by Peter Bowen
“Why waste all that time,” I says. “Just kill me now, Bridger would enjoy that.”
“I have things I must do,” said Washakie. “When they are done, we will go and make war.”
“What do I do while we wait,” I snarls. “Braid the tails and manes on your horses?”
“Hum,” said Washakie, “I think you better chase that little piece you met when you hid in the lodge.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Slight a Shoshone girl, she’ll cut off your balls,” said Washakie.
I slumped down and sat on a nearby rock with my head in my hands and stared hard at a black beetle struggling through a grass thicket near my boot-tips.
Washakie went off whistling sunnily.
I was to sit on that rock for a half hour or something, and in addition to my complete ignorance of the proper methods of blood and slaughter I was somewhat mystified at the thought of courting any girl. The Bishop’s daughter and the Sioux maidens hadn’t exactly polished me for smooth talk. Bridger had given me a lot of knowing about the country and I had a shivering sense that war school with Washakie was not going to be restful.
These savage Injuns likely courted by bringing the girl a sack of grizzly hearts or something. I got up and walked back to the camp and dropped the gear off the horses and then took them out to the big meadow and let them go.
When I got back to the guest lodge all my gear was gone. I thought Washakie had tossed it inside and I thought not much of it. I wandered off and found the spring the camp drank from. It was a huge spring, twenty feet across, and the water rose out of it swiftly, and made a good-sized creek that ran into the river a half mile away.
I drank long and deep and cooled my face—the sun was hot and there was thunderheads gathering to the west, they always sort of formed up there and when there were enough, on they came. A little black and yellow canary trilled at me and a pair of magpies went mad when I come near their nest on the way back. I thought I’d take some sleep and see what the morrow would give over in the way of humiliations.
I crawled in through the door and peeled off my boots and laid out. The teepee had been rolled up a little so there was a cool draught on my forehead.
I was ready to turn over and sleep when I saw a flash of light across the teepee from me. I squinted into the darkness and saw a woman kneeling. She didn’t have a stitch of clothing on.
It was the girl who’d sat on me earlier, when I was hiding from Bridger and the Mormons.
8
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS has fallen off me I have decided that women decide things and then they have a big wedding so men, who are pretty thick, know a point has been made even if they ain’t never sure what it was. It warn’t no different there in Washakie’s camp. I’d been chose and that was that.
Well, boys, I sat on her and there you have it.
I asked her in sign language just what in the hell she was doing here and I got back the hand over the mouth and the giggle. I was some distracted that she didn’t have a scrap of anything on and she was purely beautiful. I finally made a grab for her and she popped me a good one in the nose with her little hand. I lay there reflectively holding my whacked snoot and wondering why I was here at all. She started in on the buttons of my shirt and as soon as I was naked she lay down beside me and at it we went, started slow and clumsy and then the pace picked up.
“HHaaaahhhhhhh!!” someone screamed five feet away. A squaw tossed off the buffalo robe she’d been hiding under and went out the door and I could hear her bellering the news at the top of her lungs to all in hearing, and that meant everybody. A considerable crowd gathered outside singing and there was a lot of advice shouted that I could understand only by sensing the shift of intentions on the part of the girl. It was a most strenuous afternoon.
We was lying there, spent, and then the girl got up, put on her dress and moccasins, and came back to me. I smiled and she damn near knocked my teeth down my throat. She scuttled out the door and there was hoots and cries fading off in the distance toward the river.
I pulled on my clothes and boots and went looking for Washakie, and I was a tad worried that I had somehow offended the little minx and this was her way to get her father to cut off my balls. I wondered who her father was. I was getting a little jumpy of women, what with the Bishop’s daughter and this slender charmer in my lent lodge, and how all tales seemed to end with Luther gelded and such. It can make a feller peckish, a life as hurried and confusing as mine had been these last couple years.
Washakie was nowhere to be seen. I walked toward the bluffs behind the camp, past the big spring, and I found a cleft with a trail good enough for a goat so I went up it and come out on the top. I could see fifty miles or more south of me and behind me there was a faint blue haze on the horizon where the mountains was. I sat up there pitching pebbles over the edge and hearing them thwock on the scree.
An eagle sailed in and hovered right in front of me, not a hundred feet away, moving his pinion feathers to catch the little winds. He was looking down at something. Then he decided it wasn’t interesting and banked away, whirling up till he was so high I lost him.
I wandered back down to the camp and asked about for Washakie, and got told he was in council and couldn’t be disturbed. I could hear his big voice coming from the council lodge, so I waited nearby, hiding behind a rack of drying jerky. I crouched sort of protectively over my balls, feeling much put upon.
He come out after the pipe-smoking and I fastened on to him like a bulldog and asked him to do something before my balls was sawed off by this slender girl had just attacked me in the guest lodge.
I got the fatherly diatribe to end ’em all because the girl, of course, was Washakie’s. What in the whiteman hell did I think I was doing complaining to Washakie, father of Eats-Men-Whole, a young woman of virtues I was too coarse to appreciate. Wasn’t she good enough for me? Not good enough in the robes? Had I et of her cooking. How lucky I should feel that this woman would find a worthless paleface jackass stripling attractive. She saw good things in me that Washakie couldn’t see at all. I looked to him like I’d been raised in the dark and fed magpie shit. I was so stupid horseflies wouldn’t bite me, afraid they’d forget how to fly. I was the lowest form of whiteman scum and the only thing he could think of to recommend me at all was that I warn’t a Mormon.
Washakie’s great friend Big Throat had asked Washakie to take Luther and make him a warrior. Biggest challenge that Washakie had ever faced, but he’d do it, and Washakie had always observed that a warrior was lots more efficientlike if he had a nice hot piece at home to think on while shooting and stabbing and scalping. But if in my white jackass ninnyhammering pride I wished to fling his lovely daughter, the pride of his decrepit old age, fling her back into his ancient lap he, Washakie, would bear no ill-feelings at all forever and the matter would not be brung up by Washakie again.
I’d heard speeches of this nature from my uncle Angus, on different subjects to be sure, but I’d heard them.
“Like hell you won’t do anything you bloodthirsty goddamned old pirate,” I yelled. “You won’t have to, that daughter of yours will cut off my balls. Eats-Men-Whole, was it? Nice name, you musta thought for days on that one. Well, I think she’s beautiful and I’m honored to be a part of your family. Has any one in it died a natural death for the last three centuries?”
Washakie’s smile would have blinded the moon.
“Big Throat said you had sand,” he said, “if one dug enough. Now, Eats-Men-Whole, when she was a little girl, would go to the traders with me, and she loved the gingerbread cookies that the traders sold. They were in the shape of men.”
“My only regret is that Big Throat ain’t here to be at the wedding,” I says. “He gets so little amusement of his life.”
There is a particular shit-eating grin that some of my good friends has worn from time to time, when they has gone and got me in a fearful and embarrassing tangle and can now set and watch as I claw and wiggle my wa
y out of it. Some of them spend years in the thinking up of these traps and the sheer joy they pump out their pores when they finally got me up a stump runs kneedeep and sticky. (Of course, I do the same thing.)
Washakie was as pleased as he could be. He’d got his last daughter all married off and out of his old gray and white hairs, to some kid Bridger had flung at him like a weepy booby prize.
Washakie also had an apprentice to make miserable, which would fight off boredom and such. Washakie was a shrewd judge of character, and he knew that Eats-Men-Whole would have me in a constant state of confusion that was the best foundation for a marriage. If the old bastard had been a college professor he would have taught something useless and complex.
Washakie was pleased as a dog in a field of fresh cow shit, and he took me by the arm and marched me back to my new home, the one complete with bride, dog stew, warpole, robes, and a priceless family heirloom, the dried head of a Blackfoot Washakie had taken a particular and deep dislike to, so much that Washakie had killed the man and cut out his heart and et it, and then slow-smoked the feller’s head after scalping him.
This treasured souvenir was hauled out of its verdigris-green buffalo hide case on ceremonial occasions, when Washakie would piss on it while making nasty comments on the Blackfeet in general and this here specimen in particular.
Eats-Men-Whole was standing demurely by the door of the lodge, wearing a white doeskin dress and leggin’s and beaded moccasins and she had an angelic expression on her face, which did not match the bloodthirsty old pirate she had for a father or her considerable left hook. The two of them embraced touchingly, ignoring the dolt of a husband she had decided to take.
Washakie joined our hands in his huge paw, sang a short song, burned some sweetgrass, and then beamed happily at his children. Especially his son-in-law, and for some reason his smile did not warm me.
Eats-Men-Whole waited a decent interval, upwards of a minute, and then she grabbed my hand and led me off to our lodge. A good-sized crowd had assembled and was shouting instructions and all manner of encouragement while Washakie stood there grinning. I wished I had a cannon plumb full of grapeshot. Eats-Men-Whole near jerked me off my feet when she dived through the door. I sort of fell through it and covered the hole with a robe hung there for that purpose.
Eats-Men-Whole shucked off her dress, leggin’s, and moccasins and stood there in the creamy light, all soft curves, smiling. She had very long legs and high breasts and she’d been born sassy. When the pace I was removing my clothes at didn’t please her she started tearing my shirt off, and the sound of ripping cloth was hailed with loud cheers outside where the crowd was.
We went at it with great enthusiasm, and after the fourth time I’d shot off I was so winded I couldn’t even lift my head from the robe. (A few years later I happened to be out on the Smith River, at the end of the salmon run. The salmon die after spawning, but before they die they float for a time belly up, fins wiggling in faint jerks, head downriver, too far gone to care. They wait and hope on death and it is received gratefully. Them salmon always put me in mind of my honeymoon.)
The next morning I managed to crawl to what was left of my clothes, signing that if I didn’t piss I’d begin to leak everywhere, streams running out my ears and what a terrible sight and all. I slung my rags about me and pulled on my boots and crawled out the door, to find about two hundred Shoshones of all ages, my dear father-in-law included, ringed around the teepee.
I didn’t doubt but assumed that they would shortly tot up the scores and I’d get a cheer or a hissing. I stomped off and found a tree and stood behind it pissing for what seemed like half an hour. I checked my dick for blisters and spur marks and it seemed to be all right. One more night like the last one and I’ll be all paralyzed for life anyway. I walked to the spring and fell in it and drank deep of the clean cold water and thought about drowning.
When I come out of the spring Washakie was standing there looking so pleased I thought I’d vomit.
“Eats-Men-Whole hopes that she has pleased you,” Washakie rumbled, “and wishes to tell you that she now believes the lies she heard from the lodges of the Brule Sioux are lies.”
“Lies from the lodges of the Brule?” I said, thinking on just screaming for an hour or two. “So let me guess. I’ll just bet any money you care to name that Spotted Tail is a relation of mine.”
“Spotted Tail, your uncle,” said Washakie, “who you respect and honor.”
I nodded. I thought I could have stayed home and gone into the law or graverobbing or something honorable like that.
“Your cock seems to be big enough and if you will go back to the lodge she will have new ways to please you.”
“New ways to please me,” I said, with all the bright enthusiasm I could muster. I think my voice broke.
“And if you don’t go back pretty quick she will think that she hasn’t pleased you and she will be hurt and she will probably ...”
“Don’t say it,” I said holding up my hand. “Please. Please don’t say it.”
“When I was a young man we always took two wives at a time,” Washakie observed, looking at me like I was an order gone wrong from Sears, Roebuck. “Men have lessened lately.”
Well, as a young feller with the blood rising I couldn’t stop thinking about screwing and now it seemed I was going to die of it. Sometimes the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it.
A beautiful doom, though, a beautiful doom. Just thinking about Eats-Men-Whole and my balls began to heat up, she was a lovely woman, aside from her choice of fathers and uncles. And as Washakie no doubt planned, my interest in going off on a war journey increased as my dick sanded down.
Eats-Men-Whole would stop from time to time to force various vile concoctions down me, chased by big bowls of dog stew to keep my strength up and she painted my face with symbols that was easy to read as to their intent. While I tried to catch my breath she would think up new approaches and after a week I looked like a feller dead forty-eight hours of the consumption.
The only resting time I had I got when she was off stocking up on fresh suggestions from older women. When she had techniques enough to last all night she’d come back.
On one of my infrequent crabwise forays out into the wide and vertical world I run on to my father-in-law and I allowed as how I needed a rest in a desperate way so could we go kill and scalp a few hundred folks. Tribe and race no problem, anything he might want for his warpole. I wanted to wade up to my hips in blood.
“I’m down to half a pecker and a moan,” I said. “I never was much up to blood and slaughter before but damn if it don’t seem to sound restful-like. I’ve only killed a couple folks and that hardly counts.”
“We have to build a sweat lodge and refrain three days from women before we go,” says Washakie.
“Where do you want this here sweat lodge,” I says. “How ’bout right over there? Lots of saplings about. I’ll just hotfoot it back to my traps and get a hatchet and ...”
“Yes, my son,” said Washakie, laughing.
Eats-Men-Whole took it all in good part, and she threw herself into preparing foul potions of mallard guts, bat hair, and frog eyeballs to give me strength, wiliness, luck, and courage.
Washakie and me took frequent sweats in the lodge, pouring water over hot stones and singing holy songs and telling dirty jokes. And Washakie told me his life, what he cared to have me know. He’d been born around 1800, up in the high Wind River country, and fetched up between the Great Salt Lake and the buffalo country to the east, on the Republican River. He went to work as a trapper for the Hudson’s Bay Company around 1815, and trapped till the beaver were gone. Around 1840 he had taken to guiding pilgrims over the Oregon Trail.
“I took the Mormons to the Great Salt Lake—Big Throat asked me to—thinking that it was such bad country they would go on and die in the white deserts on their way to California. But they liked it. Jim and me, we stayed drunk a month on that mistake. Life is not
all victories.” Washakie poured more water on the hot stones. I was beginning to feel a little less pale and wan.
Washakie talked of his buffalo hunts and the mountains and waters. There were so many whites, he knew, that the Indian was doomed, doomed to vanish like the snow in spring. So he got along with the whites. They were crazy, and there were a lot of them.
“What would you do if we weren’t so many?” I said.
“Kill all of you, even Bridger and the Rope Thrower.” He smiled after he said it, but when he said it his eyes were hard.
We slept in our lodges, of course, and now that we were getting ready to go and had to abstain from fucking I fell into one of those traps that had been there all along. I was signing to Eats-Men-Whole and fishing for a word when she got that sunny smile on her face, giggled, and said, “I speak English and write it, too.”
I’d been the fool so often and so long I just sort of goggled at her and didn’t say anything at all.
We would be leaving at first light and I had to get some rest. There I lay, my mind racing, and then I dropped off and pretty soon I was woke up by my bladder—that’s how Injuns rise early, they drink a lot of water the night before.
It took time to get the war paint and war clothes on and pack the horses, and the sun was near up when we went off down the trail, each of us riding a leggy horse for the fast work and leading a strong, stock one for our traps and loot. We both had repeating rifles and revolvers. Washakie was real sour about these whiteman inventions, he felt they give fools and dwarfs advantages they should not possess and the art of war suffered accordingly. Why, he said, when he was young a warrior would often jam his hand down an opponent’s throat and rip out his lungs, disdaining even the using of a knife.
“What’d ya do with all the lungs?” I asked, getting a scowl as reward for not being awed enough.
“Wiped them on our arses,” said Washakie.
