Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  Asa stepped away from the Flathead men. “You was up early—gone afore I rolled out this morning.”

  “Didn’t sleep in.”

  “I see’d such is the way about you,” McAfferty said as he came to a halt before Bass. “That what makes you so damned good a trapper?”

  He grinned. “Maybeso, Asa. Get them flat-tails afore the day gets old.” Then, with a gesture, he asked, “What brings you to the Flatheads so early of the day?”

  Shrugging, McAfferty replied, “I happed to spend me some of last winter with this very bunch. Stayed on in their country for spring trapping.”

  “Spring gotta come late that far north.”

  Shuddering slightly, Asa declared, “No truer words was ever spoke. I was hunting on my own hook and about to mosey south for ronnyvoo when I run onto some of Davy Jackson’s boys. Said they was soon to start back to join up with their booshway so to make their way to ronnyvoo their own selves. Sounded like a fine notion to me.”

  Bass felt the sensation grow strong deep within him: something snagging his curiosity, pulling at it like the hooked claw of a golden eagle tearing at the body of its prey, peeling it back and making him suddenly aware of what lay beneath.

  “You said you was … was on your own hook?”

  McAfferty looked at him strangely a moment before answering, “Didn’t none of Jack’s boys tell you how I come to part company with ’em?”

  “S’pose they did, yes.”

  Asa stared off toward that far border of trees where the white men had their camp. “I ain’t one to stay with a gaggle of fellers, not for long I ain’t.”

  “They said you up and had to take your own way.”

  “Now, don’t go getting me wrong, Mr. Bass. Ain’t but a few men near as good as Jack Hatcher to lead a bunch of niggers what want to go their own road and do things their own way. And the rest … why, I likes some better’n others, but that’s a bunch what’ll be there when it comes time for the nut-cuttin’.”

  Scratch nodded. “They’ve been at my back ever’ time I’ve needed some backing up. Never let me down, not once.”

  “And they won’t. That just ain’t their way,” Asa argued. Then he seemed to regard the man before him carefully until he said, “You ain’t really the sort what cottons to a lot of folks around either, are you, Mr. Bass?”

  “S’pose I’m not,” he admitted.

  “How long you say you been with Jack’s outfit?”

  “Almost two years now since I got my hair stole and Jack’s bunch run onto me up by the Wind River hills.”

  With a cluck McAfferty replied, “That’s a long time for a man such as yourself to stay hooked up with others.”

  “Maybeso. Then again, maybe not.”

  “For some men, like the rest of them what been together for years and years now, it ain’t nothing to run in a pack with others winter after winter.”

  Scratch looked deep into McAfferty’s icy blue eyes. “But for you?”

  “For me?” he asked, then sighed. “I ain’t like most. Had my fill of faithless folks long time back. East it was. For winters now I ain’t been the sort to stay on with this bunch or that very long at all. Sets better by me to have my friends, spend time, trap, and winter up with ’em … then move on afore we find we ain’t friends no more. Maybeso that makes me a hard one to live with, eh, Mr. Bass?”

  “None of ’em claimed you was a hard keeper, McAfferty.”

  “I ’spect they wouldn’t—that’s why I moved on after a couple seasons with them boys. Took off afore we wasn’t friends no more. Do you figger it’s wrong to ride off before being round others starts to stick in my craw? Is it wrong that I pack up plunder and plews and get high behind down my own trail?”

  “Don’t sound unreasonable to me, if’n a man’s made of such,” Bass declared.

  “You the sort what likes to mosey on his own, Mr. Bass?”

  “I …” And Scratch paused a moment, reflecting, “I s’pose I am. Truly.”

  “Never was much a joiner, was you?”

  “Can’t say I was.”

  Then McAfferty’s eyes narrowed as he gazed at Titus. “The trapping’s better when there ain’t so many to split the take.”

  With a shrug Bass said, “We allays worked our own places on the stream. Never was a problem for me.”

  “Just give yourself a shake or two and think on it. How good you’d do ’thout all them others working that same stream.”

  “It ain’t all about the beaver—”

  But McAfferty grabbed hold of Bass’s elbow and turned him so they directly faced the west slope of the Tetons. With an arm, he waved slowly across their granite ruggedness, saying, “Now, look up there and tell me how good you’d do in beaver country, if you was the only one working a stream. Maybeso it’s only you and ’Nother trapper.”

  He turned to appraise Asa. “I had me a good spring what got me a fine hurraw on the Popo Agie. Had me ’nough plews last fall to get me a fine winter down to Taos too.”

  “Fine place, ain’t that Taos?” McAfferty said in a low voice, letting go of Bass’s elbow and licking his lips almost as if remembering the taste of aguardiente and Mexican tobacco.

  “Catched all the beaver I needed to outfit for me ’Nother year, ’long with a little likker—”

  “But think of what you’d have if all them beaver been your own.”

  Wagging his head, Scratch said, “A man don’t need all the beaver to hisself.”

  McAfferty stepped right around in front of Titus again, toe to toe. “But there’s some men what need one hell of a lot of country for their own. Now, you just try to tell me I got you wrong, Mr. Bass. You tell me you ain’t one to wanna drink up all that big space out there for your own self.”

  “I … I ain’t never thought about—”

  “You tell me you ain’t the sort what wouldn’t jump at the chance to see new country, country where you chose to go—not where you foller along behind the rest.”

  He shook his head, as if it didn’t make sense. “Much as I fought me Blackfoot, I ain’t so damned certain a man on his lonesome ain’t a crazy nigger just waiting to die.”

  Asa rocked back on his heels a moment. “So you’re the sort figgers you wanna die in a tick bed back east somewheres, white folk’ sheets pulled up around as you go off to sleep, eh?”

  “Damn well don’t.”

  McAfferty’s booming voice beginning to rise dramatically, Asa stated, “Then set off on your own hook—and say to hell with Blackfoot country when there’s more land to see than you and I both’ll ever lay eyes on in our natural lives.”

  If it wasn’t downright contagious, just the way this ex-circuit-riding preacher man stirred up the juices within him.

  “You understand that, don’t you, Mr. Bass?” McAfferty said. “You don’t have to trap Blackfoot country, less’n you cotton to the idee of losing more of your scalp.”

  “Lost all I wanna lose—”

  “There’s country far south of here what ain’t had a trap set in it. Ever.”

  “There’s country like that down to Taos?”

  McAfferty wagged his white mane vigorously. “I ain’t talking about Taos, or that Santa Fe country. I’ve heard tell of other rivers what take a man off torst the Californios.”

  “There’s beaver there?”

  “There’s beaver on the Heely!”

  Scratch swallowed hard, considering, weighing, hefting it the way he would hoist his trap sack first thing of an evening as he went out to make his sets.

  Eventually Titus asked, “Ain’t a white man been there afore?”

  “Not one I hear tell of ever set a mokerson down out in that country.”

  Bass finally tore his eyes from McAfferty’s convincing gaze to stare again at the deep-purple-hued peaks. “Sounds to me like you’re talking about a couple fellers throwing in together, Asa. Them two fellers what Jack and the rest of his bunch says’re the best trappers in these here mountains.”


  Asa stepped up so close that Scratch could feel the warmth in the man’s breath as he spoke, their noses all but touching as they locked eyes. “I’m saying you throw in with me, Mr. Bass—and you ain’t ever gonna wish you hadn’t. There’s streams out there so thick with beaver, a man don’t have to … but you said it ain’t the beaver you’re here for, is it, Mr. Bass?”

  “The plews keep me in coffee and powder,” Titus declared. “The fur buys the geegaws for a squaw or two—”

  “But the beaver ain’t what brought you,” McAfferty interrupted, a single finger tapping against Bass’s breastbone. “And that beaver ain’t what keeps you here either.”

  Right there, staring into the depths of that man’s blue eyes, he was certain McAfferty was peering right on down into his very soul. Finding the truth there that he himself had rarely considered, if ever admitted to. Perhaps this was the same powerful pull that he had seen drag grown-up folks out of those crowds gathered on the banks of rivers back east in Kentucky where he had grown up, the lure that pulled men and women right out of the crowd to join a preacher man standing waist-deep down in the stream, the same seductive call that caused those people to turn themselves over to that preacher and have themselves laid back in the water within the cradle of his arms….

  “I ain’t so sure—”

  “You’re certain enough that you don’t belong in no outfit no more, Mr. Bass,” Asa interrupted, his voice softer now.

  “Don’t mean I can just ride off from Jack and the others—”

  “And I ain’t expecting you to,” McAfferty whispered. “You wanna hook up with me?”

  “Hadn’t thought ’bout it afore.”

  “But you’re thinking ’bout it now.”

  He finally nodded.

  “Telling ’em’s a simple thing,” Asa explained. “Jack Hatcher’s the sort what understands. Time came for me to go, I set it by him and he didn’t stand in my way.”

  Bass nodded again, then said, “So did Matthew Kinkead, and Johnny Rowland too.”

  “Them too, yes,” McAfferty echoed. “Comes a time when a man must make his own way and don’t follow the shadow of others.”

  “I’m a better trapper’n any of ’em,” Scratch declared, surprising himself.

  “You ought’n be showed for just how good you are!”

  Scratch turned and gazed at the distant trees across the creek, off in the direction where he had pitched camp with Jack Hatcher’s bunch. Where Asa McAfferty camped too. Then he peered back at the white-head. At last he spoke.

  “Where’s that country you said ain’t never had a trap laid down in it that you know of?”

  “On the Heely.”

  “I s’pose you’re right that if nary a white man ever set a foot down in that country,” Titus confirmed, “then it bears out that there ain’t never been no traps set along those rivers.”

  McAfferty’s eyes widened, a smile crinkling that stark white beard. “No one there, Mr. Bass. No one … but Injuns.”

  It felt as if the very air around him were sucking him dry.

  Not anything like the steamy country back where Bass had grown up along the Ohio and the Mississippi: where a man slowly simmered in his own juices.

  Out here far beyond the western slopes of the southern Rockies they had confronted an unimaginable heat, the air around them so hot, Scratch figured it could boil fat off a flea. The sunlight grew so intense that several times a day Scratch swore his skin was shriveling, becoming just as crisp as those cracklins his mam used to fry up for him back in Kentucky … so stark and white was the radiance all around him that it felt as if his eyes were melting while he struggled to focus them on the dancing horizon, everything shimmering in the distance through the midst of that incomprehensible heat.

  And the farther south they pushed, the hotter it became.

  They desperately needed to find water for their animals, for themselves, before there was nothing left of him but a cracklin like those pan-fried pork rinds his grandpap had so loved to eat. Just to find a pool in some stream deep enough for him to sit—even to lie right down in—submerged right up to his chin so every square inch of his body could soak up that blessed moisture.

  Titus didn’t know what was worse: sizzling beneath his thick buckskin war shirt as they plodded on hour after hour, or how the sun’s powerful rays penetrated right on through that old linsey-woolsey shirt he wore under the buckskin, soaking up the sweat. This morning both he and McAfferty had decided to strip to the waist about the same time, lashing their garments behind their saddles as they kept on moving. It didn’t take long for Scratch to realize just how big a mistake that was.

  By midafternoon, with the sun still hanging high and seemingly reluctant to begin its slide into the west, Bass realized he was growing light-headed. Strangely … dreamlike. Everything he peered at around him had an unreal quality to it, shimmering, all the edges ill defined and watery, every object pale, all but translucent as they were swallowed up in the endless waves of heat rising from sand and rock and brush alike.

  Up ahead of him a few yards McAfferty slowly keeled to the side in his saddle, tipping so far this time that he spilled off in a heap, sprawled on the hot-baked hardpan.

  Of a sudden it became an insurmountable struggle for Bass to get the reins pulled back and halt his horse. He sat there a moment, huffing with exhaustion, wavering in the saddle himself, staring at McAfferty’s body lying just as twisted as one of his sister’s sock dolls on the sand-flecked, sunburned grass while he sorted out just what he would do to get himself off his horse.

  His head swimming, Scratch leaned until he felt all his weight shifted to his right leg, pain crying out in that foot stuffed in its wide cottonwood stirrup. As he brought his free leg up, he lost control, spinning out of the saddle, losing his balance, careening onto the ground, landing on his back to stare at the pale, fiery sky and that unblinking yellow eye, with that one foot still tangled in its stirrup.

  It took only a moment for him to realize that the ground beneath him was on fire, so hot he wasn’t sure he might not just burst into flame himself. In a dizzying surge of effort, Bass kicked his foot free, rolling to the side so he could rock back onto his knees. That accomplished, he brought one leg under him, reached up for the stirrup, and pulled himself onto his feet—gasping for air. Lunging forward on legs that weren’t quite heeding his commands, Scratch stumbled across the last few yards to McAfferty’s side, where he gratefully sank back to the burning ground.

  After a painful struggle he managed to get Asa rolled onto his back. Sand and flecks of the gold, withered grass clung to the man’s oak-brown cheek and forehead, plastered there above the stark white whiskers. As Bass bent over McAfferty’s face, hovering above it to peer closely at his partner, he put Asa in a shadow. Almost immediately the eyes fluttered open into no more than crusted slits, grains of sand embedded in his damp eyelids.

  Asa’s cracked lips quivered for a moment, his parched, bloated tongue trying to form the words until he spat them out. “C-cut me.”

  “Cut you?”

  “Knife,” the bleeding lips instructed. “Cut my wr-wrist.”

  “Use my knife?”

  Slowly McAfferty nodded as if his head weighed more than their trap sacks. “Here.” But it was some time before Asa urged some movement out of one of his red, burned arms and pointed at the other wrist. “You cut. I’ll suck.”

  It still didn’t make sense. “Cut you so you’ll bleed?”

  “Suck … bl-blood.”

  “I can’t cut you—”

  With what had to be the last vestige of the man’s strength, McAfferty grabbed a handful of Bass’s long brown hair and tugged on it hard enough to pull Titus right down toward his face.

  “Only ch-chance,” Asa croaked with a voice so dry it sounded like a dry rasp being dragged across coarse cast iron. “Blood … save me … till we … get to the river.”

  Then with an exhausted gasp Asa released his hair, and Scratch slowly
raised his head, squinting below that wide brim of his hat to peer off at first one horizon, then another, and finally in a third, endless direction. Nothing of any promise in sight.

  “Yeah, Asa. You just hol’ on. The river ain’t far now.”

  But he knew McAfferty wouldn’t make it … unless he cut the man. With a trembling hand Scratch reached around to the small of his back to drag the skinning knife from its rawhide sheath. His vision was blurring, his eyes stinging more and more from the sweat and the blowing sand: red, raw, bloodshot. Scratch didn’t know for sure if it was the salty drops seeping into them, or perhaps that his eyes were simply starting to melt, oozing out of their sockets and right on down his cheeks into the thick beard.

  After he had blinked, and blinked some more, to clear them for a moment, Bass peered down to find McAfferty’s head slumped to the side, the man’s eyes half-closed, only the whites showing in that glare of brutal light.

  Painfully, Scratch dragged his knees across the hardpan earth, scooting right up to Asa’s shoulder, where he jabbed his left arm under his partner’s neck. With his fingers locked under McAfferty’s armpit, he heaved against the dead weight. That effort made his stomach threaten to hurl itself against his tonsils. He bent over the body, gasping as he squinted his eyes shut, then groaned, gritting his teeth the moment he heaved against the weight once more.

  Succeeding in getting McAfferty’s shoulders propped against his thigh, Bass shuddered from that last terrible exertion. With a raspy sigh that felt as if he had swallowed cactus needles, Scratch dragged Asa’s far arm across his lap. Clamping the wrist in his left hand to steady it, he laid the sharp edge of the blade against the inside of the wrist … then suddenly found himself staring at that line where the dark saddle-leather-brown hide of the hand ended and the sunburned crimson began as it climbed up the man’s white skin.

  He gritted his teeth, resolute.

  Across that tan line he compressed the blade into the reddened flesh, struggling to focus his eyes again, to whip his mind back to the task before him … until he suddenly realized he was watching the man’s blood oozing from the laceration.

  “Asa,” he gasped in hope. “Here, Asa.”