Defending Cody

by Bill Brooks

  “El Toro Cantina is mostly where he eats.” Ramon walked to the front door, opened it and pointed with his nose. “The bull café is what it means, in case you didn’t know.”

  Teddy couldn’t tell if Ramon was simply trying to be helpful or secretly making fun of him.

  “Take good care of my friend,” Teddy said. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” then went on down the walk toward the cantina.

  Hoodoo Brown liked to play whist while he ate his supper and was doing so when the tall young man walked up to his table. Hoodoo’s companions looked up when Hoodo did.

  Teddy introduced himself, mentioned the telegram George Bangs had promised to send on John’s behalf.

  “You’re the Pinkerton,” Hoodoo said. “He’s the Pinkerton, boys,” Hoodoo said to his friends.

  “Pinkerton?” said a curly-haired fellow whose sombrero hung down his back from a stampede string.

  “We never sleep, ain’t that what you Pinkertons say?” Hoodoo said. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” Teddy said.

  Hoodoo Brown looked at him. Looked at him hard. Hoodoo took a bite of chicken drumstick that had been lying on his plate, set it down again, chewed what was in his mouth. Chewed slow and curious.

  “He’s a goner, your friend,” Hoodoo said after he swallowed the chicken meat. “Tried and convicted. You come a long way for nothing.”

  “Just some things a man has to do,” Teddy said, and turned and walked out.

  The night air was chill and festive with the music and the lights in the trees. Teddy looked over toward the jail, how it stood in deep shadows, except for the one lone light glowing from the front window. It wasn’t any damn place for a man like John Sears to be, to spend his last days in.

  It was late. Most businesses were closed, including the livery.

  He found a saloon; a place called El Capitan. There were several vaqueros sitting out front listening to the music from the plaza. They spoke Spanish with one another and passed a bottle of greasy-looking liquor back and forth.

  He went inside and up to the bar and ordered bourbon and frijoles and tamales, then found a table to eat them.

  He noticed a dark-eyed little man sitting in the corner: black frock coat, hat, moustaches, milk white skin. The man played solitaire with a dog-eared deck of cards. Teddy ate the food and was grateful for the privilege. The dark man coughed several times, spat into a handkerchief, went back to his game, sipping whiskey in between laying out his hand.

  Teddy swiped up the last of the chilies with a tortilla, ordered a beer to wash it down. In the morning he’d wire George Bangs, then he’d go see about buying a pair of fast horses. John would need a pistol and a new pair of boots. He’d have to stop by the jail and ask him what size he wore.

  He finished his beer and went back out again. The music drew him to the plaza. The dancers whirled and laughed and flirted. He thought of Kathleen Bonney, wishing she was here with him now so that they could dance. And he thought of his brother, Horace, who would never again dance or hear music, happy or otherwise.

  It made him sad, all this happy music, these happy people. He asked one of the musicians when they took a break from playing where a man might rent a room and was told a fellow might rent himself a room at the Las Vegas Hotel. It stood on the corner of the block, not far from the jail.

  Four dollars rented a modest room on the second floor. Good enough for a night’s rest, a chance to plan the thing he had in mind. He kept thinking the whole time about the woman John had shot and the reason.

  It seemed an unlikely act by a man of John’s reputation. But then jealousy fueled by whiskey made lots of men do things they normally wouldn’t.

  He could hear the muted sounds of the music through the walls, could feel the sag of the cheap bedsprings underneath him.

  It was hard to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  Word of death traveled by wire: The white man’s wire in the white man’s world in the white man’s language. The white man had given him a white name and had cut his hair in the white man’s style and given him white man’s clothes to wear. And the white man had taught him what the white man knew and this he learned with a great hunger. For such knowledge made him superior, made him a better enemy to his enemy.

  He was seventeen and had lived five years now in the white man’s world when the word of Yellow Hand’s death traveled the wire. A reporter, a scatter-haired, bespectacled man with a funny accent, even by white men’s standards, came to the school and sought him out and got permission to talk to him.

  “You know how to read English?” the reporter, who said he was a correspondent with the New York Herald, said.

  At first he didn’t say anything and the reporter looked befuddled and said, “You are the son of Yellow Hand, ain’t you, kid?”

  The reporter seemed surprised when he answered him in the white man’s tongue.

  “Yes, I am, how did you learn about me?”

  “Oh, hell, we got our ways, kid. That’s what the newspaper business is all about, finding out things on people.”

  The reporter handed him a newspaper clipping and waited for him to read it.

  What the reporter may not have known was Yellow Hand had become lost to him years before this day when the headmaster summoned him to his office where the reporter sat stinking of liquor and both he and the headmaster with their pasty white skin looked old and sick in their clothes.

  “Bob, I’m very sorry for the news to have to come to you this way…” the headmaster said.

  Bob read the article.

  And though it had been five years since he’d last seen his father, he had never forgotten the man with the eyes that could see far. Nor, for different reasons, had he forgotten the mother who took him and went off and married the evangelist who brought him east to this place, to this school where he was made to wear shoes and wear a necktie. And once they had put him in this school they went off together to speak what the old fool had said was the WORD. The white people were full of words and little else.

  “Well, you’re his boy, right?” the reporter said again, taking a stub of a pencil and a small writing tablet from his pocket.

  O, the white men were full of words and questions and opinions.

  “Is there anything I can do, Bob?” the headmaster asked…

  and…

  “Your mother and father won’t return until the spring and we’ve no way of reaching them—they’ve gone to Brazil, as you know…”

  Bob.

  That is the name they gave him. Bob Parsnip. The old fool’s name was Jonas Parsnip. Bob’s mother was once called Woman Who Sleeps by Water, but the old fool had her change it to Margaret and now she was just as white in her ways as he was. Both believers in a man who was nailed to a tree, died, and it was said had come back to life again. What foolish shit.

  The headmaster had the eyes of a sad dog.

  “Bob, will you be all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It just proves, I suppose, that war is a senseless thing…”

  He wondered what a man who ran a school for Indian kids knew about war.

  The reporter said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your father. “How do you feel about the famous Buffalo Bill Cody being the one who killed him in revenge of Custer?” And so on and so forth; questions he did not answer, for only a fool would carry on a conversation with another fool.

  And when he did not answer the reporter’s many questions, he scribbled some things in his little book anyway, then left muttering something about “Indians being close-mouthed little savages…” leaving the newspaper article for Bob to contemplate.

  That night Bob dreamed of his father. In the dream he could see his father riding his pony upon a ridge, the sky blood red with evening sun. He could see stars falling. He could see the stars turning into soldiers that rained from the sky and were scattered across the hills and in the dry washes and in the wet rivers.

  He could s
ee a Wasichu with golden hair sitting dead, stripped of his tunic, his bare chest leaking blood from several wounds. And blood dripping as well from his ears where squaws wandering onto the fields of the dead punctured their eardrums so they couldn’t hear the great Creator calling them to the happy hunting ground. The Wasichu opened one eye and looked at him in the dream, then closed it again. Bob could hear throbbing tom-toms and see shadows dancing in firelight and hear brass bugles that sounded like the shrieks of women. He could see horses running with fiery manes across the grasslands.

  He awoke, his nightshirt damp with sweat, and saw the frosted panes of glass in the dormitory glowing pale from a hunter’s moon. He dressed in his white man’s clothes and put on his white man’s coat and white man’s hat and went out from the dormitory, where others like him slept in iron beds in neat straight rows.

  Down the back stairwell he went, silent as an…Indian, and slipped out the back door and across the triangle of lawns to the headmaster’s house. The wind trailed after him. Once inside he easily followed the trail of snores to the bedroom where the headmaster slept. Moonlight fell across the bed; the old man slept on his side. Bob went quickly and strangled him.

  A quick search of the house gained him a small amount of money from the wallet found in the headmaster’s trousers. Another search found him a pistol heavy as a brick inside a desk drawer. They were the only things he would take from the Wasichu—the only things that the Wasichu seemed to worship.

  When he placed the pistol in his pocket, his fingers touched the newspaper clipping and the paper felt like fire, and the name written on it—the one who it said had killed his father, burned like fire on the tips of his fingers: Buffalo Bill. What had the reporter called him? Legendary. Indian Slayer. Scout Supreme? King of the Border Men?

  All he knew was, it was too many names for a white man.

  The reporter had said other things as well, his fool mouth running like water in a fast stream.

  Oh, you know Colonel Cody is planning a whole series of stage shows demonstrating how he killed your father…He’s gathering a whole cast of actors and they’re going to travel all over the East and put on reenactments of the event. You know what reenactments mean, Bob?

  North Platte, Nebraska, is where the newspaper clipping said: “…Colonel Cody keeps a ranch from which he guides hunting parties…”

  Bob found a butcher’s knife in the kitchen lying alone atop the table, its long sharp blade agleam with moonlight, and thought briefly of scalping the headmaster. But the old man had nothing but a few sprigs of thin hair growing from his knobby old head. Besides, he wasn’t sure how a man should be scalped. They’d taken most of the Indian out of him.

  But not all.

  And into that cold, handsome silvery night full of the hunter’s moon he went in search of this Cody, this Indian Slayer. If this Wasichu was such a powerful warrior, then he had it in him to slay one more Indian, or himself be slain.

  Bob had come to know enough of the white man’s world to go in the direction of the trains whose steel tracks lay just to the north of the school. He had often listened to their whistles, those long haunting sounds that were like that of squaws crying in grief for ones who were dead.

  Trains went everywhere the white man wanted to go—to the places where other white men were. He would go to Nebraska and find this Buffalo Bill, this Indian Slayer, and bring on him revenge. Then he would go home again to his own people—his true people and not the ones who kept him like a dog, or the ones who stole him.

  He raced across the town, keeping to the shadows as he jumped fences and heard the ruckus of dogs barking. He felt his young heart sing for the very first time since he’d ridden his pony out onto the prairies with his father.

  He waited there in the bull rushes beside the steel rails until a slow-moving freight heading west rumbled by and climbed aboard, rolling himself into one of the boxcars, eager in his heart to become an Indian again.

  The train’s whistle blew low and sweet into the long darkness.

  Chapter 5

  Morning sun crept along the streets, climbed the east walls of the adobe buildings, flowed over the plaza like empty gold, the plaza empty now of dancers.

  Teddy awakened to the sound of church bells. He pulled on his trousers, then his boots, stood and stretched out the kinks in his back from the bad mattress. He secured the shoulder rig, then donned his coat and hat and went out.

  The air was crisp as new money.

  Hell of a day for a jailbreak, he thought.

  He walked down the street taking in the lay of the place, how the roads entered the town, where the alleys were. He went down one of the alleys he judged ran behind the jail. There wasn’t any back door or window to the building and the wall looked to be several feet thick. He came back ’round again to the front, continued walking. He passed a hardware store, several saloons, a barbershop, and a land office.

  The man he’d seen sitting in the saloon the night before—the one playing solitaire with the dark eyes and bloodless flesh—was unlocking the front door of a storefront. The sign over the door read: DENTIST DOC HOLLIDAY TEETH EXTRACTED.

  The man looked up as Teddy approached. He was thin inside his clothes, not very big, five-seven, maybe a hundred-ten pounds. The man nodded.

  “You need a dentist?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  The man turned the key in the lock and went inside without further comment.

  Teddy found the telegraph office and went in and sent George a wire:

  Have arrived in Las Vegas. Too late to do any good, it seems. Thanks for your help anyway. Probably won’t be here long. Any news on the case, send me a wire.

  General Delivery, Silver City. T. Blue.

  He walked out again and down to the livery stables just north of the town proper.

  A stout man wearing a leather apron was shaping a glowing white horseshoe by striking it hard with a five-pound hammer against an anvil. The ringing of steel on steel was enough to crack an eardrum.

  The man did not alter his rhythm or otherwise acknowledge Teddy’s presence until he was satisfied he had the shoe shaped the way he wanted it and thrust it into a bucket of water with a long pair of tongs until the steam it raised evaporated.

  Setting the shoe aside the man said, “Help you?”

  “Like to buy some horses.”

  “Take your pick,” the man said, nodding toward a small corral around the side of the building with maybe a half dozen mounts. Teddy studied them for a few moments, watched how they moved, how their eyes were, the curve of their backs.

  “I’ll take that paint mustang and the roan,” Teddy said. “How much?”

  “Twenty for the paint, thirty for the roan.”

  “Saddles too.”

  “You real particular on the saddles?”

  “Don’t need any the stirrups will bust halfway between here and Arizona.” Teddy made it a point to tell the man he was headed for Arizona, knowing Hoodoo Brown would probably be asking questions after the jailbreak. Let him think Arizona.

  “That where you headed?”

  “It’s a tough ride, I know that.”

  “Got two that ain’t nothing fancy, but they’ll do for a ride like that. I could let them go at fifteen apiece.”

  “Give you twenty-five for the pair.”

  “Done.”

  “Get ’em saddled, I’ll be ’round later to gather them up.”

  Teddy paid the man and asked for a receipt. Man said, “They ain’t stole.”

  “I know they ain’t. I just don’t want to be stopped by somebody wearing a badge who thinks they might be. Put a new set of shoes on ’em too.”

  Teddy walked back up to the jail. This time it was Hoodoo Brown guarding the coffee. Hoodoo looked like he’d been wrenched through a knothole.

  “I’d like to meet with my client, Sheriff.”

  “Client? That what you Pinkertons call ’em who hire you?”
/>   “I’m his attorney too.” Teddy opened his coat and handed over his pistol.

  “You want me to shake my legs?” he said.

  Hoodoo looked at him down the length of his nose.

  “You might not be from around here, son. But you don’t look stupid enough to bust nobody out of jail.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me. Hell, I’m afraid of my own shadow.”

  Hoodoo didn’t act like he thought the comment was funny, said, “The door’s open, go on back,” with a lot of confidence.

  John was eating his breakfast, what looked like a plate of mush, a burnt biscuit, tin cup of black coffee.

  “I bet it doesn’t taste anything like Delmonico’s,” Teddy said.

  “You’d be surprised how good bad food can taste when it’s all you got to eat.”

  “I went to see the judge today,” Teddy said.

  John just looked at him.

  “I wish you’d put this out of your mind.”

  “You don’t have a say in it, the way I see it.”

  John looked from his plate to the door.

  “He’ll plant us both…”

  “You afraid of dying sooner rather than later?”

  “I’m all fixed on that part. It’s you I don’t think should count yourself as ready. Not from where I’m sitting, no how.”

  “I quit sucking the tit a long time ago, John. Why don’t you just let me worry about me.”

  John stuffed the last of the biscuit in his mouth, drank some of the coffee.

  “Well, sir. If you’ve got your mind all over this thing, you might as well tell me how you’re going to play it so we’ll both know.”

  “I figure simple is best.”

  “Always seemed to be before. But I’d just soon hear a few of the details.”

  So Teddy told him and said afterward, “I’ll be around this evening when Ramon—is it?—is on.”

  John stood and came to the bars then and put his hands around them and looked Teddy squarely in the eyes.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, John, I am. By the way, what size boots you wear?”