The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (3 page)

Slim was now awake in the bunk beneath Crab. “Hell, Levi, Russia ain’t about t’ disappear on us. It’s been there a hundred years.”

Some of the others were beginning to wake up now. Slim started to pull on his boots and said loudly, “Bust out, fellas! Your pleasant ocean voyage is comin’ to an end!”

Slim, who was really a little on the heavyset side, was sort of an assistant ramrod to Shad, and made ten bucks a month more than the rest of us. Like Shad, he could give an unpleasant order in such a way that it didn’t sound too bad, and the men would do it without hardly thinking twice. Come to think of it, if a younger, kind of green kid like me had just gone down there and lighted the lamp and yelled “Get up!” I’d have more than likely been bruised and battered somewhat severely during the process.

Rufus Hooker stood up groggy and mad, his stomach hanging out over his belt. He rubbed his small dark eyes between his mass of matted black hair and scrubby beard.

“Damn hell!” he grumbled. “I just barely got m’self t’ fuckin’ sleep!”

“No one could ever guess it, Rufe,” Slim said. “You wakin’ up just now is a vision a’ rare beauty.”

But some of the others had the same kind of excitement jumping in them that I had. Sammy the Kid sat up near where I’d been sleeping beside the rope barrier separating us from the cattle starting to stir around in the main hold, where the yellow cow had stepped through the ropes onto my foot. “Hey!” he said. “Russia?”

“Unless the captain’s made one hell of a mistake.” Slim was now up and shrugging into his Mackinaw jacket.

Shiny Joe Jackson sat up and whacked his brother, Link, on the butt to rouse him. “Heard me, one time, that them Rooskies are all coal-black, an’ got themselves horns.”

Mushy Callahan was sitting up near Shiny, buttoning his shirt. “Just grow some horns an’ you’ll be right at home.”

Shiny and a couple of the others grinned, and then Dixie Claybourne said, “That’s bullshit, a’ course. But I really damn well did hear that they skin their enemies an’ tan their hides an’ make tents out of ’em!”

“Hell,” Link yawned, half awake now. “In that case me an’ Shiny Joe oughtta be worth a fortune betwixt us. If they like black tents.”

Mushy grinned, now standing up and buttoning his pants. “The two of you’d look a lot fuckin’ better as a tent than you ever did in real life.”

“Get your gear packed an’ then come on up topside,” Slim said. “It’s about time you lazy seagoin’ bastards started workin’ as cowboys again, an’ at least halfway earnin’ your keep.”

I went back on up with Slim, thinking of the men getting ready below. Thinking of the whole actually pretty fair outfit. What Old Keats had said about being right-side up, or maybe dead or alive and all, was still kind of on my mind.

The boss, Shad Northshield, always came to my mind first and most.

Maybe that was because after my parents died in the big blizzard of ’65, he’d kind of naturally become like an older brother to me.

I was just four that hard wintertime in ’65, and my Ma and Pa had frozen to death in the little cabin they’d built, both of them hugging each other in bed one night to fight off the awful, persistent cold. The reason I’d lived is that they were hugging each other with me in between them, to give me the last little bit of warmth they had in their lives.

Shad had found us, and pried their arms apart from around me.

He’d put his head on my chest. And Old Keats, who was with him, described it one time to me later by telling me my heart “sounded like the hopeless, tiny wingbeats of an exhausted baby sparrow inside me trying to fly.”

Shad sent Old Keats on to check the blizzard-stranded cows they’d been looking for. Then he ripped up some of the inner planks from the floor of the cabin. That was the only wood in miles that wasn’t too frozen to burn. He built a fire, and not getting too close, he wrapped me in a blanket and hand-rubbed me for maybe twenty-four hours.

Then, finally, when my heart and breathing were stronger, he left me in the blanket by the fire and went out to dig graves for my Ma and Pa with a pick in the ice-hard ground.

Shad buried them there, and built fires over the newly loose ground to thaw it down. That way, with the earth melted, it would freeze over solid again, and wild animals couldn’t get to them.

Old Keats came back late the next day to find him standing, kind of bent over, near the dying fires on the graves.

“The boy?” he said.

Shad looked up at him. “He’ll be okay.” And then, “The cows?”

“Froze.”

Shad nodded slowly. “Everything out here’d be dead if they hadn’t kept that kid between ’em.”

I guess it was then that Old Keats noticed Shad was standing there over those graves in that bitter, gray, freezing late afternoon in his shirt sleeves.

Along with the blanket he’d wrapped me up in, he’d also put his coat on me.

When I came around, they’d brought me back to the nearest line shack on Joe Diamond’s ranch, and Shad was forcing lukewarm water between my teeth with a beat-up tin spoon. Old Keats was standing quietly just off to one side near him.

I gagged a little on the water, and kind of looked around, and then first thing asked where my Ma and Pa was.

The answer was clear, but gently so, on Shad’s face. And, somehow, he did a strange thing. To the best of my memory, he never really quite said they were dead, but instead he talked onward, toward the future. And because of that gentle way he had, they’ve never ever been truly dead in my mind, even to this day.

He told me to try a little more water because it was good for me. And then he said that, me being a young man already, he’d get me a job milking cows and chopping firewood and such at the main ranch house. And since he’d told me, in just that certain way that he did, that I was now a “young man,” I could only cry a little bit about my folks. But they were good tears.

And then I worked a lot and grew up some, and that was the way it was.

Right now Shad was pushing close to forty, or maybe he was even over the hill there. In any case Slim and Old Keats were the only ones among the fifteen of us who were older than him. Shad had shoulders that were about an ax handle wide and he stood over six foot high, with no gut at all and a minimum of butt, which is about as good a way for a man to be built as any. As far as his face was concerned, he had more than his share of nicks and scars from run-ins with men, beasts and violent acts of God. But you had to look close to see those marks because a lot of rain and wind and snow and sun had covered them over
into one tough, not too ugly looking, but damn well used face. He had light-blue eyes that could nail you like twin iron spikes if he was mad about something, which was fairly common. Shad never grew a beard, like a lot of the older fellas used to do, but favored the sloping longhorn mustache, which drooped slightly down around the edges of his mouth toward his rocklike jaw.

But the main thing about Shad was a rare kind of a strong inner quality that stuck out like a sore thumb. He was a natural-born man and also a natural-born boss. I guarantee that if Shad had been a new private in Napoleon’s army, and Napoleon was figuring out his next attack and happened to see Shad standing there, he’d have just naturally had to go over to Shad and say, “What do you think?” And I double guarantee that whatever Shad told him would have been smart enough to get him put on Napoleon’s general staff. And if that staff didn’t happen to go along with him, he’d have had those poor bastards shaking in their boots in no time. He was purely tougher than a spike. And yet, hard as he was, Shad never asked anything from any man that he wasn’t willing to give twice back.

Funny thing too that was part of Shad’s quality. He was as good or better than any of the rest of us at the things we were best at. Like Old Keats, hands down, was the wisest and best-read man in the outfit. For example, with an eye toward coming here, he’d even managed to teach himself a little of the language from a pocket-size book on Russian he carried. But Shad generally had a wisdom that matched Old Keats’s. Chakko, an Indian gone white, was the best tracker and runner and reader of signs, but Shad was just as good. Among men raised on horses, Natcho was probably the best rider, but Shad could move any horse any direction on a dime and give you change. I was the only one who’d finished McGuffey’s Reader, but Shad could read and write and add and subtract as well as me. Maybe even better, because he had one hell of a head for learning. And Big Yawn, born somewhere in Poland, was far and away the strongest of us. But the one time he and Shad went to Indian rassling it lasted
for nearly twenty sweating, muscle-crushing minutes, and finally turned out to be a Mexican standoff.

If there was one bad thing about Shad, it was that once he got his head set on something, that tended to be it. You might say he was a little stubborn. Or, as Old Keats once said, “If Shad made up his mind and him and a giant longhorn bull ran head-on to each other, the bull’d get knocked ass over teakettle.”

I know I’m going on a long time about Shad. But there’s a joyful, and sad, and good reason. And you’ll understand why. In time.

Right now, Slim and I got to the main deck, where the
Great Eastern Queen
was pitching around worse than before in the tossing, white-capped seas. Vladivostok was getting closer and by now you could make out a couple of long wooden wharfs set up on pilings that jutted out into the Gulf of Saint Peter with big, dark waves crashing angrily against them. Beyond the wharfs, on the land, clusters of small buildings could be seen, lights glinting dimly through their windows. At the end of the closer wharf, a man was waving some message with a couple of lamps, and up near the bow of the
Queen
a signalman with lamps was answering him back.

“C’mere!” Old Keats yelled from the railing, and when we got to him he pointed at a small boat approaching the side of the ship through the waves, four men pulling strongly on the oars and a fifth, who seemed to be in charge, holding the tiller.

“Russia’s reception committee,” Old Keats murmured quietly, holding on to the railing for his balance. “Just on general principle, I sure hope they’re friendly.”

“Hell, Keats, why shouldn’t they be?” Slim grinned. “We’re bringin’ ’em the only good cattle this godforsaken place ever had!”

Three crewmen broke open a nearby gate in the railing and rolled a rope ladder out so that its far end fell down to the waves below. Our other cowhands were coming up onto the main deck now, some of them struggling with their gear. Shad and the
captain of the
Queen
, a short, heavyset Scotsman named Barum, came down from the bridge at about the same time.

The man holding the tiller in the small boat got a grip on the rope ladder and started climbing, a couple of the others behind him. When he got to the top, Captain Barum gave him a hand up onto the deck and he stood there for a minute, looking us over in a not too friendly fashion and catching his breath as the other two came up behind him. He was middle-sized, with a lot more fat than muscle on him, and most of his forehead seemed to be a mass of thick brown eyebrows. He was wearing a heavy, long brown coat and a little brown cap that had a little shiny gold medal on it. I guess it was some kind of a naval uniform.

“I’m Captain Barum,” the captain said. “And this is Mr. Shad Northshield. He’ll be disembarking here tonight with his fourteen men and five hundred and thirty-six animals. And their baggage, of course.”

Shad said curtly, “Tell him we’re in a hurry to get docked so we can get unloaded.”

The Russian frowned at Shad and he spoke to the captain in a guttural, harsh voice, with an accent you could have cut with a dull ax. “I am Harbor Master Yakolev. I know nothing of all these men and animals.”

“That’s what we’re telling you about now,” Shad said, an ominously hard edge to his voice.

Yakolev glared at him. “What travel permission is it you have? Letters from immigration authority, passports?”

“Goddamn,” Slim whispered grimly to me and Old Keats, “I knew we’d forget somethin’. Ain’t one a’ all them five hundred longhorns got no passport.”

But Shad was already handing the Harbor Master a thick envelope. “Our Sea Papers,” he said levelly. “From Seattle through the port of Vladivostok. Okayed by the U.S.A. and by your Russian Consulate.” Then, as the man opened the envelope, he added flatly, “If you can read it, Yakolev.”

In terms of establishing a long-time friendship, Shad wasn’t making, or trying too hard to make, a whole lot of points. Yakolev glowered at him and then started to read the Sea Papers by the light of a lamp hanging from a roughly paneled bulkhead near him.

At last he said, “What’s this?” Which the way he talked sounded more like “Wawssis?” but it was getting so I could pretty much tell what he meant.

“What’s what?” Shad said.

“This—this Slash-Diamond?”

“That’s the brand on our cattle and horses. Just in case some of you Russians should get a mind t’ try t’ steal some of ’em.”

“Mr. Northshield doesn’t mean to say—” Captain Barum started uneasily.

But Yakolev silenced him with a raised hand and spoke to Shad in a high, angry voice. “I know the reason there is of branding! Under our most gracious Tzar, my friend, when a man does not behave just properly, here, that man himself is sometimes branded.” He smiled, but his smile looked more like he was about to bite something. “Your nation does not put you, or your men, outside our—our sometimes very strict laws.”

“We didn’t think t’ bring a lawyer,” Shad said. “Just check our papers.”

Yakolev, his face tight, studied them for a long, silent time, finally flipping them back and forth aimlessly.

“All right, Yakolev,” Shad said impatiently, “you can’t find one damn thing wrong with those papers, so stop wasting our time and let’s get this ship docked.”

But Yakolev, more hostile than ever, was now going to take all the time he could. “Levi Dougherty!” he suddenly said loudly, reading the name off the Sea Papers.

“Yeah?” I stepped forward curiously.

“Is not Levi, it’s a Jewish name?”

“I don’t know.”