The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (33 page)

Looking at Irenia’s downcast eyes as they clouded over sadder and sadder, I took a desperate inventory of everything I had on me and it still added up to nothing. I couldn’t give her my ugly, beaten-up old Stetson or my hand-tooled boots that’d looked pretty good a few years back. And the idea of my pocketknife or gun was even more foolish, if possible.

The only thing left to do was plain give up.

But then one final thought at last came to me. I was wearing my deer-hide jacket under that slicker, and it had two big matching buttons that held the front of it together. They were flat jet-black stones that had been made into buttons, and buffed and polished to a high gloss, so that they were really kind of pretty to look at in their own way.

Old Keats had given me those two buttons when I was just a kid, and I’d outworn a dozen jackets with them since then, wearing the buttons so much that they were simply a part of me. And you never normally think of that kind of a close part of you, any more than you normally think of your left or right foot while you’re walking.

Keats had also told me that there was some kind of an ancient and sad story about black stones like these, and about an Indian warrior and maiden who never had any luck getting together. So that the stones had finally become known as Apache Tears.

Anyway, I opened my slicker and pulled the top Apache Tear off my jacket and handed it to Irenia.

She saw that there were just two buttons and that each of us had one of them now.

She knew, somehow, that I’d been trying to think of something of myself to leave with her. And she could also tell that my time was getting short.

So she looked at me and said softly and gently the only two words she knew to say, “Hello, Levi.”

In all my life, and I know it will be so until I die, I have never heard a more beautiful way of one person saying to another—good-bye.

And then something made a sudden slamming noise behind me and I spun around to see an Imperial Cossack who’d just burst through the door. Now he swung on his heels just as quickly and went back out. He may have been drunk or he may have been checking up on me, but either way it was time to go.

Irenia had turned slightly away from me, her head bent down a little, so I didn’t try to touch her or to say any of the things I couldn’t have said anyway. All I could do was back quietly, softly out of the room, and then go quickly to where Shad and the others were getting ready to leave.

A few minutes later we were out of town and gathering speed through the almost blinding rain toward the point on the Amur River where the herd, hopefully, would just about be in position to cross by now.

In the lead, Shad suddenly put up his hand and pulled his big Red to a sudden stop. We all jerked up behind him. And then, in a crash of thunder and lightning, I saw what he’d already seen. On a hilltop before us, and facing down in the other direction toward where the cattle should now be, Colonel Verushki was ordering the forty or so Imperial Cossacks with him to move on, waving one arm and shouting something we couldn’t hear. His men galloped ahead and out of sight down the far side of the hill, and he waited on his horse there, peering off and evidently trying to make out what was happening below in the dark.

“Levi, stay with me!” Shad said. “You others circle ’round this hill t’ the right an’ ya’ oughtta come up drag on the herd!”

“An’ start ’em?” Old Keats called over the pounding rain.

“Damn right!”

“What about those Imperials?” Igor called.

“If they’re in the way, get ’em
outta
the way,
however
!”

They galloped off in the dark and the rain.

I’d thought the two of us were going to circle to the left and come up point on the herd, and that was what Shad had in mind, but not just yet. He spurred Red straight up the hill toward Verushki, with me sticking right on Red’s tail so that Buck and I wouldn’t lose them in the dark.

A few times, on that swift run up the hill, I could get a brief glimpse of what was happening in front of me, either by bursts of deafening, flashing lightning or sometimes, though it was harder to make out, just in the half-seen stormy shifting of darknesses ahead.

About a hundred feet from Verushki, Shad took his lasso off his saddle, but he didn’t uncoil it to make any kind of a throw. And then, as Shad sped on toward him, the colonel either heard the hoofbeats or sensed some danger, for he spun his horse around, jerking swiftly at his saber. But the blade never cleared its scabbard as Red raced that last short distance and Shad hit Verushki a slamming, powerful blow on the side of the head with his lariat. There was just enough give in that tough coil of rope not to kill Verushki where he sat in the saddle. Otherwise, it might just as well have been a club. The colonel’s hat went flying off into space, and he himself flew off his horse and went rolling across the muddy ground.

And when the colonel started to raise himself, still stunned, the first thing he saw was Shad sitting quietly there in the saddle, just above him, with a cocked revolver aimed right down at his head.

Verushki stood up slowly in the rain, instinctively reaching over to take hold of his horse’s reins. Maybe it was his cossack training or maybe some kind of a pride in what was an obvious aristocratic sort of a background, but he showed absolutely no fear.

“Are you going to shoot?” he asked Shad, in about the same way he might have asked what time it was.

“Hand me your saber,” Shad told him flatly.

Verushki frowned and hesitated, as curious as I was about this demand. Because sure as hell, Shad had no particular use for a saber. But he slowly took it out and handed it up to Shad, handle first. Then, for the first and only time that I ever saw, he smiled. Or at least he showed most of his front teeth all at once. “Are you planning on killing me with my own blade?”

“Now your gun.” Shad’s voice stayed deadly flat, with nothing showing in it.

When Verushki handed his revolver up, Shad’s hands were getting kind of full, so he handed the gun over to me and said, “Levi, throw that as far as you can.”

I gave it a good heave, way out into the rain and the dark, wondering even more just what the hell Shad was up to.

And Verushki, with a whole lot more at stake, must have been wondering the same thing. “Either kill me or let me ride out,” he demanded.

“Two things I want ya’ t’ remember,” Shad said.

“I have an excellent memory.”

“One, fifteen free cossacks made fools outta you and your whole goddamned garrison.”

“I was aware of that possibility.”

“More important, number two. Remember that poor little bastard cossack a’ yours who got bounced off his horse, an’ what you did to ’im.” Shad paused. “Remember that when you explain t’ your men how come you lost your gun an’ your saber
and
your horse all at once.”

I would never have thought that anything could get to Verushki as much as those words, but they did. Even though he’d been unafraid of outright death, he took a step back, his hand tightening on the reins he was holding. “There is honor!”

“That makes ya’ break a kid’s neck?”

“Then
bill
me!” Verushki screamed, suddenly hysterical with fear.

“No such luck.” Shad swung the saber and cut the reins so that Verushki was left holding two pieces of empty leather. Then Shad
whacked the horse on the butt with the saber so that it went lunging off into the stormy night. And now, finished with the blade, Shad broke it over the pommel of his saddle and threw the handle half of it down into the muddy ground so that it stuck there.

Then he galloped away and I raced after him.

We got to the point of the herd, where Old Fooler and some of the braver head following close on his heels were already brisket-deep out into the river.

“Move ’em out!” Shad yelled, galloping full speed into the shallows of the Amur. There were a few shots from behind us that didn’t sound too unfriendly, but who can tell, and there was a great, loud whooping and hollering that made itself heard against the crashing rain and the thunder. And pretty quick, with Old Fooler trailing Shad and Red, his nose just above the water, man and beast in one massive group were headed toward the far side.

It was a funny river to cross. Right in the middle of it we were suddenly on top of a high, firm sand bar so that every man, horse and cow there sort of reminded me of Christ walking on the water.

And then we were back in the deeps, and not too much later we were straggling out onto the far side.

But this time, unlike Vladivostok, there was no fire to warm and dry ourselves by, and there was no time to get any sleep or even to sit around and grumble for a little while about all those damned hardships already faced and yet to be faced.

Shad and Rostov had determined that we were going to push on past the river as far north of Khabarovsk as we could get without falling flat on our tired faces.

On a small rise, I turned to take one last look at the tiny, flickering handful of lights that was Khabarovsk, wrapped in that immensity of darkness.

It was such a small handful of lights that even my own hand, held up before me, was bigger.

And yet, somewhere within those pitiful few dim and fading lights trying to hold out against the great darkness filling all
the rest of the world as far as my eyes could see, was Irenia. And somehow I could still feel and see there the spirit of those two big men who had been hanged.

Suddenly, I was afraid. Irenia had been friendly to all of us, and especially to me. And I’d given her that Apache Tear. If that pretty, black stone should somehow cause her any trouble or pain, it could really become a tear.—It could cause her to be hanged!

And that one Imperial Cossack had seen us together tonight!

With those silent words that aren’t actually spoken but are so thunderous in the mind, I lowered my head and said to myself, “Oh, God, God,
God
!”

Shad rode up and sat his big Red beside me for just a moment. I knew he was looking where I’d been looking, and I’m pretty sure he was thinking what I’d been thinking.

Finally he said, “It’s all right. The way she is, Levi, makes it so.”

Then he turned his big Red and rode away into the blackness that was north.

I was only half sure that what he’d said was right. But I was double sure that what he wanted most was just to make me feel easier.

I took one final look at those faint pinpoint lights trembling bravely against the dark in the distance across that wide river.

And then, knowing it was the only thing to do, I turned Buck and spurred him north, catching up with the men and the cows moving that same way.

None of us yet knew in that night of swift black movement and grinding rain that we had already lost our first man.

A good one.

PART THREE
THE BATTLE OF BAKASKAYA

Diary Notes

T
HE MAJORITY
of incidents that befall us on our hazardous trek toward Bakaskaya tend to be too grim to contemplate, briefly or easily.

Aside from these harrowing times, there are a couple of pretty amusing things mixed in among them I guess, like when Shad is given a fairly large Siberian kitten. Or when me and a Tartar warrior manage to sneak up on each other one night and damnere give each other heart attacks upon the mutual surprise.

But otherwise, to be perfectly truthful, it’s just too damned heartfelt and too hard for me to simply take pen in hand and make any short or casual notes.

The only thing to do, or at least the only thing I can do, is to try to tell, as faithfully as possible, what happened before those of us who survived finally managed at last to come to that place called Bakaskaya.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

W
E DROVE
straight through the black night and the driving rain until late in the following morning, when the blackness above was at last slowly and angrily giving way to strips of bleak gray so that the sky looked like a never-ending ceiling of lead mixed with streaks of muddy milk.

The hard rain was easing off just a little as Shad signaled for a halt near a scattering of maple trees in the center of a broad plain that was surrounded in the distance by low hills. We didn’t have to do much convincing to get the exhausted cows to stop. We’d been hollering ourselves hoarse all that black night over the noise of the rain and whopping them with our lariats to keep them moving at a good clip. All we had to do was stop yelling and leave them alone, and with the forward momentum gone, most of them sank down into the mud and grass of the plain like wiped-out drunks hitting their bedrolls after a heavy Saturday night. And strong as he was, Old Fooler was one of the first to sag down.

Rostov put a few men on watch, and then he and his cossacks joined the rest of us as Shad broke out two or three bottles of Jack Daniel’s from a pack animal and started them around.

We were all drenched and half frozen, and I for one was so tired I didn’t trust myself to dismount for fear of my legs buckling under me.

Old Keats took a healthy slug of the Daniel’s and handed it to Slim who was standing next to him and Shad. “We must a’ come over fifteen miles.”

Slim took a drink and then held it up to me in the saddle. “I’d guess right close t’ twenty.”

Shiny Joe was drinking from another bottle. “One more night goin’ north like that an’ we oughtta damnere be at the goddamned North Pole.”

I passed my bottle of Daniel’s to Igor, who was next to me, still mounted.

And as I did so, I noticed a funny thing. Rostov had taken out some bottles of vodka, which were making the rounds. And with all of us kind of mingled there around Shad and Rostov, not one of us, cowboy or cossack, was paying a hell of a lot of attention to whether he was drinking bourbon or vodka. On second thought, I guess it wasn’t so funny after all, but just a kind of a good and natural thing.

Shad started to frown, glancing around at us through the still dim light and heavy rain. “Where’s Dixie?”