by William Gear
Puhagan sat cross-legged, head back, his painted face turned to the sky, arms resting palms up on his knees. Cracked Bone Thrower was thumping a small drum, his eyes closed. He sat across the fire from the medicine man.
I don’t take care of the men? They take care of me?
He stumbled slightly, Water Ghost Woman’s eternally dark eyes watching from the depths of his soul. He’d never had a dream that vivid, erotic, or terrifying.
His stomach felt like an empty hole. His bladder ached with the need to empty itself.
“Hey?” he croaked through a rusty and swollen throat. “What the hell happened? Where are my clothes?”
Cracked Bone Thrower opened his eyes, the drumming stopped. “You were dead.”
“Pa’waip killed me.” He made a face. “But that was only a dream. My dream. You couldn’t know.”
“Your body was dead, Man Who Talks to No One. You stopped breathing. Your heart no longer beat. We have been making medicine to appease your mugwa and suap so that they would not come back and plague our people.”
“Pa’waip?” Puhagan asked. His eyes opened but remained fixed on the sky. He said something that Cracked Bone Thrower translated as, “She is not known for mercy. The puhagan asks why she let you live?”
“She said I was a good man.”
When that was translated, Puhagan asked something else.
Cracked Bone Thrower seemed to hesitate, then asked, “Did she tell you anything? Give you a gift?”
“Something about a silver eagle. If I save it, I condemn it.” Butler couldn’t stop shivering. His flesh felt like ice. “Puhagan, she’s not merciful. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if she’d just devoured my souls.”
“Why is that?” Cracked Bone Thrower asked.
“Because she left me with the truth, and now I have to live with it.”
99
November 26, 1867
That day in Fort Benton, Billy sat at a back table in the restaurant at Baker’s Chouteau Hotel. He had his foot up on a second chair. His cup of coffee rested by his right hand, and a cigar perched on a tin ashtray before him. Even at midmorning the establishment was busy. Billy could hear the hollow thump of boots through the plank floor overhead. The place was loud with the clink of dishes and utensils and the animated talk and laughter shared by the patrons.
In the wake of Danny’s betrayal, he’d come back to Fort Benton, certain he’d take a berth on one of the boats. That he’d ride on a steamboat. Go to St. Louis. See what a real city was like. Try once and for all to rid himself of Maw’s and Sarah’s ghosts. Maybe drive the demons from his head.
But the last of the boats had gone, racing winter and low water.
He’d tried drink, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. Strangling a whore? Sometimes it worked, other times she just fixed herself in his dreams with the other ghouls, and stared hollowly out from his memory with dead eyes.
He picked up his cigar and drew, enjoying the euphoria that tobacco sent pulsing through his veins. One thing for sure, if you could afford it, Fort Benton had everything. Fine cigars, good drink, real beds with mattresses, tinned oysters and pickled fish, fine clothing, and anything a fella needed to freshen his trail outfit.
Word was that no less than thirty-eight steamboats had unloaded their cargo at the levee that summer. One boat had carried more than a million dollars in gold back to St. Louis. If there were a center to Montana, Billy was smack in the middle of it. But it was a curious sort of center: a smattering of frame buildings in the midst of a haphazard mixture of tents and dugouts that looked sort of half circus and part prairie-dog town. So copious had been the cargo unloaded at the levee—and the transport so insufficient—that bullwhackers were still arriving, loading their wagons, and pulling out next day for the mining camps. Even at this late date and after the first hard blizzard.
He washed down the taste of the cigar with another swig of coffee. Real coffee. At I. G. Baker’s store he’d even traded in his old worn Sharps for a brand new Model 1863 sporting rifle. It shot flatter than his old gun, and he was still learning how to adjust the sights at distance.
He nodded as the boy came around with the coffeepot and watched as his cup was filled. At the nearest table, one of the bullwhackers laughed at a joke. The four of them looked the worse for the morning, having bucked the tiger in the all-night saloons. They would load their wagons today, and be off at first light tomorrow for Helena.
Billy smiled warily and puffed his cigar to keep it burning. He was a man of leisure. That’s what having money was all about.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked under his breath as he stared into the coffee. Damn it all, he’d never been this lonely. He’d expected Danny to come back. To have at least sent word. But no post was forwarded from Helena. Nor was there a message in Helena’s Herald paper—though Billy had seen one from George Nichols dated a couple of weeks back.
He needed only telegraph if he wanted a job.
But did he?
Would it be the same without Danny?
He lifted his cigar and took another puff. Chairs scraped as a group of rough-looking men—woodcutters from their clothes—took the last empty table. They draped their thick buffalo coats on the chair backs, frozen snow melting from the hair and dripping on the floor.
It would be risky without Danny going in advance to do the scouting. More people would see him. No one would be watching his back.
“Damn you, Danny,” Billy whispered under his breath. He was the Meadowlark. Powerful men feared him, knew from his reputation that were he hired to kill them, their lives were forfeit. And here he was, wounded, a half-man because Danny had left him. And worse, Danny had fled knowing that after his desertion, if Billy ever caught up with him, that his onetime friend wouldn’t suffer the slightest remorse over shooting him dead.
It’s because of what you’ve become, the voice inside his head told him.
“And what is that?” he asked himself softly, his eyes on the rising streamers of smoke coming off the cigar ash.
You’re a monster!
For proof he need not look any further than the fragments of nightmares brewing behind his eyes. Maw—clotted dirt clinging to her grave dress—her bent finger pointing at him, red-hot anger in the empty sockets of her eyes. Or Sarah’s ghost reaching down for his hard cock, her facial features mixing with those of dead whores he’d buried, sunk, or burned.
Odd, wasn’t it? How the men he’d killed never came back to haunt him, but the women he’d wronged remained so fresh? Sometimes Sarah’s blue eyes transformed into Margarita’s doe-dark ones the moment she grabbed him. Her mouth would shape itself into Lizzie’s gap-toothed grin.
What kind of a monster are you?
The voice was probing, deep, and reverberating, as though it shook his very soul.
“The kind who belongs to the devil himself,” Billy whispered under his breath as his empty gaze fixed on the tabletop. For what seemed an eternity he stared at the grease-stained wood marked by old coffee rings.
He felt something through his boot, shocking him back to the world. Billy looked up, startled, to see the man who’d kicked the chair.
He was tall, dressed in a thick wool winter coat, a dusting of snow melting into droplets on his shoulders. The slouch hat sat crooked on his blond head, and cold blue eyes were taking Billy’s measure. The mouth behind the dark-blond beard had an amused pinch to it, as if derisive.
“Sorry to wake you, friend,” the blond man told him. “But you’ve got the only free chair in the house. Either I talk you into moving your foot and sharing your table, or I have to sit on the floor.”
“Sorry,” Billy said, removing his foot. “Lost in my head.”
The big blond seated himself, a plate of bacon and beans in his hand. “Lost ain’t the word for it. You was plumb vanished in the wilderness on beyond Jordan. First I thought you were drunk, then I wondered if maybe you was just deaf.”
Billy too
k the man’s measure in turn as the newcomer shrugged out of his thick wool coat; a Remington revolver had been tucked in a cross draw at his belt. He was a little over thirty, with a hard look. Deeply seated anger lay behind those slightly crazy blue eyes. Something about him bespoke a military bearing. Not that that was so unusual given the war or the disenchanted men from both sides that had flocked into Montana. What was unusual was that he hadn’t shed it as so many had. As if that strict bearing were somehow important to who he was.
Billy said, “Don’t be prodding, mister. It’s my table, and it’s a mite early in the day to be raising a ruckus.”
The blond studied him as he forked a load of beans into his mouth and chewed. Swallowing he said, “Hard case, are you?”
“Did you come here to eat breakfast or get shot?”
A slight quiver of the blond man’s lips, a cooling of his expression, seemed to stretch time. Then he smiled, a faint chuckle barely audible in his voice. “Fair enough. I just needed a place to eat. Guess I shouldn’t hold it against a man who was just looking for a place to think, should I?”
“Reckon not. And I should have been paying better attention. What brings you to Fort Benton? I haven’t seen you around.”
“Got in a couple of days ago.” He looked around. “Heard there was great doings up to Fort Benton. That this was the richest town in Montana Territory, and there was money to be made. Thought it would be like Denver or the Colorado strikes. Had it in my head to take over a fancy house, one suited to a better-heeled clientele. And what do I find? Blow-down tents, underground hovels, bullwhackers, two-bit monte dealers, and cold bitter enough to freeze a Massachusetts man’s arse off. And that, friend, is God-Almighty cold.”
“There’s money right enough,” Billy told him. “But it’s in freight and supply. You might make a fancy house pay, but only in summer when the boats are in. This time of year? I doubt you could count six hundred people in the whole of Chouteau County.”
The blond shrugged and shoveled another mouthful. “Where’s the best place? Helena?”
“Maybe. They’re just opening the lodes. Might take a couple of years to see the likes of the Colorado strikes or the Comstock. And even then it’d be a mighty different class of people.”
“Seems to me all these Rebels can have this damn frozen waste. And good riddance.” His eyes narrowed. “But then, from your accent, you’re a damn Rebel yourself.”
“Nope. Not really. Had kin that fought for the South. I didn’t figure it was my war. I was ready to live and let live.” He smiled thinly. “But sometimes some son of a bitch just comes along and sticks a finger in your eye.”
“They conscript you?”
Billy shook his head. “Bushwhackers. Killed Maw, took my sister. Mean bunch. Took me to nigh on the end of the war to run down and kill every last one of the whoresons. By then wasn’t a hell of a lot left of Arkansas but ruins.”
“I was in Arkansas there at the end. You’re right. Not much left.” He stared thoughtfully at nothing, as if reminiscing. “It was always the chase. They leave traces when they run. Letters home, some mention to friends. I sure miss it.”
Billy narrowed his eyes. “That what you’re doing now? Hunting someone?”
The blond laughed bitterly. “Don’t I wish. They say my means are too harsh.” He gestured with the fork to make his point. “You want to get anywhere hunting men? You’ve got to go for their throats. Especially the dangerous ones. Like pulling up weeds, you gotta yank out the whole rotten plant. Rip out its jugular, break its neck, and jerk up the roots. Then you burn the very ground it grew on and teach a lesson by destroying everyone close to the traitorous son of a bitch. Friends, wives, whores.”
His eyes seemed to flicker, lips quivering. “And somehow…” He cocked his head. “It’s just bad luck. Who would have thought a homeless cunt…?”
He seemed to have lost his train of thought.
“You going to stay around Fort Benton?”
The blond man shrugged. “Might try Helena. Maybe follow one of the freight companies down to Virginia City.” He seemed to forget the question, then looked up, gaze brittle and cold. “You see, I learned. A smart man lets them relax. Think the danger is past. Then, when they least expect it, that’s when you catch them in their doorway. That’s when you really make them pay.”
Billy studied him warily. “Thought you were looking to run a fancy house?”
“Man can have two skills, can’t he?” The blond smiled coldly. “Running special whores and killing, can’t call either one exclusive, can you?”
“Nope. Reckon not.” Billy picked up his cigar. Maybe it was time to drift back over the divide to Helena. Send a telegraph to Nichols. Maybe a winter job was what he needed.
“Call me Billy Nichols. Who are you?”
“Win Parmelee.”
Billy frowned. Where in hell had he heard that name before? Colorado? Something about a parlor house? Lord knows, a man heard a lot of names out here.
“Tell me,” Parmelee asked casually. “You ever hear of a man who calls himself the Meadowlark?”
Billy stiffened, his heart skipping. “Nope. Where’d you hear that?”
“Drunk gambler I met. Barely made it onto the last boat headed downriver. Said he was lucky to get away with his life. Funny how things work out, isn’t it? All them odd coincidences in life.”
Danny? Had to be.
“How’s that?”
Parmelee shrugged. “You ever hear anything about this Meadowlark, I’d pay to get a line on him. That’s all.”
“Why?”
“Might have some work for him.”
Billy took a draw on his cigar, only to find the ash gone cold.
100
February 18, 1868
Had you asked Butler, he would have told you it was a rotten night for a celebratory feast, especially given the blizzard that raged outside. Nevertheless, a celebration it was. Every now and then a severe gust of wind rocked the hide lodge, and drafts of cold—bearing a dusting of snowflakes—would trickle down from the smoke hole. As they fell into the warm interior, the flakes vanished.
And a snug lodge it was, crafted from scraped and tanned elk hides and wrapped around a conical framework of lodge poles. Tied to the inside of the poles, a thin calfhide liner rose two thirds of the way up the walls and acted to create an insulating layer of air.
The inside was just large enough for him to sit in the guest’s place beside the door. To his left sat a pretty young woman dressed in a beautifully beaded and quill-worked dress that sported chevron patterns of elk teeth. Her woman’s name was Wobindotadegi, or Mountain Flicker in English. Tonight they celebrated her passage from girl to woman.
Cracked Bone Thrower sat in his traditional spot in the rear as lord and master of the lodge.
Beside Cracked Bone Thrower, and across from Mountain Flicker, the man’s wife, Ainka Wei, or Red Rain, perched uncomfortably given her swollen and very pregnant belly. She was also Mountain Flicker’s older sister, and the resemblance was plain to see.
Finally, opposite Butler, Cracked Bone Thrower and Red Rain’s two little boys, five-year-old Cricket and two-year-old Water Snake, wiggled and fidgeted more than they actually sat.
In the center of the lodge—and in front of the anchor rope—the hearth crackled and burned cheerily. Resting on hearthstones sat a soapstone cooking pot, its contents bubbling and filling the air with scents of wild onions, sego lily, and biscuit root taken from the family’s dried stores. All were swimming in melted buffalo back fat.
The centerpiece of the meal was baked elk heart seasoned with dried biscuit root leaves. Strips of the succulent meat steamed on the wooden plate in Butler’s lap. He glanced at Mountain Flicker and grinned as he chewed off another bite.
He had grown fond of the girl over the months since his return from the journey to the Underworld. She had been fascinated by him and his invisible men, and she’d taken to teaching him Shoshoni as he’d instructed he
r in English. Together they’d tackled chores, played tricks on each other, and teased. But now, for reasons Butler could barely understand, things had changed.
She matched his grin, eyes sparkling. They were celebrating the conclusion of her first woman’s flux. In the white culture Butler had come from, even hinting at a woman’s monthly discharge was forbidden. Here, among the Dukurika, the event was cause for feasting. During her ten-day isolation from the community, Mountain Flicker had been instructed on a woman’s duties by Red Rain and Flowering Sage. At the end of Mountain Flicker’s passage into womanhood Red Rain had painted her face, and the part down the center of her scalp, in crimson, which marked her as an adult.
Butler thought Mountain Flicker was an enchanting girl. Her partly white ancestry—going back to her grandfather, a trapper named Travis Hartman—had given her a perfectly proportioned face, wide cheeks, and straight nose. Tonight she wore her long black hair loose, and it hung down over her shoulders to pile on the buffalo robes behind her.
Butler made the hand sign for “Are you doing well?”
“Ha’a,” she called back. “It’s good to get out of the women’s lodge.”
He wasn’t sure what to make of their relationship. He’d never really been close to a girl before. And Lord knew, they’d had a lot of fun together. More like they’d been best friends. And she’d never flinched on those days when Pettigrew, Baker, Peterson and the rest of his men were being pesky.
Red Rain and Cracked Bone Thrower had watched, but said nothing. For Butler, however, his attraction brought unease. Mountain Flicker was sixteen, but her supple young body was fully female with muscular legs, rounded hips and flat belly, broad shoulders and full breasts. She moved with a fluid grace, and he loved to watch her dance, her body undulating as her feet flew. When she did, her hair would catch the sun and shine, swishing behind her like a liquid wave that washed down almost to her knees.
Sometimes he couldn’t help but think of Water Ghost Woman, and the desire that Mountain Flicker aroused, unbidden, within him.
But then the Dukurika were anything but chaste. To Butler’s initial dismay, carnal relations between a man and wife were considered a natural behavior as unremarkable as eating and sleeping. The first time he had heard Red Rain and Cracked Bone Thrower connubially joined under the robes had shocked him. Red Rain made sounds of delight deep in her throat that ended in little yips of pleasure when she reached her paroxysm. Or a whole string of them if Cracked Bone Thrower was on his game. One thing was sure: pelvic congestion wasn’t on Red Rain’s list of concerns.
