On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch (41 page)

They were quiet, gazing into the flames, listening to the whisper of the smoldering spruce logs, as if they held some secret to tell. A rush of wind off the eastern mountain peaks brought the lingering chill of a departed winter. The flames darted, cowered, reemerged stronger.

“I know where he’s staying and what he’s doing,” Wicasha said on the tail end of the gust.

Franklin sat up straight, his shoulders squared and rigid. “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s no matter to me.”

“He’s working as a cook at Madame Lafourchette’s,” Wicasha went on as if he hadn’t heard Franklin’s protest, which even to Franklin had reverberated in his ears as hollow and insincere. “He’s unhappy, Frank. More despondent than you are. Mostly because he fears he’s made you unhappy. I talk to him when I’m in town. You’re the only person he asks about. He only wants a chance to explain why he did what he did. I can get word to him, if you want.”

“No,” Franklin snapped. “He’s no longer any of my concern.”

“Frank, I saw you flinch when I mentioned he works at Madame Lafourchette’s. You still care about the chikala wasichu. You want him back by your side.”

“Don’t put thoughts into my head, Wicasha.”

“I’d give anything to stand in your boots.” Wicasha stared beyond the fire, through the ponderosa bordering the creek, where the sound of gurgling water pierced the breeze. “To have a chance at love again,” he whispered to the wind. “What a joy that would be. Don’t ruin this for yourself, Franklin Ausmus.”

Franklin snapped the wooden spoon in two with his one hand and dashed it to the ground. “Don’t you understand English no more, Indian? I told you, mind your own damn business.”

Wicasha set down his tin cup on the table and stood with a crack of his large bones. “Suit yourself, Frank. But I have to say, you’ve become lousy company since you’ve left Tory in Spiketrout.”

Chapter 35

H
OT
grease leaped at Tory and stung his cheek. He jumped back, unaccustomed to the endless steamy work even after two weeks on the job. As he flipped the pork chops over on the grill and listened to the sizzle, his persistent worries hardened—he had lost Franklin. And yet, he believed, he most likely deserved the desolation residing in his heart.

His father had spoken the truth. Walt Whitman, yearning for love by the moaning of poetry, was nothing but “Amerikanskt skräp.” Tory would die on the prairie alone, like so many before him who had ventured west for romantic and aimless dreams. Alone and, if he walked away from a job he found more intolerable each day, penniless.

Madame Lafourchette paid him room and board. A stuffy old room in the basement, with only one window too high to look out or let in much light, and a cot that provided far less comfort than Franklin’s had. The only consolation was the two finches that nested by the window, waking him each morning with naïve chirping. He’d take the scraps he’d saved from the kitchen, climb on a chair, open the window ajar, and feed the birds like he had the pigeons back in Chicago. Little else lifted Tory’s spirits.

Looking back at the past several months, Tory marveled that Franklin hadn’t learned the truth about him sooner. So often Tory had slipped with information only Torsten P. would know. He had lived half a year with his lies undetected—as precariously as Joseph when he’d perched himself on the twelfth-floor windowsill before his fatal fall—longer than he deserved.

How horrible to mislead Franklin merely for his own selfish aim to lessen his loneliness. He’d chased Franklin for the same reason he had sought men at the cabaret on 35th Street in Chicago, only with higher stakes and a more elaborate scheme. Traveling one thousand miles by train and stagecoach, Tory had set Franklin up to fall into his hands. He had never imagined Franklin would fall in love with him, but hadn’t he done all he could to ensure he might?

Tory did love him, loved him with all the power his body could contain. He wanted to tell Franklin he had meant his words in those letters, and that the subsequent sharing of their lives since September was as real to him as life itself. Another letter to him explaining himself, conveyed away by Wicasha, would only add a sarcastic insult to Franklin’s grieving.

Wicasha’s visits were minimal comfort. He had tried to talk Tory into coming back with him to Franklin’s homestead. Tory wanted to, but the thought of facing Franklin’s wrath stymied his determination.

“Does he want me back?” Tory had asked during Wicasha’s latest visit, his eyes probing.

Wicasha’s downturned head and silence had said enough. Franklin was still fuming over Tory’s wicked stunt. He never wished to see Tory again.

And Tory could not blame him.

What he had done was inexcusable.

Tory hated himself too.

Working at the hurdy-gurdy house (a place he never even would have considered stepping inside seven months ago, much less work and live in), surrounded by foul-mouthed and nefarious men and women, seemed fitting for Tory. Just punishment for his actions. He took to his chores as a prisoner in a chain gang, living out his sentence.

Madame Lafourchette, pleased Tory’s cooking had increased her business, kept him busy in the kitchen. “I actually got people stopping by just for the food,” she had said, laughing, a few days before. “Some don’t even look at my girls.”

She had whispered something else to him, alluded to a proposition. “Just between you and me, honey. I’ve had a couple of the men ask about you. They seem interested in making a deal with me like most do with the girls.”

Had the madame insinuated she wanted Tory to become a renter? He had tolerated the renters in the cabaret on 35th Street. Never did he want to become like them. Madame Lafourchette’s proposal had filled Tory with horror.

“They think you’re awful pretty,” she had gone on. “It’s a steady income and comes with fringe benefits between you and your suitor. I won’t say anything more, I’ll just let you stew on it, and you can tell me what you think when you’re ready.”

After nights of tossing and turning, Tory had considered consenting to Madame Lafourchette’s offer. But did Tory hate himself enough, after everything, to stoop to such a degrading means to earn income? He detested knowing such a practice even took place under his nose. But where else was he to go?

As the pork chops hissed and spit at him with greasy rancor, he pondered if perhaps his destiny might not be to work as the lone male renter in a hurdy-gurdy house. Perhaps he should accept Madame Lafourchette’s proposal. What difference would it make? He was already enmeshed among whores and gamblers and drunks. Working as one of them, after all, might be proper punishment for his ugly betrayal of Franklin.

Chapter 36

F
INALLY
, the spasms stopped. In their place emerged a complacent calm. A strange tranquility settled in his veins. Good feelings shivered down his spine and constricted his throat. Listening to the rain patter the roof as he lay in bed, his head cleared. The night became retiring, gentler.

What had happened? Where had his misery gone? Had the rain washed it away, down the gully and into the creek?

Franklin understood. His agonizing sorrows had reached so low, there remained nowhere for his emotions to carry him but out of the abyss. On the wings of rising emotions, soft considerations began to bloom. Had he meant his words when he’d cursed Tory for wronging him worse than Bilodeaux? Was it “subterfuge” that had propelled Tory’s actions?

Wicasha had said Tory existed in a world of desperate loneliness. Perhaps he’d had no choice but to masquerade himself as Torsten P. Wasn’t it loneliness that had driven Franklin to take out a silly advertisement in that matchmaker periodical in the first place?

And hadn’t Torsten P.’s words been the same as Tory’s? If Torsten’s letters had moved Franklin, then in reality, Tory’s words had moved him, too.

Somewhere in his unclogging mind, an understanding took hold. As the rainy night caressed him, he kept still, allowing the new sensation to seize him. He lay helpless, yet contented. A supple light began to fill his deadened soul.

Tory had whispered during their lovemaking at the Gold Dust Inn, “Always belong to you.” Had he uttered mere words during a moment of unquenchable lust, a sinister extension of Tory’s game? Or had Tory affirmed his commitment to Franklin that night, a commitment that might have sprouted from his first correspondence?

Franklin had submitted himself to Tory, permitting him to do what Franklin had never imagined. The sensation of Tory penetrating him had been painful, but he’d relished the closeness, the intensity of melding with Tory’s body. What had it meant? Had an unusual, mystical marriage taken place between him and Tory at Madame Lafourchette’s inn that night?

Tory had broken from his captivity in a cold, dank cave and rushed out of the darkness to search for Franklin at Moonlight Gulch. Franklin now also observed a light emerging, beckoning him. Pushing him to seek Tory. Yet he balked.

Always belong to you
. Did Tory ever belong to him in the same vein that his homestead, and everything else on it, belonged to him? Had Tory woven his way into his existence much like how the creek curled its way through his land?

He moaned with one final spasm, unleashed against a withering pain of need, fear, loneliness.

Franklin climbed out of bed and retrieved Tory’s letters from his old Army trunk. He read them again, each one, by the residual light of the stove. He detected his mustache lifting, tickling his nose. He was smiling.

Wicasha had said Tory was working at Madame Lafourchette’s as a cook. Wicasha knew Franklin well. Franklin detested the idea of his being at a hurdy-gurdy house. He never did want him to work there, even that day when he’d driven Tory into town after his first night at the homestead. Something about Tory had made Franklin want to protect him from the rowdies. Since Wicasha had mentioned Tory’s whereabouts, an added irritation had compounded Franklin’s misery.

Shouldn’t he at least listen to what Tory had to say? Didn’t he deserve that much? Surely he hadn’t staged all the love and attention he’d shown Franklin since last September. The caring for his wounds from working the homestead, the gentle touch of his hands when he’d trimmed his hair. All that wasn’t subterfuge. Was it?

And Tory was certainly no gold digger. Franklin had no doubts of Tory’s sincerity when he’d pleaded with him to never pan for the gold amassed in the creek pool.

He’ll always be peering in at the world from behind bushes
. Wicasha’s words brushed his mind and released a sharp odor, like the crushing of the leaves of the stinkweed. Too much had passed between him and Tory for Franklin to let him float from his life like dandelion seeds. He should at least hear him out. He owed Tory that much.

He had decided. He would drive into Spiketrout next morning and finally have a face to face with Tory.

The night sighed. Franklin crawled back under the bedcovers. Sleep inched over him. Like the warm wash of a kettle bath over his achy limbs, wispy dreams swallowed his torment.

B
UOYED
with fresh optimism, Franklin rode the muddy trail into town dressed in his Sunday best, rehearsing over and over in his mind just what he would say to Tory once they’d meet for the first time since he’d abandoned him in Spiketrout more than two weeks before. He would maintain a distant air, but allow Tory to speak his mind. They would find a remote table away from the rowdies. He’d sit opposite him with an unmoved expression. According to Wicasha, Tory would be glad to see him under any circumstance.

Franklin would listen to Tory’s explanation of why he’d answered his advertisement and what had induced him to come to the Black Hills. While listening, Franklin would pretend to mull Tory’s words over in his mind, although he’d already determined his intentions. Standing casually, he would offer to allow Tory to return to Moonlight Gulch where he may continue as Franklin’s hired hand. But they must maintain a proper distance, of course.

Would Tory take Franklin’s fancy dress as a sign that he was desperate for him to return as his lover?