The Powder River (22 page)

It had occurred to him. Rain was the widow of his mother Annemarie’s brother Red Hand, she had no family living, the union would be suitable in every way, and he had a responsibility to her. Besides, she was lovely.

He had also made up his mind about it. “I have considered,” he said to his mother, “and decided against it.”

That was enough. Even Cheyenne mothers listened when their grown sons spoke like that. She stayed leaning against him, though. Smith luxuriated in his full belly and the closeness of his mother.

The next morning he took Lisette aside and said, “My family is now fed for the winter. All the people are fed.” Since they didn’t have to hunt, he went on, but could stay hidden in the valley, the danger from soldiers would be slight.

He thought with a sneaky smile of what he had decided to do. A couple of hundred miles’ ride, or more, but so what? It was crazy, but he loved it. He said, “I am going to Dodge City.” He didn’t add, “To see Elaine.”

Early in the big hard-face moon, which the whites called December, and which Dr. Adam Smith Maclean called by either name, according to circumstance and mood, a scout rode down Front Street leading an extra mount, both cavalry horses. Past the Alamo he came, a saloon popular with Texas cow-boys, past the Opera House Saloon, and past the Lady Gay Dance Hall. All three entertainment palaces were empty now that the cattle-drive season was over. He turned onto a side street and tied his horses opposite the porch of a self-consciously proper house. He went up to the porch door and rapped firmly. He appeared to be looking in the big windows that fronted the porch.

The plump young woman in the house next door, Sue Loveday, eyed the scout with raging curiosity—her life was knowing what went on in the neighborhood—and quickly made a shrewd guess about who this immensely tall scout was. She smiled to herself. Had her children been home to see, they would have seen on their mother’s face, with the emotional perceptiveness children have, a fluid wash of delight and malice.

Sue reached for her shawl. There was no time to lose. The poor man.

Through the front door she waddled hurriedly, but once outside she affected the air of a woman out for a stroll on a delightful Indian-summer afternoon. She saw out of the corner of her eye that the scout now had his nose to a window, his hands blinkering his eyes. The poor man.

She slowed her walk carelessly. When he turned away from the window, she started, as though she hadn’t seen him until that moment. Then she stopped and spread the look of the uninvolved but sincerely concerned across her round face. “Oh!” she cried. “Dr. Maclean?”

“Yes, madam,” Smith said politely. He wondered where in hell Elaine’s belongings were. Certainly not on that bare porch. He had no attention to spare to wonder what sort of creature he faced.

“Oh, Dr. Maclean, you must be looking for your wife.”

“Yes, madam.”

“I think you’d best ask Sheriff Masterson. Two days ago I saw him help her move her things. I can’t think where she might be living.” In fact, the woman knew very well that she was at Mrs. Yancey’s boardinghouse, but Sue Loveday didn’t hand out information freely—she traded it in a delicious little game of sharp glances, vocal nuances, and expressively bitten lips.

Smith nodded gravely. Ask the sheriff. Smith was badly scared. Maybe Elaine had finished her traction and was gone back east in her splint. Gone back east for good.

Now he looked at the woman before him, her face a vivid melange of feelings he couldn’t add up. What was he to her that her eyes should be so bright, her face so florid? What was Elaine to her? Had she gotten to know Elaine—they were next-door neighbors—and come to care about her? What was she not saying? He had a strong notion that the truth was not in this woman, and he acted on that notion.

“Thank you, madam,” he said, giving the word a hoity-toity stress on the second syllable. He touched his hat brim and turned away to untie his mount.

Sue gaped at him. The man certainly didn’t show any curiosity! And about his own wife! If they were really married! A white woman to an Indian!

Sue stood there for a moment, miffed, trying to think of something more to say, something to keep the exchange going. But she was trapped by her desire to appear simply helpful, and of course not really involved.

Smith rode off toward the sheriff’s office.

“Sheriff,” said Elaine, “I’m afraid I have to stop.”

This ride was the first when they’d ventured beyond the town streets. She’d felt up to more effort, and she intended to miss no opportunity.

But now she was tired. Maybe to herself she could even say “exhausted.”

She reached out to Bat Masterson, who had come around to help her dismount. She slid off the sidesaddle half into his arms, and instead of lowering her to the road, he slid one arm behind her legs and carried her to the surrey. A little embarrassing, but very convenient, and they weren’t in public. She appreciated Bat Masterson, he of the thick, strong arms, good looks, and attentive politeness. He lifted her straight in the seat.

Dr. Richtarsch had given her the peg leg the coffin maker had fashioned for her, from a good piece of hardwood shipped all the way from Missouri. She could start trying the leg a little each day in a couple of weeks, he said. A fine Christmas present, then—her first steps without crutches.

The sheriff clucked to the horses, turned them in a wide arc off the road, and pointed them back toward town. The motion of the surrey jolted her, and she realized how exhausted she was—she’d exerted herself with her legs today, and now they were trembling from the effort.

She looked around at the woolen blanket the sheriff had laid on the back seat, in case it got cold, he said. But the afternoon was sunny and warm, a lovely day to be out riding.

She was tired beyond tired. Maybe she could take a little nap on the way back to town. She shouldn’t, but then she was doing so much she shouldn’t. She shouldn’t have moved into a boardinghouse where she was the lone woman. But what was she to do when she couldn’t afford to stay with the Wockerleys, and Dr. Wockerley wanted to be rid of her anyway? She shouldn’t be spending time alone with the sheriff. But he was the only friend she had, and she was very lonely. Besides, she needed to get started riding, and no woman would be strong enough to help her get mounted and dismounted.

Of course, the hens of Dodge City would say what they wanted about her consorting with a man like the sheriff. But she was married, and meant to stay that way.

She reached into the back for the folded blanket and laid it on the sheriff’s shoulder. The shoulder would make what she was going to do seem less intimate. With one shy glance up at the sheriff’s face, she laid her head on the blanket.

In two or three minutes her fatigue, the warm sun, and the motion of the buggy carried her off to sleep.

“You the sheriff?”

“Unnershuriff.”

“I’m Adam Maclean,” said Smith. “I’m looking for my wife.”

The fellow was taking his ease leaning against the front wall of the office. It was that nice a day, for December.

He gave Smith a flat look. Smith supposed he didn’t like Smith’s tone much, or the fact that he stayed on his mount. If a white man spoke to the undersheriff from horseback, he was powerful and got the bended knee. If an Indian did it, scout or not, he was insolent.

The fellow started rolling a cigarette with one hand alone, a cow-boy’s trick. Took his time with it, too. “Might look out along the road toward the fort,” the fellow said. He took a deep draw. “She’s out riding with Sheriff Masterson.” He blew the smoke toward Smith. His expression was unreadable.

Out riding? In her splint? With Masterson? As Smith recalled, Masterson had some name as a fellow ready to mix it up, and as a ladies’ man.

Smith said, like the cow-boys, “Obliged,” giving away no more than the fellow did. He reined his horse in that direction.

Smith saw the buggy in the distance, crawling like a spider back toward town. He stopped and focused the field glasses he’d stolen from the sergeant he killed. And couldn’t believe what he saw.

A surrey with a driver, and a horse tied behind. And a woman next to the driver, her head resting on his shoulder.

If the driver was Masterson, and the passenger was Elaine …

He flushed. He had an impulse to gallop off, to get out of Elaine’s life, to go back to …

Humiliated. He felt humiliated, bitterly.

He was just a goddamned red nigger. Red nigger cuckold.

He had to know. And by God he would let her feel the whip of his anger. He gouged his horse with his spurs.

Elaine swam one stroke toward consciousness. Then she felt Sheriff Masterson’s hand shaking her arm gently, and she rose to the surface.

She opened her eyes. The surrey had stopped. A mounted man leading an extra horse stood in front of them, a tall mam. He …

Adam!

Elaine jerked her head up off the sheriff’s shoulder.

Adam spoke slowly and clearly in the soft and melodic Cheyenne language. He must be speaking so distinctly because he wanted her to remember the words forever. His face was dark, mottled. His words were, “A moose has wet on my lodge.” Meaning, something has happened that’s beneath my contempt. “I send you back to your relatives.”

She couldn’t respond for a moment. Then she screamed, “Wa-a-i-it!”

At that moment Adam put the spurs to his horse and was gone in a clatter of hooves.

My God, she said to herself, disbelieving.

She watched the rider get smaller, galloping toward the fort, galloping out of her life.

“What did he say?” asked Bat Masterson.

She looked at the sheriff soberly. “My husband says he divorces me,” she murmured.

The sheriff got down from the buggy and looked down at the road, maybe at Adam’s tracks. Then he looked after the two horses, already getting smaller in the distance.

“We can’t catch him in this surrey, can we?” Elaine said hopelessly.

“No,” said Bat Masterson, drawling it out. He got back into the surrey. “We can catch him with a posse, though. And we will. Remember, he’s a wanted man.” The sheriff lashed at the horses, and they broke into a run.

Divorced. My good God, divorced.

BOOK THREE

Chapter 1

On the second day she roused herself enough to go to the sheriff’s office.

She’d spent the days in a crazy state of mind. That first afternoon she’d lain about, apathetic. She threw herself about her room, actually pounding on the walls and falling on the floor. She wept, hopelessly, self-indulgently, extravagantly. She screamed. She bellowed and moaned.

At some point early on she passed beyond being nervous about what the other lodgers must think. Probably they thought she’d gone mad. They’d send men for her and lock her up. Maybe they’d put her in the cell next to Adam, and at least she could see him and be near him until they hanged him.

She fingered her shoulder-length hair. So now, bitch, you really have something to grieve about.

The next day, in what seemed a fever of rage or despair or … something, she crutched all the way to the telegraph office. There she wrote a telegram to her mother and sister in Massachusetts:

ADAM HAS ORDERED ME BACK TO MY RELATIVES STOP THAT MEANS HE HAS DIVORCED ME STOP I ASK IN SHAME IF YOU CAN SEND ME TRAIN FARE TO COME HOME STOP YOUR DAUGHTER ELAINE

Then she started to edit it down, to get the point into as few words as possible to save money. Suddenly, for no reason, she wadded the form up, slammed it into the wastebasket, glared at the operator nastily, and stomped out. She felt ridiculous trying to stomp without two feet to stomp with.

The day after that she managed to hie herself to the sheriff’s office. The man behind the desk looked like he couldn’t be roused to care about anything on earth. He didn’t get up. She wondered if he could talk around the huge chaw in his mouth.

“Are you a deputy, sir?”

“Unnershuriff.”

“May I speak to the sheriff?”

“He ain’t here.”

“Will he be in today?”

The undersheriff shrugged. “No telling. Out with a posse.” So the fellow didn’t intend to let on that he knew who Elaine was.

“Would you send word to Mrs. Maclean at Mrs. Yancey’s boardinghouse when he gets back? Whenever he gets back, day or night?”

The undersheriff made a shrug that meant, “I guess,” or, “Why not?”

“It’s important,” Elaine said.

The man nodded vaguely.

“Thank you, Unnershuriff,” Elaine said with a maliciously formal smile.

She crutched away with all the dignity she could muster and did not glance back. She thought in thunder to herself: I will get good on that peg leg, I will get graceful with it, I will wear skirts to the ground so people won’t be able to tell, I will be slender and beautiful. Meanwhile she thought how hideous she must look, at the moment, to the undersheriff.

And I will show them that I can teach and be
useful
.

For despite her tempests, her rampages, her demonstrations, she supposed she had accepted Adam’s decision. Yes, it was unfair. Yes, Adam had made a mistake. Yes, she was misunderstood. But that was just his excuse to get what he wanted anyway. What he wanted, for whatever reason, was an end to the marriage. He’d wanted that all long. She didn’t know why, but she accepted.

She would have done anything for him. But she wouldn’t beg. She never would have done that. Now that she was crippled it was unthinkable.

Not that she believed the excuses he must be giving himself. That everything was against it—the times, the cultures, the barrier of race, the tides of history—everything. It wasn’t their fault, he would say. The circumstances made it impossible.

Meanwhile only one circumstance made their marriage out of the question: Elaine could never again be a whole woman. She couldn’t go to him crippled. And a cripple couldn’t make a wife to an Indian.

So there it was. But the son of a bitch didn’t even know it.

Around midday on the second day Smith cut the old main trail of the Cheyennes moving north and followed it. Now the tracks of his stolen cavalry horses would be mixed with lots of other tracks. Since his were shod, and fresh, the posse could still track him. But he had an idea.

It was an idea that would keep him from shooting at county sheriffs any more, or the deputized agents of sheriffs. Yesterday he’d had to slow them up by letting them know he was watching his back trail. As a result they had to leave one horse for the vultures.

He kicked his horses up to a gallop. They were tired, but they’d run for a while yet. A well-trained horse would run as long as its rider asked, until it died. These horses just needed to put a little distance between Smith and his trackers. It wouldn’t do to be seen working his wiles.

He hurried right along for twenty minutes, then stopped with some rock underfoot. He’d have to work fast. He tied the reins of the two horses together. Then he got his big knife from his belt, lifted the front right hoof of the saddled horse, worked the tip in beneath the shoe, then pushed the knife down to the hilt. A little twisting and the shoe came right off-—it wasn’t as hard as he’d feared.

Seven patient repetitions. Being deliberate brought his pulse up nicely, but it saved time, and it was something he needed. He had to concentrate to keep his emotions calmed. He couldn’t afford to think about the life he was riding away from, or he wouldn’t end up getting away from it—he’d end up in the hoosegow.

There, he was finished. He put the shoes in his saddlebags, mounted, and got up to a gallop again. He needed a little distance, and then the horses could rest the whole afternoon and night. His shod tracks disappeared, and his horses became two of several hundred Indian ponies.

After two or three miles, he saw what he needed, one set of unshod tracks forking away from the main trail to the northwest. Over that way was a long hilltop. He could set himself there and watch. Mixing fresh tracks with old ones was a risk. A first-rate tracker might guess what he’d done. But Smith thought none of these white men would be as good as a Cheyenne tracker. If they were, Smith would just have to shoot him some deputies. And why not a sheriff, a goddamned sheriff who would steal your wife and make sure of her by hanging you?

He picketed his horses beyond the ridge line, hoofed back up to where he could see the main trail, and got prone with a good shooting angle. Ten minutes later Bat Masterson’s posse came to where Smith had left the main trail and rode on north without even a close look.

Bye-bye, Sheriff Masterson. You ass.

Anguish raged through Smith. After slipping away from the sheriff’s posse, Smith walked the horses away from the trail, his head down, his steps despairing. Now his memories swirled around Elaine, his mind aflame with jealousy.

He did manage to take the routine precautions—waited until past the early sunset and doubled back into some rocks to make a fireless bivouac in the dark. There he sank into a kind of stupor, a miasma of memories of Elaine, fragments of conversations, odd bits of music they’d heard together, tastes of meals they’d shared, often quite ordinary meals, all of it made piquant by intermittent touches, and made absurd by great globs of sticky desire that entangled him, mocked him, and infuriated him.

In the middle of the night it began to rain, a thin, chill drizzle that suited his misery perfectly.

When he woke wet in the morning, he honestly wasn’t sure he’d slept, whether all those throes had been fantasy or dream. He let the horses rest on some fair grass for half a day while he fretted and tried to watch his back trail, and then set out toward Ogallala. He was shaking like leaves in the wind of his own rage.

He found them stuck where the crude road crossed a wash running an inch or so of water, a teenage boy and his father, heaving at their wagon to get it out. They were headed out from town and probably could have gotten through that wash easily except for the rain and whatever their load was. Smith sat his horse and watched them from the top of a little rise for a moment, making sure they were alone, and what they seemed to be, and wondering why they were so inattentive in rough country.

The man had his hair shaved back from his forehead in the manner of devotees of the Chautauqua circuit, of all things. Well, Smith supposed intellectuals came to Nebraska, too. Even awkward-looking intellectuals like this one. The boy seemed sullen. Smith wondered whether he blamed his father for letting them get stuck in a cold drizzle.

Smith rode down close and saw that the faded lettering on the wagon said “DANA DIDEROT, MARBLE MONUMENTS.” Three big gravestones lay in the back of the wagon. Smith wondered what rich family could have been unlucky enough to have three deaths at once. He noted that Diderot didn’t have sense enough to unload the wagon so it would come out.

“Trembul-ling titties, we’ve got company,” said the gangling man. He affected an exaggerated drollness, as though he’d seen Smith coming, which he hadn’t. The kid jumped like he’d been bit. Diderot grinned madly at him, pretending they shared some secret joke. He signed a greeting of friendship to Smith.

Chuckling inside, his face somber, Smith signed friendship back.

“Tottering testicles, a
friendly
savage,” said Diderot with clownish merriment. “I wonder if he’s a helpful savage.” The man abandoned the expressive sign language of the plains for kids’ gestures: You. Us. Wagon.

Smith put on his best silent, stoic, noble face. If you’re going to be a stereotype, you may as well be a thundering one. He swung out of the saddle, led his horses to the front of the wagon, and picketed them.

He was trying to sort out the queerest impulse he had. He didn’t want to speak English with these people. He didn’t want to be Dr. Adam Smith Maclean. He wanted to give them what they saw, a dirty, stinking, ignorant savage.

He said in mellifluous Cheyenne, “I see you have troubles. I will help you,” and he repeated that promise with his hands.

“Jesus hallelujah,” Diderot went on, pronouncing Jesus in the Spanish was, “Hay-soos.” “I wish I knew what tribe he belongs to,” said Diderot. His son had nothing to say. The kid just stood there looking pissed off, like an engine building up steam. “His skull looks like the Cro-Magnon type. I’m sure there are tribal patterns. The intellectual capacity may be limited.” He played the scientist amused at a specimen.

Smith considered for a long moment. No, he wouldn’t speak English. It was the oddest feeling. He walked to the wagon, climbed in via a wheel, noting that the wheels were dug in deep. He lifted one of the gravestones and dumped it into the wash. One by one, wordless, conscious of the eyes on him, he dumped the others. The carved stones each weighed as much as a sizable man, and sank deep into the sand. Lifting them took a huge effort—for someone of ordinary size it would have been impossible. Smith made a point of seeming to do it easily.

He watched the rivulet of water run around the big stones and deliberately did not look at Diderot.

“Tottering testicles,” said Diderot, with an idiot smile at his son.

Smith jumped out of the wagon, taking Diderot’s length of hemp with him. He tied the hemp to the axle and to his saddle horn. Then he motioned to Diderot to lead the team, and lisped, “Plis, plis,” as though he were unsure of the English word. He went forward to lead his own horse. The horses strained, and the wagon came out with a gritty
suck!

“Parlez-vous français?”
he asked Diderot as he pulled the picket on his second horse. When Diderot shook his head, Smith said in French, “May it always burn when you piss.”

Diderot held out his arms in a gesture of helplessness. Smith switched his saddle from the tired mount to the rested one and pulled the cinch tight.

He said to Diderot in the Crow language, which he had spoken from childhood, “May your family put you out to starve.” The man smiled stupidly at his son and muttered, “Moronic maunderings.”

Smith swung into his saddle. “May your grandchildren all be idiots,” he said in Lakota, with a big grin and a friendly wave of the hand.

He touched his spurs to his horse’s flanks and was off. Before long, he was sure, the intellectual would recall that the gravestones were in the wash, and start considering how to hoist them back into the wagon, and not like the answer.

It was a damn nuisance. Every time she stepped, the peg banged, or clopped like a hoof on a boardwalk. Just what a lady wants, to sound like a horse when she walks. And the thing didn’t seem to give her decent balance. When she put her weight straight on it, she was balanced. But when she put part of her weight on her good leg, the peg seemed to want to scrape around and act like the deck of a pitching boat. And when she stepped forward on it, it seemed to throw her forward onto her good leg too quickly, making her feel as though she was lurching.

Oh, hell, she
was
lurching. That was what she would have to overcome. She certainly wasn’t going to be seen around town constantly saving herself with her left leg, like the strap on a swaying train. She was going to be seen walking gracefully, making people admire her carriage, and even fooling those who didn’t know. And to hell with Adam.

She sat and took the damn thing off. It was a simple device, a hardwood peg screwed into a flat, round top, then a piece of rawhide that laced tight onto her leg, with a pad of buffalo hair to act as cushion for the stump. Dr. Richtarsch had feared she didn’t have enough leg left below the knee for the rawhide to lace onto, requiring a peg leg that reached up to her thigh, but this one seemed to work.

Lord, her stump felt raw. Maybe she
was
hurrying the process. But she couldn’t stand being on crutches a day longer than she had to. She would leave Dodge City looking good. Though she was through with the West—through with it! through with it!—she wouldn’t leave until she could look like a lady, not a cripple.

All right, one more circuit of the walls of her room and she would quit. The pain was, well, all that Dr. Richtarsch had predicted it would be. She kept her mind off it by talking to herself about Sheriff Masterson.

Really, she thought some brazenness in the flirtation might solve the problem. Bat Masterson had come back from the chase disgruntled. Adam had given him the slip somehow, and that displeased him. “Pissed him off,” as he kept saying earthily. Until Adam showed up and threw her over, Bat seemed not to take the wanted notices to heart. Now he acted like the lover who was thwarted.