Savage Love (2 page)

Boots for Good Luck

A spring blizzard let down overnight. The girl clung to him with a fierce desperation, shivering in gusts beneath the sheepskins, shaking him from unruly dreams. He did not expect nor hope that she would live, only regarded the matter with a distant circumspection as somewhat subordinate to his own preoccupation with survival. You stop and you die, he thought. Between that thought and the girl tormenting him he slept but little, and rose early to piss but could not get through the door so pissed in a corner against the wall. He chewed cold roast elk for breakfast in the dark and, fortified, broke through the drift in the doorway and kicked the fresh snow till he found his cache of firewood poles. He managed to light a smoky fire on the stone hearth in the room where they slept, but the chimney would not draw and smoke presently filled the room. In a rage, he kicked the door off its hinges and threw the door bits onto the fire and fanned the smoke out the doorway, which was not much help, and finally subsided beside the girl in the smoke and gloom, his heart murderous with frustration and desire.

He took to whittling with his pocket knife. He found an unsplit cylinder of pine and began to shave it down. The girl opened her eyes and he told her where to piss. She crawled on her hands and squatted on all fours, pissing backwards like an animal. Then he said, “Take off that rag. It stinks to heaven.” She dragged her shift over her head and he threw it on the fire. Naked, on hands and knees, with no feet behind, she looked inhuman but not animal either, just alien, strange and mute. And yet she had some inner strength, a power of intention, with which he felt a kinship. What she had already endured he could not fathom. It did not matter if you were puny or strong, he thought, wrong or right; if you had the will, you could endure — until Fate or old age cut your string. Most just rolled over for the knife. He had seen it in the cornfield. He despised anyone who let himself die or whined, bargained, begged or prayed. He gave Good Luck his wife's last dress to cover her nakedness and cut and wrapped sheepskins around her stumps to keep her warm. She moved away from him, curled up close to the fire, and slept.

They were blockaded inside for a week, till he thought maybe winter had come back for good. They roasted the last of the elk, boiled the hooves, bones and sinews, scraped the hair off the skin, cut it up and boiled it and cracked and sucked the bones. He whittled the whole time because he had to be doing something, and at the end of the week had the semblance of a foot, an ankle and part of a leg, with a deep bowl cut and polished at the top to take her stump. He carved the toes and nails and little creases where the toes crooked, a dainty girl's foot, almost real in the firelight and smoke; it gleamed golden-red in the firelight. He checked her stumps every day for signs of putrescence, but they healed steadily, dry wounds with purple scar tissue pouting like lips and two rows of punctures where the thread sutures went in and out.

At the end of the week, the wind turned from the west again and a real spring thaw commenced, brutal and swift. Across the valley a cliff face of ice and rock let go and came rushing down in a thunderous wave. A freshet ran through the hut, and they had to sleep nigh to the wall, practically on top of one another, to stay dry. The new snow melted faster than the old, and he walked out one morning with the Sharps to see if any of his elk remained. All he could find was the upturned rib cage like the skeleton of an ancient wreck left high and dry by the tide and some long bones and vertebrae scattered about. He trudged over the lip of the next rise where he could see clear to an oddly feminine lithic cleft that boxed the head of the narrow valley.
And just there, instead of game, he spied a thin column of smoke like an exclamation mark over a diamond of spruce trees nestled between two fans of scree with a flat, snowy expanse of pond in front.

He bent low and hastily retraced his steps out of sight, not because he was afraid but because he preferred to make his moves in secrecy, unencumbered by the complicity or anticipation of others. Home again, he kicked out the fire and thenceforth lit it only at night, blocking the door, smoke or not. They were starving again, but were used to that. Good Luck slept with her new foot held to her chest like a dolly. He feverishly commenced work on the other, carving doggedly while perched on a granite outcrop uphill from the hut, where he repaired every morning with the Sharps to keep watch.

The second foot came into shape faster than the first but without the niceties, just the notion of a foot that still looked like a piece of dead pine with the toes and nails scratched in to give an idea. The night he finished it, he dug in his traps for his spare boots, worn-out stove pipes with pegged soles and straight lasts for walking that he had after the war. He stuffed the new feet into the boots then wrapped Good Luck's stumps in lambskin and helped her pull the boots on till she was lodged firmly inside the wooden cups. He cut down the market straps from the mule harness and buckled them around the boot tops till they cut into the flesh below her knee
, and said, “Stand.” And then he said, “Walk.” But she could do neither except she climbed her hands up the log wall and swayed in the doorway holding the jambs. “Walk,” he said, but when she tried, her legs gave way for the tenderness in her stumps and general lack of use.

He knelt and rebuckled the market straps, tighter than before. Then he nudged her with his toe and said, “Get up, or you'll have another name.” She started to drag herself up by the log wall, but he yanked her back, tossing her in a heap where the meltwater oozed. “Do it by yerself,” he said. Again he was struck by how alien she seemed, on all fours, her lank, unkempt hair over her face, her lean amphibian torso dripping water, the big, ungainly boots gleaming dully behind like a tail. Something inhuman, indomitable, but veiled. She puked between her hands, wiped her mouth with a sleeve, then hitched one booted foot under her hips, rested her weight on it a moment, then hitched the other one, rested there, gathering her strength, then pressed herself up on her fingertips and pushed off. Not enough the first time, nor the second, but the third time she rose awkwardly above her feet into a stand. She kept her eyes on the floor. He could detect no aura of emotion save for the intensity of effort and concentration. She rocked a little one way and then the other, then slid the off foot forward an inch or two, and then the other.

The Easiest Prey

After the cornfield,
the colonel put him in a sharpshooter company on the evidence of the quantity of Union dead along his front. He shot ten-inch patterns with a Leonard target rifle at two hundred yards and five hundred yards, and they issued him an English Whitworth with a four-power telescopic sight that cost a thousand dollars and could kill a man a mile away. He played cat and mouse with the Union artillery till the end of the war, mostly alone because he was a marked man, the Union gunners reaching out with percussion shells any time they had an inkling where he might be. Their officers had field glasses and watched for the muzzle flash. He never shot three times from the same stand. He ate alone, slept alone, and was let off drill and fatigues so he could perform his solitary duties in his own time. He shot officers, gunners, horses, mules, oxen, suttlers, drovers, niggers, dogs,
and once set off a powder wagon. The Whitworth threw a hexagonal bullet that whistled eerily in flight and thus announced itself. He loved to watch a gun crew suddenly go still with dread, faces turning up like leaves, waiting to see who among them had been chosen. The colonel said, “You'un must've been whelped with a long gun in your hands.” And then he said, “The easiest prey of all is a human nine hundred yards away and no knowledge of your presence, your gaze. If it weren't war, they'd call it murder.” In December 1864, he went into winter quarters with the 1st and 4th Texas between the roads to Williamsburg and Charles City outside Richmond. One night he stole a wool coat from a drunk Irishman pressed for a work battalion, tossed the Whitworth into the James River, and deserted.

Before dawn, he made up two packs for himself and the girl, everything they could carry on their backs. He told her to stand, and she did. He said, “We'll leave by and by. Tonight or tomorrow. You best practise.” He took a handful of the linen cartridges and the Sharps in its wrapping and slipped through the doorway before the sun came up. He kept to the timberline, not venturing into the open sage and grass ridges leading down to the narrow flats at the valley floor, and when the sun came up, he stepped back into the trees where the going was tedious and slow but where he was invisible. The snow was still deep amid the trees, the crust softened so he fell through time and again. He had to navigate deadfalls and rock slides and ford meltwater freshets that crashed down from the icy summits, flooding gullies. When he grew cold from the wet, he trudged faster to keep warm, and then he sweated from the effort and threw off his coat, rolled it and tied it over his shoulder, always suffering the discomfort, despising the exhaustion that now and again staggered him.

At length he met a rock spine going down with a crest of windblown evergreens like a coxcomb on top threaded by a game trail that was easy walking. He did not stop but let the trail lead him steeply down into the valley, unlimbering his rifle as he went, dropping the block, loading a cartridge, setting the cap and trimming the sights. He stopped before the trees thinned out completely and went to cover where he could see across the valley, steep-sided with islands of sage and hardy high desert grass and occasional hummocks with a few conifers holding their own, the meltwater eroding the lava dust in curves and fans, flooding the low ground and the pond and a creek emerging there and zigzagging lazily in the direction whence he had come. Smoke billowed from the camp, a freshly
lit fire burning the damp off the tinder. He could smell horseshit and piss and searched the trees till he spied the backside of one, maybe two painted ponies. He could see where their hooves had trampled the yellow-stained snow. Back in the trees was a lean-to and the fire and a single man draped in a buffalo robe. He watched carefully, letting the impressions grow into recognition, never thinking he understood the scene until he had worked over it. There was a rifle propped against a tree, near at hand. He took it for a buffalo gun, a Sharps 50 by the look, the big brother of his own but slow to reload. A sawbuck packsaddle and canvas packs sat at the back of the lean-to along with an old McClellan saddle, a string of steel traps tarnished with long use, a miner's pick and a shovel. He waited while the sun felt its way down the slant valley wall to the flats, and presently a second figure appeared from the direction of the horse line, buckling a belt round his pants, wearing a Union infantry cap and gimping on a bad left leg. Then he realized that the one in the buffalo robe wasn't a man but a woman.

He thought he had them figured now, but he waited just to be sure, and presently the smell of coffee drifted across the pond to where he lay. A horse nickered and tossed its head and tried to back out of its tether. The man hefted an axe and set up to split firewood. He rested the Sharps on a rock, threw away the first cap and fitted another over the nipple, then levelled the sights on the middle of the man's back as he raised the axe over his head, and shot him. The report rolled up the valley, then came back. He levered the chamber open before the man hit the ground, replaced the cartridge and cap,
and took his second shot. The woman was already moving, rolling sideways over a log for cover, her hand reaching for the Big 50, but his bullet caught her in the head going down, sprouting a crimson mushroom where her ear had been.

Then he was running, reloading, cursing as the snow caught him and bowled him over. He held the rifle in the air even as he tumbled, rolled up on his feet and threw away another cap, replaced it and took aim in case someone was moving in the camp. But nothing moved. He went on at an easier pace, straight across the valley, crashing through the spring crust over and over, not stopping for the creek, nascent, engorged, descending like molten glass out of the pond over a beaver dam, but going straight in up to his chest with the Sharps overhead, fighting the current and feeling with his feet for holes or rocks, sinking into the cold gravel bottom. Stop and die, he thought. He cut for the treeline away from the camp and circled to come at it from beyond the tethered horses, still anxious he might have missed something. There were three Indian ponies, short-legged pintos with big heads, thick necks and scraggly manes, unshod but their hooves had been well trimmed.

He pushed cautiously into the campsite. The Big 50 still leaned against the tree. The woman breathed with a liquid rasp, her face swollen grey-blue, a plume of pinkish brain matter caught in her black hair. She was Snake by her tattoos, the ones they called Diggers for their primitive ways, built like a tugboat and tall for a woman. Her squaw-man was dead with a curiously bloodless hole going into his spine and a bigger hole coming out the front with the entrails bursting through and bits of bone. His forage cap was gone. The dead man was going to grey like himself, but with the added pathos of a bald spot like a monk's tonsure. He pulled the dead man's boot off, rolled up his trouser leg and found the scar where a M
inié ball or a sliver of shrapnel had swept off most of the calf muscle. It was hard to say which side he had fought on. The forage cap didn't mean anything. The people coming west were mostly Southerners like himself. Both man and woman had their eyes open, but what they saw was in another world altogether.

He snapped up the Big 50 and the saddles and tack and quickly harnessed the horses, one for packing, two for riding, but one without a saddle. There was coffee, sugar, salt, flour, biscuits, salt beef and pemmican in the pack, also a cask of black powder, lead pigs, a bullet mould, wadding, pliers, a skinning knife and a wooden box containing nitric acid and aqua regia for testing gold. He rolled up the squaw's buffalo robe with another he found in the lean-to and lashed them both onto the mule pack with hide thongs. He hung the traps from the crossbuck, then coursed back and forth through the woods behind the campsite like a dog hunting a scent until he found the bale of furs
— black bear, grey wolf and bobcat — hidden in a shallow overhang. He dragged the bodies under the lean-to then collapsed the frame over them, kicked out the fire. He believed the woman was still breathing when he left her, which he could scarcely credit, injured as she was, except that he knew when his time came it would be just as slow and difficult. He mounted and rode out, leading the pack horse and spare on a string, letting the horse pick its way along the flooded creek till he spied a likely ford and crossed, then clambered up past the elk bones. By the sun, it was just after noon.