Stampede

by Len Levinson

  ~*~

  “Water . . .” Stone’s eyes were half-opened, and he saw blurry light as sun baked the torn canvas roof of the chuck wagon. The road rolled him from side to side, and every movement caused sharp suffering at numerous points of his anatomy. He was in a world of violent raging pain, unable to rise into full consciousness.

  “Water …”

  He was vaguely aware of who he was, that he’d been hurt, and might die. A great weight was dragging him deeper into a black pool, and he struggled to climb out. The endless oblivion frightened him, and somehow he had to stay alive. He focused on the chuck wagon roof, and told himself as long as he could see it, he’d live.

  “Water …” His throat was dry, his tongue was swollen, and his guts felt like cardboard. He thought he might live, if he could get a little water. Just a few drops. Then a dark form appeared above him, and a familiar voice said, “How’s it goin’, Massa John?”

  Stone knew who it was, and a chill went up his back. He was helpless, and his enemy could skin and bone him alive. “Water …” he croaked.

  Ephraim held up his canteen. “This what you want, Massa John? Well, let me tell you, I knows how you feels. I felt the same way many times, workin’ in your daddy’s fields, pickin’ your fuckin’ goddamned shit-cotton!”

  Stone was barely conscious, and his mind functioned only at its most rudimentary level, but he knew he wasn’t getting any water. He gathered together his remaining reserves of strength and said, “You son of a bitch!”

  “I might be the son of yer daddy, for all you know, Massa John—ever think ’bout that? And don’t go tellin’ me it couldn’t be, ’cuzz you knows your daddy come to the slave quarters at night. Lots of his chillun was workin’ in the fields, and I might’ve been one of them, you never can say for sure. Stranger thangs have happened in Beulah Land.”

  Stone was at Ephraim’s mercy, and there was nothing he could say. He struggled to breathe, as a great weight pressed on his chest.

  “You know, Massa John—a slave can’t have a drink whenever he wants, like a white man, becuzz while the slave is drankin’, he ain’t pickin’ none of your daddy’s cotton. About every two-three hours we could drink, so maybe I should make you wait that long, to know what it’s like.”

  Stone wished he could punch Ephraim in the mouth, but couldn’t budge. Ephraim looked at Stone contemptuously, then leaned forward and grabbed the front of Stone’s ragged shirt, bringing his face close to Stone’s.

  “I don’t want you to die, Massa John. It be too good for you. I want to kill you with my own two hands, and you fall at my feet, and kick your fuckin’ white face!” Ephraim held out the canteen. “I gonna keep you alive, because your ass belongs to me!”

  Ephraim raised Stone’s head, and touched the canteen to his lips. Stone felt the water trickle over his tongue, and it was ambrosia. He struggled to swallow it through a mangled torn throat.

  “’At’s enough for now, Massa John. You don’t wanna drank too much the fust time.” Ephraim pulled the canteen from Stone’s mouth and screwed the cap on. “I never thought I’d see the day I’d take care of you, but I’m lookin’ down the road to when you’re well … if you git well. You might git the pizzoned blood and rot real slowlike, and stink like shit. I guess if that happens, Truscott’ll put you out of your misery. We’ll bury you and I’ll come back at night and piss on your grave.”

  Ephraim disappeared, and Stone felt the wagon rocking from side to side again. He closed his eyes and thought of being buried on the prairie, and Ephraim coming back at night to piss on him, but maybe it wouldn’t matter, if a man was already dead.

  Stone thought of Ephraim, and felt his fighting spirit return. He wanted to kill the ex-slave, and that gave him something to live for. Then he lost sense of himself, sinking into the dark night, as the old beat-up chuck wagon rolled across the plains.

  ~*~

  Stone was awakened by Marie’s voice. He opened his eyes to half-mast and saw her face floating above him. A flood of joy passed through his body, obliterating the pain for a few moments, and he struggled to raise his arms.

  “Marie …”

  “He doesn’t know where he is,” Cassandra said. She sat with Stone’s head on her lap, and the cowboys gathered around. His color was better.

  Ephraim handed a bowl of beef broth to Cassandra. “John,” she said, “you’ve got to eat something.”

  Stone struggled to open his mouth. She touched the spoon to his lips, and warm meaty flavor rolled over his tongue. He swallowed laboriously, and saw Marie smile.

  “Very good, John. Now let’s try it again, all right?”

  Slipchuck knelt beside her. “I heerd it said, the best thing fer a man at the end of his rope is . . .” The old stagecoach driver removed his hat and looked at her sincerely as he searched for the appropriate word. “I don’t want to stomp on yer boot, or say somethin’ a man shouldn’t in front of a woman, ’specially if the woman’s his boss lady, but Johnny’s like a son to me, and I’d say what he needs most right now is a mouthful of good titty.”

  Her face registered horror, then astonishment, and finally compassion, as she realized the old wreckage was doing his best to help, and had just pulled one out of the hopelessly twisted memories of a million nights alone. “I’d do anything for my men, Slipchuck, but I don’t think that’s an accepted medical practice.”

  “Mebbe not,” Slipchuck said, “but it works anyways. I remember once on a run to Denver fer the old Pitkin Line, we was attacked by injuns, and I got an arrow right through me chest.” Slipchuck pulled open his shirt, and proudly showed the scar on his bony chest that sprouted a few scraggly gray hairs. “Everybody thought I was a dead duck, and I bled like a stuck pig, but we had a young lady fer a passenger, and she gimme some of her titty, and I’m alive today.”

  “She did this voluntarily, or was she forced?” Cassandra asked, trying to imagine herself in such an outlandish situation.

  “Wa’al, it was like this. She was on her way to the best cathouse in Denver, but she cut her ordinary price in half, bein’ as we was all in the same mess together.”

  ~*~

  The nighthawk traveled miles without seeing anything unusual, and then suddenly up out of the night, in the midst of a vast wilderness, were the dying embers of a fire, a chuck wagon, and dark forms lying on the ground in blankets.

  The nighthawk continued his journey, and John Stone saw him silhouetted, for a brief moment, against the moon. The breeze blew a lone tumbleweed across the campsite, through the fire pit, bouncing and spinning west toward the Pecos. He felt weak as a newborn babe, and couldn’t even raise his head off the pillow Cassandra had made out of her rolled clothing. She slept on her side a few feet away, her lovely profile aglow with moonlight.

  Stone saw Slipchuck, Duvall, Calvin Blakemore, and Don Emilio Maldonado sleeping around him. He remembered the bear’s long white fangs and big paws tipped with blood. When the beast struck him, he’d thought his whole body was coming apart. He’d fought Yankee soldiers and savage Indians at close quarters, but the bear had been a new dimension in hand-to-hand combat, and he’d never forget the stench.

  Cassandra rolled onto her back, and he could see the outline of her breasts against her cowboy shirt. She’d fed him broth, as if he were a baby and she his mother. He looked at the mountains in the distance, and saw faces in their shadow formations. They looked like old men, and they said to him: We will be here long after you are gone, but one day we will not be here either.

  The last thing he saw was Cassandra’s profile in the moonglow.

  ~*~

  The next morning the cowboys propped Stone against the wheel of the chuck wagon, and he ate stew made from beef chunks and beef blood, his hand shaking every time he raised the spoon to his mouth.

  Cassandra and the cowboys ate steaks, and Stone was surprised by the change that’d come over the segundo. He was filthy, his movements suggested a mechanical doll, and his complexion was the strangest
shade of purple. Stone turned to Cassandra and said weakly, “What happened to him?”

  Cassandra told the story from when they’d found the segundo dead, the funeral, and the resurrection of the segundo out of his grave. “Strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Cassandra said. “Evidently it affected his brain.”

  Stone stared at the segundo. He’d been the most brutal cowboy in the bunch, and now was subdued. “When’d you find him dead?”

  “The morning after you fought the bear.”

  Stone remembered Ephraim fooling with Braswell’s boots that night, and looked at Ephraim, sitting cross-legged on the ground, slicing his steak with fork and butcher knife. What had Ephraim done to the segundo’ s boots?

  They cleaned their plates, broke camp, and placed Stone in the chuck wagon, propping him against the slats so he could see the mountains. Stone rolled a cigarette, spilling half the tobacco onto his lap, as a wheel hit a prairie dog hole. Ephraim sat sturdily on the seat, the reins wrapped around his big hands. Stone scratched a match against the floor of the wagon and lit the cigarette.

  Stone was weak, and the cigarette hung loosely at the corner of his mouth as he turned to Ephraim and said in a barely audible voice, “What you put into the segundo’s boots, Ephraim?”

  Ephraim spun his head around. “What you talkin’ ’bout!”

  “I saw you spill something into the segundo’s boots the night before he died. What in hell’ve you done to him?”

  Ephraim regained his composure and grinned. “Nothin’ compared to what I’m a-gonna do to you, Massa John. I’m a-gonna rip your heart out, you sickly white shit, and use it for stew meat.”

  “I won’t be sickly long.”

  “I could cure you like that”—Ephraim snapped his fingers— “but I wants you to suffer. Darkies’re s’posed to be dumb, but I ain’t never heard of no darky walkin’ onto a bear.” Ephraim tied the reins to the brake lever, climbed in back with Stone, pulled his knife, and touched the blade to Stone’s throat. “If you knew how much I hated you, you’d shake in your boots. I could take your head off right now, and that be the end of you.” Ephraim’s lips trembled, and his eyes bulged out of his head. “I’ll take care of you later,” he said.

  Stone was a few shades paler as he inhaled the cigarette. There was something unnerving about a blade held to the throat. He had no strength, was totally vulnerable, even a child could kill him.

  It reminded him of Gettysburg, where he’d stopped a chunk of grapeshot. It went in beneath his ribs on the left side, and blew him out of his saddle. He lay on the ground as fighting raged all around him, but fortunately the Yankees had too many healthy Johnny Rebs to contend with, and Stone had survived.

  But if Indians attacked, he couldn’t fight. He was at everybody’s mercy, and Ephraim could humiliate him at will. If I ever get out of this alive, I’ll rip his head off and feed it to the buzzards.

  ~*~

  That evening at the campfire Stone chewed steak and boiled roots Ephraim had gathered earlier near a water hole. He didn’t have much strength in his jaws, but managed to get it down.

  He took a few steps after supper, then his knees buckled and he was caught by Blakemore and Duvall, who’d been standing on either side of him, waiting for him to fall. They propped him against a wheel of the chuck wagon, and Truscott approached with Cassandra.

  “Think you can ride tomorrow?” Truscott asked Stone.

  “If I had to.”

  “Colton’s a few hours ride from here, and they got a sawbones. I’m sendin’ men fer supplies, and you can go with ’em, but it’s up to you. Hard ridin’ might open yer wounds, and you’ll ride hard if you run into injuns.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “We’ll git yer horse ready in the mornin’.”

  Truscott walked away, and Slipchuck sat beside Stone, placing his hand on Stone’s shoulder. “Now that you’re gittin’ better, Johnny, I got to tell you that was a damn fool thing you did with that bear. His tracks was all over, his stink was like a shit fog, but that din’t make no difference to you. You got to look where you’re goin’, boy. When you’re strong, I’m a-gonna be yer teacher, and after I’m done, you’ll read sign like an injun, but sometimes I think you ain’t got a damn thing between yer ears ’cept dead flies—the damn dumb things you do. Enuff to make a man wonder how you got this far in life without gittin’ a bullet up yer ass, or endin’ up supper in some animal’s gut.”

  Slipchuck’s gaze returned to the fire. It wasn’t the first time he’d sat beside a beat-up pard. The queer thing about men, the old stagecoach driver reflected, is that they keep on a-comin’. And if Cassandra had given John Stone a little of her sweet titty, he’d already be a-dancin’ the Houlihan.

  Chapter Five

  In the morning, Stone felt the beef blood in his veins. His hand didn’t shake as much as he held the spoon for breakfast. He placed tender cuts of beef into his mouth, thinking about what Slipchuck had said last night.

  He’d blundered onto the most dangerous animal on the prairie, because he’d been dreaming of booze, the curse of his life. A man’s fate hung on the thread of his concentration, and everybody knew what liquor did to concentration.

  He heard a shout on the other side of the campfire, and two vaqueros jumped to their feet, hollering at each other. A crowd gathered around them, and then the two stepped back and drew long knives. Don Emilio walked between them and spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. They shouted back, a cacophony of voices, and tried to work around Don Emilio, so they could slash each other. One vaquero was Roberto, short and squat, with long hair to his shoulders and the face of a pig. The other was Manuelo, with a thin drooping mustache like a rat’s tail over his upper lip.

  Stone couldn’t speak Spanish, but knew terrible insults were going down. Both men strained to reach each other, their knives gleaming in the dawn light. A hell of a thing to wake up to, thought Stone. Don Emilio’s voice was soft, reasoning, pleading. Finally, after much haranguing, the two adversaries nodded to each other as if they’d made an agreement.

  Don Emilio turned to Truscott and said, “I am afraid this matter will have to be settled in blood.”

  “Git it over with,” Truscott replied. “We got a herd to move.”

  Don Emilio talked to the combatants, and they sheathed their knives. Turning contemptuously from each other, they walked toward their horses.

  Cassandra looked at Truscott. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “Them two greasers is gonna fight it out.”

  “Fight what out?”

  Truscott shrugged. “Only come onto it at the end, and I heerd one of ’em say something’ ’bout camisa roja.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Red shirt’ in greaser talk.”

  “You mean they’re fighting over a shirt?”

  “’Pears so.”

  “Don’t you think you should try to stop them?”

  “You don’t stop two men when they want to kill each other.”

  “Kill each other? I can’t afford to lose any cowboys, you thick-skulled son of a bitch!” Cassandra ran toward the two vaqueros. “Wait a minute!”

  Don Emilio stepped in front of her, and she tried to move around him, but he blocked her way. “It is a matter of honor,” he said. “You must leave them alone.”

  Cassandra narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m ordering you to stop them, and don’t tell me you can’t do it, because I know you can. You brought them with you from the brush country, and they do whatever you say.”

  “Señora, you do not understand. These men live by a code, and when there is an insult, someone must die. There is no other possibility.”

  “Out of my way!” She tried to walk through Don Emilio, but he held her wrists.

  “Do not interfere,” he said. “This is not woman’s business.”

  “This herd is my business, and I can’t afford to lose men! If they want to die for a shirt, they can do it when we get to Abilen
e!”

  “I am afraid it is too late for that, señora.”

  “Let me go!” She struggled to break away from his grip, but his hands were steel clamps on her wrists. “Truscott, do something!”

  “Can’t do nothin’ till one of them greasers kills each other, and you’re holdin’ up the show. Can’t you ever keep yer mouth shut, woman?”

  Cassandra was so angry she could spit. She pitched and tossed, trying to break Don Emilio’s grip, and he laughed, his white teeth flashing. She tried to butt him with her head, and he whirled like a matador, ending up behind her, his body touching hers, and he still held her wrists tightly.

  “You are a wild thing,” he whispered into her ear, “but I am the man who can tame you.”

  A strange thrill passed up her spine, while the two vaqueros mounted their horses. She yelled: “Stop it!”

  They ignored her, turned their horses around, and rode away from each other. Cassandra tried to break loose, but Don Emilio held her snugly against him. She could feel the strength of his body, and knew she could never break his iron grip.

  The vaqueros rode until they were two hundred yards apart, then turned and faced each other. They took their lassos in hand, made loops, and twirled them over their heads in ever-widening arcs. Then they spurred their horses, and the horses galloped toward each other, gathering speed while the vaqueros swung ropes over their heads. When they drew close, they threw their lassos at each other. Both missed, and they rode past each other, gathering up the ropes.

  Cassandra turned toward Don Emilio. “What’re they trying to do?”

  “You will see soon enough, señora.”

  She brought her heel down hard on his foot, and he yelped, letting her go. She ran toward the two vaqueros and held out her hands for them to stop, but they kept galloping onward, swinging lassos gracefully over their heads.

  “That’s enough!” she yelled. “I’ll buy you all the goddamned shirts you want!”