The Englishman's Boy (24 page)

I shake my head. I don’t trust my trembling hand.

“You wanted this fucking lesson. Learn it, Vincent.”

I raise the gun. Immensely heavy, a great weight dragging on my arm, it is as if I am trying to lift the scarecrow staked in the garden on the tip of the gun barrel, uproot it from the earth. I fire, the pistol springs in my hand, a small captive animal struggling in my fist.

“High and to the right,” says Shorty drily. “Point and squeeze.”

The quaking in my hand has spread, run up the length of my arm to vibrate in my shoulder. I try to fix the bead in the centre of the overalls but it twitches with every beat of my heart. Clenched muscles cannot overrule it. Another shot. A puff of dust dances in the field beyond the garden.

“Squeeze,” says McAdoo, “squeeze.”

I snap off two more shots as quickly as I can; I want to be done with it, the gun kicks in rapid recoil, the smell of expended powder worms up my nostrils. Then I am pulling the trigger of a gun dead in my hand, the hammer clicking repeatedly on empty chambers, the scarecrow leering at me untouched. Shorty’s hand closes on the barrel and pushes it down to my side.

“Learn anything?” he asks.

Over Shorty’s shoulder I spot Wylie running hard and awkward in his riding boots, knees pumping high, shoulders thrown back. Passing the burned house, he snatches a piece of lumber from the ground and hurtles on toward us.

“Lose the gun, Harry,” Shorty is saying. “It ain’t for you.” Then
he senses something, breaks off, turns and catches sight of Wylie. “Christ,” he says, “here comes the cavalry.”

The cavalry is upon us now. “I heard them shots, Shorty! I come to see!” he cries, breathless. “You okay, Shorty?” He holds the two-by-four wrapped in a two-fisted grip. A large rusted spike protrudes from it.

“Calm down,” says McAdoo. “Everything’s okay.”

Wylie’s eyes jump suspiciously from McAdoo to me. He has spotted the revolver in my hand and it seems to have stirred muddled outrage in him. “Why you shooting that gun?” he yells at me. “Shorty says you try to make him talk about stuff he don’t want to talk about.” He takes a menacing step towards me. “You leave him alone. He don’t have to talk to you.”

“Climb down off of him, Wylie,” Shorty orders. “I was just giving Harry a shooting lesson.”

Wylie clamps his top teeth over his bottom lip and sucks it, seeking solace and consolation even while his eyes narrow resentfully. “Whyn’t you give me a lesson, too?” he complains to Shorty.

“Yes, Shorty, whyn’t you give him the lesson you gave me?”

“He don’t need that particular lesson,” says Shorty.

“Please, Shorty, I ain’t never shot a short gun but once or twice. Leave me do it, Shorty.”

“Wylie don’t need no lesson like you did, Mr. Writer. You seen him coming to the rescue like hell in a handcart with nothing but that piece of lumber in his hand. He was ready to pulp somebody.” He gives me a wolfish grin. “No wind up Wylie’s ass.”

“That’s right,” agrees Wylie hesitantly, unsure what the conversation is about, “I ain’t got no wind up my ass.”

“Going to save old Shorty’s bacon, wasn’t you, boy?”

“I heard them shots. I say, There’s maybe trouble, maybe Shorty’s in trouble, and I run like the wind.”

I hand the pistol and a box of cartridges to McAdoo. “Give him his lesson,” I say.

“Show me, Shorty,” Wylie pleads. “I can do her, Shorty.”

McAdoo doesn’t say anything. He simply breaks the gun, feeds cartridges into the chambers, slaps it shut. Before giving it to Wylie, he says sternly, “Point your finger.”

“At what, Shorty? Where?”

“There. At that goddamn scarecrow you made, Wylie.”

Wylie does.

“Say
bam.”

“Bam,” says Wylie.

“Put your hand down.”

Wylie does.

“Now up and
bam –
all together.”

“Bam,” goes Wylie.

“All right.” McAdoo smacks the gun into his palm. “Do the same with this, point her and squeeze the trigger.”

Wylie hefts the gun in his hand, the brightness of the weapon pulses up his arm and into his face. He beams. The gun flies up. It goes
bam.
The overall shudders from the impact of the bullet. The next two shots flap the cloth as they tear through the denim, twisting the scarecrow askew.

“See?” says McAdoo to me. “Nothing to her.” He turns to Wylie. “Like shooting fish in a fucking barrel, ain’t it?”

Wylie grins, face shining. “Easy,” he says, head bobbing. “Easy.”

“Try for the head,” says McAdoo. The words are scarcely out of his mouth when the barrel glares in the sun. I hear three shots, so quick they stutter, and the head of the scarecrow tosses like a buggy whip.

McAdoo and I stand silent while a few wisps of errant straw float lazily to the ground. Wylie has drilled a hole in the scarecrow’s leer and two more, one through the right eye and the other two inches above the left.

“Jesus Christ,” mutters McAdoo.

“Bam,” goes Wylie with the empty gun. “Bam, bam.”

“The gun’s his,” I say. “I don’t want it. Let him keep it.”

I walk away, quickly. Wylie is standing with the gun, swinging it
from target to target, going
bam
, louder and louder. He shoots the windmill, the bunkhouse window, a fencepost. I take one last glance back after I’ve cranked the car into life. Wylie has me in his sights. “Bam!” he shouts. “Bam! Bam!” He is laughing. McAdoo jerks Wylie’s arm down as I duck into the car.

17
 

T
he fording of the Milk was a good deal easier than the Marias – no fool and blind white horse to save from drowning. Once across, they shucked their wet clothes and hung them in the willows, built a fire and breakfasted buck naked while their duds dried. Finding themselves north of the Milk seemed to lighten the boys’ mood, they were now beyond reach of the Choteau County sheriff, the United States Marshals, the army, or Indian agents. On the Canadian side of the line there were no meddlesome lawmen of any stripe whatsoever.

And the health of their spirits might have owed something to the fact that all trace of the horse thieves was now well and truly gone. Pure relief, the Englishman’s boy guessed, noting how the knot in his own gut had loosened over the last day when it became clear they had lost them. Biggity talk about what you were aiming to do to Indians was one thing, the prospect of delivering on it was another. There were some hard cases in this crowd, but even hard cases got second thoughts when their mouths fell shut long enough to allow a spell for thinking.

Hardwick let them linger over morning coffee; with the trail dissolved into thin air there was no point in hurry. The thieves might have skedaddled in any direction – maybe they’d even doubled back south. But Hardwick had decided to gamble that they were bound for the Cypress Hills, fifty miles to the north, prime hunting grounds for
the tribes. And not just for the Cree, the Saulteaux, the Assiniboine, and the Blackfoot who gathered there to dance, to hunt, to make war, and to chop lodgepole pine, the slim, arrow-straight, nearly branchless trees prized for teepee and travois poles. Because also folded in among the hills were bands of Métis who had given the
montagne de cyprès
their name, buffalo hunters who supplied the Hudson’s Bay Company with the pemmican to feed its factors and servants in the Northwest. And traders, too. Only the year before, according to Vogle, that Bay bastard, Isaac Cowie, had packed out seven hundred and fifty grizzly pelts and fifteen hundred elk skins despite the Company’s monopoly being broken by independents trading the bad whisky the Company refused to sell. The thought of whisky of any kind, bad or good, and the prospect of a long swallow had helped cheer the boys remarkable, too.

Nigh ten o’clock, Hardwick ordered them into the saddle and they forsook the camp by the Milk, winding up and over and through gaunt, brooding hoodoos the colour of cured hides, riding out onto a rippling plain contoured like a washboard. The heat of the previous day had eased a little, but the wind had struck up fierce, gusty. As far as the eye could see, the short curly grass writhed and shuddered under the invisible lash of the shrilling wind. The Englishman’s boy rode leaning into it, like a man shouldering through swinging doors, his bowler hat battened down tight around his ears. Handfuls of sparse, sombre cloud sped overhead, spinning shadows on the glowing, rolling grass like coins tossed carelessly across the lamplit baize of a saloon table. An occasional faint spit of rain accompanied the dark shadow, then suddenly disappeared, the sun pouncing back on them, quick and hotblooded as a cougar.

To the left of the Englishman’s boy, Scotty rode with a stiff smile pasted on his gob. At first the boy had wondered if the wind wasn’t twisting up the corners of the Scotchman’s lips, curling them like the tips of a waxed moustache; now he figured it had nothing to do with the wind but with the Scotchman’s mind. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched him talking to himself, a brief mumble of words, a puppet-like bobbing and wagging of the head on the stem of the thin
neck signalling agreement with his own propositions. And each time he ceased jabbering, his smile was stretched even wider across his face until the Englishman’s boy feared the mouth might rip at the corners; each time the smile seemed frozen a little harder and more unlikely ever to thaw, a toothy grimace as strange as that fixed, blue, teary shine in the Scotchman’s eyes.

The boy bounced his heels on the horse’s ribs, left the Scotchman making faces and muttering to himself, and jogged ahead to the trio of James Hughes, Charlie Harper, and Ed Grace. Better to get shut of that lame duck while the getting was good. He’d had enough of lame ducks to last a lifetime. First, the Englishman Dawe, who’d sickened and died on him, then sorry-ass Hank, now this crazy-grinning Scotchman. He had enough to look out for, looking out for his own skin.

Hughes, Harper, and Grace rode hunched in their wildly flapping coats, Hughes shouting over the roar of the wind. “Hardwick’ll land us at Farwell’s post. If he starts flying his kite there, he’ll soon forget about them horse-snatchers. We’ll do a few days’ drinking, turn around and head for home. That’s all she wrote.”

“The hell he’ll forget,” said Harper. “Those Arapaho took him captive in Wyoming put a burr under old Tom’s foreskin when it comes to Indians. I don’t know what they done to him, but he’s got one bad hate on for our red brothers. You heard what happened in the Sweet Grass Hills last April. He scattered lead on a bunch of Assiniboine riding in under a trade flag. That’s bad business, shooting the customers.”

The Englishman’s boy gave close attention to Ed Grace. Grace was a quiet man who didn’t bandy opinions, but now he seemed to be studying some thought, slowly shifting a wad of tobacco from cheek to cheek. A tall, raw-boned man with a strong hooked nose, hooded eyes, and a balding head, Ed Grace was nicknamed the Eagle. He shifted in the saddle, crooked his neck, and squirted a stream of tobacco juice over his shoulder, downwind. “Beating up on Assiniboines is one thing,” he offered in a hoarse voice. “Assiniboines are a scrubby, poor sort of Indian. Short on horses and nothing but
sawed-off Hudson’s Bay flintlocks for guns. But I figure there’ll be Blackfoot camped in Cypress. There were last year. Caught sixty Cree braves collecting spruce gum and rubbed them all out, didn’t spare a one. The Blackfoot got no shortage of horseflesh – even the squaws and brats ride fine ponies – and they own plenty of rifles, good rifles, Henrys and needle-guns. The Spitzee Cavalry didn’t do anything to keep repeaters out of their hands and they aren’t the least bit shy about turning them on whites. The dose of the smallpox they caught lately didn’t do anything for their sweet temper or our popularity. I don’t care how much that burr under Hardwick’s foreskin is bothering him – he better not go taking any potshots at Blackfoot or some of our hair will be dangling from their belts.”

The Englishman’s boy could see what Grace had said didn’t go down well – with Hughes in particular. He wasn’t about to swallow it. “Ain’t no goddamn Indians ever going to get the drop on old Tom,” said Hughes. “He’s a foxy one. No Indian’s going to outfox the fox.”

“Anyway, we got Eagle here to protect us from the Blackfoot,” said Harper, giggling through his bad teeth, the fool. “This side of the line Queen Victoria owns the Indians. Eagle being a Canadian, it’s up to him to be hospitable, see that we Yankee boys have a good time and don’t have our hair troubled by no British Indians. Eagle’s the Queen’s rep’sentative. Ain’t you, Eagle?”

“God only knows what I am,” said Grace, “but I assure you I’m not happy. Not with this situation. I ask myself why in hell I’m here. There’s no percentage in it and that’s the truth.”

“Why, you’re here for friendship’s sake, ain’t you?” Hughes hollered into the wind. “We all of us seen the winter out together, didn’t we? We all been good partners, thick and thin. Friends is duty-bound to stand by friends, ain’t they?”

“Who was Farmer Hank’s friend?” asked Grace. “Who stood by him?”

Hughes and Harper threw one another troubled glances.

“Not me,” the Eagle answered, “and not you either.” He pointed to the Englishman’s boy. “Ask him if he’s riding with us for friendship’s sake.”