The Englishman’s Boy

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  No one looked back to see how they fared. Hardwick gave them no quarter for their shortcomings. By late afternoon the breach had widened to several hundred yards. A look of panic crept over Hank’s face when he realized that Hardwick was not going to relent, would make no allowances. “Goddamn him, why don’t he slack off? He knows we can’t keep up.”

  “I can keep up,” said the Englishman’s boy.

  “I thought we was all in this together,” said Hank. “That Hardwick’s leaving us as easy pickings for any Indians that’s dogging our trail.”

  “There ain’t any Indians dogging our trail. We’re dogging theirs.”

  “We don’t know there’s no Indians dogging our trail,” the hired man muttered. “They might have slipped behind us. Ever think of that? That’s what Indians is known for. Slipping behind you and lifting your hair when you least expect it.”

  The horsemen ahead topped a rise and descended out of sight.

  “Look at that,” whined Hank. “Now they’ve skinned out on us entire. We’re cold alone and left to fend for ourselves.”

  “The reason we’re cold alone,” said the Englishman’s boy, “is because of that plug of yours.”

  Hank’s brow furrowed with worry. “I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, signing on with that Hardwick feller. I never did meet a redheaded man you could trust. Every one of them is crazy.”

  “If you keep up your pissing and moaning,” said the Englishman’s boy, “I just might ride on and join that redheaded man for the change of company. His talk has got to be a damn sight cheerfuller than what I’m getting here.”

  With the threat he might be abandoned, Hank went even more squirrelly and apprehensive. He squirmed in his saddle and threw nervous glances over his shoulder. “First rule in the wilderness is stick together, boy. We got to look out for one another. Don’t we, son?”

  “The only way we’ll stick together,” said the Englishman’s boy, “is if you kick a little more go out of that nag of yours.”

  “There’s no more go to kick out of him,” said Hank. “His go has gone and went.”

  They were climbing the rise. Breaking onto the crest they could see, half a mile away, the posse dwindling on the prairie.

  The boy said, “They put any more distance between us, even I ain’t going to catch them before nightfall.”

  “It’s a sin to leave a traveller in distress, son. Remember your Bible. Remember the Good Samaritan.” Hank put his hand in his pocket. “I got a dollar,” he said hopefully, showing it to the Englishman’s boy. “It’s yours.”

  “That is one sorry-ass horse and you are one sorry-ass son of a bitch,” said the boy.

  “It ain’t my horse. It’s Mr. Robinson’s,” Hank said plaintively. “And what am I supposed to do? There’s no getting blood out of a stone.” As he pleaded his case, the Englishman’s boy slipped his hand into his boot and fetched out his knife. Hank went pale at the sight of it. “What you setting to do with that knife, son?” he inquired in a tight voice.

  “Get blood out of a stone.” The boy leaned over, pricked the nag in the haunch. The horse squealed, bucked once, and then broke into a clumsy, wriggling gallop which slopped Hank from side to side in the saddle. The Englishman’s boy closed hard and jabbed the terrified animal’s hindquarters again. Hank screeched for him to leave off.

  But the Englishman’s boy did not leave off. He pursued horse and man across the wastes like a banishing Bible angel harrying the exile with fiery sword and implacable visage, a strange white-faced angel scrunched in a big derby hat and flapping coat, blade glittering in his upraised hand. It became clear neither pleas nor curses could deflect him. So Hank stopped his mouth and saved his breath, grimly holding on for all he was worth, like baggage strapped to a mule. They did not lose sight of the wolfers, even though by late afternoon the leading party shrank to a train of ants toiling across a tabletop.

  When they rode into the camp on the Marias, the boy was still playing drover, the knife in his hand his goad, the cattle he drove a pale horse trickling thin threads of blood down its haunches and a frightened man rigidly upright in his saddle. The wolfers rose to their feet and gaped in silence. It was a sight for silence. The white horse trotted through the camp as if fire, hushed men, picketed horses did not exist. It did not turn its head. Hank had to rear back and saw the bit to check it from plunging over the bank and into the river. There it stood and shook, head between its knees.

  “Where’s Hardwick?” asked the Englishman’s boy.

  One of the men pointed. Hardwick stepped out from behind a clump of willows, buttoning his fly. “Them boys is tardy for supper,” he said. “Where’s my switch?” The men laughed.

  “That man needs another horse,” announced the boy.

  “Does he?” said Hardwick.

  “He can’t keep up.”

  “Ain’t that a pity.”

  “He needs a horse,” said the boy.

  “Farmer Robinson put him on a horse.”

  “It’s a poor horse.”

  “It’s a poor man,” said Hardwick. The boy and Hardwick looked at one another.

  “I ain’t watching out for him no more,” said the boy.

  Hardwick shrugged.

  “He’s scared the Indians is going to catch him if he’s left behind,” said the boy.

  “Then he ought to have stopped at home and admired his favourite cow’s ass.”

  For the first time Hank looked up, roused out of his numbness. “I didn’t ask to come!” he cried. “Mr. Robinson sent me!”

  “Hold your chat,” said Hardwick quietly. “I’m talking to this boy here.”

  “Why’d you push so hard today?” cried Hank. “What was your all-fired hurry?”

  “My hurry?” said Hardwick. He wasn’t speaking to the farm hand but to the Englishman’s boy. “My hurry? My hurry was to reach water. My hurry was to get my men a sup of hot food before dark come down. Because I don’t hold with cook-fires after nightfall. I don’t hold with lighting no beacons to plundering Indians. That set all right with you?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “That set all right with you?” demanded Hardwick.

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “It don’t set with me!” shouted Hank. “And this bad treatment ain’t going to set with Mr. Robinson. It ain’t going to set with him how that boy used his horse neither. He’ll require damages!”

  “You keep on hollering,” said Hardwick, “you’ll catch some damages.”

  Hank bit his lip and crawled down off the inert horse. “I don’t have much appetite,” he remarked to nobody in particular. “Even though Mr. Robinson put ten dollars in for supplies I don’t believe I’ll help myself to my share of that bacon that’s frying.”

  “Second thought he don’t need to stop at home to admire no favourite cow’s ass,” said Hardwick to his companions. “All he need do is look in a mirror.”

  8

  I follow a ridge of starved, stingy weeds running down the middle of the lane, drive over a rise to confront desolation. A burned-out house, two walls still standing, the rest a tangle of blackened studs and joists collapsed in a cellar, fingers stabbing at the sky. I park the car, walk over. There are tortured lumps of melted window-glass scattered on the ground, heat-twisted nails, wooden shingles gnawed by fire, chunks of broken, ham-sized, smoke-cured cement. Where the floor still holds, it supports a scorched metal lamp, a charred sofa. Tall, rank weeds sprout in the midst of the debris in the cellar, evidence the conflagration was not recent.

  Across the neglected brown yard I see the ruins of a barn, destroyed by fire like the house, heaps of ash and tumbled beams. In the singed, wasted crossbeams of a windmill, birds flit from spar to spar, a rusty pipe lugubriously drips water into a trough wearing a green caul of algae. Turning slowly in an intimidating expanse my eyes come to rest on a low-slung bunkhouse I first overlooked. A single window glints in the sun, the rest are masked with tar-paper eyepatches. A man
is standing on the stoop of the bunkhouse watching me. Without acknowledging the intruder, he turns and goes into the bunkhouse. A minute later, he steps back out in a black jacket and walks towards me past a stack of rusted irrigation pipe, a hay rake, a ramshackle, derelict buggy. His stroll is unhurried and deliberate. When he reaches the car he stops, props a foot up on the bumper and ties an errant bootlace, straightens himself and says, “What you want?”

  Shaved and with his teeth in, he looks less crazed than the man in the roughcut Chance had shown me. Considerably smaller, too -five feet four, one hundred and thirty pounds of stringy muscle, tightly wound sinew, bone. A common trick of the camera, to make a man seem bigger than he is. It had come as a great shock and disappointment to me when I started work at the studio and first encountered stars in the flesh. They seemed diminished, ordinary, piddling creatures.

  But distortions of the camera aside, there is no mistaking this is Shorty McAdoo. It’s the eyes. Bits of bituminous black, countersunk in deep sooty sockets, soft coal smouldering. He isn’t wearing wrangler duds, just a pair of drab workman’s trousers, a collarless shirt under a black suit jacket that seems to have been his reason for the visit to the bunkhouse. Window dressing for the visitor.

  “Mr. Shorty McAdoo?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “The name’s Harry Vincent.” I offer my hand. He doesn’t take it. “No reason for alarm,” I say.

  “I don’t feel no alarm,” the old man informs me. He looks like one of those over-the-hill jockeys who hangs around race-tracks, a trim, youthful body surmounted by an implausibly ancient face.

  “I’ve been looking for you for more than two weeks,” I say. “I was ready to throw in the towel when I bumped into a young man by the name of Wylie.”

  “Wylie, eh?” he says in a guarded voice.

  “You came up in conversation.”

  “What else come up in conversation?”

  I hasten to reassure him. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Fuck worry. What you want, mister?”

  “I’m not here about Coster. This has got nothing to do with Coster.”

  “If it ain’t got nothing to do with Coster, why mention it?”

  My eyes sweep the bleak, ravaged property. “There must be a reason you chose this particular garden spot to hole up in. I thought it might be Coster. This looks like a convenient place to avoid a warrant.”

  “Warrant for what?”

  “Maybe assault and battery.”

  “Ain’t no warrant out on me. I never done nothing to Coster.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I say. “Why you’re here is none of my business.”

  He makes a gesture of dismissal. “This ain’t got nothing to do with Coster. I just got sick of all that picture shit.”

  “I think I know what you’re talking about,” I say. “Some of your acquaintances have been telling me tales about the bad way you’re treated.”

  “I washed my hands of her,” he says with a controlled, wintry vehemence. “Been a five-dollar-a-day fool long enough. Fellers shouting at you out of a blow-horn. Couldn’t take it no more. I’m done with all that. I reckon to get shut of this place entire. Head north.”

  “Where north?”

  “Canada. Not that that’s any of your business. But I got nothing to hide.” He pauses. “They got some space there. Was a time a man in this country could go anywhere on God’s green earth it pleased him, poor or proud. But the rich men keep putting all us dogs on the leash. Loitering law, vagrancy law. Old man like me can land in county jail for standing on a corner with empty pockets these days.”

  “Look,” I prompt him, “is there someplace we can go and talk?”

  “Talk what?”

  “Business.”

  “I don’t recollect no business to talk with you. What business I got to talk with you, Mr. Harry Vincent?”

  “Give me ten minutes. It might be your ticket up north.” I issue this like a challenge and that’s how he takes it. He weighs me grimly.

  “Come along then,” he says at last, turning on his heel for the bunkhouse.

  It is terribly still. The burned barn rides along in the corner of my eye, a black blot. I can feel the destroyed house at my back. The sombre windmill scatters sparrows into the air which wheel, shimmer in the sunlight like the leaves of an aspen, and then, one by one, drop back down solemnly on the struts of the windmill, pegs on a clothesline.

  The question presses me. “What in Christ happened here?”

  McAdoo points his finger at the house, at the barn, at the windmill. “This?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew the man owned this place, Austin Noble. He and his wife moved out here from Nebraska. Noble’d been a cattle-buyer. They was an old couple, Austin and his wife, didn’t have no kids, nothing was holding them in Nebraska; get shut of the winter cold, they figured, eat oranges in California. So they sold up in Nebraska, bought this place; he kept a few horses, she kept a few chickens. Hired a man to farm the rest of the land. They was here about a year and his wife took sick, something about the heart, the lungs.” He shrugs. “Might been both. She died. One morning, he gets up, sets fire to the house. Walks out in the yard, puts a torch to the barn. Next, the windmill. Hired man seen it. He run and hid himself in that clump of trees yonder. Austin was making for the bunkhouse but then he must have recollected he had a man living there. He stops in his tracks, takes a pistol out of his pocket, puts in it his mouth, pulls the trigger.” McAdoo halts, directs me. “Just over there.” He resumes walking. “Property went to a brother of Austin’s in Omaha. He figures to sell it to one of them movie studios – they turn it into another Universal, another Inceville – make him a rich man. Big shit ideas. He don’t know you going to pass property off on them boys you got to sell scenery. Ain’t no fucking scenery to speak of here. But that’s right to my purpose. He can set tight in Omaha waiting for an offer and I can set tight here until he gets one.”

  The bunkhouse must once have housed eight or ten men, but now it’s sadly decayed, its footings raggedly fringed with last year’s brown grass and this year’s verdigris weeds. The only sign of life is the swallows ducking in and out of mud nests daubed under the eaves, scrolling the palimpsest of dusk with their pursuit of insects. McAdoo pushes the door open and I follow him in. Because of the tar-papered windows, a kerosene lamp sits on an apple box at the far end of a room long and narrow as a shooting gallery, the light making luminous the sheets of an unmade bed. German expressionism, I think to myself. A lot of cameramen would give their eyeteeth for that shot.

  McAdoo waves me down the room. As he does, his suit jacket flaps open and I glimpse a pistol in the waistband of his pants. He put the jacket on to conceal his weapon. With a man carrying a pistol at my back, the short walk down the room lengthens alarmingly.

  Signs of the former occupants have not all been erased. Against either wall, to the left and to the right, the skeletons of iron cots stand, skinned of their mattresses, a pile of old magazines stacked at the foot of one of them. Defunct calendars curl on the walls. I slip by a cast-iron stove with a coal-scuttle tipped beside it.

  Halting in the pool of lamplight, McAdoo indicates a wooden chair. “Set yourself,” he says, sagging down on his bed. The harsh light shining up from the apple box drills his eyes even deeper into his skull, bathes the bony forehead in a fierce, waxy glow. His face appears on the verge of melting. Putting a hand inside his coat he draws out the revolver and lays it down on the mattress beside his leg. “You armed?” he asks quietly.

  “God, no, I’m not armed.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not armed.”

  “Stand up and hold out your arms,” he orders. His hands run expertly down my sides, pat my pockets, slide down the inside of my trousers. “All right, set again,” he says. “We don’t have to think about that no more.”

  I settle myself gingerly on the chair.

  “You got
to watch your step in these lonesome parts,” he remarks. “I blame these picture people. Every lazy no-account’s heard how they’ll pay you five dollar a day to stand in a crowd, holler and wave your arms. Easy money, no work, they think. Flame for the wrong kind of moths. A week ago I come in here and some ugly son of a bitch and his head lice is laying in my bed. Drifter. Clear out my bunk, I said. Know what he done? Give me a big smile, fiddled out his cod and asked for a suck. If I didn’t run the bastards off, this place’d be just the same as one of them goddamn downtown missions. I’d be lying awake of a night listening to old men bugger each other. No thanks to that music. This is my home.” He pauses. “And I don’t recall offering you no invitation.”

  “Point taken. You didn’t.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t.” He waits.

  I light a cigarette, my hands are trembling. I pass McAdoo the pack.

  “Obliged,” he says. “This is my first in a goodly time.” He wolfs down the smoke, makes to return the package.

  “Keep them,” I say.

  He presses them into my palm. His fingers feel like they’ve been whittled from something cold and hard, like ivory.

  “What I mean is, keep them, you’re a long way from supplies,” I say by way of apology.

  “I make out fine. I come here with supplies,” he declares. “Coffee, dried peas, beans. I planted me a truck garden, some of it’s showing now. There’s quail abouts, and rabbit for flesh. I shot a small doe last month. There’s still some deer in this country, not many, but some.”

  “You’re living wild then.”

  “Hell, a roof ain’t wild. This ain’t living wild.”

  “Tobacco doesn’t grow wild for the picking,” I say. “You take it.”

  He doesn’t object this time, just tucks the cigarettes away in his shirt pocket. But I guess he feels his need has compromised him. He says angrily, “I tell you this Hollywood is one sour pot of milk, can hardly see it for the flies.” He gets to his feet with a savage jerk of the shoulders and moves to the stove. In a barely audible voice he remarks, “Nothing colder’n a cold stove. Why’s that? I get a bad headache I always lay her on a cold stove.” He stoops over, presses his forehead to the stove, his hands loosely cupped around the swell of the fire-box. A strange, oddly disturbing sight, as if he is resting his head on a woman’s breast, his hands on her hips. Consolation. The old man doesn’t stir. I can hear my watch measuring the stillness. Maybe he’s faint with hunger.