Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (16 page)

6

Hooch was astounded. “You mean you
don’t want
the whole shipment?

“We ain’t used up what you sold us last time, Hooch,” said the quartermaster. “Four barrels, that’s all we want. More than we need, to tell the truth.”

“I come down the river from Dekane, loaded up with likker, not stopping to sell any at the towns along the way, I make that
sacrifice
and you tell me—”

“Now, Hooch, I reckon we all know what kind of sacrifice that was.” The quartermaster smirked a little. “I think you’ll still recover your costs, pretty much, and if you don’t, well, it just means you ain’t been careful with the profits you’ve made off us afore.”

“Who else is selling to you?”

“Nobody,” said the quartermaster.

“I been coming to Carthage City for nigh on seven years now, and the last four years I’ve had a monopoly—”

“And if you’ll pay heed, you’ll remember that in the old days it used to be Reds what bought most of your likker.”

Hooch looked around, walked away from the quartermaster, stood on the moist grassy ground of the riverbank, His flatboat rocked lazily on the water. There wasn’t a Red to be seen, not a one, and that was a fact. But it wasn’t no conspiracy, Hooch knew that. Reds had been slacking off
the last few times he came. Always there used to be a few drunks, though.

He turned and shouted at the quartermaster. “You telling me there ain’t no whisky-Reds left!”

“Sure there’s whisky-Reds. But we ain’t run out of whisky yet. So they’re all off somewhere lying around being drunk.”

Hooch cussed a little. “I’m going to see the Gov about this.”

“Not today you ain’t,” said the quartermaster. “He’s got himself a right busy schedule.”

Hooch grinned nastily. “Oh, his schedule ain’t too busy for
me
.”

“It sure is, Hooch. He said it real specific.”

“I reckon he might
think
his schedulers too busy, boy, but I reckon it just ain’t so.”

“Suit yourself,” said the quartermaster. “Want me to unload the four barrels I got here?”

“No I don’t,” he said. Then he shouted at his pole-boys, most specially at that Mike Fink, cause he looked to be the most likely to do murder if need be. “Anybody tries to lay a hand on that whisky, I want to see four bullet holes in their body before we chuck him in the water!”

The poleboys laughed and waved, except Mike Fink, who just sort of screwed his face up a little tighter. That was one mean old boy. They said you could tell which men had ever tried to wrassle Mike Fink, cause they got no ears. They said, if you want to get away from Fink with one ear still on your head, you got to wait till he’s chewing on your first ear and then shoot him twice to distract him while you get away. A real good riverboy. But it made Hooch a-little nervy to think what Fink might do if Hooch didn’t have a payroll for him. Bill Harrison was going to pay for this whole load of likker, or there’d be real trouble.

Walking into the stockade, Hooch noticed a few things. The sign was the same one Harrison put up four years ago; it was getting ratty-looking now, weathered up, but nobody changed it. Town wasn’t growing either. Everything had lost that new look, and now it was plain shabby.

Not like the way things were going back in Hio Territory. What used to be little stockade towns like this were turning into real towns, with painted houses, even a few cobbled streets. Hio was booming, at least the eastern part of it, close on to Suskwahenny, and folks speculated on how it wasn’t far from statehood.

But there wasn’t no boom going on in Cathage City.

Hooch walked along the main street inside the stockade. Still plenty of soldiers, and they still looked to have pretty good discipline, had to give Governor Bill credit for that. But where there used to be whisky-Reds sprawled all over the place, now there was river-rat types, uglier-looking than Mike Fink, unshaved, with a whisky stink as bad as any likkered-up Red ever had. Four old buildings had been turned into saloons, too, and they were doing good business in the middle of the afternoon.

That’s why, thought Hooch. That’s the trouble. Carthage City’s gone and turned into a river town, a saloon town. Nobody wants to live around here, with all these river rats. It’s a whisky town.

But if it’s a whisky town, Governor Bill ought to be buying whisky from me instead of this business about only wanting four barrels.

“You can wait if you want, Mr. Palmer, but the Governor won’t see you today.”

Hooch sat on the bench outside Harrison’s office. He noticed that Harrison had switched offices with his adjutant. Gave up his nice big office in exchange for what? Smaller space, but—all interior walls. No windows. Now, that meant something. That meant Harrison didn’t like having people look in on him. Maybe he was even afraid of getting himself killed.

Hooch sat there for two hours, watching soldiers come in and out. He tried not to get mad. Harrison did this now and then, making somebody sit around and wait so by the time they got in they was so upset they couldn’t think straight. And sometimes he did it so a body’d get in a huff and go away. Or start to feeling small and unimportant, so Harrison could do some bullying. Hooch knew all this, so he tried to stay calm. But when it got on to evening, and
the soldiers started changing shifts and going off duty, it was more than he could stand.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded of the corporal who sat at the front desk.

“Going off duty,” said the corporal.

“But I’m still here,” said Hooch.

“You can go off duty too, if you like,” said the corporal.

That smart-mouthed answer was like a slap in the face. Time was these boys all tried to suck up to Hooch Palmer. Times were changing too fast. Hooch didn’t like it at all. “I could buy your old mother and sell her at a profit,” said Hooch.

That got to him. That corporal didn’t look bored no more. But he didn’t let himself haul off and take a swing, neither. Just stood there, more or less at attention, and said, “Mr. Palmer, you can wait here all night and wait here all day tomorrow, and you ain’t going to get in to see His Excellency the Governor. And you just sitting here waiting all day is proof you’re just too plain dumb to catch on to how things are.”

So it was Hooch lost his temper and took a swing. Well, not a swing exactly. More like a kick, cause Hooch never did learn no rules about fighting like a gentleman. His idea of a duel was to wait behind a rock for his enemy to pass by, shoot him in the back, and run like hell. So that corporal got Hooch’s big old boot in his knee, which bent his leg backward in a way it wasn’t meant to go. That corporal screamed bloody murder, which he had a right to, and not just from the pain—after a kick like that, his leg would never be any good again. Hooch probably shouldn’t’ve kicked him there, he knew, but that boy was so snooty. Practically begged for it.

Trouble was, the corporal wasn’t exactly alone. First yelp he made, all of a sudden there was a sergeant and four soldiers, bayonets at the ready, popping right out of the Governor’s office and looking mad as hornets. The sergeant ordered two of his boys to carry the corporal to the infirmary. The others put Hooch under arrest. But it wasn’t gentlemanly like that last time, four years before. This time the butts of their muskets got bumped into
Hooch’s body in a few places, sort of accidentally, and Hooch had him some boot prints in various places on his clothes, can’t say how they got there. He ended up locked in a jail cell—no storage room this time. They left him with his clothes and a lot of pain.

No doubt about it. Things had changed around here.

That night six other men were put in lock-up, three of them drunks, three for brawling. Not one was Red. Hooch listened to them talking. It’s not like any of them was particularly bright, but Hooch couldn’t believe that they didn’t talk about beating up no Reds, or making fun with some of them or something. It was like Reds had practically disappeared from the vicinity.

Well, maybe that was true. Maybe the Reds had all took off, but wasn’t that what Governor Harrison hoped for? With the Reds gone, why wasn’t Carthage City prosperous, full of White settlers?

The only inkling Hooch got was something one of the brawlers said. “I reckon I’m broke till tax season.” The others whooped and hollered a little. “I got to say I don’t mind government service, but it sure ain’t steady work.”

Hooch knew better than to ask them what they meant. No need to call attention to himself. He sure didn’t want word getting around about how he looked all beat up the night he spent in jail. That kind of idea starts spreading and pretty soon everybody thinks he can beat a body up, and Hooch didn’t reckon to start all over as a common street brawler, not at his age.

In the morning the soldiers came for him. Different ones, and this time they wasn’t so careless with their feet and their musket butts. They just marched Hooch on out of the jail and now, finally, he got to see Bill Harrison.

But not in his office. It was in his own Governor’s mansion, in a cellar room. And the way they got there was peculiar. The soldiers—must have been a dozen of them—just marched along behind the house, when all of a sudden one of them dashed over, flung up the cellar door, and two others half dragged Hooch down the steps. Cellar door slammed shut almost before their heads were clear of it, and in all that time the soldiers just kept right on marching, as if nothing was happening. Hooch didn’t like that at
all. It meant that Harrison didn’t want anybody to see that Hooch was with him. Which meant this meeting could get pretty ugly, cause Harrison could deny it ever happened. Oh, the
soldiers
knew, of course, but they all knew about a certain corporal who got his knee bent the wrong way last night; they weren’t about to testify on Hooch Palmer’s behalf.

Harrison was his old self, though, smiling and shaking Hooch by the hand and clapping him on the shoulder. “How are you, Hooch?”

“I been better, Gov. How’s your wife? And that little boy of yours?”

“She’s healthy as you could hope for, a refined lady like her being out here on the frontier. And my little boy, he’s quite a soldier, we even stitched him up a little uniform, you should see him strutting on parade.”

“It’s talk like that makes me think I ought to take a wife someday.”

“I heartily recommend it. Oh, here, Hooch, what am I thinking of? You set down, set down right there.”

Hooch sat. “Thanks, Bill.”

Harrison nodded, satisfied. “It’s good to see you, it’s been so long.”

“Wisht I’d’ve seen you yesterday,” said Hooch.

Harrison smiled ruefully. “Well, I get busy. Didn’t my boys tell you I had a full-up schedule?”

“Schedule never used to be full for
me
, Bill.”

“You know how it gets sometimes. Real busy, and what can I do about it?”

Hooch shook his head. “Now, Bill, we’ve lied to each other just about long enough, I think. What happened was part of a plan, and it wasn’t
my
plan.”

“What are you talking about, Hooch?”

“I’m saying maybe that corporal didn’t want his leg broke, but I have a feeling his job was to get me swinging at him.”

“His job was to see that nobody disturbed me unless they were on my schedule, Hooch. That’s the only plan I know about.” Harrison looked sad. “Hooch, I got to tell you, this is real ugly. Assaulting an officer of the U.S. Army.”

“A corporal ain’t no officer, Bill.”

“I only wish I could ship you back to Suskwahenny for trial, Hooch. They got lawyers there, and juries, and so on. But the trial has to be
here
, and juries around here ain’t too partial to folks who go around breaking corporals’ knees.”

“Suppose you stop the threats and tell me what you really want?”

“Want? I ain’t asking for favors, Hooch. Just concerned about a friend of mine who’s got himself in trouble with the law.”

“It must be something real sickening or you’d bribe me to do it instead of trying to strong-arm me. It must be something that you think I wouldn’t be willing to do unless you scare me to death, and I keep trying to imagine what
you
think is so bad that you think I wouldn’t do it. It ain’t much of a list, Bill.”