Turpentine

by Spring Warren

  Phaegin and I lodged Curly in the branches of an elm behind the mercantile with instructions to remain on watch until we came out. Phaegin and I entered through the back. The shop was empty. The clerk seemed startled at our appearance and nervously wiped the counter with a red cloth as he asked, “Mr. Smith?”

  I nodded. The clerk nodded back. “I’m to put your purchases on Mr. O’Hare’s tab.”

  Phaegin took my arm. I handed the clerk the list and he began to fill it, making more of a mess of flour and coffee than I would have thought any clerk could make and still keep his job. While he worked I discerned a tapping. I caught Phaegin’s eye and we wandered nonchalantly to dry goods from where, behind bolts of cloth, came the noise. I shoved aside a calico to see Curly by the side window.

  “Curly!” I looked behind me. We were hidden from the clerk’s view by a forest of calico bolts. “Can’t you ever do what you’re told?”

  He was agitated, could hardly get the words out. “Things is pickin’ up. A fella’s shown up with a gun on the roof and two ’cross the street.”

  Phaegin went white. “We’ve been gulled.”

  I put my finger to my lips. “Don’t let on we know.” The clerk was craning his neck, trying to get a look at us through the fabrics. I cleared the window of the heavy bolts. “Phaegin, out quick. Head back to the livery stable we passed coming in. I’ll keep the clerk busy.”

  Phaegin shook her head. “I can’t fit through that little window.”

  “Sure you can,” Curly whispered. “Mebbe a little squeeze through the backside, but it’s squashy.”

  Phaegin glared and pushed his face back from the opening with the flat of her hand, crawled onto the table, and slipped her head and arms through the window. With only a short burst of pushing and pulling, she tumbled out while I kept up a faux conversation. “I don’t care, red or blue. They’re both nice.”

  I picked my way back to the front, complaining to the clerk, “We’ll be here all day while she reckons between one pattern and another.”

  The clerk stared at me gobble-eyed. I scratched my head and thumbed to where Phaegin supposedly was. “Fashion sense of a fish. You got pickles?” The clerk pointed to a barrel as he craned his neck for a peek of Phaegin.

  I tipped the barrel. “You’re almost out here. How do you expect me to reach—” I feigned a slip and the barrel washed vinegar over the floor.

  The clerk looked stricken, glancing from the front window, to where he’d last seen Phaegin, then back at me and the pickle juice running along the floor.

  I put my hands out. “Got a mop?”

  The clerk glanced out the front window again, then sprinted to the broom closet for the mop. When he turned, I had my gun at his belly. I put a finger to my lips, then whispered, “Hand over the apron and cap.” The clerk shot his glasses across the floor in his haste to pull the apron off. I backed him into the closet. Before I closed the door I warned, “Don’t make a peep. I don’t care if there’s a door and eight barrels between us, try anything and I’ll make your hide leak like a rotten bucket.” I locked the door, put the apron and cap on, returned to the front counter, and waited.

  I peered out the front window trying to discern what the clerk had been looking at, but could see nothing. I waited another couple of minutes, polishing the counter with the same cloth the clerk had used, then pulled the ornate atlas out from the glass case. I ripped out the pages covering Chicago to Wyoming Territory, then several southern states and Texas in case they used the vandalism as a clue. A pocket knife was in the case, a compass, and a hat pin. I took them along with a small journal to replace the one I’d lost and was fingering a blue-enameled fountain pen when five cops burst in through the front door. “Where did they go?”

  I didn’t have to feign terror. I pointed toward the back and stammered, “They ran out!”

  The cop picked up a red neckerchief. “You were supposed to wave this when the three of them were in or if anybody made a break, you dumb shit!” They piled out the back, then returned. “How long?”

  I slumped on the counter. “Not five minutes. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. They are some hard-looking folks.”

  One cop pulled out a notebook. “Let’s get a description.”

  My ears ached with the effort of listening for the clerk in the closet. How long until he began to yell? “One was a dwarf.”

  “The woman?”

  I looked baffled. “No woman, a fella dressed up like one. Oriental. Just the dwarf and the Oriental.”

  “He was Oriental?”

  “Oh, yeah. Spoke Chinese, maybe Italian.”

  There was a thump: the clerk? The policeman looked toward the closet. I moaned. “He was going to kill me, the Italian. Another ten minutes, and you woulda been visiting my ma with the news.” I put a hand to my stomach. “I think I’m going to be sick.” I covered my mouth, burped, retched.

  The cop stepped back, disgusted, and I beat it, bent at the waist and moaning, bumping into the door and counter in my haste, then out the front door. I rounded the corner, sped through a length of alley, tossed the apron and cap into a garbage bin, and meandered through shops, across streets, losing myself easily within the noisome crowds of the Chicago slums. Once there, I was in greater danger of dying from typhoid than being found in the teeming streets. By dusk I’d hit the outskirts of town. I headed north until, near our predetermined meeting point, I picked up the thready whistle of Curly’s curlew. I drubbed the bushes until Phaegin poked her head from the brush and waved me over. When I got to her, she threw her arms around me. She was shaking.

  “You took so long, my God, I thought you bagged.”

  “We’re fine, but we’d be wise to go now.”

  Curly was hopping up and down from one leg to the other, looking more like a kid heading for a birthday party than someone fleeing for his life. “Now where? What’s next?”

  I pulled the folded atlas pages from my pocket, turned them to catch the rising moonlight. After some studying, I pointed at the trace of blue line. “To the Mississippi.”

  Curly looked around. “I don’t see no river.”

  I pulled the compass from my pocket, pointed, and spoke as if I were as savvy in the wilderness as they believed. “The Big Drink, this way.”

  We followed the compass heading, losing ourselves in deep greenery of the hickory and oak forests surrounding the big waters of the Great Lakes. At one point I thought I heard dogs baying and my heart dropped, but then it was gone.

  To hide any scent, we waded some ways through a creek, torrential with spring runoff, holding hands to keep Curly from being carried away.

  “Don’t let go,” he moaned. “I swim like a cannonball.”

  I squeezed his palm even harder and yelled, over the rushing water, “I didn’t let go on the train, did I?”

  He nodded and attempted a smile that wrung my heart. No matter all this, he was still a boy.

  * * *

  Curly caught a cold right off, sneezing with the intensity of an elephant. We couldn’t chance a fire, though we were cold and miserable in wet boots and legs. We huddled together, shivering. Phaegin was wan, slumped. Even Curly seemed down-hearted. I clapped him on the back. “Curly, you saved us back there.”

  Curly looked pleased. “Did, didn’t I?”

  Phaegin pulled the blanket closer. “What happened, Ned, how’d they know?”

  I shook my head. “Big Frank told the cops, I guess.”

  “How did he know it was us? You were going to make up a name.”

  “I did. John Smith.”

  She groaned. “Might as well have told him your name was William Criminal.”

  “There are John Smiths in the world.”

  “What else?”

  “I told him I knew his son. I gave him the medal and didn’t even ask for money; he offered it. Then he wanted to take me for dinner, but I had to meet a couple of friends.”

  Phaegin groaned again.

  “He sa
id I’d set his mind at ease, and I could pick up supplies at the mercantile.”

  Curly sneezed twice more. “It was in the paper you’d been to Nebraska.”

  I winced. “I told him I’d been to Connecticut.”

  Phaegin shook her head. “You practically put two and two together for the gorilla.”

  “I can’t believe he’d turn me in. He was in tears over the medal.”

  “A thousand dollars is a thousand dollars.”

  But that wasn’t it. I thought I knew what was. He figured I was a friend like the other fellow was a friend, like Tilfert had been a friend.

  Phaegin nudged me. “You look so sad.”

  “I was thinking about Avelina.”

  Phaegin shifted closer. She rested her head on my shoulder. “You thought enough for today, Neddy-boy. No more. Close your eyes.” She hummed a melody from the nickel dump. I closed my eyes and within minutes left the hard ground for the dance floor, and nothing existed but the smell of her hair and the pressure of her soft body against mine.

  CHAPTER 27

  By midafternoon, seven days out of Chicago, the grip of hickory and oak had loosed and, instead, spreading in an undulating mantle, thick grass made bright with spring.

  “Hit’s the perrairy!” Curly was ecstatic.

  Phaegin also had a look of wonder on her face and I remembered, even as sick as I had been, what glory the open space held upon my first sighting. It was at once immense and then diminished by the even more astonishing immensity of sky overhead. A wondrous grassy ocean, islands of trees dotting the horizon.

  The prairie turned our luck. Gone was the chill, gone were wet legs and wet shoes, gone were the shadows. We walked through open air, feeling a false safety because, in the long views, nothing could creep up on us. In fact, when a horse and cart clattered up the rutted road we trod, we had an indecisive half hour to decide what peril it might or might not hold for us, before we decided to chance a meeting.

  When we saw the driver of the cart was a weary-looking farmer rather than a Pinkerton, Curly ran down the road and asked the driver with a disarming grin, “How ’bout a ride, mister?”

  “No room.” The farmer nodded behind him where, stacked two deep in the cart, were stick crates, each with a substantial-looking piglet inside who commenced squealing as if in answer to the human voices. “Takin’ weaners t’ home.”

  Curly announced, his fingers poking into one of the cages, “I love pigs. These ’re good ’uns, too.”

  The farmer nodded but did not waver from his path.

  Curly trotted alongside the wagon, grunting softly to the pigs. He picked up a stick, scratched one of their backs. The pig leaned into it, grunting with pleasure. The farmer, in spite of himself, loosed a small smile. Curly took his advantage, jogging toward the front and pointing to the seat beside the farmer. “Could the lady sit there, mister?”

  The farmer nodded. “Help yerself.”

  Phaegin glanced at me, looking relieved and not a little touched by Curly’s gesture. “Might as well get on with a load off.” She climbed on. The farmer looked neither right nor left.

  We kept along for some time with our taciturn guide, Curly jogging along on short legs to keep up. After half an hour, Curly panted, “Cain’t keep it up.” He shook his head then called to the farmer, “We could sit on the cages.”

  “Nyope. They break.”

  Phaegin looked at Curly. “You sit awhile, I’ll walk.”

  She and Curly exchanged places. But she was almost as short-legged as he was, and in ten minutes she was panting, face pink. In fifteen she was bright red.

  I was alarmed. “Curly, give over.”

  “I hardly got a rest!”

  I shouted, “Curly!”

  I boosted Phaegin onto the bench seat. She arranged her skirt and, when she’d regained her breath, asked the driver, “If we buy a pig, can we take its spot?” The driver shrugged. Phaegin asked, “How much did you pay for them?”

  “Dollar each.”

  Phaegin looked at me, tipped her head toward the farmer. I nodded, figured Curly and I, sitting cross-legged, could squeeze into two pigs’ worth of space, and produced two dollars.

  The farmer shook his head. “When done, they’ll be two-’n-a-half-dollar pigs.”

  Phaegin tipped her head again and I mouthed, No.

  Phaegin glared, mouthed back, Pay him.

  I fingered the cash Mr. O’Hare had given me. “How far are you going?”

  The farmer nodded toward the horizon. “Two days, this pace.”

  It was as good a disguise as we were going to get, I figured, looking like a family on the way back to the family farm. I handed him five dollars. “Two pigs.”

  He took the bills, pulled his horse to a stop.

  Phaegin grinned. “We might as well introduce ourselves. I’m Alice.”

  The farmer shook his head. “Don’t care to know. I like things quiet.”

  Curly and I lifted out two crates, the smallest two pigs. We opened the first door and one of the pigs ran lightheartedly into the grass, disappearing in the green curtain. The farmer looked sorrowful. “Coyotes will have a meal tonight.”

  Curly gasped. He slammed the door shut on the second cage as the pig was preparing to make its getaway. “No!”

  “You can’t leave him in there, Curly, he’ll starve to death.”

  “Don’t care. Won’t have a stinking coyote chewin the hams offa him.”

  The farmer made a chk noise and the horse began to plod away.

  Phaegin yelled, “Get in!”

  Curly looked at me pleadingly. “He’s a baby. I cain’t leave him to coyotes. I’ll hold him on my lap.”

  I knew that arrangement wouldn’t last long. I shrugged. “It’s your lap.”

  He somehow made it into the wagon bed with the struggling animal. I got into my corner, piled some hay into a backrest, and within minutes fell sound asleep.

  When I woke, Curly was still in possession of the pig. He’d shoved it into a burlap sack, a hole cut into the fabric that just let the pig’s head stick out. The pig seemed more than happy, leaning against Curly’s side like a cat, head up, while Curly scratched under its chin, around the moon of its leathery ears. I glanced at Phaegin. She watched the pair looking disgusted. “He’s one of them accidents, a pig in a human body.”

  We journeyed with the farmer for two days and one night and never knew the man’s name. He had a brief spate of loquaciousness around the campfire and told us he’d been cheated by the railroad and God. “Sunk my entire life savings on four hunnert acres and seed to cover it. Green an’ pretty, grass to my armpits. Planted wheat and God took the rain away. Got half a crop of horseradish in the kitchen garden and the locusts came even for that. Now there’s nothin’ but three hunnert acres of desert and a hunnert of rock. Only pigs can find enough to eat. I sup on pork mornin’, noon, ’n night no matter the sabbath or holy day.” He sighed. “Wife left after the boy died. This country makes for one plague after another. Keep lookin’ for Moses to come over the hill and rescue me.”

  He turned his back to the fire, pulled the blanket over his head, and said nothing further. The next morning he poured a dish of water for each piglet and threw a dessicated cob of corn into each cage, harnessed the horse and, once we were all in, plodded toward his ill-fated farm.

  We rode in silence, as if his troubles had sucked the words from the air. Even Curly’s pig, better fed on Curly’s breakfast than Curly, slept mildly in his burlap purse.

  We reached the banks of the Mississippi before noon and paid the ferryman to take us across on a crude flatboat knocked together from green oak and powered by a swayback horse on the other side. It seemed a dear price—a nickel a pig and a dollar for the wagon and human passengers—for such a rickety craft, but the conveyance swam true as a swan; in five minutes we were on the far shore.

  Our good crossing seemed to me to indicate our fortunes were changing. The breeze over the water blew cool as I reclin
ed in the straw among the softly grunting piglets.

  By midafternoon, however, the sun blazed. The farmer climbed down from the cart, pulled a tarp over the pigs, poured another measure of water. He handed me the half-filled canvas that served as canteen and stood staring at us.

  I looked out over the country, which did indeed look as if it had been abandoned by moisture, if not God himself. “Guess it’s time to leave.”

  Phaegin shouldered her bag. Curly grabbed the burlap sack, the pig pitching and squealing with his trotters off solid footing.

  “Good luck.” I shook the farmer’s hand.

  “There’s none here, only bad.” He hesitated, then added, “Consider it well to get no luck at all.”

  He got back in the cart and drove away without a backward glance.

  I checked our bearings. Phaegin looked over my shoulder. “Where exactly are we going, Ned?”

  I pointed to a dot on the map. “Omaha.” I drew my hand across the country between us into Nebraska, where Lill waited for help she wouldn’t get. All I could give her was the truth about what I was and what I’d done. And when she had it, I was sure, her life would seem sweet in comparison.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “It’s empty, and there’s stops along the way to get provisions. We’ll ghost the train without getting on. That way we’ll be safe from the law but won’t get lost.”

  The first small town we’d hit, according to the map, was Philip, Iowa. We’d have a careful time of water and food between here and there but would be all right if we kept up a pace.

  I warned Curly, watching him trudging along half bent over with the weight of the pig, riding like a spotted pasha, on his back, “If that pig is a problem, that’s the end of him.”

  “He won’t be. He’s a good pig, hardly weighs anything.” The pig lifted its snout and squealed assent.

  “I’m not talking about his character, Curly. I’m warning you that we have only so much water, only so much food, only so much energy. If there’s misery to go round, he’s getting it first.”