  “It’s frying hot now,” I said. “Let’s go up to Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy. As soon as the fall rains come, we can go on to Chico.”

  So we packed and caught a train that would take us to another narrow-gauge train and we rode in comfort up to the big lodge and rented a room and bath with a balcony.

  The lodge had horses for the guests, and we took two and went through Hetch Hetchy—it’s a prettier valley than Yosemite, and we et a lot of trout and huckleberries.

  We was lying in bed one morning and Lucretia propped herself up on an elbow and says, “We need to go to Washington and Baltimore.”

  “WHAT?” I said. My eyelids had flown so far back in my head I wasn’t sure they’d come out again.

  “We can settle all the petty matters there and then leave for California when it is cool and nice to be there.”

  Well, it made sense, for damned sure. Lucretia felt that given her husband’s tastes she could get a quiet annulment and if I very docilely writ out reports for Teethadore he would not consider me so much of a challenge.

  God knows I longed for Teethadore’s contempt like Parsifal did the goddamned Grail.

  So back down we went and picked up our various duds and bought trunks and took the train the long six-day trip, and even though we had a Pullman suite it was wearing.

  We stayed in Washington a couple days and then Lucretia took a train for Baltimore. Waving goodbye to her was actually painful, my chest hurt.

  I sent a message to Teethadore and another came back fast as a ball caroms off brick. Teddy had arranged and furnished an office for me on the backside of the Department of War building, and there was prominent maps of South Africa and the Philippines up on the walls and boxes of little toy soldiers on pins should I care to reduce war to a kid’s game, like Teethadore did. Like a child, he was unaware of the pain he caused. The chance for greatness was all.

  I settled in and commenced writing out my reports on foolscap so TR would get the point. There wasn’t much to ’em, in South Africa the British were making sure the Boers hated them for five hundred years.

  The Philippines was another matter, and I pointed out that fighting a war of extermination, for that is what it would take to solve the Igorotes, to protect a sugar trust, and to open a gateway to the markets of China might cost no more than ten or whatever times the money that could be got back on it.

  The first of September come and it was hot and muggy—the capital is built on a malarial swamp—and Lucretia come back from Bawlemohr with that funny accent they got there saying all was well and society was horrified and was there a decent restaurant in Washington?

  I took her for some seafood at a small back-door kind of place had three tables and five stools, for the best crab cakes and grilled sword-fish I ever et.

  We was still walking when I heard the clear boom and Maine accent of former Speaker of the House Ted Reed, who’d been so disgusted with our national policies of late he had retired and gone to the practice of law.

  “Luther!” he cried, getting down from his cab and waving for us to wait while he settled his bill.

  Tom was a giant, well over six feet, and heavy, with an enormous moon of a face and a bland and sleepy expression which ain’t what he was at all. I’d seen him in debate, slitting up the opposition into strands.

  “Our national life seems to have attained the moral fervor of a yellow-backed novel,” he said. “And excuse me, ma’am,” and he bowed to Lucretia, who smiled at him.

  “You have the tragic news?” he went on. “As soon as the inconvenient guerrilla war in the Philippines passes on I suppose we shall invade Greenland and teach democracy to the musk oxen.”

  “I think,” I said, “we could just look at a map of what ain’t taken and quit holding our breath, we’ll own it a day after the President finds out where it is. Whatever it is.”

  I suggested coffee and perhaps even something stronger, and we repaired to the escorted-ladies section of our hotel’s saloon. Tom was charming Lucretia out of her bustle, as I went to piss. I figured that if they was gone when I got back I’d have to shrug and say “good luck.” Tom on full charm was formidable. His mind was the best one I knew, and his speech seemed struck from Maine granite, like sparks off a flint.

  Tom was an orator and if he had only Lucretia for audience, why he would call forth his uttermost powers to charm her. I was contemplating setting him on fire but I liked him too well.

  “McKinley had but one talent,” said Tom. “He knew uncannily when it was the right moment to nail his colors to the fence. Theodore, while a pleasant and ebullient youth, confuses foreign policy with lacrosse. We shall shortly buy ten million Malays, unpicked, and no one knows what it will cost to pick them.”

  “This man is your friend?” said Lucretia, showing her pearly white teeth. “I’ve met only the bank robbers.”

  “Worthy occupations,” Tom rumbled. “I am at the moment ashamed of my most recent one. The country has enjoyed twelve decades of peaceful illusion, we shall now either be worse bastards than the Europeans or be eaten by them.”

  From that man, a cry of pain.

  We stayed very late, talking a little but mostly listening to Tom, who, unsoiled by office, still missed listeners straining to catch his every flourish.

  We walked outside together and I hailed a cab and asked Tom if he would like to join us. He said no, and he waved and walked away, his cane tapping the cobbles. I supposed he would walk most of the night and end up either on a bridge looking down to the filthy waters of the Potomac, or sitting by them. It’s what I do when thinking is mortal painful.

  Neither me nor Lucretia was tired, so we sat drinking tea until dawn, and then I pulled the shades and we went to sleep.

  I was about dropped off when there was a cattle stampede went right under the
window, pursued by howling Minneconjou Sioux. I sat up, holding my head.

  “What in the name of Christ is going on out there,” said Lucretia, behind a satin sleeping mask.

  I’d gone to the window and throwed it open and looked down.

  “Texas Longhorns being pursued by Injuns,” I said. “And I know some of the Injuns.”

  “Kelly, you’ve been smoking that opium again,” said Lucretia.

  Bloodthirsty war yells and clattering iron-shod hooves and a flap of banners.

  “Well?”

  “Don River Cossacks.”

  “I ask the nice man a question, he tells me some damned lie,” said Lucretia, going facedown.

  Bellers, hollers and whip and pistol shots.

  “A lot of cowboys,” I says, “follered by Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.”

  “I am going home to mother,” said Lucretia, standing up. She was naked and she grabbed a shift from the bedpost.

  “Elephants,” I said, “and Bengal Lancers.” The elephant brayed a couple times.

  “In short, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Authentic Wild West Show is in town.” I shut the window.

  Lucretia leaned on my shoulder. “I don’t take anything back but I’ll stay a couple of days,” she said.

  “Here come the gaddamned buffalo,” I said, eyes widening. Them buffalo is not easy of herding. There was about twenty, including a huge old bull weighed better than a ton.

  “I believe that last was a mistake,” I said. “I say we don’t go out until we have news that they are all penned up.”

  “MMMMMmmm,” said Lucretia, dragging me back to the bed by the ear.

  “You know, Kelly,” she said, much later, “I know so little about you. Just the wonderful Buntline novels. What a jackass he made you into! Good stock to work from, give him that. And all the people you know who I want to meet.”

  “Most of the people I know you don’t want to meet.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, but when you consider Butch and Sundance was about the best-mannered of the lot, and you think on Liver-Eatin’ Jack and Geronimo, who both had their good qualities, and there was far too many embarrassing details out there I’d as soon stayed hid.