Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  “What’s your name, mister?” Caleb asked as he leaped to the ground and presented the stranger his hand.

  “Jacob Slaughter.”

  Campbell stepped over, waving his arm toward the trees. “C’mon, then—any man’s always welcome in Robert Campbell’s camp!”

  “Yonder looks good for us,” Jack explained, pointing upstream. “We’ll picket the horses, then mosey down for supper.”

  That evening the company trappers hosted Hatcher’s outfit. Over the flames broiled juicy quarters of elk and antelope, as well as two bighorn sheep that hunters had brought down to camp earlier in the day.

  “Ain’t never had me no sheep afore,” Scratch told the man who served up a slab of the red meat thicker than two of his fingers. He stuffed the end of the sliver in his mouth and sliced off a healthy bite, finding the texture and sweet taste of the meat entirely pleasant.

  The company man settled on his haunches right at Bass’s knee. “And I ain’t never knowed no one gone to Mexico afore. Heard tell the food’s every bit as hot as the sun can boil a man’s brains there. Any of that true?”

  “A feller can get hisself a pepper belly, that’s for sartin,” Isaac piped up on the far side of Titus.

  “Forget the goddamned food!” A second of Campbell’s men squatted near them. “The women—tell me ’bout them.”

  “Nawww,” Scratch said, shaking his head. “You don’t want us to go and tell you ’bout them Mexican women.”

  “Hell if I don’t!” he roared in mock wounding.

  “We been dry since we come in to ronnyvoo,” explained that first of the company trappers who pointed across the stream. “Them Snakes over there ain’t bringing out their wimmens for none of us.”

  “Course they ain’t,” grumbled the second man. “Leastways not till Sublette gets here with shinies and foofaraw what can make any Injun woman plop on her back and open her legs for an American!”

  “So go right ahead and tell us ’bout them greaser gals!” a third man exclaimed as he strode up, grease dripping from his lower lip into his chin whiskers.

  “Why, now … they ain’t like no white gals I ever poked,” Bass said, trying his best to emulate that knowledgeable tone of the backwoods schoolteachers he had suffered under for so many years. “Not like no Injun women neither. My, my—”

  “That’s a crock of shit!” Wood blurted out. “And this nigger’s full of it up to the bung!”

  Bass whirled on him, growling around a chunk of bighorn sheep, “Careful who you say is full of shit, Caleb!”

  “This here pilgrim ain’t never bedded down no Mex gals but one,” Wood continued. “Nary but that one.”

  “It ain’t cause I didn’t wanna—”

  “Must’a took a shine to her since you humped just her all winter long!” Caleb interrupted.

  Scratch shrugged, explaining, “She was a good whore. Good ’nough to last me the winter.”

  “You had a Mex whore?” asked one of the company men.

  “Mama Louisa’s fine Taos whores,” Caleb declared. “I been through ’em all—forwards and backwards, boys. I can tell you anything you wanna know ’bout them greaser womens.”

  Another company man lunged in anxiously. “They any good?”

  “Good? You ask me if them bang-tails is good?” Wood replied. “Just how good a willing woman gotta be when a man’s been ’thout for nigh onto half a year?”

  They were attracting more of Campbell’s trappers as Caleb warmed to his task before this attentive audience.

  “They really good, eh?”

  “Good ain’t the word for it,” Caleb declared matter-of-factly. “Better’n any red gal, twice’t as good as any white whore I poked.”

  One man licked his lips unconsciously; another dragged the back of his forearm across his mouth, eyes wide, glistening in primal stimulation.

  “G’won, Caleb,” Hatcher said as he walked up, a curved and meaty rib in hand. “Tell ’em how good them greaser women are for American men.”

  Wood nodded, leaned forward, and said in a low, dramatic voice, “You boys know them Mex folks cook most of their food with hot peppers in it?”

  He waited until most of his audience bobbed their heads in eager agreement.

  “Well, now—I s’pose it’s them peppers.”

  “What ’bout them peppers?” demanded a Campbell man.

  Caleb looked at him straight-faced. “I figger the peppers they eat just makes them Mex gals naturally eager to jump on a likely American. Makes ’em just ’bout as hot to jump on your wiping stick as them peppers they eat in their food!”

  Some of the men whooped in glee; others stomped a moccasin on the ground or slapped a thigh, while a few whistled with lurid approval. This was just what they wanted to hear. More fantasy to feed their womanless dreams as brigades of men roamed this far and lonely mountain west. Fanciful dreams to warm a man on cold winter nights, trapped in the fastness of the wilderness, far from Indian camp or white settlement or Mexican village. Sometimes dreams might just be enough for a man to make it through to spring, on till rendezvous.

  If he made it, then a man had cause to celebrate—what with waiting and yearning all year long to find himself a gal who would fulfill even the slightest of his inflated fantasies … for after a long autumn, a terrible winter, and an endless spring of fevered, womanless dreaming, it damn well didn’t take much at all for most any woman to fill those wildest of cravings.

  As Bass leaned back against a pack of company beaver, Campbell’s men leaned in attentively, totally captivated by Caleb Wood’s exploits with one Mexican maiden after another: tales of bared shoulders, filmy camisoles allowed to hang so loose, they barely covered the rounded tops of a woman’s breasts, how those Taos females shamelessly flaunted their ankles and calves beneath a swirl of short skirts, their cheeks reddened with a bright-red berry juice, clenching corn-husk cigarillos between their full and provocative lips.

  How brazen were those brown women, he explained, women who called out to the Americans whenever they passed through the town’s narrow byways. Women actually beckoned a man to join them for a drink, a meal, and often more … for some modest payment. Women eager, perhaps, to find and catch themselves a likely American husband rather than some poor, earth-grubbing pelado.

  “Ain’t none of ’em got any money?” asked one of the company men.

  “Most don’t have much at all,” Hatcher explained as he came up and sat. “Only a few got anything to call their own. Their kind looks down their noses at the rest of their people, not just Americans.”

  A Campbell man turned to Caleb. “You ever poke one of them rich gals?”

  “Nary a one what was real rich,” Wood admitted with a wag of his head. “They wear too damn many clothes—just like our own gals back in the States. Almost like they don’t wanna show no skin on their bodies. So them poor gals is the only ones ever showed me a good time … they’re the kind of woman what gonna show you ever’thing on their bodies!”

  As Bass dragged out his tiny pipe, then retrieved a small chunk of tobacco carrot from his belt pouch, he listened to Caleb and Jack go on to tell the company men about the wonders of Mexican women. Between a finger and thumb he crumpled a bit of the dried leaf over the bowl, tamped it in with a fingertip, then crumpled in some more until he had the pipe filled. After retrieving a twig from the fire, he lit the tobacco, inhaled, then sighed, ruminating again on Kinkead and Rowland.

  John must surely have made it back to Taos by now, he decided. Likely Rowland went straight for Matthew’s place—stay there for a time till he sorted out what he figured to do. Till he figured out how he could get himself over the miseries for his Maria.

  As much as he had made peace with himself for leaving those two women in the past, Scratch wondered how a man ever came to feel so much for a woman that he found himself grieving and lost without her. Then he remembered sensing more than a twinge of that sort of strong, undeniable feeling for Marissa Guthrie. Admitting t
hat it was possible to feel that way about a woman … because it was just that sort of feeling that compelled him to leave Marissa before that feeling grew into an unmovable thing, before his need for her outweighed his hunger to see what lay beyond the next valley.

  More than likely it was possible for a man to care about a woman and stay to one place with her as much as a man could be lured to see what lay over the next hill, what beckoned from the far valley, what adventure awaited him far away from the bothersome nattering of a woman who rarely gave her man room to breathe, room to be.

  Poor Rowland, having give up so much for that woman … only to have what little he had left of a sudden took from him by the Comanche in those mountains above Taos.

  How sad it made Titus to remember the melancholy of that dreary, rainy morning when John parted company from old friends.

  Rowland had taken the small folder of waxed paper from the crude pocket sewn inside his blanket capote, thinking on it a moment before handing the folder to Rufus Graham.

  “You keep this now,” he told Graham. “You boys get stopped here or there by some Mex soldados, just show ’em your paper here, Juan.”

  “Juan?” Rufus echoed.

  “That’s the name on that paper what says you can trap in Mex waters,” Rowland instructed. “I don’t need it … leastwise not for some time to come.”

  “So that’s your license?” Elbridge asked, tapping a finger against the corner of the waxed envelope Rufus held.

  “To the greasers my name is Juan Roles.” He repeated what they all knew. “Now you carry the license for the rest of these here men, Rufus.”

  “I’ll hang on to it till you need it again,” Graham replied. “You just ask for it back.”

  With a shrug John continued, “They give it to me ’cause I got married to Maria. Padre Martinez baptized me in their church and married me the same day to her. That’s why they give me a license last winter after we come back … come back from fighting them Comanche and why they ain’t gonna ever give the rest of you a license.”

  “No, Johnny,” Hatcher said, stepping up to tap his finger against the envelope, the huge dollop of an emblazoned wax seal growing brittle and cracking. “They give ye that license ’cause you was a brave man.”

  Rowland shook his head. “I become a Mexican citizen, so they give it to me—”

  “They didn’t give it to ye when you was baptized, did they?” Jack demanded.

  “N-no.”

  “And they didn’t give it to ye when you got married neither, did they?”

  “No,” Rowland admitted.

  “You was a brave man, going with the rest of us to get them women and children back from the Comanch’,” Hatcher explained. “They give ye that license for being a brave man with the rest of us.”

  “You think they knowed the rest of us was going to use Johnny’s license?” Elbridge Gray had asked.

  “Damn right they did,” Jack said. “And I don’t figger it made ’em no never-mind. It was the governor’s way of saying to us—saying to Johnny—he was grateful for what we done to bring his family back to him.”

  Throughout the winter there had been other expressions of gratitude for the men who had risked their own lives to rescue those who meant nothing to them, to rescue women and children who weren’t even American. The tax assessor had turned his head and looked the other way, or had conveniently been busy or out of Taos when William Workman rode into town to trade. For gringo trappers who expected to trade off their furs in barter for supplies from Mexican merchants, the local officials normally levied a tax of 60 percent on every beaver plew brought into Mexican territory. After all, to the government’s way of thinking, there was simply no way an American could prove that his packs of fur weren’t Mexican beaver.

  But throughout that long winter in Taos, they hadn’t suffered any hefty governmental tax. And by disposing of the beaver a few pelts at a time, Workman was able to see that Hatcher’s men were resupplied by the time they prepared to set off north for another trapping season. In fact, the $3.50-per-pound price the whiskey maker was able to wrangle in pesos for their plews in Taos actually turned out to be a half dollar higher in American money than they figured they would have made packing those furs to rendezvous where they would trade them off to Billy Sublette. That meant Hatcher’s men earned at least five dollars per hide in Taos.

  Perhaps for no better reason than because John Rowland’s Mexican wife had been slaughtered with a Comanche lance.

  Scratch stared off through the trees, gazing across the stream at that cluster of buffalo-hide lodges, watching the fires kindled out in front of each one, studying the shadowy figures passing this way and that in the Shoshone village.

  As Campbell’s men carried on with Hatcher and Wood, Titus suddenly interrupted them to ask, “Any you fellas know what band that be over yonder?”

  Some of the company men turned to look at him in surprise, wagging their heads.

  Jack glanced across the creek, then turned back to ask, “Ye don’t figger it might be Goat Horn’s bunch, do ye?”

  “Nawww. That camp ain’t near big enough,” Bass replied. “But maybeso that bunch knows where Goat Horn’s people are … knows if they’re coming in for ronnyvoo too.”

  Hatcher asked, “Ye fixing to see about it?”

  “Morning be soon enough, I s’pose.”

  This here was Snake country, no doubt of that.

  But that wasn’t Goat Horn’s band.

  Two of the headmen in the village across the creek did know of the chief and his oldest son, Slays in the Night. But in sign and little of their spoken tongue, the two explained they did not know where Goat Horn’s band was that spring, nor if he would bring his people to join in the white man’s rendezvous.

  Last night had been a restless one for Scratch. First he had grown too warm, kicking off his blanket and robe. Later he became chilled. Then warm again as he tossed and fought through dreams and remembrances of Pretty Water.

  A great, gray disappointment settled upon him when he discovered there would be no familiar faces, no joyful reunion with Slays in the Night, nor with the old, blind shaman, Porcupine Brush, nor a chance to gaze upon, perhaps to embrace, that woman who had cared for him as his shoulder had knitted, as he had nursed his rage in losing his topknot to the Arapaho. Not a young woman, but he had found Pretty Water all the more desirable because of her experience in the robes. She knew what it took to satisfy herself, and more so, she practiced what it took to satisfy a man.

  He had crossed the Popo Agie on foot that summer morning as soon as it was light enough for a few of the Shoshone women to emerge from their lodges and go about kindling fires, preparing breakfasts, seeing to infants bundled tightly in their cradleboards.

  Only two of Campbell’s men stirred when a dejected Bass recrossed the stream and slogged onto the east bank. Their coffee was just beginning to boil as Scratch walked up.

  One of the men pulled the kettle to the edge of the flames to slow its roiling. “Coffee?”

  “Never passed up a cup,” he admitted with a sigh, settling to the ground by the fire. “Either of you fellers know a man named Potts?”

  “Daniel?” replied the first.

  “That’s him.”

  Asked the second, “How you know Potts?”

  “Come to meet him my first ronnyvoo out here, back to twenty-six.”

  The coffee maker tossed Bass a tin cup. “Potts give up on pulling the tiger’s tail. He’s gone back east.”

  “East.” Bass said it as if that land were a far and foreign place now after these few short years.

  “Daniel figgered he ought’n made his fortune out here already,” the second man explained. Then he peered into the smoky fire. “Ain’t none of us gonna make ourselves rich men.”

  The coffee maker wagged his head. “’Cept maybe the booshways like Smith or Jackson—like Sublette his own self.”

  “’Diah Smith’s gone under,” the second man claimed. “
Ain’t no man see’d him since he took his men to Californy two y’ar ago now.”

  “Davy Jackson ain’t the kind what’ll make hisself a rich man neither,” the first man declared. “He’ll allays be a working man like the rest of us.”

  “But that Sublette—now, he’s gonna make hisself a tidy nest egg afore long,” the second trapper said as he began to carve thick slices of red meat from the rear haunch of an elk.

  “Plain to see that some men come out here to this high land for the money,” Scratch commented as he brought his coffee tin to his lips. “Dame Fate does end up smiling on some of them what come for the money.”

  “Like Billy Sublette,” the coffee maker replied.

  But the meat carver commented, “Then there’s most what your Dame Fate might as well spit on—like poor Daniel Potts.”

  “I met a couple other fellas that same ronnyvoo,” Bass explained, suddenly remembering faces. “I ain’t seen either of ’em here. One was named Bridger.”

  “Jim Bridger?” the first trapper asked. “Bridger did go back east with Sublette last year—see his ol’ home and family some … but he ain’t give up on the mountains.”

  “He’s got him some family he wanted to see back to Missoura,” the other man explained.

  And the coffee maker said, “Likely Jim’ll be back out with Sublette’s pack train when it shows up in the next few days.”

  For a while Titus watched the flames in the fire pit as more men began to stir in their blankets, some rising to move out to the bushes, where they relieved themselves. A few came over to join the three at the fire, while most simply returned to their bedrolls and drifted back to sleep as the chilly air brightened with the sun’s first appearance in the east.

  “Knowed me ’Nother fella—his mama was a slave and his daddy was a Virginia tobacco grower,” Bass began to explain. “They come out to Missouri when he was a tad. That feller had him his mama’s dark skin and curly hair—”

  “And he wore it long and fancy,” interrupted one of the new arrivals to the fire as he came to a halt. “Fact be, all his clothes was damned fancy, wasn’t they?”