Текст книги "Paradise Sky"

Автор книги: Joe R. Lansdale

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“I fought against them colors,” the man said, nodding at my jacket.

“We ain’t shot Southerner a one,” I said.

“I say we lynch them, even the dead one.” This from one of the other men, a fellow that looked as if he had gotten his jaw broken at some point and it had grown back crooked.

“If we carry him on, no harm done,” I said. “But he’s starting to stink, so we thought he might need some ground, and he asked for a Christian burial in a Christian graveyard, and here you have it.”

I noticed one of the men in the back was edging to our right. He had a shotgun, which at that range was sure enough a deadly weapon. It could take both me and Cullen out, kill Satan, and kill Cramp all over again.

I don’t know what come over me, but all of a sudden I was through talking. My hand went quick for Mr. Loving’s Colt. I thumbed back the hammer and fired. I hit the fellow with the shotgun a smooth shot in the forehead, and whatever was between his ears that he had been thinking with was knocked out the back of his head.

Then they was all moving.

The Colt, which I had cross-pulled, was in my right hand, and now I cross-drew the LeMat with my left. I was firing them both, moving to the left, then to the right, ducking down, twisting, and firing, shooting as fast as I could, and somehow in the midst of my speed I can say I was taking my time, too. I was willing and accurate, and they was scared and wild.

Bullets cracked near me. I seen Cullen out of the corner of my eye, heard him say, “Ah, shit,” and he toppled over. And damned if that Chinaman, who had stood right up front with that ax in one hand and the lantern in the other, didn’t sort of come unstuck from the night. He dropped the lantern, cocked back that ax, and rushed me. I had mostly shot around him, the ones with guns being more my concern than him. I had fired quick, sometimes two shots to a man. I had emptied the Colt and the nine-shot LeMat. I had just enough time to flick the lever on the LeMat to the shotgun position, and as the Chinaman came up on me, I fired. It was a hell of a blast, and it tore a hole in his chest and put him on his knees. He chopped out at me. The ax went right between my legs but missed my vitals. He was held up by the ax for a moment, leaking his insides, until I kicked his hand loose. He came forward on his face then, his heels sort of snapping up in the air, throwing some graveyard dirt with them.

I went over to Satan, who hadn’t even so much as moved. Wasn’t no figuring that horse. I reckon he was trying out all possibilities. I pulled the loop-cock Winchester off his saddle and went over and found Cullen lying on his back. I knelt down beside him and looked for a wound. A bullet had only grazed him across the head and had knocked him out. I said, “Hell, Cullen, you ain’t hardly touched. You fought Apaches, and now you’re lying on the ground taking a nap and I’m shooting it out.”

I helped him up and got him steady on his feet.

It was then that them four China girls came up out of the dark, rattling along in a little wagon with loops of thin wood over the back of it and a striped tarp that was pulled down off of it and gathered at the rear of the wagon in a wad. The wagon was pulled by a couple of horses. It was the cripple driving the wagon. The others was in the back, and they had carpetbags with them that was near their size. It was like they had been ready and waiting for just such a moment. They said almost together, “We go with you.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“We seen what you do,” the cripple said. “Kill them all. You bad men, and we need bad men. We cook. Give free pussy.”

“We can’t take you with us.”

“They kill us,” said the cripple, who seemed to be the mouthpiece for the three of them, but I noted the ugly one seemed to be paying right smart attention, and this was a thing that would matter later. “His brothers, they take us and chop us up. Make chop suey.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“He done it before,” said the crip. “You ate some white man tonight. No Chinese girl yet. But white man.”

I sorted that one around in my bean, said, “You mean that wasn’t a calf’s eyeball?”

“No calf’s eyeball.”

“Hell,” Cullen said. “It tasted all right, though. Salty, but all right.”

The cripple kept talking. “Fat man sleeping. Chun kill him with ax. He do the same to you, he got chance.”

“He won’t,” Cullen said, nodding at the Chinaman on the ground.

Down below in Ransack there was starting to be a stirring. White men and Chinamen was both moving in our direction. I said, “Cullen, you was a buggy driver. Can you drive a wagon?”

“I can,” he said.

Cullen climbed up, edged the cripple aside on the driver’s seat, and took the reins.

I looked out across the dark prairie, seen a storm was coming. Lightning was working its way across the sky in angry yellow slits, and thunder roared like big cannons. I could see the shadows of a fine and rare stand of trees down there, about a quarter mile away, most likely along a little creek.

“Take the wagon into them trees,” I said, “and don’t spare the horses. Get down in the creek bed if you can. You can hold out better there.”

“What about you?” he said.

“You worry about you and them women,” I said.

Cullen turned the team, started across the prairie, clattering away, urging the horses on. From where I stood it seemed to me that wagon and those horses was hardly touching ground. I could see those China girls bouncing around in the back like they was popping corn in a greasy skillet.

There was a half dozen mounted men riding my way, followed by a bunch of screaming lunatics on foot—whites, mostly, and some Chinamen, all of them on the run and sounding like someone had invited them to a free dinner of boiled eggs and hog leavings.

Still holding my Winchester, I leaped on Satan’s back, hoping after the day Satan had been through he still had some serious horse left in him.

12

Satan was a black grass fire shoved by the wind, the fastest, smoothest-running critter I’d ever climbed on. He left those horses and riders that was after us like they was standing still. Compared to him, Pegasus was a nag. And for a change he wasn’t trying to buck me off or bite me or kick me to death.

That quarter mile melted away. As I come up on the trees, I seen the wagon was pulled down into the creek mostly, but the tail end of it was still sticking up. I could hear Cullen yelling to the horses, “Go on” and such, and gradually the wagon bumped over the bank and out of sight and into the shallow creek, which wasn’t really any more than a trickle of water.

I rode Satan down in there, flung myself off of him, led him into a run of trees alongside the bank below the firing line. I tied him off and took the saddlebags of ammunition and climbed up with the Winchester and found me a spot. That posse of men was coming and would soon be on us.

I beaded along the Winchester and shot the horse in the forefront of the line through the chest. It went down, and so did the rider. It was a bad thing for the horse but a good thing for us. The rider struck the ground so hard on his head I could hear his neck crack like someone had stepped on a clay pot. He got up, crawled in our direction for a short ways, determined that wasn’t a good idea, and like a dog looking for a place to lie down, turned about on his hands and knees a couple times, then flattened out and didn’t move. All the while he had done this with his head at an odd angle, like he was trying to look back and see if his asshole was properly centered. I think his neck finally come loose of something it needed, and it done him in.

The others had already turned their horses and rode back in the direction of town. They stopped about halfway there where they met up with all the men on foot that had been running behind them. They grouped up to consider their situation. I turned and seen Cullen had climbed up on the edge of the bank with the Spencer. I could see the women in the wagon down below.

“I think you discouraged them, Nat,” Cullen said.

“Yeah, but I don’t know I’ve given them enough of it,” I said. “I was them, I would try and flank us. Though they’d have to come down through the trees or along the creek if they did that, and that still ain’t positions to their good.”

“They could come up behind us,” Cullen said.

“Two men, one on either side of the creek, could hold them off pretty damn good cause we got the cover and the better shooting position, and they ain’t Apaches. We done dealt with some of the best sneakers there is, so these boys don’t worry me the same.”

“We got to come out of here eventually,” Cullen said.

“That’s true,” I said. “And they got to decide how many men they want to lose before we do.”

“They could rush us,” Cullen said.

“They could, but I bet they won’t. We got to wait until the right moment and roll out. I think we might do better to leave the wagon. Make some reins and bridles out of those lines, put the women on the wagon horses, get you on Satan with me, and creep out of here like a medicine show.”

“I don’t know,” Cullen said.

“Damn it, Cullen. I’m trying to be on the ups about this. Quit putting a weight on my head.”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

The rain was starting now, lightning was blasting away, the thunder was still rumbling. The rain was cold, and it rolled off my hat and run down the back of my shirt and made me tremble. I was thinking that with the clouds growing thick, maybe we could steal out under cover of darkness, but the constant lightning flashes made that tricky. I was turning all this around in my mind, trying to figure the odds, when I seen someone coming on horseback, all alone, sitting ramrod straight in the saddle. It was an old horse, and it walked with its head down. It rambled here and there and finally set a course toward us.

“What in the world is he thinking?” Cullen said. He propped the Spencer against the bank and took a bead.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

On came the rider, stiff in the saddle, dark as night, hat pulled down over his eyes. His arms dangled at his sides. There was a flash of lightning, and in that quick glow I could see the reins was tied to the saddle horn and there was a big pole fastened to it, too; the rider was fixed firmly against that saddle horn and pole. I saw all this in that flash. Saw, too, that he was a colored man, and the wind carrying his stink, along with another flash of lightning, announced that it was Cramp.

The horse trotted right up to the bank. I stood in front of it so I wasn’t being sighted by a rifle, took the reins, and guided the horse down into the shallow creek bed, Cramp wobbling in the saddle.

I tied the horse to the back of the wagon, nodded at the China girls in the rig, and hustled back to my spot and peeped over the bank. There was shapes of men and horses out in the distance, lights from the town flickering behind them.

“There’s your friend,” a voice called out from among them. “Bury him somewhere else. You done gonna fill up our cemetery with all them men you killed. We don’t want no more trouble, now. We’re giving you your chance. You go, we’ll leave you alone.”

I hadn’t planned on going back for Cramp. I had done my best, and the whole promise had been a dumb one to begin with. This was as good a time as any to make our retreat. They had opened the door and wanted us to run through it. Course, I didn’t believe that part about letting it be over and done with.

“Go on, then,” I yelled loud as I could. “And we’ll leave you be!”

“All right, then,” said the voice. They turned their mounts and rode back into town, a clutter of riffraff walking after them, lightning flashing fast and furious, thunder echoing, rain coming down in cold, dark sheets.

What we did was we skedaddled.

Me and Cullen cut Cramp down and put him in the back of the wagon with the women. It wasn’t a thing they liked, and they let us know in a burst of China talk, except for the ugly one, who said, “Why not leave him?”

“Say what, now?” Cullen said.

“Why not leave him here?” she said.

“We got that,” I said. “But you speak English?”

“We all do,” she said.

“You speak it so it makes sense.”

“I have had more experience.”

“So why didn’t you say something before?” I asked.

“I was waiting to see how things were,” she said. “I learned to speak English in missionary school and to be quiet in any language. Missionaries liked to take a stick to you if you talked in a way they didn’t like. I think they just liked to paddle little girls.”

“Well, here’s how things are,” I said. “I was going to leave old Cramp back there, but now that we got him, we’re going to get out of here fast as we can, cause they are a pack of liars and will most likely be on us by daybreak.”

And that’s what we did. Cullen took the old, broken-down horse Cramp had been tied to, and Peg Leg, as I had come to know her, took the wagon lines and drove it on down the creek until there was a break in the trees and a gradual slope where she could drive it up and onto the prairie. The rain was still coming down; it had knocked our hats near flat on top and bent the brims down. The women didn’t have hats, but they had produced umbrellas I didn’t know they had. One of the women sat up by Peg Leg and held the umbrella over her head and her own while Peg Leg drove the wagon. The others protected themselves, scrunching under their umbrellas as best they could.

We rode across the prairie into wet darkness. A streak of lightning ripped the sky so wide and white I went blind for a moment. The lightning struck the ground, and there was a flare of fire from some mesquite bushes out there, then the fire and bushes smoked white from the rain. It made me more than a little nervous to be out there in the naked world with all that lightning and us its only targets.

Only good thing I can say about that night was the rain took some of the stink off Cramp’s body, which was starting to swell in places and fall into itself in others.

Right before the night ended, the rain stopped and the sunlight edged up like a busted apple. As the day seeped in I saw three men riding at us. They was coming slow but steady. Cullen was riding beside me on that skin-and-bones horse we had taken, and I said, “They have sent three riders.”

“I can see that. Seems stupid of them, considering what you did to all them men back there. I ain’t never seen anything like that, Nat. I just thought you was a badass in the Apache fight, but you done come into your own.”

“Think I just surprised them, but I bet these three ain’t cowards like them was, all except that Chinaman. He was a game rooster.”

“Hired killers?”

“Most likely,” I said.

“We going to stand and fight?”

While I was figuring on that, one of the men raised a white flag tied to his rifle and rode a piece toward us. He was a fat man with a big head and a little derby hat and a red kerchief around his neck. He was wearing a greasy buckskin shirt and black-and-yellow-checked pants.

He stopped when he was within earshot, said, “Can I have a palaver with you?”

I cupped my hands over my mouth and called out to him because I wanted them other two to hear me, see that I was making the rules here. “Drop that rifle and ride forward some more, and keep your hand away from your pistol.”

He dropped the rifle and the flag on the ground and come on toward us. I told Cullen to stick and rode out to meet him. When we was about ten feet apart, I reined my horse in, said, “This will do.”

“We been sent to hunt you down and kill you,” he said.

“We’ll see how that works out for you.”

“We don’t want to do that,” he said.

“No?”

“No, cause we think it might not turn out as well as we’d like. We seen all them you killed by your lonesome, and we figure you to be a fair hand with a gun. What we was wondering is, could we just say we killed you and you not come back anymore?”

“I’ll deny such a thing for the obvious reason. I’m alive.”

“So we got to shoot it out?”

“Why don’t you say you couldn’t find us? That gets you off the hook.”

“We was paid twenty dollars apiece to kill all of you,” he said.

“That’s a lot of work for twenty dollars apiece, considering you might not be going home again.”

“But they did pay us twenty dollars,” he said. “You know how it is, honest day for an honest dollar.”

“And you know how it is with being dead,” I said. “Ain’t none of them dead folk make it home for supper.”

He studied on that a moment and gently reached for his derby as if to take it off.

As his fingers touched the brim, I said, “If there is a gun in that derby, you’ll be dead before you get it off your head.”

“All right, then,” he said, and left it on.

“My name is Nat Love,” I said, “and it would do you best not to lie about killing us. The lie about not finding us I can live with. My pride doesn’t care for the other.”

I know how that sounds. Small of me, but I felt exactly that way.

“Ah, hell,” he said. “We’ll just say you all got away.”

“Good. I see you or them other two again, I’ll kill the lot of you.”

“They’re gonna think we was chickenshits,” he said.

“You are, aren’t you?”

That didn’t set right with him, but he considered on things, probably recollected on the stories about how I had killed all them men with my revolvers, which as I have said was mostly because they didn’t know what in hell they was doing. To be honest, I think some of them might have shot their own comrades trying to kill us, so it’s possible I’ve given myself a shade more credit than I deserve.

He licked his lips, nodded. “Guess we’re settled, then,” he said, rode back to where he dropped his Winchester, got down out of the saddle, slowly picked it up, and remounted. I watched him carefully, having pulled my own rifle from its boot and laid it across my saddle. The man rode back to join the others. I rode back to the wagon, pulled up next to Cullen.

“You think he’ll say we run off?” Cullen said, having heard our conversation.

“He’ll say he killed us all, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him by agreeing. I have come to the end of catering to white folks.”

“I don’t really care so much one way or the other,” Cullen said.

We watched them ride well out of sight, then we turned and headed on toward the northeast.

13

After a couple of days I come to think we wasn’t being followed and they had gone back to Ransack to tell whatever lie soothed them. We was moving toward the Texas Panhandle, and there ain’t no more desolate stretch of empty land than that. Coming from East Texas, I thought West Texas was bleak, but that northern part was sad on the eye and the mind; it wouldn’t surprise me that anyone that lived out that way did so because their horse died there or their wagon broke down. I couldn’t see no other reason for wanting to be there on purpose.

We got in a rhythm of traveling by night, sleeping in the day. Those China girls turned out to be right friendly, which was good, because the nights could be brisk. I found out the one with the wooden leg was called Wing Ding, Ling Ding, or some such, though as soon as I thought I was getting a handle on her name she’d laugh and correct me. In the bedroll she was prone to stretching a man’s back to the breaking point and leaving splinters on one outside thigh; she really needed to sand that thing down. The ugly one turned out to be a real pistol. After a few nights of us taking turns and doing our pleasure with them all, we spaced ourselves better, due to weakness setting in.

We pulled the cover over the wagon during the day, when we was doing business in there, and the way we done it was me and the girls would stand outside of the wagon modest-like and talk about what we could understand from each other, and I do remember having quite a conversation once about beans. The ugly girl’s name was Wow or some such. She was a good English speaker. She had read some books, some of the same ones Mr. Loving read. She knew, too, about a fellow whose name for a while I thought was Corn Foolish but finally came to realize was Confucius. He turned out to be some wise Chinaman and had a saying or two for just about every situation. Soon as you thought you was getting the hang of old Confucius, he’d turn on you and would mean something other than what it seemed like he was saying, or so Wow explained. I figured if a man had something to say, he ought to just go on and say it and not make it some kind of puzzle. I can honestly say I didn’t care for him much, though the two of us never met, which can make a difference in your opinions.

Now, I suppose you’re wondering about Cramp and where he was during all this time, and the situation is like this. About two days out no one could stay in that wagon but him. He was the sole owner of the wagon bed, and he commanded his area by stench. We finally pulled him out and dug a hole with some tools in the wagon and buried him. Turned out Wow knew a few Christian words, though she was what she called a Buddhist, and we buried him with those words and a rock on his well-covered hole and moved on. Had we done that early on, even without Wow’s words, we would have been a sight better off.

That wagon was full of all manner of goods, the Chinaman having been a man of commerce. We got rid of our soldier trappings, as there was clothing in the wagon we could wear. We made our way toward the Dakota Territory, for no other reason than we had heard while at the fort that there was strikes of gold and silver there and that even a colored man could make a large stash. Frankly, it seemed as good a direction as any. In time the old horse they had sent out with Cramp on it began to wear down, and I felt bad about it, cause it was a sweet old horse and would nicker ever’ time you got up close to it. It was friendly and would push its nose against you to be petted. But it got real weak, and I had to shoot it. We ate part of it. I had to not think on who I was eating to enjoy it. After that, Satan kept an eye on me, had a brisker step, and held his head high just to make sure there wasn’t any confusion on his health.

One time, after we had traveled all night, we pulled the wagon to a stop just as the morning got bright and put the cover up. But as we was about to crawl in the wagon, Cullen said, “Look yonder.”

Out there on the prairie we could see what looked like a dark sea rolling in with a loud rumble. After a bit of watching, we seen it was a sea of fur. Buffalo. They stretched far as the eye could see. They was right close to us, and we kept our spot, least we might somehow stir and stampede them. We watched them cross near us, and I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was seeing was something that was soon to be no more. It wasn’t but a few years beyond that when near every buffalo that had walked the earth was dead. Some of them buffalo was killed for food, some for hides, and finally just for sport, to be left rotting on the prairie. It was partly done out of greed, and partly for no other reason than to deny the Plains Indians breakfast and supper. It was the destruction of the Indians’ on-the-hoof grocery store, and it done them in surer than smallpox-diseased blankets or repeating rifles.

We needed meat, and we watched for at least an hour as they passed, and then we shot a straggler on the end who looked as if he had already hurt a leg bad enough he would soon be for the wolves. Them buffalo, big and mighty as they are, was also dumb. They didn’t seem to understand what the shot was about. If they missed the old boy on the end, there was no note of it we could see. Maybe at the end of the day one of them would turn and say, “Hey, boys, where’s Bill?”

We skinned that buffalo out, made a cook fire using dried buffalo turds, which burned real good but smelled, as you might guess, like dried buffalo shit. We cooked some buffalo hump and stripped out some of the meat and salted it with the wagon supplies. Later on during the trip we ate it. The salt cured it enough it didn’t rot, but I got to tell you, it was hardly worth the thirst it gave you; watering holes was far apart. There was plenty of goods in that wagon, but one of the ones we had to scrounge for was water.

Still, all in all, that trip was one of the finest and most measured times of my life. With those China girls and us taking turns in the wagon, living off the land, laughing and hooting and such, Wow telling me about this and that she had read, it was one of the greatest pleasures of my life. The trip took us a long time, from the inside edge of West Texas, across the Panhandle, on through Indian Territory—without seeing any Indians—climbing up to South Dakota. Those days and nights seemed to float by like turtles in the river.

Before we actually seen the town we seen the hills, and they was thick and dark with trees. Along the hills a considerable fire had raged, gnawing up wood like a fiery beaver. I later learned that burned-up dead wood was how the town got its name.

We smelled the place before we come up on it. It was the stink of sewage tossed in the streets and that which had run down from outhouses built on higher land. As we come nearer you could add to that body odor and sweat and whiffs of cooking smells and a waft of burned wood breezing down gently from the trees on the rise above us. That burn smell, compared to the other, was a kind of refreshment.

There was a main road that was so muddy and deep with washouts it made the wagon jump as it come along. We had to pull ourselves to the side to keep from being crushed by an ox team that was rolling out of Deadwood, most likely on its way to gather fresh supplies of some ilk or another. The team was led on foot by a stout woman with a big old whip and a dress that hung over her boots, except for the toes. Her boots and dress was splattered in mud. It was quite a train of critters and wagons and such, and when it passed us we continued into town, though calling it a town seems overly polite, like calling a pimp a gentleman.

The buildings was thrown up willy-nilly along the sides of the street, as if some drunk had been given lumber, hammer, and nails and told to go at it. A few buildings had seen paint at one time or another; some rambled nearly into the street, as if they was trying to slink across it and into the hills and return to timber. Here and there were clusters of lumber due to some buildings having toppled like stacks of dominoes. A number of houses had low-slung wooden fences built around sad gardens where weeds grew and bugs lived, though I figured them bugs was embarrassed at their quarters.

There was placer mines right there in the big middle of things. As we come by, I seen a man at one spot, a woman at another, eyeing us as if they thought we might at any moment fly off the handle and steal whatever goods they had dug up. The woman, who was fifty if she was a day, wearing a big blue bonnet, stood with a Winchester in her left hand and a rock in the other. When I looked her way, she tossed the rock at us and winged Wow, who was at the wagon reins this day. After bouncing off Wow’s arm, the rock landed on the seat. Wow scooped it up, swiveled from her position, and with a fine throw beaned the old woman hard enough in the head it knocked her down, slinging her bonnet to the wind. She was up in a flash, tossing more rocks at us, but by that time we was out of her aim and the strength of her arm. To our advantage, she was unwilling to move too far from her claim.

“This is a real nice town,” Cullen said from the back of the wagon. “If it was to catch on fire.”

We had the cover rolled back now, and Cullen and the three China girls was sitting back there like frogs on a log. Wow was clucking at the horses as they plodded through the mud. I rode Satan closer to the wagon. “Don’t you know they’re glad to see two coloreds and some China girls?” I said.

“I don’t know that old woman is glad to see anybody,” Cullen said.

We passed a building on a hill marked as a Congregational church. There was ragged, crooked stairs that climbed up to it. On a kind of porch, I could see what appeared to be a small buffalo, but as we passed I seen it was someone under a buffalo robe, having passed out there either from exhaustion or too much rotgut whiskey. We rolled past a place called the Gem Theater, which was two stories high and not a bad-looking building.

Now, for us colored and China folk, the only place we could go was somewhere on the edge of town, which is how it always was. It was a thing that caused a boiling anger in me and in some ways made me wish I had stayed with the army. We was about finding that place when a man with a tree limb under one arm for a crutch, the skin on his head peeled back from a probable attempt at scalping, limped out from between two buildings and nearly got hit by the horses hauling the wagon. Wow pulled them up, and the fellow put the spy on me so hard I could almost feel his eyes crawling under my skin. His jaw was broke on the left side, and the bone had heaped up there like a snake coiled under leaves. His skin was burned and puckered along the same side of his face, and the other side was a series of ridges made by scars, most likely carved there by a knife. There wasn’t no way to know how he might have looked once, and I felt sorry for him. He not only had that face and a limp, his clothes looked to have been taken off a smaller man than himself. They was wore through with holes, and one of his boots had a flapping heel. He made it across the street with some effort and hobbled between the buildings and out of sight. Wow clucked to the horses and continued.

I seen a place called the Big Horn Store and ragged buildings that served this or that, mostly whiskey, and finally we come to a place that was somewhat cleaner and more organized. This was the Chinaman section of town. The air had a smoky aroma and a peculiar nose-twitching scent that I later learned was opium, and all this was hitting us as we parked in a yard where we was charged a bit of money for currying the horses and storing the wagon. It was a considerable bite in the loot me and Cullen had laid by, so it struck me we was going to have to find work, and pretty damn quick. I still had enough for a meal, and there was a chop suey place near us, but the idea of eating there made me nervous.