Crack in the Sky (82 page)

When the young man turned away, averting his misty eyes, the chief continued. “That’s when Bird in Ground slowly fell over to the side and closed his eyes. After all
that time and pain, he simply laid over and closed his eyes … as if he were going to sleep.”

“I will never forget that look on his face,” Pretty On Top declared. “He was content. He died at peace with his medicine. At peace with the way he chose to die—as a man of honor. As a very, very brave warrior.”

After a long time Scratch was able to speak. He pointed to one of the brown buffalo-hide cones. “Is that his lodge?”

“Yes,” Rotten Belly answered. “Among our people the lodge is something a woman possesses. Not a man. But Bird in Ground’s medicine told him different, because he was a man-woman. We have not let anyone tear it apart or take it down in mourning. I don’t know what I will choose to do when we have to move from this camp—”

“May I sleep in it?” Titus suddenly interrupted.

For a long moment Arapooesh looked into the white man’s face. “Yes,” he finally answered. “I think that would be a good thing,
Pote Ani.”

Pretty On Top agreed. Quietly he said, “I know Bird in Ground would say it is a good thing too—this, what you do to stay close to the spirit of your friend.”

She lay warm against him within the scratchy warmth of the wool blankets, both of them nestled under the weight of two buffalo robes. His own skin still smelled of hers and their coupling in the firefly darkness of the lodge where Bird in Ground once lived.

This woman who had been with him for several weeks now was younger than some who had come to be a bed warmer for him on the long winter nights spent among the Crow. This woman who had lost two infants to sickness and told him she could never carry another in her belly because something was torn inside her. No children, and now no husband. He had gone off to hunt one day early last fall, gone to bring in some game for their lodge … and never come back.

She too battled the beast of loneliness.

Here in the deep hours of the long winter night, Bass smelled the firesmoke in her tangled hair and thought back
on the faces and hair, the breasts and bellies, hips and legs, of all those who had gone before her. And with those memories Scratch wasn’t at all surprised to find he still sensed the same sort of seeping emptiness he had always felt, something akin to that first flush of contentment that washed over him right after the moment of coupling began to seep out of him like milk oozing from a crack in one of his mam’s earthenware crocks.

Maybe, Titus told himself, he should be at peace with what he had shared with each of them in turn. Maybe that was enough.

Suddenly there in the darkness beneath that patch of dark sky hung above him at the smoke hole, Scratch found himself looking back on Amy as his very first stumble, falling headlong into the world of women. Oh, how he had been swept up with what his own body was experiencing while his hands raced over virginal Amy’s warm flesh, those soft breasts and rounded hips, the downy fur of her down below—all of it arousing him frantically: while his head didn’t have any idea what to do next, it was his body that took command of him that night at the swimming hole.

In the end Titus had to run away from her, from the prison she and those farmer’s fields would make for him.

By the time he found Mincemeat in that Ohio River tippling house as he was closing in on his seventeenth birthday, he came to appreciate all that a woman could do for a man when she herself knew and practiced more of all those mysteries of how a woman and a man pleasured one another.

But unlike that Kentucky farmer’s daughter he had escaped, Mincemeat ran away from him, leaving him a raw and open wound for the longest time.

When he had chanced upon the carnal warmth of Marissa in the loft of her father’s barn, Bass was beguiled at just how one woman could heal all those places left so tender and painful by the woman come before her. So good was what Marissa gave him of her body that Able Guthrie’s daughter almost did make young Titus forget the hurt, forget that he had vowed to make his way to St.
Louis, forget that he swore he would never settle down in one place to work the land like his pap.

Lo, that second time he forced himself to flee from the prison he was sure his affection for Marissa would make for him, chaining him down to what he feared most.

In those brawling back ways and along the waterfront shanties of St. Louis, young Bass discovered no settlers’ daughters to threaten his freedom—only a procession of faceless whores who took no more than he was ready to give … until the night he ventured back to a tiny crib with a coffee-skinned quadroon just come up the river from New Orleans. In the candlelight of that tiny hovel, he found her skin to have the same sheen and color of damp mud along the banks where the Mississippi lapped.

Each time he visited the mulatto, Titus reluctantly promised himself that he couldn’t love a whore who lay with other men. But when he wasn’t with her, he was forced to admit that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, nor that pleasure she brought him. How good she made him feel about himself.

Yet in the end she too had deserted him—leaving for a man wealthy enough to buy her pleasures all for himself, just as a person would put something away on a shelf for no one else to enjoy. All Titus had left were the memories of the quadroon, and the blue silk bandanna she had tied around his neck.

During those dark and drunken days that followed, Bass had brooded only long enough to decide that it all proved beyond a doubt that he would never be anything more than a bone-headed idiot when it came to the fair sex. The women who wanted him surely wanted him only for security—something that scared him enough that he fled.

But what of those women
he
wanted so desperately? Why, they just up and disappeared on him—without so much as a fare-thee-well or an explanation of why they abandoned him. Each time it happened, his not knowing why served only to crust another thin layer of scar over his heart, like the layers of an onion, every new crust protecting the others below it.

That’s probably why the Indian women had come like a breath of mountain breeze on a still, airless day. Fawn had asked so little from him that winter he had spent with the Ute in Park Kyack. And Pretty Water had wanted only to nurse him back to health that long autumn he had healed among the Shoshone at the foot of the Wind River Mountains. Even the procession of robe-warmers who had come to him in turn across each of the three winters he had spent among the Crow in Absaroka had demanded nothing more than to feel his body pressed against theirs in the darkness of their lodges.

Maybe it was better that he think of them as meaning nothing more to him than those whores like Conchita down in Taos: women who walked into his life and stayed for but a moment only to take away a little of that constant agony of his loneliness. They had come for nothing more than stolen moments, flickers of time a person snatched here and there the way he had snatched at fireflies as a boy.

Truth was, as a young man, that’s all he had really cared for: a woman of the moment to soothe an immediate need until he got itchy moccasins and moved on. A woman to stay only until he had rubbed his horns and the fever of the rut was gone.

So why was it not the same this winter? Why was he no longer able to curl up with a warm brown body, take his pleasure and give the woman hers, then sleep the rest of the night away without remorse? Why the hell had he begun to feel as if something was missing?

Hell, he had all he wanted to eat, and a warm shelter out of the wind. He had him a good mule and horses and a darn fine rifle and traps. And when it came to friends, why—Scratch figured no man could go any finer than the men Titus Bass called friend, both white and red. Besides, he didn’t answer to no booshway, and he sure didn’t bow and scrape to no gussied-up, apron-stringed eastern gal with her should-do-this and shouldn’t-do-that!

So why the hell was he lying here in the dark next to this warm, pretty, naked woman … and grappling with
something a man of his spare talents had no damned business grappling with?

There had never been any doubt that he was the sort who stumbled through anything dealing with women, stubbing his toe and stumbling, yet somehow managing on in his own bumbling way—somehow just getting by when it came to the fairer sex. After all, right from day one back at that swimming hole in Boone County, Kentucky, when he had crawled atop his first woman, Titus Bass had been in way over his head. And the best he ever figured he could do was tread water till …

Till … maybeso he found himself a full-time night-woman who would keep his lodge warm and his pots boiling when he came back from seeing to his traps every evening. A woman who would listen when he wanted her to listen to what he had to say, a woman who would talk when he wanted to hear that gentle sound of a female’s voice—so appealing after so many seasons of nothing but deep, bass-toned, bullock voices there at his ear. The sort of gal who’d be there knowing when he wanted to scream and when he wanted to cry. The sort of woman what’d know the difference.

Were these feelings troubling him this winter after so many winters gone before it … simply because he had turned thirty-eight?

Did a man start thinking of so weighty a matter as that of finding a full-time night-woman for himself when he had added a certain tally of rings and his hair had started to gray? Could that be the reason he was dwelling on why he hadn’t already found himself one good woman, wondering when he’d stop making the rounds of one roll in the robes after another? Was this brooding late at night on such things just one more sign of his getting on in his years?

In the late winter darkness, his skin slightly moist where it lay right against hers, he strained to remember the faces of those gone before this one. Most names he could recall—but strained to conjure up the eyes and nose and mouth of Amy … Abigail Thresher … Marissa Guthrie … even the quadroon and those women who
had taken him into their lodges and allowed him between their legs season after season after season.

If he tried hard enough, staring long enough at that place where the poles were bound one to the other, he figured he just might come up with a composite of their faces—putting them all together in some murky memory puddle the way rain made earth colors run. The best eyes and nose, the warmest lips and the rounded breasts … all of them thrown in and stirred up in his remembrance the way his mam would stir up her stew of so many ingredients.

Unable to remember any one of them alone any longer now, Scratch had to satisfy himself that he could recall just enough to put them together into a watery, filmy, half-focused face, all mouth and breasts, hips and legs.

But because he failed to draw up a clear image of any one of them from the past, lately Scratch had become certain he would never be worthy of having just one for the rest of his days. He had no right to want just one woman to last him all the seasons yet to come in his life. If he could not pay homage to all that the many had given him from the past, then Titus figured he was certain he had no right to hope for finding that one woman who would stand at his side through those seasons yet unborn.

Perhaps, he decided, he had been blessed enough … so maybe it was enough to accept what he did of each new day, thanking that which was larger than all of them, there at the end of each day granted him. With all that he had been given already, to want a full-time night-woman for the last of his years was simply more than he had the right to ask.

And so Titus consoled himself that dark morning as he had been consoling himself for many nights this winter now grown old. Doing his best to push the loneliness back, to push away the emptiness that cried out within him, its voice become louder and louder while spring loomed on the far horizon.

Oh, how he hungered for white faces as he floated adrift in this sea of copperskins. Like a dry man not knowing when he would next have a drink of water—Scratch
thirsted for white voices and white laughter and the soul-healing potion of strong, saddle-varnish liquor.

If he did not have a woman come to fill those empty places in his soul, at least he knew there would always be friends and voices, laughter and whiskey, to soothe those raw and oozing places in his life.

Perhaps he would have enough of all the rest … so that one day he would eventually forget this deepest, most secret need of all.

More and more with every turn of the seasons, Titus Bass came to know that no matter how long or hard the winters of his life, spring was always sure to come.