The Powder River (11 page)

Before long the cow-boy would get sufficiently full of himself to follow his nymph to the back rooms and invest some of his trail-driving money in a good time. It would be a strange transaction between a blustery lad and a cynical lass, both probably teenagers, one with too little experience and the other with too much. As both a come-on and a guard against intimacy, the girl wouldn’t tell the cow-boy her real name, but would give him a nom de guerre. Girls working in Dodge City at that time were called the likes of Timberline, Hambone Jane, Dutch Jake, Wicked Alice, Peg-Leg Annie, Roaring Gimlet, Tit Bit, or Lady Jane Gray.

Lust, thought Smith, good, healthy lust. Something white folks always spoke ill of—they didn’t even have a word for it that didn’t sound disapproving.

Lust, something Smith was full of and hadn’t been able to let out with his wife. Two and a half weeks of marriage but not two and a half weeks of loving. She’d been passionate once, but there was something desperate about that. That was the night she’d spoken of wanting to run away.

What a honeymoon he’d given his wife. If her family knew, they’d have called out the army to get her back, and get Smith hanged. Well, she was out of it now, well out of it.

Came a mocking inner voice, Out of what, redskin?

Smith kicked himself toward the bar. He got whiskey from a black bartender with droopy, all-knowing eyes. He went to the dice table where they played chuck-a-luck and waited until the point was four, a magical number to the Cheyenne, and bet a dollar on it. Four won. He got more whiskey. He bet on four again, and again, every time he saw it come up. He got more whiskey, and bet on four some more. Toward midnight by the railroad watch he had no use for, he kicked himself out the door toward the porch where he would sleep. He’d bet on four seven times (another magical number) at one table and won five times, and seven times at another table and won six times. He’d come out ahead two ten-dollar gold pieces.

Walking down the middle of the street, not entirely sober, he muttered, “Hoorah for the Cheyennes.” He nearly stumbled into a rut. He reconsidered his mutter. This time he raised a mock toast to the sky and bellowed, “Hurrah for the goddamn Cheyennes.” And repeated it in Cheyenne for the sake of any Cheyenne gods who might be listening.

Then he thought of one more toast. He lifted an imaginary shot glass to the heavens and roared, “Here’s to the gods, goddamn them!”

Chuckling, and weaving a little, he angled toward Wockerley’s house, which was half a block off the main drag, Front Street. Smith was sober enough not to stumble, or make any noises that would offend the good doctor and his wife. Rather, the objectionable doctor and his wife the cadaver.

The good doctor had a good house, Smith thought, looking it over. A two-story affair in proper Victorian style, respectable and good-looking. Since doctoring hardly paid, he must be profiting in patent medicines. House was plenty big enough for a home and office both, even a back porch to take care of convalescents. With a separate porch entrance in case the convalescent’s husband was a man of color. Right for a respectable but officious doctor and his corpse of a wife.

Smith went up the path toward the porch, thinking of Elaine there in her drugged sleep. Then something scuffed in the road behind him.

He jumped instantly to one side with his knife ready. It felt good to be fast. It felt lousy not to see anything in the street.

It hit him in the back and head and knocked him facedown, hard.

Smith made out that it was a human body on him. He tried to roll, but he was pinned flat. A hand grabbed his hair. Then he felt the sharp tip of the knife at his throat. He decided to lie quiet.

“Very good,
veho
,” whispered a voice in his ear. In Cheyenne. He recognized the voice but couldn’t place it. The bastard had waited on the porch roof and tricked Smith with a rock thrown into the street.

“I see you are where you belong now,” rasped the voice. “You eat the white man’s food, gamble for his gold. Did you take one of his women-for-pay? Mmm?”

Smith kept his mouth shut and waited.

“While you gamble,
veho
, who watches your
veho
wife? Who but me?”

Smith quivered with fear, and his enemy tightened his grip on Smith’s hair. Smith ordered himself to put the fear away.

“You should stay in this town,
veho
. The white people would pay you their money to make their bodies well while their spirits rot. You are good at that. You could get lots of gold. See what a fine, big house this doctor has, the one who takes care of your wife. Your wife could work as a woman-for-pay and get lots of gold, too. You could be rich. That’s what you
vehos
want—rich.”

Smith just waited. It would come.

“Turn your head,
veho
, and see who has your life to take or give back.
Turn!
”

Smith rotated his head slowly, away from the knife point.

It was Twist, his face full of triumph and malice.

Twist switched to his bad English, except for the one word he kept repeating. “Do you wants your life,
veho
? I gives it to you. Is no honor in kill a
veho
.”

Twist took the knife point away, but ground Smith’s head into the earth with one arm. “Now Twist gives you your life, he tells you where spend it.

“Stays in Dodge City,
veho
. Stays away from the Human Beings. Your
veho
spirit corrupts the people. Your wife tries turn them into white men. Stays away. If you comes back, Twist cuts your guts out. Then, during you die, he fucks your wife in front of you and cut her head off while he fucks her.

“Thinks of that,
veho
.”

Smith flinched when the knife point touched the socket of his right eye.

“Now Little Wolf will give you something to help you remember,” the warror said in Cheyenne.

Pain jerked hot through him, and something else felt incredible—Smith couldn’t believe it. The knife point ground against bone. It circled the outside of his eye socket—it felt to Smith like it was screeching soundlessly. He felt hot blood run into his eye.

Then Twist’s weight lifted off him, and the muzzle of a pistol pressed against the top of his spine.

“Lie still,
veho
,” growled Twist. “If you get up while I can see you, I will shoot you.” He cackled hideously, but Smith thought it was a stagy cackle, thought out in advance. The pressure of the muzzle disappeared.

So why didn’t you kill me, Twist? Smith asked himself. If you really think I’m a
veho
?

“I would enjoy killing you,” Twist said softly from a few steps away. “Why don’t you move?”

It’s because I’m a Cheyenne, Smith thought triumphantly. You don’t want to kill me because I’m a Cheyenne. You’re afraid of being banished for wasting the blood of one of the Human Beings.

Smith wanted to holler out gladly, and mockingly. But he lay still. Twist was crazy, and a crazy man might do anything.

You’re afraid to kill me, Twist, Smith thought gleefully. He rubbed the blood out of his eye.

After a long while, maybe five minutes, Smith got cautiously to his hands and knees. Nothing happened. He stood up. Still nothing. He ran to the porch where his wife lay sleeping.

He lit a candle. Elaine seemed to be asleep, and at peace. He felt for the artery in her neck—she had a steady pulse. She looked very beautiful in sleep, he thought. She lay on her back, her head angled to one side revealing a classic New England profile, the sort of profile that idealists like abolitionists and suffragists showed in magazine pictures. Smith like that. He felt tender toward her, and admired her. But, he noticed, his feelings were as though from afar. He shook his head—how odd.

Then he noticed that something looked wrong—a hump on Elaine’s chest. He reached and carefully drew the covers down from her neck. The ribbons of her nightgown had been untied, and it lay open, exposing her pale body. Between her small, delicate breasts reposed a horse turd.

Smith picked it up. Not quite dry.

He felt a spasm of hatred. “You’re dead,” Smith said softly to Twist. He pictured the Indian riding silently through the night, back toward the Human Beings. “You’re dead.”

Chapter 14

Smith endured Richtarsch’s needle ironically, but there was something frightening, intimidating, about having stitches done next to your eye. He sucked in his breath quickly, got pierced again, and forced himself to relax and let it out.

No doubt Richtarsch and Wockerley thought Smith had been fighting and fornicating last night. How else would he get cut around the eye? And the neatness of the incision let experienced eyes know it had been done by a knife. A knife fight, how like an Indian. You can paint civilization onto a barbarian, but what you get is a painted barbarian.

Praise be, his colleagues were not going to ask any questions about how he got cut, or let on that it was anything out of the ordinary. They were going to maintain the facade of collegiality.

Richtarsch set down the needle, clipped the ends of the thread, and slapped his hands together as though brushing dust off. “That will do it, I think, Dr. Maclean, and very well.”

He handed Smith a hand mirror. The stitches made a black row of tracks around the outside edge of his eye. The effect was piratical.

Richtarsch was the opposite of Wockerley—talkative, dynamic, respectful (overrespectful) to Smith, and cocksure of himself. He was ultra-military, his uniform gleaming, his bearing erect, his movements snappy, even his buttocks, Smith noticed, taut.

Now he “moved around Elaine with the air of a man on the stage he was born to. He held up her wrist and declared her pulse normal. He touched her forehead and judged sonorously that she was not feverish. He felt and smelled her shin wound and found it warm. He also observed that it was not inflamed.

“Gut,”
he said, “no infection.” Sometimes Dieter Richtarsch’s German birth spoke through his English pronunciations. Wockerley said he’d earned a considerable reputation as a surgeon in the War Between the States and become something of an authority on serious fractures.

Richtarsch inspected the shin minutely where the bones were broken and palpated it firmly. Smith watched Elaine’s face for pain, but Wockerley had her deeply medicated, and she looked placid.

“It is displaced,” Richtarsch said authoritatively. He gave a formal smile through his red mustache and beard.

He stood and brushed his hands as though to get dust off them. “Well, it is not zo bad, Dr. Maclean. We have seen many of these in the Rebellion. Many plus many. The treatment is straightforward—traction. We got a good result many times, but sometimes not.” The surgeon’s
w
’s were only halfway to
v
’s, which was not bad.

“Of course it takes weeks. At the fort, fine, she could be there, but it’s not so good to move her now. Dr. Wockerley, could you see fit to care for the patient here? I could come in and check her every few days, which would be sufficient.”

“Of course, Dr. Richtarsch.” Wockerley was all the deferential fool now. “Of course, the fort would be less expensive for Dr. Maclean.” Apparently the army would help out a civilian and charge nothing. A white woman, anyway.

Richtarsch waved that consideration off. Evidently Richtarsch judged that money couldn’t be a consideration to a doctor, even a redskin doctor. Or if it could be, it would be not mannerly or not collegial to admit the possibility.

Smith wondered if Wockerley agreed to board Elaine because he wanted the pay, or because he would cater to whatever Richtarsch wanted.

“So. Why not today, hmmm? Things are not getting any better as we wait.” The German doctor looked boldy at his two colleagues, and neither protested. “I will ask Private Connors to go get the mechanical equipment.” Smith supposed Private Connors was the soldier waiting at the buggy outside. “In the meantime, let’s get some lunch. Will you join me, gentlemen?”

Wockerley accepted eagerly, but Smith said he wanted to stay with Elaine.

The two doctors made their way toward the street, Richtarsch talking enthusiastically. “I like the Saratoga,” declared Richtarsch. “That Chalk Beeson sets an excellent table. Remarkable name, isn’t it—Chalk? Very American …”

Smith could no longer hear the fellow.

He looked at his wife and sat down next to her. He took her hand, surrounded it with his oversized ones, and rested it in his lap. She still felt the effects of the laudanum now. Richtarsch would be ready to reset the bones in about three hours, so she would need more anodyne in about two hours.

Maybe, just before then, she would be better able to hear and understand him. Maybe he would be able to tell her. Ask her. Whatever. It was then or not at all.

She heard Adam only now and again. She seemed to be borne up on a cresting wave of consciousness and dropped into a trough of oblivion. Though she couldn’t make out all the words or be sure what he was asking, she knew the music of what he was saying, knew the melody but not the lyrics. He was uncertain. He hurt. He didn’t know whether she wanted him. He didn’t know whether to go back to the people or stay with her.

She felt washed in regret. She felt for Adam and wanted to reach out to him. She couldn’t—she didn’t have whatever it took to reach out to him or anybody. He was too far away. Everything was too far away.

She tried once to take his hand, but succeeded only in flopping her own hand off her lap and onto the bed. He didn’t see what she wanted to give him, and didn’t grasp her hand.

She wanted to tell him that she wanted to be married to him and to live with him forever. But she couldn’t tell him that now—she couldn’t have if she’d been all right. It was too momentous, too dangerous, and she was too shattered, too much in need of being put back together. She wanted to want him. She thought she would after she was safe, nurtured, and whole.

Making declarations to him now would be talking of life ashore. She didn’t know whether she would get to shore.

She knew what he was going through, what he thought, what he feared. She had known right along, known without admitting to herself that she knew. He felt ashamed that he had brought her into his world, and nearly destroyed her life. He felt ashamed of the barbarous way his people lived, and of himself—and at the same time he felt proud of the beautiful and spiritual way they lived, and of himself. He felt unwanted because she’d been reluctant to make love to him … well, in the rocks and the dirt. He felt not good enough for her, and at the same time hated her for thinking him not good enough. Which she didn’t. He feared she’d meant it literally when she made that dumb remark about running away.

She regretted it all, but the regret seemed far away. She did not so much love him as she wanted to love him. She would love him when she got back to shore, she knew she would, but that was so far away, perhaps unreachable.

He took her hand, and that made her glad. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Tears glistened on his broad, flat, manly face. A lovable face. She did love him. She squeezed his hand affectionately and closed her eyes.

It was so hard, it was all so hard.

She had a picture in her head, splinters of timbers covered with foam and floating in the sea, being borne away from the shore by some unseen but all-powerful tide. She wondered whether she and Adam were caught up in such a tide. If so, they had no say in where it would take them.

Suddenly she felt a great urgency. She must say something to him. She must set him free to go to the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio with a good conscience, she must. She began sorting out the words in her mind, like polished pebbles she wanted to give him. Sometimes she lost track, but then she rearranged her pebbles, and at last turned onto her side and tried to raise up on one elbow. Adam grasped her, concerned.

Speak, she shouted at herself. Speak.

Smith held his wife up, wondering what she wanted. Did she want to tell him something? He’d gotten used to talking to himself, talking himself through whatever he had to go through, a solitary passage.

Elaine fell back and lay still. Occasionally her lips worked, but only a whispery rasp came out, far from language. He wondered if she was saying, “Don’t go.” Or, “Come back.”

But he didn’t know. Smith could permit himself no illusion or sentimentality, not at a time like this. He would have to go on. He would have to go without feeling sure where their marriage stood.

He would go on with the Cheyennes toward the Powder River. Toward it, and maybe only toward. If all turned out well, he would come back for her—hunt her down if necessary. But he would understand if she wanted to end the marriage. Maybe she hadn’t understood the life she was letting herself in for. Truly not.

He loved her. He loved her. He loved her.

Adam Smith Maclean stood up, looked at his sleeping wife, bent and kissed her forehead. He would not wait for the doctors to come back, would not help them set up the traction. She was not infected, and that would have to be enough.

His lot was chosen. He would get his horse from the livery and go back to being what he really was, a poor, desperate Indian.