by Peter Bowen
The train rolled across the wintered fields of fat and prosperous Illinois toward Chicago, and the thousand miles of track that led on to New York.
We pulled into the main station about five in the afternoon and got out on the platform, which was filled with relatives and everyone anxious to find their travelers.
One tall man in coachman’s rough costume was looking for someone, and when we passed him he raised a hand.
“I am here for William Drouillette,” he says. “Did you see him on the train?”
“No,” says Alys, bold as ever. “But then we have a private car.”
While we waited for the cab I ordered up, the crowd thinned.
The coachman was the last to turn away.
I hadn’t seen Blue Fox on the platform.
15
“THE GRAND UNION HOTEL,” Alys says to the cabby. We put our two small bags in the coach with us and the feller took off right smart, headed south. Even in cities I look up at the sky, a habit of wantin’ to know where I am.
“That bastard killed Drouillette and took his sleeping room,” says Alys. “He must have been with those Indians.”
I sighed.
“You want to get your papers back to Laramie,” I says, “it can be done with Blue Fox’s help or not at all.”
Alys swiveled round to face me.
“Kill him,” she says. She was the sort of girl cuts right to a good tight solution first thing.
“He’s gone,” I says, “and that’s that. No telling where. He could show up at a tea in New York, all I know.”
“Why would he bother to attack the train and get on and kill some passenger?”
Alys might get to the end of Blue Fox, but I thought maybe not. The truth of the matter is the man was mad and enjoyed jumping from one world to another. And a madness like that grows and shapes to something terrifying, some elemental force of evil been around for a while, and scared people into making up gods by the thousands to be some shield against it. I got no better explanation. There ain’t one.
I have a great respect for warriors, whether they wear paint and feathers or Army blue, but hard as many men had tried to kill me, there weren’t no malice in it at all. We just happened to be the ones got to try conclusions on behalf of others.
But Blue Fox was different, and he flat scared me. For one thing, you got no real way of figuring what a crazy man will do.
Alys kept a suite of rooms at the Grand Union—I’d passed by it, but it was far too grand for the likes of me. The doormen all was retired infantry sergeants, I’d lay gold on.
We was hustled up to the rooms without no sly glances, and I wondered if I was the first to come there with her, and then I thought not. Like me, she did what she pleased and be damned to the public, whoever they are.
We got cleaned up and I would go in the morning and get some more clothes.
We went downstairs for supper and then walked on the promenade for a while. The stink of coal smoke was everywhere and had been since Laramie. Chicago was bustling, factories turning out goods and the slaughterhouses running ’round the clock. Now that the railroad went clear to the San Francisco Bay it would get even busier, heart of America, out in the corn.
We went back up after ordering some whiskey and brandy and seegars and soda and such, and was into our second drink when there was a firm rap on the door like police give the world round. I knew of no warrants out on me for the moment, except a couple in Utah and one in Arizona—a clear case of mistaken identity, since I had never been there.
I opened up and there was a constable and another man in black, quiet and leathery, a Pinkerton for sure.
They was pleasant, asked if we had seen Mr. Drouillette on the train. I said we had dined with him and shared a drink or two in the private car.
“Could you describe the feller?” says the Pinkerton.
I says he was dark enough to be Indian and black-haired, and dressed well right down to a waistcoat, watch, and Elks fob.
“Dark you say, sir?”
He looked at the constable.
So I gave a detailed description of Blue Fox, right down to the cut on the back of his right hand.
“You’re Kelly,” says the Pink, “and I will tell you that though we have Mr. Drouillette as probably dead, he was blond and tall and two conductors who had been on the train from Salt Lake are also missing. They would have known what the real Mr. Drouillette looked like. So I am afraid your dark-complected friend is a triple murderer.”
I’d guess Blue Fox’s victims was over a hundred, what little I had seen, but I warn’t going to elaborate.
“The railroad regrets any inconvenience,” says the Pink, “and will raise hell in Washington.” The Pinkerton man looked at Alys and blushed—he’d forgot there was a lady present. He spluttered apologies, and the two of them left.
“That man is a perfect monster,” says Alys.
I nodded, no disagreement there.
I wasn’t going to say nothing at the moment, but I would be right happy to kill Blue Fox I could find the bastard, so long as I killed him far away from the lands of the Cheyenne. If he was there when we headed out from Laramie in the spring, I couldn’t touch him, and mad though he was he knew that.
He would have shed the late Mr. Drouillette’s duds by now and look like someone else, and be out there headed somewheres but I knew in my gut I’d run on to him someplace out East, New York or Boston or one of those hellholes.
I was in a black funk and thinking so loud Alys heard my thoughts, for she came behind the chair I was slouched in and she leaned down and put her arms around me and whispered that I just had to do it.
“You know,” I says, growling, “I could have stayed in Laramie being drunk a lot and ...”
“If you mention that whorehouse,” Alys purred, “I will use a shotgun on you ... sweet Luther.”
Right then I resolved first opportunity to cut and run, go to the West Coast and bide a while, until the Cheyenne madman and the lunatic scientists and this luscious wench had killed each other off. I would be nice and safe, and I purely hate getting dragged into fights I ain’t planned on. And I plan damn few, and favor a single shot from a buffalo rifle. You want a brave feller stalking down the dusty street to fight with other pistoleros, go look up Hickok.
“Poor Luther,” Alys murmured. “He wants to run and hide and let all of this go away, but I won’t let him. You black Irish son of a bitch, you’re as transparent as glass, and I will break you up like a cheap windowpane you run out on me.”
“How could you think that of me?” I sputters, trying to sound convincing.
“People who get reputations as glowing as yours is are all the same, Luther, my sweet, unprincipled fellers come out looking best,” says Alys.
“And how,” I says, “do you figure that about me?”
Alys run her fingernail down my cheek, digging it in just enough to hurt a little.
“Women,” she purred, “have to be ever so much more clever than men. You are so big and strong and powerful, which is never, my dear, a substitute for brains.”
I felt something cold in my ear, and I knew that it was her little pistol. She laid the barrel lovingly in my earhole and explained the life of Luther from henceforth, and how short and painful that life would be if I gave in to my baser instincts, as I had all of my life, and ... disappointed her.
That was a real unkind cut. My mother never laid a switch on me, or a hand, and all she had to do was fix me with her merciless black eyes and say, mildly, that I had disappointed her. My father could have beat me to death and it wouldn’t have hurt so bad.
Alys nudged me to get up and she walked me back to the bed and pushed me over on it and started pulling off my boots and we coupled desperately for a long time and finally fell exhausted.
Doing the woolly deed with this wench was the most strenuous exercise I could remember. Oh, I had worked hard at other things, but this left me drained everywhere.
Alys laugh
ed and she got up and walked out to get another drink, naked, with her hair down and falling to her round butt. She lit a Spanish cigarette and she sat down on a brocaded chair and put one heel on the seat, wanton as a happy whore, and she smoked and laughed and looked at me with those enormous blue eyes.
I had to laugh, too.
I come out to her and took a chair and we drank; I had a seegar and some whiskey and the air felt cool and good.
Alys lifted up the tabletop and brought out some cards and a cribbage board and we played for points.
Time to time she’d ask a sly question about other women, but I just said their faces was just a blur and I couldn’t quite recall and by morning my mind would no doubt be an utter blank.
“Good answer,” purred Alys.
Clever dog, Kelly, I thinks.
We finished the game and retired to the bed again and this time we was slow and gentle with each other, and we was both near to sleep. A long trip and a long day.
Just before I dropped off to sleep she run her finger down my cheek, on the line her nail had scratched earlier.
“Was I right, Luther?” she purred.
“Right about what?” I mumbles.
“All your mother had to do with you was say she was ... disappointed?”
“No,” I says. “She beat me with a frying pan.”
Alys laughed softly and told me to shut up.
16
MY MOTHER HAD A saying that she applied time to time when she was fetching me up. “What’s the use in being Irish if you can’t be thick!” she’d say. When I had to light out at fourteen for far places, something about the bishop’s daughter, and I joined the Union Army in time, barely, to end the War, I didn’t leave no forwarding address. She found me anyway. One day, when I was hunting for a fort way out in Minnesota, there was a letter from her. Dear Son, what’s the use ... your loving mother, p.s. things always look darkest just before they go pitch-black.
Alys went along with me to buy duds and I ended up outfitted like a damned stockbroker, down to white tie and tails. I could read her plans for Mrs. Kelly’s son Luther right down to the fine print, and thoughts of living out my days in Mongolia kept bubbling up unbidden. I resolved to keep an eye peeled for an opportunity to cut and run.
Not that I didn’t like being with her. I liked it too much and I had lost once and didn’t care to have that torn feeling in my chest again.*
It took three stores ’fore she had me properly fitted out for slaughter, and she had the parcels wrapped up and the cabby piled the boxes in the trunk and those things needed to be tailored was to be sent on soon as they were done. She crossed the palm of the shop owner and he vowed to keep his wage slaves at it night and day, and no mistake.
We went back to the hotel and I was looking forward to a good dinner, a long romp, and sleep, but all I got was one drink and, time to pack my things and then it was back down to the trains, where Alys had borrowed some great friend’s private car and we was on our way to the East.
The car was all done in various purples and reds and yellows and reminded me of buffalo innards.
Not long after the Commodore would have express trains that would do the Chicago–New York run in twenty-four hours, but it still took two days for us to get there then. We come clanking and swaying into the big city and my guts clutched. I can be happy when I’m about half-lost in the middle of nowhere and two weeks hard riding to the pale edge of white settlemen, but cities made me sweat and jump worse than being dry-camped and a war party looking for me.
I had a few, and was tamped down enough with the booze to bear up, or so I thought, but Alys had been giving me flat looks for the last couple hours before we come into New York, and finally she says, well, we’ll just go on to Boston, it’s quieter.
She had enough prominence so we was coupled up to another train within half an hour. I gratefully passed out.
I woke up again because the train started bucketing around like it was about to hop the tracks. We’d run plumb into a nor’easter and sleet was slamming against the windows and sounding against the metal hide of the parlor car. The winds got so bad the train slowed down to a crawl and stopped someplace for a few hours. I repaired myself with a lot of black coffee and food and Alys perked up a little.
Her father had been a drunk and he’d died in convulsions, she told me, right in front of her, when she was eight. They was in the library of a Sunday afternoon and the old man drank about half of a whiskey and soda and got a startled look on his face and he fell over backwards and jerked a while and was gone. Her mother had died when Alys was born.
I could see the sad, bewildered little girl in her face, under the mature beauty. But when she talked of her Uncle Digby she brightened considerable.
Uncle Digby, it seemed, was to meet us in Boston, if the nor’easter ever died down enough for us to get there.
“I so hoped you would be awake to meet him,” she says dryly.
“Right,” I says. Orders is orders and besides I had done revealed a basic lack of backbone, which flaw in my character I felt she ought to know about.
We didn’t get to Boston till afternoon on the following day. The storm tides was so high we passed not a few boats up on land, and bashed by breakers on the way in, and the sleet was still slamming in when we come into the station.
A conductor brought us a note from Uncle Digby, apologizing for not being there. He was to home, and his coachman would see us there.
The coachman was a young Irisher who hollered, “Miss Alys!”
We was drove right away off to Uncle Digby’s, the coachman remarking that he’d go back and get our things. In time we pulled in to a porte cochere stuck on a huge pile, in the style of the time, sort of like a wedding cake all garnished with pills.
Digby dashed out and hugged Alys for a while, and when he looked at me he gave a cheerful wink. He wasn’t all that much older than we was—I figured him to be in his early thirties—so he must have been her mother’s much younger brother.
The weather was filthy enough to get under the roof of the porte cochere and so he hustled us into the house, where some French servants hollered and kissed Alys and even smiled at me some. That was some relief, I was half-expecting dour Irish ticking off the mortal sins of the household.
Alys went off to “freshen up,” accompanied by the servants, and Digby took my elbow and steered me off to his library and study, a place full of books floor to ceiling but not a lot else except a snooker table under a big Tiffany lamp.
He went to the sideboard and demanded me to name my poison and I admitted I had been pretty well poisoned recently, and so he made up some cocktail of liqueurs and a raw egg for me. I drunk it down and in about fifteen minutes the whips and jangles had gone and I felt relaxed.
“I expected the wench to find the odd dinosaur,” says Digby. “But as for potting the famous Yellowstone Kelly, well it surely surprised me.”
She hadn’t just arrived with me in tow, thank God.
“When my sister died her last words to me were to watch out for her daughter,” says Digby, “which I did till she was five or so, and then all I could do was stand back and pray a little. At ten she announced that her finishing school was unspeakably boring and she demanded relief. So I sent her to a real school in Switzerland. Didn’t see her for a good ten years, and when she came back she was Alys entire.”
Digby walked with a limp and he held his left arm a little oddly, and there was a white streak in his black hair, the sort a ball leaves when it cuts the skin deep. I suspected he’d been an officer in the War, and the marks was from that, but unlike most men he didn’t have mementos hanging on his wall. The library was damned spare.
Digby plied me with questions as we played snooker, neither one of us giving much of a damn who won. Finally, he stood up just as he was about to take a shot and said if I found the game as boring as he did, perhaps we could find something else to do.
I laughed and we put our cues up and he led me a
long the banks of books, pulling out those he thought might interest me. I loved to read, and there was classics now in paperback books; the Union Army had whole freight trains of them brought up to the lines and a soldier could buy one for a nickel. But the paper was cheap and yellowed quick and the bindings broke easy and often the wind would take the pages you hadn’t read yet.
These books was bound in Morocco leather and stamped with gilt, all of a piece.
I had made my choices in life, and it occurred to me that what was racked up on the walls here was the only thing I felt bad about leaving behind.
Digby even had the full quarto Audubon Birds of America on a walnut stand made special for them.
Alys finally come back all glowing from her bath and she just marched over to the sideboard and poured herself some brandy and she lit one of her Spanish cigarettes and she walked around the library on Digby’s arm, a real procession. Time to time they’d put their heads together and laugh.
After once such bout of hilarity Digby looked slyly back at me and he winked again.
He excused himself for a moment and went off and Alys took my arm and we walked around the library, her arm in mine.
Digby had been a soldier all right, and wounded at the battles of Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Petersburg, and at last the day before Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Courthouse. He’d been a cavalryman.
He had a boxful of medals, said Alys, and letters from Lincoln. They were stored someplace.
Old soldiers in trouble either stopped by or wrote him, and Digby helped them with money.
He never talked about the War.
But three years ago he had been prevailed upon to speak at the dedication of a cemetery, down in Virginia, and he had gone and there was a huge crowd there and a big platform filled with dignitaries.
The cemetery was new, and the graves didn’t even have crosses on them yet.
Some pompous orator spoke for an hour by way of introducing Digby, and then Digby rose to speak.
