Savage Love (3 page)

In the Eyes o
f Another Man You See the Enemy

He incinerated the hut and the remains of the pole barn ere they departed and threw what bones he could find into the conflagration. Then they rode hard to the mouth of the valley into the high desert between the Lemhi Mountains and the Lost River Range where the Pashimeroi trickled like a green snake in the summer, the almost treeless mountain slopes on either hand covered in scree and dust-blown snow, looking like the mountains of the moon. At the river they reined north toward Leesburg and the Bitterroots. There was no track nor sign of travellers and after the third day when the thaw continued they slackened their pace to preserve the horses. But then, at the confluence of the Salmon, where they joined an old prospecting trail, they met a party of Bannocks, relatives of the Snakes, three men and a woman skinning a pronghorn buck, evidently joyful at their luck. They had but three sorry horses between them, bows and lances and a single muzzleloader; one was spitting blood. The men stood back suspiciously from their kill, notching arrows, and the woman stepped forward haranguing the strangers. She wore a black wool white-woman
's skirt hiked up to her breasts and a cavalry trooper's jacket with the buttons and insignia removed, those lank breasts bare with nipples like walnuts.

They gave the Indians a wide berth, circling away from the arrows and then kicking up to a trot when they were into the trail again, quickly out of sight through the trees, the river gurgling over gravel drifts at the left. They kept on for a half mile, then he pulled up, dismounted, loaded the Big 50 and the Sharps, handed Good Luck the reins and said, “Ride on. Quick.” Then he added, “But come back ere nightfall.” And went to cover in a blowdown uphill from the river whence he could still see the trail. After an hour the Indians came on horseback, the woman riding double. They came silently, walking their horses, figuring to catch their prey when they camped. He let them ride so close there was no call for marksmanship and blew the shoulder off the first man with the Big 50, causing the woman some injury to her face, which appeared briefly as she fell from the horse, drabbled with gore like butchered meat, then dropped the second man with the Sharps. The third man had time to swing his mount, desperately thumping its scrawny flank with his bow, and dash down the trail. But he cleared the Sharps, loaded and fitted the percussion cap, aimed and shot the horse, severing one of the hind legs clean at the radius. Then he walked past the first set of bodies, still alive but moribund, reloading as he went, and killed the fallen rider where he fought to free his legs from under the struggling horse. He finished the others with his butcher knife, then dragged their bodies to the bank and heaved them into shallows. He caught their horses, retrieved the Big 50, and left the dying horse for varmints.

Why do they come after me? he thought. Why does the world insist? he thought. He lived in a slaughterous universe under a doleful sign of dream from which he did not wish to awaken, for that seemed like death to him. You stop and you die, he thought. He met the girl coming back to find him, which was a surprise as he expected betrayal at every turn. He followed her glance and noticed for the first time the hematitic stains on his hands, his arms and spattered on his shirt, as though he had bathed in blood. She dismounted and shuffled to him without her sticks, taking his hands in turn, inspecting them with her fingers, palpating for wounds, then suddenly grazing his wrist with her hungry tongue, a gesture he could not interpret, though he felt it directly in his balls as if his body had rendered up a meaning he could not himself name. He found her muteness eloquent in ways he could not explain; she did not deceive him, veiling herself in words as people generally did until he just wanted to shoot them to make them shut up and be.

Upriver, the land was scabbed and scotched with
abandoned hydraulic mining works, dammed creeks, banks and hillsides scoured of trees and water-blasted, with gullies and fans of silt destroying the graceful curves of the old channel. He killed three Chinamen damming a creek to feed their water machines, leaving their bodies floating face down in the icy pond. In examining their campsite, he found bottles of whiskey. He opened one, tilted it back, swallowed half without stopping to breathe, neatly capped the bottle again and returned to looting. Presently he discovered buffalo-robe bedding in the Chinamen's tent and went to ground there taking the bottle, which, when he looked again, was empty. At nightfall the girl joined him, bringing another bottle, and they drank together, then slept or fell unconscious. In his sleep, he heard the dead Chinamen whispering together under the reservoir water, speaking of the country whence they had come, of women they had loved, of poems they had once memorized, and of regret at not being alive. He woke and stumbled outside to piss and pissed against a tree and tripped over a tent peg and roared around the camp naked and sweating and feeling as if he had fallen into a fire he was that warm. Around him the forest seemed to glow. Stars glowed. It seemed to him the days and nights had reversed their orders. The girl appeared at the tent flap, swaying uncertainly in her boots, in his wife's last dress. He kicked her back into the buffalo skins, and when she tried to rise, he slapped her down, and then slapped her once more to inspire affection. Then he fell upon her with an untidy passion, not actually entering her, for she was ignorant and unhelpful in that regard, and presently reached the end of his desire in an onanistic paroxysm of shakes, grunts and incontinent dribbles. In that moment of sweet black forgetfulness he somehow recalled a singsong ditty his mother had crooned. At least he thought it was his mother, having no other memory of her save for the voice and the words.
Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy / and we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow
.

They met a tinker driving a garishly tricked-up John Deere freight wagon drawn by four snow-white Spanish mules with tin bells on their collars and periwinkle-coloured tassels nodding above their heads. Coming from the goldfields, the tinker's cart was light in goods, bouncing high over the ruts, but pregnant with the implication of cash money. Afrighted at the sight of the two asymmetric strangers who, yes, seemed almost to glow with a nimbus of menace, the tinker pulled a dragoon revolver that needed two hands to sight and shoot, and even then, with his nerves and the mad kick of the gun, he was only able to wound one of the Indian horses and a mule. With his third bullet, he shredded his foot, after which he became resigned to his fate. He said, “I will give you my money, but I know you are going to kill me surely.” The stranger said, “Every man goes some time. Now's yers.” The tinker said, “You are God's Hand. My foot hurts somethin' fierce. Do it quick.”

In Leesburg
, he sold the ponies, horses, mules, furs, buffalo gun, and various tools and artifacts he had collected along the way to a blacksmith at a quarter of what they were worth, which immediately attracted suspicion and notoriety, not to mention the fact that the blacksmith recognized the white mules and wondered where the tinker had got to. He bought two fresh horses and a pack mule and saddles and tack for all three and stabled the animals at a livery. He bought new clothes for himself and Good Luck and a Henry repeating rifle to go with the Sharps and then a pound of yellow cheese, white onions, beef jerky and a bottle of whiskey and retired with the girl to a hotel, where he had a tub and hot water brought to the room. He lay in the tub sipping whiskey
, peeling and slicing the onions and eating them like apple quarters between bites of cheese. He bade the girl scrub his back with a rag, but she left off after a pass or two and presently he felt her strange tongue at the back of his neck, then licking water off his earlobe. He tried to kiss her, but she squirmed away. He had a hard-on now and tried to make her grasp it. But she would not come near. He drank more whiskey, and as the water was growing cold, he rose, wet and sickly white except for the leathery tan of his hands and face, stepped dripping to the bed and took the quilt to dry himself. Then he threw the girl — boots, dress and all — into the tub and said, “Now it'
s yer turn. Wash yerself. You stink.” She dragged off his wife's last dress and then the boots and the wooden feet and crouched shivering in the shallow grey water with her arms across her breasts. He slugged whiskey from the upended bottle and examined his pecker, flicking off pebbles of smegma beneath the foreskin, stood and pissed a long arc into the tub and laughed and said, “That'll warm ye up.” But he saw that she was weeping and could not evade him or escape the tub without the purchase of her feet.

The complexity of the situation, the misfire of his drunken overtures, now self-seen as awkward, if not moronic, enraged him. His first impulse was to strike, but unwitting, the impulse transmuted to his limbs became something else. He lifted Good Luck roughly from the tainted water, wrapping her in the quilt, and fell to examining the scars of her stumps
, which he rubbed dry with a sheet, disturbed by the innocence of her pudenda fully displayed for him in the act of mercy. The scars were angry, puckered, purple lines etched clumsily into the whiteness of her flesh. “Do they fret ye?” he asked. She shook her head. “Some blistered,” he said. “I will find ye better boots.” He tipped water from the boots and dried them and dried the carved feet, pulling the sheets from the bed and using them to sop up the water. Then he left the boots to air with the sheepskins hung on the back of a chair, rolled Good Luck in the quilt with a pillow under her head, and said to sleep. He blew out the lamps and sat in his new shirt in a captain's chair by the glass window with the Henry and a box of shiny brass cartridges, felt for the brass follower with his fingers, drew it up against the spring to the top of the barrel, twisted the magazine open, and counted a dozen cartridges into the tube. Then he twisted the magazine closed and eased the follower down to the last cartridge lest the snap of the new spring accidentally set off the primers.

He stirred ere dawn, convinced he was being watched through the glass window where he had carelessly slept. He remembered the blacksmith's fleer as he counted out the money. He remembered the bones emerging from the snow, the burned-out wagons, the desolate campsites, the litter of corpses along the road coming up, the accumulated calculus of carnage vexing toward him, low breathing and indistinguishable motions just beyond his senses. Stop and die, he thought, slipping out of the hotel the back way to strangle the blacksmith in his sooty bed above the forge and retrieve the horses and tack. Flames from the burning smithy illuminated their backs as they rode away, long black shadows preceding them, deforming in the ruts, pursued by the slobber and shriek of horses in their panic, the thunder of guns as men shot the trapped horses through the burning stable walls. He said to the girl riding out, “I don
't believe y've ever seen a body kiss before.” She shook her head. “What strange world were ye a-born in?” And then he said, “I kilt the horse-shoer because he was blabbing about us.” And then after a silence, when they had left the last of the Leesburg townsite and diggings behind and had seen nobody but a nigger with a wooden yoke and two steaming buckets of night soil, he said, “I don't believe yer ever going to speak to me.” She shook her head. “I don't take it personal,” he said. She wore a black full skirt hiked up to get her legs across the saddle; her boots cut into her flesh just below the knee and her thighs were bare except for the lace-hemmed lavender pantalets in the morning twilight. She had a warm wool coat, a knitted cap and a scarf and seemed, on the whole, pleased with herself.

Epithalamium

The weather held. They travel
led fast at first, heading east from Leesburg, taking the saddleback pass over the Beaverheads toward Bloody Dick Creek and the Wisdom River, mostly avoiding the common trails and mining settlements because he felt at a disadvantage in the midst of a crowd and did not think he was riding faster than his legend. He killed now and then but tried to be prudent and reasonable in his depredations. “Why are you a-killing me?” one asked. “Because I am the Hand of God,” he said. “Bullshit.” Blam. One man he let go when the Sharps hung fire three times in a row. “Speak well of me,” he said. “I will. Thank 'ee.” One man said, “God help you. Kill me, but save my wife and childers.” “I can't do that,” he said. “May we say a family prayer first?” asked the man. “A short one, I hain't got all day.” Blam. Always following the spring freshets swelling the creeks in the dry valleys in the shadow of noble mountains. And everywhere they found derelict sluices, dams, ditches, flumes, tailing pools, abandoned cabins, all evidence of the gold rush where the placers had petered out. “Are ye a preacher?” he asked. “No.” Blam. “What do you want a preacher for?” “To get hitched.” “Haha. That's a good 'un. To the crip?” Blam.

He rode toward the smoke-heaving blast furnaces of Bannack with a short string of stolen horses packed with loot, gold dust in his pockets, leaving Good Luck in camp in a spring-flower coulee stippled with pines where they had chanced upon a hot-water pool, the boulders and moss beds round
about littered with eagle feathers, stone arrow points, beads and bits of bone left by the Indians. Dandling her legs in the pool to ease her stumps, she seemed like a whole girl, half smiling and twitching as the bubbles erupting from crevices below tickled her scars. And he thought were she to speak, it would complete the illusion. But then he thought, She does not speak because she sees her life as a dream, a nightmare, which, if she speaks, will only turn real. In town he listened to stories about himself in saloons where brave men spoke loudly of Vigilance Committees and hangings, in the company of other brave men, voices sounding of brass. But they made him anxious, every hand turned against him, even if they didn't know it was him, and there were too many to shoot. He bought three steers of a Christian stockman starting a spread on the Grasshopper Creek to drive ahead as a disguise and made for the coulee with coffee, a ribbon for the girl and whiskey bottles clinking in his saddlebags. Then, hidden from the eyes of men, he threw himself naked into the springs, scorching his skin pink, breaking the surface with a shout. He uncorked the store whiskey from his packs and stretched on a moss bed with Good Luck as the sun went down. He helped her shed her boots and clothing and coaxed her into the water. She gasped and flung her footless legs around him, her ribs sliding inside her skin each time she breathed, her small breasts like upturned cups, jewel
led with water drops, slippery against his chest. She burrowed against his neck and licked and sucked his skin. “I ain't a tit,” he said, attempting to kiss her, but she would not. Then, with the heat of the spring water and the excitement of their parts rubbing together, he shot his load into the seething effervescence, cried out a cry of pathos and dismay, and seemed to fall into a black pit. Coming to himself, he heard the mother voice, the words.
Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy / and we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow
.