THE SISTERS
BROTHERS
Patrick deWitt
Dedication
For my mother
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Part One - TROUBLE WITH THE HORSES
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Two - CALIFORNIA
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
INTERMISSION
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part Three - HERMANN KERMIT WARM
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
INTERMISSION II
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By Patrick deWitt
Credit
Copyright
About the Publisher
OREGON CITY, 1851
Part One
TROUBLE
WITH THE
HORSES
Chapter 1
I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie’s new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and lately had been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.
I felt a weight of eyes on me and looked away from Nimble. Charlie was gazing down from the upper-story window, holding up five fingers. I did not respond and he distorted his face to make me smile; when I did not smile his expression fell slack and he moved backward, out of view. He had seen me watching his horse, I knew. The morning before I had suggested we sell Tub and go halves on a new horse and he had agreed this was fair but then later, over lunch, he had said we should put it off until the new job was completed, which did not make sense because the problem with Tub was that he would impede the job, so would it not be best to replace him prior to? Charlie had a slick of food grease in his mustache and he said, ‘After the job is best, Eli.’ He had no complaints with Nimble, who was as good or better than his previous horse, unnamed, but then he had had first pick of the two while I lay in bed recovering from a leg wound received on the job. I did not like Tub but my brother was satisfied with Nimble. This was the trouble with the horses.
Chapter 2
Charlie climbed onto Nimble and we rode away, heading for the Pig-King. It had been only two months since our last visit to Oregon City but I counted five new businesses on the main street and each of these appeared to be doing well. ‘An ingenious species,’ I said to Charlie, who made no reply. We sat at a table in the back of the King and were brought our usual bottle and a pair of glasses. Charlie poured me a drink, when normally we pour our own, so I was prepared for bad news when he said it: ‘I’m to be lead man on this one, Eli.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Commodore says so.’
I drank my brandy. ‘What’s it mean?’
‘It means I am in charge.’
‘What’s it mean about money?’
‘More for me.’
‘My money, I mean. Same as before?’
‘It’s less for you.’
‘I don’t see the sense in it.’
‘Commodore says there wouldn’t have been the problems with the last job if there had been a lead man.’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Well, it does.’
He poured me another drink and I drank it. As much to myself as to Charlie I said, ‘He wants to pay for a lead man, that’s fine. But it’s bad business to short the man underneath. I got my leg gouged out and my horse burned to death working for him.’
‘I got my horse burned to death, too. He got us new horses.’
‘It’s bad business. Stop pouring for me like I’m an invalid.’ I took the bottle away and asked about the specifics of the job. We were to find and kill a prospector in California named Hermann Kermit Warm. Charlie produced a letter from his jacket pocket, this from the Commodore’s scout, a dandy named Henry Morris who often went ahead of us to gather information: ‘Have studied Warm for many days and can offer the following in respects to his habits and character. He is solitary in nature but spends long hours in the San Francisco saloons, passing time reading his science and mathematics books or making drawings in their margins. He hauls these tomes around with a strap like a schoolboy, for which he is mocked. He is small in stature, which adds to this comedy, but beware he will not be teased about his size. I have seen him fight several times, and though he typically loses, I do not think any of his opponents would wish to fight him again. He is not above biting, for example. He is bald-headed, with a wild red beard, long, gangly arms, and the protruded belly of a pregnant woman. He washes infrequently and sleeps where he can—barns, doorways, or if need be, in the streets. Whenever he is engaged to speak his manner is brusque and uninviting. He carries a baby dragoon, this tucked into a sash slung around his waist. He does not drink often, but when he finally lifts his bottle, he lifts it to become completely drunken. He pays for his whiskey with raw gold dust that he keeps in a leather pouch worn on a long string, this hidden in the folds of his many-layered clothing. He has not once left the town since I have been here and I do not know if he plans to return to his claim, which sits some ten miles east of Sacramento (map enclosed). Yesterday in a saloon he asked me for a match, addressing me politely and by name. I have no idea how he knew this, for he never seemed to notice that I was following him. When I asked how he had come to learn my identity he became abusive, and I left. I do not care for him, though there are some who say his mind is uncommonly strong. I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.’
Next to the map of Warm’s claim, Morris had made a smudged drawing of the man; but he might have been standing at my side and I would not have known it, it was so clumsy a rendering. I mentioned this to Charlie and he said, ‘Morris is waiting for us at a hotel in San Francisco. He will point Warm out and we will be on our way. It’s a good place to kill someone, I have heard. When they are not busily burning the entire town down, they are distracted by its endless rebuilding.’
‘Why doesn’t Morris kill him?’
‘That’s always your question, and I always have my answer: It’s not his job, but ours.’
‘It’s mindless. The Commodore shorts me my wage but pays this bumbler his fee and expenses just to have Warm tipped off that he is under observation.’
‘You cannot call Morris a bumbler, brother. This is the first time he has made a mistake, and he admits his error openly. I think his being discovered says more about Warm than Morris.’
‘But the man is spending the night in the streets. What is holding Morris back from simply shooting him as he sleeps?’
‘How about the fact that Morris is not a killer?’
‘Then why send him at all? Why did he not send us a month ago instead?’
‘A month ago we were on another job. You forget that the Commodore has many interests and concerns and can get to them but one at a time. Hurried business is bad business, these are words from the man himself. You only have to admire his successes to see the truth in it.’
It made me ill to hear him quote the Commodore so lovingly. I said, ‘It will take us weeks to get to California. Why make the trip if we don’t have to?’
‘But we do have to make the trip. That is the job.’
‘And what if Warm’s not there?’
‘He’ll be there.’
‘What if he’s not?’
‘Goddamnit, he will be.’
When it came time to settle I pointed to Charlie. ‘The lead man’s paying.’ Normally we would have gone halves, so he did not like that. My brother has always been miserly, a trait handed down from our father.
‘Just the one time,’ he said.
‘Lead man with his lead man’s wages.’
‘You never liked the Commodore. And he’s never liked you.’
‘I like him less and less,’ I said.
‘You’re free to tell him, if it becomes an unbearable burden.’
‘You will know it, Charlie, if my burden becomes unbearable. You will know it and so will he.’
This bickering might have continued but I left my brother and retired to my room in the hotel across from the saloon. I do not like to argue and especially not with Charlie, who can be uncommonly cruel with his tongue. Later that night I could hear him exchanging words in the road with a group of men, and I listened to make sure he was not in danger, and he was not—the men asked him his name and he told them and they left him alone. But I would have come to his aid and in fact was putting on my boots when the group scattered. I heard Charlie coming up the stairs and jumped into bed, pretending I was fast asleep. He stuck his head in the room and said my name but I did not answer. He closed the door and moved to his room and I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.
Chapter 3
In the morning it was raining—constant, cold drops that turned the roads to muddy soup. Charlie was stomach-sick from the brandy, and I visited the chemist’s for a nausea remedy. I was given a scentless, robin’s-egg-blue powder which I mixed into his coffee. I did not know the tincture’s ingredients, only that it got him out of bed and onto Nimble, and that it made him alert to the point of distraction. We stopped to rest twenty miles from town in a barren section of forest that had the summer prior been burned through in a lightning fire. We finished our lunch and were preparing to move on when we saw a man walking a horse a hundred yards to our south. If he had been riding I do not think we would have commented but it was strange, him leading the horse like that. ‘Why don’t you go see what he is doing,’ Charlie said.
‘A direct order from the lead man,’ I said. He did not respond and I thought, The joke is wearing thin. I decided I would not tell it again. I rode Tub out to meet the walker. When I swung around I noticed he was weeping and I dismounted to face him. I am a tall and heavy and rough-looking man and could read the alarm on his face; to soothe his worries, I said, ‘I don’t mean you any harm. My brother and I are only having our lunch. I prepared too much and thought to ask if you were hungry.’
The man dried his face with his palm, inhaling deeply and shivering. He attempted to answer me—at least he opened his mouth—but no words or sound emerged, being distraught to the degree that communication was not possible.
I said, ‘I can see you’re in some distress and probably want to keep traveling on your own. My apologies for disturbing you, and I hope you are heading for something better.’ I remounted Tub and was halfway to camp when I saw Charlie stand and level his pistol in my direction. Turning back, I saw the weeping man riding quickly toward me; he did not seem to wish to hurt me and I motioned for Charlie to lower his gun. Now the weeping man and I were riding side by side, and he called over: ‘I will take you up on your offer.’ When we got to camp, Charlie took hold of the man’s horse and said, ‘You should not chase someone like that. I thought you were after my brother and nearly took a shot.’ The weeping man made a dismissive gesture with his hands indicating the irrelevance of the statement. This took Charlie by surprise—he looked at me and asked, ‘Who is this person?’
‘He has been upset by something. I offered him a plate of food.’
‘There’s no food left but biscuits.’
‘I will make more then.’
‘You will not.’ Charlie looked the weeping man up and down. ‘Isn’t he the mournful one, though?’
Clearing his throat, the weeping man spoke: ‘It is ignorant behavior, to talk about a man as though he was not present.’
Charlie was not sure whether to laugh or strike him down. He said to me, ‘Is he crazy?’
‘I will ask you to watch your words,’ I told the stranger. ‘My brother isn’t feeling well today.’
‘I am fine,’ said Charlie.
‘His charity is strained,’ I said.
‘He looks sick,’ said the weeping man.
‘I said I’m fine, damn you.’
‘He is sick, slightly,’ I said. I could see that Charlie’s patience had reached its limit. I took some of the biscuits and put them in the hand of the weeping man. He gazed upon them for a long moment, then began to weep all over again, coughing and inhaling and shivering pitifully. I said to Charlie, ‘This was how it was when I found him.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘He didn’t say.’ I asked the weeping man, ‘Sir, what’s the matter with you?’
‘They’re gone!’ he cried. ‘They’re all gone!’
‘Who’s gone?’ asked Charlie.
‘Gone without me! And I wish I was gone! I want to be gone with them!’ He dropped the biscuits and walked away with his horse. He would take ten steps and throw back his head to moan. He did this three times and my brother and I turned to clean our camp.
‘I wonder what was the matter with him,’ said Charlie.
‘Some kind of grief has made him insane.’
By the time we mounted our horses, the weeping man was out of sight, and the source of his worry would remain forever a mystery.
Chapter 4
We rode along in silence, thinking our private thoughts. Charlie and I had an unspoken agreement not to throw ourselves into speedy travel just after a meal. There were many hardships to our type of life and we took these small comforts as they came; I found they added up to something decent enough to carry on.
‘What has this Hermann Warm done?’ I asked.
‘Taken something of the Commodore’s.’
‘What has he taken?’
‘This will be revealed soon enough. To kill him is the thing.’ He rode ahead and I rode after. I had been wanting to talk about it for some time, before the last job, even.
‘Haven’t you ever found it strange, Charlie? All these men foolish enough to steal from the Commodore? As feared a man as he is?’
‘The Commodore has money. What else would attract a thief?’
‘How are they getting the money? We know the Commodore to be cautious. How is it that all these different men have access to his wealth?’
‘He does business in every corner of the country. A man cannot be in two places at once, much less a hundred. It only stands to reason he’d be victimized.’
‘Victimized!’ I said.
‘What would you call it when a man is forced to protect his fortune with the likes of us?’
‘Victimized!’ I found it amusing, genuinely. In honor of the poor Commodore, I sang a mawkish ballad: ‘His tears behind a veil of flowers, the news came in from town.’
‘Oh, all right.’
‘His virgin seen near country bower, in arms of golden down.’
‘You are only angry with me for taking the lead position.’
‘His heart mistook her smile for kindness, and now he pays the cost.’
‘I’m through talking with you about it.’
‘His woman lain in sin, her highness, endless love is lost.’
Charlie could not help but smile. ‘What is that song?’
‘Picked it up somewhere.’
‘It’s a sad one.’
‘All the best songs are sad ones.’
‘That’s what Mother used to say.’
I paused. ‘The sad ones don’t actually make me sad.’
‘You are just like Mother, in many ways.’
‘You’re not. And you’re not like Father, either.’
‘I am like no one.’
He said this casually, but it was the type of statement that eclipsed the conversation, killed it. He pulled ahead and I watched his back, and he knew I was watching his back. He stuck Nimble’s ribs with his heels and they ran off, with me following behind. We were only traveling in our typical fashion, at our typical pace, but I felt all the same to be chasing him.
Chapter 5
Short, late-winter days, and we stopped in a dried ravine to make up camp for the night. You will often see this scenario in serialized adventure novels: Two grisly riders before the fire telling their bawdy stories and singing harrowing songs of death and lace. But I can tell you that after a full day of riding I want nothing more than to lie down and sleep, which is just what I did, without even eating a proper meal. In the morning, pulling on my boots, I felt a sharp pain at the long toe of my left foot. I upended and tapped at the heel of the boot, expecting a nettle to drop, when a large, hairy spider thumped to the ground on its back, eight arms pedaling in the cold air. My pulse was sprinting and I became weak-headed because I am very much afraid of spiders and snakes and crawling things, and Charlie, knowing this, came to my aid, tossing the creature into the fire with his knife. I watched the spider curl up and die, smoking like balled paper, and was happy for its suffering.
Now a shimmering cold was traveling up my shinbone like a frost and I said, ‘That was a powerful little animal, brother.’ A fever came over me at once and I was forced to lie down. Charlie became worried by my pale coloring; when I found I could no longer speak he stoked up the fire and rode to the nearest town for a doctor, whom he brought to me against or partially against the man’s will—I was in a fog but recall his cursing each time Charlie walked out of earshot. I was given a kind of medicine or antivenom, some element of which made me glad and woozy as when drunk, and all I wanted to do was forgive everyone for everything and also to smoke tobacco ceaselessly. I soon dropped off into dead-weighted sleep and remained untouchable all through that day and night and into the next morning. When I awoke, Charlie was still at the fire, and he looked over to me and smiled.
‘Can you remember what you were dreaming of just now?’ he asked.
‘Only that I was being restricted,’ I said.
‘You kept saying, “I am in the tent! I am in the tent!” ’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘ “I am in the tent!” ’
‘Help me stand up.’
He assisted me and in a moment I was circling the camp on wooden-feeling legs. I was slightly nauseated but ate a full meal of bacon and coffee and biscuits and managed to keep this down. I decided I was well enough to travel and we rode easy for four or five hours before settling down again. Charlie asked me repeatedly how I was feeling and I attempted each time to answer, but the truth of it was that I did not exactly know. Whether it was the poison from the spider or the harried doctor’s antivenom, I was not entirely in my body. I passed a night of fever and starts and in the morning, when I turned to meet Charlie’s good-day greeting, he took a look at me and emitted a shriek of fright. I asked him what was the matter and he brought over a tin plate to use as a looking glass.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s your head, friend.’ He leaned back on his heels and whistled.
The left side of my face was grotesquely swollen, from the crown of my skull all the way to the neck, tapering off at the shoulder. My eye was merely a slit and Charlie, regaining his humor, said I looked like a half dog, and he tossed a stick to see if I would chase it. I traced the source of the swelling to my teeth and gums; when I tapped a finger on the lower left row, a singing pain rang through my body from top to bottom and back again.
‘There must be a gallon of blood sloshing around,’ said Charlie.
‘Where did you find that doctor? We should revisit him and have him lance me.’
Charlie shook his head. ‘Best not to search him out. There was an unhappy episode regarding his fee. He would be glad to see me again, it’s true, but I doubt he would be eager to assist us further. He mentioned another encampment a few miles farther to the south. That might be our wisest bet, if you think you can make it.’
‘I don’t suppose I have a choice.’
‘As with so many things in a life, brother, I don’t suppose you do.’
It was slow going, though the terrain was easy enough—a mild downhill grade over firm, forested earth. I was feeling strangely happy, as though involved in a minor amusement, when Tub made a misstep and my mouth clacked shut. I screamed out from the pain, but in the same breath was laughing at the ridiculousness of it. I stuck a wad of tobacco between my uppers and lowers for cushioning. This filled my head with brown saliva but I could not spit, as it proved too painful, so I merely leaned forward and let the liquid leak from my mouth and onto Tub’s neck. We passed through a quick flurry of snow; the flakes felt welcome and cool on my face. My head was listing and Charlie circled me to stare and ogle. ‘You can see it from behind, even,’ he said. ‘The scalp itself is swollen. Your hair is swollen.’ We passed widely around the unpaid doctor’s town and located the next encampment some miles later, a nameless place, a quarter mile long and home to a hundred people or less. But luck was with us, and we found a tooth doctor there named Watts smoking a pipe outside his storefront. As I approached the man he smiled and said, ‘What a profession to be involved in, that I’m actually happy to see someone so distorted.’ He ushered me into his efficient little work space, and toward a cushioned leather chair that squeaked and sighed with newness as I sat. Pulling up a tray of gleaming tools, he asked tooth-history questions I had no satisfactory answers for. At any rate I got the impression he did not care to know the answers but was merely pleased to be making his inquiries.
I shared my theory that this tooth problem was linked to the spider bite, or else the antivenom, but Watts said there was no medical evidence to support it. He told me, ‘The body is an actual miracle, and who can dissect a miracle? It may have been the spider, true, and it may have been a reaction to the doctor’s so-called antivenom, and it may have been neither one. Really, though, what difference does it make why you’re unwell? Am I right?’
I said I supposed he was. Charlie said, ‘I was telling Eli here, Doc, that I bet there’s a gallon of blood sloshing loose in his head.’
Watts unsheathed a polished silver lance. Sitting back, he regarded my head as a monstrous bust. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said.
Chapter 6
The story of Reginald Watts was a luckless one dealing in every manner of failure and catastrophe, though he spoke of this without bitterness or regret, and in fact seemed to find humor in his numberless missteps: ‘I’ve failed at straight business, I’ve failed at criminal enterprise, I’ve failed at love, I’ve failed at friendship. You name it, I’ve failed at it. Go ahead and name something. Anything at all.’
‘Agriculture,’ I said.
‘I owned a sugar beet farm a hundred miles northeast of here. Never made a penny. Hardly saw one sugar beet. A devastating failure. Name something else.’
‘Shipping.’
‘I bought a share in a paddle-wheel steamboat running goods up and down the Mississippi at an obscene markup. Highly profitable enterprise until I came along. Second trip she made with my money in her, sank to the bottom of the river. She was uninsured, which was my bright idea to save us a few dollars on overhead. Also I had encouraged a name change, from The Periwinkle, which I thought bespoke frivolity, to the Queen Bee. An unmitigated failure. My fellow investors, if I’m not mistaken, were going to lynch me. I pinned a suicide note to my front door and left town in one hell of a shameful hurry. Left a good woman behind, too. Still think of her, these many years later.’ The doctor took a moment and shook his head. ‘Name something else. No, don’t. I’m tired of talking about it.’
‘That’s two of us,’ said Charlie. He was sitting in the corner reading a newspaper.
I said, ‘Looks like you’re making a go of it here, Doc.’
‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘You’re my third customer in three weeks. It would appear that oral hygiene is low on the list of priorities in this part of the world. No, I expect I’ll fail in dentistry, also. Give it another two months on the outside and the bank’ll shut me down.’ He held a long, dripping needle next to my face. ‘This is going to pinch, son.’
‘Ouch!’ I said.
‘Where did you study dentistry?’ Charlie asked.
‘A most reputable institution,’ he answered. But there was a smirk on his lips I did not care for.
‘I understand the course of study takes several years,’ I said.
‘Years?’ said Watts, and he laughed.
‘How long then?’
‘Me personally? Just as long as it took to memorize the nerve chart. As long as it took those fools to ship me the tools on credit.’ I looked over to Charlie, who shrugged and returned to his reading. I reached up to check the swelling of my cheek and was startled to find I had no feeling in my face.
Watts said, ‘Isn’t that something? I could pull every tooth you’ve got and you wouldn’t feel the slightest pain.’
Charlie’s eyes peered over the paper. ‘You really can’t feel anything?’ I shook my head and he asked Watts, ‘How do you get ahold of that?’
‘Can’t, unless you’re in the profession.’
‘Might prove handy, in our line of work. What would you say to selling us some?’
‘They don’t hand it over by the barrel,’ Watts said.
‘We’d give you a fair price.’
‘I’m afraid the answer is no.’
Charlie looked at me blankly; his face disappeared behind the paper.
Watts lanced my face in three different places and the colorful fluids came trickling out. There was some remaining in the head but he said it would go down of its own accord, and that the worst of it was passed. He extracted the two offending teeth and I laughed at the painless violence of it. Charlie became uneasy and retired to the saloon across the road. ‘Coward,’ called Watts. He stitched the hole closed and filled my mouth with cotton, afterward leading me to a marble basin where he showed me a dainty, wooden-handled brush with a rectangular head of gray-white bristles. ‘A toothbrush,’ he said. ‘This will keep your teeth clean and your breath pleasant. Here, watch how I do it.’ The doctor demonstrated the proper use of the tool, then blew mint-smelling air on my face. Now he handed me a new brush, identical to his own, and also a packet of the tooth powder that produced the minty foam, telling me they were mine to keep. I protested this but he admitted he had been sent a complimentary box from the manufacturer. I paid him two dollars for the removal of the teeth and he brought out a bottle of whiskey to toast what he called our mutually beneficial transaction. Altogether I found the man quite charming, and I was remorseful when Charlie reentered the office with his pistol drawn, leveling it at the good doctor. ‘I tried to bargain with you,’ he said, his face flushed with brandy.
‘I wonder what I will fail at next,’ Watts said forlornly.
‘I don’t know, and I don’t care. Eli, gather the numbing medicine and needles. Watts, find me a piece of rope, and quickly. If you get shifty on me I will put a hole in your brain.’
‘At times I feel one is already there.’ To me he said, ‘The pursuit of money and comfort has made me weary. Take care of your teeth, son. Keep a healthy mouth. Your words will only sound that much sweeter, isn’t that right?’
Charlie cuffed Watts on the ear, thus bringing his speech to a close.
Chapter 7
We rode through the afternoon and into the evening, when I became dizzy to the point I thought I might fall from the saddle. I asked Charlie if we could stop for the night and he agreed to this, but only if we should find a sheltered place to camp, as it was threatening to rain. He smelled a fire on the air and we traced it to a one-room shack, wispy cotton-smoke spinning from its chimney, a low light dancing in the lone window. An old woman wrapped in quilting and rags answered the door. She had long gray hairs quivering from her chin and her half-opened mouth was filled with jagged, blackened teeth. Charlie, crushing his hat in his hand, spoke of our recent hardships in a stage actor’s dramatic timbre. The woman’s oyster-flesh eyes fell on me and I grew instantly colder. She walked away from the door without a word. I heard the scrape of a chair on the floor. Charlie turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘Let’s keep on.’
‘She’s left the door open for us.’
‘There is something not right with her.’
He kicked at a patch of snow. ‘She knows how to build a fire. What more do you want? We’re not looking to settle down.’
‘I think we should keep on,’ I repeated.
‘Door!’ cried the woman.
‘A couple of hours in a warm room would suit me fine,’ said Charlie.
‘I am the sick one,’ I said. ‘And I am willing to move on.’
‘I am for staying.’
The shadow of the woman crept along the far interior wall and she stood at the entrance once more. ‘Door!’ she shrieked. ‘Door! Door!’
‘You can see she wants us to enter,’ said Charlie.
Yes, I thought, past her lips and into her stomach. But I was too weak to fight any longer, and when my brother took me by the arm to enter the cabin I did not resist him.
In the room was a table, a chair, and an unclean mattress. Charlie and I sat before the stone fireplace on the twisted wooden floorboards. The heat stung pleasantly at my face and hands and for a moment I was happy with my new surroundings. The woman sat at the table speaking not a word, her face obscured in the folds of her rags. Before her lay a mound of dull red and black beads or stones; her hands emerged from her layers and nimbly took these up one by one, stringing them onto a piece of thin wire to fashion a long necklace or some other manner of elaborate jewelry. There was a lamp on the table, lowly lit and flickering yellow and orange, a tail of black smoke slipping from the tip of the flame.
‘We are obliged to you, ma’am,’ said Charlie. ‘My brother is feeling poorly, and in no condition to be sleeping out of doors.’ When the woman did not respond, Charlie said to me he supposed she was deaf. ‘I am not deaf,’ she countered. She brought a piece of the wire to her mouth and chewed it back and forth to snap it.
‘Of course,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t mean any offense to you. Now I can see how able you are, how sharp. And you keep a fine home, if you don’t mind my saying.’
She laid her beads and wire on the table. Her head swiveled to face us but her features remained hidden in slipping shadows. ‘Do you think I don’t know what type of men you are?’ she asked, pointing a broken-looking finger at our gun belts. ‘Who are you pretending to be, and why?’
Charlie’s demeanor changed, or resumed, and he was once more himself. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘who are we then?’
‘Would you not call yourselves killers?’
‘Just because of our guns, and you assume it?’
‘I assume nothing. I know by the dead men following behind you.’
The hair on my neck stood up. It was ridiculous, but I dared not turn around. Charlie’s tone was even: ‘Do you fear we will kill you?’
‘I fear nothing, least of all your bullets and talk.’ She looked at me and asked, ‘Do you fear I will kill you?’
‘I am very tired,’ came my lame reply.
‘Take the bed,’ she instructed.
‘Where will you sleep?’
‘I will not. I must finish my work. In the morning, I will be mostly gone.’
Charlie’s face had grown hard. ‘This isn’t your cabin, is it?’
At this she stiffened, and did not look to be breathing. She pulled back her rags, and in the firelight and lamplight I saw she had almost no hair on her head, only white tufts here and there, and her skull was dented, appearing soft in places, pushed in like an old piece of fruit. ‘Every heart has a tone,’ she said to Charlie, ‘just as every bell has one. Your heart’s tone is most oppressive to hear, young man. It is hurtful to my ears, and your eyes hurt my eyes to look at them.’
A long silence followed with Charlie and the old witch simply staring at each other. I could not, from either of their expressions, understand what they were thinking. Eventually the woman rewrapped her skull and resumed her work, and Charlie lay down on the floor. I did not climb onto the bed, but lay down beside him, because I was frightened by the woman and thought it safest for us to sleep close together. I was so weak that despite my uneasiness I soon fell away into a dream state wherein I envisaged the room just as it was, though I was standing by, watching my own sleeping body. The old woman rose and came upon us; my body began to fidget and sweat but Charlie’s was calm and still and the old woman leaned over him, opening his mouth with her hands. From the dark space in her folds there flowed a slow and heavy black liquid; this dropped into his mouth and I, not the sleeping I but the watching I, began to scream that she should leave him alone. With this the dream abruptly ended and I came to. Charlie was beside me, looking at me, eyes open though he was sleeping, as was his unnerving habit. Behind him sat the old woman, her bead pile significantly smaller—a good deal of time had passed. She remained at her table but her head was turned all the way around, looking in the far dark corner. I do not know what had caught her attention but she stared for such a time that I gave up wondering and returned my head to the floor. In a jump I was dead asleep once more.
Chapter 8
In the morning I awoke on the floor, and Charlie was not beside me. I heard a footfall at my back and turned to find him standing before the open doorway, looking out at the field before the cabin. It was a bright day and the horses stood in the distance, tied to the root of an upended snag. Nimble nosed about in the frost for a mouthful of grass; Tub shivered and stared at nothing. ‘The woman has left,’ Charlie said.
‘That is all right by me,’ I replied, standing. The room stunk of ash and charcoal and my eyes were raw and burning. I had to make water and moved to exit the cabin but Charlie blocked my way, his face gaunt and unrested. ‘She has left,’ he said, ‘but has kept us with something as a remembrance.’ He pointed and I followed the line of his finger. The woman had hung the string of beads around the jamb of the door. I will be mostly gone, I recalled her saying—mostly but not completely.
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.
Charlie said, ‘It’s no decoration.’
‘We could take it down,’ I said, reaching.
He caught my hand. ‘Don’t touch it, Eli.’
We stood back to consider the options. The horses heard our voices and were watching us from the field. ‘We won’t walk beneath it,’ said Charlie. ‘The only thing is to knock out the window and climb through.’ Feeling my middle section, which is and always has been bountiful, I said I did not think I would fit in the small opening. Charlie mentioned it was worth a try but the idea of failing—of climbing back away from the hole red-faced—was not something I was eager to experience, and I said I would not attempt it.
‘Then I will go alone,’ said Charlie, ‘and return to you with some tools to cut a larger piece away.’ Standing on the old woman’s wobbly chair, he knocked out the glass with the handle of his revolver and I boosted him up and out the window. Now we faced each other on opposite sides of the door. He was smiling, and I was not. ‘There you are,’ he said, patting the glass shards from his belly.
I said, ‘I don’t like this plan. Striking out into the wild with hopes of finding a gentle soul eager to loan out his tools. You will ride aimlessly while I stew in this hovel. What if the old woman returns?’
‘She has left us her evil tidings, and there is no reason for her to come back.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’
‘I believe it to be true. And what else can I do? If you have another plan, now is the time to share it.’
But no, I did not have one. I asked him to bring me my food bag and I watched him walk out to the horses. ‘Don’t forget a pan,’ I called. ‘What man?’ he asked. ‘A pan! A pan!’ I mimed a cooking-with-a-pan motion, and he nodded. He returned and pushed my effects through the window, wishing me a happy breakfast before mounting Nimble and riding away. I experienced a miserable feeling at their leaving; staring at the opening in the tree line where they had disappeared, I felt a premonitory concern they would never revisit it.
I gathered up my reserves of cheer and decided to make a temporary home of the cabin. There was no chopped wood or kindling available but the ashes and coals were still glowing hot so I demolished the old woman’s chair by swinging it widely and crashing it over the floor. I stacked its legs, seat, and back into the fireplace in an upside down V shape, pouring some of the lamp’s oil over top of the pile. A moment passed and the chair ignited all at once. I was heartened by its light and fragrance. It was made of hard oak and would burn well. ‘Little victories,’ my mother used to say, and which I then said aloud, to myself.
I spent some minutes standing in the doorway, looking out at the world. There was not a cloud in sight and it was one of those purple-blue days where the sky appears taller and deeper than usual. Melted snow-water came draining off the roof in rivulets and I held my tin cup out the window to fill it. The tin turned frigid in my hand and small islands of translucent ice floated on the water’s surface, stinging my lip as I drank. It was a relief to wash away my mouth’s ghastly coffin-taste of stale blood leftover from the day before. I warmed the cold liquid over my tongue, pushing it back and forth in hopes of cleansing my wound. I became alarmed when I felt something solid come loose, knocking around in my water-filled skull. Thinking the object a flap of skin, I spit it out onto the floor. It landed with a sickening slap, and I crouched down close to inspect it. It was cylindrical and black, which brought my heart to a trot: Had Doctor Watts slid a leech into my mouth without my knowing it? But when I nudged the thing with my thumb it unraveled, and I recalled the cotton he had tucked beside my gums. I flung it into the fire and it slithered down a flaming chair leg, bubbling and smoking and leaving a trail of blood and saliva.
Staring out at the steam rising in the field, I felt a gladness at having survived the recent series of happenings: The spider, the bloated head, the curse averted. I filled my lungs with all the cold air they could hold. ‘Tub!’ I shouted into the wilderness. ‘I am stuck inside the cabin of the vile gypsy-witch!’ He raised his head, his jaw working on a mouthful of crunchy grass. ‘Tub! Assist me in my time of need!’
I made myself a modest breakfast of bacon, grits, and coffee. A piece of gristle lodged itself into my tooth-hole and I had no small amount of trouble removing it, thus irritating the wound and causing bleeding. I thought of the toothbrush then, which I retrieved from my vest pocket along with the powder, laying these neatly on the table beside the tin cup. Watts had not said whether I should wait for my mouth to heal entirely before using the tool but I thought to go ahead, albeit cautiously. I dampened the bristles and tapped out a thimbleful of the powder. ‘Up, down, side to side,’ I said, for these were the words the doctor had spoken. My mouth was filled with the mint-smelling foam and I scrubbed my tongue raw. Pulling myself up to the window, I spit the bloody water into the dirt and snow. My breath was cool and fine-smelling and I was greatly impressed with the tingling feeling this toothbrush gave me. I decided I would use it every day, and was tapping the tool on the bridge of my nose, thinking of nothing, or of several vague things simultaneously, when I saw the bear lumber out of the woods, toward Tub.
Chapter 9
It was a grizzly. He was large but rangy and had likely just awoken from hibernation. Tub saw him or smelled him and began bucking and jumping but could not loose himself from the tree root. Standing shy of the doorway, I raised my pistol, firing six quick shots, but these were taken in a panic and none of them hit their mark. The bear was unimpressed with the gun’s report and continued on; by the time I took up my second pistol he was standing over Tub. I fired twice but missed and he lunged, knocking Tub to the ground with a heavy blow to the eye. Now he was standing on the far side of Tub and I could not get a clean shot without putting the horse in danger, and so with no other option but to watch my animal slaughtered, I crossed the cursed threshold, running into the fray and screaming just as loud as I was able. The grizzly took notice of my approach and became confused—should he continue the killing of the horse, already under way, or should he address this noisy new two-legged animal? While he pondered this I put two bullets in his face and two in his chest and he fell dead on the ground. Whether Tub was alive or not, I could not tell. He did not appear to be breathing. I turned back to face the black mouth of the cabin. A trembling grew in my hands and in the flesh of my legs. I was ringing all over.
Chapter 10
I returned to the cabin. Cursed or not I did not see the point of letting Charlie in on the news. I took stock of my health but could not pinpoint any particular feeling besides the ringing, which I decided was nerves, and which at any rate was abating. Tub was still not moving and I was certain he was dead when a nuthatch lit upon his nose and he leapt up, shaking his head and panting. I walked away from the door and lay on the bed. It was damp and lumpy and smelled of sod. I cut away a hole to look inside and saw it was full of grass and earth. Some kind of witch preference, perhaps. I moved to sleep on the floor before the fire. I woke up an hour later. My brother was shouting my name and attacking the window frame with an ax.
Chapter 11
I crawled out the hole and we walked over and sat on the ground next to the dead bear. Charlie said, ‘I saw this gentleman lying here and called your name, but you didn’t answer. Then I looked in the doorway and saw you on your back on the floor. That is an unpleasant feeling, wanting to cross into a house but not being able to.’ He asked me what had happened and I said, ‘There’s not a lot to it. The bear came out of the woods and knocked Tub to the ground. I took careful aim and killed him dead.’
‘How many shots did you fire?’
‘I emptied both pistols and hit him two with one and two the other.’
Charlie examined the bear’s wounds. ‘You fired from the window or the door?’
‘Why are you asking all these questions?’
‘No reason.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s some nice shooting, brother.’
‘Lucky, is all.’ Hoping to change the subject, I asked about the ax.
‘Prospectors heading south,’ he said. There was a divot of skin gone from one of his knuckles and I asked how he came to be injured. ‘The men were hesitant to loan me their equipment. Well, they’ll not need the ax, now.’ He returned to the cabin, entering through his hole. I did not know what he was doing at first, but soon saw the smoke issuing from inside. Next, my bag and pan jumped out the window, with Charlie following closely behind and wearing a wide smile. As we rode away the structure was a whirling tornado of whistling heat and flames and the bear, which Charlie had coated in lamp oil, was likewise burning—an impressive sight, but sad, and I was grateful to take leave of the place. It occurred to me that I had crossed the threshold for a horse I did not want but Charlie had not done the same for his own flesh and blood. A life of ups and downs, I thought.
Chapter 12
Tub’s eye was red and swollen and dead-looking, and he was acting strangely, turning right when I pulled left, stopping and starting of his own accord, and walking sideways. I said to Charlie, ‘I think there’s been some damage done to Tub’s brain by that grizzly’s paw.’
Charlie said, ‘He is probably only dazed temporarily.’ Tub walked headfirst into a tree and began loudly to urinate. ‘You’re too kind with him. Stab him in the ribs with your heels. This will give him all the focus you could want.’
‘The last horse didn’t need such prodding.’
Charlie shook his head. ‘Let’s not talk about that again, thank you.’
‘The last horse was smarter than many grown men I’ve known.’
Charlie shook his head; he would not speak of it anymore. We came to the camp of the dead prospectors, or to-be prospectors, or never-to-be prospectors. I counted five bodies facedown on the ground, and none of them was lying next to another. Charlie told me the story while emptying their pockets and bags of valuables: ‘This fat fellow here, he was the tough one. I tried to reason with him but he wanted to make a show for his friends. I shot him in the mouth and everyone ran. That’s why they’re all scattered and back wounded, see?’ He squatted before a slight body. ‘This one here can’t be more than sixteen, I’d say. Well, he should have known better than to travel with such hotheads.’
I said nothing. Charlie looked at me for a reaction and I shrugged.
‘What’s that mean?’ he said. ‘You had a hand in this, let’s not forget.’
‘I don’t see how you can say that. I did not want to stay the night in that old woman’s cabin, remember.’
‘But it was your illness that made such a stop necessary.’
‘A spider crawled into my boot, there is the cause of my illness.’
‘You’re saying you wish to blame the spider?’
‘I don’t wish to blame anyone. You’re the one who brought it up.’
Speaking to the assembled dead, Charlie said, ‘My good men, it is a spider to blame for the early demise of your group. A woolly, fat-bottomed spider in search of warmth—here is the cause of your deaths.’
I said, ‘All I am telling you, brother, is that it’s a shame they had to go. And it is a shame. And that’s all.’ I rolled the boy over with my boot. His mouth was slack and a pair of hugely bucked upper teeth pushed past his lips.
‘There’s a handsome lad,’ Charlie offered drolly. But he was feeling remorseful, I could see it. He spit on the ground and tossed a handful of dirt over his shoulder. ‘All these people searching out their fortunes in California would do better to stay where they are and work their own land.’
‘I understand it. They are looking for adventure.’
‘These men found theirs.’ He resumed rifling their pockets. ‘This one has a fine watch and fob. Do you want it? Here, feel how heavy it is.’
‘Leave the man his watch,’ I said.
‘I would feel better about this if you took something.’
‘And I’d feel worse. Leave the watch, or take it for yourself, but I won’t have it.’
He had also killed their horses. These lay in a group at the bottom of a gully past the camp. Normally this would not have bothered me but two of them were fine animals, greatly superior to Tub; I pointed this out to Charlie and he became bitter and told me, ‘Yes, and their marks are here for anyone to see. Would you be so stupid as to ride a murdered man’s horse into California, where his arrival is expected?’
‘No one is expecting these men. And you know as well as I do there’s no better place in the world to hide than California.’
‘I’m done talking about your horse, Eli.’
‘If you think it will not come up again, you are mistaken.’
‘Then I’m done talking about your horse today. Now, let us divide the money.’
‘This is your killing. You keep it.’
‘I killed these men to free you from the cursed shack,’ he complained. But I would not accept the coins and he said, ‘Don’t think I’m going to force it on you. I am overdue for some new clothes anyway. Do you think your mangled, brainless horse can make it to the next town without hurtling itself off a cliff? What’s that? You’re not smiling, are you? We’re in a quarrel and you mustn’t under any circumstances smile.’ I was not smiling, but then began to, slightly. ‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘you mustn’t smile when quarreling. It’s wrong, and I dare say you know it’s wrong. You must stew and hate and revisit all the slights I offered you in childhood.’
We mounted to leave the camp. I kicked Tub in his ribs and he lay down flat on the ground.
Chapter 13
It was after dark by the time we came to the next town, and the trading post did not look to be open for business. But the door was unlocked and the chimney was smoking, and we knocked and entered. The room was warm and still, the smell of new goods strong in my nostrils—pants and shirts and undershirts and stockings and hats filled the shelves in neat piles. Charlie knocked his boot heel on the floor and a spry old man in a sagging undershirt emerged from behind a heavy black-velvet curtain. He did not return our greeting but moved silently from place to place, lighting the lamps on the counter with a thin stick of pine, its end glowing and bobbing in his hand. Soon the room was bright in the golden glow, and the old man laid his hands on the countertop, blinking and smiling inquisitively.
‘I am looking for some new clothes,’ said Charlie.
‘Top to bottom?’ said the old man.
‘I am thinking of a new shirt, foremostly.’
‘Your hat is tattered.’
‘What do you have in the way of shirts?’ asked Charlie.
The old man studied Charlie’s torso, reading his measurements with a trained eye, then turned and scurried up a ladder just behind him, pulling from the shelves a short stack of folded shirts. He descended and laid the stack before Charlie; as my brother sorted through these, the old man asked me, ‘And you, sir?’
‘I am not looking for anything this evening.’
‘Your hat is tattered, also.’
‘I like my hat.’
‘You seem to have known each other a long while, judging by the sweat rings.’
My face darkened and I said, ‘It is impolite to speak of other people’s clothing like that.’
The man’s eyes were black and slick and he reminded me of a mole or some other type of burrowing animal: Quick and sure and single-minded. He said, ‘I did not intend to be impolite. I blame my line of work. Whenever I see a man in compromised attire I am drawn to him in sympathy.’ His eyes grew wide and innocent but while he spoke his hands, working independently, laid three new hats out on the counter.
‘Did you not hear me when I said I wanted nothing?’ I asked.
‘What will putting one on hurt you?’ he wondered, propping up a looking glass. ‘You’re just passing time while your friend here tries out shirts.’ The hats were black, chocolate, and dark blue. I laid mine next to them and had to admit it was in poor shape by comparison. I said I might try one on and the old man called out sharply, ‘Rag!’ Now a pregnant and markedly ugly young girl emerged from behind the curtain with a steaming cloth in her hand. She flung this at me and returned without a word from whence she came. I stood handling the hot rag, tossing it back and forth to cool it, and the old man offered his explanation: ‘If you wouldn’t mind wiping down your hands and brow, sir. We can’t have the merchandise sullied by every fellow who enters the room.’ I set about cleaning myself while he turned his attention to Charlie, busily buttoning up a black cotton shirt with pearl snap buttons. ‘Now, that is a beautiful fit,’ the old man said. Charlie stood before a long looking glass, moving this way and that to view the shirt from each angle. He turned to me and pointed at the garment, his eyebrows slightly raised.
‘It is a handsome one,’ I said.
‘I’ll take it,’ Charlie said.
‘And what do you think of your friend in this?’ the old man asked as he put the chocolate hat atop my head. Charlie considered my profile, then asked to see what the black one looked like. When the old man swapped them out, Charlie nodded. ‘If you were after a hat, you could stop right there. It’s not going to get much better than that. And I think I might like to see the blue one, while they’re out.’
‘Rag!’ said the old man, and again the pregnant girl emerged to hurl a steaming cloth over the counter, and again she returned, saying nothing. Wiping his forehead, Charlie smiled. ‘That your woman, old man?’
‘She is,’ he said proudly.
‘That your child in her belly?’
His face puckered to a scowl. ‘You doubt the quality of my seed?’
‘I had no plans to discuss your seed.’
‘It is impertinent.’
Charlie raised his hands to make peace. ‘I am impressed with you, is all. I meant you no offense, and wish the both of you a long and happy life together.’ In this way the matter was settled, and whatever hard feelings that remained were put to rest by our purchases: I bought the hat and also a shirt, and Charlie, in a frenzy of commerce, was outfitted from head to toe. The old man went to bed forty dollars richer, and was glad to have risen from his slumber and seen to our needs. As we rode away in all our finery I said to Charlie, ‘That is a tidy business.’
‘It is tidier than killing,’ he agreed.
‘I believe I could settle into a life like that. I sometimes think about slowing down. Didn’t it seem pleasant in there? Lighting the lamps? The smell of all the brand-new goods?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘I would go out of my mind with boredom. That mute girl would come rushing out of her hole for the hundredth time and I’d shoot her dead. Or I would shoot myself.’
‘It struck me as restful industry. I’ll wager that old man sleeps very well at night.’
‘Do you not sleep well at night?’ Charlie asked earnestly.
‘I do not,’ I said. ‘And neither do you.’
‘I sleep like a stone,’ he protested.
‘You whimper and moan.’
‘Ho ho!’
‘It’s the truth, Charlie.’
‘Ho,’ he said, sniffing. He paused to study my words. He wished to check if they were sincere, I knew, but could not think of a way to ask without sounding overly concerned. The joy went out of him then, and his eyes for a time could not meet mine. I thought, We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.
Chapter 14
We set up in a drafty, lopsided hotel at the southernmost end of town. There was but a single vacancy and Charlie and I were forced to share a room, when we typically kept individual quarters. Sitting before the washbasin I laid out my toothbrush and powder and Charlie, who had not seen these before, asked me what I was doing. I explained and demonstrated the proper use of the tool and afterward smacked my jaws and breathed in deeply. ‘It is highly refreshing to the mouth,’ I told him.
Charlie considered this. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘I think it’s foolish.’
‘Think what you like. Our Dr. Watts says my teeth will never rot if I use the brush dependably.’
Charlie remained skeptical. He told me I looked like a rabid beast with my mouth full of foam. I countered that I would prefer to look like one for minutes each day rather than smell like one all through my life, and this marked the end of our toothbrush conversation. My talk of Watts reminded him of the stolen numbing medicine, and he retrieved the bottle and needle from his saddlebags. He wanted to try it on himself, he said, and I watched him inject a goodly amount into his cheek. Once the medicine settled in he began to pinch and wrench his face. ‘I will be goddamned,’ he said. He beckoned me to slap him, which I did, lightly.
‘I feel nothing,’ he said.
‘Your face is hanging like a griddle cake.’
‘Slap me again, but harder,’ he instructed, and I did this. ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘Slap me again, one last time, only do it hard as you please.’
I pulled my arm back and slapped him with such force that it stung my hand. ‘You felt that one. Your hair jumped. I could see the pain in your eyes.’
‘A recoil from the blow, but no pain,’ he said in wonderment. ‘A smart man could make use of this.’
‘Perhaps you could go from one town to the next, inviting frustrated citizens to clobber your head for a fee.’
‘I’m being serious. We have in this bottle something which makes the impossible, possible. There is a profit in there somewhere.’
‘We will see how you feel about the miracle solution when the effects wear off.’
His mouth was slack and a stringy length of spittle ran down his chin. ‘Makes me drool,’ he said, sucking this up. Shrugging, he put the bottle and needle away and said he wished to cross the street to the saloon. He invited me along, and though I did not much want to watch him grow hoggish with brandy I likewise did not wish to spend my time in the hotel room by myself, with its warped wallpaper, its drafts and dust and scent of previous boarders. The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.
Chapter 15
I awoke at dawn with a nagging pain in my head, not so much brandy-sickness as general fatigue, though the drinking had not helped the situation. I dunked my face in the water basin and brushed my teeth, standing beside an open window to feel the breeze against my skull. It was cool out but the air was enveloped in warmth; here was the first taste of spring, which brought me a satisfaction, a sense of rightness and organization. I crossed the room to check on Charlie’s progress against the day, which I found to be poorer than my own.
‘I was feeling shaky myself,’ I told him, ‘though I am better all the while. I believe there is some healing element to that tooth powder.’
‘Call me a bath,’ he croaked, hidden in quilts and sheets. ‘Tell the woman I want it scorching.’
‘A bath cost twenty-five cents,’ I said. I knew this because I had seen the sign in the lobby; I mentioned it because back home a bath cost a nickel. But Charlie was not concerned with the price: ‘If it costs twenty-five dollars, I don’t care. It will save my life, if it’s possible to save my life. I want the water hot enough to cook a bird. And I will ask you to fetch me medicine from the chemist’s.’
I said, ‘I wonder what the Commodore would think of a lead man so frequently sick from alcohol.’
‘No more talking,’ he pleaded. ‘Go and find the woman. Scorching, tell her.’
‘I will be back after the chemist’s.’
‘Hurry, please.’
I found the woman downstairs in the lobby, sitting behind her counter, mending a pillowcase with a long needle and thread. I had noticed her only perfunctorily when we checked in, but now I could see she was somewhat pretty, young and pale and plump and firm. Her hair was sweat-pasted to her forehead and her arm worked speedily, extending to its limit as she pulled the needle back. I knocked on the countertop and her eyes landed upon me with undisguised annoyance.
‘My brother is brandy-sick and in need of a scorching hot bath.’
‘Thirty cents,’ she said monotonously. I looked at the sign above her, which still read twenty-five cents, but before I could speak she told me, ‘It was twenty-five yesterday. It is thirty, now. Someday soon it will be thirty-five.’
‘A boom time for the painters of signs,’ I said. But the woman only continued her sewing. Pushing on, then: ‘I had better pay immediately, before the prices get away from me.’ Not so much as a smile from the overworked hotel maiden. To irritate her further I paid with a twenty-dollar piece. She regarded the heavy coin for several long seconds before sweeping it into her filthy smock pocket and fishing out the change. She made no effort to camouflage her dislike of me and I thought it prudent to warn her, ‘My brother is not so patient as I am, ma’am, and he is in poor spirits this morning. He asks for a scorching hot bath and he had better get one. He is not one you will wish to upset, and you can take my word for it.’
‘It will be scorching,’ she said. Tucking the pillow under her arm, she turned to fulfill her duties. As she ducked behind the beaded curtain separating the lobby from the kitchen and boilers, I noticed a sliver of her dress was stuck between her buttocks. She removed this with a single dainty tug—a thoughtless, automatic action on her part, but I felt a great fortune to have witnessed it and began whistling a wild, snappy tune.
I left the hotel, searching distractedly for a chemist’s or a doctor’s, but found myself focusing mainly on the subject of women, and love. I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness; and though it was unrealistic for a man in my position to be thinking such thoughts, I could not help myself: I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, When will that man there find himself to be loved?
I located the chemist’s and purchased a small bottle of morphine. Returning to the hotel, I met with the woman clomping down the stairs. She held a tin tub under her arm and her side was damp with bathwater. She paused a moment; I thought she wished to greet me and I took off my hat, offering my version of a smile. But now I saw she was breathing heavily and harboring some bitterness or unhappy feelings. When I asked her what was the matter she declared, and loudly, that my brother was a heathen, and that the hottest waters of hell would not cleanse him. I asked what he had done but she did not answer, she only pushed past me into the lobby. I heard the sound of her beaded curtains, and the crash of the tub hitting a wall. Now I stood awhile on the stairs, listening to the hotel sounds floating all around, the invisible footsteps and creakings, doors opening and closing, muffled laughter and talking, a baby crying. I noticed an unlit candle on the stairwell wall before me. I lit it, then blew out the match, propping this against the candle. Looking to the top of the stairs, I saw that my and Charlie’s door was ajar; as I approached I was surprised to find him speaking, and speaking to me, though for all he knew I was not there. He was speaking aloud in the bathtub, a habit he had picked up in childhood. I snuck to the door and listened:
‘But I am the lead man. Yes. Well, I am. You? You cannot lead your horse without assistance. Also you are sickly. Yes, you are. You invite sickness and worry. If you were not a blood relative I would have kept you back a long time ago. In fact the Commodore asked me to do just this, but I said no. He admired my faithfulness. It seems I cannot lose with him. “Faith will be repaid with faith,” he said. He has faith in me. Yes, he does, brother. There you go, laugh. You laugh at everything. But I ask you this question, and it is a serious one. Who do you know that has faith in you?’
He paused to dunk and scrub his body. I knocked upon the door as I opened it, stamping my feet ridiculously and clearing my throat. ‘Charlie,’ I called out. ‘I have your medicine with me.’ I puffed myself up to make my voice sound natural but my tone reflected the hurt I had suffered by the unkind words of my brother. When I entered the bathroom he was leaning halfway out of the tub, his body bright red from the waist down as though he were wearing pants. He was retching into a spittoon and I watched his sides spasming as he pushed out his poison bile. Holding up a finger and gasping, he said, ‘Don’t go anywhere.’ He continued his retching and I pulled up a chair to sit beside him. My knees were shaking and I wished, impossibly, I had never heard his speech. Finally I decided I could not stay in the room with him. I stood and laid the morphine on the chair, pointing to the door as though some pressing task awaited me on the other side. He did not notice my leaving, I do not think, preoccupied as he was with his vomiting and unwellness.
Chapter 16
I had nowhere to go, and did not wish to be seen by anyone for fear they would recognize my sadness, and so for several minutes I simply stood in the hall, shifting my weight and breathing and attempting to clear my mind of every recognizable thought. I noticed the candle I had lit was once again out. I assumed a draft had snuffed the flame but on closer inspection I saw my match was gone; I repeated my previous action of lighting the wick and propping the spent match against the candle in its black metal holder. I had the sensation of conversing, with whom I did not know, likely the hotel woman. Might I leave her a secret note? But I had no paper or ink and at any rate what would I say to her? Dear Miss, I wish you would wash your face and be nice to me. I have money. Do you want it? I never know what to do with it.
I sat on the stairs for twenty more minutes before returning to the room. Charlie was sitting on his bed, wearing his new shirt but no pants. He held one of his new boots in his hands, patting and admiring it. He had drunk a third of the morphine and its powers had taken hold; his eyes were sagging at their edges and he looked pleased as a pig on holiday.
‘Headache’s gone, brother?’
‘No, she’s still there, but the medicine makes it so I don’t mind her.’ Flipping the boot to study its interior he said solemnly, ‘The skill and patience involved with the making of this boot humbles me.’
I felt repulsed by Charlie then. ‘You make for a pretty picture.’
His lids were rising and falling like a pair of blinds being lifted and dropped. He shrugged and said, ‘Some days we are stronger . . . than others.’
‘When do you want to get moving?’
Now he spoke with his eyes closed: ‘I cannot travel in this state. Another day in town won’t matter. The woman mentioned a duel in the morning. We will leave just after that.’
‘Whatever you say.’
He opened his eyes to slits. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re acting differently.’
‘I feel the same as before.’
‘You were listening to me in the bathtub, weren’t you?’ I did not reply and his eyes fully opened: ‘I thought I heard you out there. Here is the fate of the sneak and the eavesdropper.’ Suddenly he doubled over, and a thin column of yellow bile poured from his mouth and onto the floor. His face was dripping when he raised it, his wet lips arched in a devilish smile. ‘I almost vomited in the boot! I was just about to vomit in the boot! Can you imagine how upset I would have been?’
‘I will see you later on,’ I told him.
‘What?’ he said. ‘No, stay here with me. I am not feeling well. I’m sorry if I made you feel badly before. They were just some thoughtless words.’
‘No, I would like to be alone. You drink your morphine and go to sleep.’
I turned for the door but he, either not noticing this or pretending it was not happening, continued to speak to me. ‘There was some type of poison in that brandy, I think.’ He retched in his own mouth. ‘This is the worst I’ve ever felt from alcohol.’
‘I drank the same brandy and I am not poisoned.’
‘You did not drink as much as I did.’
‘There’s no percentage in arguing with a drunkard as per whom should be blamed.’
‘So I’m a drunkard, now.’
‘I’m through with you for the day. I must attend to my stitches and wounds. I will see you later on, brother. I advise you to stay away from the saloon in the meantime.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll be able, being so depraved a drunkard as I am.’
He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this. I returned to the lobby (the candle, I noticed on my way down, had remained lit, the match untouched), where I found the woman behind her desk, reading a letter and smiling. Apparently this note brought welcome news, for she was in better spirits because of it and she greeted me, if not warmly, then not nearly as coldly as before. I asked to borrow a pair of scissors and a looking glass and she did not answer but offered to cut my hair for fifty cents, assuming this was my reason for needing the tools. I declined with thanks, explaining about my stitches; she asked if she might follow to my room and witness the gory procedure. When I told her I had hoped to spend some time apart from my brother she said, ‘That I can understand.’ Then she asked where I was planning to perform my minor surgery; when I admitted I had not thought about this, she invited me into her quarters.
‘Haven’t you some other pressing business?’ I asked. ‘You hadn’t a moment to spare, earlier this morning.’
Her cheek flushed, and she explained, ‘I’m sorry if I was short with you. My help disappeared last week and I’ve been losing sleep hoping to keep up. Also there has been a sickness in my family that I have been anxious to know about.’ She tapped the letter and nodded.
‘All is well then?’
‘Not all but most.’ With this, she invited me behind her sacred counter and I followed her through the beaded curtain and into her private world. The beads felt lovely and tickling on my face, and I experienced a shudder of happiness at this. It is true, I thought. I am living a life.
Chapter 17
Her room was not the room I would have imagined, if I had had time to imagine her room, which I did not. But there were no flowers and niceties, no silk or perfume, no lady things hung with a lady’s decorative hand; there were no volumes of poetry, no vanity and brush set; there were no lace-edged pillows featuring heartening proverbs meant to calm the spirit in times of distress or else lead us through the monotony of endlessly redundant days with their succoring words and tones. No, her room was a low-ceilinged bunker, without any windows or natural light, and as it was located just next to the kitchen and laundry it smelled of grease and brown water and moldy soap flakes. She must have noticed my dismayed expression, for she became shy, and said quietly that she did not suppose I was impressed with her quarters; this naturally sent me falling over myself to praise the room, which I told her gave one the feeling of safety by way of impenetrability and also that it was perfectly private. She said my words were kindly spoken but not necessary. The room was lacking, she knew this, but she would have to put up with it for only a short while longer, for owing to the constant stream of prospectors she was doing a remarkable business. ‘Six more months, then I will move into the finest room in this hotel.’ The way she spoke this last sentence informed me it was a significant ambition for her.
‘Six months is a long time,’ I said.
‘I have waited longer for less.’
‘I wish there was some way I could hurry it along for you.’
She puzzled over this. ‘What a strange thing to tell a stranger,’ she said.
Now she guided me to a small pine table, propping a looking glass before me. My overlarge face leapt into view, which I studied with my usual mixture of curiosity and pity. She fetched me a pair of scissors and I took them up, holding the blades between my palms to warm them. Tilting the glass so that I could watch myself working, I snipped at the knotted stitching and began pulling away the black string from my mouth. It did not hurt but vaguely burned, as when a rope is run through your hands. It was too early to have removed the stitches and the string was coated in blood. I stacked the pieces in a pile at my feet and afterward burned these, as their smell was ungodly. Once this was finished I elected to show the woman my new toothbrush and powder, which I had in my vest pocket. She became excited by the suggestion, for she was also a recent convert to this method, and she hurried to fetch her equipment that we might brush simultaneously. So it was that we stood side by side at the wash basin, our mouths filling with foam, smiling as we worked. After we finished there was an awkward moment where neither of us knew what to say; and when I sat upon her bed she began looking at the door as if wishing to leave.
‘Come sit beside me,’ I said. ‘I would like to talk to you.’
‘I should be getting back to my work.’
‘Am I not a guest here? You must entertain me, or I will write reproachful letters to the chamber of commerce.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Gathering her dress in her hands as she sat, she asked, ‘What would you like to talk about?’
‘Anything in the world. What about the letter, the one that made you smile? Who in your family was sick?’
‘My brother, Pete. He was kicked in the chest by a mule but they tell me he’s healing nicely. Mother says you can make out the hoof shape quite clearly.’
‘He is lucky. That would have been a most undignified death.’
‘Death is death.’
‘You are wrong. There are many kinds of death.’ I counted them off on my fingers: ‘Quick death, slow death. Early death, late death. Brave death, cowardly death.’
‘Anyway, he’s weakened. I will send a letter inviting him to work with me.’
‘You are close with your brother?’ I said.
‘We are twins,’ she answered. ‘We have always had a strong connection. I think of him sometimes and it is just as though he is in the room with me. The night he was kicked I awoke with a red mark over my breast. I suppose that sounds odd.’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘I believe I must have hit myself in my sleep,’ she explained.
‘Oh.’
‘Is that man upstairs really your brother?’
‘Yes.’
She said, ‘You two are very different, aren’t you? He is not bad, I don’t think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.’
‘Neither of us is good, but he is lazy, it’s true. When he was a boy he would not wash until my mother actually wept.’
‘What is your mother like?’
‘She was very smart, and very sad.’
‘When did she die?’
‘She did not die.’
‘But you said she was very smart.’
‘I guess I only meant—well, she won’t see us, if you want to know the truth. She is not happy with our work, and says she will not speak with us until we have found some other form of employment.’
‘And what is it you two do?’
‘We are Eli and Charlie Sisters.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, my.’
‘My father is dead. He was killed, and deserved to be killed.’
‘All right,’ she said, standing.
I gripped her hand. ‘What is your name? I suppose you have a man already? Yes or no?’ But she was edging toward the door and said she had not a minute longer to spare. I stood and moved in close to her, asking if I might steal a kiss, but she claimed once again to be hurried. I pressed her for details in respect to her feelings for me, if in fact she had any; she answered that she did not know me well enough to say, and admitted a preference for slight men, or at least men not quite as heavyset as me. She was not saying it to be cruel but the effects of her words stung me, and after she stole away I stood a long while before her looking glass, studying my profile, the line I cut in this world of men and ladies.
Chapter 18
I avoided Charlie all that afternoon and evening. I returned to our room after dinner and found him sleeping, the morphine bottle toppled and empty on the floor. In the morning we ate breakfast together in our room, or he ate breakfast, as I had resolved to cease filling myself so gluttonously, that I might trim my middle down to a more suitable shape and weight. Charlie was groggy but glad, and wanted to make friends with me. Pointing his knife at my face he asked, ‘Remember how you got your freckles?’
I shook my head. I was not ready to make friends. I said, ‘Do you know the specifics of this duel?’
He nodded. ‘One man is a lawyer, and by all accounts out of his element in such a fight. Williams is his name. He is going up against a ranch hand with an evil history, a man called Stamm. They say Stamm will kill Williams dead, no way around it.’
‘But what are the specifics of their quarrel?’
‘Stamm hired Williams to chase down some wages owed him by a local rancher. The matter went to court and Williams lost. The moment the verdict came in, Stamm challenged Williams to pistols.’
‘And the lawyer has no history of shooting?’
‘You hear talk of gentlemen gunfighters, but I’ve yet to meet one.’
‘It doesn’t sound like much of a pairing. I would just as soon move on.’
‘If that’s what you wish to do.’ Charlie pulled a watch from his pocket. I recognized it as the watch of the prospector he had killed. ‘It is just past nine o’clock, now. You can go ahead on Tub, and I’ll catch up after the duel, in an hour’s time.’
‘I believe I will,’ I said.
The hotel woman knocked and entered to collect our plates and cups. I bid her a good morning and she responded kindly, laying a hand on my back as she passed. Charlie also greeted her, but she pretended not to have heard. When she commented on my untouched plate, I patted my stomach and said I was hoping to slim down for reasons of the heart.
‘Is that so,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Charlie.
The woman’s stained smock was nowhere in sight, replaced by a red linen blouse, cut low to reveal her throat and collarbone. Charlie asked if she would attend the gunfight and she answered in the affirmative, telling us, ‘You men would do well to hurry up and find yourselves a place to watch. The streets fill up quickly here, and people are loath to give up their positions.’
‘Perhaps I will stay on,’ I said.
‘Oh?’ asked Charlie.
We three walked out to the dueling grounds together. As I pushed through the crowd I was pleased to notice the woman’s arm on mine. I was feeling very grand and chivalrous; Charlie brought up the rear, whistling a conspicuously innocent melody. We found our place in the crowd and it was as the woman predicted, the competition for choice locations was fierce. I threatened a man who pushed against her, and Charlie called out, ‘Beware the Rabid Gentleman, you faithful natives.’ As the duelists arrived a body at my back bumped into me once, and then again. I turned to complain and saw it was a man with a child of seven or eight resting upon his shoulders—the child had been hitting me with his boot. ‘I would appreciate your boy not kicking my back,’ I said.
‘Was he kicking you?’ asked the man. ‘I don’t think he was.’
‘He was, and if it happens again I will lay blame with you alone.’
‘Is that a fact?’ he said, making an expression that imparted his belief I was being unreasonable or overly dramatic. I tried to match his eyes then, that I might inform him of the peril his attitude was leading him toward, but he would not look at me, he only peered over my shoulder at the dueling grounds. I turned away to stew, the woman clutching my forearm to soothe me, but my temper was up now, and I spun around to readdress the man: ‘Anyway, I don’t understand why you would show the lad such violence at his age.’
‘I’ve seen a killing before,’ the boy told me. ‘I saw an Indian cut through with a dagger blade, his guts running out of him like a fat red snake. I also saw a man hanging from a tree outside of town. His tongue was swelled up in his head, like this.’ The child made an ugly face.
‘I still don’t think it’s correct,’ I told the man, who said nothing. The child continued to make his face and I turned back to watch the men taking their places in the street. They were easy enough to identify: The hand, Stamm, was in leather and well-worn cotton, his face weathered and unshaven. He stood alone, without a second to assist him, looking out at the crowd with a dead expression in his eyes, his arms hanging slack at his sides. The lawyer Williams wore a gray tailored suit, his hair center-parted, his mustache waxed and trimmed. His second, similarly dandified, removed Williams’s coat, and the crowd watched the lawyer performing a series of knee-bending exercises. Now he leveled a phantom gun at Stamm and imitated its recoil. These pantomimes were the cause of some stifled chuckling in the crowd, but Williams’s face was perfectly serious and solemn. I thought Stamm was drunk or had recently been drunk.
‘Who are you hoping for?’ I asked the hotel woman.
‘Stamm is a bastard. I don’t know Williams but he looks like a bastard, also.’
The man with the child on his shoulders overheard this and said, ‘Mister Williams is not a bastard. Mister Williams is a gentleman.’
I turned slowly. ‘He is a friend of yours?’
‘I am proud to say he is.’
‘I hope you have said your good-byes. He will be dead within the minute.’
The man shook his head. ‘He is not afraid.’
It was such a stupid thing to say, I actually laughed. ‘So what if he isn’t?’
The man dismissed me with a wave. The child, anyway, had heard me; he regarded me with a knowing fear. I told him, ‘Your father wants you to see violence, and today you will.’ The man stood a moment, then cursed under his breath and moved away, pushing through the throng to watch the duel from another location.
Now I heard Williams’s second call out to Stamm: ‘Where is your second, sir?’
‘I don’t know, and I don’t care,’ Stamm replied.
Williams and his second had a private word. The second nodded and asked Stamm if he might inspect his pistol. Stamm repeated that he did not care, and the second took up the weapon to check it. Nodding his approval, he asked if Stamm wished to check Williams’s pistol, and Stamm said he did not. Now Williams approached, and he and Stamm stood facing each other. Despite the show of bravery, it did not seem that Williams’s heart was in the fight; sure enough, he whispered into his second’s ear and the second said to Stamm, ‘If you wish to make an apology, that would satisfy Mr. Williams.’
‘I don’t,’ said Stamm.
‘Very well,’ said the second. He stood the men back-to-back and called it at twenty paces. He began to count it out and the duelists took their steps in time. Williams’s forehead was shining with perspiration, and his pistol was trembling, while Stamm might have been walking to an outhouse, for all the concern he displayed. At the count of twenty they swiveled and fired. Williams missed but Stamm’s bullet struck Williams in the center of his chest. The lawyer’s face transformed to a ridiculous mask of agony and surprise and, I thought, a degree of insult. Staggering this way and that, he pulled his trigger and fired into the body of onlookers. A series of shrieks, then—the bullet had struck a young woman in the shin and she lay in the dirt writhing and clutching her leg. I do not know if Williams noticed his shameful error or not; by the time I looked back at him he was dead on the ground. Stamm was walking away in the direction of a saloon, pistol holstered, his arms once more at his sides. The second stood alone on the dueling ground, looking impotently to his left and right. I scanned the crowd for the man with the boy on his shoulders, that I might make a scornful face at him, but they were nowhere to be found.
Chapter 19
The woman had some work to attend to, and excused herself while I packed my bags to leave. I searched the hotel to say good-bye but could not find her, so I made her a present of five dollars, hiding the coin beneath the sheets, that she might associate her thoughts of me with the notion of a marriage bed, or anyway a bed. Charlie caught me doing this and said he admired the gesture but that my plan was flawed in that the sheets were dirty and would continue to accumulate dirt because the woman had no interest in keeping a tidy business. ‘You are only giving away that money to the next man who sleeps in this room.’
‘She may find it,’ I said.
‘She will not, and besides that, five dollars is too much. Leave her a dollar at the front desk. She could have her smock cleaned, with enough left over to drink herself into a stupor.’
‘You are only jealous because you don’t have a girl.’
‘Is that hard scrubber your girl? My congratulations. It’s a shame we couldn’t take her to Mother. She would be so glad to meet the delicate flower.’
‘If it’s a question of talking with a fool or not at all, I will choose the second.’
‘Spitting into the dirt, wiping her nose on her sleeve. A very special lady indeed.’
‘Not talking at all,’ I said, and I left him to gather his things. Stepping into the road to meet Tub, I greeted him and asked how he was feeling. He appeared more alert than the day previous, though his eye was so much the worse, and I found myself sympathetic to the animal. He was resilient, if nothing else. I moved to stroke him but when my hand landed on his face he started, and I experienced shame at this, that he was so unused to a gentle touch. I decided to try to show him a better time, and made a private promise to this effect. Now Charlie exited the hotel, chuckling at the tender scene. ‘Witness here the lover of all living things,’ he called. ‘Will he leave his faulty beast cash in its feedbag? I would not put it past him, friends.’ He approached and snapped his fingers on either side of Tub’s head. Tub’s ears twitched and Charlie, satisfied with the test, moved to attend to Nimble. ‘We will be out of doors for the rest of the trip,’ he said. ‘No more lazing about in hotel rooms for us.’
‘It makes no difference to me,’ I told him.
He paused. ‘I only mean, if you suffer another of your spells or illnesses, I will have to carry on without you.’
‘Spells or illnesses? That’s fine, coming from you. Two times now you’ve slowed our progress with your drinking.’
‘All right then, let’s just say that we’ve had some bad luck, and set a poor example for ourselves. What’s passed is passed, but that’s the last of it, are we agreed?’
‘Let’s not hear anymore of my spells or illnesses.’
‘Fair enough, brother.’ He mounted Nimble and looked down the road, beyond the storefronts and toward the wilderness. I heard the tapping of metal on glass and saw the hotel woman standing in mine and Charlie’s room on the second story, the five dollars gripped between her fingers as she rapped it across the pane. Now she kissed the coin and held her palm to the window, and I crossed my arms at Charlie, whose face was cold and thoughtless; he kicked Nimble in the ribs and rode away. I raised a hand to the woman and she mouthed some words that I could not decipher but assumed were an expression of thanks. I turned to follow Charlie, thinking of her voice in the empty room where she worked and worried, and I was glad to have left her the money and hoped it would make her happy, if only for a little while. I resolved to lose twenty-five pounds of fat and to write her a letter of love and praises, that I might improve her time on the earth with the devotion of another human being.
Chapter 20
There was a storm at our backs, the last true storm of the winter, but we managed to keep ahead of it and made good time through the afternoon and into the night. We set up camp in a large cave, its roof blackened with the soot of other men’s fires. Charlie made us a dinner of beans and pork and biscuits but I only ate the beans, secretly feeding the rest to Tub. I went to sleep hungry and woke up in the middle of the night to find a riderless horse standing at the mouth of the cave, breathing and rocking on its feet. It was black in coloring and slick with sweat; when he began to shiver, I approached him and tossed my blanket over his back.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Charlie, leaning up on his elbow beside the fire.
‘A horse.’
‘Where is the rider?’
‘There is no rider that I can see.’
‘If the rider appears, you may wake me.’ He turned and fell back asleep.
The horse was seventeen hands tall and all muscle. He had no brand or saddle or shoes but his mane was clean and he did not shy from my hand. I brought him a biscuit but he was not hungry and only nibbled at it. ‘Where are you headed to, running through the night like that?’ I asked him. I tried to guide him toward Nimble and Tub, to share in their huddled heat, but he pulled away and returned to the mouth, where I had found him. ‘You mean to leave me without a blanket, is that it?’ I reentered the cave to stoke the fire, curling up beside it for warmth, but I could not sleep without proper covering and instead spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious. By the time the sun rose in the morning I had decided to keep this horse for my own. I told my plan to Charlie as I handed him his coffee and he nodded. ‘You can have him shoed in Jacksonville. And we might get a fair price for Tub, though I doubt it—they’ll probably only slaughter him. Well, you can keep whatever money you get. You’ve had a tough time with Tub, I’ll not deny it. A happy coincidence, this horse just walking up to meet you. What will you call him? What about, Son of Tub.’
I said, ‘I should think some farmer would be happy to pay for Tub’s services. He has a few good years left yet.’
‘I wouldn’t get his hopes up.’ He turned to Tub and said, ‘Stew meat? Or pretty pasture, with the farmer’s soft-bottomed daughter?’ To me he whispered, ‘Stew meat.’
The black horse accepted the bit and saddle without incident. Tub hung his head when I slung a rope around his neck and I could not meet his eyes. We were two miles out when we found the dead Indian on the ground. ‘This will be the previous owner,’ Charlie said. We rolled him over to get a look. His body was stiff and distorted, his neck snapped back and his mouth open wide in an expression of absolute suffering.
‘Strange, though, that an Indian horse would take a bit and saddle,’ I said.
‘Must’ve been that he stole it from a white man,’ said Charlie.
‘But the horse has no shoes or brand?’
‘It’s a conundrum,’ he admitted. Pointing to the Indian, he said, ‘Ask him.’
The Indian had no wounds to explain his death but was extremely heavyset and we thought perhaps he had suffered an attack of organ failure, then fell from the horse and broke his neck. ‘Horse just kept on going,’ Charlie said. ‘Likely they were headed to the cave. I wonder what he’d have done, the two of us sleeping in his spot like that.’ The black horse lowered his head to the Indian, smelling and nudging him. At this same time I could feel Tub looking at me. I decided to return to our travels. At first the black horse didn’t want to leave but once we were clear he ran very nicely despite the rough terrain, and having Tub in tow behind us. A heavy rain began to fall but the chill was gone from the air; I was sweating, as was the new horse, and his smell and warmth were agreeable to me. His every move was sharp and graceful and I found him to be an altogether gifted runner, and though it did not feel good to think of it, I knew it would be a great relief to be free of Tub. I looked back at him and watched as he did his best to keep up. His eye was watering and bloodshot and he held his head up and to the side, as if to avoid drowning.
Chapter 21
When we arrived in Jacksonville, I wondered if Charlie would honor his vow to sleep out of doors; I knew he would not when I saw his face look searchingly into the glowing windows of the first saloon we passed. We stabled the horses for the night. I told the hand to shoe the black horse and asked him for a price on Tub. The man held his lantern next to Tub’s injured eye and said he would tell me in the morning, when he might get a better look at him. Charlie and I parted ways in the center of town. He wished to drink and I to eat. He pointed to a hotel as our eventual meeting place, and I nodded.
The rainstorm had passed; now the moon was full and low and the stars were bright. I entered a modest restaurant and took a seat by the window, watching my hands on the bare table. They were still and ivory looking in the light of the planets, and I felt no particular personal attachment to them. A boy came by and placed a candle on the table, ruining the effect, and I studied the bill of fare posted on the wall. I had eaten little at breakfast, despite having gone to sleep with an empty stomach, and my insides were squirming with hunger. But I found the food to be of the most fattening sort, and when the waiter arrived at my side, half bowing with a pencil at the ready, I asked him if he had anything to offer that was not quite so rich.
‘Not hungry tonight, sir?’
‘I am weak with hunger,’ I told him. ‘But I am looking for something less filling than beer, beef, and buttered spuds.’
The waiter tapped his pencil on his pad. ‘You want to eat but you don’t want to become full?’
‘I want to be unhungry,’ I said.
‘And what is the difference?’
‘I want to eat, only I don’t want to eat such heavy foods, don’t you see?’
He said, ‘To me, the whole point of eating is to get full.’
‘Are you telling me there are no options other than what’s listed?’
The waiter was baffled. He excused himself to fetch the cook from the kitchen; she was overworked and annoyed at the inconvenience.
‘What’s the problem, sir?’ she asked, wiping her hands on her sleeves.
‘I never said there was a problem. I only wonder if there’s a lighter option than the meals listed on the bill of fare.’
The cook looked at the waiter and back to me. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘We could give you a half portion, if you’re not hungry,’ said the waiter.
‘I’ve already told you I’m hungry. I’m famished. But I’m looking for something that isn’t so filling, do you see?’
‘When I eat a meal, I want to get full,’ said the cook.
‘That’s the object of eating!’ said the waiter.
‘And then, when you finish, you pat your belly and say, “I’m full.” ’
‘Everybody does that.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a half portion of beef, no spuds, with wine. Do you have any vegetables? Any greens?’
I thought the cook would laugh in my face. ‘I believe there are some carrots out by the hutches.’
‘Bring me a handful of carrots, opposite the beef, peeled and boiled. You can charge me the price of a full plate for the trouble, is that all right?’
‘Whatever you say,’ said the cook.
‘I’ll bring the wine out now,’ said the waiter.
When they brought me my plate it was heaped with limp, hot carrots. The cook had skinned the stalks but left the green tops attached, a malicious oversight, I felt. I choked down half a dozen of these but it was as though they disappeared before arriving in my stomach, and I began somewhat despairingly to root for the beef. I found this at the bottom of the pile and savored every bite, but it was gone far too quickly, and I became depressed. I blew out the candle and stared once more at my ghostly hands. When they began to tingle, I wondered about the curse from the gypsy-witch’s shack. When would it come to bloom, if ever? What form would it take? The waiter returned to clear the table and pointed at the remaining carrots. ‘Didn’t you care for the vegetables?’ he asked naively.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Take it away.’
‘More wine?’
‘One more glass.’
‘Would you like any dessert?’
‘No! Goddamnit!’
The tormented waiter hurried away from me.
Chapter 22
In the morning I checked on Charlie and was unsurprised to find him sick and disinclined to travel. I started in with my halfhearted reprimand, but it was not necessary; he knew as well as I we could not pass another day without hard riding and he promised to be ready in one hour. I did not know what magic he thought to conjure that might bring his suffering to an end in so short a time but I did not engage him on this topic, leaving him instead to his vapors and pains and returning to the restaurant from the night previous for my much needed breakfast. The waiter was not there but in his place was a lad who resembled him and whom I assumed was his son; however, when I asked, ‘Where is your father?’ the boy gripped his hands and said, ‘Heaven.’ I ate a small portion of eggs and beans and was still very hungry when I was finished. I sat looking at the greasy plate, wishing, frankly, to lick it, but decorum kept me from doing so. When the lad came by and picked the plate up I watched it hovering across the dining room and into the kitchen, out of my field of vision. The boy returned and asked if I wanted anything more before paying up. ‘Fresh pie this morning,’ he said.
‘What kind of pie?’ I demanded. I thought, Don’t let it be cherry.
‘Cherry,’ said the boy. ‘Just out of the oven. They go fast around here. Kind of famous, really.’ I must have been making a face, for he asked me, ‘You okay, mister? You look hurt.’
Beads of sweat grew from my forehead, and my hands were trembling. My very blood wanted that cherry pie. Dabbing my face with the napkin, I told the lad I was fine, only tired.
‘Pie or no pie?’ he asked.
‘No pie!’ I said. He laid down the bill and returned to the kitchen. After paying up I set out to replenish my and Charlie’s stock of food, humming my tune of virtue. A rooster stood before me in the road, looking for a fight; I tipped my hat to him and he scooted away over the puddles, all brawn and feathers and brainlessness.
With my tooth powder dwindling, I asked the proprietor at the trading post if he carried any and he pointed to a short row of boxes, each of these advertising a different scent or flavor: Sage, pine, mint, and fennel. When he asked which flavor I was after I told him I might stick to mint, as I had been happy with its taste up to then, but the man, a pigeon-in-a-vest type, insisted I sample the others. ‘The spice of life,’ he said, and though I did not care for his satisfied attitude, I was curious about these others and carried them to a washbasin in the back room, careful not to bend or damage the boxes lest I be forced to purchase one I did not care for. I sampled them one after the other. Returning to the front room I told the proprietor, ‘The pine is all right. It offers a fine, clean feeling on the tongue. The sage burns my throat; I did not like it much. The fennel is downright foul. I will take this mint one, as I said before.’
‘It is always better to know for sure,’ he said, an obvious, somewhat idiotic statement to which I did not respond. In addition to the powder I purchased a pound of flour, a pound of coffee, a half pound of sugar, two pounds of beans, two pounds of salted pork, and two pounds of dried fruit, my stomach now actively groaning. I drank a large cup of water and walked to the stable, my insides sloshing with each step.
The stable hand had just finished shoeing the black horse when I entered. ‘I will give you six dollars for the low-backed animal,’ he said. ‘We will call it a dollar for the shoes, so let’s say five dollars.’ I approached Tub and placed a hand on his muzzle. ‘Good morning,’ I told him. I felt he recognized me; he looked at me honestly, and without fear or malice. The stable hand stood at my back. ‘He’ll very probably lose that eye,’ he told me. ‘Will he even pull a cart? I will give you four dollars.’
‘I have decided not to sell him,’ I said.
‘I will give you six dollars, including the shoes.’
‘No, I have changed my mind. Let us discuss the black horse.’
‘Seven dollars is my final offer for the low-backed animal.’
‘What will you give me for the black horse?’
‘I cannot afford the black horse. I will give you eight dollars for the other.’
‘Make me an offer on the black horse,’ I said.
‘Twenty-five dollars.’
‘He is worth fifty dollars.’
‘Thirty dollars with the saddle.’
‘Don’t be ignorant. I will take forty, without the saddle.’
‘I will give you thirty-five dollars.’
‘Thirty-five dollars without the saddle?’
‘Thirty-five, without the saddle, minus a dollar for the shoes.’
‘You expect me to pay for shoes on a horse I’m not keeping?’
‘You asked me to shoe him. Now, you must pay for the service.’
‘You would have shoed him anyway.’
‘That is neither up nor down.’
‘Thirty-four dollars,’ I said.
The hand disappeared into his quarters to fetch his money. I could hear him arguing with a woman about it. He spoke in a hiss, and though I could not grasp the words, I understood the sentiment: Shut up! The man out there is a fool! Charlie entered the stable then, green at the neck but hoping to hide it. When the hand came out with the money, he also brought a bottle of whiskey to toast the deal in good faith. I offered a drink to my brother and he swooned. He was so distracted by his own suffering he did not notice my business dealings until we were ten miles out of town.
Chapter 23
‘Where is the black horse? Why are you still riding Tub?’
‘I had a change of heart and have decided to keep him.’
‘I don’t understand you, brother.’
‘He has been a faithful animal to me.’
‘I don’t understand you. That black horse was one in a million.’
I said, ‘It was a few days ago you were holding me back from selling Tub. You were only converted to my way of thinking when a suitable replacement showed up on the wind, free of charge.’
‘You are always harkening back in arguments, but another time is another time and thus irrelevant. Providence brought you that black horse. And what will become of the man who shuns Providence?’
‘Providence has no place in this discussion. An Indian ate too much and died, that was the source of my good fortune. The point of my argument is that you were only keen on Tub’s departure when it suited you financially.’
‘So I am a drunkard and a miser?’
‘Who is harkening back now?’
‘A drunken miser. There is my sorry fate.’
‘You are a contrarian.’
He lurched, as if hit by a bullet. ‘A drunken, miserly contrarian! The heat of his vicious words!’ He chuckled to himself. In a moment he grew thoughtful and asked, ‘What did we make on the black horse, anyway?’
‘We?’ I said, and I laughed at him.
We quickened the pace of our animals. Charlie’s sickness was stubborn and twice I watched him spit out mouthfuls of bile midstride. Was there any greater agony than riding a horse while brandy-sick? I had to admit my brother took his punishments without complaint, but I knew he could not keep up the pace for longer than a couple of hours, and I believe he was about to call for a rest when we spied a grouping of wagons at the base of a pass in the distance. He headed in their direction, riding purposefully, with an air of dutiful seriousness, but I knew he was only counting the seconds until he could dismount and rest his tortured innards.
We rode around the three wagons but saw no sign of life save for the small fire at its center. Charlie called out a greeting but received no response. He dismounted and moved to enter the circle by climbing over the hitches of two adjoining wagons when the barrel of a bulky rifle emerged silently, viperlike from one of the canopies. Charlie stared up at the gun, his eyes slightly crossing. ‘Okay,’ he said. The barrel rose to his forehead, and a boy of fifteen years or less looked upon us. His face was dirt caked, blistered at the nostrils and mouth, his expression a permanent sneer; his hands were steady and his posture was at ease with the weapon—I believed he was well acquainted with it. His eyes were full of mistrust and dislike and he was in short a most unfriendly young man, and I was concerned he would murder my brother if we did not communicate ourselves, and quickly. ‘We don’t mean you any mischief, son,’ I said.
‘That’s what the last ones told me,’ said the boy. ‘Then they hit me on the head and took all my potato cakes.’
‘We don’t want any potato cakes,’ Charlie said.
‘We’re a good match then, because I haven’t got any.’
I could see the boy was near starved, and told him he was welcome to our pork if he was hungry. ‘I bought it just this morning, in town,’ I said. ‘And flour, too. Would you like that, boy? A feast of pork and biscuits?’
‘You are a liar,’ he said. ‘There’s no town near here. My daddy went searching for food a week ago.’
Charlie looked over at me. ‘I wonder if that is the man we met on the trail yesterday. He was in a hurry to get back and feed his son, remember?’
‘That’s right. And he was heading this way, too.’
‘Was he riding a gray mare?’ asked the boy, his expression transformed to one of pitiful hopefulness.
Charlie nodded. ‘A gray mare, yes he was. He told us what a fine boy you were, how proud he was of you. He was worried sick, he said. Couldn’t hardly wait to see you.’
‘Daddy said that?’ the boy asked doubtfully. ‘Did he really?’
‘Yes, he was mighty glad to be heading back. It’s a shame we had to kill him.’
‘W-what?’ Before the boy could recover Charlie snatched the rifle away and jammed him hard on the head with the stock. The boy fell back into the canopied wagon and was silent. ‘Let’s get some coffee on that fire,’ Charlie said, jumping over the hitches.
Chapter 24
Charlie had been invigorated by this latest adventure —the blood rush had banished his sickness he said—and he fell to preparing our lunch with an uncommon enthusiasm. He agreed to make enough for the boy, but not until I checked his condition, because for all we knew the blow had killed him. I put my head in the canopy and saw he was alive, sitting up now, and turned away from me. ‘We’re cooking some food out here,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have to eat with us if you don’t want to but my brother’s making you a plateful.’
‘Bastards killed my daddy,’ said the boy, choking on his tears.
‘Oh, that was just a ruse to get clear of your rifle.’
He turned and looked at me. The blow had split his forehead and a trickle of blood was thickening over his eyebrow. ‘You mean it?’ he asked. ‘You put it on God?’
‘That wouldn’t mean anything to me, so I won’t bother with it. I’ll put in on my horse, though, how about that?’
‘You never saw a man on a gray mare?’
‘We never saw him.’
The boy collected himself and began climbing toward me over the wagon benches. I took his arm to help him down; his legs were weak as I walked him to the fire. ‘Look who’s back from the brink of lonely death,’ Charlie said cheerfully.
‘I want my rifle,’ said the boy.
‘Best to brace yourself for disappointment then.’
‘We’ll give it back on our way out,’ I told the boy. I handed him a plate of pork and beans and biscuits but he did not eat, he only stared mournfully at the food, as though the meal itself was somehow melancholy to him. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘I’m tired of this,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s always hitting me on the head.’
‘You’re lucky I didn’t take yours off with a bullet,’ said Charlie.
‘We won’t hit you again,’ I told him, ‘as long as you don’t try anything smart. Now, eat your pork before it gets cold.’
The boy cleaned his plate but quickly vomited it back up. He had gone too long without solid food and his stomach could not accept so much out of the blue. He sat there looking at his half-digested lunch on the ground, wondering I suppose if he should scoop it up and try again. ‘Kid,’ Charlie said, ‘you so much as touch it and I’ll shoot you dead.’ I gave the boy the bulk of my plateful and instructed him to eat slowly, and afterward to lay back and breathe in plenty of fresh air. He did this and fifteen minutes passed without incident, though his stomach was loudly squirming. The boy sat up and asked, ‘Aren’t you going to be hungry now?’
‘My brother is fasting in the name of love,’ said Charlie.
I blushed and said nothing. I had not known my brother was aware of my diet; I could not match his playful gaze.
The boy was looking at me for an explanation. ‘You got a yourself a girl?’ Still I said nothing. ‘I got one too,’ he told me. ‘At least she was my girl when Daddy and I left Tennessee.’
Charlie said, ‘How it is that you’ve found yourself alone with three wagons, no animals, and no food?’
He said, ‘There was a group of us heading out to work the California rivers. Me and my daddy and his two brothers, Jimmy and Tom, and one of Tom’s friends and then Tom’s friend’s wife. She was the first to die. Couldn’t keep any food in her. Daddy said it was wrong to’ve brought her, and I guess it was, too. We buried her and kept on, then Tom’s friend turned home, said we could keep his wagon and gear because his heart was broken and he wanted to get back to start his grieving. Uncle Tom took a shot at him once he was about a quarter mile out.’
‘Just after the man’s wife died?’ I asked.
‘It was a couple days after she died. Tom wasn’t trying to hit him, just scare him. A bit of fun, he called it.’
‘That’s not very kind of him.’
‘No, Uncle Tom never did anything kind in his life. He died next, in a saloon fight. Took a knife in the belly and the blood pooled out like a rug underneath him. We were all pretty glad he was gone, to tell you the truth. Tom was hard to be around. He hit me on the head more than anybody else. Didn’t even need a reason, just passing time.’
‘Didn’t your daddy tell him to stop?’
‘Daddy was never much for talking? He’s what you might call the private type.’
‘Carry on with the story,’ said Charlie.
‘Right,’ said the boy. ‘So Tom’s dead, and we sold his horse and tried to sell his wagon, but nobody wanted it because it was so poorly outfitted. Now, we got two oxen pulling three carts, and what do you think happens next? The oxen die, starved and thirsty, with whipping wounds on their backs, and now it’s me and Daddy and Uncle Jimmy, and the horses are pulling the carts, and the money’s going quick and so’s the food, and we’re looking at one another and we’re all thinking the same thing: Dang.’
‘Was Uncle Jimmy nasty, too?’ I asked.
‘I liked Uncle Jimmy right up until he took all the money and ran out on us. That was two weeks ago. I don’t know if he went east or west or north or south. Daddy and I’ve been stuck here, sitting and thinking what to do. He left, like I said, a week ago. I expect he will be back soon. I don’t know what could have taken him so long as this. I’m obliged to you for sharing this food with me. I nearly killed a rabbit yesterday but they’re hard to lay a bead on, and my ammunition’s not very well stocked.’
‘Where is your mother?’ Charlie asked.
‘Dead.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Thank you. But she was always dead.’
‘Tell us about your girl,’ I said.
‘Her name is Anna, and her hair is the color of honey. It is the cleanest hair I have ever seen and runs halfway down to the ground. I am in love with her.’
‘Are your feelings reciprocated?’
‘I don’t know what that word means.’
‘Does she love you too?’
‘I don’t think she does, no. I have tried to kiss and hold her but she pushes me away. Last time, she said she would have her father and brothers beat me if I did it again. But she’ll change her tune when she sees my pocketful of riches. There is gold tumbling down those California rivers like hop-frogs, and all you have to do is stand still and catch them in your pan.’
‘Is that what you believe?’ asked Charlie.
‘It said as much in the newspaper.’
‘You are in for a rude awakening, I fear.’
‘I just want to get there already. I’m tired of sitting here with nothing to do.’
‘You’re not far now,’ I told him. ‘That’s California just over the pass, there.’
‘That’s the direction Daddy went.’
Charlie laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked the boy.
‘Nothing,’ Charlie answered. ‘He probably just dashed over to catch a few pounds of tumbling gold. He’ll be back with some ready cash by suppertime, I am sure of it.’
‘You don’t know my daddy.’
‘Don’t I?’
The boy sniffed and turned to me. ‘You never told me about your girl. What color is her hair?’
‘Chestnut brown.’
‘Mud brown,’ said Charlie.
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked. I watched him, but he did not answer.
‘What’s her name?’ asked the boy.
I said, ‘That is all to be worked out.’
The boy drew in the dirt with a stick. ‘You don’t know her name?’
‘Her name is Sally,’ Charlie said. ‘And if you’re curious how I know that and my brother doesn’t, so should he be.’
‘What’s that mean?’ I asked sharply. He still did not answer. I stood and looked down over him. ‘What the hell does it mean?’
‘I only say it to put you on the proper path,’ said Charlie.
‘Only say what?’
‘That I got for free what you paid five dollars for and still did not get.’
I started to speak but trailed off. I remembered meeting the woman on the stairs of the hotel. She had been in Charlie’s room, filling his bathtub, and she was upset. ‘What did you do to her?’
‘She laid it out for me. I wasn’t even thinking of it. Fifty cents for hand work, dollar for the mouth, fifty cents more for the whole thing. I took the whole thing.’
My head was thumping hard. I found myself reaching for a biscuit. ‘What was she so upset about?’
‘If you want the truth, I found the service lacking. My payment reflected this, or should I say my nonpayment, and she took offense. You have to know, I wouldn’t have touched the girl if I’d known how you felt. But I was sick, you’ll remember, and in need of comfort. I’m sorry, Eli, but at that time, far as I knew she was up for grabs.’
I ate the biscuit in two bites and reached for another. ‘Where’s the pork fat?’ The boy handed me the tin and I dipped the biscuit whole.
‘I let your five dollars slide,’ Charlie continued, ‘but I didn’t want to see you starve yourself for no reason.’ My blood was pulsing ebulliently in celebration of the arrival of the heavy food, while my heart was struck dumb from this news of the hotel woman’s character. I sat back down, chewing and thinking and brooding. ‘I could make some more pork,’ Charlie offered peaceably.
‘Make more of everything,’ I said.
The boy pulled a harmonica from his shirt pocket and tapped it on his palm.
‘I will play an eating song.’
Part Two
CALIFORNIA
Chapter 25
The boy said he had a horse hidden in a nearby cluster of timber, and asked if he could ride along with us to the California border. Charlie was against it but I could not see the harm and told the boy he had five minutes to gather his effects. He left and returned with his horse, a small and sickly thing with no saddle or accoutrements, and with patches of its hair fallen away, exposing raw flesh and rib bones. In response to our concerned expressions the boy replied, ‘I know he doesn’t look like much, but Lucky Paul can climb these steep hills like a spider climbs a wall.’
Charlie asked me, ‘Will you speak to him, or shall I?’
I said that I would and Charlie stepped away. I was not sure where to begin but decided to address the problem from the practical standpoint.
‘Where is your saddle, boy?’
‘I have a blanket, and my own personal padding.’ He tapped his backside.
‘No bit? No reins?’
‘Uncle Jimmy took those with him. Who knows why. But it doesn’t matter. Lucky Paul knows which way to go.’
‘We will not wait for you,’ I told him.
He was feeding the horse a biscuit. ‘You do not understand, but you will. He is fed and rested and ready to cover some ground.’
His confidence was true, and I had a hope Lucky Paul was just the type of runner the boy claimed him to be, but this was not the case, and we lost them instantaneously. The horse had no interest in climbing the long pass; looking back I saw the boy pummeling him about his skull and neck. Charlie nearly fell off Nimble from laughing, and neither was the humor of the episode lost on me, but this diversion quickly lost its appeal and we settled into some serious riding, so that we hit the snowy summit in a matter of four hours. Despite Tub’s eye wound he never so much as stumbled, and I felt for the first time that we knew and understood each other; I sensed in him a desire to improve himself, which perhaps was whimsy or wishful thinking on my part, but such are the musings of the traveling man.
The far side of the pass presented us with more favorable terrain, and by dusk we had crossed beneath the snow line, where we set up for the night. In the morning we slept late and rode at a moderate pace into California. We entered a dense and tall forest of pines late in the afternoon and happened on a small, winding stream, the sight of which gave us pause. Here before us was the very thing that had induced thousands of previously intelligent men and women to abandon their families and homes forever. The both of us stared at it, saying nothing. Finally Charlie could not help himself; he dismounted and squatted beside the stream, pulling up a handful of wet sand and rooting through it with his finger.
I spied a tent on the far side of the water, a quarter mile to the north. A lone face, bearded and extremely dirty, peered out from behind it. I held up my hand in greeting and the face darted back. ‘I believe we have us a real live prospector,’ I said.
‘Pretty far out to be working, don’t you think?’
‘For all we know. Shall we pay him a visit and see how he is doing?’
Charlie threw the sand back. ‘There is nothing in this river, brother.’
‘But you’re not curious to know?’
‘If you want to check in with him, you go ahead while I make my toilet. But I cannot invest my own time with every curiosity.’
He walked into the forest and I rode Tub upstream, calling my greeting from across the water, but there was no sign of the bearded man. I saw a pair of boots in front of his tent and a small fire in a pit; there was a saddle on the ground, but no horse that I could see. I called out once again, and again I heard nothing. Had the man run barefoot into the woods rather than share news of unknown riches? But no, the sight of the blighted camp told me the prospector was not having any successes. Here was a man greedy for gold but not hearty enough to brave the wasps’ nest that was California proper. He would find nothing, he would starve, he would rave and expire—I could see his naked body picked over by blackbirds. ‘One of these cold mornings,’ I said.
There came the sound of a rifle being cocked behind me. ‘Cold mornings what?’ said a voice. I raised my hands and the prospector began laughing, relishing his position.
‘Tunnel under the river,’ he said. ‘Weren’t thinking of that, were you?’ He jabbed my thigh painfully with his gun muzzle and I began to turn. ‘Look at me, I’ll shoot your face off, bastard,’ he hissed.
‘There’s no need for this,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean you any harm.’
He jabbed my leg again. ‘Maybe I do you, think of that?’ His laughter was high pitched and wistful and I thought he had likely gone crazy or was going crazy. I realized with annoyance that Charlie had been correct to leave the man alone. ‘You’re a hunter, that it?’ he asked. ‘You looking for the red-haired she-bear?’
‘I don’t know about a red-haired she-bear,’ I said.
‘There’s a red-haired she-bear near here. Mayfield put the price of a hundred dollars on her and now the hunters are going mad for the pelt. I saw her two miles north of camp yesterday morning. Took a shot but couldn’t get in close enough.’
‘I’m not interested in it one way or the other, and I don’t know anyone called Mayfield.’
He jabbed my leg again. ‘Wasn’t you just with him, you son of a bitch? And him checking the sand in my riverbed?’
‘You’re talking about my brother, Charlie. We’re heading south from Oregon Territory. We’ve never been through this way and don’t know anyone in these parts.’
‘Mayfield’s big boss around here. Sends men over to upset my camp when I’m in town fetching supplies. Sure that wasn’t him a minute ago? I thought I saw his stupid, laughing face.’
‘That’s only Charlie. He’s ducked into the woods to make his toilet. We’re on our way south to work the rivers.’
I heard him step around to Tub’s far side, and then back. ‘Where’s your gear?’ he asked. ‘You say you’re going to work the rivers but you got no gear?’
‘We will buy our gear in Sacramento.’
‘Right off the top then, you’re losing money. Only a fool buys his gear in town.’
I had nothing to say to this. He jabbed my thigh and said, ‘I’m talking to you.’ I said nothing and he jabbed me.
‘Stop jabbing me like that.’
He jabbed me. ‘Don’t like it, do you?’ He jabbed me.
‘I want you to stop.’
‘Think I care what you want!’ He jabbed me and held the gun against my smarting leg. A twig snapped in the distance and I felt the gun go slack as the prospector turned to look. I grabbed the rifle barrel and yanked it away. The prospector lit out for the woods and I turned and pulled the trigger but the rifle was not loaded. I was reaching for my pistol when Charlie stepped from behind a tree and casually shot the prospector as he ran past. It was a head shot, which took the back off his skull like a cap in the wind. I dismounted and limped over to the twitching body. My leg was stinging terribly and I was possessed with a rage. The man’s brain was painted in purple blood, bubbling foam emerging from its folds; I raised up my boot and dropped my heel into the hole with all my weight behind it, caving in what was left of the skull and flattening it in general so that it was no longer recognizable as the head of a man. When I removed my boot it was as though I were pulling it from wet mud. Now I walked away from the body, without purpose and for no reason besides needing to escape my own anger. Charlie called my name but did not pursue me, knowing to leave me alone when I am like this. I walked a half mile and sat beneath a broad pine, tensing and untensing my body with my knees against my chest. I thought I would break my own jaw from clenching, and stuck my knife’s leather sheath between my teeth.
Rising to my knees, I pulled down my pants to check the state of my leg. The skin was inflamed and I could make out the perfect circular shape of the barrel, or series of barrels, a half-dozen red zeros—the sight of these made me frustrated all over again and I wished the prospector might come back to life so I could kill him myself, but slowly. I stood, thinking I would return to mutilate his body further, to unload my pistol in his stomach, but after a moment I decided against it, thankfully. My pants were still down and after collecting my emotions I took up my organ to compromise myself. As a young man, when my temper was proving problematic, my mother instructed me to do this as a means of achieving calm, and I have found it a useful practice ever since. Once accomplished I headed back to the river, feeling empty and cold inside but no longer angry. I cannot understand the motivation of a bully, is what it is; this is the one thing that makes me unreasonable.
I located the dead prospector’s tunnel, so-called. I had imagined a head-high underground pathway with wooden supports and hanging lanterns, but it was barely large enough around to crawl through, and as it was located at the stream’s thinnest point, only a few feet across. We dragged the prospector over and pushed him into the hole. I rode Tub over top of this, marching from one side of the stream to the other to cave it in. We had found little on his person, a pocketknife, a pipe, and a letter, which we buried with him, and which read:Dear Mother,I am lonely and the days are long here. My horse has passed and he was a close friend to me. I think of your cooking and wonder what I am doing. I believe I will come home soon. I have near two hundred dollars in gold dust. It is not the pile I had hoped for, but good enough for now. How is Sis? I do not miss her so much. Did she marry that Fat man? I hope he took her far away! The smell of smoke is in my nostrils always and I haven’t had a laugh in such a long, long while. Mother! I think I will leave here very soon.Loveingly,
Your Own Son.
Thinking of it now I suppose it would have been best if I had posted the letter. But as I said, when my temper is up everything goes black and narrow for me, and such notions were not in my mind. It is lonesome to think of a headless skeleton under that cold, running water. I do not regret that the man is dead but wish I had kept better hold of my emotions. The loss of control does not frighten me so much as embarrass me.
Once the prospector was out of sight, Charlie and I began rooting around in search of his gold. It was not difficult to find. He had set it away from the camp twenty yards, marked with a small crucifix fashioned from twigs. It did not look like two hundred dollars’ worth but I had never dealt with the powder and chunky flakes, and so could not be sure. We divided it fifty-fifty and I emptied my share in an old tobacco pouch I found buried in my saddlebag.
Charlie spent the night in the shelter and I had tried to also but could not stomach the lingering smell, both the dead prospector’s and the horse’s, which had been butchered, its meat lying on a makeshift drying rack at the rear of the tent. I slept beside the fire pit rather than contend with these fumes, passing a night under the stars. It was cold, but the cold did not have what I have heard called ‘winter weight’—it chilled your flesh, but not your muscle and bone. Charlie emerged from the shelter half an hour past the dawn, looking a decade older and a good bit dirtier, also. He slapped his chest to show the cloud of dust rise away from him; he decided a morning bath was in order, and pulled one of the prospector’s pans to the water’s edge to fill it, afterward placing this on the fire. He then located a deep spot in the stream, stripped down, and leapt in, shrieking loudly at its coldness. I sat on the bank and watched him splashing and singing; he had not had anything to drink the night before and there had been no other people around to upset his volatile nature, and I found myself becoming sentimental by this rare show of innocent happiness. Charlie had often been glad and singing as a younger man, before we took up with the Commodore, when he became guarded and hard, so it was sad in a way to watch him frolic in that shimmering river, with the tall snowy mountains walling us in. He was revisiting his earlier self but only briefly, and I knew he would return to his present incarnation soon enough. He rushed naked up the bank to stand near the fire. His genitals were shriveled and he made a joke about how swimming always brought him back to childhood. Lifting the pan from the fire, he poured the hot water over his head, which inspired another round of joyous screaming and bellowing.
After breakfast, I took advantage of his good humor, convincing him to try my toothbrush. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Up and down. Now, give the tongue a good scrub.’ Breathing in, he felt the mint on his tongue and was impressed with the sensation of it. Handing back the brush and powder he said, ‘There is a very fine feeling.’
‘That is what I’ve been telling you.’
‘It is as though my entire head has been cleaned.’
‘We might pick you up a brush of your own in San Francisco.’
‘I think we may have to.’
We were preparing to leave when I saw the boy and Lucky Paul emerge from the forest on the opposite side of the stream. He had fresh blood all about his face and head and looked to be half dead. He saw me and raised his hand before dropping from his horse to the ground, where he lay still and unmoving. Lucky Paul took no notice of this but approached the river to drink.
Chapter 26
We dunked the boy in the stream and he awoke with a start. He was happy to see us, amused as he sat up. ‘I have never come to in running water before.’ He clapped the surface with his palm. ‘My God, it’s cold.’
‘What happened to you?’ I asked.
‘At the start of the woods I met a group of trappers on horseback, four of them, said they were looking for a red-colored bear. When I told them I hadn’t seen the bear they hit me on the head with a club. I dropped to the dirt and they rode off laughing. After I got my bearings I climbed back on old Paul and he led me here, to you all.’
‘He led himself to water, is what he did,’ said Charlie.
‘No,’ said the boy, patting and stroking Lucky Paul’s face. ‘His thoughts were with me, and he did what was needed.’
Charlie said, ‘You sound like my brother and his horse, Tub.’ He turned to me. ‘You and this boy should come together and form a committee or association of some kind.’
‘Which way did these men go?’ I asked the boy.
‘The Protectors of Moronic Beasts,’ said Charlie.
The boy said, ‘I heard them say they were heading back to Mayfield. Is that a town? I wonder if that’s where my father is.’
‘Mayfield is the boss man around here,’ I explained, relaying to Charlie what the prospector had said about the hundred-dollar tariff for the elusive bear’s pelt. Charlie said any man who would pay that much for a bear skin was a fool. The boy, washing the blood from his face and hair, said a hundred dollars would buy him all he needed in a lifetime. I pointed out the camp across the stream and told him he might make use of the fire and find temporary shelter there. At this, he appeared confused. ‘I thought I would come along with you two.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Charlie. ‘It was humorous the one time, but that’s the end of that.’
‘Now that we are clear of the pass, Lucky Paul will show you his stuff.’
‘Last you said he was one for the hills.’
‘He is slick as grease on the flats.’
‘No and no again,’ Charlie said.
The boy appealed to me with a sorrowful look but I told him he was on his own. He started crying and Charlie moved to strike him; I held my brother back and he broke off, returning to the camp to pack. I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence. Now he was weeping in earnest, with bubbles of mucus blooming from his nostrils, and no sooner had the right nostril’s bubble exploded than another took shape in the left. I explained we were in no position to care for children, that our way was a swift and dangerous one, a speech likely made for nothing, the boy being so engrossed with his own sadness I do not think he heard my words. At last, fearful I might hurt him if he did not cease his mewling, I walked the boy across the stream to the prospector’s camp and pulled the tobacco pouch from my saddlebag. Showing him the gold, I told him, ‘This will get you back to your home, and your girl, if you can avoid having your skull knocked from your shoulders. There is horse meat in that shelter. I suggest you feed yourself and Lucky Paul and rest for the night. At first light I want you to backtrack, just the same way you came.’ I handed him the pouch and he stood there staring at it in his palm. Charlie had seen the transaction out of the corner of his eye and he moved to stand beside us.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked me.
‘You are giving me this?’ said the boy.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Charlie asked.
I told the boy, ‘Return over the pass and keep to the north. When you arrive in Jacksonville, find the sheriff there and explain your situation. If you think him trustworthy, ask him to exchange your dust for hard cash.’
‘Ho-ho!’ said the boy, bouncing the pouch in his hand.
‘I am against this,’ Charlie said. ‘You are throwing that money away.’
I said, ‘That was money pulled from the ground, when neither one of us needs it.’
‘Simply dug up from the ground, is that all? But I seem to recall some element of work involved outside of wholesomely burrowing in the soil.’
‘Well, the boy has my share, if not yours.’
‘When did my share enter into the conversation, even?’
‘Never mind then.’
‘Who ever said anything about it?’
‘Never mind.’ Refocusing on the boy, I said, ‘Once the sheriff sets you right with the dust I want you to outfit yourself with some new clothes, ones that make you look older. I should think it wise to buy yourself the largest hat you can find, that it might cover up your head. Also you will need a new horse.’
‘What about Lucky Paul?’ asked the boy.
‘You should sell him for whatever price you can get. If you cannot find a buyer I would advise abandoning him.’
The boy shook his head. ‘I will never part with him.’
‘Then you will never get home. He will hold you up until your money’s gone and you’re both starved. I am trying to help you, do you understand? If you don’t listen to me I will take that gold dust back from you.’
The boy withdrew into silence. I threw some wood on the fire and instructed him to dry his clothes well before sunset. He stripped down but did not hang his clothing; it lay in a heap in the mud and sand and he stood before us, lumpily naked and full of petulance and defeat. He was an unattractive creature with his clothes on; in the nude I thought he looked something like a goat. He began once more to cry, which I took as my cue to sever our ties. As I climbed onto Tub I wished the boy safe travels, but these were empty words, for he was clearly doomed, and it was a mistake to have given him that gold but it was not as though I could take it back now. He stood there weeping and watching us go, while behind him Lucky Paul entered and collapsed the prospector’s tent, and I thought, Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.
Chapter 27
We headed south. The banks were sandy but hard packed and we rode at an easy pace on opposite sides of the stream. The sun pushed through the tops of the trees and warmed our faces; the water was translucent and three-foot trout strolled upriver, or hung in the current, lazy and fat. Charlie called over to say he was impressed with California, that there was something in the air, a fortuitous energy, was the phrase he used. I did not feel this but understood what he meant. It was the thought that something as scenic as this running water might offer you not only aesthetic solace but also golden riches; the thought that the earth itself was taking care of you, was in favor of you. This perhaps was what lay at the very root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.
But then, as if California wished to prove me wrong on this point, we had stopped for a drink of water when the red-haired she-bear emerged from the forest and walked across the stream not thirty yards in front of us. She was fully grown and her pelt, which I had imagined might be blond-ginger, was in fact apple red. She looked at us cursorily and lumbered away into the woods. Charlie checked his pistols and made to follow after her; when I stood by he asked what I was waiting for.
‘We don’t even know where this Mayfield lives,’ I said.
‘We know he lives downriver.’
‘We have been riding downriver all morning. What if we passed him by? I don’t like the idea of climbing hills and mountains with a dead bear tied to my horse.’
‘Mayfield is only after the pelt.’
‘And which of us will skin her?’
‘Whoever shoots her, the other will skin her.’ Now he stepped away from Nimble. ‘You’re really not coming with me?’
‘There is no reason for it.’
‘Best get your knife ready then,’ he said, dashing away into the woods. I stood awhile, watching the passing trout and inspecting Tub’s worsening eye and hoping against hope I would not hear the report from Charlie’s gun. But he was a keen tracker and dead shot, and when his pistol sounded five minutes later I accepted my fate and moved toward the noise with my knife. I found Charlie sitting next to the fallen animal. He was panting and laughing, and he nudged the she-bear’s belly with his boot.
‘Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?’ he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, ‘It is a hundred dollars.’
I rolled the bear onto her back and plunged my knife in the center of her chest. I have always had a feeling that an animal’s insides are unclean, more so than a man’s, which I know does not make sense when you consider what poisons we put into our bodies, but the feeling was one I could not escape, and so I loathed and was resentful about having to skin the bear. After Charlie caught his breath he left to search out the boss-man Mayfield’s encampment, saying he had seen a series of trails some miles back, these leading away from the stream and to the west. Three-quarters of an hour later I was washing the she-bear’s fur and sticky blood from my hands and forearms, and the black-eyed pelt was lain out over some fern plants. The carcass lay on its side before me, no longer male or female, only a pile of ribboned meat, alive with an ecstatic and ever-growing community of fat-bottomed flies. Their number grew so that I could hardly see the bear’s flesh, and I could not hear myself thinking, so clamorous was their buzzing. Why and how do flies make this noise? Does it not sound like shouting to them? When the buzzing suddenly and completely ceased I looked up from my washing, expecting to find the flies gone and some larger predator close by, but the insects had remained atop the she-bear, all of them quiet and still save for their wings, which folded and unfolded as they pleased. What caused this uniform silence? I will never know. Their buzzing had returned in full when Charlie, back from his patrol, let out a shrill whistle. At this, the flies rose away from the bear in a black mass. Upon seeing the carcass my brother called out his happy greeting: ‘God’s little butcher. God’s own knife and conscience, too.’
Chapter 28
I had never before seen so many pelts and heads and cotton-stuffed hawks and owls in one place as in Mister Mayfield’s well-equipped parlor, located in the town of Mayfield’s one hotel, which I was unsurprised to learn was named: Mayfield’s. The man himself sat at a desk, behind a curtain of cigar smoke. Not knowing our business, neither who we were nor why we had come, he did not rise to shake our hands or greet us verbally. Four trappers matching the description given by the hit-on-the-head boy stood two on either side of him. These enormous men looked down on us with full confidence and no trace of concern. They struck me as fearless but mindless, and their outfits were exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness, being so heavily covered in furs and leather and straps and pistols and knives that I wondered how they stood upright to carry these burdens. Their hair was long and stringy and their hats were each matching but of a kind I had not seen before: Wide, floppy brims, with tall, pointy tops. How is it, I wondered, that they all look so similar to one another when the dress is so eccentric? Surely there was one among them who had been first to outfit himself in such a way. Had this man been pleased when the others imitated him, or annoyed, his individual sense of flair devalued by their emulation?
Mayfield’s desktop was the base segment of a moderately sized pine tree, perhaps five feet across and four or five inches thick, with the bark intact. When I reached up to touch the chunky outer ring Mayfield spoke his first words: ‘Don’t pick at it, son.’ At this I jerked my hand back, and experienced a flash of shame at succumbing to the reprimand. To Charlie, he explained, ‘People love to pick the bark. Drives me crazy.’
‘I wasn’t going to pick it, just touch it,’ I said, a statement that effectively doubled my discomfort with its wounded tone. I decided the table was the stupidest piece of furniture I had ever laid eyes on.
Charlie handed over the she-bear’s pelt and Mayfield’s face transformed from its expression of apparent indigestion to that of a lad gazing upon his first set of naked breasts. ‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘Aha!’ There were three brass handbells on his desk, identical save for their sizes, small, medium, and large; he rang the smallest bell, which summoned an old hotel crone. She was told the pelt should be hung on the wall behind him and she unfurled it with a snap. But as I had failed to scrape the skin, this sent red globules of fat and blood flying across the room. These clung to the windowpane and Mayfield, scowling distastefully, called for the pelt to be cleaned. The woman rerolled it and left, her eyes on the ground as she walked.
The trappers, meanwhile, were unhappy we had usurped their glory with the she-bear and were, I felt, preparing to exhibit rudeness. To thwart this I introduced Charlie and myself, our full names, which silenced them. Now they will hate us ever more virulently, but secretly, I thought. Charlie found these men amusing, and could not help but make a comment. ‘It seems you four are involved in a kind of contest to become totally circular, is that it?’
Mayfield laughed about this. The trappers looked at one another uneasily. The largest one of the group said, ‘You do not know the customs here.’
‘If I were to linger, do you suppose I too would take on the physical proportions of the buffalo?’
‘Do you plan to linger?’
‘We are only passing through, for now. But I am for getting to know a place intimately, so do not be surprised if you see me on my return trip.’
‘Nothing in this world could surprise me,’ said the trapper.
‘Nothing?’ Charlie wondered, and he winked at me.
Mayfield sent these men away. As the evening came upon us, he called for the room to be lit. This was accomplished by ringing the medium-sized bell, which produced a different tone and thus summoned a different human, a Chinese boy of eleven or twelve; we watched as he flitted from candle to candle with admirable precision and not a half second wasted. Charlie said, ‘He moves like his life depends on it.’
‘It’s not his life, it’s his family’s,’ said Mayfield. ‘He’s saving to bring them over from China. Sister and mother and father—a cripple, from what I gather, though to tell you the truth I don’t know what he’s talking about half the time. Little bastard might see his mission through, though, the way he hops to.’ When the young fellow had finished, the room was bathed in light, and he stood before Mayfield, removing his silken hat and bowing. Mayfield clapped and said, ‘Now, you dance, chink!’ With these words the boy began dancing wildly and without grace, looking much like someone forced to stand barefoot over hot coals. It was an ugly thing to witness, and if I had not before this point made my decision about Mayfield, the matter was now settled in my mind. When he clapped a second time the boy dropped to his hands and knees, panting and spent. A handful of coins were tossed to the ground and the boy scooped these into his hat. He stood and bowed, and as he left his footsteps made no noise whatsoever.
The crone soon returned with the red pelt, now scraped and set on a kind of display to stretch it taut, something like a large drum lain on edge. She pulled this cumbersome apparatus across the threshold; I stood to assist her and Mayfield ordered me, a little too curtly I felt, to sit. ‘Let her do it,’ he said. She dragged the display to a far corner where we all might study the strange coloring of the she-bear. The crone wiped her brow and walked heavily from the room.
I said, ‘The woman is too old for such tasks.’
Mayfield shook his head. ‘She is a dynamo. I have tried to assign her simpler, lighter work, but she won’t hear of it. She enjoys industry, is the long and short of it.’
‘I could not see the joy. But perhaps it is the inward kind that strangers can never read.’
‘My advice is to not bother yourself about it any longer.’
‘I would not say I am bothered, exactly.’
‘You are bothering me.’
Charlie said, ‘About our payment for this pelt.’
Mayfield watched me a moment, then turned to Charlie. He tossed five double eagles across the table and Charlie dragged them into his palm. He handed me two coins and I took them. I decided I would spend the money even more carelessly than usual. What would the world be, I thought, without money hung around our necks, hung around our very souls?
Mayfield hefted and rang the third, largest bell. Presently we heard hurried footsteps in the hall and I was half prepared for the trappers to barge through and set upon us. Instead of this, the room filled with painted whores, seven in number, each of them in frills and lace, each of them already drunk. They fell to putting on their playful shows for us, re-creating themselves as curious, doting, loving, lusty. One of them thought it prudent to speak like a baby. I found their presence depressing but Charlie was in highest spirits, and I could see his interest in Mayfield growing before my eyes. I realized that by looking at this boss man I was witnessing the earthly personification of Charlie’s future, or proposed future, for ours was so often in jeopardy; and it was true, just as the dead prospector had said, that Charlie and Mayfield bore a resemblance to each other, though the latter was older and heavier and doubly pickled from alcohol. But yes, just as I longed for the organized solitude of the shopkeeper, so did Charlie wish for the days of continued excitement and violence, except he would no longer engage personally but dictate from behind a wall of well-armed soldiers, while he remained in perfumed rooms where fleshy women poured his drinks and crawled on the ground like hysterical infants, their backsides in the air, shivering with laughter and brandy and deviousness. Mayfield must have thought I was acting without sufficient enthusiasm, for he asked me, in put-upon tone, ‘You don’t like the women?’
‘The women are fine, thank you.’
‘Maybe it is the brandy that makes you curl your lips when you speak?’
‘The brandy is also fine.’
‘It is too smoky in here, is that it? Shall I open a window? Would you like a fan?’
‘Everything is fine.’
‘Perhaps it is the custom where you come from, to squint and glare at your host.’ Turning to Charlie, he said, ‘I must admit I did not care for Oregon City, the one time I visited there.’
‘What was your business in Oregon City?’ Charlie asked.
‘You know, I cannot exactly remember. In those younger days, I followed one mad idea after the other, and my purpose was often blurred. But Oregon City was a dead loss. I was robbed by a man with a limp. Neither of you has a limp, do you?’
‘You saw us come in yourself,’ I said.
‘I was not paying attention then.’ Half seriously he asked, ‘Would you two object to standing and clicking your heels for me?’
‘I would object to that strongly,’ I told him.
‘We are both healthy in our legs,’ Charlie said assuredly.
‘But you would not do it?’ he asked me.
‘I would sooner die than click my heels for you.’
‘He is the unfriendly one,’ Mayfield said to Charlie.
‘We take turns,’ Charlie said.
‘Anyway, I prefer you to him.’
‘What did this limping man get away with?’ Charlie asked.
‘He took a purseful of gold worth twenty-five dollars, and an ivory-handled Paterson Colt revolver that I could not put a price on. The name of the saloon was the Pig-King. Are you boys familiar with it? I would not be surprised if it wasn’t there anymore, the way these towns jump up and down.’
‘It is still there,’ Charlie said.
‘The man who robbed me had a knife with a hooked blade, like a small scythe.’
‘Oh, you are talking about Robinson,’ said Charlie.
Mayfield sat up. ‘What? You know the man? Are you sure?’
‘James Robinson.’ He nodded.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. Charlie reached over and pinched my thigh. Mayfield, fumbling with his ink pot, was scribbling the name down.
‘Does he still live in Oregon City?’ he asked breathlessly.
‘Yes, he does. And he still carries the same curved blade he used to rob you. His limp was only a temporary injury that has since healed over, but you will find him sitting at the King, just as before, making jokes that no one enjoys and that in fact almost never make sense.’
‘I’ve thought of the man many times, these last years,’ Mayfield said. Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, ‘I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.’ At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not help but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man. Mayfield excused himself to make water; in the thirty seconds he was away my brother and I had this quickly spoken, whispered discussion:
‘What do you mean, giving Robinson away like that?’
‘Robinson died of typhus half a year ago.’
‘What? You sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I visited his widow last time we were in town. Did you know she had false teeth? I nearly gagged when she plopped them in her water glass.’ A whore passed him by, tickling his chin; he smiled at her and asked me distractedly, ‘What do you think about staying the night?’
‘I’m for moving on. You’ll just be sick in the morning and we’ll miss another day of travel. Plus, there’ll be trouble with Mayfield.’
‘If there’s trouble, it’ll be trouble for him, not us.’
‘Trouble’s trouble. I’m for moving on.’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, brother, but the pipsqueak’s going to war tonight.’
Mayfield emerged from the water closet, buttoning up his pants. ‘What’s this? I would never have pegged the famous Sisters brothers as secret tellers.’
With the whores like cats, circling the room behind us.
Chapter 29
Charlie had drunk three glasses of brandy and his face was turning the familiar scarlet color that indicated the onset of sloven drunkenness. He began asking Mayfield questions about his business and successes, these put to the man in a deferential tone in which I did not like to hear my brother speak. Mayfield responded to the queries vaguely but I deduced he had hit a lucky strike and was now spending his golden winnings as fast as he was able. I grew tired of their strained banter and became quietly drunk. The women continued to visit and tease me, sitting on my lap until my organ became engorged, then laughing at me or it and moving on to my brother or Mayfield. I recall standing to correct and retuck the bloated appendage and noticing that both my brother and Mayfield were likewise engorged. Just your everyday grouping of civilized gentlemen, sitting in a round robin to discuss the events of the day with quivering erections. As the brandy took hold of my mind, I could not seem to place one particular girl; their cackles and perfumes blurred together in a garish bouquet that I found at once enticing and stomach turning. Mayfield and Charlie were ostensibly involved in a conversation, but really they were speaking to themselves and wished only to hear their own words and voices: Charlie made fun of my toothbrush; Mayfield debunked the myth of the divining rod. On and on like this until I despised them both. I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is in a room by himself—there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.
Another brandy, then another, when I noticed a new woman in the far corner of the parlor standing by herself at a window. She was paler and not so meaty as the others, her eyes ringed with worry or lack of sleep. Despite her sickliness, she was a true beauty, with jade-colored eyes and golden hair running to the small of her back. Emboldened with brandy and its attendant stupidity, I watched her alone until she could not help but return my attentions, when she offered me a pitying smile. I winked at her and her pity doubled. Now she crossed the parlor to leave, but with every step her eyes remained fixed upon me. She exited the room and I stared awhile at the door, which she had left ajar.
‘Who was that?’ I asked Mayfield.
‘Who was who?’ he said.
‘Who-be-do?’ said Charlie, and the whores all laughed.
I left the parlor and found the woman smoking a cigarette in the hall. She was not surprised I had followed her out, which is not to say she was happy about it. It was likely that each time she left a room, some man or another followed after her, and over time she had become accustomed to it. I reached up to remove my hat but it was not on my head. I told her, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of that room.’ She said nothing. ‘My brother and I sold Mayfield a pelt. Now we are obliged to sit and listen to his boasts and lies.’ She continued only to stare, smoke draining from her mouth, a smile lingering on her lips, and I could not decipher her thoughts. ‘What is your business here?’ I asked.
‘I live here. I’m Mr. Mayfield’s bookkeeper.’
‘Are your quarters a hotel room, or somehow different?’ I thought, Here is precisely the wrong kind of question to ask, and I am asking it because of the brandy. I thought, Stop drinking brandy! Happily, the woman was not small about it. ‘My room’s a regular hotel room. But sometimes I’ll sleep in a vacant room, just for the fun of it.’
‘How is it fun?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t they all the same?’
‘They are the same on the surface. But the differences in actuality are significant.’
I did not know what to say in response but the brandy implored me to blather on, and I was opening my jaws to do just this when some deeper reasoning took hold and I closed my mouth, maintaining my silence. I was congratulating myself inwardly when the woman began casting around for somewhere to put her cigarette. I volunteered to dispose of it and she dropped the smoldering lump into my outstretched palm. I pinched its light shut between my fingers while staring coolly at the woman, hoping, I suppose, to display my threshold for pain, which has always been abnormally high: Stop drinking brandy! I put the ash and charred paper into my pocket. The woman’s attentions remained foreign, separate. I said, ‘I can’t tell about you, ma’am.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I can’t tell if you’re happy or sad or mad or what you are.’
‘I am sick.’
‘How are you sick?’
She produced from her dress pocket a handkerchief with dried bloodstains on it, flaunting this with a ghoulish amusement. But I did not take it lightly, and in fact was outraged by the sight of the stains. Mindlessly then, I asked if she was dying. Her expression was downcast and I sputtered my apologies: ‘Don’t answer that. I have had too much to drink. Will you forgive me? Please, say you will.’
She did not, but neither did she appear to be holding a grudge, and I decided to carry on just as if I had not made the blunder. As casually as I could manage, I said, ‘Where are you going now, can I ask?’
‘I have no place in mind. There is no other place than this hotel, at night.’
‘Well,’ I said, clucking my tongue, ‘it seems that you were waiting for me out here.’
‘I was not.’
‘You left the door open, that I might follow after you.’
‘I did not.’
‘I think you probably did.’
I heard a creaking down the hall; the woman and I turned to find one of the trappers standing at the top of the stairway. He had been eavesdropping, and his face was unsmiling. ‘You should get to your room now,’ he said to her.
‘How is that your concern?’ she asked.
‘Don’t I work for the man?’
‘Don’t I? I am speaking to a guest of his.’
‘There will be problems if you keep it up.’
‘Problems with whom?’
‘You know. Him.’
‘You,’ I said to the trapper.
‘What?’
‘Go right away from here.’
The man paused, then plunged a hand in his blue-black beard, itching at his cheek and jaw. He turned and walked back down the stairs and the woman told me, ‘He follows me around the hotel. I have to keep my door locked at night.’
‘Mayfield is your man, is that it?’
She pointed to the whore-filled parlor. ‘He has no one woman.’ At my sunken expression, for this answer was suspiciously incomplete, she added, ‘But no, we are not connected. Once, perhaps, in a way.’
From behind the doors I could hear my brother’s high-volume laughter. Charlie has an unintelligent-sounding laugh. It is braying, is what it is. ‘This town is leaving a poor impression on me,’ I said.
The woman took a step toward me. Was she leaning in for a kiss? But no, she only had a secret to tell me: ‘I heard that trapper and the others talking about you and your brother. They have some plan against you. I couldn’t understand, exactly, but every other night they are drinking, and tonight they are not. You should be careful.’
‘I have had too much brandy to be careful.’
‘Then you had better return to your party. To stay close to Mayfield would be best, I think.’
‘No, I can’t stay another minute in there. I only want to sleep.’
‘Where has Mayfield put you?’
‘He hasn’t put me anywhere.’
‘I will find you a safe place,’ she said, and led me away to the far end of the hall, where she opened a door with a key from her pocket. She did this with care not to make a sound, and I found myself mimicking her cautious steps. We entered the darkened room and she closed the door behind us. She stood me against a wall and told me to stay still while she searched out a candle. I could not see her but listened to her movements—her footsteps, her hands rooting through drawers and over tabletops; I found this endearing, her nearness to me, her busyness, and my not knowing just what she was doing. I decided I liked her then; I was flattered she was devoting her time and concerns to me and I thought, I do not need much at all, to make me feel contented.
She lit a candle and drew open the curtains to let in the light of the moon. It was a hotel room just like any other, only there was a dust and staleness on the air, and she explained to me, ‘This is always vacant because the key was misplaced, and Mayfield’s too lazy to bring in a locksmith. Except the key wasn’t misplaced, I took it. I come here sometimes, when I want to be alone.’
Nodding politely, I said, ‘Yes, well, it is fairly obvious that you are in love with me!’
‘No,’ she said, coloring. ‘Not that.’
‘I can see it. Hopelessly in love, powerless to guard against it. You shouldn’t feel too badly about it, it has happened before. It seems that every time I walk down the road there comes a woman in my direction, her eyes filled up with passion and longing.’ I flopped onto the small bed, rolling around on the mattress. The woman was amused by me but not so much that she wished to stay any longer, and she returned to the door to leave. I jostled back and forth and the bed issued its plaintive squeaks and she told me, ‘You should stop that rolling on the bed. The trappers’ quarters are just beneath us.’
‘Oh, stop talking about them already. I don’t care about it, and there isn’t anything they can do to me.’
‘But they are killers,’ she whispered.
‘So am I!’ I whispered back.
‘What do you mean?’
There was something about the look on her face, her paleness and unsureness, it made me wild, and I was seized by a kind of cruelty or animal-mindedness. Standing, I shouted out: ‘Death stalks all of us upon this earth!’ These words came from I knew not where, and they inspired me terribly; I lurched away from the bed, taking up my pistol and firing a shot into the floorboards. The report was terrifically loud; it doubled off the walls and the room filled with smoke and the horrified woman spun on her heels and left me, locking the door with her key. I crossed over and unlocked it, opening it wide and sitting back on the tormented bed, my pistols drawn, cocked, and leveled. My heart was thudding and I was looking forward to an end-of-all-time fight, but after five minutes my eyes began growing heavy. After ten minutes I decided the trappers had not heard the shot. They were not in their room, or I had fired into a room that was not theirs. I gave up my adventure for dead. I brushed my teeth and went to sleep.
Chapter 30
It was sunny in the morning, and the open window carried cool air over my face as I lay in the bed. I was fully clothed and the door was closed and bolted. Had the bookkeeper returned in the night to protect me? I heard a key in the lock and she entered, sitting on the edge of the mattress and smiling. I asked after Charlie and she said he was fine. She invited me to go walking with her, and though she still looked only half living she was a sweet-smelling, powdered beauty, and appeared not unhappy to be visiting. Pulling myself up from the bed, I stepped to the window and propped myself against its frame, looking down over the road beneath the hotel. Men and women passed this way and that, saying their good mornings, bowing and tipping their hats. The woman cleared her throat and said, ‘Last night you said you couldn’t tell about me. Now I find myself thinking the same thing about you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘For one, why in the world did you shoot your pistol into the floor?’
‘I am embarrassed by that,’ I admitted. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’
‘But why would you do it?’
‘Sometimes, if I drink too much, and I’m feeling low, a part of me wants to die.’ I thought, Who is showing whom their bloody rag now?
‘Why were you feeling low?’
‘Why does anyone? It creeps up on you from time to time.’
‘But you were glad the one moment, then suddenly not.’
I shrugged. In the road I saw a man who was familiar to me, but I could not determine his position in my past. His carriage was heavy and dazed, his gait aimless, as though he did not have any one destination in mind. ‘I know that person,’ I said, pointing. The woman stood beside me to look but the man had moved out of sight. Straightening her dress, she asked, ‘Will you come walking with me or not?’
I ate some tooth powder and she led me down the hall by my arm. As we passed the open door to Mayfield’s parlor I saw the boss man sleeping facedown at his desk, head and arms resting amid the upset of bottles and cigar ash, the three toppled bells. There was a large whore, stark naked and flat on her back on the floor beside him. Her face was turned away and I paused to watch her dozing body, breasts and stomach rising and falling with her breath. Here was the picture of moral negligence, and I found myself startled by the sight of her genitals, the hair matted and stamped upon. I noticed my hat was hanging from the antler of a buck on the far wall and I crossed the great room to retrieve it. Achieving this, I was doubling back, dusting ash from the hat’s brim when I tripped and fell onto the floor. I had been caught up on the fur stretching rack, which I now saw was without the red pelt. This had not been untied, but quickly and indelicately cut away. I looked back at the bookkeeper standing under the jamb; her eyes were closed and she was rolling her head in slow circles and I thought, She is stuck fast under the weight of her burdens.
Chapter 31
The road had turned to mud and deep puddles, and to cross we were forced to hobble over a series of wooden planks. The woman enjoyed this and her laughter was clear and rich in the morning. Her laughter and this cold, fresh air, I thought. They are just the same welcome and cleansing thing to me. It is odd to think this struck me as an adventure, I who had had so many truly dangerous adventures already, but there I was, holding her hand and pointing the way along the rocking boards; nausea was ever looming but this only made the event that much more comical, and therefore merry. By the time we arrived on the far side of the road my boots were mud covered but hers had not a blemish upon them and for this she said the words, ‘Thank you.’ Safely installed on the dry wooden walkway, she held her grip on my arm for a half-dozen paces, then broke off to pat and refashion her hair. I do not think there was any precise need for her to have broken away, that it was done in the name of good taste and principles. I believe she enjoyed the feel of my arm and wished to grip it longer. This at any rate was my hopeful impression.
I asked, ‘How is it working for Mayfield?’
‘He pays me well enough, but he is hard to be around, always wanting to show he is the right one. He was a good man, before he hit his strike.’
‘He looks to be spending it quickly enough. Perhaps he will change back to the first man once it’s all gone.’
‘He will change, but not back to the first man. He will become a third man, and I think the third will be even less pleasant than the second.’ I remained quiet and she added, ‘Yes, there isn’t anything to say about it.’ A moment passed and she reached up to grip my arm again. I felt proud, and my legs were sure and confident beneath me. I said, ‘How is it that my door was locked this morning? Did you return later in the night to visit me?’
‘You don’t remember?’ she asked.
‘I am sorry to say I don’t.’
‘That makes me feel just wretched.’
‘Will you explain what happened?’
She considered this, and said, ‘If you really want to know, you will recall it by your own force of mind.’ Thinking of something, she laughed once more, and the sound was bright and diamond shaped.
‘Your laughter is like cool water to me,’ I said. I felt my heart sob at these words, and it would not have been hard to summon tears: Strange.
‘You are so serious all of a sudden,’ she told me.
‘I am not any one thing,’ I said.
Reaching the edge of town, we crossed another line of planks and returned in the direction of the hotel. I thought of my room, of the bed I had slept in; I imagined my shape indented over the blankets. Remembering, then, I said, ‘He is the weeping man!’
‘Who is?’ asked the woman. ‘The what, now?’
‘The person I saw from the window that I said was familiar to me? I met him in Oregon Territory some weeks ago. My brother and I were riding out of Oregon City and came across a lone man leading a horse on foot. He was in great distress but would not accept our help. His grief ran deep and made him unreasonable.’
‘Had his luck changed at all, did you notice?’
‘It did not appear to have, no.’
‘Poor soul.’
‘He makes good time for a hysterical man on foot.’
A pause, and she let go of my arm.
‘Last night you spoke of some pressing business in San Francisco,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘We are after a man called Hermann Warm who is said to be living there.’
‘What does that mean? After him?’
‘He has done something incorrect and we have been hired to bring him to justice.’
‘But you are not lawmen?’
‘We are the opposite of lawmen.’
Her face became pensive. ‘Is this Warm a very bad man?’
‘I don’t know. That is an unclear question. They say he is a thief.’
‘What did he steal?’
‘Whatever people normally steal. Money, probably.’ This lying made me feel ugly, and I searched around for something to look at and find distraction in but could not locate anything suitable. ‘Honestly, actually, he probably didn’t steal a penny.’ Her eyes dropped and I laughed a little. I said, ‘It would not surprise me in the least if he was perfectly innocent.’
‘And do you typically go after men you think are innocent?’
‘There is nothing typical about my profession.’ Suddenly I did not want to talk about it any longer. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any longer.’
Ignoring this statement, she asked, ‘Do you enjoy this work?’
‘Each job is different. Some I have seen as singular escapades. Others have been like a hell.’ I shrugged. ‘You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability. In a way, I suppose it feels significant to have something as large as a man’s life entrusted to me.’
‘A man’s death,’ she corrected.
I had not been certain she understood what my position consisted of. I was relieved to know she did—that I did not have to tell her precisely. ‘However you wish to phrase it,’ I said.
‘Haven’t you ever thought to stop?’
‘I have wanted to,’ I admitted.
She took up my arm again. ‘What about after you deal with this man, Warm? What will you do then?’
I told her, ‘I have a small home outside of Oregon City that I share with my brother. The land is pretty but the house is cramped and drafty. I would like to move but can’t seem to find time to search out another spot. Charlie has many unsavory acquaintances. They have no respect for the traditional hours of sleep.’ But the woman was made restless by my answer and I said, ‘What is it that you are asking me?’
‘My hope is that I will see you again.’
My chest swelled like an aching bruise and I thought, I am a perfect ass. ‘Your hope will be fulfilled,’ I promised.
‘If you leave I don’t think I will see you anymore.’
‘I will be back, I give you my word.’ The woman did not believe me, however, or she only partially believed me. Looking up at my face she asked me to take off my coat, which I did, and she pulled a length of bright blue silk from her layers. She tied the sash over my shoulder, fastening it with a snug knot and afterward stepping back to look at me. She was very sad, and beautiful, her eyes damp and heavy with their powders and ancient spells. I placed my hands on the material but could think of nothing to say about it.
She told me, ‘You should always wear it just like that, and when you see it, you will remember me, and remember your promise to return here.’ Stroking the fabric, she smiled. ‘Will it make your brother very jealous?’
‘I think he will want to know all about it.’
‘Isn’t it a fine piece, though?’
‘It is very shiny.’
I buttoned my coat to cover it. She came forward and put her arms around me, resting the side of her face over my heart, listening to the organ’s mad jumping. After this she said her good-byes, then turned and disappeared into the hotel, but not before I had slipped Mayfield’s forty dollars in her petticoat pocket. I called out that I would see her on my return, but she did not respond and I stood alone, my thoughts dipping and shooting away, dipping and dying. I did not wish to be indoors, but to continue circulating in the open. I spied a row of houses off from the main road and walked in their direction.
INTERMISSION
I came upon a young girl of seven or eight years old, outfitted in the finest clothing from hat to shoe and standing stiffly before the fenced-in yard of a quaint, freshly painted house. She glared at the property with an intense dislike or malice—her brow was furrowed, her hands clenched, and she was crying, not forcefully, but calmly and without a sound. When I approached her and asked her what was the matter, she told me she had had a bad dream.
‘Just now you had a bad dream?’ I said, for the sun was high in the sky.
‘In the night I had one. But I had forgotten about it until a moment ago, when that dog reminded me.’ She pointed to a fat dog, asleep on the other side of the fence. I was startled when I spied what looked to be the dog’s leg lying independently from the body, but upon closer inspection I saw it was the femur bone of a lamb or calf, this for the dog to chew on. It still had some meat and gristle attached, which gave it a fleshy appearance. I smiled at the girl.
‘I thought it was the dog’s leg,’ I said.
The girl wiped the tears from her cheeks. ‘But it is the dog’s leg.’
I shook my head and pointed. ‘The dog’s leg is tucked under him, do you see?’
‘You are wrong. Watch.’ She whistled and the dog awoke and stood, and I discovered it truly was missing the leg closest to the bone on the ground, only the skin had long since healed over. It was a years-old wound, and though I was confused, I persevered: ‘That there on the ground is the femur bone of a lamb, and not the dog’s. Don’t you see the animal suffered its loss some time ago and that he is not in pain?’
The statement angered the girl, and now she regarded me with just the same malice with which she had been regarding the house. ‘The dog is in pain,’ she insisted. ‘The dog is in no small amount of pain!’
The violence of her words and temper caught me by surprise; I found myself taking a step away from her. ‘You are a peculiar girl,’ I said.
‘It’s a peculiar lifetime on earth,’ she countered. I did not know what to say to that. At any rate it was as truthful a statement as I had come across. The girl continued, her voice now honeyed and innocent: ‘But you did not ask about my dream.’
‘You said it was about this dog.’
‘The dog was but a part of it. It was also about the fence, and the house, and you.’
‘I was in your dream?’
‘A man was in it. A man I did not know or care about.’
‘Was he a good man or a bad man?’
She spoke in a whisper: ‘He was a protected man.’
I thought at once of the gypsy-witch, of the doorway and necklace. ‘How was he protected?’ I asked. ‘Protected from what?’
But she would not answer my question. She said, ‘I was walking here to see this dog, which I hate. And as I slipped it its poison to kill it there appeared in this yard before me a fist-sized, swirling gray-and-black cloud. This grew bigger and was soon a foot across, then two feet, then ten—now it was big as the house. And I felt the wind from its spinning, a cold wind, so cold it burned my face.’ She closed her eyes and tilted her head upward, as though recalling this sensation.
‘What kind of poison did you slip the dog?’ I asked, for I noticed her right hand had a grainy black residue over the knuckles.
‘The cloud became bigger still,’ the terrible girl continued, her volume and agitation increasing, ‘soon lifting me into its center, where I hung in the air, tumbling lightly in circles. I think it might have been calming if the three-legged dog, now dead, was not also spinning within the orb beside me.’
‘That is a distressing dream, girl.’
‘The three-legged dog, now dead, spinning within the orb beside me!’ She clapped once, turned abruptly around, and left me where I stood, dumbfounded and not a little unnerved. I thought, How I long for a reliable companion. The girl had rounded the corner before I looked back at the dog, which was once more lying prone on the ground, foam issuing from his mouth, ribs no longer rising to breathe, dead as dead could be. There was a shift of the curtains in the house and I turned and left just as hastily as the girl had but in the opposite direction, and I did not at any point look back. It was time to say good-bye and good riddance to Mayfield, for now.
END INTERMISSION
Chapter 32
Passing Mayfield’s parlor I peered in and saw both he and the naked woman were gone, and the pelt stand had been righted. Farther down the hall, one of the whores was standing with her head on the door of the room next to mine. Walking toward her, I asked if she had seen Charlie. ‘He just escorted me out.’ Her skin had a greenish tint to it; she was deathly brandy-sick. Belching, she covered her mouth with a balled fist. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. I opened the door to my room and asked her to tell Charlie to hurry along. ‘I will not tell him a thing, sir. I am headed for my own bed to wait out these long hours in private.’ I watched as she walked away, her fist on the wall, unsure in her footsteps. Charlie’s door was locked and when I knocked he made a guttural sound communicating a desire for solitude. When I called to him, he came to the door in the nude and waved me in.
‘Where have you been?’ he asked.
‘I was walking with the girl from last night.’
‘What girl from last night?’
‘The pretty, thin one.’
‘Was there a pretty, thin one?’
‘You were too distracted with your guffawing to notice. Look at how red your head is.’
I could hear Mayfield’s muffled, angry voice emanating from the parlor. I told Charlie about the missing pelt and he stiffened. ‘What do you mean, missing?’ he demanded.
‘Missing. Not there. The stand was toppled and the pelt had been cut away.’
He studied this awhile, then began getting dressed. ‘I will talk to Mayfield about it,’ he said, groaning as he pulled on his pants. ‘We got along very fine last night. Surely the responsible party was one of those filthy trappers he has on the payroll.’
He left and I sat heavily in a low wicker chair. I noticed Charlie’s mattress had been pulled to the floor and shredded with a knife, its stuffing yanked out in shocks. I thought, Will his fondness for senseless carnage ever cease? He and Mayfield were having an argument but I could not understand the words. My body was burning with fatigue and I was halfway asleep when Charlie returned, his face tight, his fists clenched and white at the knuckle. ‘There is a man who knows how to raise his voice,’ he said. ‘What a blusterer.’
‘Does he think we took the pelt?’
‘He most certainly does, and do you know why? One of his trappers claims to have seen you hurrying through the hall with it tucked under your arm. I asked Mayfield to upend our rooms and baggage but he said it was beneath him. He whispered to his whore, and she hurried away. She is searching the trappers out, I’d imagine.’ He moved to the window, gazing down at the main road. ‘It makes me angry to think of them playing such a trick on us. If I wasn’t feeling so low I’d go right after them.’ He looked over at me. ‘What about you, brother? Are you up for a fight?’
‘Hardly.’
Squinting, he asked, ‘What’s that under your coat?’
‘A gift from the girl.’
‘Is there to be a parade?’
‘It’s a simple bit of fabric to recall her by. A bomboniere, as Mother would say.’
He sucked his teeth. ‘You should not wear it,’ he said decisively.
‘It’s very expensive material, I think.’
‘The girl has played a joke on you.’
‘She is a serious person.’
‘You look like the prize goose.’
I untied and removed the cloth, folding it into a tidy square. I decided I would keep it with me but regard it only in private. ‘Now who has the red head?’ said Charlie. Turning back to the window, he tapped the pane and said, ‘Aha, here we go.’
I crossed over and saw the whore from the floor of the parlor speaking to the largest trapper. He stood listening, rolling a cigarette, and nodding; when she was through he shared with her some instruction or another, and she returned in the direction of the hotel. I watched her until she was out of sight, then looked again at the trapper, who had located us in the window and was staring from beneath his floppy-brimmed, pointed hat. ‘Where do you even get a hat like that?’ Charlie wondered. ‘They must make them themselves.’ The trapper lit his cigarette, exhaled a plume of smoke, and walked in the opposite direction of the hotel. Charlie slapped his leg and spit. ‘I hate to admit it, but we’re beat. Give me your double eagles, and I will hand mine in, also.’
‘Returning the money is just the same as an admission of guilt.’
‘It is our only option other than fighting or running, neither of which we are in any shape to do. Come on now, let’s have it.’ He approached and stood before me with his hand out. I went through the motions of patting my pockets, a sad pantomime that gave me away. Scratching his stubbly neck, he said, ‘You left it for the woman, didn’t you.’
‘That was my own earned money. And what a man does with his earned money is no other man’s business.’ Remembering his whore’s clutched hand as she had covered her mouth, I said, ‘Didn’t you give any of yours away?’
‘You know, I hadn’t thought of that.’ He checked his purse and laughed bitterly. ‘And Mayfield had said it was on the house, too.’
More shouting from the parlor. A bell was rung, a glass broken.
‘I hope you don’t propose to pay the man out of our own pockets,’ I said.
‘No, I am not that keen to make friends. Let me gather my things, then we’ll fetch yours. We can exit out your window and hope for an unchecked departure. We will fight if we must but I would prefer to wait for another day, when we are feeling one hundred percent.’ Bag in hand, then, he scanned the room and asked, ‘Have we got everything? Yes? All right. Let us navigate the hall in pure silence.’
Pure silence, I thought as we crept along to my quarters. The words struck me as somehow poetical.
Chapter 33
We climbed out the window of my room and snuck along the overhang that ran the length of the walkway. This proved handy to us, for Tub and Nimble were housed in a stable at the far end of Mayfield, and we covered that entire distance without a soul noticing our travels. At the halfway point, Charlie paused behind a tall sign to watch the largest trapper leaning against a hitching post below us. Now the other three joined him, and the group stood in a loose circle, speaking through their dirty beards. ‘Doubtless they are infamous among the muskrat community hereabouts,’ said Charlie. ‘But these are not killers of men.’ He pointed at the leader. ‘He is the one who stole the pelt, I’m sure of it. If we come up against them, I will take care of him. Watch the rest take flight at the first shot fired.’
The men dispersed and we continued along the overhang to its limit, dropping off and sneaking into the stable, where I found the bucktoothed hand standing next to Tub and Nimble, staring at them dumbly. He jumped at our greeting and was loath to help us with the saddles, which I should have been made suspicious by but was too distracted with thoughts of escape to dissect properly. And so: Charlie and I were tying off our bags when the four trappers stepped noiselessly from the stall behind ours. We did not notice them until it was too late. They had us cold, the barrels of their pistols leveled at our hearts.
‘You are ready to leave Mayfield?’ asked the largest trapper.
‘We are leaving,’ said Charlie. I was not sure how he would play it, but he had a habit of cracking his index fingers with his thumbs just prior to drawing his guns and I kept my ear trained for the noise.
‘You’re not leaving without returning the money you owe Mr. Mayfield.’
‘Mr. Mayfield,’ said Charlie. ‘The beloved employer. Tell us, do you make his bed down for him also? Do you warm his feet with your hands on the long winter nights?’
‘One hundred dollars or I will kill you. I will probably kill you anyway. You think I am slow in my furs and leather, but you will find me faster than you had believed. And won’t you be surprised to find my bullets in your body?’
Charlie said, ‘I do think you are slow, trapper, but it is not your clothing that hinders your speed. Your mind is the culprit. For I believe you to be just as stupid as the animals you lurk in the mud and snow to catch.’
The trapper laughed, or pretended to laugh, an imitation of lightness and good nature. He said, ‘I heard you getting drunk last night and thought, I will not drink a drop this evening. I will be rested and quick, just in case I have to kill this man in the morning. And now it is morning, and I ask you this only once more: Will you return the money, or the pelt?’
‘All you will get from me is Death.’ Charlie’s words, spoken just as casual as a man describing the weather, brought the hair on my neck up and my hands began to pulse and throb. He is wonderful in situations like this, clear minded and without a trace of fear. He had always been this way, and though I had seen it many times, every time I did I felt an admiration for him.
‘I am going to shoot you down,’ said the trapper.
‘My brother will count it out,’ said Charlie. ‘When he reaches three, we draw.’
The trapper nodded and returned his pistol to its holster. ‘He can count to one hundred if it suits you,’ he said, opening and closing his hand to stretch it.
Charlie made a sour face. ‘What a stupid thing to say. Think of something else besides that. A man wants his last words to be respectable.’
‘I will be speaking all through this day and into the night. I will tell my grandchildren of the time I killed the famous Sisters brothers.’
‘That at least makes sense. Also it will serve as a humorous footnote.’ To me, Charlie said, ‘He’s going to kill both of us, now, Eli.’
‘I have been happy these days, riding and working with you,’ I told him.
‘But is it time for final good-byes?’ he asked. ‘If you look closely at the man you can see his heart is not in it. Notice how slick his flesh has become. Somewhere in his being there is a voice informing him of his mistake.’
‘Count it out, goddamnit,’ said the trapper.
‘We will put that on your tombstone,’ Charlie said, and he loudly cracked his fingers. ‘Count three, brother. Slow and even.’
‘You are both ready, now?’ I asked.
‘I am ready,’ said the trapper.
‘Ready,’ Charlie said.
‘One,’ I said—and Charlie and I both let loose with our pistols, four bullets fired simultaneously, with each finding its target, skull shots every one. The trappers dropped to the ground from which none of them would rise again. It was an immaculate bit of killing, the slickest and most efficient I could recall, and no sooner had they fallen than Charlie began laughing, as did I, though more out of relief than anything, whereas Charlie I believe was genuinely tickled. It isn’t enough to be lucky, I thought. A man has to be balanced in his mind, to remain calm, when your average man is anything but. The trapper with the blue-black beard was still gasping, and I crossed over to look upon him. He was confused, his eyes darting every which way.
‘What was that noise?’ he asked.
‘That was a bullet going into you.’
‘A bullet going into me where?’
‘Into your head.’
‘I can’t feel it. And I can’t hardly hear anything. Where’s the others?’
‘They’re lying next to you. Their heads have bullets, also.’
‘They do? Are they talking? I can’t hear them.’
‘No, they’re dead.’
‘But I’m not dead?’
‘Not yet you’re not.’
‘Ch,’ he said. His eyes closed and his head became still. I was stepping away when he shuddered and opened his eyes. ‘Jim was the one who wanted to come after you two. I didn’t want to.’
‘Okay.’
‘He thinks because he’s big, he’s got to do big things.’
‘He’s dead, now.’
‘He was talking about it all night. They would write books about us, he said. He didn’t like you all making fun of our clothes, was what it was.’
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