The Devil's Paintbox (30 page)

“A man can do some work with broken ribs. Could grease the skids,” Aiden said.

“Some could.” Powhee gave a rare smile. “But if William Buck had a splinter in his little finger he couldn't wipe his own ass. You are lucky you broke just his nose and not your own hand. Broken hand and you're out of work. All the bones matter here, you see? Arm? Elbow?” He wrapped his huge hand around Aiden's arm and bent it up. “Little finger bone here?” He grasped Aiden's finger and squeezed it until Aiden thought he might really snap it.

“But there are ways to fight without breaking the bones.” Powhee dropped Aiden's hand and sat back. “I can teach you.”

“How about you just send me to a different camp?” Aiden proposed, thinking about the delicious meat pie from camp four.

“I'm not talking about Buck. Buck can go to hell,” he spat. “Bandy girls aren't the only entertainment out here. Men like fighting, and there's money in fighting.”

“I learned that for my two dollars already.”

“I don't mean that. I mean real fights.” Powhee laughed. “My fights. There are rules, but the fights are real enough.”

“I'm listening,” Aiden said.

“They're held every other Saturday in camp three. You have to fight without damage. One dollar is guaranteed each fighter; the rest is wagers. After payout, thirty percent of the bets goes to me, ten to each of the other camp bosses, twenty-five percent to the winner, five to the loser.”

“Meaning what? For a loser?”

“Any man can fight,” Powhee explained. “But no one bets much on the bad fighters. For a bad fight, the loser might earn just fifty cents. But for the best matches, even if you lose, you get two, maybe three dollars.”

“On top of the one guaranteed?”

“Yes.”

This math was easy enough; if a loser was getting two dollars, the winner made ten.

“What are my chances?”

“You are tall, agile and fairly strong. You are good at sensing a person; that will help. You are too quick to anger; that will hurt. You learn fast, but you think you have learned more than you really know.” Powhee tapped his fist on his chest. “You have no center, so you slip. You have a quick mind, so you recover. You don't care if you live or die. That could work either way.” Aiden blushed under the cool assessment of his character.

“But we don't want men to die,” Powhee went on. “Or even lose a day of work, so if it goes bad, we usually can stop it in time.”

“How often have you failed at that?”

“Once.”

Aiden nodded. Those odds were the best in his life so far.

“All right, then. I'll fight.”

Powhee trained him every night for a week. They slipped away to a different place in the woods every time, for there were always spies to fear. The fights, Aiden soon discovered, were good business. A few tips on a man's style, strength or tactics could greatly influence the wagers. It wasn't just Napoleon Gilivrey's camps involved either. The fights drew Indians, prospectors and traders. It seemed there was any number of shadowy people living up here in the distant forest eager for entertainment and the chance at riches.

There were few rules; essentially, no punching to the head with a closed fist and no head butts, eye gouging or biting. Kicking was legal to take a man down but not to break a knee and not at all once he was on the ground. If you wounded a man so he couldn't work, you were docked twice his pay for each missed day and banned from the next fight. But as Aiden soon found out, there was still plenty of hurt to go around. The fights were mostly a sort of wrestling. There were points for taking a man down and more points for lifting him whole off the ground while doing it, the higher the better. You won by pinning a man, by throwing him entirely out of the circle or by having more points. The awarding of points, however, was generally thought too complicated; the winner was more often chosen simply by the more raucous approval from the crowd.

Powhee taught Aiden useful skills: how to hunch against an avalanche of body blows or use leverage to escape a pin. He also taught him some show moves: how to dart in and slap his opponent silly, fake a dramatic fall and then spring up and slam the man down.

“They're stuck out here,” Powhee explained. “So give them some show.”

Aiden fought three times his first night. He was pinned within a minute his first time but won his second, though with little pride, for his opponent was slow and drunk and hardly worth the effort. But the third was a good match, long and difficult, exciting enough that betting was vigorous. Even though Aiden lost, and with a black eye and hurt upon him everywhere, the spectators cheered him off, and he pocketed three dollars from bets, plus the one guaranteed.

“Well done, lad.” Bony slapped his back and handed him a bottle of whiskey. “You made me a tenner there—though I was fearful a few times you might turn it around!”

“You bet against me?” Aiden took a deep swallow.

“Of course! Jesus, I've seen the other fellow spin a man over his head like a baby. What do you think? It ain't a charity, lad.”

inter settled in, with a strange and disconcerting mildness and the same bleak dishrag sky day after day. Aiden did not miss the bone-scraping winds and terrifying blizzards of Kansas, but he did long for the clear winter sky, the deep, sharp blue that made his teeth sting. Here the occasional snowfall dusted the trees, but it was a desultory effort, like an ancient auntie applying powder for a dance where she knew she would just sit in the corner, saved from solitude only by young nephews charged with her attendance, dutifully arriving with cups of punch. Still, overall it was better than Kansas, who was just an old witch, purely out to kill. Once there was a real snowstorm and the men worked quickly to move fallen trees, for snow made the easiest road of all. Soon the banks of the creek were crowded with timber awaiting the spring floods.

Aiden was getting better with the crosscut saw, but didn't like it as much as the axe. Still, it was exciting to see a huge tree come down. Felling was a dangerous business, with many ways to go deadly wrong, but that just made it more interesting. A falling tree sheared limbs off other trees as it broke through the canopy. These branches, justly called widowmakers, could fly anywhere and crush a man before he saw them coming.

“I saw a fellow impaled once,” Bony told him grimly. “A branch as thick as my arm went right through him here to
here.” He touched his chest just below the collarbone, then the back of the opposite hip. “Pinned him to the ground like a spear. We had to saw the branch through to get him free. The boss went ahead and shot him in the head first. He was lucky. Some won't do that.”

Aiden said nothing. Mr. Powhee usually wore a pistol, but Aiden had figured it was for show.

His new life settled into a comfortable routine: cut down trees, eat, sleep, fight. With days of work, nights of liquor and the constant bruising of the fights, time passed in acceptable numbness. There were only two or three miles between each of the five camps, but since they were located in stream valleys, there were steep hills to cross in between. Aiden didn't mind the walks; in fact, he liked them. The trails were good, and climbing the hills strengthened his legs for the wrestling. He usually left as soon as the Saturday noon whistle halted their work, grabbing some sandwiches to eat on the way while the others ate their full meal and took a nap before departing.

He liked walking alone. He liked the mossy solitude of these strange, dense woods. He liked the silent cushion of pine needles beneath his feet and the way shafts of sunlight sometimes broke through and lit up the mist between the massive tree trunks. Along the trails, moss grew in thick emerald green carpets, punctuated by little clusters of mushrooms. He did not even mind the rain. There was no slant to it here; it fell straight and steady with a gentle percussion. Aiden liked these walks mostly because, for a little while, time and the world did not exist.

The fights generally started around four, as darkness fell early in the North Woods in winter. He would fight two or
three men a night and sleep there after, for the trail was too dark and his body too thumped for the journey home. Increasingly he was too drunk as well. Whiskey was a welcome friend after the brutal nights, and those who won money on him were always generous.

On Sunday morning at first light, after mugs of strong coffee and plates of bacon and eggs, the men would all walk back to their own camps, pick up their tools and start work again.

Aiden came to know men in all the camps but still generally kept to himself. The Kansas boys lived in camp three and so were always at the fights. They had both become fallers and were gaining a reputation as the fastest team in any of the camps, able to zip the long saw through the biggest tree trunk as smoothly as a hot knife through butter. They loved to bet and always put something on Aiden, even when he was clearly outmatched. Somehow they generally broke even and never seemed to lose their high spirits.

William Buck was usually at the fights as well, though he kept a careful distance. Powhee had transferred him to camp two, which was populated by the roughest down-and-outs, scary, evil-eyed men, sneaky and grim.

“It's the worst timber there,” Old Finn explained. “Steepest hills and weakest stream. Hardly worth the effort to run a camp, but they need someplace to put the bad ones, and Gilivrey will always manage to squeeze out a profit.”

Buck liked to bet but would not fight himself.

“It's a stupid kind of fighting,” he declared frequently. “Ain't really even fighting when you got all kinds of rules and can't even punch a man in the face!”

Aiden never spoke to him but was secretly pleased to
notice the permanent squashed mess of his nose. The widower showed up now and then but never bet, for he was intent on saving every penny.

“They say the railroad will be across in another three or four years,” he told Aiden one night. “I can bring my children out then.” It was his only goal.

A few of the Bandy girls usually arrived in camp three for fight night, but rarely the whole group, and they never bothered with the musical show. It wasn't a good night for them; half the men would have lost all their money, and the winners were generally too drunk and raucous to spend much on the girls. But Bandy usually came along to mind her few charges, while sending Mr. Hi-yow to guard the rest of the girls in another camp. She and Aiden would sit up late talking and drinking together like old friends. She was the only person he felt comfortable with. She was twenty-three, he had learned, and her real name was Amanda. She had a nice singing voice, could shoot his bow amazingly well and owned two full sets of long underwear made of China silk. (She hated the feel of wool against her skin.) She could make any dog, anywhere, do anything she asked with just a soft word and a wave of her hand. Talking with her was easy. He even let her sit beside him one night while the cook sewed up a cut on his head. When the clumsy needle jabbed him painfully deeply and he yelped despite himself, she grasped his hand, and he did not pull away. Her palm was soft, but he could feel the scarred skin stretched tight. She had not shown him her face again since the first night they had met.

“You actually like the fighting, don't you?” she asked. “It isn't just money or pride for you.”

“Yeah.” He winced at the tug of thread against his scalp. Maddy had been so gentle, he'd never felt her knots.

“Why?”

“I don't know. Makes you feel something.”

“Makes you feel hurt.”

“Yeah, but hurt is something.” The cook finished and clipped the thread. Aiden gave him a quarter and took a deep drink of whiskey. The cut was on the back of his head, so it didn't matter how it looked.

“My girls can make you feel something.”

“So I hear.”

“You're a rich man now, and sixteen years old. Aren't you feeling some … longing?”

“I'm done with all longings.”

Bandy burst out laughing. Aiden pulled away. “I'm sorry.” She caught his arm tenderly, then giggled again. “It's just the way you said that—it's like a line from a melodrama!”

Aiden hunched up and looked into the fire.