Sudden Country (15 page)

S
on, it's time." There is a quarter hour, just before the first steel shaft parts the sky to the east, when the night loses its velvet gloss and becomes as flat and black as coke. It was in that quarter hour that Mr. Knox's words, whispered so close to my ear his lips almost touched it, brought me awake.

I was surprised to learn that I had lost consciousness at all with our plot about to unfold and its chief target lying only a yard away; but the sleep I had missed the previous night had caught up I had left on my boots, and thanks to that ancient bed of pine needles managed to roll out and make away in Mr. Knox's footsteps without a sound.

Sleep now was as remote as Cathay, there in the predawn Dakota chill with the birds mute in the trees and crickets stitching deep in the forest, as we crept past motionless blanketed figures–enemies all–toward our rendezvous. For the second time since we had entered these hills I felt poised on the edge of something. Was it just weeks ago that I had sat at my little desk, fretting over the rainfall in Argentina?

A crowd awaited us behind the wagon where the weapons were kept. At first I thought, with a tightening in my stomach, that the would-be mutineers had anticipated us, but then in the smoky starlight I recognized Judge Blod's rotundity and Deacon Hecate's angular height among three of the men whom the Deacon had drafted in Cheyenne. One, Will Asper, was a slim sandy youth, not ten years my senior and a contemporary of the treacherous Tom; the others, older, were an ox-shouldered Swede named Dahlgren–corrupted to Dolly by his peers–and a swarthy man, clean-shaven and balding in front, who was nearly Ben Wedlock's age and whose surname was Aintchell, although he was sometimes called H. L., which as pronounced by the Deacon sounded like "Angel." He seldom spoke and his eyes held a curious deadness I found unsettling. I understood that he had been a guard in the federal penitentiary at Yuma, Arizona, until a wave of humanitarian sentiment had forced officials there to replace its more brutal personnel. This was our army.

The Deacon issued pistols. I inspected the Navy Colt's load and thrust it inside my belt, feeling taller and older. Will Asper spun his balanced Russian like the gunmen Judge Blod wrote about, and Dolly wrapped a huge hand around a converted Army Colt's of Civil War vintage that obscured all but the end of its barrel. Aintchell dropped a short ugly bulldog revolver into his pocket after an indifferent glance and unfolded a fat jackknife to expose a blade with a wicked blue edge. He tested the point against the ball of one thumb. A drop of blood appeared. He licked it off.

"No unnecessary slaughter." The Deacon's low command seemed to be directed at Aintchell exclusively. "We shall want something to hang."

"Back in civilization," clarified Mr. Knox; "following a trial."

"Civilization is a world and a heaven away. Tonight we are fighting for our lives."

"You're fighting for your lives," Will Asper said. "What's our cut?"

"Equal parts of whatever we find. Which will amount to equal parts of nothing if we do not win tonight." Mr. Knox was emphatic.

Judge Blod said, "This is not a fit assignment for men of education and breeding. We should send Master Grayle for help."

Thus were the Judge's true colors hoisted at last. Mr. Knox ignored them, twirling the cylinder of his pocket Lightning.

"Even if he made it, he would return to find us all murdered. You all know the plan. Deacon, you and the others will throw down on the Amarillans and our two recalcitrants from Cheyenne. David, the horses are your responsibility. If anyone makes for them, run them off. They won't wander far, and we cannot afford to let any of Wedlock's men ride back for reinforcements. Wedlock is mine."

"I claim Wedlock," said the Deacon.

"We shall go together. That puts you in charge of the others, Judge. Remember, no shooting unless they produce a weapon."

"Or knifing." This time there was no question that the Deacon was addressing Aintchell, who shrugged as he wiped his blade rhythmically on his shirt.

Mr. Knox said, "You have five minutes to reach your stations. When I fire my pistol, that will be the signal to act."

"You best fire it now, schoolteacher."

None of us had observed Mike McPhee gliding through the shadows, and now he stood ten paces away with his back to the camp and the first gray streaks of dawn shining on his drawn pistol, a small instrument of the pocket variety like Mr. Knox's, but with a larger bore. His loud brogue rang in the morning stillness.

"If you ain't fixing to fire it," he said, "maybe you best toss it back with the rest. Now." He cocked his weapon for emphasis.

Mr. Knox let out his breath, half turned, and tossed his pistol into the wagon with a clatter.

"Unburden yourselves, the rest of you. That goes for the brat."

Judge Blod was the first to obey. Deacon Hecate opened his stern mouth as if to deliver an oration from Scripture, then seemed to think better of it and added his yellow-handled pistol to the pile in the wagon. This prompted Will Asper and Dolly to relinquish their arms. I surrendered the Navy. Aintchell alone hesitated. In the growing light, McPhee's face grew dangerous. "You too, Fisheye. That short piece in your pocket."

Aintchell drew out the bulldog revolver carefully and flipped it with a nonchalant movement into the wagon.

"Try to get the better of Bloody Bill's men, is it? You'll learn–"

Turning back, Aintchell made a little sidearm gesture as if sweeping open a door. The Irishman's reactions were fast. He fired and Aintchell doubled over. But not before McPhee reeled back with the black handle of the jackknife standing out like a stud from the center of his chest. Correcting himself automatically, he lurched forward a step, then stumbled back two and sat down hard on the ground, losing his grip on the pistol. His face was in shadow now and I could not imagine its expression. After a moment he heeled over.

By this time Aintchell was in convulsions on the ground, both hands clutching his belly. A hideous stench of blood and excrement and spent powder fouled the morning air.

There was, however, no time to see to him. "Quickly, now!" barked Mr. Knox, reaching back inside the wagon. With startled obscenities the camp was coming alive around us. I moved to join him. Irrationally, I groped for my own weapon in the darkness, ignoring all others. The Deacon shoved me aside to capture the instrument most handy, after which there was a scramble.

"On the ridge!"

The Judge's baritone was nearly as loud as McPhee's shot. In my excitement I applauded him, imagining that his wits had overcome his native cowardice and that he had sung out to distract the raiders while we established our position. A sudden stillness among my fellow defenders killed that thought. The entire camp, in fact, had fallen silent except for the mortal groans of the wounded Aintchell at our feet. I withdrew my hands from the arsenal and followed the others' gaze to the high ground in the east, where the sun was rising behind a line of mounted men crowned with feathers and painted barbarically from hairlines to moccasins.

They capped the horizon, looking as tall as the sparse evergreens that studded that rocky slope and nearly as inanimate, only their feathers and plaited hair moving in the wind. It seemed at first that there were hundreds. In truth they were but a score. In that moment I realized the tales I had read in the Knickerbocker books, of handfuls of plucky frontiersmen standing off hordes of redskins, were not so much outright lies as innocent exaggerations. Fear is the great multiplier.

T
he odds were sufficiently daunting. Drawn together though we now were by race and mutual survival, without McPhee and Aintchell we were just fourteen, and they held the high ground with rifles and carbines in hand and the sun in our eyes. They wore, in addition to the traditional savage regalia, white men's cotton shirts with the sleeves torn off and simple geometric designs painted on in bright colors–the "ghost shirts" of infamy. I did not doubt that this was Lives Again and his band of renegades from Standing Rock; flushed with their late victory over their pursuers, serene in the belief that their charmed tunics would preserve them from harm, the taste of Corporal Panther's blood still upon their tongues. In my mind's eye I saw a cadre of vultures circling over my own poor remains.

Still they did not move. It seemed hours. It was probably moments. I began to hope ...

"Tom, no!"

Ben Wedlock's shout brought me around just as he lunged to slap aside the barrel of our young traitor's rifle.

In that instant it discharged. Dirt and pebbles spattered one of the horses on the hill. The animal blew and reared. While its rider struggled for control–a war-horse it most decidedly was not–another brave leveled his carbine across his own mount's neck and fired. Tom cried out and fell.

There would be no peace that day. More shots followed, whether from our side or theirs I cannot say now and could not tell then, for in the next moment the fighting became general. With brain-curdling whoops and cries the riders charged down the slope, firing under and over their horses' necks and maneuvering the animals at full gallop between and around rocks and trees as if one brain controlled both horse and rider. Now and then in my sleep I still hear bullets whizzing past me and wake up shouting.

For me, the fight lasted less than a minute. I have spent many hours dissecting those movements I witnessed and was part of, and have concluded that there were at least twenty. I saw the Deacon, as erect as on those Sundays when he read from the Book of Genesis to all who would listen, steadying his pistol across one forearm and firing in a precise hammering rhythm, with measured spaces between shots; Eli Freedman unlashing the team belonging to Judge Blod's wagon and shooting one of the animals so beloved of him to create a breastwork; the Judge's ample backside retreating toward a part of that country not overrun by Indians; Christopher Agnes whirling a sack of snakes around his head and letting fly into the arms of a startled Indian bearing down upon him. These things I saw and more, despite Mr. Knox's attempts to push me under the wagon while fending off attackers with the pistol in his other hand. Eventually he became too involved in the latter activity, and I moved away from his protection.

I do not know to this day whether it was a bullet that clipped me or the butt of a long gun, for it was in the nature of those Indians to use their firearms as bludgeons when they were among us. I remember taking aim at a human being for the first time in my life, and I remember that by some miracle I had managed after all to snatch my inherited Navy from the pile. I remember too that my target was a superbly ugly creature with his face painted in halves of black and vermilion, busy closing in upon a distracted Will Asper. After that I remember nothing except an explosion of pain and sudden nausea, followed by a black void.

MAD ALICE

R
eality was a slow dawning through a gauzy window. I lay without moving, seeing objects around me without registering their place or function, while a slothful kind of panic spread through me, of time lost and an appointment of mortal importance missed. So potent was this fear that for minutes I did not notice the pain in my head. When I raised it, lightning arced, blinding me. I fell back with a gasp. A cushion fashioned from some scratchy material sewn inside scratchy material supported my head. I was in a bed of some kind. Mine? Had I, in one of the periodic fevers that swept through my place and time, merely dreamed all of the events from Jotham Flynn on? Would my mother at any moment enter with her unspeakable soup and assure me that all was as it had always been? I cannot say now whether this information would have relieved or distressed me.

"Calvin, you never will learn to duck when that crazy piebald scoots under the apple tree."

The voice, an aural personification of the creaking inside my head, broke into a wheezy cackle. Decidedly it did not belong to my mother. Out of the corner of one eye I saw a figure seated beside the bed that I will not at this point describe, for fear the reader will think me unrecovered from the blow to my head. I was not certain myself.

"Swallow this." A crusty hand stole behind my neck, supporting it as a black spoon that had once been silver came to my lips.

The odor that filled my nostrils from the liquid in the bowl of the spoon was indescribable, but not unpleasant; and warm. Emphatically, it did not remind me of my mother's sickbed brew. My stomach growled then and I realized that much time had passed since it had held anything. Obediently I opened my mouth. The flavor was familiar and welcome; a meat broth. Greedily I accepted another spoonful and yet another. No feast was ever appreciated more. I asked what it was. My own voice was nearly as creaky as the one that answered.