This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  Hughes sat thoughtfully, fingers laced over his chest, a frown on his face. He’d obviously been an attorney long enough to know that whatever the hand, the cards would be shown soon enough.

  Big Ed was the first to look up. “If these figures are true, you’re not exactly dissuading us from horning our way in on the action, Sarah.”

  “Then you agree that what we’ve put together at Angel’s Lair is a valuable business?”

  “Which is why we’re going ahead with our own,” Ed told her. “If you want us to stop, not even begging will help. And if we don’t do it, someone else will.”

  She cradled her coffee, sitting back, giving them a demure smile. “Why saturate the market? Angel’s Lair has an established clientele, a reputation that has spread far beyond Denver. We’re doing four shows a week now. If my projections are correct—despite the outrageous prices I’m charging—by the end of the year we can fill every seat, every night of the week. We’d have waiting lines if we could get the railroad here.”

  Heatley slapped a hand to the table. “We agree.”

  Now Sarah leaned forward. “So why should we fight over johnnies to fill the seats? Come on, Ed, you worked out the formula yourself when it comes to the gambling hells. You run honest games, and your tables are full because you offer the chuckleheads a square deal. Your theaters are packed because you provide superb productions and top actors. Why ruin a good thing like Angel’s Lair with cheap imitations?”

  Heatley shrugged. “We’ll figure out how to do it ourselves, Sarah.”

  “Sure. But why not have it all ready-made?” She shot Ed a smile. “Like I said, I’m not here to stop you. We’ve established that I own Angel’s Lair, lock, stock, barrel, and band. You can see that it’s making me a tidy profit. That could be your profit.”

  She paused. “Gentlemen, I brought my brother today in case I need a family member to cosign any of the paperwork. There are things I’d like to do in Denver.” She glanced at Bela Hughes. “Investments I’d like to make in the Board of Trade. So, Ed, I’m offering you Angel’s Lair.”

  She slipped another piece of paper across the table to Big Ed. “That’s my price and the conditions of the sale.”

  On cue, Pat O’Reilly leaned forward, saying, “Lass, I thought ye were supposed to offer Nichols first—”

  “He didn’t meet my price.”

  “But he never offers full price at first. He likes to whittle ye down,” O’Reilly countered.

  Big Ed had glanced up, his glacial eyes narrowing.

  Sarah gave a slight shrug, not wanting to overplay the rivalry between Big Ed and Nichols. That hook was now set.

  Heatley was still studying the figures in the ledger, then glancing at her conditions. “Agatha, Theresa, and Mick stay with the business?”

  “Agatha is the brains behind the shows. Don’t meddle. Theresa has a knack for keeping the girls happy. Mick’s been keeping track of inventory, and you’d be a fool to lose Mam. Her cooking is twenty percent of our income.”

  Big Ed asked, “And what are you going to do? Start another house? You’re the Goddess, after all. You’re part of the allure.”

  She glanced at Pat. “How are we doing on the Cheyenne lots?”

  “Ye’ve doubled yer money, lass. And that’s after me percentage. As for the other project, between us, we’re currently holding forty-six percent of the investment. All we need is another five percent and we have control.”

  Sarah nodded, saying, “Ed, I’ve created and run the best house in the Rockies. I’d rather retire offstage, conduct affairs where I’m not the center of attention. There’s my offer. Take or leave it.”

  Because George Nichols is out there, and he’ll be coming for me one of these days.

  Sarah sat back; the chair was uncomfortable as hell, but she’d endured worse.

  And she’d wait.

  If it took all afternoon.

  111

  May 15, 1868

  Butler sat in the sun, his back to an aspen tree. With his knife he whittled on a chokecherry stem. He had stripped the bark, already steeple-notched one end, and was working on the other. When it was finished, he’d stretch sinew netting across the inside of the square he was making; it would be a light, portable drying rack. Propped on supports, it could be placed high enough over a pit of glowing coals that roots, fruits, meats, and leaves could be desiccated for storage. They’d also receive a slight coating of smoke. This, Mountain Flicker assured him, would keep them from molding, even in damp weather.

  A smart and cunning people, these Mountain Shoshoni.

  “Makes a heap more sense than Rebel commissary ever did,” Johnny Baker noted where he sat on Butler’s saddle.

  “Thinking of all them roots and berries we been eating, I sure do miss salt pork,” Phil Vail added where he crouched in the crushed grass.

  “I don’t know about you all,” Butler told them, “but I’ve never felt better. I know you’re missing your wives and families, and if—”

  “We ain’t the ones living wild and free,” Pettigrew announced as he slung his rifle over his shoulder and stared out over the vista.

  “Then what are you doing?” Butler asked. “You’re marching everywhere I do. Seeing the same country. Would you rather be back in the army? Camped in the rain and mud, making sloosh out of moldy cornmeal and rancid bacon? And not enough of that to keep your belly from being ganted?”

  “Butler!” his father’s voice snapped.

  He laid his whittling aside and crossed over to where his father lay on the travois. His broken thigh had mended to the point that he could hobble around camp on his crutch as long as someone helped balance him. People didn’t think about how awkward a one-armed man on a crutch was, especially on rough ground. And Paw’s leg, despite being mostly knit, pained him to walk on.

  Butler crossed by the smoldering fire and glanced out at the slope below. The women, children, and some of the dogs were scattered across the landscape. Each place a bobbing white sego lily or onion grew, a woman would stop, plant her digging stick, and with a pop, lever it out of the ground. The child following behind her with a sack would pluck up the bulb and stem, clean the dirt away, and drop it into his or her sack.

  This was broken country where Owl Creek ran out of the mountains; it consisted of tilted layers of sandstone, with rocky outcrops on either side of the valley. The sage-grayed, juniper-spotted slopes slowly gave way to conifer forest as the mountains rose behind the broken hills. To the south, the horizon was dominated by the peak known as Coyote’s Penis.

  Looking back down the valley, Butler could see the distant Big Horn Mountains, looking blue in the misty haze. Fresh snow capped their heights. Here in the lower basin it had rained for a solid week, and now the moisture-laden air almost reminded Butler of Arkansas. “Almost” being the key word.

  Most of the Dukurika men and dogs had left before dawn, following Owl Creek farther up into its mountains, their intent being to hunt the elk calving grounds in higher meadows.

  Butler would have gone had he not been needed to care for his father.

  “What do you need, Paw?” Butler dropped to a crouch beside him. The man’s hawkish eyes were filled with that old irritation Butler had known so well as a child. Years of cringing under their glare now faded as Butler realized it was an improvement over the glassy and wavering emptiness that had possessed Paw’s stare for the past week. The fever had finally broken, and the watery pink pus that drained around the stump of his right arm had slowed.

  Since Butler had cut his arm off, Paw had mostly raved in delirium. Then he’d been so weak he could barely move. For days it had been all the man could do just to draw breath.

  Puhagan had looked on as Butler and Mountain Flicker had tended Paw, and shaken his head. They’d made teas from red willow and aspen bark, adding rose hips and sage leaves. Mountain Flicker had made diapers woven of juniper bark and stuffed with powdered, sun-dried buffalo dung that proved to be a remarkable absorbent. />
  “Just like with a teaippe,” she told him. The word meaning “baby.”

  Now Butler smiled down at his father. “I’ve been telling the men how ironic life is, how the way we care for—”

  “I wish you’d stop that!” Paw snapped.

  “Stop what?”

  “Talking to nothing like some lunatic. It sends shivers down my spine. It’s not bad enough that I’m in this fix? I have to watch you acting like the village idiot? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Doc, um, Philip, calls it the fatigue.”

  Paw made a face, glancing away. “Your high-and-sanctimonious brother. Gone off to Boston. Well, it was good riddance. Hope he used my money to set himself up.”

  “I told you about Philip, what happened to him. And about Maw, and the squatters. About the graves behind the house. Do you remember?”

  Paw kept his head turned away, nodding. “I was a little woozy. Think you said you thought the two graves were Maw and Sarah, but no idea about Billy?”

  “He was in the hills last time I was able to visit. That was back in…” He frowned, trying to remember.

  “Back in sixty-three, Cap’n,” Parsons told him from the side.

  “Thank you, Private. Yes, back in sixty-three. Winter. Before Prairie Grove.”

  “There you go!” Paw griped. “Looking off and talking to the air. Man Who Talks to No One. You’re a lunatic! My crazy son of a bitch of a son! I won’t have it! From here on out you’re—”

  Butler changed the subject. “Your fever’s broken. The delirium has passed. You can finally understand the question. Why didn’t you contact us after you ran from Shiloh?”

  Paw’s lips bent into that old smile that always presaged a lie.

  “Don’t even think it,” Butler ordered. “Shiloh. Remember? You were with a Mississippi regiment. I know you marched into the fight. Talked to some of the boys when we got back to Corinth. They said sometime around mid-afternoon, you disappeared.”

  Paw’s expression fell. The crafty look was back, but when Butler narrowed an eye and pointed with an accusatory finger, it faded.

  “Tell the truth, Paw. You owe me that.”

  “Disappeared?” Paw stared off toward the distant Big Horns. “Hell no. Ran. Hid in the brush in a creek bottom, and come nightfall I did a crawdad outta there.”

  He swallowed hard, voice dropping. “You had to have been there. Like nothing I’d ever seen. Not even in Mexico. It was the boys being shot down all around me. Falling, bleeding, scared and dying. The smoke and stink and sound of it. God, the sounds. The minié balls whizzing, singing by my head. I couldn’t take it. That voice in me screamed, ‘Run!’ and by thunder, I did.”

  “Because you were scared?”

  “Scared like I ain’t never been.” Paw looked at him, arrogance twitching his lips. “If you ever got close to that fight, you’d know.”

  Butler lifted his hands. “I don’t understand. You’re not a coward. You shot men in duels! You had half the men in Benton County scared of you.”

  “What are you? A Papist priest?”

  “Just tell me!”

  Paw started to rile, then snorted in self-derision. “What the hell. All right. Here’s the way of it: first one I shot was Pat Phillips. He was so drunk he couldn’t find his pecker, let alone the sights on a pistol.” Paw shook his head. “Second one, Brandy Hayes, I bullied into it, knowing he couldn’t hit a barn from three paces. Eli Johnson? He was shaking so hard, he wet himself just before I blew his brains out. After that, I never had to fight another duel.”

  Butler sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Thousands of men ran that day. You weren’t the only one. But what about Maw and Sarah and Billy? What about me? Why didn’t you send word you were alive? If you’d gone home—”

  “Maybe all this wouldn’t have happened? Maybe you wouldn’t be a goddamned raving lunatic? Maybe Maw and Sarah’d be alive? Or maybe they’d have shot me for desertion, and it all would have worked out the same. Except that you’d have had to live with the reputation that your father was a coward and a deserter.”

  “Why here?” Butler asked, gesturing around.

  “Won’t make no sense to you.”

  “Try me. I read Kierkegaard at the academy.”

  Paw actually smiled, then said, “Here in the mountains was the only place that I wasn’t a lie. For a while, at least.”

  “You saved Tom Hindman that night he was going to be beaten, maybe killed.”

  “Ha!” Paw almost spat. “I’d lost every cent I had at the poker table. Hindman was just another gamble. I knew the ruffians who beset him. Dangerous chuckleheads as long as they had the advantage. When I whacked ’em from behind, it put the scare in ’em and they run. See, Hindman thought he owed me his life. Good temperance man that he was, he still bought me drinks all night long.”

  Paw raised a finger on his mangled left hand. “That’s the thing, Butler. You can always game a ‘man of honor.’ Just like those canny politicians gamed all those thousands they sent into battle. I recognized that on the first day at Shiloh. I shouted ‘Death before dishonor!’ and my boys all cried huzzah and marched headlong into massed Yankee fire.”

  He shook his head. “Not me. This child ain’t no man’s patsy for a cause.”

  “Why even enlist, then?”

  Paw shot him a look like he was an idiot. “I didn’t think the fools would keep fighting, killing, and tearing up the country. Anyone with sense would have said, ‘We ain’t dying like flies in a tannery. Stop this nonsense.’ And it would have been over.”

  Paw grinned. “Hell, boy, I didn’t figure it would last six months. When it was over I’d be known to have been a Union man, but I’d go back to Arkansas having served as a Southern officer. Down in the legislature, I could have played both sides. Maybe even been governor.”

  Butler glanced at the men; they were watching with somber, sometimes tortured eyes. “It was always about you, wasn’t it? Why’d you even marry Maw in the first place?”

  He sniffed, as if derisive. “She was a beauty. Tall, hair like corn silk, with a face that would have shamed immortal Helen. Hell, I was just back in America for a season before heading back to the mountains. But here was a woman the likes of which I couldn’t turn down. Insisted we be married a’fore she’d let me take her to the blankets.”

  “And Grandfather was a lunger,” Butler added, remembering the story. “He’d just sold his farm. Gold that would be Maw’s. Which meant yours. Gold that built the farm.”

  Paw shrugged, the action making a mockery of his stumped arm. “You think I ever got my fingers on a coin of that? Your maw was no fool. Then, something changed in her when Philip was born. She wanted more than just the adventure. Demanded roots. I’ll say this for your maw, she kept me on a string.”

  He frowned, searching Butler’s eyes, “Why the hell do you think I ran off to Mexico? Robbed that damn church and melted all the gold into bars?”

  “You robbed a church?”

  “Papists, son. Not fully Christian. And wasn’t nobody around, them Spanish bastards having all scampered off like rats ahead of the yanqui army.”

  Butler sighed and glanced sidelong at the men. Did they see his shame? “Did any of us mean anything to you?”

  Paw blinked, worked his lips. “You made me feel like a real gentleman. And I appreciated it more than I could tell you. All I had to do was go home, and there was the house, the fields, and your mother and you. All looking prosperous. I could bring anyone I wanted, and for a day I was a lord in his manor. Complete with a beautiful wife, a library, and two boys who weren’t going to be mere farmers.

  “I tell you, men were impressed. Even the plantation scions, because unlike Phillips County, this was the backwoods, a plantation and empire in the making.”

  “Don’t heah nuthin’ ’bout nuthin’ but yor paw,” Kershaw whispered behind Butler’s ear.

  “Makes me wonder why Maw stuck with him,” Butler said for Kershaw’s ears a
lone.

  “Probably warn’t no other way,” Pettigrew told him. “Hell, for all you know, he’d a shot her for throwing him out.”

  “Would you?” Butler asked his father.

  “Would I what?” Paw asked, confused.

  “Have shot Maw if she’d divorced you?”

  That seemed to set him back. “Divorced? No. She just figured a man was a man, having been raised by the likes of her own father. Her only interest was in you kids … and making the farm a success. She always gambled that I’d be shot by some jealous husband or lover. A divorced woman gets nothing. A widow gets it all.”

  “Why’d you break Philip’s heart, Paw?”

  “That Sally Spears he was in love with? I knew her for what she was. She’d set her sights on Philip as her way out of Elkhorn Tavern. The boy didn’t have a chance once she’d grabbed him by the pizzle. I only knew of one way to keep him from marrying her.”

  “What would it have hurt?”

  “He’d have never become a physician.”

  “You made him hate you.”

  Paw chuckled weakly. “I needed successful sons more than I needed their love.” He sighed, “And here, in the middle of no place, you show up, a broken lunatic worthy of the asylum.”

  “What you needed? That was the only thing?”

  “It’s a hard lesson, boy. But if you’d learned it you’d be teaching in some academy or university instead of ending up exiled from civilized society and mumbling to the air.” He closed his eyes, adding, “Just as well I ended up here. You’re a disgrace.”

  Butler said nothing, his insides crumbling.

  Paw shot him a sidelong glance. “My only regret? Running into that silvertip sow and her cubs on the trail.” He used his ruined left hand to indicate his amputated arm. “I ain’t living like this, Butler. Ain’t gonna be no hobbling, one-armed, three-fingered cripple. Wish you’d a let me die.”

  112

  May 20, 1868

  Maybe it was the weather that brought it on. In the afternoon—on the day Sarah had sold the Angel’s Lair—dark clouds rolled in off the mountains and intiated weeks of off-and-on rain. Denver’s streets, normally foul with trash and fly-filled manure, reminded Doc of the Camp Douglas yard—a liquefied quagmire of filth.