by William Gear
94
September 2, 1867
In Billy’s eyes, Helena was high, wide, and handsome. The placer claims were pretty well played out, but talk was that a wealth of gold and silver lode deposits lay waiting for the miners’ pick and drill. That several of the newfangled smelters were going to be built, and the moment they were, all of those stubborn lode deposits were going to place Helena at “the top of the heap.”
He and Danny had rented rooms in a two-story firetrap on Boulder Street just off Montana Avenue. Danny had actually managed to show a profit on his gambling, having established a table in the back of Follet’s saloon just off the Last Chance Gulch road.
“Play at it long enough,” Danny had told him, “and I could even make you a poker player.”
“I’ll stick to guns and knives,” Billy had replied with a smile.
If Billy had had any good news it was that he’d cured the nightmares for the last couple of days. They had been getting bad, leaving Billy shivering with night sweats after Maw’s or Sarah’s ghosts had haunted him in the middle of the night.
Then two nights ago, shivering and shaken, Billy had dressed, and in the wee morning hours, found Lizzie’s crib—a rickety plank shebang housing her bed, an oil lamp, and table. Lizzie—homely as a plain board fence—had laid back on the bed, pulled up her skirts, and given Billy a gap-toothed grin as he blew out the light.
In the darkness, he’d been able to close his eyes, imagine Sarah, and pay her back for the suffering and humiliation. As she’d bucked and contorted beneath him, he’d pumped his loins. When he came back to his senses, she lay limp and unfeeling beneath him.
Billy had felt around until he found the lamp, lifted off the chimney and unscrewed the lamp and wick from the bowl. He had poured coal oil over Lizzie’s body and bedding. Then, at the door, he’d struck a match and tossed it. He’d watched blue-based flames start in the bedding as he’d closed the door behind him.
All that remained the next morning had been a pile of charred ash, burned planks, and a half-cooked corpse in the wreckage of what once had been a bed.
Word on the street was that it had been a terrible accident. Lizzie was known to drown herself in drink and opiates. Speculation was that she’d knocked the lamp over in a drunken stupor.
Billy appreciated the people of Helena. They didn’t bother themselves to think beyond the obvious.
He considered that as he and Danny walked through the cool evening, boots leaving tracks in the dusty street where boardwalks hadn’t been built. Billy looked up at the nighthawks where they flipped and flittered against the darkening sky.
“Long way from Elkhorn Tavern, ain’t we?”
Danny cast a sidelong glance at him. “Where the hell did that come from? You been having them nightmares again?”
Billy shrugged. “Not so bad these last couple of weeks.” He barked a laugh, then lowered his voice. “Can you believe? They done offered up a ten-thousand-dollar reward for old Meagher’s killer and ain’t nobody found his body.”
“Why’d you suppose that is?” Danny answered with a sly grin.
“Aw, I reckon sometime a hundred years from now, somebody’s gonna be building something out there in the uplands and dig up bones. They’ll be a story in the Fort Benton paper. Folks’ll find his buttons, the belt buckle, and the like. Reckon they’ll know it’s a white man, but that’s about all there’ll be to it.”
“It ain’t gonna last, you know.”
“What ain’t gonna last?” Billy glanced Danny’s way as they passed a saloon. Inside mediocre musicians were playing “Union Forever,” but the singers—most of them drunk and off key—were belting out the Confederate verses, singing, “‘Down with the eagle and up with the star! Won’t you rally ’round the flag, Won’t you rally ’round the flag, Dixie forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah!’”
That was another of the things he liked about Montana. Most of the men were Democrats—a bunch of them unrepentant Rebels—and though the black damn Republicans ran the government—what there was of it—they were in the minority.
“You being dream-free, the money, the job, what we got. It ain’t gonna last.”
“What are you talking about? We’re the best they is, Danny.”
He shot Billy a measuring glance. “We been lucky. That’s all. What if that old nigger deckhand had forgot something and stepped out just as you was sticking Meagher? What if someone had been looking out a slit in the door when I knocked on the old man’s stateroom that night? Somewhere, just like in cards, there’s gonna be an ace turn up at the wrong moment.”
“Such as?”
Danny lowered his voice. “Might be some bullwhacker sleeping in the alley under a tarp who just happens to wake up and see you step out of some whore’s shebang. Sees you moments before the thing goes up in flames. Maybe pulls her dead body out of the blaze.”
“You saying what I think you are, Danny Goodman?”
“Billy? We made us a pile of money. Hell, more’n I ever figgered to see. We could just up and quit. Go home. You ever thought of that?”
Billy kicked at a rock as they walked, happy with the cool breeze blowing down the canyon from the west. “I can’t go home. Ain’t nothing left there.”
“What about the farm?”
“Too many ghosts. If Sarah ain’t dead, she’s running it now. Or maybe Butler if he ever come home from the war. I ain’t never setting foot in Arkansas again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep one step ahead of the devil for as long as I can. Ain’t no happy ending to this, Daniel.”
“Don’t have to be that way, Billy. You got enough to buy yourself a nice place. A tavern, a sporting house. A store if you wanted to be respectable. Me, I think I could enjoy bossing a gambling house. Run a couple of tables, have games like a spin-the-wheel, maybe one of them fancy roulette tables.”
“House always wins?”
Danny smiled. “That’s where the real money is. You got enough you could go someplace like Oregon, maybe Texas, or just stay here if you wanted. You could buy a place up in the hills, run some cattle, and market-hunt to keep busy.”
“What are you really saying, Danny?”
“I’m saying I want you to think about it. Not for tomorrow, not for next week, but sometime soon.” He raised a finger, eyes sincere. “’Cause sometime soon, Billy, that ace is gonna come up, and they’re gonna hang you.”
“What the hell difference does it make? I ain’t got nothing to live for anyway.”
Danny spread his hands wide. “Then, for God’s sake, find something, you damned fool! There’s got to be something else in this old world that puts that joy in your heart besides sticking a knife in some johnny’s guts, or popping your cork in a whore while you’re choking her.”
“Ain’t found it yet.” He considered the implications as they resumed their way. “You ever going back to Arkansas? You still got family. They might even have moved back to Benton County.”
“Maybe. Someday. After it’s all rebuilt. I’m kinda like you, I guess. When I look back at Arkansas, all I see is ruin and death and war. Never figgered I’d live this long. But since I have, and I got a stake in my sock, I’m thinking I might like to try life without the bloodshed and fret.”
They reached the front door of Follet’s. Billy reached out, stopping his friend. “I don’t know how long I got till the Devil snaps me up. But till then, I need you, Danny. Ain’t a better front man in the country than you. Hell, you’re the only reason I’m still alive.”
Danny grinned at him. “You know why, don’t you? It’s ’cause I figured out how to talk to a man, string him on, and he ain’t got a clue about what’s running in my mind. He thinks I’m his best friend, right up to the moment the Meadowlark slips in the back door. Reckon it’s like a sixth sense, knowing when the time to act is ’thout the other guy catching wise.”
“And don’t think I don’t appreciate it. That’s why I can’t quit. Not yet. But
maybe in another six months or so. Maybe we’ll both just ride away.”
“Hell, just for you being willing to think about it, I’ll buy you a whole bottle of Follett’s best.” Danny slapped him on the shoulder, and led the way into the log-and-tent saloon.
When Billy blinked awake the next morning, he was lying on the sawdust-covered floor. His mouth was dry as Montana dust, his head pounding, and his stomach flipping and tickling with the urge to puke. Sunlight could be seen through the cracks and gaps in the walls. Men talked softly, and glasses clinked from the bar. Billy’s eyes might have been full of gravel as he blinked to clear his sight.
He still clutched a whiskey bottle in which a swallow or two remained. Tilting it to his lips, he sucked it down, reveling in the taste and wetness on his tongue.
Sitting up, he brushed sawdust from his clothes, groaned, and staggered to his feet. Damn, he was still drunk given the swimming and wobbling. Nevertheless he staggered out the back to the two-hole outhouse. Made it halfway through a piss before he caught the odor coming up through the hole. At just a whiff, he bent double and threw up. Then came the dry heaves; with each convulsion of his guts, he thought his head was going to explode.
Exhausted and weary, he staggered back to his room, drank the entire pitcher of wash water, and collapsed on his bed.
Dusk was darkening the sky when his bladder insisted he rise and stumble over to the chamber pot.
It wasn’t until the morning after that that he discovered that Danny was gone. Not only was his room empty and his bedroll and war bag gone, but so was his horse from the livery.
“He left this fer ye,” the hostler told him, handing him a folded piece of paper sealed with a drop of candle wax.
Billy broke the seal. Read the short note. He crumpled the paper in his fist. A curious weakness in his knees caused him to lean against one of the support posts. Like he’d gone hollow inside.
Printed in Danny’s poor block script was written: Cant Do this no Mor yor frend Dany.
95
September 4, 1867
“These mountains are old, coon,” Cracked Bone Thrower told Butler as they sat on the edge of the high mountain camp. The Sheep Eater village literally perched at the top of the world, on a long, knifelike ridge between two rocky peaks. Hardly the place anyone sane would think to put even a temporary camp. The aerie was so high, Butler was surprised that when he reached overhead his fingers didn’t rake the clouds.
Groves of white-bark pine lay to either side, the occasional nutcracker flying past on black-and-white wings.
But, God in heaven, did it ever have a view! The majesty before him—ragged peak after ragged peak fading into the distance—seemed to swell his heart. His men, dressed in their rags, were seated in a line behind him, quiet and awed, as if they’d become acolytes desperate for knowledge.
Cracked Bone Thrower, his half-white face passive, gestured toward the panorama of distant snow-capped crags. “In the beginning, Tam Apo, our father, lifted hisself from Tam Segobia, our mother, to create the arch of the sky. That was the beginning of everything. And it was plumb mixed up as the spirit beings and the first creatures come up from the Underworld, and the springs began to flow. From them came the spirits of the Underworld. Beings like the nynymbi, the little people. The rock ogres we call dzoavits, and the Giant Cannibals. All walked the earth. Some still do.”
“Sounds like demons t’ me,” Billy Thompson muttered.
“Amen to that, friend,” Johnny Baker agreed softly.
Cracked Bone Thrower laced his fingers around his knees and leaned back, the mountain breeze tossing his long brown-black hair as he continued, saying, “The Water Ghost Woman, her name is Pa’waip, rose from the watery depths, beautiful and deadly. Her sheath is forever desperate for a man’s pizzle. With a smile and flashing dark eyes, she draws a man close. Such is her beauty that when she lies down and spreads her legs, a man cannot help himself. It is said that at the moment his seed squirts into her, she rolls him into the water and drowns him. Then she devours his souls and leaves his empty corpse to float away.”
“Reckon they’s Natchez whores rougher’n that,” Pettigrew noted.
Butler shot a warning glare over his shoulder to silence the corporal.
Cracked Bone Thrower inclined his head toward the women working on the slope below. They bent over mountain-sheep hides, hacking and scraping to flesh them. “As cunning as Pa’waip is when it comes to seducing and killing men, so are the Water Babies skilled at trapping women. We call them the pa’unha, and they look like abandoned infants left beside the waters of a creek. When a woman picks one up and places the pa’unha to her breast, it grabs her by the nipple. It never lets go, and bite by bite eats the rest of her.”
Pettigrew snickered rudely. “Puts a whole new twist on ‘breast feeding,’ don’t it?”
“Corporal, you will be silent!” Butler snapped.
Cracked Bone Thrower ignored him, as he often did when Butler talked to his men. “In the middle world, Wolf and Coyote and Rabbit and Pack Rat fought the monsters and created life and death. In the sky world Eagle, Falcon, Hawk, Hummingbird, and Chickadee learned to fly and to work the Powers of the sun, clouds, wind, lightning, and rain.
“The first humans were born after Coyote snuck his pizzle into a spirit woman. That old coon had to knock the teeth out of her cunt with a rock before he could have her. Afterward she gave birth to the first people. Kept these newborn people in a basket, but they eventually got out and ran around fucking and having babies. And some became the Newe. Our people.”
This time Butler turned far enough to glare at the men, ensuring their silence.
Cracked Bone Thrower pointed to the peaks across the valley. “White coons call those mountains Absaroka. Dukurika call them the Wind River’s Mountains because they are the birthplace of the water. Water is everything to my people.”
Butler stared at the distant peaks, feeling the slight chill to the air. Behind them, just down from the ridge and sheltered from the west wind, the Dukurika had set up their hide-and-brush lodges in little hollows cut into the slope. It might be hell to climb to, but from here he could see clear across the Wind River Basin to the distant Green Mountains. Had to be a hundred and fifty miles or so.
Butler had counted sixty-seven men, women, and children, and sixteen of the big dogs. Just below the alpine camp lay a snowfield, its surface covered with bighorn sheep carcasses—and the reason the high-altitude camp was occupied.
The day after they’d brought Butler here, the band had managed to herd a flock of bighorn sheep into a V-shaped drive line on the other side of the ridge. He’d watched from a distance as the people and dogs had slowly eased the animals into the trap’s confines. At the puhagan’s cry, they had rushed the milling sheep, funneling them between the narrowing drive lines and into a log pen. Even as the sheep piled together a large net had been thrown over them. As soon as it settled, the panicked sheep had crouched down as though paralyzed.
Butler had turned away as men and women with clubs waded in, whacking and smacking. It may not have been pretty, but it was over within a minute. Then the real work began as the carcasses were dragged out one by one, gutted and quartered, and carried down to the snow patch to cool.
“Winter food,” Cracked Bone Thrower had told Butler and the men. Though Butler had offered to pitch in and carry his share, Cracked Bone Thrower had told him, “You stay away, Man Who Talks to No One. Puhagan is still uncertain about your Power, or even if it is good or bad. People don’t want you close yet.”
And maybe it was for the best. To Butler’s chagrin, even when he went about collecting firewood for the camp, all but the littlest of children worked harder than he could. He’d stop, gasping for breath, while the little tykes would race up and down the slopes, hopping from rock to rock like Shakespearean sprites.
Though the people treated him with reserve, not wanting to get too close, he’d gotten a good look at them. Unlike the Cherokee, or t
he Cheyenne he’d met on the trail, these were a tall, muscular, sun-darkened people. They worked almost naked while mucking around in the blood and gore of the kill pen and gut piles, and then scrubbed themselves clean with snow before dressing again for the evening. He had never known Indians as clean and well dressed. Or nearly as attractive.
He was constantly disciplining the men, minding them to keep their tongues civil, especially when it came to comments about the half-naked young women with their glistening black hair and supple, bare-breasted bodies.
When the Dukurika thought Butler wasn’t looking, they laughed, joked, sang curiously unintelligible songs, and played, often slinging guts at each other, or pulling other tricks. The children were obviously loved and indulged as they crawled over the adults, got their heads patted, and were constantly attended to.
The men were all muscle and sinew, and possessed of a self-assured virility. The women, too, were lithe and muscular, with an almost irresistible allure, as if their athletic bodies exuded some elemental sensuality. The pregnant women were the most remarkable to Butler, working right alongside everyone else, apparently oblivious to a condition that would have required their enforced isolation back in American society. Here they carried on as if their swollen abdomens and protruding navels were no more out of the ordinary than the clouds in the sky.
Was this what Rousseau had been thinking of all those years ago when he wrote his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality?
That afternoon the Sheep Eaters started down the mountain. Packing camp hadn’t taken more than fifteen minutes. The brush-and-branch lodges were simply abandoned, along with the grinding stones, heavy butchering tools, and even the big net, which was stuffed into the dry shelter of a rock overhang.
“It will be waiting for us next year,” Cracked Bone Thrower told him with a shrug. “We know these hills and camps. Why carry heavy tools when you know there’s another one just like it waiting where you left it last season? And shelters are easy to make. It doesn’t take more than an afternoon.”
Butler had offered his horses, both of which were packed with meat. So, too, were the big pack dogs, each loaded with the weight of a sheep. Every man, woman, and child carried his share.
