Heaven and Hell (66 page)

He crouched amid the underbrush growing in heavy woods at the tear of the Dixie Store. At the end of the front porch visible to him, 4l6 HEAVEN AND HELL

some slatternly white women lounged. One had the front of her dress undone. A scrawny baby suckled at her left nipple. The conversation of the women was loud and profane.

On the other side of the dirt road Andy saw children seated in the dust, along with a couple of the poorer sharecroppers from the district.

All at once the talking stopped. The white people turned their attention to something out of sight beyond the store.

Sweating, he decided to move closer and observe from behind a huge live oak that stood about ten feet from the porch. To reach it he would have to cross open ground directly in front of him, weaving through
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a clump of foot-high yucca plants with rigid leaves sharp as spears. The open space was brightly lighted--a row of oil lanterns glowed on the porch, and a cropper's boy stood nearby with a blazing torch--but the people in the clearing were all looking the other way, up the road.

He counted to three and moved.

He dodged among the yuccas, running with barefoot stealth. A woman on the porch heard him, but before she turned around he was crushed against the back of the tree, the bark rough against his shirt.

He heard the woman grunt. "Just some animal, I reckon."

After a period of silence, he heard a faint rhythmic thudding. Horses or mules, walking down the dusty river road. In the crossroads clearing, someone cried, "Hurrah! Here they come."

Andy slid his face to the left behind the tree trunk, until one eye cleared the edge, giving him a good view of the crossroads, brilliantly lit now; half of the new arrivals carried smoking torches.

He knew they were men, and only that. Yet the sight of them struck him hard. They wore robes and hoods with eyeholes. The costumes were sewn of some shiny stuff the color of blood. It shimmered with highlights from the torches. He clutched the trunk and watched with his left eye, holding his breath.

In single file they paraded into the crossroads. The right side of the lead rider's robe was pulled up and tucked behind a belt gleaming with metal cartridges. The butt of his holstered pistol hung free. Among the other riders Andy spied old squirrel rifles, an ancient spontoon, even a saber or two.

Dust puffed up where the hooves fell. Round and round the clearing they rode, somehow all the more frightening because of their silence.

Even the white slatterns and the croppers looked cowed.

The leader reined his horse in front of the Dixie Store. Andy noticed something he hadn't seen before. The second man carried some kind of wood box on his saddle, partly concealed under his robe. The box appeared to be rectangular, about two feet long, and made of unpainted pine.

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The leader raised an old ear trumpet of the kind used by deaf people. He spoke through it. The trumpet made his voice tinny and gravelly, disguising it somewhat.

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"The knights of the Invisible Empire gather. Enemies of white chivalry beware. Your days are numbered. Your deaths are certain."

It was trumpery, Andy knew. A childish masquerade. Yet he also knew the hearts of the hooded men, if not their faces. They were determined, and full of hate.

"Let the word go out," the leader bellowed through the dented trumpet. "Here is the first who will feel our wrath."

The second rider tossed the box on the ground. The lid popped off. The box held some kind of doll.

The leader motioned and the file of riders moved out. Andy decided he'd seen enough. He started back through the yuccas to the thick woods from which he'd emerged. His mistake was glancing over his shoulder to check on the Klansmen.

He stepped too near one of the yuccas. The point of the long leaf stabbed his leg through his pants, and he exclaimed in pain. Not loudly, but he drew the attention of the night riders. Someone yelled, rifles came up, pistols came out. The leader signaled toward the black man bolting for the trees.

Leaves daggered his legs as two hooded men rode him down, one on each side of the clump of yuccas. Panting, Andy ran faster, out of the yuccas. A musket butt slammed his head and knocked him to his knees.

The men dismounted and dragged him around in front of the porch.

One of the white women, the one nursing, leaned over and spat in his hair. Held by his ears and shoulders, he was pushed near the leader's horse.

"Niggers were warned from this gathering," the leader boomed through the trumpet. He was a fearsome, towering figure, looming over Andy in robes that shone as if on fire. "Niggers who defy the Invisible Empire get what they deserve."

Another Klansman pulled out an immense hunting knife. The blade flashed as he turned the knife this way and that. "Drop his pants. You're through, boy. We boil nigger heads and nigger balls for soup."

"No." The leader slashed the air with the trumpet. "Let him carry Word of what he saw here. Show him the coffin."

A man yanked Andy's head around so he could see the box open

°n the ground. A bullet had been fired into the velvet dress of the crude cornhusk doll inside the box. The leader indicated blackened letters burned
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into the coffin lid. Crooked letters, but legible.

"Someone read him what it says."

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"I know this nigger," another Klansman said. "He's a Mont Royal nigger. He can read it for himself." Though the speaker tried to roughen his voice to disguise it, Andy recognized Gettys.

He was so frightened, his eyes blurred. He had to clamp himself tight with his inside muscles to keep from urinating. The leader roared,

"All right, then. You tell that woman what you saw and what you read right there, nigger." He signaled again. Andy was released and kicked toward the woods.

He staggered forward. A pistol boomed four times. Each time, he started violently, expecting to be hit. He kept running, past the yuccas toward the woods. Luckily, he didn't fall. He twisted when he reached the trees and saw gun smoke drifting blue above the robed men. They laughed at him. He ran into the dark.

Unable to sleep all night. Andy saw the Klan, and what they had burned into the lid of the coffin representing their intended victim. He wrote it out for me, his hand shaking, sweat dripping from his brow to the old brown paper:

' 'Dead Damned & Delivered''

the nigress

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On the.day of the trouble, Charles woke an hour later than usual--

five in the afternoon. He reached under his cot, uncorked the bottle, and took his first drink before getting out of bed. It had become his habit to start the day this way.

It was mid-August. The shanty where he slept, behind the place
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he worked, was airless and hot. Noisy, too. Texas cowhands shouted and stomped around the dance floor in the main building while Professor played a polka on the establishment's brand-new Fenway upright.

After a second drink, he reluctantly got up. He was already dressed; he usually slept in his clothes. He faced a twelve-hour shift as night bouncer at Trooper Nell's. Nell's was a thriving dance hall with upstairs rooms for the whores and their clients. It was located on Texas Street, between the Applejack and the Pearl, south of the railroad. If he listened carefully, he could hear the horses and hacks bringing paid-off trail hands to this less-than-respectable section of Abilene.

Trooper Nell's never closed. Abilene was booming, quickly becoming the most popular shipping point in Kansas. The gamble of Joe McCoy, an unassuming Illinois farm boy with a keen business sense, had paid off. Last year, in its first season, McCoy's two-hundred-fifty acre complex of pens and chutes had loaded about thirty-five thousand head of Texas cattle aboard the U.P.E.D. This second season promised to double that. Despite the Indian trouble all summer, herds continued to pour across Humbarger's Ford on the Smoky Hill south of town.

Almost every night, Charles had plenty of free-spending, hard-drinking cowpokes to sit on when they got out of hand. The Dickinson County

sheriff did little. He was a grocer by trade, with no talent for handling rowdies.

Charles used his fingers to comb tangles from his long beard. From

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a chair with a broken leg, he picked up a canvas scabbard he'd sewn together after studying a picture of a fierce Japanese warrior in an old copy of Leslie's. The warrior, called a Samurai, carried his long sword in such a scabbard on his back, the hilt jutting above his left shoulder.

Charles put on the scabbard and shoved his Spencer into it. That plus his strapped-on Colt usually damped the fighting urge of the cowboys.

He'd taken a lesson from Wild Bill, who'd become quite a legend in Kansas. Sometimes Hickok wore as many as five guns, plus a knife.

That way, he cowed men instead of having to kill them. Charles hadn't seen Wild Bill in a while; he'd heard he was riding dispatch for the

Army.

It was Charles's bad luck that he wasn't employed the same way.

In fact, he hadn't put his sights on an Indian since his dismissal from the Tenth. And this was surely the year for it. The tribes had wintered peacefully enough. But then the Washington politicians had been unable
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to agree on the amount of the annuities to be paid under the terms set at Medicine Lodge Creek. Rations, guns, and ammunition went unissued as well. Last spring the angry Comanches had broken loose and gone on the warpath in Texas. Then the Cheyennes under Tall Bull, Scar, and other war leaders stormed into Kansas, supposedly to attack their old enemies the Pawnee. Before long they turned their hostility on the whites.

The Saline, Solomon, and Republican river settlements soon felt the fury. Fifteen whites were killed, five women raped in just a few weeks. So far August had been the worst month, with a wagon train attacked and almost destroyed at Fort Dodge, three wood choppers slaughtered while they worked near Fort Wallace, a Denver stage caught in a four-hour running fight from which driver and passengers barely escaped.

Agent Wynkoop could control the peace chiefs, but not the young men. Sheridan was in trouble. He had but twenty-six hundred infantry and cavalry with which to stop the raids. He'd sent a couple of experienced scouts, Comstock and Grover, to try to restore peace with the Cheyennes. A group under Turkey Leg welcomed the men, then turned on them with no warning, murdering Comstock and badly wounding Grover before he got away. The treachery didn't surprise Charles.

He hated being trapped so far from the action. But he didn't know any Indian-fighting outfit that would take him, and he wasn't fool enough to set out alone, a solitary executioner. So he worked in Abilene, and drank, while his rage and frustration built inside him.

One more drink and he left the shanty. He trudged across the trash strewn back yard toward the rambling two-story building. He'd slept a

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hard, but with more nightmares. He usually dreamed the old dream of blazing woods, wounded horses falling, his own slow death from smoky suffocation. Last night it had been different. In his dream, Elkanah Bent dangled a big pearl earring in front of him while he pricked Charles with a huge knife.

Early in the year, a telegraph message sent care of Jack Duncan had informed Charles of the murder of George Hazard's wife. Bent's long vendetta against the two families only strengthened Charles's conviction that the world and most of those in it were worthless. He didn't suppose Bent would ever come after him, though. Charles had frightened him badly in Texas before the war.

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Since January, Charles had returned to Leavenworth only twice.

Duncan treated him with stiff-necked correctness, but no warmth. He let Charles know that he disapproved of the frequency with which Charles took a drink. Charles had tried to play with his son, talk to him, but the boy didn't-like to be alone with him, always wanting to return to Maureen or the brigadier.

There were no letters from Willa waiting at Leavenworth, either.

Nor had he written.

He was in his usual sullen, spiteful mood as he yanked the flimsy back door open and stalked down the dim hall to start work.

Professor was hammering the Fenway. Two cowhands were dancing with two of the whores on the plank floor. Three tables held groups of noisy, dusty drinkers. Charles saw some of the cowhands eye him as he strode toward the end of the shiny fifty-foot brass-fitted bar.

"Hit me, Lem." The bartender dutifully poured a double shot of his special-stock bourbon. Charles knocked it back, not noticing a seated cowboy whispering to another, who had curly blond hair. The blond youngster studied Charles with contempt.

The place smelled of spit and sawdust, cigars and trail dust, and of cow chips someone had stepped in. Trade was brisk for half past five, and no more boisterous than usual. Down a staircase opposite the bar came the owner, five-foot-tall Nellie Slingerland. Nellie was somewhere over forty, always wore high-necked gowns, and had the biggest bosom Charles had ever seen on a woman so petite. Her eyes were bright and calculating, her cheeks pitted from some childhood disease.

Nellie cost twice as much as any of the other whores, but to Charles she gave herself free. They slept together once or twice a week, usually during the day, and Charles always had to be good and drunk first.

"Roll over here, buck," she'd say, and then he'd straddle her and push in and hold himself with straightened arms while he did her. She always yelled and jumped a lot. Because he was so tall, his head stuck out 422 HEAVEN AND HELL

beyond hers. She never saw his closed eyes, or the strange twisted-up expression on his face. He always tried to pretend she was Willa. It never worked.

"How are you, buck?" Nellie's expensive tooled mule-ear boots thumped as she approached. She was called Trooper Nell because she refused to take the boots off for any man, Charles included. Abilene told a lot of tales about her: She was a former schoolteacher; she had poisoned her husband for his money on their farm near Xenia, Ohio; she preferred women.