Scotty trotted up. Silt from the river had dried on his face in a fine, pale powder. It lent him a ghastly, otherworldly air, as if he were one of the risen dead answering to the last trump. A ghost with an odd look in his eye.
“I see Harris tweed in this howling wilderness,” he remarked.
“Which one’s Harris Tweed?” The Englishman’s boy glanced about him.
Scotty brushed the boy’s sleeve, fingered it covetously. “This is Harris tweed.”
“The stuff?”
“Yes,” said Scotty. “Harris tweed cut and stitched by a gentleman’s tailor.”
“Ain’t no gentleman wearing it.”
“Gentlemen are not commonly found in these parts. The conditions are not favourable for their support.”
“The one owned this coat died right enough,” said the boy.
The Scotchman sighed. “Misadventures are legion here. Road agents, sickness, storms, snakes, Indians -”
“Deep water with a fool in it.”
“Indeed.”
They rode on in silence for several minutes. Whereupon Scotty made a mournful request. “You wouldn’t consider selling me that jacket, would you?”
“No.”
“It’s sizes too big for you.”
“What’s the matter with the coat you got?”
The Scotchman stared down at its travel-stained front. “I suppose it’s largely a matter of comparison between the two. I mean to say -” He turned back to the Englishman’s boy. “The maker’s label on your jacket – what does it read?”
“Couldn’t say. Can’t read but a little.”
“If you would permit me?” They stopped their horses and Scotty short-sightedly scrutinized the jacket lining. “London,” he said at last, rebuttoning the jacket like a fond father putting his son in order before Sunday service. “Cruikshank’s.”
The boy held up the sleeve and showed him where the blood of the Benton hotel-keeper had drenched the cuff. “Spoiled,” he said.
Scotty ruefully shook his head, tightened his lips.
They moved on. The Scotchman said, “If I was to claim to have once been a gentleman, would you believe me?”
“I ain’t about to call you a liar.”
“I ask because you’re the only one of these fellows here who has had society with a gentleman. My mother was fond of saying that the definition of a gentleman is one who never inflicts pain.” He contemplated for a moment. “On the other hand, it is said clothes do make the man. A Cruikshank coat couldn’t hurt,” he mused aloud. “Men in animal skins -” He cast a nervous, furtive glance at some of the half-breeds in buckskin. “Well, perhaps they acquire the characteristics of what they wear. What do you think?”
“I never gave it any thought.”
“I confess regret at not having spoken up about the treatment of that chap at the ford. But when in Rome…” His voice faded off.
“It wouldn’t made no difference. I don’t believe there’s a man among us is up to changing Hardwick’s mind.”
“Not Evans?”
A harsh bark of derisive laughter.
“I had pinned my hopes on Evans,” said the Scotchman.
“Pin ’em on the donkey.”
“I believed I detected a strain of common decency in Evans.”
“Well, whatever strain’s in his friend Hardwick is right uncommon. You can go to the bank on that.”
Scotty fell dumb, growing more and more the sad and disillusioned spectre. Nursing, it seemed to the Englishman’s boy, thoughts of Hardwick, or disappointment over the refusal to sell him the tweed coat he set such store by. Or maybe both.
Crossing rolling countryside in late afternoon, the line of march scattered and ragged as it crawls up ridges and descends into declivities which cup unpalatable water with a white petticoat hem of alkali deposit peeking from under a dirty skirt of mud. Evans and Hardwick outlined in stark silhouette against a sheet of azure sky cleansed of every stain of cloud; Evans and Hardwick dropping out of sight behind a knoll to rise again in vivid resurrection, tiny black figures against a void, only suddenly to waver, to run and dissolve like characters written in weak, watery ink.
The Englishman’s boy dozing slumped in the saddle, hat tipped over his eyes, boots dangling loose in the stirrups, hands folded over the horn, horse wearily plodding on, rocking his saddle-cradle like a solicitous mother. Then, the surprise of a distant rifle-shot. The Englishman’s boy snapping awake, ears cocking, eyes springing like cats at the landscape. Held breath. A second crack, followed by a faint ringing, like the dying fall of a tuning fork, a sound wavering, dispersing in the blue vacancy.
Scotty gives a shout, rousing his horse into a gallop. The Englishman’s boy jerks his carbine from its scabbard, levers a cartridge into the chamber and turns loose after the Scotchman. Ahead, he sees five men spurring hard, rifles brandished in the air. They flounder over a knoll, disappear, suddenly reappear on the face of another barren swell, hounds of dust pursuing their heels. The boy leans into each rise over the withers of the scrambling horse, cocking himself forward in his stirrups; cants himself back in the saddle, toes up, when it drops on its haunches and slithers down a slope in a whirl of dust and pebbles. Up and down they go; two rises, three rises, four. He crests the fourth and suddenly there are no more. They’ve been rubbed flat. The sky rushes down to a great level span of monochrome – tarnished sage, withered bunch grass, dun dirt. A hundred yards beyond, the five horsemen are galloping to where their companions sit horses ranged along the horizon line like cups pushed flush to a table edge.
As he closes, he can hear shouting, wild cries, sees rifles bristling, horses stamping and wheeling. He reins his lathered horse in beside Scotty, stands in his stirrups to view the shivaree. Thirty yards off, Hardwick is on his horse, head to head with a big bull buffalo.
“Vogle was scouting for Indian trace when he spots this lone bull,” a man called George Bell tells them excitedly. “Hardwick bets Vogle he can’t take him down from back yonder, one shot with his Sharp’s buffalo gun. Vogle lets fly and misses clean. The buffalo breaks and Hardwick snaps off a chance shot. Lucky son of a bitch hits one of his legs and cripples him.” He points to the buffalo sidling and backing, shaggy head swinging slowly from side to side like a church bell tolling as Hardwick edges a nervous pony towards him.
Bell grins. “Tom’s just hazing that old buff. Playing some kind of bean-eater Mexican bullfighter, I reckon.”
Hardwick spurs his fidgety horse towards the bull. The bull lowers his head, lunges. Hardwick skips his horse to the side as the buffalo’s leg buckles, crashing him into the dust. There are war-whoops, rebel yells, shrill whistling.
The bull struggles up smeared with ashy dust, panting, maddened, drool hanging like tinsel from his beard. Hardwick slaps his horse forward with a rifle barrel along the flank and the bull bawls, hooks his horns into the earth, gores and rips the prairie, showering dust and dirt over his back, his blunt head.
The men are all bawling, answering the bull. Deep, sonorous bellows. Shouts. “That buffler is in a fine pucker, Tom! He’s a-looking to hook you up Salt River, he is!” “Fix his flint, Tom!”
And Hardwick, heeling his horse on, a cold, arrogant look on his face, rifle-stock planted on his hip. The bull dashes for the horse, the smashed leg crumples again and the buffalo capsizes, a blur of flailing legs. The wolfers guffaw, trumpet and bellow. Hardwick steps his horse daintily around the buffalo while the bull strains to rise, great hump and shoulders pitching, wrenching himself up to totter on three legs, fractured foreleg flapping like a broken branch only held together by a shred of bark.
Hardwick presses the jibbing horse to where the bull waits with black, distended tongue and blood-red eyes, shaking his huge head, flinging threads of slobber into his dirty, matted wool, massive shoulders bridling, the curved, polished horns hooking the air. Hardwick, erect in the saddle, eyes on the bull, rowels the horse on. The musk of the bull flaring the mare’s nostrils, lift
ing her head higher and higher on a twisted neck, turning her eyes crazed and white, firing her hind legs into an executioner’s drum roll.
They are all shouting now, some in English, some in French. To the Englishman’s boy, the Frenchies’ gibbering is crazy folks’ noise, the babble of the county madhouse. Beside him he can hear Bell shouting frantic encouragement to Hardwick. “Go it, boy! Take him by the tail!”
The heavy head rises, the red eyes stare.
The Englishman’s boy ducks at the sudden explosion beside his ear. Hardwick’s horse is rearing and Hardwick clinging to her back. An acrid whiff of gunpowder sweeps like smelling salts through the head of the Englishman’s boy. The bull is slowly dropping to the earth, a mass of meat and bone sinking slowly under its own weight, hindquarters slumping, head lolling. He subsides into the bunch grass with a groan, a whoosh of dust squirts out from under the collapsing body.
The Englishman’s boy speaks to Scotty. Cannot hear his own voice. Scotty does not hear it either. His rifle is still tucked in his shoulder and he is looking down the steel-blue barrel at the dying buffalo. A whiff of blue smoke unravels when he slowly lowers the carbine. Now the Englishman’s boy can hear Hardwick shouting angrily, wanting to know who the fuck has meddled in his frolic.
The Englishman’s boy has never seen the like. Vogle cuts the throat and the blood pours out thick and hot, a couple of the breeds catching it in tin cups like water from a pump, gulping it down. Devereux steps forward and splits the skull with a hand-axe, dipping brains with his fingers. Others scatter blue and yellow guts in the scramble for the heart and liver; where the intestines have snaked and coiled the grass wears a greasy shine. Charlie Harper slices buffalo hump like it was a loaf of bread.
Hardwick yanks the liver out of Duval’s hand. Duval doesn’t argue, doesn’t object when Hardwick stalks off to hunker moodily on the ground. Holding the liver in his left hand, he grips it in his teeth, saws off a piece of the flesh with the hunting knife in his right. In a loud voice, between bites, he recollects a British hunter who had travelled with the wolfers for a season and had gladly eaten his meat raw. “He wasn’t too high-toned and almighty to take his meat rare. Learned to like it and his women the same way – red and raw. He didn’t put on no goddamn airs, did he, boys?” says Hardwick, staring at the Scotchman, who has refused to join the feast.
The Englishman’s boy makes himself scarce, disappears amidst the hobbled horses.
The Scotchman sits alone on the grass, looking past the bloody banquet. Like a bystander in shock at a train wreck. Refusing to see.
12
The way he ties into the groceries I deliver makes me suspect the old man has been living on jack-rabbit and not much else. He starts with the cheese, paring cheddar from the wedge, shingling his soda crackers with paper-thin slices. Unhurried, steady chewing, a ruminative savouring of flavour, old turtle eyes squinching up with delight. After that, a can of sardines, forked up with the blade of a jackknife, the empty can mopped clean of the last of the oil, polished shiny with a dry heel of bread stored in the apple box by his bed.
“That was some fine!” he exclaims, wiping his mouth, hefting a can of peaches. The fruit ceremonially relished piece by piece, rolled slippery and sweet in the mouth, mulled over. The juice drunk off with a sigh and stately bobbing of Adam’s apple in the loose skin of the throat. Last of all, he uncorks the whisky, sloshes it into the tin, rinses the film of sugary syrup around and around, sips and grins, sips and grins his gaunt old man’s smile while studying the label, its pictures of tawny, blushing fruit.
I get up and go to the door for a breath of air; it is stiflingly hot in the bunkhouse. I look out at the burned house and barn, the quixotic scorched windmill. This abandoned ranch, this barren portion of earth might be the photographic negative of the Golden State. Hollywood is supposed to be orange blossoms, eucalyptus, jasmine, palmetto palms, pepper trees, geraniums, bougainvillea, roses, poinsettias flourishing wild in the Hollywood hills. Hollywood is supposed to be soft breezes, the languishing blue eyes of swimming pools, the waves of the Pacific rhythmically combing miles of smooth sand. It is supposed to be flowers and flesh, Mack Sennett bathing beauties, Valentinoish males. Longing, clinging, beckoning. That is what California is supposed to be. Love, riches, fame, dreams, wild possibility. Not blackened, ruined buildings, a half-starved old man filling himself with sickeningly sweet canned fruit, dust chasing dust, blind windows and rusted locks, suspended action, the camera crank stuck. Suspended action, the failure to find the right key for his rusted lock, is what the rest of the morning turns into.
I don’t make much headway because I press too hard. The long frustrating search for Shorty McAdoo makes me impatient of further delay. I feel my life gathering speed, impelling me onward like the compulsive forward momentum of motion pictures Chance talks about.
Forward momentum, however, does not sit well with Shorty McAdoo. I ask a question about Indian fighting and he says, “Only thing them peaches lacked was a dollop of yellow cream. Churn it into that heavy syrup – Lord, my toes curl.”
“I’ll get you some tomorrow,” I say.
He nods slowly, stroking his bottom lip with his thumb.
I back off on the Indians. There is obviously something there, but it isn’t for today. I have a feeling about McAdoo, that he wants to talk. At the mention of Indians, his jaw clamped down hard, just the way a recovering alcoholic picks up his pace passing the entrance to a bar.
So I draw back, but keep my pencil and my pad in prominent view. I want him to get used to the sight of them, see them as a natural part of me, ordinary as my ear, or my nose, rob them of any power to turn him self-conscious. I am trying to ease Shorty McAdoo into conversation the way you ease yourself into a scalding bath. My mistake is that McAdoo has been in more scalding baths than I have. I ask easy questions. He replies with teasing answers.
Where was he born? He tucks his tongue into his cheek and examines the ceiling. Couldn’t rightly say. He didn’t have the papers on it.
Where did he think he was born then? He’d never given it too much thinking, he says. His mother said she got him from under a cabbage, but never named the patch. She’d been a godly, upright, Christian woman, so he’d take her word for it until somebody proved him wrong. She’d died of gravel and stone of the kidney when he was about seven, so he’d never heard her supply a correction.
What did his people do? Farmed.
Where? Ends of the bloody earth.
What ends of what bloody earth? Made no difference. If I wanted the nearest post office, write down hell.
“I’m not checking up on you,” I say. “What difference would the truth make?”
“You got it right,” he says. “What difference would it make?”
I want to know what made it hell.
“Worked harder and ate worst than the mules.”
“What did you raise on your farm?”
“Stones.”
Does he have any family living? He shrugs. His daddy is dead. Died when Shorty was twelve, of unspecified complaints. His brother might be dead or alive, might have children, he doesn’t know. He’d put distance between himself and hell as quick as he could.
Where did he go? On the wander.
Wander where? No place to speak of. Every place. Just on the wander.
How old was he when he went on the wander? It was a long time ago. Maybe he was thirteen, maybe fourteen, couldn’t testify exactly. One day he scooted, just up and scooted. Spent the summer snitching vegetables from gardens, snaring game. If I didn’t tell anybody, he’d lifted a few chickens and milked a cow or two didn’t belong to him.
After that? After that, this and that. Come first snow, a sheriff arrested him for vagrancy or beggary, some charge along those lines. The county sold him to a farmer who paid his five-dollar fine. He was bound over to pay off the cash owed to Mr. Good Samaritan. Drew a six-month sentence. Worked out to eighty-three cents a month, room and board. Mr. Samaritan f
igured he’d scamper first chance he got, which was about right, so he chained him up in a cold chop-box every night. He might have starved if it weren’t for that chop-box; ate pig feed by the handful, the farmer weren’t a heavy feeder of jailhouse help. He was due for release in May but May came and the farmer said he weren’t going nowhere. He’d broke a fifty-cent saw blade, had to work that off before he was free and clear, all debts discharged. All right, he’d said. Don’t matter. Another month and I’ll be dead of starvation anyways. But just so Mr. Samaritan knew. Watch his Christian back waking and sleeping. He didn’t care. They’d hang him for it but he’d see the farmer breeding maggots first. So help him God, he’d put a pitchfork in his guts, a chisel in his head, an axe in his back, he’d bash his brains with a rock till they splashed. If he didn’t kill him, he’d burn his barn or house.
“And,” I say, “what was the result?”
“He give me a cool glass of buttermilk and some warm corn bread – with butter. He put a bit of salt pork in my satchel. He made his nigger take the boots right off his feet and give them to me. A man travels faster with boots on his feet.” He sends me a confiding look, his tongue mischievously tucked in his cheek. “You think your rich man going to like that story? That one going to sell?”
“It might, if that isn’t all. Tell me you met an angel of mercy on that road from the farmer’s house who turned your life around and put forgiveness in your heart. Tell me you went on to found a great business and endow numerous homes for orphans. Is it possible you did any of those things, Mr. McAdoo?”
He smiles to show we understand one another. “Hell no, Harry, I didn’t get around to doing none of them things.”
I close my pad and put my pencil in my pocket. “Then this was just practice,” I say. “I’m a little rusty with the shorthand and you’re a little rusty finding the right stories. Both of us will improve as time goes by.” I open my wallet and pass him the money. “Let’s see how we manage tomorrow.”
The Englishman’s Boy Page 13
