When this was done and all of them were finally nodding and saying “Dah,” the four of us started on into Vladivostok.
It was a dumpy, dark, deserted town, with narrow dirt streets going up and down and curving around every which way. The houses and small buildings were made of plain unfinished wood planks, most of which seemed to have been nailed up by carpenters who had failing eyesight. Once inside the town, you got the feeling there wasn’t a straight line left in the world. But still and all the houses must have been built securely, because once in a while high winds would come shrieking in off the ocean that would have knocked anything flat that wasn’t pretty sturdy.
About our only greeting was from some occasional unfriendly dogs, who barked from a distance and slunk away growling if we passed by up close.
And then we saw a few lights from windows in a small building down closer to the water. There were three sleepy little horses that looked like undersized mustangs tied up outside, and there was a small hand-painted sign hanging over the door.
“What’s it say?” Shiny asked Keats, staring at the strange, meaningless lettering.
“Hell,” Keats muttered, “could be Chinese for all I know. But I think it’s a bar.”
We tied the mules to the hitching rail near the horses and went into the small building.
Old Keats looked around and said hesitantly, “I guess this is one a’ those bars without a bar.”
We were in a plain, poorly lighted room with nothing more than six or eight wobbly tables and some rickety chairs in it. Sitting at a table near the corner were three men in flea-bitten fur hats and thick brown homespun coats that came down to their ankles. They were all dressed enough alike to maybe be in some sort of uniform. They were drinking something that looked like water, and all three of them stared up at us with just barely controlled shock, paying particular attention to Shiny and his jet-black skin.
Then a fat man came out of a back door and we saw our first familiar sight in Russia because he was wearing a filthy grease-stained apron that had probably been white some years back.
“Thank God,” Keats murmured. “A bartender.”
Seeing us, he stopped short. Then overcoming his surprise, he started slowly toward us, asking some kind of a question in a deep, rasping voice. Like the others, he seemed particularly fascinated by Shiny.
Keats said just one word, so I remember it all right. The way things turned out later I’d sure as hell have remembered it anyway. He said, “Vautkee.” Then he added to us, “That’s their name for whiskey.”
The bartender waved us to a table and went back out the rear door. As we were sitting down he came back quickly with a bottle full of colorless liquid like the Russians in the corner were drinking and four glasses. He put it on the table and Shad poured a glassful. “Hope this stuff ain’t as weak as it looks.” There was a silence in the room as he lifted the glass, looked at it, sniffed it, and then shrugged. “Sure don’t smell like much.” The bartender and the three men in the corner were frowning at him with close, curious interest.
“Well,” Keats said, “try it.”
Shad raised the glass to his lips and downed it in two, or maybe three, gulps. I couldn’t tell exactly because at one point his throat seemed to become briefly paralyzed. He finished it all and put the glass down without a word. I could tell by his dead-set face he was either awful thoughtful or suffering something fierce. As Shiny pointed out later, Shad “looked like an iron man who’d just swallowed a large cannon ball.”
“I think,” Shad said finally, in an unusually husky voice, “this may serve our purpose.”
“How ’bout us tryin’ it?” I asked.
Shad just nodded, and I poured for Keats, Shiny and myself.
“Well, here’s how,” I said to them, raising my glass.
But the way I did it wasn’t how at all.
I took one gulp and thought I’d die right there on the spot for sure. Pure, burning fire started scorching and searing down my throat at the same time that a massive flood of salty tears surged up around my eyes.
Gagging as slightly as possible and forcing the nearly blinding tears back with fast, hard blinks, I put the drink down. Shiny was putting his nearly full glass back down too, not hardly breathing at all.
“Embarrassin’,” I gasped.
Shiny just nodded, not yet able to speak.
Between short, mercifully cooling gulps of air, and trying to joke away my own failure as a drinker, I at last managed to tell him, “You almost went white there, Shiny—or at least gray—if I can make light of the subject.”
Shiny swallowed slowly and then said, “Any—any color’s better’n pale green, like you.”
Old Keats had finished his entire glass, and without any noticeable side effects at all he shook his head admiringly. “Now that, by God, is one hell of a drink!”
“Tell him that we want t’ buy a lot of it,” Shad said.
“Vautkee, ochen horosho!” Keats said to the bartender, pulling up a chair and gesturing for the man to join us.
The fat man sat down, but he was suspicious and uncomfortable.
With the help of a newly poured drink and his language book, Old Keats went into an earnest conversation with him, using his hands and checking back and forth in his book from time to time. The bartender stayed unsmiling, just short of being hostile.
Finally Keats turned to Shad. “He and a couple of friends make it themselves for the whole town. I think he’s got about fifty bottles here, and a keg of it at his house, I think. Which is about another forty bottles, I guess.”
“Tell ’im we’ll take it all.”
“I already did, I think. But I think what he’s curious about now is how much’re we gonna pay him. And what kind of money.”
Shad took a silver dollar out of his pocket and tossed it on the table. “In American dollars like this.”
The fat man picked up the dollar and examined it closely on both sides, frowning. Finally he pointed at a part of the coin and said something to Keats, who started looking through his book.
At last he said, “He wants t’ know what that thing in the lady’s hair is, with those spikes above it.”
“It’s a headband that says ‘Liberty.’” Shad leaned forward impatiently. “Tell him what it means and tell him that’s a word no goddamned Russian could ever understand in the first place!”
“The hell with all that, Shad,” Keats told him. “I’m havin’ a hard enough time already!”
After another few minutes of searching the book and talking, Keats said, “He’ll sell his vautkee, I think. But I think he thinks we’re tryin’ to cheat him.”
Shad stood up, angrily shoving the chair away behind him. “How the hell can we be cheating him? We haven’t talked money!”
Keats, equally angry, said, “Cool off! I think he thinks we’re tryin’ to buy his whole supply for that one dollar!”
Shad hesitated, taking this in, and then said, “Oh. Well, tell him we’ll give him one dollar for every one bottle.”
Keats explained, pointing at the dollar and the bottle on the table, and for the first time the fat bartender began to nod eagerly and say “Dah” in such a way that you couldn’t help but know it meant “Yes.”
About half an hour later Shad and I got back to the camp with one of the mules packing forty bottles. The Russians Keats had talked to on the beach had brought maybe fifty big containers. There were washtubs, large earthenware pots and even wooden and iron barrels that were cut in half sideways, probably to catch rainwater or to feed stock. But by the time we got back, there wasn’t a Russian in sight any longer.
Slim and the others had brought our ton or more of oats and barley and corn up from the beach and piled the gunny sacks near the fire.
“Hey, them Ruskies ain’t half bad,” Slim said. “Look at all these barrels and such they brang.”
“We told ’em we’d pay ’em,” Shad said flatly. Then he walked off toward the herd.
“Where the hell’d they all go?” I asked Slim.
“They just brang these things an’ then took off. Maybe they have t’ git up pretty quick. They’re mostly fishermen, an’ some farmers.”
“How d’ you know what they are?” I started unloading the bottles from the pack sacks. “Your Russian’s not too fluent.”
“I dunno. I just know that somehow ya’ know if you’re a’ talkin’ t’ somebody an’ ya’ both know it’s friendly.” Slim started helping me with the bottles. “Some a’ them fishermen’ve made purty good hauls in the last two, three weeks. They tell me fish’ve been runnin’ real good out there.”
Shad now came striding back into the light of the fire. He said tersely, “Some of those cows’re lyin’ down t’ die.”
“They ain’t in real good shape, boss,” Slim agreed. “Their leg muscles’re startin’ t’ stiffen up.”
“All right!’ Shad’s powerful voice carried to all of us over the sound of the fire and the wind. “We got some more of this white whiskey comin’, but we’re gonna start now! We’ll fill these containers with grain and wet it down with that whiskey! Fast!”
“How much whiskey for how much grain?” Crab asked.
“A little bit goes a long way!” Shad said. “Taste it and pretend you’re a cow!” He wasn’t fooling, for that was about as accurate a way to judge as any. Then he added, “Let’s go!” and we all jumped to it.
The rest of the night was kind of funny, in a way.
Old Keats and Shiny showed up half an hour later with the rest of the “white whiskey,” just at about the time we were running short. All in all, we fed nearly a hundred bottles mixed with more than a ton of grain to our five-hundred-odd head of cattle. As we figured it, that was roughly half a bottle to every ten pounds of feed. Depending on how you looked at it, that was either a pretty dry mash or awful wet.
Some of the stronger bulls started at the Russian white-whiskey mash first, as we all started lugging it out to feed them. On my third trip out, carrying a washtub with Mushy, I noticed Old Fooler sniff the air like a deeply damaged cowboy on Saturday night. He raised his right foreleg like he was waving an uncertain hello to no one in particular and headed vaguely but enthusiastically for the next refreshments he could find.
And what with all the mooing and calling and bellowing and snorting of the first ones to try this new recipe, it brought the sick and the lame, the halt and the mostly damnere frozen to their feet, even if it was just out of pure curiosity. On my fourth trip out, hauling half a big barrel with Big Yawn and Natcho, I saw that spotted cow with the yearling calf who’d stopped the stampede aboard ship. She’d had a bit out of a washtub herself and was insistently nudging her bawling youngster toward it.
Along toward daylight, they were the drunkest, healthiest, most relaxed bunch of longhorns anyone could ever hope to see. Most of them were out there on the frozen ground sleeping, but it was a deep, comfortable sleep, with easy, regular breathing and relaxed leg muscles.
“Them cows could all be takin’ their forty winks on a block a’ ice an’ not know any different,” Slim said as the first glimmer of sun began to break dimly in the east.
Shad looked off toward the dim gray dawn. “The herd’ll be ready t’ move in about four hours. I’ll take two volunteers t’ stay up with me an’ watch ’em. The rest of ya’ get a little sleep before we bust outta here.”
Thank God Slim and Big Yawn volunteered because by that time I was too tired to hardly raise my arm or even speak. Along with the others I laid out my bedroll by the fire and almost died in it.
And when I woke up, a bright sun was shining and burning in my eyes. It was like a clear, brisk spring day anywhere in the world, except somebody was yelling that some goddamned cossacks were riding down the hill toward us.
CHAPTER FIVE
I STAGGERED up into a sitting position and started pulling on my boots, looking off up the far rise, the corners of my eyes still sand-filled with sleep.
Chakko, who never said anything, muttered, “Jumpin’ Jesus Christ, Goddamn hell!” It was the longest sentence I’d ever heard him say.
And then, as my eyes focused better, I began to see why Chakko had made up such a long sentence.
Old Keats told me one time there was a fictitious thing called a centaur. Half man and half horse. Those men coming down the hill surely looked like a group of those fictitious characters. There were about fifteen or twenty of them loping swiftly down, and you just knew that if any one of those horses flicked its tail at a fly biting its ass, its rider would have known all about it and, without looking, reached back and down and grabbed that fly and thrown it away onto the ground, all in stride.
Those men and their horses were that much together.
But on top of that they were an even more spooky bunch because there was, somehow, an invincibility about them that scared the hell out of you from a mile away. It was like nothing on earth could stop them from getting where they were going.
They wore uniforms no one ever heard of since the Napoleonic Wars. They had on trim black-fur hats and black capes that flowed behind them as they rode. But the inside of their capes and their thick laced vests were bright scarlet. They wore roomy black trousers tucked into very high, shiny black boots. They all carried handsome swords at their sides and had rifles strapped across their shoulders. Their leader, a black-bearded giant of a man, wore a huge sword that glinted silver and gold in the distance. Big Yawn, with his occasional grasp of description, muttered, “Fuck! Are they fancy!”
“I hope t’ hell they’re not after us,” Slim said. And then he added grimly, “But they sure seem t’ be headed this way.”
“Both sides,” Natcho said quietly, and Shad, who already knew about it, nodded.
I looked in the other direction and saw Yakolev barreling up along the beach on a little pony that looked too small to carry him, the bottom of his long brown coat flapping clear back and down against the hocks of the overworked pony’s back legs. Riding behind him, on equally miserable mounts, were thirty or forty men in long coats and scrubby fur hats like the three men we’d seen in the bar.
“Looks like Yakolev’s mad about somethin’ an’ he’s called out all the marines in the whole damn country,” Slim said.
“I want every man to have a gun in easy reach.” Shad slowly took out his pack of Bull Durham.
Most of the men who were up already had revolvers on. I stood and quickly buckled on my old Navy Remington .44. A couple of others just moved closer to their saddles and the rifles they now had near at hand in their scabbards.
Yakolev jerked his undersized pony to a halt and swung down, slightly tripping in his fury, and stalked toward Shad. The men behind him dismounted and followed, looking ready for trouble.
“You came here ashore!” Yakolev snarled in his thick, muddy accent.
Shad was now pouring tobacco into the cigarette paper, but he knew exactly how much to put in, so he was looking right at Yakolev while he did it. “Want t’ check our Sea Papers again?”
“I have brought these many soldiers to enforce our port laws! There are large import duties, many taxes that I must have to collect!”
Shad rolled the paper around the tobacco and licked it, then started to gently and slowly firm it together with his fingers. “We’re all paid up front, mister. And you know it.”
It was then that the cossacks rode up from the other side. Scared as I was, I couldn’t help noticing the great difference between the two bunches of men. Yakolev and his soldiers were grubby hunks of dirt compared to the cossacks. Even their shabby little horses couldn’t begin to compare with the cossacks’ handsome, finely groomed mounts. The cossacks came up twice as fast and with half as much noise, and when they dismounted, swiftly and surely, every man’s foot seemed to touch the ground within the same split second.
The big, bearded man leading them strode toward Yakolev and Shad. It struck me as strange that he walked with that same cougar’s grace and controlled s
trength that was in all of Shad’s movements.
“Christ!” Slim muttered. “It looks like we’re gonna have t’ swim back to Seattle!”
The big cossack said something to Yakolev in a voice that sounded like a bear growling when he hasn’t decided whether he’s mad or not. They started talking, with the cossack asking short questions and Yakolev answering a little uncertainly. A couple of us looked at Old Keats, wondering what they were talking about, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them and just shrugged his shoulders.
As they spoke, Shad reached over to a box of cooking matches on a pile of gear and took one, striking it on his thumbnail to light his now-built cigarette. Yakolev was startled by the sudden spurt of flame from Shad’s hand and stopped halfway through some answer or another.
“Whatever you two fellas are talkin’ about,” Shad told Yakolev, lighting up his smoke and tossing away the match, “tell your fancy friend that come hell or high water, we’re movin’ out right after breakfast.”
“You’re moving out before breakfast,” the big cossack said.
Shad’s reaction was a difficult thing to paint. The rest of us damnere fell down. But Shad looked, for a moment, like he had the night before when he drank the glass of white whiskey. In both cases he’d bitten off quite a bit, but he sure as hell was going to chew it.
He frowned slightly. “You talk American.”
“Probably better than you do,” the big cossack growled.
Shad’s voice got harder. “In that case, you know what ‘fuck you’ means.”
There was a silence as the two men stared at each other, both of them looking like something over six feet of solid granite.
“Now wait,” Yakolev finally said with nervous anger. “I am Harbor Master here! First there are matters of import duties, taxes and other expenses!”
The cossack glared at Yakolev. “You have been paid.”
Some of us glanced at each other, wondering who was on whose side.
“No!” Yakolev struggled to take a small brown cigar from one of his pockets. “And remember, I have forty soldiers here who represent the Tzar!”
The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 5
