The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  Old Tules wasn’t a hermit. He come out bright enough, smiling and waving and we sat outside his shack and drank good coffee, he spiked his with rum but we didn’t have any, the ride home was a fair long one.

  One of his bitches had whelped a few weeks before and she was leading eight small puppies like a mother duck leads her brood. Lucretia laughed at the little pups, they are about the cutest things in creation at six or seven weeks, and one little dog, a bitch, come over to her and commenced tugging on her dress, all the while growling in high piping tones that would have been about right for a bird.

  I asked Old Tules how much and he said forty dollars—a damned steep price, but I paid it to him. We got ready to go and a couple horsemen was crossing the grassbeds out east.

  Coming for their dogs, Old Tules said. One of the riders was a railroad magnate, the other a Senator.

  “Raise good dogs,” said Old Tules, “that I do, yes.”

  I put the little pup in my shirt. She squealed once and scratched my belly with her puppy claws, and then decided it was warm in here and she was tired, and she went to sleep and didn’t wake up till we got near my house, when she announced her waking by pissing a lot more water than a dog that size could possibly hold. I cussed some in surprise, but of course the little thing didn’t know no better.

  We kept pretty much to ourselves that fall, not wanting to see any other folks. Other than the hooraw about the pictures we had no quarrels and certainly no fights, I did as I was told, which made things easy all the way round.

  Lucy and me took the steamer down to Sacramento to buy her a couple shotguns and hunting clothes.

  She was a crack shot, of course, having grown up near the Chesapeake, and she’d sit out in sleet half a day to bag enough canvasbacks to feed us for a week.

  One day I realized with a start that I was happy. I wasn’t used to it. I thought I’d get more familiar with it.

  22

  I HAD THE NEWSPAPERS delivered by mail, so they was four or five days old—longer if I didn’t go into town to pick up the pile, mostly letters from old friends who needed money.

  In early November I got a big sack—hadn’t been into town in three weeks we’d been hunting so much—and the headlines on the Sacramento paper said Aguinaldo had escaped. I was well out of all of it and wished Emilio all success.

  Sorting through the pile I come to a letter written on heavy vellum in a spiky script and I tore it open gleefully, hollering at Lucretia to come on in.

  It was a letter from my old chum Mark Twain, now a white-haired and prophetic-looking cuss, he amounted to our national conscience.

  I was looking for a funny letter but this warn’t it. Twain and Tom Reed were enjoying each other’s company—their barbs would be a true clash of Titans—and the disgusting events in the Philippines was causing Twain and Reed anguish.

  They wanted to know if I would come back and give sworn testimony of the horrors I had seen.

  Lucy pounced on a perfumed violet letter from Gussie, and she ripped it open, growling a little, dainty-like, deep down in her throat. The rest was the usual ruck from folk I barely knew, who assumed that I was rich and kindhearted. Fools.

  Lucretia was jumping up and down on Gussie’s letter, softening it up for the match. It was my profound hope that I would be an innocent bystander in all this. I should have taken a closer look at the sack when I had the chance.

  She did not even feel the courtesy of letting me read my own mail was required in this instance. She set fire to the letter and put it in the little kitchen stove and did a sort of war dance around it and when there was just a flat paper of ash she bashed on it with the poker hard enough to bend the haft.

  She halted, puffing a little from the exertion but looking most pleased with herself. I was scratching a refusal to Mark, or Sam as we called him, saying I would let this letter be my speech, I don’t like speaking and won’t do it. I didn’t think addressing the Parnassians was in my line of work.

  “You know Mark Twain?” said Lucretia, with about the same amazement she’d give if I said I knew Charlemagne. She’d seen the signature over my shoulder.

  “Yup,” I said.

  She tugged the letter away from under my elbow and read it and said “My God! Luther, I am so proud of you! Speaking to the country’s men of letters. And women, too.”

  The sure feeling that I was being completely misread washed over me. This coupled with a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, since it seemed I was going to be improved up to what she thought was snuff.

  “And the wonderful Mr. Reed! What a fine, funny man!”

  And the wonderful Mr. Kelly, the one with the collar around his neck, with the rhinestones turned in.

  “I ain’t doing it,” I said, firm as I possibly could, pounding the table and raising my voice to whoop level. “I’ll send them a deposition but I ain’t doing it!”

  “Fine,” sniffed Lucretia. She went outside to flee the stink of spinelessness and mopery.

  An envelope caught my eye. White House stationery. It seemed the very President of the United States was writing me, no doubt for advice and to pay back the $500 he borrowed of me in 1887. I thought perhaps I should just burn the damned thing and claim I never saw it, which only meant that the next letter would be delivered by a flying wedge of generals and admirals.

  Lucretia came back in, sniffing, in the fond hope that I had come to my senses and would now act like a hero. I am here only because I rarely ever acted like a hero—on purpose, anyway.

  “If Mark Twain wrote me ...” said Lucretia, pulling a stool over to the stone table, and setting to glare at me.

  “I’ll write him and ask him to write you. I don’t know what the hell Sam has been drinkin’ lately, he knows me better than to write with a fool proposition like that.”

  This sally was met by a gloomy silence.

  “This here’s a letter from the President of the Ewnited States and points east,” I says, tearing open the envelope. It was a short message. Teethadore was demanding that I come along with him and God alone knew what gaggle of congressmen and other grafters and dethroned kings to wreak a great slaughter in the Yellowstone country. Soon it would be illegal to shoot game in the park, and Teethadore was a law-abiding man.

  “How can he go hunting when the world is in such distress?” said Lucretia, and it was one of them questions a smart man would not answer.

  “He’s teaching a lesson to the grizzly bears, who would otherwise sweep down upon Omaha. Teethadore’s vigilance guards us all.”

  “You’re afraid to give a speech?” said Lucretia.

  “No,” I says. “I look out at all them faces, and they always seem to be made of pudding, and I think ‘My God, these idiots have come here to listen to me,’ and my dicey stomach acts up and I puke over the first two rows. I ain’t a crusader.”

  Besides, a p.s. from Teddy said all was forgiven and I was retired, if I came to guide him hunting.

  “Lucy,” I said, “I’ve been out where no sane man would go since 1865. I done a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I have been through places no other white man has gone to yet. Theodore says if I come, I’m retired. Means I don’t have to hope every time I see a letter or a rider that it isn’t an order to go to Boola Boola and either watch a war or start one.”

  “Luther, get out here,” said Georgia, a polite housekeeper is a treasure, I always have thought. “It’s one of your goddamned red Indians and he’s coming right here! You answer the door! Hurry!”

  Lucretia snorted and laughed while I scuttled.

  I was standing on the porch waiting when he come up and I couldn’t quite name him, but he looked familiar. He was Shoshone, and I knew why he had come.

  “I am Fools Enemy,” the young warrior said. “Washakie lies dying and wishes to see his son Stands-in-the-Fire-and-Argues. He sends you this.” He handed me a grizzly claw all carved, strung on a horsehair string. I bound it around my neck.

  Fools Enemy had tu
rned and gone, the Shoshone don’t bandy words at a time like this.

  I come hollering into the house and Lucretia and I packed and were rushed into Chico by my neighbor, Tom Clarke. We took the spur train to Sacramento and got on the next train headin’ east.

  When we were in our suite Lucretia washed her face and found some mineral water and we drank two of the big bottles, so parched we’d got from the heat.

  “Washakie must be quite a man,” said Lucretia. “You wouldn’t go to this trouble for a whole nation.”

  It seemed my spine, though flabby, was perceived to perhaps adjust to stiffening, if the right goddamned hammerlock could be found for it.

  “I’m sorry, Luther,” she said, after a moment. “If Mark Twain can’t do anything, no one can.”

  I told her what I knew of Washakie, how he was a warrior so feared by his enemies they made effigies of him to mutilate before going into battle with him. How he’d taken me, a green boy, and plunged me into the warrior’s world, what he had taught me of tracking and leaving no tracks, his courage and humor.

  “I wanted to be a cowboy,” said Lucretia, “and be in the West because it seemed so new. It’s gone now.”

  That it was, that it was.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “At Crowheart,” I said, laughing. “He’d want to die in Crowheart, to twit the Crows.” And I told her of Washakie’s challenge and how he had eaten the heart of the Crow’s best warrior and so taken the lands from the Crows.

  He’d been born before many white men ever saw the Rocky Mountains. His people had been there a thousand or ten thousand years, and then along comes the likes of Luther Kelly and the next thing you know everything is fenced in, shot, or polluted.

  Lucretia listened, laughing, and I told her how Washakie stole the warpoles of the Crows, and how he’d given me a spotted horse to ride who never did buck for spit until exactly five minutes after you mounted—to the second—when the horse fell apart in about twelve pieces, all of which had teeth.

  We slept through Salt Lake—everyone does one way or another—and got off at Rock Springs. I rented us horses and tack and we bought canned stuffs to eat and made tracks north, driving two remounts ahead of us. Lucretia was a dandy rider, and she was wearing denims and boots like me.

  It took five days to get to Crowheart, and it seemed that half the people in America was there—and a mess of old scouts and trappers—Jim Baker from out in eastern Wyoming, and Jim Bridger’s daughter Anna.

  There was a cordon of young Shoshone warriors around Washakie’s lodge, and when they saw me they motioned for me to come, and I grabbed Lucretia’s hand and went on in the lodge. There was a fug of sweat and tobacco smoke and sweetgrass, and propped up on a willow backrest was Washakie, more my father than any other man.

  “Stands-in-the-Fire-and-Argues!” Washakie boomed. “You bring me a pretty woman! Perhaps I die tomorrow. You can go now.”

  Lucretia giggled, and by God, if I’d have turned around I’d bet she would have stayed.

  “Stands-in-the-Fire-and-Argues is my son,” said Washakie. “I tried to teach him how to fight, how to have honor, how to steal horses. He learned how to steal horses.” And the old bastard told the tale of my naming, which Lucretia much enjoyed.

  “Come here, child,” Washakie said. Lucy scooted over and he took her hand.

  “You’re pregnant! Good!” said Washakie. “Any idea who the father is?”

  I looked quick and sure enough, Lucy was blushing red as a holly berry.

  Something cold crawled across my heart. I shivered and thought of Eats-Men-Whole. So long ago.

  “This dying is tiring,” said Washakie. “You can’t really die without saying farewell to your friends. I didn’t know I had so many friends. I should have been more careful.”

  He closed his eyes for a minute. They flew open and he looked at me.

  “You guiding Teddy?” he said. I nodded.

  “God, what a fool that man is. He’s dangerous.”

  He closed his eyes again and I took his hand and murmured goodbye to my father, and Washakie gave a little jerk and he was gone, like that. His jaw dropped and he sighed, with his eyes half closed.

  “He waited for you,” said Lucretia. We held each other for a moment, and then we walked stooped way over out of the lodge and I went to the grandson of Washakie—well over sixty himself—and said the old man was gone.

  The women began the ululations and the men sang. I held Lucretia’s hand tightly and we walked away. There wouldn’t be but a few minutes before the newspaper reporters and such would be here like flies on shit.

  We were a fair haul from anyplace that you could call a hotel, and I suggested to Lucretia that we just ride on up toward the Yellowstone country, hooking around by Jackson’s Hole, where we could get proper outfitting and I could meet Teethadore and his beaters and she could stay in the inn at Old Faithful. I assured her that she would not want to be along with Teethadore and the rest of his faithful clowns. I don’t like trophy hunters much. If you don’t want to eat it, why bother it?

  I was able to rummage around and find my old sheaf of tricks to keep warm and comfortable, and there was still quite a lot of game. We et antelope a lot, and when we finally come up the last rise and saw the Tetons spread across the sky and the sun on them Lucretia gave a whoop of surprise and joy.

  We checked into the Lodge and took baths for hours, and I was able to get a telegram to Chico to tell Georgia to send a trunk of Lucretia’s clothes along. In the meantime she scandalized the toffs who were dressed like they was going to dinner in New York or Paris. I thought she looked fetching in jeans and boots and the big yellow silk scarf I got her in the hotel gift shop.

  There was even a hatter at work in the old lodge across the way, and I had him make up a couple tall-crowned cream-colored Monarch of the Plains hats, best head cover for this country or any other, you ask me.

  We had three weeks until Teethadore would be at Old Faithful, so we waited for Lucretia’s trunk to come and then took a stage over that way, stopping at Hot Springs and taking the waters. Lucretia all jammed into her lady duds was not happy. She said she’d had no idea how much she was putting up with before.

  It was the rump end of the season here at Old Faithful, the days warm and sunny, some frost at night, but up this high winter didn’t blow in, it just shut its jaws.

  There were boardwalks laid over the fissured travertine where the hot water seeped, and we were walking the morning after we had got there when I looked up ahead and froze in angry horror. Some fool in a straw boater and a celluloid collar was over by a little tree, poking a grizzly cub with his furled umbrella.

  His wife—found out later that they was newlyweds—was laughing and all entertained.

  I wondered where the mother was. I didn’t have a gun big enough to do the job, but it didn’t matter, there was a sudden roaring grunt and she came round a bump of travertine—grizzlies are a lot faster than horses—and the dude took about two steps and she was on him, tearing his chest open so deep his lungs and heart was torn completely out.

  The woman was screaming and running and the bear took about two steps after her and then she went back to her cub and they took off.

  A couple lodge hands with rifles come running over, both so damn scared that they was levering cartridges out as they ran. The bears were long gone anyway, and the woman was slumped in a heap on the boardwalk. Some other folk come by with a stretcher and put her on it and hauled her up to the lodge.

  “Gaddamned fool got what he deserved,” I said, real low so I wouldn’t be heard. Fool. Idiot.

  I looked round the basin at the green trees and the ghostly white marl from the geysers. I’d been through here first in ’72, and there was a railroad spur right to the lodge now. I guess I showed sadness in my face, Lucretia come and put her arms around me and said, “It was beautiful then, but it’s gone, Luther.”

  “We were both young together,” I said. “I look fo
rward to some sedate and ordinary, dull life. So far we have been through a war, a typhoon, Washington, D.C., and other petty diversions. I told you turnips? I don’t want to raise turnips. I want to raise potatoes. Turnips stick up above the damn ground. Forward and pushy. Potatoes stay buried. I vote for the meeker vegetable.”

  The lodge was all in a huzzah as there hadn’t ever been a mauling by a bear. All the guests was crowded into one of the big dining rooms while the manager flannel-mouthed away about this unheard of crime, first time ever, no idea where this rogue animal came from.

  A feller slammed in past us, caroming off the doorjamb, and his slouch hat was pulled down so low that I couldn’t see him. He had poured quite a little Panther Sweat down his gullet, he reeked like a busted still.

  “Twarn’t the bar’s goddamned fault, ya lily-livered fish-backed weasel-hearted pomaded fop!” said the stranger. “Yer stupid unbaked bridegroom got his guts tore out ’cause he was a-pokin’ a cub in a tree! He worked hard to get hisself killed! I kin see better brains in mule’s asses!”

  “It’s Buffalo Jones,” I says, delighted. “What he’s doin’ here I do not know.”

  Buffalo was wearing a floor-length wolfskin coat and yellow boots. He looked sorter like a big hairy mushroom with yeller feet.

  “Mr. Jones,” said the manager, “thank you for your advice, but if you wouldn’t mind ...”

  “I mind, ya posy-smelling carny-barker,” roared Jones. “I told you not to leave the damn garbage out but ya did so the guests could see some goddamned bears. Ya satisfied now?”

  Buffalo had run out of steam and he turned right around and was marching in the direction of the saloon and he glanced at me and stopped and turned and looked hard.

  “Wherever they sold ya that goddamned mask a Luther Kelly go take it back, he’s a lots uglier and they orter give a bottle of stink out with the mask they want to fool his friends.”

  Buffalo squinted hard at Lucretia, who was laughing into the back of her hand.