Charbonneau (10 page)

“Yes, Sir.” Baptiste didn’t give that much of a damn about what school he went to. He knew, though, that Welch would be hard to slip away from. And he was hurt at Clark.

Isaiah went to Honoré’s later that day and packed his belongings over to Welch’s house.

Mrs. Welch greeted him happily. Even Welch seemed pleased, though Baptiste thought the Reverend might just be gloating over the failure of the papists. Mrs. Welch got him started on his clavichord lessons again, and Baptiste liked that. Welch was irksome, but Baptiste got even with him by littering the Bible lessons with words like “sacrament,” “eucharist,” “confession,” and “indulgence.” Within a week he had some of his freedom back. He got permission from Clark to clerk at the gunsmith shop Clark owned. That gave him an excuse to stay away from the Welch’s. He spent part of his time learning to play euchre and seven-up with Jim and Winney. Jim was apprenticed to a blacksmith now. Winney had turned into a nice-looking girl, all willowy, and she was still a tease.

He got back down to the Row after about three weeks.

“Hi, Good-lookin’,” Blue greeted him.

“Hello, Jean,” Mike bellowed, and grabbed him by the top of the head and shook him. Bill, stretched out on the bed of the cheap room, lifted a hand lazily.

Baptiste told them about his bad luck in getting sentenced to Welch’s school.

“Ah, it’s not square,” Mike exclaimed. “They push you around because you’re Indian. You gotta stomp ’em. Let’em know you’re yer own man.”

“Injun kid’s damn lucky to larn readin’ and writin’,” Bill muttered. “I cain’t read nor write. I don’ know nothin’.”

Silence stopped them for a moment.

“You’re jest drunk, Bill,” said Blue. “And jealous. This boy’s sexier ’n’ you are.”

Bill humphed.

Everyone sat quiet, waiting for the breeze to come up or the sun to go down or the river to flow backward or someone to get a card game started. It was late afternoon, a lazy and restless time of day before the evening’s play got started. Mike, Bill, and Blue, bored, were getting tanked. Baptiste plopped down next to Blue, who was sitting on the floor propped against a wall. She leaned her head against his shoulder. After a moment Baptiste wondered if she were asleep.

“Bill, she’s rough with you. And now look at her scrunched up.” Mike nodded at Blue and Baptiste.

“Woman needs to have fear put in her,” said Bill. But he didn’t sound like he cared.

Mike was getting antsy. The minutes slipping by were pricking at him one by one. Someone rapped on the open door.

It was a gangly, warped-looking young man—slightly humped in the back, slightly splayed out in the hips, his muscles odd bumps on his arms. He smiled fatuously, showing his buck teeth. “’Lo there. You Mike Fink?” Mike nodded. He could tell by the smell that the fellow was a farmer, and he held farmers in contempt. “And Bill Carpenter?” Bill looked sideways and grunted.

“Well, my friend and I hear tell”—a bent old man, his hide well dried, made himself seen behind the young man—“that you fellers do a cup shootin’ trick that’s fancy. Mighty fancy.” He showed his buck-toothed smile again, and looked like he wanted to paw the doorsill. “Well, we’d sure like to see it, we would, yessirree.”

Mike scowled and turned away. “We know that to do some’p’n like that, that’s real dangerous and all, you got to be paid. And we got five dollars. Five dollars in gold.”

Mike went to the door and looked out, nearly bumping the young man out of the doorway. He could see fifty to seventy-five people on the levee—some boatmen lounging around in front of the Row, some others unloading a keelboat, some merchants and clerks, some farmers hanging around to watch.

He turned to Bill. “Some action, maybe.” He grinned. He and Bill had been stone broke for two days.

He sent the young farmer and the old man to the boat to spread the word. He and Bill told a couple of the boatmen on the Row. They needed to stir up the action both ways. Then Mike and Bill whispered for a moment, looked at Blue, and laughed.

Mike bet the five dollars twice. So did Bill. They were sure about this first part. The crowd was gathering and murmuring, men were gesticulating, some men were accepting money to hold. Several small boys were crowding to the front. Baptiste stayed close to Mike and Bill until they took their stances and Blue filled the whisky cup.

Mike shot first—off-handed, without a rest, as was the bargain—and the crowd cheered when he sent the cup spinning. Then Mike insisted on collecting his bets, asserting that if he had to die, he wanted to die rich. Bill plunked the cup off his head just as easily. Everyone hurrahed again, even the losers.

Mike shouted for attention. He would offer everyone a chance to win his money back, he said. He and Bill would attempt something much more difficult and much more dangerous. The crowd murmured. Mike strutted over to Blue. He lifted her skirt and put the cup between her legs just above the knees. Snickers ran through the crowd, but Mike shushed them with a scowl. He and Bill, he explained, would shoot the cup at the same time. At the same time. Difficult, because if either man shot first, the cup would fly out and would be hit only once. Then the bets would be lost. For this trick, he announced, the odds would be five to one, he would take five dollars to cover one dollar of his own. The crowd roared.

Mike and Bill circulated, taking bets. They now had twenty-five dollars between them. Mike bet all his share. Bill held back five dollars.

Baptiste had seen Blue stand for them several times, and knew that they had tried this trick in practice. This was their first time to put money on it. Whenever she stood for them, Blue’s eyes seemed to get blacker, and she stood straight and shook her hair in the wind. Baptiste liked to see it.

Blue held her skirt up, higher than necessary for the trick, and looked defiantly at Mike and Bill. They stood fifteen or twenty feet apart, looking very relaxed. When they raised their long rifles, Baptiste called out the count.

The rifle barrels jerked toward the sky at the same moment. The cup tore from between Blue’s legs. Mike frowned at Bill. “You a little quick,” he said.

“You were a mite slow,” Bill answered.

They were right. Just one hole in the cup. Mike paid off slowly and sullenly, fingering the coins.

When they had paid, Blue eased between Mike and Bill and took both their arms. They walked along for a moment, then Mike jerked his arm away and walked ahead. He spun around. “Bill,” he said, smoldering, “let’s get drunk.”

Blue stopped and Bill walked on. Baptiste slipped up beside her, knowing better than to touch her now, and reached into his hip pocket. When Blue saw the flask, she took it, sniffed, and flashed him a big smile. Baptiste could still see the anger behind it.

The light had faded in the room, so that blue-gray shadows fell on the walls and the day bed and the cot and the pot-bellied stove. Blue had not lit the candles—she had no camphene lamp—and she didn’t seem to be thinking about it. She was stretched crossways on the bed, half bolstered by the wall, and Baptiste was next to her. For an hour or two they had sipped slowly, nursing what liquor they had. Baptiste had never drunk more than a taste before, and he felt a bit giddy. Blue stood up abruptly, stepped to the stove, and chunked a couple of pieces of firewood. As she walked back, the half-light from the window caught her blue calico frock and made it seem to bristle as it swished. She jutted her back against the wall again beside him, tipped the flask high and held it for a long moment, then let it drop onto the bed between them. “That’s the bottom of it,” she said. Baptiste could see a glint of eyes in the shadows of her face. She held his eyes a while.

She reached across and put a hand on his flat belly. She was facing him now, and close. Her hand slipped down to his crotch. One firm squeeze and she felt him come hard. She smiled into his face. “You ain’t afeerd of me, are ya? You ain’t afeerd of any woman.” She kissed him on the lips, and her hand moved faster and harder. In his ear she squeezed out, “Let’s fuck.”

Lying on the bed naked afterwards, he could feel her go restless. Half-asleep or passed out, she was twitching and tossing. He could never have slept. He could feel his heart pounding, and his mind was racing calling up odd images of his mother bending over a pot and of the taste of the whisky and Welch’s bad eye and the smell of burning buffalo chips and the sound of
“Panis Angelicus”
and the feeling of Blue warm and tight around him, images going nowhere but just spinning out into the darkness. He wanted to pound his chest or jump into the air or chop wood until his arms fell off.

He got up, dressed, and slipped out into the cool night and walked for a couple of hours. He sat on the sand. He tried to play something on the mouth organ, but he was too restless. After midnight he sneaked back into Welch’s house and went heavily to sleep on the floor of the detached kitchen.

He heard Mrs. Welch stirring at about dawn and cleared out, grabbing some food on the way. He sat in front of the Beckwourth house, the skimpy half of a duplex, and ate a roll. He had an idea. After an hour or so he saw Jim leave for the blacksmith’s shop.

“Picnic,” he said to Winney at the front door, holding up the sausages and bread and grinning impishly.

She cocked her head sideways at him. “Why not?” she answered. “Take me a while,” she said, glancing back into the house.

“At the bottom of the cliff path.”

An hour later she came down the path to the bottom of the cliff that guarded the river below the levee, looking at him a little warily but with a big smile. He stood up and took her hand and started leading her along the bank downriver. She started to pull her hand back but looked at him oddly and left it.

“Got an idea,” he said.

“Probably trouble, knowin’ you.”

“Goin’ to Carondelet.”

Half a mile down the river some heavy wooden flat-boats were tied to crude docks, boats used for taking the big catfish out of the channel. Baptiste helped Winney in, pushed off quickly, and paddled slowly down under the cover of the high bank. He passed her last night’s flask, now filled with snitched apple brandy, and she took a tentative pull, testing. He could feel her watching him when she thought he wouldn’t notice.

He put in on a sizable point most of the way to Carondelet, the village of French poor who survived on odd jobs and booze. It was a well-wooded point, with deep, prickly grass, some brambles, and a thick stand of oak. They stretched on their backs in the sun, knees up like children, and munched the sausages.

“What do you do all day, Winney?”

“What can I do with myself?”

“You got do somethin’.”

“Some’p’n ain’t much if you a nigger.” He let it pass. “My pa, he send some of his white money sometimes. Not much I can do but keep goin’. I do washin’ once in a while, like Ma, but I hate that. I could wipe they kids asses for ’em in they fancy houses. But I don’ wonna do that. Shit.”

“You’ll get married, I guess.”

“Shit.”

After a while he got out the brandy again. She drank without seeming to like it. She just lay there in the sun, watching him once in a while.

He got up on one elbow, leaned over her, and kissed her on the lips. She didn’t kiss him back, so he moved his lips around a little. She still didn’t stir.

He drew back and looked at her. She said nothing, made no gesture, no move. He thought from her eyes that maybe she was laughing at him a little. He put a hand on her small tit and rubbed it. Still nothing. He reached under her skirt and felt and rubbed. Now he could see play in her eyes.

When he came to her, she was wild—bouncing, grabbing, clawing, daring him with her eyes to do more and do it harder. He did. He did her and rested and did her again. She never encouraged him or led him, always responded strongly, always dared him with her eyes. Much later, when he came at her again, she said “’Nuff,” turned onto her side and got up. “What’s that?” she asked. Baptiste’s hoop had fallen out of his shirt.

“Something my mother gave me.”

“Stand for somp’n’?”

“Wards off evil spirits,” he grinned.

“How come you keep it hid?”

“It’s my secret medicine.”

The wind and the current pushed at the boat and made the two miles back slow, tedious, and hard. Halfway, he put in and left the boat. They walked back in the settling dusk.

At her door Winney said only, “So long, John,” and smiled.

He reflected, on the way home, that he was not her first. That dropped out of his mind, washed away by the thought of what he had done. He imagined himself coming over her. He felt the power again. He shot one arm in the air and yelled, for the whole street to hear, “Damn, I feel good.”

Welch did beat him that night. He took off his heavy leather belt and strapped Baptiste on the legs with it. He did it in front of Mrs. Welch and the eight other boys, them just gawking. Baptiste felt himself hating Welch as the strap cut into his calves, but he just stared at the Reverend coldly. Welch turned the belt end for end and hit him with the cinch, which hurt deeply. Baptiste thought of hitting the bastard back, but he felt humiliated at being watched, so he couldn’t hate completely.

He went straight to bed and lay there rubbing the welts on his legs. He made up his mind that next time Welch beat him, he would lambast the bastard.

Baptiste was surprised the next morning that Welch did not send him to Clark. Welch intended to show that he could handle discipline by himself. Baptiste was glad he meant to try.

JULY, 1821: The next time Baptiste saw Blue, she was with Mike and Bill, and Baptiste felt uncomfortable around them. He drank some whisky sociably, to show that he knew how and to let them see something of a mysterious new air in him. He left before long. Blue had given no hint of what had happened, or what might yet happen.

He went down to the levee with Jim and Winney a couple of times and watched the keelboats being unloaded, joshing with the boatmen. Winney was as relaxed and easy as if they had never made it together. A couple of weeks later, though, he found her alone late in the afternoon. They screwed in the dark on the deck of one of the boats. Winney told him that she had done it on the deck of a boat before, but she wouldn’t say with whom. She hinted that she had done it more than once.