Dance on the Wind

23

“Arr! Arr! Arrrggggg! God … goddamn!”

Bass bolted awake with a start at Washburn’s roar.

Isaac thrashed in his blankets, struggling to free his legs—then as suddenly the trapper awoke. Sat up. Drew his legs up against himself and wrapped his arms around them. He began to rock back and forth, staring blankly at nothing while he mumbled.

“You all right, Isaac?” Titus asked, scared at what he saw on the older man’s face.

When Washburn did not reply, Bass inched closer, crawling on his hands and knees across that clay floor where he lived back in the corner of Troost’s livery. Slowly, he reached out, laid his hand gently on the trapper’s shoulder.

Isaac nearly jumped out of his skin at the touch, swinging an arm wildly at Bass. Titus fell back against his own blankets sprawled on the pallet of fresh hay.

“Isaac?”

“What the hell you want?”

“You … it’s me. Titus,” he tried to explain.

“I damn well know who it is,” he snapped, finally turning to look directly at Bass. “What’s the matter with ye—don’t think I know who ye are?”

“You was screaming—sounding wild … wild as you would if’n that grizzly that got Hugh Glass was after you.”

For a moment Washburn tried to glare Bass down, then gave in. The anger, the bravado, drained from his face, and he buried his face in his arms he had looped over his knees.

Titus asked, “You want I get you something?”

“Some of that whiskey maybe,” was the mumble.

From one of the empty cherrywood pails Titus retrieved the green bottle, the glass cold against his skin. Putting the cork in his teeth, he worried it from the neck, then nudged the bottle against Washburn’s hand. Isaac looked up from his arms, recognized the bottle for what it was, and took the whiskey. As Bass turned away to pry open the small stove’s door, he listened as the potent liquid spilled down the old man’s gullet in great, ravenous gulps.

“It were the horse, that goddamned horse again,” Washburn growled low, almost under his breath.

Bass turned from punching up the fire, asking, “What horse?”

“The white one, goddammit!”

Titus tossed a last piece of firewood into the stove and latched the iron door as the tiny cell began to warm almost immediately. A little smoke leaked from that chimney—but he decided he could stuff some more chinking in it come a warm day when the whole of it cooled off enough for him to get up there and work on it.

“I don’t know what white horse you’re talking about, Isaac,” Bass admitted as he settled before the man, watching Washburn’s throat work greedily at the whiskey again. “Slow down on that a minute and tell me ’bout this here white horse of your’n.”

“Same white horse. The one it’s allays been,” he repeated, his tone angry as he swiped amber drops off the hairs of his mustache that hung over his lips like a worn corn-bristle broom.

“Cain’t be your white horse,” Bass said finally, wagging his head slightly in confusion. “That pony you brung in weren’t—”

He whirled his head on Titus to interrupt with a warning growl, “I damn well know that son of a bitch jug-head pony ain’t white. You blamed idjit—I ain’t talking about it, cain’t you see?”

Titus eyed the green whiskey bottle, saw that it was less than half-full already. “Tell me what you want me to see, Isaac.”

Then Bass glanced over at the piggin between their pallets, noticing they had only another two bottles of whiskey out of all of that they had bought last week. They had been drinking a hell of a lot of the stuff, ever since he had been on the mend and Washburn had taken to teaching him all that he knew about life in the Indian country.

“Ain’t ye ever heerd tell of the white horse, Titus? Surely ye have. I tol’t ye ’bout it, ain’t I? Must have—many, many a time.”

“I … can’t rightly remember—”

Isaac’s eyes were glazing already in stupor. “Glass said he seen the horse once’t too. Tol’t me hisself. See’d it fer nights in his dreams afore he bent over to take him that drink at the river.”

Bass started feeling his skin go cold. “On the Grand?”

Washburn nodded. “Saw that thar’ horse in his dreams, he said—many a night afore the sow grizz chawed on him.”

Swallowing hard, Titus watched Washburn gulp down more of the whiskey from the bottle’s dull-green glow in the orange firelight. Titus’s tiny cell smelled of fresh hay and cold sweat—from the both of them. It was the smell of fear. Nothing less than pure fear of the unknown, the unseen.

“Glass saw a white horse in his dreams?”

Washburn took the bottle from his lips, licked them with the tip of his tongue as he stared at Bass with eyes that seemed as black as cinders. Deep circles of liver-colored flesh sagged beneath the man’s eyes. Made them look almost like sockets in a skull. He sucked on that snaggletooth a moment, then said quietly, “I see’d that horse too, Titus.”

“W-when?”

“Yest now,” he whispered, belched, and stared down at the bottle in his hand. It began to tremble at first. Then the more it shook, the more frightened Washburn became until he grabbed hold of the bottle with his second hand and with both of them held it out for Bass to take.

Seizing the whiskey from Isaac, Titus welcomed a chance to swallow some for himself. When he had that satisfying burn coursing all the way down his gullet, Bass finally asked, “This ain’t the first time you seen it neither, is it?”

“Said it wasn’t.”

“Damn,” Bass muttered.

“Damn right, damn” Washburn echoed. “Know what that means?”

What should he say? What could he say? All he did eventually was shrug a shoulder and try to grin as he replied, “Means you and me’ll just have to stay out’n the way of bears, I s’pose.”

Washburn snorted, wagging his head. “It ain’t yest the b’ars, Titus. That white horse … it’s an ol’, ol’ legend. B’ars don’t mean shit in that legend.”

Titus squirmed uneasily, his eyes flicking out to the doorway’s darkness. “All right—s’pose you tell me the legend.”

At first the trapper eased back on his pallet, stretching out on his back, one arm crooked over his forehead, covering his eyes. “A man what sees a white horse in his dream … that man gonna die.”

Bass let it sink in as he stared at Washburn for a long time. Then he eventually tried to cheer his friend. “We all gonna die sometime, Isaac.”

Washburn rolled up on an elbow and glared at Bass angrily. “Means a man’s gonna die soon.” He plopped over onto his back once more.

“Glass didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“He didn’t die,” Bass retorted. “Not after he saw his white horse. Shows that’s just a bunch of bunk.”

For some time it appeared Washburn thought on it; then from beneath his arm he said, “He came no more’n a ha’r away from dyin’, Titus. That close.”

“But he didn’t die, Isaac. So forget the white horse—”

“It’s differ’nt: Glass didn’t die ’cause the Almighty wanted him to take his revenge on them what left him!” Washburn blurted in interruption. “The Almighty’s the only thing what saved Glass from dying when the white horse come to call him out.”

“That what you think you seen? A white horse called you out?”

He snarled, “My time’s comin’, goddammit.”

“You stay out’n them whiskey houses, now, Isaac,” Bass suggested. “We’ll keep clear of the Injuns once we head west on the Platte—”

“It don’t matter, Titus.”

“You can damn well make sure none of it matters ’bout that white horse, don’t you see? Just be careful and watch out—”

“It don’t matter—none of what I try to do. My time to go is my time,” Washburn grumbled. “These here dreams mean to tell me I lived out my time an’ the white horse is come to call me out.”

“A man don’t have to—”

“I told ye!” Washburn bellowed, then went on in a quieter voice as he turned his back on Bass, facing the wall, and yanked his blankets up to his shoulders. “It don’t matter if’n I’m here in St. Louie … or if’n I’m out thar’ on the prerra. It yest don’t make a good goddamn no more now.”

For the longest time Bass stared at the man’s back, what he could make out of Washburn’s form in the fire’s dull light emitted from the grating on the stove door. He took himself a long, last drink of the whiskey, snugged the cork back in the neck, and settled it in among the other two in the piggin against that back wall of his cell.

Easing back, he rerolled his old blanket coat into a pillow for his head. Closed his eyes. Letting images swim before him. Conjuring up how that white horse must look. But the creature simply refused to take shape.

Instead, what swam behind his eyelids were images of the last few weeks with Isaac Washburn. What revelry they had shared! Haunting the grog houses, watering holes, and those stinking knocking shops where all manner of delights to the flesh were to be found—they roamed the back streets and alleyways down close to the wharf, where life lay closer to the earth—with little hope of sanctity. In those cold hours before dawn they would stagger home in the drizzle to collapse upon their blankets and sleep until Troost came in at sunrise to angrily kick Bass’s foot.

“You went out an’ done it again,” the livery owner would grumble. “Get rid of that son of a bitch, Titus Bass—or he’ll be the end of you.”

“You gonna throw me out’n my job?” Bass always asked, bleary-eyed.

“I thought about it,” Troost would reply. “But not yet. Get up and put in your day. And then we’ll see.”

So he did. Young enough that the whiskey tremors and the hard-liquor hammers in his head were not near cruel enough to keep him prisoner in that bed after a long night of chasing numbness, a long night of seeking release buried deep within the moistness of some faceless other who bit and clawed and screeched with her delight at his utter ferocity.

None of them knew. Not a one of those whores had any idea it wasn’t she who made him such a beast. Whatever it was, Titus didn’t know. Only that the longer he waited to be gone, the more he felt like some caged animal, trapped there in St. Louis. As if his leg were snared in one of those square-jawed traps he crafted for the two of them, caught and held as he strained to be gone, to be out there, to be reaching for the horizon.

“Not yet,” Washburn always said, drunk or sober, when Bass prodded him to be about leaving. “Not yet we go.”

So they drank and whored, and they fought—back to back many times. Fists up in those ear-biting, eye-gouging contests to which Titus was no stranger. A healthy letting of blood, he always figured. A good row only made them all the thirstier for the whiskey and apple beer, hungrier for a skinny one of an evening, perhaps a big and fleshy one the next night. Over the weeks Washburn had even developed his own favorites, and of them—one in particular.

“A young one,” he called her, “barely old ’nough out of her schooldays.”

Titus knew better, for the whore had been working one brothel or another for better than ten years now. But what mattered was that Isaac was content with her, happy to consider her but a slip of a child—no matter that she weighed that much more than Washburn himself.

“I like havin’ all that sweet, slick hide on a woman to grab on to when I’m ruttin’,” he would explain to Bass. “When she gets to goin’ under me, less’n I got some of that hide to grab on to, an’ a lot of it too—that damn li’l girl’s bound to heave me off!”

Isaac wasn’t alone in finding a favorite. For Titus she was a recent arrival: a quadroon imported upriver from New Orleans, her skin the palest brown, almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the lower Mississippi itself.

First time Titus saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine, she wore tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair dark as a moonless midnight, a velvet choker with a whalebone brooch clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her quickened pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, it was no wonder Titus came away from her so many nights wearing the tiny blue bruises and teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, from shoulder on down to the flat of his belly. After swearing she was his favorite early one morning as Washburn pounded on the door and hollered that he was ready to head back to the livery, she reached up to pull a scarf down from a peg in the wall beside her narrow, shortposted muley-bed.

“You take this,” she commanded as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.

He knew not what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”

“My scarf,” she said, taking it from him to unknot. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”

“Where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s hammering on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.

“I don’t have no people no more,” she said. “But I want you to be somebody special to me.”

“I will be, always be,” he vowed, and let her tie the scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.

He wore it knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her, when he could afford her, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at her from across the smoky room where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while, only her eyes asking why it was not he who was raising her skirts and rubbing her legs then and there in the tavern, panting to take her back to her little room.

More and more he and Isaac had other things to do with some of Titus’s money.

There were blankets and trade goods, vermilion and beads, mirrors and hawks-bells, coffee and sugar and flour they were laying by as the time to go drew nigh.

“We have to leave afore June,” Washburn warned. “Time we get across’t the prerra, it’ll be fall. An’ winter don’t wait long to come down on that kentry. Be ready to turn yer back on all of this come June.”

So Bass worked on more traps when he could get away with it, sneaking in that time over the forge among the other jobs Troost had for him to do. What with all that he owed the blacksmith, Titus dared not fail to give full measure to Hysham Troost. Bit by bit, week by week, the livery owner gave over the coins he had been saving for Titus through all the years gone by. And with each week’s payday Hysham warned that the money was disappearing far faster than Bass was earning it. Pretty soon, Hysham warned, Bass would be back to nothing but waiting on his next pay.

Far too much whiskey, and the women, for him and Washburn. Sweating the alcohol out of his pores every day over the forge while the trapper sat and talked endlessly about this piece of country, or that stream, this beaver valley, or that pass—all the landmarks Titus struggled to keep straight in his head each time Isaac drew a crude map on the clay floor there beneath the bellows, there beside the anvil where Titus sweated out the whiskey he had paid such good money for the night before.

Hour after hour Isaac told his stories of the animals and the sky. How the land went on and on for as far as a man’s eye could ever hope to see—right into tomorrow, if you really tried.

They needed extra locks for their rifles, at least one spare for their pistols. Then too, a small, coarse sack of lock springs and screws, lock hammers, and several pounds of fine French amber flints. Slowly that tiny cell Titus had called home for so many winters grew even more cramped as the partners acquired everything they would need to winter up come the time they struck out for the far mountains.

“You’ll need a saddle soon,” Isaac said one afternoon. “An’ a horse too.”

Titus hadn’t thought about that, but he supposed Washburn was right. “What about you? We ought’n get you something better’n that pony.”

“That Injun pony do me jest fine, Titus. Ye’ll see—what when we get to Injun kentry. Injun pony best, mark my word on it.”

The day’s work complete—counting what Troost expected him to do and what time he could squeeze in forging traps and rifle parts, harness and bits for their horses—Washburn led them upriver from the wharf a ways. There they smeared pennyroyal on their exposed flesh at ankles and wrists and necks to keep off the seed ticks, then took a belt ax to blaze a blond mark on a tree, no bigger than the width of Titus’s hand, before pacing off the proper distance and toeing a line in the soft earth coming alive with the thick green springtime carpet.

Bass fired with Washburn’s rifle as much as he shot that mark with his grandpap’s old weapon. Slowly, every few days, week by week, Washburn moved the mark back farther and farther still. Teaching the younger man what he could about holding, breathing, letting the heavy barrel on the trapper’s weapon weave across the target rather than fighting to hold the sights perfectly still before he touched off the rifle.

“Yer gettin’ good thar’, coon,” Washburn had said one evening. “Not nowhere near good as me yet. But it’s comin’. Time’s come fer us go wet down our gullets an’ see ’bout pokin’ our stingers in a honey-pot.”

Days of work, evenings at shooting, and on into the nights with the women and the whiskey, then Troost nudging him awake to start it all over again.

“When’r you going to learn me how to throw a knife?” Bass had inquired one evening they headed back toward the livery after target practice, there to pack everything away before hurrying off to one of the watering holes. “Always wanted to know how to throw a knife proper.”

“I’ll show you, soon enough.”

“It ain’t long afore June’s coming.”

Isaac gazed at the sky deepening in twilight. “Yep. An’ afore then I’ll have you throwin’ a tomeehawk too.”

That first evening he had hefted the weapon at the end of his arm, the memory of sights and sounds of Rabbit Hash in Boone County flooded in upon him. Struggling to soothe his mind from those haunts of youth, he drank in the smells of considerable redbud in that damp grove where the two of them made their daily pilgrimage down by the river, where the strong, acrid stench hung heavy on the air at twilight.

Nearby a half-dozen women kept a trio of huge, bubbling, steaming kettles suspended over fires they tended as they boiled down lye from wood ashes and straw kept close at hand in more than a dozen brass tubs and barrel halves.

That odor always rankled his nose, even with the merest of memory. That night and ever since he had thought on home. Thought on his mam, and how she had made her soap outside on those cool spring and autumn days, never of a hot summer’s day. Always at hog-killing time. The feel of those slimy intestines slithering out of his hands as he’d spilled them into the brass kettle his mam had set to a boil until a thick grease had coated the white-oak paddle she’d used to stir the whole blamed concoction. Cooked and simmered all through the day, then cooled enough before the nastiest of the work had required them to plunge their hands into the semisoft mass, bringing out gobs of it to smear into blocks, where it would harden enough to be cut into cakes of the proper size.

From the earliest he could remember, it had been his job alone to keep the fire going beneath his mam’s lye kettle. After all, Titus was the oldest of the children, the only one capable of splitting the wood, carrying armloads of it out back of the kitchen shanty built apart from their first small cabin on the ground Thaddeus was helping grandpap clear. The kitchen and that little cabin were connected by a narrow dogtrot, where Titus had got himself out of the sun on those soap-making days every spring, then again every autumn. Out of the sun and upwind from the stench of that boiling lye.

No, neither his mam nor those women down by the clearing where he and Washburn went of an evening were making a fine Windsor shaving soap, much less a fine castile. It was only the crudest sort of cleaning agent, the sort that all but made a man prefer staying dirty, caked with sweat and grime in every crevice of his fingers, a deep, brooding crescent of old labors mired back of every fingernail rather than face a hard scrubbing with lye soap.

How Thaddeus had stayed as far from bathing as he could had always made his mother livid with anger as she’d sweated over those stinking kettles, or scrubbed their children at least once a week out in that big hardwood tub they’d kept hung from a nail hammered into a side of the three-sided bathing shed attached to the kitchen.

Regular bathing bordered on pure lunacy, Thaddeus would argue. The cause of agues and croups, tick-sicks and who knew what-all fevers! A body bathed was a body defenseless against all manner of assault.

But Titus took after his mother on that account. Sitting down in a warm, sudsy tub of water every two weeks or so these days was worth the few pennies it cost him at one of the few bathhouses in the city. Letting the old women pour that water over his head as he sputtered and gasped, to be scalded and scrubbed raw, as pink as a newborn before he set off for another wildsome frolic. Outside those bathing houses a lackey kept the water boiling, the sort of slow-witted man who could find no better work—much like those who made their rounds at twilight, firing up what lamps adorned the streets of St. Louis, lamps all too often badly in need of a good scrubbing themselves: the isinglass flecked and marred with the singed and blackened bodies of so many moths and other insects that nothing more than a pale and feeble yellow light flickered down upon passersby.

Here in the dark of this early morning as he listened, the trapper began to snore. At long last Titus sensed the arms of sleep embrace him.

Contentment come.

More often than he cared to admit, Titus sorely missed the smells that had filled his senses back in that Kentucky country hard by the Ohio River: green oak stumps smoldering at the far edges of the moist, newly cleared fields; green fodder beans simmering on the fire while sweet johnnycakes toasted in the Dutch oven; his mother’s white-as-snow hominy coming to a boil; his grandmami sweet potatoes, each roasting in its own mound of warm ash heaped on the brick hearth; his pap’s own corn whiskey poured steaming, fresh, potent, and with a hint of amber from the bung spout on the doubler.

In place of those memories he now savored the steamy earthiness of fresh dung from the horses he shoed or hitched to the carriages Troost hired out; the sweet lilac and gardenia perfume of the proper French ladies flouncing past in their layers of starched crinoline as they swirled by him with parasols a’twirl upon bare shoulders, devilment in their eyes; the heated closeness of the animals he brushed and curried, rank with cold sweat after the gentlemen of St. Louis returned their hire; the heavy scent of brimstone issuing from the forge; grown so accustomed to the aroma of the hardwood fire he kept glowing in that tiny stove of his cell; and the sweet elixir that was the quadroon’s body calling out to his.

What a man went and got himself used to as the years passed by.

“I ain’t goin’ with you tonight, Isaac,” Bass declared emphatically. “I ain’t got no more money to buy us whiskey.”

Washburn reared back, appraised the younger man, then snorted a loud guffaw. “The hell you say? You ain’t bald-facin’ me, are ye?”

“Bald-face?”

“Lyin to me, Titus!”

“No,” he answered quietly. “It’s all … all gone. Ever’thing Troost saved for me across the y’ars. All drunk up–”

“—an’ whored away,” Isaac sighed. “Ain’t that allays the way it be? Man works too damn long for what money comes his way, an’ it slips right through his hands a helluva lot faster’n he can make more money.”

Bass wagged his head. “We ain’t even got all you said we’re gonna need when we go.”

“Never you mind. We’ll get it,” Washburn replied, looking away, his eyes squinting as if he were fitting together the pieces of a child’s block puzzle in his mind. Then he suddenly looked back at Titus, a big grin on his face, the upper lip pulling back from that lone fang of a tooth in the middle of his face. “An’ don’t ye go frettin’ yerself ’bout drinkin’ money tonight neither.”

“We ain’t got no money to go—”

“Don’t need none,” he broke in. “Why, I’ll bet thar’s lots of fellers buy the both of us drinks in ever’ place we care to walk into this fine evenin’.”

“Who the hell’s gonna buy us drinks?”

“Ever’ man what loses his gamble with Isaac Washburn.”

“Gamble?” Bass asked suspiciously. “Just what you got in mind?”

“Nothin’ but a li’l game o’ chance,” he replied, turning to kneel at his blankets, dragging his possibles pouch over to begin rummaging through it. “There!” he exclaimed with genuine excitement, standing before Bass to slowly open his hand.

In Washburn’s dirty palm lay two small pieces of what looked like quartz stone, perhaps ivory, both of them carved and painted with strange hieroglyphic symbols totally foreign to Titus.

“What’s them?”

“Bones.”

“You gonna gamble with them?”

He nodded matter-of-factly, his Adam’s apple bobbing appropriately. “Ol’ Injun game of hand. I find us a place on the floor to play, singin’ out that the loser buys the drinks.”

“Then what?”

“We wait till we got us someone to play.”

“How you play?”

“I go an’ hide one of ’em in my hand, and the unlucky son of a coon can guess till tomorry which hand’s got it the bone—he ain’t got a chance of winnin’. Or ’nother way the Injuns play is to bet how many of these here scratches gonna come up when I throw the both of ’em on the floor.”

“But you ain’t got no money to buy a fella his drink when you lose.”

Washburn’s face went blank with righteous indignation. “I don’t ever lose at the bones, Titus. Never, ever lose.”

He looked down at those two small objects, like some foreign, sacred totems they were. And his gut rumbled in warning. “I … I ain’t goin’ with you, Isaac.”

“I don’t never, ever lose!” he repeated. “C’mon—don’t ye hear the whiskey callin’ out yer name?” He slung an arm over Bass’s shoulder, clacking the two bones together in his hand with the clatter of ivory dominoes on a hardwood table. “Cain’t ye jest feeeeel that Negra gal’s poon yest wrapped right around ye, squeezin’ yer pecker an’ makin’ ye wanna go off with a roar?”

He swallowed hard. Damn, but it sounded like it could work. Washburn knew what he spoke of—on everything from Indians to the courses of the far rivers, from the valleys and passes and mountain ranges, to the ways of whiskey and the whys of women. Tempting, seductive, so damned luring was his scheme for the night—

“No, I can’t go out gaming with you tonight ’thout no money,” Bass answered resolutely.

“Don’t be no yella-livered fool, now, Titus.”

“I ain’t yella!” he growled with a mighty shrug, flinging Washburn’s arm off his shoulder and stepping away.

“Then c’mon with me an’ have some fun.”

With a shake of his head Titus said, “Better us go down to the grove where we can shoot some more. Maybeso you can show me better how to throw that belt ’hawk of your’n.”

“Nope,” he replied succinctly, turning to sweep up his possibles pouch, draping it over his shoulder, then pulled up the flap to drop the bones within. “Ye can find me, Titus. If’n yer of a mind to have yerself a spree with Isaac Washburn.”

“You’re gonna go and get yourself in ’nother fight.”

He whirled on Bass. “Don’t tell me ye gone and got squeamish ’bout a li’l fightin’ when yer drinkin’! Why, you an’ me been mixin’ the fightin’ an’ drinkin’ for better’n a hull damned moon now.”

“And we gone through everything I had, ’cept what I’ll make tomorry.”

“What’s it all track anyway, Titus? If yer money buyed us a bunch of whiskey an’ a hull bunch of daubin’ our stingers—then it were worth it! Yest money, an’ a man allays can get him some more for the next spree he plans to have fer hisself.”

Now it was Bass who turned aside, brushing past the trapper as he stepped out of his cell. “I got ’nother trap to finish.”

“It’ll be thar’ tomorry, Titus.”

“There’s more lock parts I gots to file down an’ polish for our guns—”

“They’ll be there too,” Washburn interrupted, following Bass into the livery as Titus headed for the forge. “It can all wait. It allays has.”

Bass stopped, wheeled on Washburn. “Yeah, it allays has, ain’t it? Long as there was enough money to give us both a hammer in our heads the next day … while’st you watched me pounding away at this here goddamned anvil!”

“Hell with ye, then!” Washburn roared in reply, flinging his arms in the air as he thundered past Titus. “Ye yest stay hyar, goddammit! Maybeso ye can yest stay right hyar in St. Louie when Isaac Washburn takes off fer the far places, Mr. High-an’-Mighty!”

“Isaac!”

The trapper kept on walking down the long, dusty corridor between the stalls, waving an arm in dispute of Bass’s cry. “Yer a sneak an’ a coward—an’ not fit to eat with a dog or even drink with a nigger. Ye can yest stay behin’t when I set off—”

“Isaac!”

“To hell with ye, Mr. Too-Good-to-Come-Drinkin’-with-Me!” he roared his words over his shoulder when he reached the door.

“Come back here, Isaac!”

Washburn shoved against the door with a loud scrape of wood and creak of heavy iron hinges. “I’m better on my own, ye god-blamed penny sniffer!”

And he was gone into that evening’s glow as the sun sank somewhere out there to the west—far, far beyond what world Titus had ever known. For the briefest moment a golden shaft of light exploded in through that doorway flung open by Washburn, igniting the lingering particles of dust the trapper had stirred up, like flecks of crimson-fired starlight slowly settling in the shaft of light. Too quickly the sunset’s fire went out, the gold swallowed by the interior darkness, the livery cold once more.

The sun gone to rest out there once more.

He turned, resolute. Looked back over his shoulder one last time, for but an instant considering that he might run to catch up the trapper—at the least to put things a’right before he returned to work, before night fell, before Washburn was off to chance a dangerous gamble to pay for his spree.

It was cold when Titus awoke to the startling, pristine silence. The fire must have all but gone out, he decided as he turned beneath the blankets, fighting the urge to lie there.

Eventually the silence alarmed fear in him.

Rolling quickly, Titus bolted upright. Washburn’s blankets were empty.

Blinking, he tried to clear the webby gauze from his mind. He rubbed the grit from his eyes, then gazed through that doorway. Nothing but gloom. It must surely still be night, he assured himself. Not a thing to worry himself about.

Then he recognized the gray seep of false dawn bleeding into the livery. Enough light to realize day would not be long in arriving now.

As he sat there staring at the trapper’s old, greasy blankets, what little Washburn had to truly call his own, Bass wanted to believe Isaac was at that very moment snoring beside one of his lovelies. But try as he might, Titus could not convince himself that the night remained innocent.

That he himself might not be an unwitting accomplice. Guilty for no other reason than allowing Washburn the freedom to go off with a damned fool notion playing in his head.

A drizzle began its insistent, growing patter on the shake roof overhead as he wobbled to his feet. From a tenpenny nail he took down his blanket coat, looped the wide leather belt about his waist as he reached the back door beyond the forge. Into the rain he plunged, through the soggy paddock where Troost kept his animals, over the split-rail fence and on to Market Street.

Little life stirred in lower St. Louis this time of day. Night all but done. Day yet to announce itself. Smudges of fire smoke clung low about the roofs like gray death’s wreaths; at his feet tumbled the scattered clutter of fog. Wild-eyed dogs eyed him, put their noses to the air, testing for scent of the man—be he friend or danger—then slunk back into the shadows, off down an alleyway, then stopped and turned to find Titus turning into the same dark shadows of that alley before those curs loped away at a greater hurry.

Into the first of Isaac’s favorite watering holes he went, stopping just inside the doorway to rake his eyes over those crumpled over the tables, collapsed in the corners, stretched out atop crude benches, their arms and legs akimbo as only the besotted can sleep. Turning to the long bar where puddles of ale and whiskey lay unattended, he nudged the tender, asleep on a curled arm.

“Whatta ye want?” the man growled without raising his head.

“Looking for a friend,” Titus explained, anxious as he peered into that face swollen with fatigue and interrupted sleep. “Wears a red scarf over his head. A silver earring.”

The head came up slowly. “No, nobody like that here.”

“Was he? Last night.”

The barman waved him away, his head sinking back to his arm pillow. “Early. Gone early. Some others throwed him out. You want a drink? If not—be off.”

“No, just tell me why he was throwed—”

“Shaddup, now. You be gone an’ let a man have his sleep.”

“He say where he—”

“That one’s lucky they didn’t choose to cut his throat—that Injun game of his!”

“Where—”

“Get out before I cut your liver out me own self!”

As he turned, Titus saw several of the patrons stirring restlessly, but not a one awoke. The entire room settled back into a languorous stupor, the fire crumbling to coals in the stone fireplace.

The dogs scattered from the doorway as he hurried out, turning up the back way, feeling more desperate than ever before the dank closeness of these low-roofed shanties and whores’ cribs squeezing in on that narrow, twisting passage he followed to the next of Washburn’s favored haunts along the wharf.

It was much the same there, and at the next. In fact, Titus learned the trapper had visited every last one of those considered the worst of the river city’s watering troughs. In most grogshops he learned how Washburn had attempted his game of chance, his sleight of hand, and for it was good-naturedly thrown out on his ear. Told to be off and take his lumbering scheme some other place.

From there Bass backtracked to the hovel where Isaac’s prostitute plied her trade. Surprise crossed her face as she pulled back the heavy Russian canvas sheeting hung for a doorway.

“You got the wrong bed, don’t you, lover?” she said, her voice thick with interrupted sleep. She pointed. “Your bitch is three beds down.”

“I didn’t come for her.”

A crass smile crossed the woman’s lips as she turned aside, motioning him in, then dropped the door curtain back in place behind him. Without a word the young woman stepped over to the pallet and settled to her knees, pulling up the hem of her long nightshirt until it rested at her waist, her bony, boyish hipbones straining against her pale skin, the dark triangle a stark contrast.

“I knew you’d have to have me one of these days, lover.”

“No,” and he wagged his head. “You don’t understand.”

“It don’t matter,” she cooed, hiking the nightshirt on up her body, over her shoulders, and flinging it into the corner, then rising up on her knees to sway provocatively as she fondled a breast. “I won’t ever tell your bitch you had to come have some of the sweetest lovin’ you’d get on the river.”

“Please—I’m looking for Washburn.”

“Isaac? Don’t you worry, now—I don’t think he’ll be back soon,” she replied, cupping her hands beneath the other small breast. “He don’t have to know neither. C’mere an’ taste these an’ tell me they ain’t ripe and juicy.”

He licked his lips, trying to keep his eyes from straying below her neck. The way she moved, swayed, rocked her hips in slow, luring gyrations.

“When was he here? Early, late?”

“Middle of the night,” she said, her voice deepening. “He was getting crazy awready. C’mon, lover—you know you can’t leave me now.”

“He tell you where he was—”

“Shut your mouth and c’mere. You got me all worked up.”

“You don’t know nothing more?”

“Forget about Washburn, that crazy old man,” she snapped. “He stunk like nobody else I ever smelled.”

Suddenly he felt very, very sorry for her. More sorry for Isaac. “That crazy ol’ man thought the world of you. It’d kill him to think of you saying these things ’bout him.”

Hurriedly she got to her feet, padding over to Titus, looping her arms around him and saying, “What he don’t know won’t never hurt ’im.”

Gently pushing her bony shoulders away, he was reminded of Mincemeat. So sad was the memory that he sighed.

She tried to push his arms away and slip closer again. Rubbing her groin against his thigh. “This is all yours right now.”

“Go to bed.”

“That’s the whole idea, sugar boy.”

He shoved her backward, angry, hearing her snarl like some animal as he pushed aside the canvas flap and ducked into the low hallway that led to the door which would take him back to the narrow alley.

“I’ll kill you, you ever come back again!”

How he hoped her shriek would quickly disappear behind him, swallowed by the coming gray in dawn’s creeping presence. Feeling all the sadder, all the more remorse for Washburn that she was without the least shred of decency and loyalty, despite how she fed herself, kept that shabby roof over her head. There was shame, and then there was downright shameful.

Stopping outside in the rain for but a moment, he thought on his sweet quadroon, how it had been three or more nights since the last visit. Then he pried himself away, down Wharf Street and among the tortuous twists of the tree-lined pathway that led toward the docks themselves.

On and on he searched, failing to find Washburn in any of the grogshops, even the worst of the drinking dens. Yet time and again his questions aroused the smoldering anger of those who had been bested in Isaac’s game of chance, before the trapper had been soundly pummeled with fists and tossed out. But where Washburn had gone after every beating, more drunk and belligerent with every new stop, no one had the least interest in helping Titus discover.

Day was coming when he finally started for the grove—hoping the trapper had gone there to sleep it off. Past the last wharves where the side-wheelers tied up to off-load, where the keelboats bobbed at their moorings to take on loads for the upriver Indian trade. Not far beyond the last of the wooden pilings the river lapped against the gentle slope of the bank. Driftwood cluttered the sandy, muddy shore. Over and around what had at one time been dangerous sawyers or planters he trudged, his moccasins soaked.

Stopped, peered at the dark object against the muddy bank ahead. Not a snag—it bobbed half in, half out of the Mississippi … in the shape of a body.

Titus feared. Dared not believe. Refused to allow himself to hope as he inched closer. That faded red scarf tied round the man’s head. Mud-soaked now. Washburn floated facedown in the shallow, brown water where Bass collapsed to his knees.

Dragging Isaac into his lap, he rolled the trapper over, brushing mud from the bruised and swollen face: eyes, cheeks split, lips cracked and bleeding, whiskers crusted with river silt. Titus sensed his own tears begin to spill as he slapped the face—hoping for life, some flicker of movement.

For the longest time Titus sat there in that cold water, cradling Washburn to hrs breast, clutched the friend beneath his chin so close he could smell the stale, sickly stench of drink about the dead man. This place, the cold unforgiving lap of the river around him, and the reek of one spree too many thick in his nostrils all brought Bass to thinking on what must have been the trapper’s last minutes. Somehow limping down here after one beating too many. Coming here rather than the livery where Titus had spurned him. Perhaps Washburn stood in this very spot for some moments before he fell, staring at the water rolling out of that land far, far to the north—cursing the river that passed him by, just as so many seasons were now behind him.

Titus knew how that felt aiready.

Too much whiskey and too sound a thrashing—finally to crumple here into the shallow current at the edge of the muddy bank, here to drown. Never again to move. Dead drunk again.

And this time, dead.

Back and forth he rocked with the body. Then as the light ballooned in the east across the river, Titus struggled from under the weight. He nearly stumbled himself in the soft, giving mud as he got to his feet, began to drag the body out of the water.

Heaving, he brought Washburn up the bank a few yards with great exertion. Then collapsed himself beside the trapper once more. Shivering as he watched the sun continue its climb.

A new day. A little colder.

And now one friend less.