Turpentine

by Spring Warren

  She looked out across the wavering scrub like she was hoping to see a waterlogged buffalo on the horizon. “What if you lose us?”

  I checked the howling wilderness around us, the grisly hills, the sky so hot and clear as to be almost colorless. “If I’m not back by sundown …” I took my pistol from the bag “… shoot once. I’ll hear it and know where you are.” I handed her the pistol and she took it hesitantly. I asked, “Do you know how to shoot it?”

  “Oh, sure, I’m the star of the nickel dump rifle club.”

  I showed her how to work it, told Curly to work his boots—bend them, chew them, soften them up any way he could—because if I couldn’t find the shoes, he was going to be wearing them, on his knees or hands or feet: his choice—and I took off.

  I picked my way through the scrub, losing sight of Phaegin and Curly with alarming rapidity, following what I was pretty sure was our path by looking for the broken stems of brush. I was thankful for Curly’s predisposition for swordplay. He had crushed bush after bush in his imaginings of himself as pirate or Viking. But the bushes were few and far between in this nude and grim landscape. After some time, he must have taken a rest, for I found no mark of his destruction. I backed some distance, searched again for a footprint: a snapped twig, a crushed spline, or a bruised blade of grass. I checked the compass and hesitantly went forward, scanning from north to south for the brown leather shoes.

  I checked the sky, wishing I had my father’s watch. I had gone far enough, at least an hour out, maybe an hour and a half. Phaegin was right: I might be a dozen yards off, I might be five, I might be a hundred; it might as well be a mile. I sat down and fought the panic that was billowing. We were going to die of thirst. And that would be a far worse death than hanging in New Haven would have been. The sky dimmed. I should head back. Phaegin would worry and, worse, use one of our precious bullets. I struggled to my feet and scanned the ground once again, willing myself to find the shoes.

  A blur of dust rose from the east. A fire? A dust devil? But I felt no wind. After some minutes, the blur closer, I heard lowing. A minute more, a wagon pulled by a yoke of oxen rose from the swell of prairie, a strangely printed canvas cover stretched over its bows. Two people sat on the forward jockey box and another peered out the box to the rear. I waved my arms and shouted like a banshee.

  CHAPTER 28

  It was a Conestoga, painted like a gypsy’s with a yellow box and blue wheels. Incredibly, its white canvas was painted with fossils I well recognized—a slothlike Megatherium, a curvilinear nautilus, the hulking club of a megalosaurus femur—and on the back, clinging to the wooden ribs of the frame like an orangutan, a paintbrush-armed man was dabbing black paint on the canvas.

  Even more incredibly, on the seat of the Conestoga, wearing a wide-brimmed hat decorated with a spray of chokecherry leaves, was Mrs. Quillan.

  She leaned forward, beaming with amazement, and clapped her hands together as she ascertained it was I. “Ned Bayard! Am I dreaming?”

  I felt dizzy, almost certain that Mrs. Quillan and the strange wagon were a product of heat and my burgeoning despair. “Mrs. Quillan?”

  She laughed. “My lord, what are you doing out here?” She looked around. “It’s like you sprouted from the sand. Did you fly?”

  “Walked. Partway.” I motioned. “I have friends over there. Where are we?”

  As Mrs. Quillan laughed, the driver of the wagon, a vigorous-looking man with a Montana peaked hat, canvas mining pants, and scuffed work boots, pushed the brim of his hat up, his eyes blue as the sky. Mrs. Quillan took his hand. “A friend found, what are the chances?”

  He kissed her hand and shrugged. “The country is vast, but roads and rivers are few.” He looked at me. “Des Moines is about three days directly east.”

  I blanched. We must have been walking parallel to the Missouri. If we’d maintained our trajectory, we would not have survived to hit the great river.

  Mrs. Quillan made introductions. “This is Charles Laramore. Charles, this is Edward Turrentine Bayard the Third.”

  He said “Pleased” and stuck his hand out.

  I shook it. “The other paleontologist?”

  Charles Laramore laughed. “The other paleontologist. Do you hear that, Sylvia? The other paleontologist.”

  Mrs. Quillan turned and motioned toward the simian man in the back. “And this is Mr. Dawbs. We are giving him a lift. It is certainly our week for finding wandering souls on the prairie.”

  The man in back, as dusty and derelict-looking as I supposed I was, clenched his brush between his teeth, leaned down from his perch to shake my hand, and grated, “Just Dawbs,” sounding as if his throat was as dusty on the inside as it was on the out.

  “Do you know,” I asked Mrs. Quillan, “about what’s going on in New Haven?”

  “Not a clue,” she said gaily. “And I don’t care.”

  “Were you the one who spilled the beans? About the fossils?”

  “The coal scam? I certainly did. I took the train to Pittsburgh all by myself. Walked into the offices, all by myself. I revealed Professor Quillan as the charlatan he is, all by myself. And then, I went to Boston and bumped into Charles. All by myself.” Her eyes sparked. “Professor Quillan labored under the sad misapprehension that I was weak. I trust he thinks otherwise now.”

  “What he thinks, what the entire world seems to think, is that I’ve murdered you and that the coal scam is of my doing.”

  Laramore disembarked from the wagon, went around, and helped Mrs. Quillan from her seat as if he escorted her to the opera. For her part, she beamed at him as if he’d given her a diamond, then dragged her attention back to me. “What are you talking about?”

  I told her the entire story, from the time I went to Pennsylvania with Quillan and adopted Curly: about being fired, the bombing, and our subsequent flight. I pulled the folded and tattered newspaper articles from my pocket and handed them to her. “You see? I am being blamed for your disappearance!”

  “That man!” She shook the papers at Laramore. “He says I can’t possibly have left him, and so I must have been kidnapped and murdered. He still has no idea of what I am capable of.”

  I said, “Mrs. Quillan, the professor underestimating you is a small matter compared to my situation, don’t you think?”

  She waved me off. “Pshaw. You are free. You are a man in a wild country. No one can touch you.”

  “Mrs. Quillan, they can touch me—with the noosed end of a rope. They can and they mean to, and they’ve come awful close already!”

  She looked sad. She put out her hand and drew me near her. She spoke quietly. “I know it must seem a difficult situation, Ned, but only because you are in it. Put yourself in my place, and you will feel so much better.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She sighed. “I cannot go back. Ever. I was a cat’s whisker away from …” She looked into the sky and clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “Ned, the bump behind my ear and the swale of my neck have damned me.”

  I was visited by the image of the professor, his porcelain phrenologist’s skull at his side, palpating Mrs. Quillan’s head just as he had done mine.

  She touched her temple. “Have you ever seen the inside of a mental institution? If you are rational going in, you do not remain so long. I took a three-day ‘cure.’ Three days, and it almost undid me. It was a year before I could sit in a room with a closed window or door. If I were to return to the professor, if I were in any way to make myself known, they would come after me and I would not see the light of day again—nor, I fear, the light of my sanity.”

  I began to protest and she put her hand to my lips. “No. You do not know. You do not know. Do know I will never go back. Not for anything.” She glanced at Laramore. “Not for anyone. Never.”

  Her face was set. There was no more glittering anger or hilarity, only a concrete fixedness I would not break.

  I pleaded. “Then Dr. Laramore. He can tell the authorities about you, ab
out my innocence.”

  “I must ever be a secret, I fear. Besides”—she smiled at me, as though her thought were a pleasing one—“if they would hang you for the bombing, it doesn’t really matter if they believe you’ve done me in as well. In fact, it is rather a silver lining, don’t you think? A sort of inadvertent good deed you may take to heaven.”

  I pounded my fist into my palm. “I don’t want to take anything to heaven. You have to tell them, explain everything about the bombing, about Quillan. You have to tell them it wasn’t me who was trying to cheat the coal company. Please!”

  Laramore took a bag of tobacco from his jacket. “Certainly I can make an attempt. I will tell the authorities some safe version of your story when I return to Boston in September.”

  “September! My neck will be stretched by then!”

  Charles Laramore filled his pipe. As he tamped the tobacco with his thumb he grinned awkwardly. “Sorry about that, but nothing I can do. We’ve—” he gestured with the bowl of the pipe toward Mrs. Quillan “—got to wait on some cooling of rather warm situations ourselves.”

  Mrs. Quillan glanced at Dawbs, who was putting the finishing touches on a trilobite. She leaned forward and whispered to me. “Yet another unfortunate marriage. It promises to be a very sticky situation, drama, recriminations, threats of terminations, and that’s just Harvard. His wife is sure to be livid as well. He left rather abruptly. The world wants a facade, Ned. Chip away at it, and you are in peril.”

  “You’re talking about peril to me?”

  “I know you understand. Allow a few months for the passions to cool, and Charles will return with his new discoveries. Harvard will ignore the old excitement for the new. And then—” she gazed at him with adoration “—Charles, you will do what you can?”

  Laramore lit his pipe and puffed and nodded. From the distance came the sound of a pistol shot.

  “That’s Phaegin, she’ll be worried.” I remembered the shoes, my friends’ thirst. The situation was hopeless. All I could do was keep one step away from utter failure.

  Phaegin almost collapsed with relief when she saw me in the wagon. Curly crawled forward with the pig squealing beside him, “Give poor pig somethin’ to drink, he don’t care if it’s water or booze or piss, as long’s it’s wet.”

  Laramore handed Curly one canteen. I traded Phaegin the pistol for the other. Curly watered the piglet before gulping his own water. When they’d finished drinking, I made introductions but forestalled Phaegin’s questions. “They can’t help us with the police. We’re going to have to go on without.”

  Mrs. Quillan patted a meal bag. “We are happy to share our water and supplies, however.”

  I nodded. “We need shoes.”

  Curly lifted his crusty feet for perusal and Mrs. Quillan made a face.

  Laramore shook his head and handed a bag of beans and a bag of flour to Phaegin. “No shoes, sorry.”

  Dawbs looked at Curly’s swollen oozing toes with interest. “Gangrene.”

  Curly paled. “Nah.”

  Dawbs asked Laramore, “What do you have?”

  Laramore went to the back, shuffled through the supplies, and returned with a vial of iodine.

  Dawbs sneered and pushed it away. “To my wagon.”

  Laramore was amused. “Dawbs is a man of few words. Practically prehistoric himself.”

  Dawbs shut one eye. “You could keep a windmill goin’.”

  Laramore laughed self-consciously. “Fair enough, fair enough. Let’s get on then; we’ll drive you.”

  Dawbs pointed across a rocky draw. “Walk. Too long around.”

  Phaegin put her hands on her hips. “Walk? Have you forgotten the state of his feet?”

  Dawbs didn’t say a word, just hunkered down for Curly to take hold around his neck. Dawbs headed west with Curly hanging behind, the slaked pig trotting along. Phaegin picked up her bag and skirts, and followed, yelling, “Ned, let’s go!”

  Laramore lost his grin, calling, “Hey, there, my canteen!” Mrs. Quillan put her hand on his arm and he added, “Ah, well, we’ve another. Good luck to you.”

  He shook my hand cheerfully and pointed toward the diminishing trio. “You’d better catch up, son.”

  I didn’t like this man’s cheer. I might have understood him, even admired him under different circumstances. But this was not the time to feel anything but scorn for abstract ideals. The quest for knowledge, the vision of the past, science and truth: These are great gleaming treasures in better times, but at knife’s blade, in baking heat, they are thinner than water.

  I narrowed my eyes and stood straight. I was easily Laramore’s height, so I leaned toward him as I repeated, “We are in need of shoes.”

  “Sorry, son. As I said, I can’t help you there.”

  I strode to the back of the wagon and began to rifle the stores.

  Laramore shouted. “First the canteen and now this? Give an inch….” He took hold of my shoulder and swung me around. I shoved him off and he came back and punched me on the side of my skull, knocking me to the ground.

  I had the pistol out in a second. He put his hands in the air at once. Mrs. Quillan ran to his side. I struggled to my feet, my ear buzzing. “Take off your boots.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I waved my pistol toward his feet. “I want your boots.”

  Laramore placed his hands on his hips and smiled. “You’re not taking my boots, son.”

  Without hesitation and certainly without remorse, I shot. Laramore howled and jumped about on one leg.

  “Charles!” Mrs. Quillan screamed. “Give him the boots!”

  He fell to the ground and began unlacing. He threw one boot, then the other to me. The right boot had a small hole in the leather; Laramore’s right toe was bleeding where the bullet had torn a pebble of flesh from the tip. I gathered the footwear and tied the laces together.

  “You’ll be fine, Laramore. You’re a man in wild country, after all.” I backed slowly away. “Better put some iodine on that, and if you’re thinking of retaliating, alerting the authorities as to our whereabouts instead of as to our innocence, let me warn you, I wouldn’t think twice about paring a nice little silver lining into an institution for the lady.”

  Strangely enough, Mrs. Quillan smiled at that, and as I retreated she called, real friendly, “Ned, I think your mother is in Connecticut. I saw a woman of such resemblance to you a week before I left, it was breathtaking.”

  That did throw me for a loop, wondering what effect she hoped the news would have on me and if I could trust her on it. She put up a hand, however, and waved so sadly that she reminded me of my mother, long ago now, on the station platform in Connecticut. I smiled back in spite of myself. “Take care, Sylvia.”

  I followed Dawbs, Curly, and Phaegin toward the draw. Dawbs turned, stared at the departing wagon, and grinned. Curly, in spite of his discomfort, whistled wolfishly, and Phaegin pursed her lips and shook her head.

  I turned to see what the fuss was about. It was the canvas covering on the wagon. At a distance the Megatherium, the nautilus, and the long thick bone of the megalosaurus merged together to become a reclining, buxom, and naked woman.

  Dawbs was not only a skilled illusionist, he was a powerful man. He climbed across rocks, jumped dry gulches, and clambered up silty hummocks as if he didn’t have Curly on his back. We were at odds to keep up with him. After about two hours of nonstop clambering, we found Dawbs’s handcart at the mouth of the little canyon. Though a handcart, it was of decent size, its wheels set wide enough to fit in a Conestoga’s ruts.

  If we had thought Laramore’s wagon had been well painted, Dawbs’s cart was an absolute circus of erotica. There were enough sylphs, mermaids, madonnas, Venuses, Eves, and sirens cavorting in abandon across the wooden planks to keep a cow town busy for a month.

  Dawbs dumped Curly into the shadow that the wagon cast and then ran his hands over the reliefs like he was seeing a lost friend.

  Phaegin rolled her eyes.<
br />
  Curly had his nose practically on the wood, forgetting about his infected feet. “Hit’s nice,” he breathed.

  Dawbs pulled back the tarp from the back, drew out a keg of turpentine, an empty bucket, and a jug of what he called “tarantula juice.” He offered the jug to Curly. “Take a belt. In fact, take two or three.”

  Curly sniffed, grinned, and poured back a glug of liquid, grimaced, shuddered, and shouted, “Whooooo-hoo! Tha’s leg stretcher, all right!”

  After Curly’d downed his moonshine, Dawbs poured turpentine from the keg into the bucket, pointed at the bucket. “Put cher walkin’ pegs in.”

  Curly lowered his feet into the liquid, screamed, and jerked his knees up around his chin, his entire face screwed tight. “Jeeesus, you’re killin’ me!” Pig commenced squealing.

  Dawbs watched Curly, unmoved. “Beats having no feet at all.” He nodded as Curly whimpered and set his feet in the tincture once again. “Won’t hurt so in a minute. A poultice of gunpowder and lint, you’ll be right as rain.”

  As Dawbs doctored Curly, Phaegin and I gathered scrub for a fire. Dawbs stirred up cornmeal and jerked venison and baked it in a cast-iron pot covered with coals. He prepared our rough food with peculiar nicety, trimming a piece of sage into slivers for flavoring and scooping the yellow lumps into a careful mound on the tin plate before offering it to Phaegin.

  Dawbs passed his jug around. The liquor kicked like a mule, dissolving weeks into a blurry memory so I had the first evening of relaxation in ages. The fire crackled, the stars like lamps. Fireflies waxed and waned like the edge of imagination.

  Curly sat happily munching his food, Laramore’s boots huge on his feet, allowing for both the poultice and the strips of petticoat binding to fit in as well. He admired his footwear. “Not good as cowboy boots, but they’re big. Look a man in these, I sure do.” He gazed at Dawbs. “How’d you know about feet? You a doctor?”