by Max McCoy
The girl made an opening gesture with her hands.
“Little Door Woman,” she said.
“When the old man dies,” Burns said, “the girl will be mine. Poor child, she will have no one else to care for her in this world. Lucky she has me, because many in this camp would force their affections upon her—or worse.”
Gamble drank the weak coffee and sat staring at the fire, and the warmth made him sleepy. When he felt he could no longer keep his eyes open, he placed the cup on one of the flat stones near the fire and slipped his hand beneath his coat to rest on the brass and walnut grip of the loaded Manhattan.
Gamble woke with a jerk, his eyes snapping open. Sunlight was streaming in through the smoke hole above him, and he could see wisps of clouds in the winter sky. The fingers of his left hand were still touching the revolver.
He glanced over at his hat. The silver dollar was gone.
Little Door Woman was kneeling beside the fire, frying bacon in a cast-iron skillet. The interior of the lodge was hazy with smoke, and most of the sleepers from the night before were still huddled beneath their blankets, snoring.
“Where’s Burns?”
“Making water,” the girl said. “Or, making logs.”
There was a rustling sound in the back of the lodge, and the girl called something in Kiowa. Her grandfather came forward, a blue blanket draping his naked shoulders, and he sat cross-legged a yard or so away from Gamble.
The girl placed a tin plate with a slab of bacon and a few hunks of fried cornmeal in front of the old man, and he grunted his thanks, but did not touch the food. Then she brought a plate for Gamble, who held it on his lap and used his pocketknife to cut the bacon. It smelled faintly rancid, but Gamble ate it because he was so hungry his stomach ached.
The girl sat down between the men. She and the grandfather exchanged a few words. Then the old man slowly turned his head to look at Gamble, and as he did the sunlight from above caught him full in the face. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, his beaklike nose was bulbous and scarred, and his cheeks and forehead and chin were a mass of fissures.
“Grandfather says you are the one-eyed white man from his dreams.”
“He probably remembers me from last night.”
“He says he has been dreaming of you since the Winter When Horses Ate Ashes. That was when the snow was so deep that the horses could not get to the grass and were so hungry they ate the ashes from the campfires.”
“How long ago was that?”
She shrugged.
“Years, I think.”
“How many years?”
“Time is not like that for us,” she said. “Our time doesn’t pass in a straight line, as if shot from the barrel of a gun. Instead, time is a wheel. We keep a winter count, and each year is named for something that happened. Grandfather wanders now among the winter counts. Last night, he was in the Winter the Stars Fell and fighting the Osage Takers of Heads. Tonight, he may go back to When Horses Ate Ashes, so it is difficult to say whether that winter is in the past or whether it has not yet happened again.”
“All right,” Gamble said. “Ask him, then, what happened in the white man’s world When Horses Ate Ashes.”
She spoke to her grandfather in a tone that was apologetic and amused. The old man thought for a moment, then began speaking and held up a gnarled hand and with his thumb and forefinger made the universal sign for a pistol. The girl asked another question, then nodded.
“He says it was during the time the whites made the great war with each other,” she said. “Also, it was the winter you took up the gun. He saw you, in his dreams. You were a boy, but before a giant put out your eye with a rock. It is the same gun you carry beneath your coat now.”
That was thirty-six years ago, Gamble thought. The old Indian must have heard the story. Gamble had gone West after the war and many people knew the story of his fight with the guerrilla chieftain Alf Bolin in Taney County, Missouri.
He speared a chunk of bacon with his knife.
“How old is your grandfather?”
“Old,” she said. “He was born when the Kiowa still lived in the mountains, before we came down to the flat land and we became a horse people. He has outlived forty-three wives and all of his children.”
“That’s impossible. Nobody is four hundred years old.”
The girl shrugged.
“And yet there he sits,” she said. “His daughw-daughw will die with him, and he will have no one to pass the medicine bundle to because he has no favorite living son. I am the last of his kin—a lowly girl.”
“What is this power he has?”
“Daughw-daughw is the power of the universe and all things have it,” she said, “but some things and some people have more of it than others. The sun has more than an eagle, the eagle more than a rabbit, and the whirlwind more than a summer breeze. A warrior gathers daughw-daughw through many battles won. Have you killed men? Then you now have their power as your own.”
Gamble sighed.
“The only thing killing has got me was trouble.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?” she asked, reacting to his condescending tone. “I’m sure you think all of this is just superstition, a bunch of fairy tales, that we Kiowa are just like the rest of the poor ignorant red children. But we see how the world works clearer than any of you whites, whose eyes are clouded by so many of your own lies that you can no longer see the sun in the sky or the moon at night.”
“Hold your fire,” Gamble said. “My bastard brother was raised by the Chiricahua, and he believed in this power you speak of. My inconstant mother thought she could divine the future in a deck of cards. Me, I’m fairly ecumenical—white or red, I think it is all hokum.”
“Which road are you on?”
“You mean, which way am I headed? West.”
“No, which path.”
“West, always west.”
“The medicine wheel has seven directions and seven colors. We are here in the middle, on the earth, which is green. Up above, which is where Grandfather will soon be headed, is yellow. Some folks go down below, which is brown.”
“Yes, I’ve put a few down there myself.”
“Spirits can also go in the four other directions. North is blue, sadness and defeat, and winter, a time of waiting. East is red, the spring, and victory. South is white, the summer, a time of plenty and happiness. That’s the best place to go. Grandfather will probably go there after going up and shaking hands with Jesus.”
“And my road?”
“West,” Little Door Woman said. “The black road. Autumn. The place where the souls of your enemies and the great black spirit dwells. The black spirit wants to tear out a man’s soul and carry it away to the west, to put it into a black box buried deep in the black mud, and to place a black serpent coiled upon it.”
Alarmed, she glanced at him with hard eyes.
“West. You’re sure?”
“I’ve been heading west since the day I was born,” Gamble said. “Too late to change now.”
“Does the white man have a name for the black path?”
“Damnation Road,” Gamble said.
The old man grumbled, then pushed his plate away.
“What’s the matter?”
“He says he is ready to die and will not eat the food because it would be a waste,” she said, then began picking at the bacon and putting it in her mouth. “But he says that every morning. He will only eat after I have taken a little.”
The old man smiled and reached out a hoary hand and touched the girl’s cheek. Then he turned to Gamble and began speaking quickly.
“He says there are many people in the land of the dead who are anxious to talk with you.”
“They may not have long to wait,” he said. “I am damn near fifty years old myself.”
“Yes, you are old,” the girl said. “And ugly, as are all whites. But grandfather says you still have many winters left before you are reunited with your mother and your half-brother.”
>
“That’s who wants to talk to me?”
“No, Grandfather says, it is the ghost of your father who grows impatient—he is no longer content to stay in the land of the dead, but wishes to cross over.”
“Why?”
The girl looked thoughtful as she put the plate back on her grandfather’s lap.
“This is very bad medicine,” she said. “We do not speak of our own ancestors in this way, or even speak their names, for fear of inviting them over from the dreamworld. But Grandfather says that it is proper to speak to you of these things, because you are white and things for you are like looking in a mirror—that is, they are reversed.”
Gamble rubbed his forehead with his left hand.
“See?” she said, pointing.
“Little Door Woman, not that I believe any of this—but ask your grandfather if he knows what the ghost of my father seeks.”
She turned to the old man and asked.
“How could he know?” she asked. “My grandfather doesn’t speak your language. He says that you will have to cross into the land of the dead and ask him yourself.”
“With dope and whiskey? No.”
“Grandfather uses the poison because he is too old to sleep deeply enough to enter the land of the dead,” she said. “But there are other ways, all of which bring you close to death. Starvation. Sickness, especially fever. Sunstroke. Freezing. Loss of much blood.”
Gamble sighed and put the plate down beside him.
“Whiskey and opium don’t sound so bad.”
The girl brushed the hair from her eyes.
“They are poisons and lead to death as well,” she said. “Like smallpox and guns, they are gifts from across the water. The horse is the only good thing the white man ever brought. Well, that and bees. I like honey.”
“You seem remarkably well informed,” Gamble said.
“For a little squaw, you mean?”
“Is that what I said? No, you are uncommonly bright for a person your age, no matter what the shade of your skin. As for gender, I’d expect you to be smarter than a boy your age—girl heads ripen quicker.”
She attempted to suppress a smile, but could not.
“It’s the Methodists,” she said. “They are well meaning, but terribly confused. They have built a church on the reservation at Mount Scott and are teaching us to read and write American and to wear civilized clothes and to take Christian names, but it is making us a nation of broken people. Someday soon I will be forced to return, I suppose. But for now, my grandfather needs me.”
“When your grandfather dies,” Gamble said, “you had better light out quick. The way Burns looks at you makes my stomach feel like I ate something rotten.”
“It’s probably the bacon.”
SEVEN
Gamble grabbed his hat, made sure the Manhattan was secure in its holster, and stepped outside the lodge to relieve himself in the snow far on the other side of where the horses were tied. The chestnut mare was still staked where she had been the night before, and as he walked back she nickered and tossed her head.
“Sorry, girl,” Gamble said, touching her muzzle. “Don’t have a thing for you. I can barely feed myself. But maybe I can find you an apple or something later.”
There was a dirty strip of snow between the rows of shacks and tents. Wood smoke seeped from the stovepipes poking through the wood and canvas, and the sound of hard laughter rang in the cold air. He looked at the sun, still low in the sky, and judged that it was eight or eight-thirty in the morning.
Gamble trudged through the mottled snow toward the biggest tent. It had a wooden door that creaked badly when it was opened. The floor was made of dirt and there was a crackling stove toward the back, a bar made out of an oak plank set across two whiskey barrels along the east wall, and a few empty round card tables on the opposite side. But in the middle of the one-room tent was an ornate craps table with carved legs and a green baize surface. Hanging from the pole that supported the peaked roof overhead was a brass lantern with six arms that held flickering kerosene flames.
Five men were clustered intently around the craps table. Some of them were already, or were still, drunk. The woman he had seen smoking opium the night before was leaning against the shooter, an arm around his waist.
Gamble walked over to the bar and ordered a shot of whiskey from a gaunt man who had an unruly salt-and-pepper beard that spread over his chest like a bib. He tossed the quarter dollars down as if he didn’t care what the drink cost, picked up the shot glass in one hand, and leaned back and put an elbow on the oak plank.
“You Buell?”
“What’s it to you?”
Gamble sipped the whiskey. It tasted like something that would come in a bottle of horse liniment.
“Lester Burns said you run an honest poker game here,” he said. “Wouldn’t mind trying my luck.”
“Sure thing,” the bearded man said. “But right now, the game is craps. You could throw the bones until we get some cowboys interested in cards.”
“Not my game,” Gamble said. “Maybe I could get up my own table.”
Buell’s eyelids flickered.
“Rent on the tables is five dollars an hour,” he said.
“That’s only fair,” Gamble said, even though he had less than four dollars left from hocking the fiddle.
“And the house gets a taste of your winnings.”
“How much?”
Buell paused.
“Ten percent,” he said, finally.
“Now, that’s something we should negotiate,” Gamble said, and took another sip of the bad whiskey. “Fair would be paying a cut or an hourly rate, but not both. My preference is the hourly rate.”
“No.”
“All right,” Gamble said. “The house percentage, then. But three percent, not ten.”
“I have overhead,” Buell said. “This tent, wood for the stove, the tables and chairs. Seven percent.”
“You’re right,” Gamble said, and drained the shot glass. He turned it upside down and put it on the plank. “I’m imposing on your goodwill. Forgive me.” He tipped his hat and walked toward the entrance.
“Hold on,” Buell said, but Gamble did not. Then, in a lower voice: “Five percent.”
Gamble stopped. He turned and walked back. He leaned over the plank.
“Deal,” he said. “But just so you know, I play an honest game.”
“Then how the hell do you plan to make any money?”
“I plan to win,” Gamble said. “Now, reach into some of that overhead of yours and give me a deck of cards.”
Gamble took the deck and walked over to the cleanest of the round tables, the one in the back toward the stove, and sat down with his back to the corner. He shuffled the deck, cut it, then fanned the cards out on the table, facedown. He folded his hands across his stomach and waited.
“Craps!”
The shooter shoved the woman away from him, and she stumbled and fell against one of the tables, nearly upending it. Her shawl slipped from one shoulder, revealing a bruised breast overlapping a wine-colored corset. Around her waist was a wide belt made of rattlesnake skin.
“Settle down there,” Buell called.
“I told her to give me elbow room,” the cowboy said, pushing his hat back, spilling a sheaf of straight blond hair over his forehead. In a fancy tooled holster on his right hip was a nickel-plated Peacemaker with a bone grip. “The bitch cost me a month’s pay on that last throw. She’s the one what should pay.”
His drunken friends laughed.
Still on the floor, the woman tucked her breast back into the corset. She turned her face away from the men, but not from Gamble. Her eyes locked on his, defiant.
“Yeah,” one of them said and slapped him on the back. “Blame your bad luck on the whore, Timothy. What was your excuse in Pawhuska?”
“Go to hell,” the shooter said. “And don’t call me Timothy.”
The men at the table laughed harder, and the shooter be
came red-faced. He pushed away from the table like a spring uncoiling, grabbed the woman’s wrist, and jerked her to her feet.
“You owe me twenty-five dollars, you filthy cunny,” he shouted.
“Go to hell,” the woman said. “You rolled those bones, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, but I would have done a better job if you hadn’t been ahold of my johnson.”
“Is that what it was?” the woman said. “Thought maybe you had a pencil in your pocket. A really short one.”
The cowboy bent her hand back over her wrist. The woman cried out in pain and leaned back, trying to ease the pain.
“That’s enough,” Gamble said, his hands still folded across his stomach.
“Did you say something, pops?” the cowboy asked.
“You heard me,” Gamble said. “Take your hands off the woman.”
The cowboy twisted her hand back with a final sadistic flourish, then suddenly released it. She fell in a heap on the floor, clutching her hand.
“There,” the cowboy said, walking wildly in a circle “Are you happy, pappy? You’d better watch your step with me, old man, or you just might get all busted up.”
He lunged at Gamble with a feigned punch, but Gamble did not flinch.
“You think you’re tough,” Gamble said, “but you’re not. You’re just drunk. You work on one of the big spreads in the Nations, probably the Miller brothers, and maybe you impress the girls in town, but you’re not a real cowboy. You wouldn’t have held a candle to any of the men that came up the Chisholm Trail twenty-five or thirty years ago.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“I was there,” Gamble said. “For a season or two, anyway. I was about your age and so full of shit that my eye damned near turned brown. But that’s one of the advantages of a long life—you get over that.”
“You’re as old and washed up and as full of it as my Pa.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t change the fact that you aren’t as tough as you think. You wouldn’t have been good enough to ride the river with any of the men I knew back then.”
The cowboy grinned drunkenly and looked over at his friends, but Gamble was keeping an eye on his right hand. His fingers were hanging too loose and too close to the bone-handled Colt.
