Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Ben and Clam did not allow young Amboise to help with their balloon. Amboise was always ripping things. Ben and Clam—internationally recognized balloon journalists—could not afford mistakes; a leaky balloon meant no end of trouble. They got out their bellows and prepared to inflate their balloon, watched by the curious Indians.

  Though the Partezon didn’t like whites and didn’t want his people to be corrupted by a dependence on the various goods they produced, he recognized that the whites were very ingenious when it came to tools and gadgets. Their weapons were excellent. He himself had a fine rifle that he had taken off a dead captain, but he rarely shot it, or even showed it, lest his people become dependent on the gun and lose their high skill with the bow—a skill that was essential if they were to continue in the old ways, the ways of their fathers, who had flourished with no reliance on white men’s goods.

  To the Partezon’s surprise, the whites didn’t make their fire on the ground—they made it in a kind of metal pot—then, using some kind of bellows, they began to pump hot air into the great silk blanket they had spread on the ground. To the consternation of the young warriors, the cloth began to swell, moving as if a great beast of some kind were inside it. This unexpected development frightened some of the young men considerably, but the Partezon gave them a stern look.

  The white men pumped and pumped until gradually the great silk cloth assumed a kind of round shape and began to rise off the prairie—it reminded the Partezon a little of the floats boys sometimes made from buffalo bladders, floats they clung to as they frolicked in the river.

  But the great sphere that was rising above the white man’s basket was no small float. Suddenly a great air beast of some kind had risen above them, tethered, for the moment, to some stakes the whites had driven into the ground.

  The young warriors were becoming very nervous. What if a great bird emerged and tried to carry them away? The Partezon looked at them with contempt, but he didn’t speak. If the boys were such cowards, then let them go—he would deal with them later.

  Soon the great air beast was straining at the ropes that held it.

  “I believe we’re ready,” Clam said, checking the lines that tied the balloon to the basket.

  “We’re ready,” Ben agreed. “Do try to keep us in sight, Amboise—we’ll hope to alight somewhere beside this river.”

  But Amboise d’Avigdor was shaking and shivering.

  “You wouldn’t leave me, would you, sir?” he asked Ben. “I won’t last long, if you do. I feel quite sure the Partezon will kill me most painfully, if I’m left.”

  “Nonsense,” Ben said firmly—at such times firmness was always the best policy. The young fellow merely needed to buck up.

  “Now, now, none of that,” Clam said. “Someone has to bring the wagon and lead our palfreys. And that, after all, is your job, my boy.”

  “Besides, the basket only holds two, plus a few provisions, of course,” Ben reminded the terrified interpreter.

  Amboise d’Avigdor, seeing that the case was hopeless, said no more. His masters, the Englishman and the Frenchman, clambered into their basket and gestured to him to unloose the ropes that kept the balloon pegged to its stakes. Amboise, moving like the dead man he now considered himself to be, did as directed—performing a last duty, as he saw it.

  As soon as it was released the balloon rose gracefully, fifty feet, a hundred feet, higher and higher.

  This was too much for the young warriors of the Brulé Sioux, convinced that a great bird would soon swoop down on them, ignoring the wagon filled with treasures, ignoring Amboise d’Avigdor, even ignoring the Partezon.

  Only the Partezon and old Fool’s Bull held their ground. Soon they could barely see the faces of the two men in the basket. More from curiosity than anger the Partezon notched an arrow and shot it at the two men in the basket. His strength with the bow had always been legendary among the People—he could drive an arrow completely through a running buffalo if he chose; this time he used his full strength, yet his arrow barely reached the basket, high above them. It hung for a moment and then fell back to earth.

  “The time of the People is over,” the Partezon said, to Fool’s Bull. In his heart he felt bitter chagrin. His lifelong discipline and rigor, all his efforts to protect the People from a weakening dependence on the white man’s goods, would now be for naught. The white men, in this instance, had not made a false claim: they said they could fly and they were flying. He had been looking forward to a jolly time, torturing the two flyers and the young man too, but in the face of what he had just seen, it all seemed pointless. The white men, after all, were superior, not in heart but in invention. Many of the People were brave, but none of them could fly.

  The balloon, now very high, rode the strong wind that was blowing from the east—already the two flyers were well on their way toward the setting sun. The great air beast was moving through the sky, it seemed to Fool’s Bull, almost as fast as the great geese moved. Soon the balloon would be out of sight.

  “I don’t know why you think the time of the People is over,” Fool’s Bull said, though without much conviction. “It’s just two men.”

  “Oh, there will be some battles yet,” the Partezon told him. “We will win some and the whites will win some. But we can’t fly, and they can. Who do you think will win in the end? They can rain down fire on our villages—maybe they could even run off the buffalo.”

  Amboise d’Avigdor scarcely dared move. All the young Sioux had run away—only the two old men remained, but one of the old men was the Partezon. It seemed to Amboise that if he could just stay still enough, he might be allowed to live, after all. He stood as if planted; he tried not to shake; he even took care to breathe quietly.

  The Partezon dismounted and picked up his arrow.

  It seemed to Fool’s Bull that he looked older; he looked as some warriors looked when suddenly faced with defeat.

  “Do you want me to kill this boy?” Fool’s Bull asked. “We could take him—it could be someone to torture.”

  The Partezon shook his head. He had no interest in the trembling boy who probably would not last an hour under torture anyway. He had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing the white men fly—what it meant was that the time for idle amusements was over. If the People were to enjoy much more time as free men, certain steps needed to be taken at once, steps that were much more important than torturing a sniveling white boy.

  Though reluctant to ignore such an easy victim, Fool’s Bull felt it was not the right time to argue with the Partezon, who, no doubt, was disgusted by the cowardice of the young warriors. In such a mood he would not brook argument—he would probably just kill anyone who annoyed him at such a difficult moment.

  And yet, Fool’s Bull had a fearful feeling—when he was fearful it was hard for him to hold his tongue.

  “What will we do?” he asked, in his uncertainty.

  The Partezon knew exactly what he wanted to do next—it was something he had had in mind to do ten years earlier but, for various reasons, had delayed.

  “We are going to attack the Mandans and the Rees,” the Partezon told him firmly. These were the tribes that controlled the Missouri River—they were the tribes that had encouraged the whites to come, bring trade goods, take away furs.

  “They are rich and corrupt, those tribes,” he went on. “They want all the things the white men bring—guns, cloth, beads, tobacco, whiskey. It’s because of them that so many white men came up the river. I should have destroyed both tribes long ago.”

  It was clear to the Partezon now how he had erred. Foolishly he had let the white men have the river, supposing they would be satisfied with the peltries they got from these weak tribes, these corn Indians, farmers and traders. He had believed the whites would be satisfied with this safe trade and not bother challenging the stronger tribes of the interior—the tribes whose lands two white men were at this very moment flying over. His calculation had been wrong to begin with: even now the whites
were trapping in the lands of the Utes and the Shoshones; eventually they would even be strong enough to challenge the Blackfeet. The truth the Partezon now had to face was that the whites were not going to be satisfied until they had all the People’s land. They would not be satisfied with the beaver; when those were gone they would want the buffalo. They would want everything—the rivers, the holy mountains, everything. Even now two whites were directing their air beast directly into the heart of his own country. There were only two, at the moment, but there would be more.

  Fool’s Bull was startled by the Partezon’s statement, though he wasn’t disturbed at the prospect of war with the Mandans or the Rees, who had long been trading Indians. They didn’t produce many good warriors— and yet the thought of attacking the Mandans particularly made him nervous, not from fear of their warriors but from fear of the Bad Eye, the most powerful prophet in the West, a terrible man whose prophecies, some said, could cause earthquakes and floods. There were even some who believed the Bad Eye had the power to raise the dead. What if the Bad Eye summoned an army of skeleton warriors to stand against the Sioux? Even the Partezon, who feared nothing, might quail if he saw an army of skeletons rising out of the earth to fight against him.

  “I’m worried about the Bad Eye,” Fool’s Bull admitted.

  “He’s blind and he’s fat—they say he can no longer stand up,” the Partezon said. “Why worry about him’t”

  “Some say he can raise the dead,” Fool’s Bull reminded him.

  The Partezon merely gave Fool’s Bull a scornful look.

  “Even if he can’t raise the dead, he might make a bad prophecy,” Fool’s Bull insisted.

  “If he does, it will be his last prophecy,” the Partezon replied. “He can’t raise the dead but he might join them.”

  Amboise d’Avigdor didn’t dare move until the two old Indians were almost out of sight. His fear had been so great, his heart pounded so violently, that it was several minutes before he allowed himself to believe that he was safe. He saw his bosses’ two gray palfreys, grazing some distance away, and realized that—since he was alive—he had better get busy. Though the encounter with the Partezon had scared him out of his wits, there were his duties to attend to, if he didn’t want to be cursed or even cuffed when his employers landed. Ben Hope-Tipping and Clam de Paty did not like to be kept waiting. There was cognac and cheese in the balloon’s basket, but little else; his bosses would expect dinner when they landed—it occurred to Amboise that the two might drift so far away that he would be unable to find them before dark, a circumstance to be avoided if at all possible. A night without their amenities would make the two of them very angry indeed. And yet, what was the anger of two Europeans compared to the terror he had just faced? Whatever abuse his bosses might heap on him, it would be nothing compared to what the old Partezon might have done.

  7

  Below them lay the plains . . .

  “I SAY, Clam—handy thing, a balloon,” Ben remarked, offering his companion a slice of cheese. Below them lay the plains, an endless expanse of gray grass.

  “It startled those red fellows no end—got us out of a scrape,” he added. “The dreaded Partezon was forced to turn tail. I believe I’ll just write up our little encounter.”

  “I am already writing it up,” Clam assured him, closing his notebook for a moment in order to better enjoy the cheese, which had come all the way from Paris. The tiff with the Partezon had been, in his view, merely a nuisance, the sort of thing that was only to be expected in an uncivilized country.

  “Hardly know where we’ll post our next reports,” Ben worried. “Postal facilities rather scarce out here, I imagine.”

  So far, thanks to traffic along the rivers, the two journalists had been able to forward a steady stream of reports to their respective papers. In Cincinnati they had been feted; in Saint Louis they were able to interview the famous Captain William Clark himself, who gave them much useful instruction, showing them on his big map how to locate the famous Swamp of the Swans and other well-known points of interest. Their last report had been filed from Plattesmouth, which merely meant that they had handed their pages to a trapper who claimed to be headed downriver.

  “I wonder if that trapper actually took our little write-ups all the way to Saint Louis,” Ben said. “We didn’t pay the fellow much. Wouldn’t surprise me if he tossed them overboard. He couldn’t read, you know— as illiterate as a pig.”

  “We have copies,” Clam reminded him. “Our readers will get them someday. You should be keeping the lookout, Ben.”

  “Lookout for what?” Ben inquired. “I can see the Platte River, and lots of grass, but I don’t for the moment see anything that could count as copy.”

  “You must keep the close lookout so we don’t float over the people we need to interview,” Clam reminded him firmly. He felt obliged to speak rather sharply: Hope-Tipping, though a good journalist in his way, could be at times a bit thick, making it necessary not merely to point out the obvious, but to repeat it frequently as well.

  “The prince of Weid is here somewhere—I would like to speak to this prince and also to his hunter, Herr Dreidoppel, who is, I believe, from Alsace. Perhaps they will have seen the grizzly bears. Many people in Paris want to know about the grizzly bears.”

  “Of course—same’s true of London,” Ben remarked. ‘All the same, I hope it’s this hunter who meets them, and not ourselves.”

  He peered down, happy to see that the plain below them seemed to be absent of bears.

  “I’ve heard that the prince of Weid is not a particularly interesting fellow,” Ben went on. “Thorough in his way, I suppose, but hardly notorious. We’d do better to find the Scotsman Drummond Stewart, or some rich fur trader like William Ashley, or, of course, the Berrybenders, my own countrymen. Rather hard to say where they might be.

  “Lady Tasmin Berrybender is said to be a very great beauty,” he went on. ‘And they have a rather prominent cellist with them, a Miss Venetia Kennet.”

  “May be, may be,” Clam agreed. “But we must find these people before we can write them up. So far we are not finding anybody except these noisy red fellows—that is why you must keep the lookout.”

  “Of course I will look, as best I can,” Ben assured his friend. “Shouldn’t have indulged in that cognac, though.”

  “What’s wrong with the cognac? I chose it myself,” Clam said—he found that he had constantly to defend French taste against the rather slighting ways of the English.

  “No insult intended, my man,” Ben said at once. “It’s just that when I drink and look down I become rather queasy. The stomach threatens to flop, at such moments.”

  Clam de Paty made no reply; he wore, as was often the case, a slightly aggrieved look.

  “Things really are so distant in America,” Ben continued. “I fear we still have hundreds of miles to go before we can expect to find these intrepid explorers you propose to write up.”

  “We should have questioned that old savage at more length,” Clam suggested. ‘Asked him about the more popular tortures. People always like to read about tortures, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I agree that people love reading about tortures,” Ben allowed, “but I’m not sure it would have been wise to raise the subject of tortures with him—he might have been all too willing to give a practical demonstration. They did some rather shocking things to your Jesuits, I believe.”

  “Look, les oiseaux!” Clam said, suddenly pointing to a flock of very large birds, flapping toward them from the north.

  “Why, so they are,” Ben said. “What a pity our ornithological books are all in the wagon. What would you say they are, Clam? Herons, perhaps.”

  “Well, they have long, sharp beaks,” Clam began, and then stopped. The birds were closer now, they were very large birds, and they were coming straight toward the balloon.

  “Could they be cranes? They’re said to be quite large, I believe,” Ben said.

  “Shoot them, th
ey are going to hit the balloon,” Clam said, in sudden panic. “Go down, go down!”

  “The gun, I fear, is in the wagon,” Ben reminded him, a second before these very large birds, unwilling to vary their course, plunged into the balloon and even into the basket. Great wings beat all around them. Two of the birds, striking the basket, evidently broke their necks and fell to earth. Some hit the balloon and managed a recovery, while two were actually stuck to the balloon, their beaks having penetrated the silk fabric.

  “Let us descend at once, monsieur,” Clam insisted.

  “Oh, we’re descending all right,” Ben assured him—the two birds stuck to the balloon managed to free themselves and flew on, followed by an audible hiss of escaping air.

  “Damnable creatures, why wouldn’t they turn!” Clam yelled, his face red with fury.

  “Doubt they expected to run into a balloon on their trip,” Ben suggested.

  “No, don’t talk, steer!” Clam demanded. The balloon was deflating rapidly—already its shape had ceased to be spherical. Fortunately they were over the Platte River, broad and shallow at this point.

  “We’re going to land either with a thump or a splash,” Ben declared. “I think on the whole I prefer the splash.”

  Fortunately, as the balloon descended, the unfortunate collision with the cranes, if that was what they had been, was balanced by a very helpful gust or two of wind, which allowed them to descend directly into the brown river. The splash, when it came, was a rather considerable one.

  “There’s something worth writing up, wouldn’t you agree, Clam?” Ben Hope-Tipping asked, as the two of them waded out of the cold, shallow water. “Pioneering balloonists felled by whooping cranes—if that indeed is what they were. We’ll be the envy of every ornithologist in the world, and not a few reporters.”