“Nobody said ya’ were,” Shad told him flatly. “Get mounted.”
As Shiny moved resentfully off, it occurred to me that Yawn wasn’t exactly typical either. He was by far the biggest man in our outfit, like Kirdyaga was among the cossacks. And it further occurred to me that next to Sergeant Nick, Vody and Yakov were the biggest and toughest-looking men among them. So Rostov had chosen the three roughest, most spine-chilling customers in his whole outfit to go into town with Bruk on this particular day.
Shad and Rostov were both stacking their small going-into-town decks with the largest, meanest-looking, most untypical men they had. And in favor of Shad’s decision making, Shiny and Link were not only Negro, but both of them topped six feet and weighed in at a long way over two hundred pounds. In addition, if you didn’t know them, and therefore know how gentle they really were, they just happened to look as fierce as wet wildcats.
The four men now led up their horses, and Shiny said quietly, “Me an’ Link goin’ ’cause we’re niggers?”
“Partly,” Shad said.
“Hell, boss!” Shiny grumbled as he and the others swung up on their horses. “You’re gettin’ rid a’ your fuckin’ misfits!”
“Who you callin’ a misfit?” Big Yawn growled.
But right then Shad had already grabbed the bit on Shiny’s mare Ginger, so that she wasn’t about to move without getting her jaw broken. And the funny thing was that as he did this he wasn’t even mad so much as he was kind of saddened. Holding Ginger motionless he said quietly, “Ya’ feel that way, get off. I’ll send somebody else.”
But Shiny wasn’t yet quite ready to get down. He sat in the saddle, frowning vaguely, as though he had a feeling he’d done something wrong but didn’t know exactly what.
Keats, who had mounted to lead the others off, turned and spoke with more anger than I’d ever heard in his voice before. “Shiny!”
Every eye there jerked around to him, and he went on as hard as before, every word slamming against Shiny like a clenched fist. “You think Shad’d send you ’cause you’re a nigger? Who went night b’fore last?”
Shiny’s gaze winced and narrowed under those battering words.
“You’re goin’ ’cause you’re a good man an’ thank God black! You an’ Link’ll be outstandin’ as hell! Like Big Yawn here, who’ll stand about a foot an’ a half taller than anybody there!” Keats took a quick, angry breath. “Shad’s sendin’ you three with me ’cause he thinks you’re the most all-round impressive bastards t’ go along on this first, hard day!”
Shiny’s low voice just barely hung on. “Won’t do nothin’,” he muttered, “made t’ feel like a dumb, black nigger sonofabitch.”
For some reason, Shiny was really hurting, and we all looked at him, puzzled.
With a frowning, genuine innocence, his brother, Link, said, “Nobody’s made me feel like a dumb, black nigger sonofabitch.”
As one of the chosen three, uncomfortable, and with nothing better to say just then, Big Yawn rumbled, “Me neither.”
Slim was quiet but about equally as sore as Old Keats. They both felt that Shad’s fairness was in question. “Civil War’s finished these fifteen years, Shiny. Slavery abolished an’ all. An’ you still think, either way, whether you’re picked or not picked, you’re bein’ picked on!”
Rostov’s four cossacks were mounted and waiting, and it was easy for them to see that we had some kind of problem, so Shad cut it short. He twisted the bit in his hand just slightly, so that Shiny’s mare was damned ready and willing to back away and sit down. “I told ya’ t’ get off, Shiny, and I’ll send somebody else.”
“Easy, boss, ya’ might hurt her.”
“I won’t hurt her. I’ll just get on the saddle when you finally get off.”
And then, with Shiny’s mare Ginger about to be forced down on her haunches, Shiny said the damnedest thing to Shad. “Did you ever say I was a dumb, black nigger sonofabitch?”
“No! But I’ll say it right now, you dumb, nigger sonofabitch!”
Somehow that suddenly turned things around. Shiny said “Okay” in such an easy way that Shad damnere let go of Ginger’s bit, and she reared back up to a full standing position.
Knowing Shad the way I did, I couldn’t see any reason for it, but Shiny repeated the question. “You never said that?”
“I just now did!” Shad told him flatly, still holding the bit and controlling the mare.
I looked at Shiny, who knew that Shad couldn’t tell him anything but the truth. And for maybe the first and the last time I had a brief, fleeting look then into Shiny’s mind, which was both at once so smart and yet so innocent, and even more, so terribly hardened, that it would be the first to collapse under a gentle pressure of kindness.
And Shad, not trying to be kind, was so. “If you an’ me don’t know what the hell we’re talkin’ about,” he said gruffly, “then there ain’t no goddamn sense in the whole world. So what are you talkin’ about a dumb, nigger sonofabitch for?”
Shiny had a hard time asking. “Am I goin’ into that town as a nigger or as a man?”
“That’s up t’ you.” Shad’s quiet voice still cut hard as an ax. “And don’t never question me on that again. Because if ya’ have t’ ask about bein’ a man, then you already said the answer.”
Shiny took this in, and understood. “Boss,” he said, “if you don’t let go a’ that bit, it’ll be harder’n hell for me t’ ever make it t’ town with them fellas.”
Our other three men now moved off to join the cossacks, who were starting up over the hill toward Khabarovsk.
Shad released the bit and stepped back.
Shiny fingered the reins briefly, gently regaining control of Ginger, and calming her. He said, “I’ll tell ya’ one thing, boss. Bein’ picked as a man sure does make a difference.” And then he spurred off at a dead run.
We watched as he raced his pony to catch up to the other seven men, and then together they mounted the hills between us and Khabarovsk. Finally they disappeared, topping the last high crest and going out of our sight down those far, sloping meadows stretching toward the town.
“That can turn out t’ be a kind of a rough detail,” I said, feeling a lot, but not talking to anybody in particular.
“They’ll be okay,” Slim said in the same general way, “if they just remember t’ handle themselves like they ought.”
“Eight good men there.” Shad stepped over and swung up aboard his big Red. “They’ll bluff that town out, like we did, an’ be back in good shape.”
He put his spurs to Red and loped on over to the meadow to take stock of the herd and the men riding it. About the same time, Slim went off to do something or other, and the rest of us were free for a little while to do whatever we wanted.
For myself, I got some neat’s-foot oil and sat by my bedroll to put some of it on my bridle. The leather had been hardening up, and that oil would sink right into it, making it softer and stronger, so it wouldn’t brittle up and crack. Neat’s-foot oil was the best cure in the world for bad-off leather. And the funny thing about that sticky yellow stuff was that like the very leather it was saving, it came from a cow, too. It was made from the crushed bones of cattle, and along with being a cure-all for leather, it was also a first-class medicine for saddle sores or for cuts or tick infections or whatever cattle might get. Old Keats had first brought that fact to my attention a few years back. “It’s as though, in a strange way, everything in the world starts an’ stops with one ol’ cow.” We’d been fixing a beaten-up harness with neat’s-foot. “Yep,” Keats had gone on thoughtfully. “As though God never gave us a problem without the answer being right next to it.”
Maybe what’s made me go on like this was the problem of Shiny Jackson. And I was about to find out that the answer was sitting right next to me.
A small card game had started up nearby, and I wound up both working with the bridle and at the same time sort of halfway listening to Crab and Rufe and Dixie playing bla
ckjack for beans and arguing quietly among themselves about the game.
Dixie spoke a word that somehow jarred my ear. He said “misfit,” which sure as hell didn’t seem to me to be a word that’s used all that much. And also, sure as hell, I’d heard that unoften word used not long before.
I looked over at their game at about the same time that the ace of spades came up in front of Dixie. It was his first card face up and it gave him blackjack, and he said to that ace of spades in a real pleased way, “You black nigger sonofabitch!” as he started to gather his beans in from the pot.
I put down the bridle and stood up and faced him, just looking at him without saying anything.
He glanced at me once or twice, just standing there before him. Then he finally glared at me and said, “What the fuck are you starin’ at?”
“It was you,” I said.
He’d gone over twenty-one in this hand anyway, so he tossed his cards back in with a violent, angry gesture. “Yeah?—What was me?”
I still couldn’t think of any better words, so I said simply, once again, “It was you.”
He reared halfway up, onto one knee, madder than one of them Indian cobras coming up out of a basket, and damned if his tongue wasn’t flicking around in that same kind of a spooky way. “I told Shiny the way it would be!” He reared even higher, the tongue still going, with the threat of fangs somewhere behind it. “Them too niggers’ll be the first t’ go!”
“Maybe.” I was too filled up with feeling to say anymore.
“Then what are ya’ starin’ at?”
Crab and Rufe didn’t know quite what was going on, but they knew Dixie was ignoring the cards he’d just been dealt. And they knew there was something rough in the air. “Levi,” Crab said to my silence, “you ain’t bein’ your normal quick an’ witty self.”
That broke me loose enough to finally at least say more than a couple of words at a time. “Just who told Shiny that Shad said that he was a dumb, black nigger sonofabitch?”
“Anybody knows that he is!” Dixie stood full up, ready to fight.
But, oh, God, was he going to lose, judging from the hard power and fury raging up inside me.
And he did lose.
But I got slightly whacked around in the process.
The way that now came about was that Dixie said, “Just fuck off, nigger lover!”
I replied to that, “Shiny Jackson is worth ten thousand of you, lined up side by side.”
And then we went into the battle, which I had the advantage of because I was so mad that while he was swinging at me, I’d already knocked him ass over teakettle in the first place.
It happened to, actually in truth, be an ass over a teakettle.
We were so close to the cossacks that Dixie’s butt, with him attached to it, went sailing across a small fire with some tea boiling on it.
He leaped up out of that overturned boiling tea and scattered fire with a great deal of alacrity and charged back upon me, and with the cowboys and cossacks not interfering on either side, we went to it. Since it was between two Slash-Diamonders, even Rostov stayed out of it.
I won, as I sort of hinted before.
But I wasn’t too proud of it. Every time he hit me, it hurt. But it was almost like it didn’t really matter. Because he could have hit me with a goddamned ax and I’d have still gone back at him. And every time I hit him, I felt sorry for the whole way he was. Maybe it was because I knew that in the final, final judgment of whatever gods there are, I was right and he was wrong. In any case, I knew I’d whip him. And I also knew that then I’d have to take care of him.
And that’s what happened.
When Shad came back to camp a little later, packing his saddle on his shoulder, he looked at me swabbing down Dixie’s beaten-up face and asked, which was kind of natural, “What happened?”
“He fell down,” I said.
“And you?”
I couldn’t see Rostov, but I had a feeling there was a faint grin on his face as he and some of his men now mounted up and rode away. It was plain that he’d just stayed long enough to make sure nobody got killed.
Dixie was awake enough to know what was going on. And he was damn well aware that he’d caused what could have been an ugly time between Shiny and Shad. I squeezed some more water from the cloth into his black left eye and said, “I fell down tryin’ t’ hold him up.”
“That ain’t too funny,” Shad said.
I’d done as much as I could for Dixie medically, so I stood up. “I know, Shad. We had a fight.”
“What over?”
I could see Dixie getting ready to die then, for what he’d done, and he deserved it. “I just don’t like ’im,” I said.
We walked back over toward Shad’s bunk, where he dropped his saddle to the ground, quietly looking around. “Camp got torn up a little.”
“Yeah,” I said, “a little.”
He lay down, his head resting in the seat of his saddle and his hat shading his eyes. “You just don’t like Dixie?”
“That’s right.”
Shad shifted his hat better against the sun. “Levi,” he said, so tired and yet so patient, “I know that fight was because of Shiny.” He took a deep, long breath. “And I appreciate your point of view.”
“That leads up to a ‘but,’” I said, “where a boss tells a dumb roustabout like me what t’ do.”
“Right.” Shad moved his hat a little bit again. “And ya’ ought t’ be more peaceful.” He relaxed now like a cougar I’d seen napping one time, relaxed but ready and powerful all in the same instant. “Don’t waste your time on little fights”—he yawned—“when at any minute there’re so many big ones all ready an’ waitin’ to bust out.”
“Would you have had me do other?”
I’m pretty sure he almost said something like, “I guess not,” but that sort of backing-away statement went against his nature. Instead he said, “Just don’t do it again.”
“Okay, boss.”
And then he was into his first brief sleep in about twenty-four hours.
Looking down at him, still reminded of that cougar who’d been asleep yet ready to move instantly, I had a brief, sudden insight into the meaning of the term “cat nap.”
With both the cougar and Shad there was so much easy, quick power there that either one of them could tear an enemy in half while their eyes were still flicking open.
Spooky if they were against you.
Reassuring if they were on your side.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WHEN I turned to move off, I almost bumped into Slim, who’d come back into camp and was quietly sizing things up. And he’d heard enough of what Shad and I were saying to take it from there.
“You an’ Dixie been playin’ Civil War?”
“Sort of.”
“Hmm. Looks like the South lost again.”
“It was close t’ bein’ Pyrrhic.” It hadn’t been at all close, but that seemed like kind of the right thing to say.
Slim nodded. “While Shad’s gettin’ his forty winks, let’s wander over t’ the cossacks’ playgrounds. Rostov’s over there.”
“Okay. I’ll toss a saddle on Buck.” In turning, Dixie came into my line of sight. His eye and a couple of big bruises were starting to lump up something fierce. I hesitated. “Hey, Dixie?”
“Yeah?”
“Want t’ come along, over t’ the meadow?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Why not?”
A couple of minutes later about half a dozen of us rode off over the hill and down into the big meadow where the cossacks were already doing some interesting things. Rostov was on his big black near the rock, and except for two of his men in camp and six on lookout, the rest of them were out galloping around in the meadow, but they weren’t racing.
We all pulled up near him and took a better look at what was going on. All of the men in the meadow had their sabers out. About half of them were going at full speed to where the creek flowed quietly, leaping it, a
nd slashing the water with their sabers as they flew over. The others were near the center of the meadow, and what they were doing seemed even sillier, if possible. They’d put up six more slender poles in a fairly straight line about fifty feet apart from each other, and on the top of each pole they’d mounted a giant pine cone. The men down there were charging along the line swinging at each pine cone, but never hitting it hard enough to cut it really deep or topple it to the ground.
Slim was watching carefully and not making any quick judgments, but Dixie did, and for once I was inclined to agree with him. “What the hell they doin’, Captain?” He frowned, his tone indicating a kind of puzzled disbelief.
“Practicing and improving their use of the saber.”
“Well, hell,” Crab said, “it sure don’t look like much t’ hit some water an’ a pine cone.”
“Remember,” Slim said easily, “the way they hit them wolves that night?”
His point was damn well taken, and none of us had a quick answer to it.
“Notice the way they slash the water,” Rostov explained. “Of course anyone can hit it. But try doing it in mid-leap with the cutting edge of the blade entering so perfectly that the water is not disturbed.”
“My God!” Natcho said, watching more closely. “That’s impossible!”
And that sure as hell was right. Between the next three cossacks leaping the stream I doubt if their blades caused more than two drops of water. And Natcho was the best one of us to remark on it, too. I remembered one time when some of us had gone for a kind of a halfway bath and halfway swim in a pond on the Slash-D Ranch. When most of us had leaped in, we’d damnere splashed the pond dry. But when Natcho had jumped in, his hands were held out together in front of him and his legs were straight out behind him, so that altogether he was shaped like an arrow, and he hadn’t made hardly more than a ripple.
“What about them big pine cones?” Slim asked.
“They’re the best natural duplication, with a similar resilience, that we have on hand to represent a man’s head, which is the best place to hit him with a saber.”
The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 19
