“I see you found him,” he said.
“He was at Henryetta’s,” Joe Mountain said. “Trying to stomp a bunch of railroad men.”
“Is the local law looking for him?”
“No, it was just a friendly fight.”
It began to dawn on my befuddled mind that the big Osage had not appeared at the whorehouse by accident. Schiller had had him out looking for me. I was infuriated.
“I don’t need you to change my pants,” I said.
“Evans told me you might need some watching,” he said, spooning his snuff and cocaine into the little cans. “When Joe came in from The Nations this afternoon, I sent him looking for you, Mr. Pay.”
“I don’t need you to change my pants,” I repeated. “And I’m sick and tired of this ‘Mr. Pay’ foolishness. ‘Mr. Pay’ this, ‘Mr. Pay’ that! You’re old enough to be my father. Even my grandfather, maybe.”
Schiller watched me swaying, with Joe Mountain’s hand under one of my arms to keep me from falling. In my mouth was the sour taste of vomit and blood.
“What would you like to be called?”
“Well, hell,” I said. My mind shot off on another tangent. “Why the hell do you use that stuff?”
“Cocaine? I don’t see it does me any harm. It’s not against the law. You know I don’t do things against the law.”
From the corner, the black man laughed softly.
“Well, there’s another damned thing,” I said, defensively. “I don’t want anything more to do with all this crooked horseshit. All this confiscating Nations whiskey to sell here. And those damned railroad passes you get by threatening people and then selling them. I don’t want any more of that horseshit. When we go someplace from now on, I’ll pay my own way. I don’t want any more of that railroad pass horseshit.”
Oscar Schiller sipped his tea and the corners of his thin mouth twitched, and for a moment I thought he might smile.
“He’s rambunctious, ain’t he, Cap’n?” Joe Mountain said.
“He’s drunk and disorderly,” Schiller said. “But that’s all right. From here on, we’ll call you Eben, if that’s what you want. And next time we take a train somewheres, you can pay your own way. I’ll even sell you the tickets for half price.”
Joe Mountain and the black man laughed. Although I suspected Schiller might be serious, the situation suddenly struck me as ludicrous and I laughed, too. It hurt my swollen lips.
“This here is Burris Garret,” Schiller said, waving a hand toward the man in the corner. “He’s a deputy marshal. He works out of Okmulgee, in the Creek Nation. Burris, take a look at that nose.”
Garret came over and shook my hand. He was almost as tall as I, a broad-shouldered man with a strong neck and a well-shaped head. He wore a close-trimmed beard that formed a black frame around his full-lipped mouth.
“Why don’t you lay down over here?” he said. Joe Mountain led me to one of the mattresses and I managed to get down on it without falling. I lay there faceup and Garret bent over me, feeling my nose. His face was the color of drugstore chocolate syrup, glistening in the lamplight. The room was spinning and I held fast to the mattress with both hands. But then my head began to clear, and one of those moments of abrupt clarity came when Garret squeezed the bridge of my nose between his heavy fingers.
“You got a busted nose, Mr. Pay,” he said.
“Better not call him that,” Oscar Schiller said and Joe Mountain laughed again. Burris Garret chuckled and it sounded like air bubbles coming up from the bottom of a full rain barrel. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and ripped off one corner, rolling it like a cigarette. He pushed the cloth cylinder under my upper lip, pressing it hard against my gums. What was left of the handkerchief he took to a dry sink near the furnace, wet it in a water bucket there, and placed it across the bridge of my nose.
Joe Mountain was telling Schiller about looking along Garrison Avenue for me and finding me at Henryetta’s. Not being allowed inside he had watched through the windows as my little escapade developed.
“Eben Pay was making bets on the prizefight,” he said. “I could hear him from outside. Was pretty noisy about it. He was betting against Big Rachael. Them railroad men was mad as wet yellow jackets.”
“Well, Joe, I suspect maybe you and me ought to go down there and show some displeasure about one of our men being rough-handled,” Oscar Schiller said. He rose and came over to me, pulling on a shirt. I was still hanging on to the bed, but in the whirling room I could see the marshal’s face over me. Joe Mountain and Burris Garret walked outside the door and I could hear their voices as Schiller stood above me, buttoning his shirt.
“You sober enough to understand something needs saying?”
I mumbled that I was. He had his jacket then, and after slipping into it he took a handful of peanuts from a pocket and began to hull them, tossing the meats into his mouth and chewing. It was a long spiel, and I struggled to hear it all in my alcohol haze.
“Do you know how much money I make? Because I’m a district chief deputy, I get a hundred dollars a year flat rate. But other than that, I get paid like all the other deputies out of Parker’s court. I get two dollars for every prisoner I bring in alive. He may be mean and try to shoot my ass off, but I get two dollars for him. If my posse has to kill him, I don’t get a dime, and I have to pay for burying him. For each witness I bring to court, I get fifty cents. I get ten cents a mile travel. If I’m traveling with a prisoner, I get ten cents apiece for each one, the same for my scouts. That covers transportation and eats and lodging. The marshal of Parker’s court gets thirty-five percent of everything I make, just like he does for all the deputies.
“Sometimes I get a reward on a prisoner convicted, paid by one of the railroads or a bank or even a community. I’ve got to gouge out all I can get otherwise. You may think a lot of what I do is dishonest. But let me tell you, in my day, before I joined Parker, I did a lot of things worse than what I do now. The Wyoming Cattleman’s Association got a reward out for my hide right now. There are at least two counties in Texas would like nothing better than to get me in front of one of their jake-leg courts for appropriating various horses. I haven’t had to kill a man since the war, but I’ve done about everything else.
“Most of the men who ride for Parker are no better than me. Some are a lot worse.”
Throughout all of this he had been looking down at me with those unblinking eyes shining behind his glasses, chewing slowly. Now he turned away and moved to an old trunk and took out the big nickel-plated revolver I’d seen in his hand in Eureka Springs. He slid it under his coat and started for the door, but he wasn’t finished.
“That’s one reason I hate these little pop-head no-accounts we’re after now. Most of the people I chase are just like that. They haven’t robbed any train or bank. They don’t have any reward posted on ’em. So if we bring all of them in, I’ll make about enough to buy a new pair of boots. Provided I don’t get killed in the process.”
“Well, why the hell do you do it, then?” I asked.
“It’s the best way I know to stay out of the pen or off the gallows,” he said. “Hell, Eben, if I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be robbing banks myself. So don’t begrudge me a dollar here and there. And don’t start that holier-than-thou business with me again. This isn’t your high-society Saint Louis you’re involved with. The people we chase ain’t no band of angels. And neither are we.”
At the door, he spoke to Burris Garret.
“Why don’t you tell him what we’ve got planned?” he said. “Come on, Joe, let’s get to business.”
“If I’m with the Cap’n,” Joe Mountain called through the door, “they’ll let me in that whorehouse.” I could see his wolf ’s teeth shining.
Burris Garret pulled up a ladder-back beside my mattress and sat backward in the chair, resting his arms across the back. He felt my nose again and I winced, feeling cartilage grind under the skin.
“Old Schiller thinks you’re a good
man,” Garret said.
I lay with my eyes closed, sobering fast, attributable likely to the disgorging of rye under the streetlamp. I began to feel the bruises, along my ribs and under my eyes against the cheekbones. But it felt good. The hurts and the long talk Schiller had made, all of it felt good.
“I’ve been looking for your friend Milk Eye over in the Creek Nation,” Burris Garret said. “No luck yet.”
He spoke with a strange accent, but he had been well schooled in English. I supposed him at first to be from the North or perhaps from one of the British West Indies. Neither was the case.
“You work the Creek Nation?” I mumbled, fighting sleep now.
“That’s right. I know all that country. Born there. Grew up there. My folks were Creek slaves; then after the Treaty of 1866 they were Creek citizens. I went to one of the Creek boys’ academies. They got some good ones. Then I joined the Creek lighthorse. The Creek police. About three years ago, I got my commission as a deputy marshal out of Parker’s court. We’ll be working together on this case. It’s winding down to the Creek country.”
His chocolate-colored face swam before my eyes.
“I never knew there were any . . .” I started to say, then stopped. He chuckled.
“Black marshals? Sure, there are a few. Parker doesn’t care what you are, so long as you can marshal.”
He pulled the wad of cotton cloth from my mouth and stared intently into my nose.
“Looks like the bleeding stopped.”
“What about Schiller? Will he stay on this case?”
“Sure, it’s his case. But we’ll all be together now. We’re going over to that prizefight across the river day after tomorrow.”
“What for?”
“We got a lead. I arrested a whiskey peddler this morning and brought him in from the Creek Nation. On the way, he fell off his horse a lot.” Garret laughed. I realized his gentle manner might be deceptive. “After a while, he got tired of falling off his horse and banging up his head. He told me there were rumors some of the Winding Stair bunch might come in for the betting.”
He swabbed my face with a damp cloth and I caught my breath when he touched the bridge of my nose.
“Whiskey peddlers are good sources. They’re scared of what’s going to happen to them in Parker’s court. And they know most of the people in The Nations and what they do for pleasure.”
“You mean there are people over there who might know who we’re after?”
“I suspect so.”
“And they won’t come forward? They won’t help bring in these killers?”
Burris Garret looked at me a long time before he answered, as though he wanted to think carefully about his words.
“No,” he said. “Oh, some will, but a lot of them have done things themselves that make them leery of the law. Some are scared to talk. And there are a lot of good people there who don’t like the idea of turning their own kind over to a court outside their country. They all know that when a man gets to Fort Smith, he’ll get tried by a white jury.”
I remembered what Evans had said once about the men hanged since 1875, when Judge Parker arrived.
“But Judge Parker’s hanged more white men than Indians, by a hell of a sight.”
“Sure. And it’s the white ones people in The Nations are most afraid of. You take a Cherokee killer. His own people are reluctant to inform on him and send him to a white man’s court. But if the killer is a white man, they’re usually afraid to inform on him.”
“But why?” I asked, and knew it was a stupid question even as I said it. Garret laughed, more at me than because it was funny, I suspected.
“Bad things can happen in the night,” he said.
“Well, it looks like we’ve already got the white man in this case,” I said.
“That’s right. So you see why my whiskey peddler had to fall off his horse so much before he told me anything at all. He’s a Creek, and the Yuchi are almost family to the Creeks sometimes.”
“You think Milk Eye might come?”
“He’s a betting man, no doubt about that. And there’ll be chicken fights later, after dark. And Milk Eye does like chicken fights. But I don’t expect him. He may not be too smart but he’s smart enough to stay hidden a while longer.”
“Do you know Milk Eye?”
“He and I grew up together,” Garret said. “He’s a tough little Yuchi. His people are good folks. But they work hard and never have anything. They scratch corn and sorghum on a little patch of ground not far from Okmulgee. Poor as bald-headed whores.”
Garret stood up and hitched at his pants. The butt of the pistol thrust out black and deadly from beneath his coat.
“You get some sleep now,” he said. “Think I’ll walk down to Henryetta’s myself.”
He left the lamp burning and I lay watching the cobwebs moving gently among the rafters. I could still taste blood and sourness in my mouth. Before sleep came, my mind staggered from one thought to the next. It had been a day that would stay in my memory for a long time, each detail. I had been cut down a few pegs. First, that bastard Evans. Then Schiller. Not the railroaders, though. I had won that one. Maybe I had won them all. I felt a little older and I congratulated myself on the wisdom of my father for sending me here. Perhaps I had purchased a little wisdom myself, at the expense of a punctured self-esteem and a broken nose.
Something else filtered through my hazy thinking. At this moment, three very intimidating men were at Henryetta’s, letting everyone know I was a part of the Parker court. I had come to know these men, and other deputies who worked for Parker, and they were good peace officers, each in his own way. But Oscar Schiller was good because people were afraid of him, and it made me feel good that I wasn’t.
As I fell finally into a deep sleep, the last thing I heard was the late-night Texas freight road engine whistling in the yards before pulling out to the south for Winding Stair and Kiamachi Valley.
In the flat of an anvil, there is a small hole that on proper occasions of celebration, when filled with black powder and correctly fused, will explode like a howitzer. The process is called “shooting the anvil.” In Fort Smith on that 1890 Fourth of July, it was everyone’s favorite firecracker. The advantages of shooting an anvil were apparent. The heavy metal itself was not damaged, and after each shot, it could be recharged and blown again, each time making the same defiant roar and lifting a dense cloud of white smoke into the clear, windless sky.
During most of the war, Fort Smith had been occupied by federal troops. That and the influence of the border country made it less a Southern city than an amalgam of many regions. On Independence Day, everyone turned out for the Garrison Avenue parade and the ceremonies in National Cemetery, where men clad in their old uniforms of blue or gray placed flags on the graves and the city band played the marches of both armies, all typical of the place as a part of Arkansas, which had seceded from the Union and then from time to time threatened to secede from the Confederacy as well.
When the grand and glorious day arrived in 1890, there were speeches, too, at the new pilings on the Arkansas side of the river where Jay Gould was building a railroad bridge, just south of the foot of Garrison Avenue. In the yard of the new Belle Grove School, there was a band concert, with lemonade served by the volunteer firemen. Open house was held at Saint John’s Hospital, where visitors might expect to see the chairman of the board of governors, Judge Isaac Parker.
Along Rogers Avenue, the German and Jewish restaurateurs sold chocolate and coconut cakes on the sidewalks. Saloons were open all day, many offering drinks at half price and free lunches ranging from prime roast beef to panfried catfish. The city’s chili vendors pushed their carts among the crowds, serving their hot stew in tiny pie shells. All the streetcars were decorated in red, white, and blue bunting, and bursts of firecrackers and Roman candles were set off by mobs of yowling boys along the sidewalks.
On The Nations side of the river, people gathered for the prizefight, and the bar
ges and ferries crossed back and forth from early morning until well into the night. The madams from along railyard row came in surreys, their ladies gathered about them and all carrying parasols. They stayed well back from the mob around the ring, watching from a distance as the local gladiator attempted to maul the invader from the North. The area was a white field of shirtsleeved men, arm garters garish and multicolored, most of them with large hats to shade against the sun. The Fort Smith newspapers would say that more than two thousand people attended the affair, and perhaps that many more tried to see what was happening on the sand flats at the bend of the Arkansas, watching from the high banks across the river.
In that sea of faces, one came to realize how cosmopolitan this little frontier city had become. The Irish and English from the barges and the railroads, the German brewery workers and the Jewish shopkeepers. Gas well drillers and cotton farmers, the hill people and the flatlands garden farmers, the blacks who worked in the city and the ones across the river who were now part of various Indian tribes. And the tribesmen themselves. The Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. And the Cherokee, on whose land the spectacle was being waged. Walking through the crowds, one could hear two dozen different languages, see all shades of skin pigmentation, all manner and texture of hair, all color and shape of eyes. It was a seething, writhing human stew, set off here along the border of the last continental Indian frontier, a place never passaged by the old pioneer wagon routes to the West or the newer railroads building toward the Pacific. A backwater in time, with a surging energy and life all its own, unique among all places as it celebrated the one hundred and fourteenth year of national independence.
NINE
The fight was a complete debacle for the Fort Smith favorite.
Big Rachael’s long arms and massive fists were of little use against the smaller, quick-footed Dirty Jake, who pummeled the bigger man almost at will, sending him down again and again. Big Rachael would rise, spitting blood, and stagger to his corner, where seconds dashed water in his face and swabbed off his mouth and nose. Before the minute expired, he would be back at center ring, toeing the mark as required in the rules of the prize ring.
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