Here by the Bloods (10 page)

“Let me have a drink, boy.”

“If you need a drink, you are going to hell still needing it.”

“Well, I never was the Pearly Gates type.”

“She was a sweet girl.”

“Was she? I would not know.” He fixes his eyes on me best he can. His neck wrenches back to see me. “Come on, boy. I know you got a flask on you. Just give me one shot. All I ask is one shot.”

“Sure.” I draw the Colt and fire point-blank into the back of his thigh. His scream is more surprise than pain, until the pain sets in.

“Don't do this, boy. You're better than this.”

I holster the Colt and drop down, driving my knee into the fresh wound as I land on top of him. Now he screams like a girl. I holster the Colt and draw my knife. I keep a plenty sharp blade, but it is no razor. I
could
use his razor. It would be fitting. But I think better of it. A little dullness never hurt anybody. Unless you are Jed Barnes.

“No, I am not,” I say into his ear. “And when I see you in hell I will do it again.” His hair is foul and wet—I grab a thick, greasy handful of it. I feel, for the first time in hours, nothing. I am at peace. I am Navajo.

The desert floor passes beneath me, washed pale gray by a moon that holds small and bright in the sky. I follow the railroad tracks. My vision is clear again, the pain in my head nearly gone. The stiffness in my back and arms slows me a little, but the burning in my hip, where the shovel caught me, turns my walk more into a limp with every stride.

I call again for Storm and am answered back only by the cool breeze rolling down from the Sangres. Far to my left, a gray pulse of movement draws my eye. I spin toward it and see nothing but rocks and fat fingers of cacti. Then from behind me a high-pitched
Yaaooo
punctures the night. A signal. When I look forward again, the flicker where a shadow had been is now a young man, seated atop a piebald mare. He cannot be more than thirty yards from where I stand.

All at once I know three things:

1. The tracker in me has been out-tracked.

2. If there is one in front of me, so conspicuous, then I can bet my silver that there are plenty more lurking in the dark.

3. They will probably kill me.

The scout's hair, parted in the middle and blacker than the coal smeared across my shirt, hangs down to his elbows in two ropey braids. He sits bareback. True Navajo. Saddlery is the fussy business of white men. Cradled in his arm I make out a Kentucky Longrifle—ancient, from before the war—aimed casually, but unequivocally, in the vicinity of my heart. I continue toward him at an easy, unthreatening pace.

A rifle shot cracks the air behind me and kicks up the dust at my feet, close enough for a pebble to skitter against my boot. It is either an effective warning or a dismal kill shot. Whichever it is, I stop.

Horses canter up from the rear. I do not turn around. A chestnut gelding passes close enough to touch. That is the intent, I gather, when the moccasin of its rider jabs me in the shoulder. This second scout's face comes into view, set firmly in a sneer. He already does not care for me. He steers the gelding with his knees, his hands occupied with more pressing business. From his left, a rope drapes behind him to the bridle of an unmounted horse. It is the palomino. And behind it, gnawing unsuccessfully at the rope and thoroughly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, is Storm. The scout's right hand holds my own Spencer rifle and I find myself staring down the barrel of it.

“Gaagii,” he calls to the other without taking his eyes off me.

The younger one, maybe nineteen, same as I, edges the piebald over and takes the rope. A rusty lock opens in my brain. Words, forgotten sounds from a lifetime ago, stretch from their slumber.
Gaagii
. Raven. The younger one is called Raven.

“
O'o, anaai
,” Raven says, taking the rope.
O'o
. Yes.
Anaai
. Brother. No. More than brother.
Older
brother.

The elder scout hurls words at me I do not understand. I know none of them are kind. He wears his hair tied back, practical, ready for battle. He doubles back on the gelding and shoves me again—more of an inspection than a blow, like a kid poking a lifeless dog with a stick to see if it is really dead. I react only enough to catch my balance. Something about that bothers him. He spins the Spencer around and slams the butt against my head. I go down. He flies off his horse and meets me on the ground. The cold edge of a tomahawk, dulled by the bones of a hundred cavalry soldiers, finds the skin of my cheek. He holds it there while the steady stream of invectives continues to pour out of him.

“Ahiga.” A new voice, graveled with age and soft with authority, freezes my tormentor. He rises off me, slightly, enough to let me see the ghost. A pale gray pony—the exact color of the moonlight—stands before us. Seated atop him, draped in white buckskin, is a silver-haired man with a face as cragged as the great Western Canyons. He raises a single, quieting finger. I know at once that he is the scouts' father. And when a subtle wave of that finger backs his son off me completely, I know he is also their chief.

The pair of Colts riding my hips pops into my head. I could fell one brave for sure, maybe even the chief, but then the other one would see to it that I died slowly—burned at the stake is my guess, as the wailing squaws feasted on my skin. I glance over at the young scout, Raven, with that well-oiled Longrifle. If his weapon of choice predates the Union I reckon he is mighty confident in its accuracy. So even killing one scout would be a stretch. As I consider the Colts, the chief seems to hear my thought and does the same. You do not get to his age in the Bloods without taking a few precautions. “Ahiga,” the chief says again.

The warrior son comes back to me and grabs at my waist. The holster unbuckles and drops to the ground. He shoves me away.
Ahiga.
The word falls into my head. Fighter. The chief named his son Fighter and the son has made good on its meaning. He argues a hard case to his father that my scalp would look better tied to his belt than sitting intact in its present location.

Two men discuss my fate while I stand by with my arms up. I feel the tide turning in the wrong direction. Words that I have not heard or uttered since I was a boy bounce inside my skull, but I have no trust in my command of them. English troubles me enough. The Dineh tongue wields its biting force with a serpent's power.

“Dineh,” I say, using their word for Navajo. I touch my chest and say it again. The silver-hair levels a withering, hawklike gaze upon me, appraising me with fresh eyes. Raven perks up noticeably, his aim now bereft of its earlier lassitude. The butt of the Spencer slams into my gut. I double over. But the pain never comes. I have been beaten so much today that even the pain is wore out.

“Bilagáana!”
Ahiga hovers over me, spitting out the Dineh word for White Man and a few others unsuitable for church.

Somehow I start breathing again and find the strength to look up. “
Ama
,” I say.
Mother
. “
Ama
was Dineh too.” The silver-hair brings his pony closer, curious now. If he deems me a liar—or worse, that my intent is mockery—he will slay me himself. But I speak true.

“What name, mother?” the chief asks. And something about his drift into English makes me feel Death's icy fingers dance across my neck.

I answer him. “Yanaha. Yanaha Begay.” I could leave it at that, but for some reason I keep talking. “But white folks called her Rosie.”

I swear that in the moonlight I see a flicker of a smile dash across his lips before he can quash it. It is a smile I have seen before, on the faces of men of a certain age, when I mention Mamma. But then the chief grows reflective, as if a forgotten, wretched soul had called out to him from the Spirit Realm.

The chief raises his eyes skyward, beseeching the heavens to guide him. His voice carries a lilting prayer high into the night. My fate rests on a warm breeze that nudges gently at my back and then shifts abruptly to sweep across my chest.

The chief's brown eyes pop open, startled, and fall on me with genuine surprise. “You puzzle the Spirits. You speak words of the Dineh, but are clothed in garments of the trouser-wearers.”

Ahiga blurts out that all I am is a trouser-wearer and that that alone should warrant the spilling of my blood upon the desert floor.

“No, my son,” the silver-hair says, using English for my benefit. “This man
hok'ee
. Abandoned. His spirit cannot rest. Two worlds tear at him. Dineh and
bilagáana
.”

The warrior son wants to hear none of it. He steps in front of his father, gets in my face with that ax, itching to split my skull open. He says something about all trouser-wearers being the same and how I would use the White Man's guns to slaughter the Dineh if the White Man asked me to. I see the silver-head mulling the prospect and again I feel myself compelled to speak.

“Tell me how white I am.” I bring my arm down slowly, giving Ahiga all the excuse he needs to raise that ax up over my head. A supplicating gesture—my open palms—earns me the slightest currency to continue. My fingers descend into my coat pocket and wrap themselves around the sopping, hairy mass I have stored there. Blood squeezes from it like a sponge. “You come for the scalp of a white man. You have it.” I place what I have ripped from Jed Barnes's head into the outstretched hand of the stunned Navaho warrior. I close my fist around his and let the blood bind us. It seeps through our fingers, down our forearms, forever uniting us in the spirit under which we were both born. “You follow them tracks, you will find the rest of him.”

His trophy secured, Ahiga retreats to his horse and I turn my attention to the chief. “The palomino there, he will serve the Great Leader well. But the stallion, I will not trouble you with him. Best let me ride him off.” The silver-hair turns toward the horses. Storm picks that exact moment to let every chiseled sinew of muscle flex with perfection as if he were the star of the auction block. His coat shimmers in the moonlight.

“Good horse,” chief says. “Will honor me with strong ride.”

“Got a devil's spirit, that one,” I say, not giving myself a chance to think about it. “Mean as a badger. Thickheaded, to boot.”

The chief shrugs. “Then we eat him.”

“I swear, even his flesh is deviled. One bite of his poison blood and you drop where you stand.” The chief eyes me suspect. I do not budge. Sweat drips down my back. Talk may not be my strong suit, but let's see that slippery cigar drummer back at the hotel try to hoodwink a wily Indian chief—a hairsbreadth away from killing him—out of a perfectly good stallion. Every ounce of moisture drains from my mouth.

“I see no devil in him,” the chief says.

“Storm!” I yell. All at once, the stallion rears up on his hind legs and lets out a heinous cry that no rider would ever want to hear again. The force against the rope jerks the head of the hapless palomino and nearly topples Raven from his mount. Ahiga runs to the rescue, but Storm's fate is already sealed.

“He has the spirit of your mother,” the chief says, before addressing his sons in Dineh. “Cut the stallion loose. We will leave these two tortured brothers to the winds' mercy.”

Raven defers to his obedience and begrudgingly slices the rope. Storm dances back from him. My Spencer hangs from Ahiga's broad shoulder as he parades the palomino in front of me.

“That Spencer is a tricky bitch too,” I offer.

Ahiga climbs atop his horse and spits out a grin. “Don't push your luck, half-breed.”

The smell of coffee swirls up from the bar where Merle refills my cup from a fresh pot. “You get any sleep?” he asks with a probing eye.

“'Bout two hours,” I offer.

“That's two more than me,” he says. Early morning light splays mutedly through the greasy sweat and splatters of whiskey that coat the panes of the Jewel's front window. Merle has not yet gotten there with his rag, but I know he will have the place spit-shined by opening. “Noon can't come fast enough. Get that bastard hanged and in the ground so I can get some goddamn shut-eye.” Merle looks at me, grimaces, then looks away. “You hear about Scratch Gardner?”

“Not more than what I saw.”

“Dead before he got to Doc's. Died on the wagon.” Merle pauses at a white gob stuck to the bar. He picks at it with his finger. “Goddamn chewing gum! You believe this bullshit? I don't care how good the till is running, this ain't a fucking schoolhouse.”

The door to the street clangs open and a weary traveler, dusty from the road, steps into the saloon. “We're closed!” Merle barks. “Come back at nine.”

The little man looks at Merle, dumbfounded, then digs out his pocket watch. “Why, it's twelve minutes to,” he says.

“Then piss off and come back in twelve minutes.” Merle snaps his rag on the bar for good measure. The man slumps and shuffles back out the way he came.

I grip my mug with both hands, letting the warmth seep through my aching fingers. The blood from last night washed off easily enough, but the coal dust required an extra going-over with lye soap—making for one hell of a cold bath in the pre-dawn darkness beneath the water pump behind the barn. Then it was two hours of thin, restless sleep before I pulled on the last of my new shirts and headed down to the Jewel. I felt compelled to check in with Merle, my lone conspirator—he apparently felt the same. With Jed now feeding the crows, the Jewel need no longer be a place to avoid.

“That head Pinkerton and the mayor come in here last night looking for you.”

“What they want?”

“Did not say. But I told them, ‘If Harlan is the object of your search, well, El Dorado would be easier to find.'”

“I 'spect that set well.”

“You assume correct. But since I knew you wouldn't mind my saying, I told the gentlemen that if you were not at home, an unscheduled hunting excursion beneath the full moon was the most likely culprit.” Merle leans in and pitches his voice to a whisper, concealing his words from the ears of the two other souls in the room. “And on that point, I doubt I was wrong.”

“Much obliged,” I say.

Merle reaches beneath the bar and comes back with a bottle and two shot glasses. He pours generously. “To long nights.” We clink our glasses.

The liquor slides down and I know that this is the last we will ever speak of it. Still, I am uneasy that Mulgrew and the mayor would take time to search me out. The business with Maria seems hardly a matter to concern themselves with, but I figure avoiding them sends the wrong message and reason I might ought to amble over to the jail after my coffee.

“Dude looks like he found himself a game.”

“And then some,” Merle says. In the far corner, Avery Willis plucks a few poker chips from his stack and tosses them into the center of the table. A sandy-haired stranger sits across from him. “Fourteen hours and counting. Everybody else bust out, except them two.” The stranger sports a chocolate brown suit that has seen better days, but his crisp white shirt looks fresh out of the box. Only the untied scarlet bowtie dangling from his collar hints at the duration of the game.

The stranger thinks for a moment before pushing in his chips. “I call ya,” he says, and then picks up the deck to deal. “You ain't hit your flush yet.”

“Gave his name as Jessup,” Merle whispers to me. “Out of Kansas, I think. Throwing the dude all he can handle. Then again, the dude is the one with the horse.”

“What horse?”

Merle motions to the window. A giant brown figure, obscured by the gauzy film of the glass, bobs gently at the tie-pole out front. “A fine, dappled filly. Some half-witted sot put her up in the stud game. Turns over a pair to the dude's straight and dude has got himself a two-hundred-dollar racer.”

“He can tie it to the back of his coach, I guess.”

“I better keep them lubricated,” Merle says, drifting toward the table, coffeepot in hand.

“More coffee, gentlemen?” Merle's cheeriness is lethal. “Or perhaps you're ready for a more substantial eye-opener?”

The front door clangs open, followed by the shuffle of eager footsteps. “We're fucking closed!” Merle barks. Then he smiles. “Oh, it's you two.”

Big Jack bounds in from the street, followed closely by Elbert. “Morning, Merle,” Big Jack says before noticing me. “Harlan! Hell, you been outside? Folks is gatherin' up for the hangin' even now.”

“Ten-deep in some places,” Elbert adds. “And every type of drummer right there to shill 'em something. Heck, I oughta set up outside with a bottle of rye. Five cents a pull!”

“Elbert, you so much as hawk a glass of lemonade to my would-be customers, I'll cut your hands off.”

“Shit, Merle, I was just supposing.”

“Good. Coffee, boys?” Merle asks.

“Sure thing,” Big Jack says. Merle pours them each a cup. “I hear they're predicting a thousand.”

“A thousand? Shit,” Merle says. “I better tell Rico to shovel some more lye over the piss trough. Where the hell is Rico anyway?”

“Your boy is outside, tending to my new horse,” Willis says from the table, without taking his eyes off his opponent. “Thanks for the use of him. Please charge my tab accordingly.”

“No trouble at all, sir,” Merle says.

“Two pair,” he then announces, turning over his hole cards.

The one called Jessup shakes his head with a little embarrassed snort. “You had me till Seventh Street, but I fell ass-backwards into a boat.” The Kansan flips up the three aces that complete his full house and starts raking the mountain of chips toward his side.

Avery Willis watches coolly as half of his stack changes ownership. “Merle, I shall take that whiskey now.”

“Coming right up, sir.”

Elbert glares over at Willis in disbelief—not at the dude's misfortune, but at the inconceivable notion that he would choose to spend the entire night in a musty saloon rather than at the hotel . . . with her.

The woman. I had shut her out of my mind like a door against the howling wind. But all at once her face comes back to me, the brush of her gloved hand as she descended the stairs at the hotel. A pang of guilt kicks angrily inside me. I do my best to push it away.

“Seems a crime, do it not?” Elbert begins, careful to keep his words from reaching the dude's ears. “Leaving a woman like that all alone? Lord mercy, I could think of 'bout a hundred things I could do with that fine piece of ass and ain't one of them involve a deck of cards.”

“It is 'cause you are not married, Elbert,” Merle says. “I don't care how comely a woman is. Some fella, somewhere, has grown bored of her dewiest charms.”

“Might I point out, them two ain't married neither,” Big Jack says. “What do you think of it, Harlan?”

I down the last of my coffee. “I think the lot of you gabble like a pack of hens.”

 

 

“The aces seem to love you today, sir,” Willis says as the Kansan riffles the deck to deal.

“I make no claim to explain the fickle variance of cards, Mister Willis. Their love can turn to ice as quickly as the wind shifts.” Jessup splits the cards and flutters them back upon themselves.

“But I cannot help noticing that the aces favor you considerably more kindly on your own deal then they do on mine.” The dude's tone makes Jessup freeze. All at once, Avery Willis flies up from his chair and slams a vise grip down on the wrist of the unsuspecting Kansan.

“What the hell?” Jessup cries as Willis rips open the man's shirt cuff.

“You black cheater!” howls Willis as he pulls the fabric back, exposing the clover of the ace of clubs tethered to the Kansan's forearm. “I'll cave your blasted head in!”

Jessup counters with a lightning-quick draw of his forty, which holds steady and unwavering in his left hand, the barrel locked on the dude's head. Jessup steps back from the table, only then shifting slightly to bring the four of us at the bar into his view. He keeps the gun trained on Willis. “Now listen here,” the Kansan says firmly. “Ain't no man here need to be a hero or jump into that what ain't his concern.”

Each steadfast, backward step carries the cardsharp closer to the door, until his free, groping hand finds the knob. I think about the Colts weighing on my hip. The twelve-gauge Merle keeps behind the bar would be the second option. But the Kansas cheater has not aimed his gun at me. Cheating might be wrong from the pulpit, but I feel none compelled—not after Jed Barnes—to catch even a grazing whisper of a poorly aimed slug. It is not my money and not my fight. Willis would be in his rights to draw on Jessup. He might get himself killed. If the gambler were dead . . . I do not even let myself think about it. I push the woman's face out of my brain as quickly as it rose up there.

“Leave that derringer in your pocket, Willis,” Jessup says as he swings the barroom door open with his leg. The sounds of the street rush in—shouts and laughter and clattering wagons. “You take them chips as your own and we'll call it square.”

“Like hell we will,” Willis sneers.

The Kansan turns and bolts out into the crowd. I am on my feet and moving, Willis and the others a step behind me.

I catch sight of the fleeing man as he bobs through the crowd and across the road. “There he is!” I point to the Kansan as he unhitches his pony at lightning speed.

“Stop that man!” Willis shouts. Merle's Mexican bar boy, Rico, looks up at us from the tie-pole where he brushes the dude's handsome new acquisition.

Jessup hops in his saddle, kicking the pony out of his nap. They disappear into the far alley, no doubt set on the open desert. Merle unleashes a sharp whistle that draws the eye of the Pinkerton sniper on the roof of the Dry Goods.

“Thief,” Merle yells, “on the pony!” The sniper looks back, confused. Merle's words get swallowed up by the din of the street, leaving the Pinkerton man straining to interpret a charade of points and gestures—to no avail.

“He's getting away, dammit,” Willis cranes his neck and sees a second Pinkerton man directly over the Jewel, watching over us with some curiosity. “Sir, I have been swindled by that blasted man on the pony!”

“There's a hanging today,” says the Pinkerton.

“I know there's a fucking hanging. We still have laws against thievery!”

“Can't spare a man, sir. We hold our ground. We have our orders.”

“Useless, these Pinkerton oafs!” Willis stomps the ground in disgust.

“Now don't you worry about the money,” Merle interjects. “He took no cash off the table and all the chips go to you.”

“I will not be cheated!” Willis barks. “It is reputation at stake. Word gets out, every two-bit river gypsy from here to Atlanta will think they can shark Avery Willis!”

“Not one of us will ever speak of it. You have my word,” Merle says.

“Mine too,” offers Elbert.

“And mine,” says Big Jack.

But I see the gambler's eyes narrow with stony resolve. He pulls from his waistcoat a silver-plated forty-four, considerably larger than any derringer. The gun could take a man down at a hundred paces. He shifts it to his front waistband for a speedier draw.

“Lock up my chips, Merle.” Before anyone can counter, Avery Willis charges past me. “Untie her, boy!” Rico, wide-eyed with fear, paws at the lashing and flicks the horse free. Willis leaps off the porch and lands squarely in the saddle of the unsuspecting filly. A precise heel to her flank, timed with a confident pull on the reins, dissolves any unfamiliarity between mount and rider. The filly flares up and pivots around at the gambler's command. “Yaah!” Willis cries as the powerful animal sprints forth into the street.

Startled spectators scatter like mice—save for a lone, wretched woman who nearly trips over her own gown. Already at full gallop, Willis orders an elegant sidestep around the woman with an imperceptible tug of the reins, a maneuver that further flaunts the indisputable expertise of a talented horseman.

Merle is the first to find the words that voice our collective sentiment. “Lord, have mercy! That dude can
ride
.”