“Later that month, when Maria Elena’s teeth fell out, I swapped my peltry to Ratnose in exchange for her freedom. She turned a trick or two for him during the off months in later years, but generally she was content with the trappers’ life.”
I found it hard to believe Johnny Black’s story. In the first place, I was sure that Ratnose had never owned a whorehouse in Silenius. He was a woodsman, not a townie. In the second place, I was by now reasonably certain that Ratnose was the German poet Horst-Dieter Rotznase, a homosexual militant whose 1927 epic, Smegma, had only recently been translated from the Silesian. . . .
Why had Johnny Black helped Ratnose? Why did Ratnose have my son’s dump truck? Where was the bastard? Johnny wouldn’t say—he was now sound asleep.
I drank for an hour, eating my grievances as Butch Beckwourth had his own prick, and then I awakened Johnny Black to face his reward.
28
“YOU TRIED TO HURT ME,” I said. “Us.”
“But not personally,” he answered. “I had no idea I was stealing from you. If I’d known . . .”
“That doesn’t matter. The point is, the person you tried to hurt was me, and since my son was with me, you tried to hurt us—whether you knew it was me, and thus us, or not. Let’s not get caught up in semantics.”
“Look,” he said, “if I had known it was you—that moustache, all those years, you’re much heavier than you were; sure I watched you while I tracked you, but with that heavy clothing . . . maybe if the weather had been warmer . . . I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“That’s tough, Johnny. You did, and now I’m going to hurt you back.”
I had him sweating now, the sweat gleaming in the firelight on his lined, sagging face. His eyes were sick. I remembered how tough he had looked when he cut down the Chinks back there when he was younger. A man bent on revenge is tougher than a man bent on thievery—or was it just the years? I could feel myself softening, the humanism creeping in again. Why are there so many sides to an action?
“Why don’t you just leave it where it is?” he asked, sensing my indecision. “You already killed my old lady. You have my horses and my weapons, and the money Ratanous gave me for your gear. Just let me crawl out of here—it’ll be tough enough. I’m eighty-six years old, and you’ve already kicked the hell out of me, and it’s almost winter. I probably won’t make it out of these hills alive anyway.”
His eyes watered within the dark wrinkles of his sickness and his age. I might look that way one day. . . .
But wait a minute: this was a rugged old scoundrel, a killer, a mountain man, a sneak thief. He’d done me dirt. He could certainly do me no good. . . .
Still, I might tie him up and see how I felt in the morning. If I shot him, I’d have to watch him die and then drag him out of here, and then look aside when we rode away. . . .
But if I tied him up, he might get loose and kill us while we slept—a knife, a couple of bullets . . .
No, I wasn’t really afraid of that. He wasn’t strong enough for murder anymore. Age had reduced him to petty thievery. If he got loose, he’d simply steal our gear and ease away into the night. And anyway, I could stay awake and watch him; the boy and I could take alternate watches. . . .
God, I was tired of this place—this river and this bleak country. I wanted nothing more than to get out of it. Back home, where it was warm and complicated, where the complexities themselves were excuse enough to justify inaction. Down there, if someone robbed you, you called the cops and the insurance man. The cops did nothing and the insurance man sent you a check. If you saw the thief on the street, you looked the other way: it was taken care of, you had your check, it was police business. Up here . . .
“All right,” I said finally. “I won’t kill you, then. We’ve got our gear back, or some of it, anyhow, and I guess you’ve paid with your suffering.”
With that, a sudden transformation hit him: the suffering left his eyes, replaced by a flicker of triumph.
“You shouldn’t have come this far up the river,” he scolded. “Not with a youngster in tow, and so lightly armed. This is strong country. It’s not for you lowlanders.” He shifted his position, flexing his legs, and I could see that the paralysis caused by the bullet wound had been only temporary. A strident tone entered his voice, something between a sneer and a snivel. “If you’d stayed where you belong, none of this would have happened. My woman would be alive; I would be warm and happy—not as I am now, facing the prospect of a long, dangerous, and painful journey, unarmed and on my knees. . . . Give me a horse, at least, and a knife. You owe it to me . . .”
Rage flushed through me—the sneering, imperious old sneak thief! His mouth was curled with righteousness and self-pity. His eyes flashed like a cash register totting up the amount of my moral indebtedness to him. . . .
“This is all I owe you,” I said. The Luger banged like a slamming door. His chest caved in, and the wheedling outrage in his eyes faded into an instant of surprise, which in turn faded to nothingness.
When he was quiet, I caught him by the hair—he still had a thick, strong mop of it, streaked with gray—and dragged him out beyond the firelight. I rolled him into a gully and kicked some dirt and leaves over him. My knees were shaking. The mandiggers would find him soon enough. I could hear the river grumbling off in the night, down below.
“Well,” I said, my voice as shaky as my knees, “serves you right for stealing.”
Walking back to the fire, I passed the horses. They snuffled wetly in the dark. I cut their hobbles and slapped their rumps, then watched them gallop away downriver. I wanted nothing of the old mans—nothing.
The boy came back a short time later, empty-handed.
“Where’s Johnny?”
“Gone,” I said. “The horses are gone too.”
“What do we do now?”
“First thing in the morning, we’re getting out of here. We’re heading for home.”
He was silent, staring into the fire.
“Couldn’t we go on to Ratnose’s camp?” he asked finally. “See if we couldn’t buy back the rest of our things?”
“Ratnose would string us up by our own guts,” I said. “He’d skin us out for glove leather. We’re going home while the going’s good.”
He fed sticks into the fire, chewed on a chunk of jerky, whistled a random tune.
“I think I spotted a salt lick up the river a ways,” he said. “Why don’t I take the shotgun and belly on up there? Maybe I can knock over a deer. We’ll need meat for the return trip.”
“You ought to get some sleep,” I said. “We’ll be taking off at first light.”
“I’m not tired,” he said. “I’m still all wound up about the old lady; I don’t think I could sleep.”
“Don’t worry about her,” I said. “She was just an old whore—crowbait. She’d have cut your throat as soon as look at you, if the positions were reversed.”
Yes, I thought, it’s time to leave. We’re getting too hard. Some Boy Scout—he helped that old lady across the street, all right . . .
The boy stood at the edge of the firelight with the shotgun in the crook of his arm. He stared at me; his face was solemn. For a moment I thought he intended to shoot me, but it was only the flickering shadows. He turned without a farewell and padded up into the rocks.
The next morning, when I awoke, he was still not back. I waited until the sun had cleared the horizon, fear knotting my gut. Ratnose, I thought, finally. I had been afraid even to pronounce the name silently. I ran up to the top of the ridge and looked out over the country. It rolled away in all directions—empty, cold, vast, and impartial.
“Ratnose!” I yelled. “Ratnose! Ratnose! Ratnose!”
Part II
29
I’d like to tell you how when I went out wandering in the woods that night with the shotgun, looking maybe to drop a deer at the salt lick, I was instead surprised and captured by Ratnose and his gang—not without a fight, though—and then, with my hand
s lashed to the wooden stirrup of Ratnose’s horse, a stinky little mare who kept farting all the while, they yanked me up the first long hill with her belly gurgling like a sewer and the smell of sour grass in my nose mixed with the taste of my own blood, like when you’ve been creamed playing football; stunned, the cut of leather on my wrists, rocks buckling my ankles, and Ratnose’s sjambok slashing my face whenever my weeping rose too loud over the clatter of hoofs and the creak of saddles and the horse’s endless cannonade of farts, his harsh curses and raucous laughter at my plight, poor little boy, and how we stopped finally at first light and the horsemen in their greasy jerkins slipped from their high, wood-and-fur saddles like so many two-legged oysters, lighting a small fire of birch bark first and then hickory twigs to keep the smoke down in case of pursuit, the teakettle steaming over the white flames as if to thicken the night fog in its last few minutes of life, Ratnose leaning there against the lathered leg of his rumble-gutted mare, his plug hat back on his forehead, picking his nose and then flicking the boogers into the little fire, fuel for our tea, Ratnose with his one good eye bright and the other an empty cave that led down to a world of twitching black wires, questioning me, the scritch of his fingernails in the armpit of his ratskin shirt as loud as the scrape of steel on the oily whetstone where he sharpened his toad stabber, and chortling at the thought of my death by slow torture, yuckety-yuk . . . I’d like to tell you all of that, but it would be a lie.
What actually happened, I ran away and joined up with Ratnose’s band out there in the mountains. And what’s worse, I don’t regret it one little bit.
I was plugged at my old man. Here we’d been hiking up this rotten river for what seemed like years without any teevee since we’d left old Otto’s jerkwater town—no Cokes or hotdogs or fruit rolls in all that time; not that I really needed any of that junk—any kid who just has to have junk like that is really gross—but still, you kind of miss it . . . No food other than what we shot or snagged out of the river, no game of any decent size except that dwarf elephant and the bear; what the hell were we doing up here? We could have killed more game and in greater comfort down home. And then that Indian comes and clips our goods—my books, my dump truck. And then my dad makes me kill the old lady while he chickens out and lets the Indian go without getting our stuff back. Not that I really needed that dump truck, but it was the principle of the thing. Being up here bored, and they take away the one thing that makes me feel like I’m back home, or anyway stand a chance of getting back there. The thing is, I knew Ratnose had that truck and that Ratnose was around here somewhere, and I wanted to meet him. I knew my old man would head back down the river without chasing Ratnose or getting our stuff back from him, and even if he tried to, Ratnose was too clever for my old man ever to catch up with him.
And then too, I was really fascinated with Ratnose. He was mean, he was ugly, he took what he wanted when he wanted it—not one of those mealy-mouthed grown-ups who’s always telling you that self-denial is good for your soul. He was rotten to the core, and frankly I’d always suspected that I was that way too. Or maybe it’s only now, looking back, that I suspect it. I changed a lot during the time I spent with Ratnose and his people. They say that drinking the water of the Hassayampa makes a liar out of you, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple. More likely what happens is that the weird things you see and do on the Hassayampa confuse the hell out of you, so that what seemed to be true when you started out at the mouth of the river gets all kind of flip-flopped by the time you reach its head, and then when you get back home again, if you ever do, and tell people what you saw and heard and did up there, and they remember what kind of a person you were when you left, there’s no way they’re going to believe you. Nobody changes that much, they think.
Oh yeah?
It was easy enough to find Ratnose’s hideout. When I split from my father’s camp that night, I hiked northeast away from the river toward a bald-topped knoll I’d noticed the previous afternoon, taking care to walk bare rock as much as possible to leave no trail. By dawn I was at the top of the ridge. I ate a chunk of jerky while I looked down on the country ahead. Low gray hills bumping away toward a tall blue-black horizon splashed with white as if some huge bird had crapped all over it, except I knew it was snow on the Altyn Tagh.
After a while, I noticed that some of the hills in the foreground formed two low ridges like an upside-down V, a tributary of the Hassayampa flowing between them. There were three smokes in the middle distance. One of them was too big to be the smoke from a camp—probably it was a muskeg swamp burning—and the other was so small that it burned out while I was finishing my tea. The third smoke was up near the crotch of the V and looked steady enough to be a campfire or a group of campfires. I took a compass bearing on it and then picked my way down the ridge, heading toward the smoke for as long as I could see it, then checking my compass every half mile or so, like my dad had taught me.
The stream, when I came to it, was fast and cold, with kingfishers dive-bombing the shallows, spearing what looked like baby Dolly Vardens. I could see bigger trout hanging in the brown bulges of water behind the rocks and finning under the roots of trees along the bank, but I had left all the fishing gear back with my father, and anyway, I was in a hurry.
In the late afternoon I spooked a big animal away from one of the pools—a bear most likely. I heard it crash away through the devils club for a short distance when it stopped and began to moan. None of that chuff-chuff and clacking of teeth that you read about in the boys’ adventure books, but instead a low, sorrowful moaning, up and down, like my father sometimes makes in his sleep when he isn’t snoring. I thought I could see its eyes glittering through the spiky devil’s club.
I backtracked slowly for a ways and then shucked out the shells I had in the pump gun—they were 6s, since I’d been hoping to maybe puddle-jump a few ducks—and replaced them with slugs: not that even a 12-gauge slug could stop an angry bear for sure, but at least it gave me a chance. Then I crossed the stream to the opposite side from the bear and pussyfooted my way around him, not stopping until well after dark.
I built a big fire in the lee of an uprooted fir tree, and the popping of the logs drowned out any sounds that might have scared me. Before dawn I woke up with the fire burned down to a bed of coals. I thought I heard singing way off in the distance, but it was probably just the stream running over the rocks. I made an early start.
About noon the next day, I cut a horse trail that came in from the west and then ran parallel to the stream I was following. I kicked a few road apples open and saw that the horses had been well fed. Ratnose’s ponies? In the edges along the horse trail I jumped a few partridges, but I didn’t dare shoot for fear that someone would hear me. Or maybe I should say that the partridges jumped me. I’ve always been edgy in good bird cover—“grouse-shy,” my dad calls it: they go off with such a sudden roar, any which way, and you have to get up on them so fast, it gives me the same tight feeling in the balls that you feel when you’re playing hide-and-seek or kick-the-can and you’re “it.” Still, I wish I could have taken a poke at a couple. It’s such a great feeling when they explode to the shot all broken-winged and loose and you hear that thump when they hit the ground. I killed one once that flew out of the briers across a stone wall directly into the setting sun, and after the recoil all I could see past the end of the muzzle was a perfect halo of grouse feathers, bronze and blue and buff against the light, drifting downward with the sun. Ratnose says there is beauty in killing, and of course he’s right.
Now it started to rain—one of those cold, quiet soaking drizzles that seems to drain into your ear holes and run down your spine just under the skin and fills your boots in a hurry. Toward dark I came to a rusty barbed-wire fence strung through the open woods along the horse trail. There was a dead coyote hanging upside down from the wire. The rain had soaked his dirty blond hair and dripped from his nose. His teeth were so white that they looked luminous in the gloom. One of his eyes star
ed at me almost cynically, I thought, like a pale blue marble. The other had already been pecked out by the whisky-jacks.
In those days I still thought that disfigurement was worse even than death, and the sight of a legless man or a kid with a withered arm would give me nightmares for weeks. One of my friends had a dog named Harry that had lost one of its legs in a trap, but even though old Harry could still get around well enough on three legs to catch a woodchuck now and then, I was very relieved when he finally got run over by a cement mixer. As for myself, I knew I would rather be dead than maimed, so the sight of the coyote, who was both and getting worse all the time, really spooked me.
I remember leaning there on the shotgun, wet and miserable in the rainy dusk, staring into the marbled eye of the coyote and thinking that I could turn around right now, I could walk all night and all the next day and be back at my dad’s campsite on the Hassayampa by sunset. A friendly fire. Tea and talk. Caution and good sense. We would build a raft and get the hell out of there—home in two weeks if we were lucky. When we got home, Mom would be baking bread and the kitchen would smell all sweet and nutty, and I’d turn on the teevee—something really gentle like the NFL Game of the Week—and I’d just lie there on the new carpeting in the den, wrestling with the dog maybe, or building a model rocket, and nibble on an apricot-flavored fruit roll while it rained outside, getting darker and darker while the house got brighter and warmer . . .
A horse coughed in the distance, over the next hill, and another horse answered it with a whinny. The wind had shifted, carrying both the sound and the rain into my face on a chilling slant. I could hear a hollow clatter like that of cooking pans, and the thin yelp of dogs and children. After checking the shotgun to be sure I had a round of Double-O-Buck in the breech and the Polychoke at open cylinder, I started slowly and quietly up the rise. I wondered if Ratnose would like me.
Blood Sport Page 9
