The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  I pulled off my boots and took off my clothes and Lucy did the same. There was a faint coolness coming up from below the grass mats we was laying on, and we both settled down and then I looked at her and she me and we fell to it as though we had just woke up from a long sleep. I damn near expected sparks when we touched.

  Too tired to sleep, we lay there murmuring things of no value or weight—foods we liked, wines, childhood stuff—and went to sleep in the middle of sentences.

  No one woke us, the little village went about its business like it had for the last ten thousand years or so, and after the worries of the days before the sleepiness of the place was like a medicine.

  In the late afternoon it smelled of rain, and tall black clouds was piled up coming in from the Pacific, and there was a little wind. We dressed and come down to find Butch and Sundance and Maria playing poker. She was winning.

  Butch looked up and smiled as sunny as could be, while Sundance furrowed his brows and glared at his cards.

  “The Kid and me is heading to South America,” said Butch.

  “Damn right,” says the Kid. “I know I’ll end on the gallows but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be for rustling water buffalo. The goddamned things is the family puppy dog, and I ain’t gonna hang for stealing the family puppy dog. These Filipinos sure knows how to break a badman’s heart.”

  “We’re overspecialized, I told the Kid. Here, I said, ‘Kid, we own plain old hidebound skulduggery.’ Said we ought to have gone into the whorehouse business or making matches or something,” said Butch.

  “We’re what ya come to you don’t get an aim in life early,” said the Kid. “Just like my mother said, if I didn’t buckle down to them schoolbooks I’d turn out like me.”

  “But we hear in South America they got real cows to steal and banks and even a few trains, for a change of pace,” says Butch. “And at our age we don’t really have the wherewithal ...”

  “The what?” says Sundance.

  “Money.”

  “Well, why the hell didn’t you say so?”

  “I did.”

  “Shit.”

  “Anyway, we can’t see anything we can do for you and if you can think of something we’ll stay for sure,” says Butch.

  “Till Wednesday,” says Sundance.

  “You don’t even know what day it is, goddamn it!”

  “There you go, picking on me for my lack of education,” says Sundance, looking grieved. “I done the best with what I got.”

  Lucretia was about on the ground, she’d laughed out so much air that her tight chest wouldn’t get it back.

  “Which way is South America, anyway?” says Sundance.

  “Over there,” says Butch, pointing.

  “How far?”

  “Ten, twelve thousand miles,” says Butch.

  “We gonna swim?” says Sundance.

  “Naw, we’ll take a boat.”

  “I was lookin’ forward to the exercise,” said Sundance.

  “We’ll get exercise stealing the boat,” says Butch.

  Lucretia gasped her breath back and said, “I have a boat you can have. It’s in the yacht basin, and I’ll give you a note to the harbormaster. You’ll have to learn how to navigate.”

  “What’s navigate?” says Sundance.

  “Tellin’ where you are.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Sundance,” says Butch, “I’m gettin’ tired of your goddamned act. Now, draw a line in the dirt and step up to it and then tell these nice people where you went to college.”

  Sundance drew a line in the dust and stepped up to it and put both toes of his boots on it.

  “Princeton,” says the Sundance Kid.

  “What in,” says Butch.

  “Mathematics,” says Sundance.

  “And how did you graduate?”

  “Mongoose come loudly,” says Sundance. “I always wondered what it was that they did to that poor mongoose.”

  They hitched on their bandoliers and picked up their guns and Lucretia handed them a note and she hugged and kissed each one of them a long time. They was both grinning like walruses, and happy for me, which they expressed by warning her what I did to dogs and poultry if I was let loose without a keeper.

  “You need money?” I said.

  “Money’s in the bank,” says Butch. “We know all about it.”

  And they walked down the path that went down the mountain to join the main road. They waved once at the bend in the trail and then they were gone.

  “Marvelous,” said Lucretia, over and over.

  “Those boys is better behaved than most,” I says. “Some of my friends ought to be welded into cages and left for the birds.”

  She laughed again.

  “Nice of you to give ’em your yacht,” I said.

  “Sams won’t use it,” she said. “And I’m glad to be rid of it. I wonder if they will turn to piracy before they sight South America?”

  “They’ll turn to piracy ’fore they get out of Manila Bay,” I predicted.

  It was damn lonely without them. We were at the mercy of the people in the village, and whatever form the guerrilleros were taking now.

  “It is easier for them to come to you than for you to go,” said Maria, “but there are some things I want you to see here.” I expected bullet-riddled children or amputees but it wasn’t anything like that. She took us to the village school, where twelve children were studying on one tattered book and doing their alphabets in the dust.

  “If the Spanish found a village school they would shoot the teacher in the stomach, so they would die in great pain over many hours, and then cut off the left hand of each of the children.” The kids all had stumps on the left.

  We walked away, toward a little brook that came from high up, starting near what looked like the cone of an extinct volcano. There was fifty kinds of orchids I could see, and hibiscus and frangipani. Bright birds dashed around the green trees, their songs were ones I had never heard before. Huge butterflies with metallic wings hung sipping nectar from flowers shaped like flagons. The jungle seemed to breathe, to throb visibly, all one creature. It scared the hell out of me.

  The islands had fifty kinds of snakes, forty-eight of which was poisonous, and them damned tiger hornets and insects the size of shoes that lived on fresh meat. I saw a spider would’ve hung off a dinner plate leap out and grab a bird out of the air and all manner of leeches was squirming and trying to get to us, like they could smell us even though they was underwater.

  “El Tigre will come in three days,” said Maria. “Until then you should rest, there is plenty of food in the village and you must eat and drink well. I am going back to my warriors now, all you must do is stay, do not try to leave, the people of the village would have to kill you.”

  “I think we should stay,” said Lucretia. “I think they really want us to.”

  We fucked a lot, and walked around hand in hand, and looked for different colors of butterflies and lived in each other for days. The heat was just bearable, and we could bathe in the stream if we got the leeches off before they was dug in good.

  The villagers went on about their business as if we weren’t there. The meals was communal, but they brought a big leaf all piled up with food and a weak warm beer and looked hurt if we did not finish everything at once.

  Lucretia’s undone hair fell almost to her knees, and she bade me cut it one evening. I had only my killing knife from my boot and it was sharper than a razor, and I cut her hair off short as mine all round, and a lucky thing I did, for I found a big tick in her scalp, all swollen up with blood. I lit a candle and heated my penknife blade in it and got the tick to back out—it’s bad when you jerk them out and they leave their heads in—and I smashed the bugger and had her look me over good but I hadn’t any. Them ticks have an ether in their saliva numbs the skin when they burrow in, I guess.

  It rained every four hours, and we’d lay together in the hut running our hands over each other. Lucy had a gra
nd smile, white and quick.

  The guerrilleros came on the fourth morning, we were sitting on the lashed bamboo staircase when these small brown silent men came out of the jungle all around us, and the leader come walking toward where we sat, with his machete in his hand.

  I damn near burst out laughing. He had tiger-stripes tattooed across his face. El Tigre, indeed. I must have smiled wide, for he smiled, too.

  “I was drunk,” he said, in good English. “You know how it is when you have too much fun.”

  “Luther Kelly,” I says, extending my hand. He took it in a firm, dry grip and shook twice. He was still smiling.

  “And Lucretia Sams,” I went on.

  “Did you have to mention that son of a bitch?” she said, smiling at El Tigre. Butch and Sundance had left her a shotgun and a pair of ivory-handled thirty-eights (“we took them off this bank clerk and they was too small to use and too purty to throw away”) and she did look ready for war. I aimed to keep her as far out of it as I could.

  “We go now,” said El Tigre, and he and his men split halves, one group going in front and one behind, and off we went into the wet green dark of the jungle.

  The path was cleared and flat, with only an occasional liana or strangler fig across it, but they was big enough to see good. The quiet was eerie, and any sounds of birds or animals came from high above, two hundred feet, in the tops of the trees. As green as it was and as full of life it felt old as sin.

  We come to a fire clearing, where some folk had burnt out the undergrowth so they could raise one or two crops of whatever before the tired soil gave out. There was a death stench in the air and I pulled Lucretia behind me. I doubted that she’d ever seen a corpse bloated from the heat and I meant to spare her. There was several, in American uniforms, and Lucretia took one look and choked and stuck her face in my shirt. I led her away and to the trail and she sniffed twice and was fine.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “First time it’s hard. And the forty after that,” I said, telling her no more than the honest truth. I don’t see how a human could ever get used to it.

  A couple of hours farther down the mountain she come up beside me and said, “It isn’t a game, is it?” and I said no it wasn’t and it could get very rough real quick, especially fighting in the jungle, where everybody was fighting like they had blindfolds on and Bowie knives in a darkened room, like the stories.

  We crossed a pretty good road in a hurry and the ones in the rear brushed away our tracks and on we went, swinging with the same rhythm, silent and sinister. Killers in front, killers behind, killers looking for us, and who knew when we would stumble blind one into another. I wished to Christ that Lucretia had stayed. I feared for her, and, damn it, I had begun to fear for myself, and wondered how much of my life had been misspent because I did not really care what happened to me at all.

  When we stopped for the customary ball of rice glue Lucretia got near me and whispered, “What are you thinking so hard about?” and I said I was philosophizing on an empty head and not to take it too serious.

  “They won’t let anything happen to us,” said Lucretia. “We are the ones who tell the world.”

  Assuming that they’d listen, which I doubted deep.

  Early that evening we padded into a big clearing with many large bread loaf–shaped huts spread out around the edges of the forest. We stopped for the night, and Lucretia and me was steered to a small hut back behind one of the big ones. One of the guerrilleros beckoned to us and led us to a tall tree all hung with big green vines. He slashed one open and water sluiced down and he left us the machete and a double handful of leaves that had soap for sap. We got clean and washed our clothes some, and though there were fifty men about not one gave us so much as a glance as we walked to the hut, leaving our clothes to dry as much as they would on the bamboo staircase.

  We coupled like leopards, full of some urgency we felt, and lay for a while till the sweat dried and then went at it again. Her fingers dug into my back and I moaned once, and thought I have never done that.

  In the early light we went on, along a wider trail, and the troop was much more relaxed. The dangerous territory had been crossed, it seemed, and we were closing in on shelter. I had a quick sight on the stars when I had first got up, and we seemed by my reckoning to be moving out on the peninsula on the west side of Manila Bay. I couldn’t remember what it was called.

  I whispered the question to Lucretia, who said “Bataan,” and I shrugged and went back to watching the bushes. I wondered if you sat off in the jungle twenty feet if anyone could see you, the colors was such a riot to the eye.

  We went up a steep slope and along a narrow razorback ridge, and then through a cave that went right through the flank of the mountain. I heard a crashing off a ways and lifted my gun, but it was just some wild pigs.

  The pace slowed and we come through a narrow gully and to a clearing shaped like a willow leaf.

  The troops filed off left and right and there was Maria, and next to her, unless I missed my guess, the often captured Emilio Aguinaldo, patriot, busy cleaning his house.

  16

  EL TIGRE AND EIGHT others with stripes on their faces just like him stood behind Emilio and Maria, grinning like sots at a wake.

  Lucretia put a hand to her pretty mouth and then she burst out with that booming laugh.

  “Every once and so often the Americans kill or capture El Tigre. They brag on it. And a new one comes forth. El Tigre cannot be killed. El Tigre is immortal. Bravo Bravo Bravo.”

  The nine bowed.

  “Did you hear what your Speaker of the House Reed said?” Emilio grinned and kissed his fingertips. “He said to the full House of Representatives that the valiant United States Army had captured Aguinaldo’s two-year-old son, and was presently in hot pursuit of the mother.”

  Tom Reed, now there was one to conjure with. I’d been near when Teethadore had asked him if he’d plans to be the Republican presidential candidate. “No,” said Reed, “I expect my party can do worse, and they will.”

  “I got a fool letter promising amnesty, so I could be with my son, from that General MacArthur—he’s pretty good general—so I wrote back and said I was fighting so my son wouldn’t have to be kidnapped by bastards like him, in his own country,” said Emilio.

  Aguinaldo had some dry wit, I’ll tell you.

  The peninsula we was on was so jumbled and jungly it was a defender’s dream and an attacker’s nightmare. The Americans would win hands down anything fought where they could maneuver, but they couldn’t do much here but get lost and wear themselves plumb out chasing noises which was usually wild pigs.

  Maria took Lucretia off, I supposed for a bath, and Aguinaldo got me a gourd half full of rice brandy and we found a dry old log to set on and we talked.

  “These Spaniards, they were cruel,” he said. “But you Americans are just greedy. Your merchants want to milk my country for as many years as you can get away with. We don’t deserve that.”

  I sipped the brandy. All true so far, for all the good it will do you, Emilio. Under all the fancy talk about democracy you are just another nigger standing on the gold to them. I have known these people a long time.

  “Also, I worry because I am beginning to love war. It is a sin, but I do. I love the battles, afterward is bad, but the battles are good. Do you know how many American troops there are here trying to catch me and my five thousand men? One hundred fifty thousand. Most of them are lost in the jungle, feeding the leeches. If some get shot or have their throats cut, they kill everyone, little babies, everyone, in the next two or three villages. They run around looking for me and I let them fight me when I want to. I can’t take Manila, the MacArthur, he’s a damn good general. He can’t find me in the jungle. I’ll stay here until he leaves and the troops, too. You tell them go home?”

  I explained that very little of MacArthur’s ears was hanging on my every word, and that I could scream in MacArthur’s face and he’d just wave a hand
to have me thrown out and go on with his correspondence. In short, I was not likely to be real useful.

  “Then I will have to wear them out, let the bugs and the boredom of the jungle destroy them.”

  I nodded. There wasn’t anything wrong with his tactics save I knew he didn’t have no notion of how far greed will propel a country of businessmen if they don’t have to do any of the dying. Also he didn’t think much of Germany or Japan bothering him. One or the other would be coming right up the walk the moment the last American troopship was hull down on the horizon.

  So we sat there and I told him all this and he looked at me like I’d had too much sun, wondering what on earth those countries would need from the poor Philippines.

  We watched a couple battalions of his soldiers drill. They was wearing ragged peasant clothes and sandals, but the guns all gleamed with oil and the men drilled right smart. The bandoliers was full of cartridges and everything had been lifted from the Americans, adding to MacArthur’s fury. This war could go on for a long, long time.

  Maria and Lucretia come back, Lucretia all aglow from her bath, and I wanted one, too, but would have to wait. She tried the rice brandy and screwed up her face and grinned and drank the rest of it.

  “Waste not, want not,” she said. “That’s very good. The jungle seems greener after a few snorts of that. Mmmmmmmmm.”

  Maria laughed with her hand held over her mouth.

  Just then a runner burst out of the jungle and he looked around and saw Aguinaldo and raced over, spewing out a string of the bastard Polynesian that everyone in the Philippines knew but me and I thought Lucretia, but she was listening and taking in the words and nodding.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Americans pushing into Bataan. Aguinaldo said we’ll go give them a bloody nose.”

  I rose to go with Aguinaldo, but he shook his head.

  “We talk more when I get back,” he said. “You stay with the pretty lady.”

  Lucretia was glowing, her skin was some transparent anyway, but now she looked pale and hot. It worried me. I had her turn round and I looked at the place where the tick had been, but I couldn’t even see it. She felt warm to my hand. This was no place to have a fever in. I gave her quinine and the bitter taste wrinkled her nose and then she laughed.