Winding Stair (9781101559239) (38 page)

He said it all with a natural calmness, as though he might be speaking of having breakfast at the Main Hotel. He held his breath, lungs full of smoke. Under the glaring light overhead, the pockmarks in his fat cheeks looked like the pits in a peach stone.

“All right, Smoker. You wanted to see me,” I said.

“Mr. Pay, I want to ask a favor. I don't trust any of these other white bastards around here. Would you do me a favor?”

“That depends on what it is,” I said.

“It's not much. I just want you to give some information to the newspapers after they swing me through that trap out there.” And he inclined his head in the direction of the compound where the gallows stood.

“What kind of information?”

“It's just a little story. So everybody will know Smoker Chubee never raped anyone.”

“You've been convicted of it,” I said. “I don't know that anything I say to the newspapers will change that.”

“Yes, it will. I've done enough to be hanged, all right, but rape isn't one of them. I've always taken certain pride in what I do, Mr. Pay. I don't want at the last to be remembered as a man who does rape. You can let me have that much, can't you?”

His speech was startling, coming as it did from the scarred black face. He used the language as well as most college professors I had known, although his vocabulary was limited. He watched the effect of his words on me, drawing on the cigarette, burning the tip down a full quarter-inch and turning it red-hot. Only half-finished with the fast cigarette, he lighted a second one from it.

“These are good smokes,” he said, puffing. I took one of the cigarettes, too, and we sat smoking silently for a few moments. I knew he needed no time to think of how to begin. He had gone over it all in his cell. I was sure. But he left me waiting, my feet growing colder each minute. He started slowly, at last, watching me closely, watching the impact of each word.

“My mother was a slave,” he said. “She was a little girl when removal started. A Creek slave. After they got to the Territory, her folks tried to run away, to Mexico. There were a lot of those colored slaves who tried it. They didn't know it was over five hundred miles, and a lot of that through Comanche country. They'd never heard of Comanches.”

As he drew on the cigarette, I could see its pinpoint of fire in his eyes. I recalled what Joe Mountain had said about this man: a dog without a home.

“Well, the bunch Mother started to Mexico with, the Comanches caught 'em. Somewhere in west Texas. She told me what she could remember of it, but she had no clear idea of locations. After they'd killed all the others, the Comanches took Mother with them. I guess them Comanches hadn't seen many colored people. They cut the skin on her arms and peeled it back to see what was underneath. She carried those scars on her arms to her deathbed. Other than that, they treated her well enough.

“As near as I can figure, she was with them for about a year. Then the band was on Red River doing some horse trading and a Seminole saw her in the band. He offered to buy her, and the Comanches were willing. So she ended up back in the Territory, with a Seminole master. Near where Wewoka is now. I don't suppose you knew that Wewoka, the Seminole capital, was founded by a colored man.”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“It was. Anyway, this Seminole raised Mother and then married her in his old age. I was their son. The old man's name was Tub Something-or-other. I never knew him. He died of cholera about ten years before the war.”

From that, I knew Smoker Chubee must have been about forty years old. When I'd first seen him, he hadn't looked it, but now with the fat, he looked even older.

“I was raised like a good Seminole. Seminoles always treated their colored people well, even when they were slaves. Afterward, a woman like my mother was just another member of the tribe. Not only by law, but by treatment. We lived in one of those little towns, all colored people like you find in The Nations, where they settled and made their own life after they were freed. But we were still Seminoles and I went to one of their schools.

“I started herding livestock. I was a drover, and a pretty good one. I made some drives up from Texas to the railheads. My first drive was to Baxter Springs. I trailed a herd into Ellsworth once. After the cattle were sold and we got paid off, we went into town for hell-raising. Next day we were getting our gear ready for the ride south, not much hurry, and everybody with pop head. About noon, a bunch of men rode out from town. They were armed to the teeth, and on serious business. They caught me up with ropes, and said they were about to teach me to leave their womenfolks alone. They dragged me off into a dry wash, where there was a tree down, and they spread me on that tree and pulled off my pants. All those white men I'd come north with just stood around and watched, afraid to do anything.”

The muscles of his face moved as he recalled it, twisting and knotting, but his eyes still seemed detached, not a part of it. He smoked for a long time, watching my face.

“These people that live on deserts, in Africa,” he said. “Where the chiefs have a whole herd of wives . . .”

“Harems?”

“Yeah. Harems. And they keep these men to guard the women who aren't men at all.”

“Eunuchs?”

“That's the word. Eunuchs. Those Kansas men had a butcher knife, and they did that to me. I would have bled to death but the cook in our outfit dragged me back to camp and stopped the blood with a red-hot branding iron. You know, those bastards took it all. They took it all.”

“They emasculated you?”

“That's the other word.” And he laughed. Not from the memory, but from the effect it was obviously having on me.

“For God's sake, why didn't you tell that story on the witness stand?”

“It's not an easy story to tell,” he said. “Besides, they had me on the killings. They can't hang you but once.”

What he said next, I was sure he had not intended to say, had not planned. But somehow, once he was started, it all came out. He seemed to think aloud as though I was not there.

“A thing like that takes something away from a man.” He seemed amused at his double entendre. “It makes him think in a way most men don't think. You take something away from him that all other men have, so he tries to make all the rest of living different than other men. Until you take his pants off, nobody knows he's different. He's more woman than man, maybe. But he's not that, either. He's nothing. There's going to be no women in all his life and there's going to be no children or grandchildren all his life.

“At first, I was just mad. But after a while, that changed. I was sorry they hadn't killed me. They left me to walk around alive, but I was really dead.”

“And you started to take it all out on everybody then, with a gun?”

He gave a start, coming back to the moment and apparently only then realizing what he'd just said to me.

“Maybe. I never thought about it like that exactly. It was just a thing I started doing. But whatever I did, I wanted to do it better than anybody else. It wasn't revenge. It was something else.”

“But you enjoyed it.”

“There are only so many things a man can enjoy in his life. One of the best is women. When that was gone, something had to take its place. Did you ever see an old blind man who's been blind a long time? After his eyes go, his fingers take on more feeling. It doesn't happen all at once, but after a while, his fingers take on some of the things the eyes have done.”

It suddenly struck me that although in most cases a killer may not even be aware of it, here was one who recognized, perhaps dimly, that his own destructiveness was something sexual, something to replace all chance of his ever being with a woman again. What he said next made me believe that Smoker Chubee had never really blamed those Kansas men who had castrated him. He blamed women. Not just the one who had brought on the retribution, but all women.

“I watched Rufus and those other boys having their time with Mrs. Thrasher and it was almost like having the pleasure myself, just watching.”

But if he hated women, why had he let her go that day when she'd slipped out of the house? He'd seen her just before she ran down across the yard and into the woods, just watched her and nothing more. I asked him why and it was as incomprehensible to him as to me.

“Damned if I know why I didn't shoot her,” he said. “That was another one of my big mistakes. If I had, the rope wouldn't be waiting for me right now.”

 

 

For many years, I have thought about that interview with Smoker Chubee. It has become impossible for me to assess what my feelings were at the time. Perhaps most distressing of all was that with this most violent of men, I took it all rather for granted. It was some hours later, lying in my bed, before I realized that the Kansas incident was not a part of his brutal nature, but the beginning of it.

“Now, do you think you might tell that to the newspapers?”

I had no doubt the press would be overjoyed with such a sensational story. But I had a price.

“If you'll do a favor for me,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Just answer a few questions.”

For an instant, what might have been a grimace of quick anger crossed his face. But those eyes remained unchanged, hard and cold. It was the most chilling thing about this man, the unchanging eyes.

“Just for your own amusement?”

“If you want to call it that. Did you do anything in Kansas that might have led those men to such a thing?”

He shrugged. “I lay with a white woman,” he said. He lifted his hands to his face, the fingers touching the deep pockmarks. “Before I had the smallpox, I wasn't a bad-looking nigger. It wasn't the first white woman I'd been with. But it never was against their will or without their consent. Isn't that how the judge said it?”

“That's how he said it.”

“I guess you'd rather think of me as a Seminole, laying with a white woman.”

“It doesn't matter to me one way or the other.”

“I guess to you, a Seminole is a nigger, too.”

“If you thought that, why did you call me in here? For somebody who's asking a favor, you're an arrogant son of a bitch.”

He laughed, and I think he actually enjoyed me saying it.

“Well, it doesn't matter, does it? After they cut me and I got back home, I laid up a long time. My mother died about then. They said it was consumption. She'd always been a brave little woman. But she took the consumption and died.” For the first time, he lowered his gaze. He stared at his hands a moment, squeezing them together until the knuckles were white. “She was the only person I ever had any feeling for. The only person who ever had any feeling for me.”

The moment passed quickly and he seemed to shake himself as he took a fresh cigarette from the package and struck a match to it.

“I started getting into a little trouble then. A little horse stealing in Creek Nation and out west amongst the Kiowas and Cheyennes. I started working with pistols, and I got pretty good at that, too. Before long, I got to be what we call a hired shooter.”

He leaned back and sighed, blowing smoke up at the bare bulb above us. I looked at his hands, long and delicate like so many Indian hands I had seen, yet they had a heavy strength inherited from his mother.

“Yeah, I hired out to kill people. For money. Sometimes I charged fifty dollars. Sometimes five hundred. There are a lot of men like that in The Nations. Go to any crossroads store and you can find one or two. Most of them aren't worth a sack of horseshit. They like to get drunk and brag. I never made that mistake. Only mistake I ever made was getting together with that wild little Yuchi.”

“Milk Eye?”

“Yeah, Rufus. He was crazy. But I liked him. He paid me to shoot. He was always in trouble, and he couldn't shoot worth a damn, and I guess he didn't have the stomach for it either. So he'd hire me for that chore.”

“Smoker, something's been bothering me for a long time, since we rode into that farmyard and saw all those dead chickens. Why in the world would you want to shoot those chickens, and the dog and the milk cow?”

“I killed anything Rufus paid me to kill.”

He said it almost casually, as though he were speaking of chopping cotton or weeding corn, as though it meant absolutely nothing to him. I knew then, sitting in that cold little room in the federal jail, that it truly didn't mean anything to him. It was sickening, beyond my understanding.

“Smoker, you said Rufus Deer didn't have the stomach for shooting, but he was at Low Hawk Corners that night, when you killed Marshal Garret.”

“I never did understand that,” he said. “Rufus wanted to come along on that. He wanted to pop away at that marshal. I think that was the first time he'd ever shot at anybody, even in the dark. That was funny, when you were on the stand, telling about bullets hitting the wall and breaking the window glass. Those were old Rufus's shots. All mine went right at Garret.”

“Joe Mountain says he's glad you missed him that night.”

“The big Osage? Hell, I wasn't shooting at him. Rufus was going to give me that black horse for killing Garret.” He sat for a moment, rubbing his cheeks with those slender fingers, the nails a pinkish white. “Those damned Osages. If they hadn't hit that horse, I'd be in Oklahoma Territory now, have traded that horse for a whole string of good Comanche stock.”

“Smoker, that old woman . . .”

“Rufus's mother? That old woman, she's tough as boot leather. We had it all planned with her. Rufus did, anyway. I'd let out the word Rufus was coming and Rufus figured that would bring Garret out, to get up a posse for him. Most likely at Low Hawk Corners. Rufus was smart. He was a smart little bastard. If Garret was in that store, then the old woman would be on the back porch. It was all a signal. The storm was just luck. If it hadn't been for that, the old woman would have made some other excuse to stay the night at the Corners. But the storm gave her and the old man a good reason to stay in town. The old man, he didn't know anything about it. He didn't know what was happening. He was drunk most of the time, and Rufus never did trust him much. But that old woman. She's got all kinds of guts.”