The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  It was still fairly cool as we clopped away over the cobbles and headed up the avenue. The mountains was a ways off, behind rain clouds, and we wouldn’t see them close until the evening, and it was a two-day trip up to the mountain house.

  Butch and Sundance was slouched back to back in the cart behind, having an eye-opener and ready to let the broadsides fly if they saw suspicious wiggles in the bushes. I expected that after last night’s set-to there would be a few days before a rematch and I hoped by then to get to whoever was ordering this and convince them that it warn’t us. All the while hoping that it really warn’t us.

  “I like it when you call me Lucy,” said Lucretia, putting her head on my shoulder. We were both bushed, and she went to sleep immediately. I followed. Butch and Sundance were good for many hours and I wasn’t. They were so damn drunk you could’ve brain-shot the pair of ’em and they wouldn’t have died till they sobered up. Like all good cowboys, they feared neither God nor man but was terrified of Bennington Schoolmarms. Talking to Lucretia every other word was ma’am and they was continually correcting each other’s etiquette. They’d knocked over the eight that come to Lucretia’s house in about four seconds. And then apologized for making such a mess, ma’am.

  I didn’t dare to laugh at them, though I grinned a lot as they blushed and stammered.

  The buggy we was in had deep, comfortable seats all plushed in dark brown velvet, and we sort of laid back and held each other while drinking cold white wine from a canvas bag full of ice and bottles. I idly pitched one of the bottles toward the side of the road and a horde of brown children were fighting over it at once. And fighting hard, they was kicking and using sticks, any old thing to get that prized green bottle, worth about one cent U.S. Lucretia saw my stare.

  “The country people are so poor an ordinary glass bottle is wealth to them. They sell their daughters to the whoremasters for money to buy rice with. They never have enough to eat. They wear rags. That’s the Philippines, Kelly, the crowd around that bottle. They have God, but can’t eat Him.”

  We passed skinny farmers walking with carabao, for here the family water buffalo is a pet, too. They has acquired some of the habits of dogs.

  “Tell me about the Yellowstone,” she said. “Tell me about Cody and Liver-Eatin’ Jack and Tom Horn and all of them.” She put her pretty head on my shoulder. I resolved not to cuss out Ned Buntline so much.

  So I did, as we moved slowly along in the rising heat. We stopped to change horses and use the jakes and went on. Butch and Sundance was pert as ever, they’d found another bottle of Panther Sweat, which I supposed Lucretia had stuck in their cart. She was a superb hostess.

  For that afternoon I told her true and funny stories of my friends, and I had a potful of both. They’d as soon get a laugh as get a drink, those friends.

  When I told her of meeting Cody when we was both cinched up to the eyebolts in the Hitchfoot Hotel she laughed so hard she slid off the seat. I told her about me being the Great Crepe of the Northern Plains, and my first meeting with Spotted Tail. I ain’t never been rich enough to afford much dignity anyway.

  There was a huge inn at the halfway mark, and we stopped there for the night, and looked the rooms over good and finally took a big suite away from the main building, over the carriage house. There was only one stairway up to it, and the walls was three feet thick. I figured we could do watches.

  Lucretia tried to send down for food but I shook my head and we went down together and picked up food from the kitchen pots. There was a couple hundred other guests and more coming on every minute. I didn’t figure anyone would try to get us by poisoning everybody. We had plenty of white wine, iced tea, and I took four bottles of arrack for my two fugitive chums. It’s Malay rice brandy and shaves yer gullet down to bedrock.

  “Why are these people trying to kill you?” she said later, when we were soaking in a huge tub of cool water. I said I purely didn’t know but expected that I wouldn’t allow it. I tried hard never to interfere with someone else’s fun but in this case I was going to be obnoxious about it and never mind why.

  We had come up some in altitude and it got cooler quicker, and we sat out on a broad balcony and ate and talked, and kept an eye on the foot of the stairs. We’d told the inn we was not to be disturbed by anyone and those that did could find themselves shot pretty much to death. One moment I looked at the plates of paella and the cheap silverware, and then at the guns all about like makings for another kind of feast.

  At dusk them huge bats flapped past and I guess I must have flinched a little, for Lucretia laughed and said they were fruit bats and didn’t attack anything that could move.

  This island was the most dangerous place I had ever been in, where murder was cheap and there was so many people needy for so many things that they confused it all and I couldn’t tell just who wanted me dead. If the war was the kind of war I suspected it could even be American troops, who’d been killing everyone out of frustration and didn’t want the word to get back.

  Well, I thought, if they want to try me and the other hardcases good luck to ’em.

  Nothing at all happened over the night, and we took off long before dawn. The hostlers had slept with the stock and near the buggies and carts, and they didn’t see anything either. All of them were Lucretia’s family’s retainers and had been employed for forty years or so.

  The jungle is beautiful. I have never seen flowers like there was beside the road again. The Philippines also has thousands of different kinds of mosquitoes and millions of each one of ’em, and a feller could go reasonably insane in a short time without loose clothes and citronella. Me, I didn’t mind smelling like Aunt Maud’s Christmas fruitcake.

  We got to Lucretia’s summer house without incident, and the maids and butlers and all was lined up out front, and they didn’t flicker an eyelash when Butch and Sundance and me run right round them and in the front door and through the house, guns out, finding only one elderly drunk passed out in a clothes hamper. We come back out in a few minutes and we was clanking in our armaments and looking like fools. Lucretia was explaining us in rapid Spanish and the staff was nodding at double time.

  The house was light and open and airy, a pleasant place surrounded by lawns and ponds. I saw fish turn in the ponds and asked about them, they was ornamental carp, from Japan. When I walked up close there was a swirl of reds and oranges and whites and blacks—and I stood there musing on pinto fish for a while. Jesus, what some folks will do for fun.

  Full of the perplex, I went back to the house. I heard a soft whistle, and there was Sundance on top of the roof, just having a look, and armed like he was going to take Manila alone. I suspect he could, if he’d wanted it some.

  I was still in my same old clothes, and Lucy and the other folk had gone through the closets and found me some light cotton shirts and loose, light trousers which I put on gratefully. It was hot this time of evening even up here, though I could see the breeze beginning to move some of the trees. I put a gunbelt over the pants and thought that this was the first time I’d ever fought in goddamned pajamas.

  We had a late supper, just three of us, with Butch on the roof at first and then I went up and took the watch for a while. There was three automatic shotguns loaded with buckshot, I figured I could about stop a brigade with rapid fire.

  Lucretia come up to join me and we sat together, me scanning the grounds. I did not think we had worries, but I wasn’t sure. She got impatient with my head turning and kissed me for a long time and then I went back to it and she said “Jesus!” and flounced off. I knew it was inconvenient to be doing what I was doing but I thought we all might live longer this way. The events of the last few days had me hard spooked.

  Sundance showed up right quick and though I thought I was due for the night watch apparently Lucy had made her vexation known and I was being given a chance to smooth it over.

  Time I got to the bedroom she had recovered herself and she apologized.

  “I just want to sp
end every second with you. It’s foolish,” she said, her arms wrapped around herself.

  I heard Sundance whistle and I run to the balcony and looked up. He was pointing out on the lawn. I could see someone with a white banner standing there.

  “I’ll go out,” I said to the Kid. “Keep an eye on me.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Lucy. “And don’t try to stop me.” There was considerable steel in her voice and I shrugged. I got a shotgun and my Colts full all the way round and then I padded down the hall and stairs in my bare feet—my boots was too hot—and then I started across the cool clipped grass, which felt good on my feet. Lucretia was right behind me to the left, so I could swing and shoot in a part of a second.

  “It is not necessary,” the feller with the flag said. “I am not armed and there is no one with me.” The Spanish was a soft dialect, I could sort out some of it but not all.

  “What do you wish?” says Lucretia, and she and the flagbearer rattled at each other for a few minutes.

  “This is Mrs. Maria Aguinaldo,” said Lucretia. “The Americans have captured her husband and their infant son.”

  “And is in hot pursuit of the mother,” I snarls. “Well, that’s about right.”

  I waved to Sundance and saw him back away from view. He’d had a shotgun pointed this way all along.

  “Come, come,” said Lucretia to the tiny Filipina. “Come inside, we can talk there and no one will bother us.”

  Not for long anyway, I thought, my mind resting on my chums. I felt a sight safer than if the entire Fifth Cavalry was riding close order on the lawn.

  Butch and Sundance was at the dining room table, eating quick, pistols by their plates like an extra fork. They finished quickly and went on out, to become two more shadows in the bushes. I hoped Mrs. Aguinaldo wasn’t lying about being alone, for if she was we’d soon know it with God alone knew what effect upon our conversation.

  Lucretia gave Maria a glass of wine and we sat down at the dining table and listened to her story. It was simple enough. The guerrilleros had fought the Spanish for as long as anyone could remember, and the Americans had come and been greeted like the liberators they was only they then settled down into the chairs so recently vacated by the Spanish and announced they liked it here and it suited them.

  So the rebel soldiers took two deep breaths and began fighting the Americans, as they did not want anybody bothering them. They would like their own country free and clear to make their mistakes in and as for a corrupt government, they were sure local talent would easily equal anything available elsewhere. They did not enjoy shooting Americans any more than they had enjoyed shooting Spaniards, but they felt obligated to do it so why didn’t we just up and leave?

  And who the hell were the goddamned Americans to refer to Filipinos as “little brown brothers,” the ill-mannered sonsofbitches?

  Maria’s husband, Emilio, was on Bataan, and their two-year-old son captured.

  They felt that stronger nations was making a war for their own purposes, but the Filipinos were doing most of the dying and it was very real and close to them.

  Maria didn’t cry, she had a glittery air about her, and when she said modestly that if she was a general things were desperate, no? I laughed uproariously and shook my head.

  “Luther!” Lucretia scolded me. “You are being rude!”

  “But what do you want me to do?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Come with me, see what the soldiers do in the name of your country.”

  “Who was trying to kill me in Manila?”

  “The Japanese,” Maria said.

  “Why?”

  “Ask them.” Well, I had about half a mind to do just that, but Lucretia shook her head at me and looked dangerous. “Don’t think that. Quit,” she said, so I did.

  “Why do you think this will help—my seeing it, I mean.”

  “No one knows,” said Maria. “We are a poor country. For most of us, life is all lived within a few miles of the huts we were born in. Most people think that the earth is flat and the sun a god. Most cannot read. Yet strange soldiers come, huge men stinking of raw beef, and kill them, call them rebels when they are not, kill, rape the women sometimes to death, kill whole villages. Is this your democracy?”

  Pretty much, I thought, remembering Sand Creek and Wounded Knee Creek and the Bear Paw battle.

  All hell broke loose outside. I blew out the candles and grabbed my guns and peeked through the bamboo screens. There was spurts of flame out in the jacaranda and I heard the crump of grenades and wondered if Butch or Sundance had any or was that the others? Then I could see them coming across the lawn, flicking a shot backwards from time to time. They dove through a window and crashed on to an end table, scattering porcelain Buddhas and ashtrays. I was looking hard across the lawn but didn’t see anything coming on.

  “Who was it?” I says.

  “The fucking Altar Guild canvassing for a new rag,” says Butch, who was not a patient feller, “or maybe it was the Doan’s Little Liver Pills man. Orientals.”

  “Since we are in the Orient that comforts me,” I says. “It would be unnerving if they was niggers or Eskimos.”

  Butch held up a handful of bloody papers.

  “I cain’t read it,” he said.

  Neither could I. The characters were swift penmarks. I stuffed them in my shirt.

  “I think maybe we should leave,” I said. “You know, go somewhere and leave no forwarding address. Somewhere remote and not much traveled upon.”

  “Suits me,” said Sundance, smiling and looking for someone to kill.

  “I got money,” I said, “if we end up anywhere that uses money.”

  Maria Aguinaldo was laughing, quiet-like, I loved her for it. Lucretia was snickering, too.

  “It’s just a game to you, isn’t it,” she said.

  “Philosophers make my teeth itch,” said Sundance. “All my life I been looking for a place where everybody’s as stupid as I am.

  “One thing though,” says Sundance, “I got to ask. I don’t mind the jungle, I don’t mind the leeches that reminds me of lawyers, I don’t mind the shrubbery and the mud, I don’t mind the birds that sound like they escaped from the bughouse.”

  “What?” Maria said.

  “Republicans,” said the Kid. “We ain’t going where they got Republicans, are we?”

  “No,” said Maria. “No Republicans.”

  “Well, thank God,” said the Kid. “I was worried.”

  It was still outside. No movement in the bushes, maybe, maybe not, maybe someone was there, but we’d have to find out sooner or later.

  “You ready?” said Lucretia. I was struggling into my knee-high boots.

  “Yup.”

  “Yup.”

  “Yup.”

  “Yup.”

  We followed Maria out the back way and filed into the jungle. She found a path and led us on. We walked for maybe three hours and come to a ridgetop, and when we looked back Lucretia’s house was burning brightly.

  I shook my head and so did she.

  “This is serious business,” I said. “You can leave if you want to.”

  “Fuck off, Luther,” she said, smiling.

  15

  “GODDAMN IT,” SAID LUCRETIA. “They burned up my Turner and the Hiroshige prints. I don’t mind being hounded and shot at but that makes me mad.”

  There was a sudden whirl of sparks, from an explosion.

  “There went the dynamite in the basement.”

  We was both tired from the long day and all the excitement and the long walk, where we’d been lashed with branches had leaves that cut you a little.

  “Eeeeh! Come on!” said Maria. “Far to go.” We follered our general right along.

  Butch and Sundance was bringing up the rear, with a practiced routine. If they each didn’t have a thirty-thousand-dollar price on their head they could’ve gone on to vaudeville.

  “When we find the pink-spotted snake we can go.”
r />   “I just saw it last night.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Wrong time.”

  (In a few months time they was to go to Bolivia, steal a big herd of cows, and drive them clear through the Amazon to Argentina. How they did it, no one knows. Keeping yourself alive on that journey is a miracle, to keep two thousand cows alive is beyond all the hopes of men, cows being as dumb as they are.)

  “Sundance, look? A little paint and it’ll do? Right?”

  “You call that a snake? It ain’t big enough for a damn bootlace. Jesus.”

  Maria kept up a stiff pace through the gloom, that pale green-gray light of the jungle. Critters crashed off through the jungle, and once or twice I saw the huge coils of constrictor snakes tighten around something as we passed. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and the high whine of mosquitoes in their millions was enough to send you mad—like having a dentist’s drill in your ear.

  She left us in a glade by a small river and went off and she come back in a bit with balls of gluey rice, and that was lunch. We crossed the river, which was fairly deep, and picked the leeches off each other on the far bank.

  “Modesty is for people don’t have leeches on them,” said Lucretia. We all stripped and plucked and then dressed and went on. I was watching every move Maria made, for this was all new country to me and I didn’t know its ways or dangers. There were different ones that I wasn’t used to. In the line of work I’m in time to time a sprained ankle or a missed meal can be a death sentence.

  We walked till dark and finally come out into a small clearing with little thatched houses up on stilts all the way around it. I heard pigs grunt and the bawl of calves—water buffalo, I guessed—and a couple men slid out of the shadows and Maria hugged them and then brought them and introduced Juan and Diego, her friends and fellow rebels.

  We was all exhausted, and Lucretia and I was led off to a hut on the far edge and gestured into it. I let the cloth door drop and looked at my beautiful, bedraggled love, who grinned out of her tangles of hair and sank to the floor, exhausted.

  “Used to be all I did was take tea and lovers,” she said. “I don’t know how a girl gets used to all the excitement.”