The Yellowstone (24 page)

Chapter 10

August, 1865, Time when the cherries are ripe

June and July in Powder River country were months of war and rumors of war. Red Cloud and his fighters put a dead halt to traffic on the Bozeman trail. Sometimes they stopped travel on the Oregon Trail as well. They raided. They looted. They remembered Sand Creek and acted as though they were honoring the Biblical injunction “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Westerners raised the eternal cry of people who are in over their heads: “Why doesn’t the government do something?”

Now that the Civil War was over, the government did, more or less. It sent soldiers. But the soldiers had just fought a long and discouraging war. They wanted to be at home. They behaved as though they wanted to be at home. They were no match for the Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahoes, who kept doing what they wanted—raiding, looting, burning, and killing.

Mac heard of all these doings at Yellowstone House, but he was far enough away to hear just reports of war and not the din of battle itself.

On the spring rise mackinaws full of gold chasers came downstream from Alder Gulch and Grasshopper Creek, plus the new diggings at Emigrant Gulch and Last Chance Gulch. Fortunately, Jim Sykes had brought supplies in from Benton in time.

Mac decided to stay home while Jim went to Fort Union to meet the June steamboat with the year’s take and get more supplies. Mac was needed at home, he said. He needed to be where he could get news of the boys.

Annemarie and Little One told him he needed something more—days on the river. They reminded him of how he loved that time on the river. They made him think of mornings of motion, currents, eddies, ducks on the water, rocking along under a sky as deep and wide and blue as the mothering sea. They promised to send an express when Smith and Thomas got back.

Mac went with Jim, a month late, in July.

The two passed up the opportunity to make the trip in a mackinaw, with plenty of company, and went alone with the bales of hides in a bullboat, now a craft that reminded them of old times, bufialo skins stretched over a willow framework, steered with poles. It would bear up under a heavy load such as they had, and it would negotiate Wolf Rapid, at the mouth of the Tongue River, just fine. Mac remarked to Jim with satisfaction that for all the captains’ daring with steamboats, no captain had ventured far up the Yellowstone. Wolf Rapid would stop whoever tried.

Floating, the two friends spoke of the future. Or rather Mac spoke of it and Jim listened. Mac wasn’t sure whether Jim was listening to the words or just the melody of complaint or only the sound of the wind and the river. Sometimes, when Jim seemed particularly absorbed, Mac kidded himself that Jim was listening for the sound of the earth spinning on its axis.

Mac observed aloud that he could now make all the money he wanted. What for, he wasn’t sure. In three years the white population of Montana Territory had expanded from maybe a hundred to eighteen thousand, and they were hollering for statehood. The governor didn’t live in Montana Territory anymore—he spent his time in Washington City lobbying for that almighty statehood.

Jim just sneered.

The entire Yellowstone country was ceded in perpetuity to the Indians, Mac repeated. He wondered how perpetuity would stand up to a gold strike.

Jim pointed to two otters playing in the shallows, a rare and charming sight.

Mac thought but did not speak of Owen Mackenzie and Smith and Thomas. The subject was too painful.

Jim grabbed the fowling piece whenever he saw a goose. He always said goose flesh was the best taste on earth.

Mac reflected often that his friend did not speak of the future and seemed to give it no thought. But Mac couldn’t help talking about it.

There was only one letter at Fort Union—from Robert Campbell. It stated simply and formally that Mac’s Uncle Hugh had died the previous November, of influenza. It expressed sorrow and sympathy. It stated that Mac was Hugh’s only heir, and that Campbell as executor would see to the sale of the house and store and the payment in cash to Mac’s account. The extensive library would be shipped upriver unless Mac ordered otherwise. Then Campbell summarized the finances of Yellowstone House and wished Mac well for the coming year.

Mac was taken off guard by how melancholy that news made him.

There was also word of Smith and Thomas at the fort, word from the Cheyennes and Lakotas who drifted in to trade. The Maclean boys were making heroes of themselves. They were dauntless in battle. Smith was clever, Thomas wild and ferocious. They were acquiring reputations among the Cheyennes as soldiers.

That news gave Mac a catch in his throat. He felt half proud, half terrified.

But there was little word of Owen Mackenzie. When Mac asked after him, the Indians merely shrugged—they hadn’t seen him. A bullwhacker recollected he was scouting for the Army somewhere. Couldn’t think where for sure, though.

Mac made clomps in the dust as he went back into the fort with Jim. “That makes me feel some easier,” said Mac. “I been having dreams, sinister dreams, about that Owen.”

Jim nodded. “I wish you sounded easy.”

Chapter 11

Time when the cherries are ripe

Drewyer said, “You wanna get yourself a tobacco pouch?”

Thomas curled a smile toward him and shook his head no. Drewyer meant what the pretend soldiers were reported to have done at Sand Creek—cut off a scrotum here or a breast there and made containers for tobacco.

Drewyer was
too
crazy, but a real friend, the first Thomas had ever had.

Thomas looked down on the little group of pony soldiers, headed south. Probably to Platte Bridge Station, to tell the bosses the Army had gotten its ass kicked again and to ask for horses. They would be obliged to say how Colonel Meyer was bringing his cavalry outfit back to the fort, having sought Indians, seen sign everywhere but no redskins, gotten men picked off, and lost half the horses. So they were walking back, humiliated.

A funny story, pony soldiers afoot.

Thomas meant to see these soldiers didn’t live to tell it.

He put the glass on them again. They were sitting around the cook fire. Lambert had gotten meat for them today, fresh antelope. They were eating and Thomas was hungry. Seemed to be always the way it was in life—whites eat and Injuns go hungry.

Thomas stuck his hand out to Drewyer for the flask. Light. A pint didn’t stretch far. You had to judge fine to keep just a little edge on, which was the way Thomas liked it. One pint to share during the day, another in the evening. Nice flask. Engraved. German silver. Drewyer took it off a supply officer up at the Rosebud. Thomas wanted one like it. He swigged, deeper than his judgment said.

Oh, well, it wasn’t long to dark. Then the two of them would move gently back to the horses, eat some jerked beef, which Thomas hated, and get a refill of the flask. And then move gently toward the soldier bivouac.

Thomas glassed it again. The camp was about half a mile to the east, across the sagebrush plains, on a trickle of a spring.

Glassing was safe. The sun was setting behind them, and Thomas kept the telescope in his shadow. Flat Jack jumped up and made some weird motions. Probably clowning. That was Flat Jack. Thomas wondered again why they called old Jacques Lambert “Flat Jack.” The skinny mountain man was a friend of Thomas’s father. Maybe Thomas would let him live.

But the bastard was scouting for the soldiers. Except for him, these pony soldiers wouldn’t need killing. They’d die of getting lost or starving or going dry. Or better yet they’d drink alkali water and shit themselves to death.

Thomas snickered and handed the telescope back to Drewyer. Drewyer turned over and stared at the evening sky, then stuck his tongue out at it and made a farting noise. Thomas chuckled appreciatively.

They were just waiting for dark.

Drewyer was a breed, like Thomas. Frenchman. Dark. His people had been in the country practically before the Indians. Had a quick wit. He addressed all white men with some Mandan word Thomas didn’t know that sounded like
mugrum
. “Mr. Mugrum,” Drewyer would say politely to any white man at any fort, and then ask his question in comically broken English. Drewyer spoke not only English but French and Spanish and several Indian languages fluently. When Thomas asked what “mugrum” meant, Drewyer said with a sly smile, “tinkle balls.”

And Drewyer had given Thomas his first dance with the mysterious lady, his first journey on the road to Xanadu, laudanum.

It was just opium dissolved in alcohol, commonly used on the frontier to relieve pain. The trick was in the amount. Conservative little sips made you pleasantly sleepy. Neither Drewyer nor Thomas was a conservative person. Excessive amounts could have results that were, well, intriguing.

Of course, Drewyer explained, different people respond in different ways. Thomas responded like the lady’s natural-born bridegroom. He saw things. Different things, always, but always fascinating. Once he saw a world of plants alone, surrounding lovely, gleaming lakes, hovered over by soft, violet clouds. The plants took the most outrageous shapes and sizes and colors and textures, huge bells of lurid green, trumpet flowers soft as silk and yellow as bananas, mushrooms as tall as giraffes and flamingo-pink, turquoise jack-in-the-pulpits, and black, velvety roses floating through the air.

Dancing with the lady was not just a journey of the mind. Sometimes Thomas had intense physical sensations, too. He would get light-headed or even faint. His face would flush hot. He would sweat violently. Or he would simply get incredibly excited, as though heart and lungs and brain and blood were all racing at triple speed. You danced with the lady body and soul.

Drewyer had lifted the first batch from a downed Army medic. Later the two of them cracked a miserable excuse for an Army doctor on the head and took more. This fellow had hypodermic needles. They learned to inject the opium in the form of morphine. Now little would perform like lots.

That was where the two of them left the other raiders behind, Smith included. Black Finger, the leader who imagined himself the boss, got stiff-necked about laudanum, or even booze. Smith himself acted kind of stiff-necked about the lady. Told Thomas and Drewyer they’d have to get crazy on their own time.

Smith didn’t understand. Since Thomas started shedding blood—nothing commonplace, like taking a military objective or turning back an enemy, but drenching himself body and soul in human blood—he felt his feet on the path of beauty and understanding. It was not an understanding you could put into words.

Thomas believed that in the sun dance men reached such an understanding. Men pierced their flesh with skewers, blood ran down their backs and chests, they shuffled their feet to the eternal rhythm of the drum, they neither drank nor ate, and they focused their minds on the effigies in the center pole’s crotch. And on the other side of those rituals of pain, of self-chastening, Thomas thought, they saw. They grasped the universe of blood, a comprehension beyond words, and moved in time with it.

Likewise Thomas, in the fever pitch of fighting, saw. And raised his voice in praise to the gods of bloodletting, moved into battle in the perfect rhythm of the world.

Those moments of battle were what he lived for. He only drank, or danced with the lady, when he could not sing his song of blood.

Drewyer understood. And felt no need to speak of what was manifest but unexplainable. That’s why they were soulmates, and why they stayed clear of earthbound people such as Black Finger and Smith.

But there would be no lady tonight. Tonight was to be a moment of destiny. They would creep up on the camp under the cloak of darkness and commit murder. And take scalps. And Thomas would sever thumbs. He intended to make a necklace of thumbs from men he had killed with his own hands. In fact he already had enough. Thomas smiled to himself.

The sky at last light was a keen, bright turquoise with plush, dark-magenta clouds. Lady colors, Thomas thought. So Flat Jack hadn’t moved camp at the last minute, to be tricky. The soldiers lay right there. Old Jack must be slipping.

Thomas touched Drewyer on the shoulder, and his friend nodded. The two dark young men slipped away.

Thomas could smell the dead campfire. His father had taught him that—you could smell lots more than you gave thought to. Now it meant to him that they were close, within maybe twenty yards, crouched here in the sage. Still on the rough plain, but within twenty yards of the soft, verdant vegetation around the spring, and the soft, vulnerable bellies of the white men.

Thomas heard Drewyer’s slow, deep breathing beside him. On these approaches Drewyer would breathe deep a little and practically go into a trance. It was wonderful.

They had talked it over as they ate their miserable jerked beef. They would ease close and take out the sentry. Drewyer’s arrow was the way for that. Then they’d slip all the way into camp. They’d done it once before. Stood there among sleeping men—and that time a woman with a small child—silent and unsuspected, tense, careful, measured; and then knowing they’d brought it off, relaxing, feeling the blood flow, looking at each other, and wanting to whoop for joy.

And then they would let that energy explode in murderous deeds. Knife the sleeping bundles until someone, somehow, made a sound, and then shoot and run if you have to. They wouldn’t spare Flat Jack. That was just a way to spread your name as a killer and make it harder to have the silent fun.

Now they stood up tall, behind giant sagebrush. Thomas liked this, standing full open, utterly still, there for the sentry to lay eyes on but not to see. Thomas was good at this making like a tree, and Drewyer was amazing. Even Thomas couldn’t make out Drewyer half the time, though close by and knowing where he was. Thomas knew that he’d spot any sentry before the sentry spotted him. He had a knife in his right hand, hawk handy in his left, repeating pistol in his belt.

The coals of the fire were glowing but not bright enough to help. In the light of the half moon, his eyes long adjusted to the dark, Thomas could make out sleeping figures, even the rocks they’d sat on to eat. Everything but the sentry.

“That’ll do ’er, boys,” came Flat Jack’s voice. Behind. The voice made Thomas think of a reptile tongue, languidly flicking out and getting the fly.

He heard weapons being cocked. Behind.

A smooth, thin layer of clouds lay flat in the east, and the sunrise tinted them the color of dirty syrup.

Flat Jack was eating beans cold. Thomas and Drewyer were tied together, back-to-back, lying on the ground near the fire. Jack was alone. Said he didn’t need any help to guard scum. The soldiers, he said, should go out and find the ponies and the belongings. He didn’t offer Thomas and Drewyer any beans. No need to feed prisoners, he said, if you were going to kill them.

Thomas was afraid. Abjectly afraid. Drewyer’s back and arms seemed brittle and angry behind him. Thomas’s body felt slack to himself, like noodles.

Flat Jack was talking while he ate. Flat Jack always talked in his twangy way, like some wheezing machine that worked endlessly and noisily. He’d already spent half an hour hee-hawing about how he’d set Thomas and Drewyer up, sucked them right into the trap. Knew where they was all along, he claimed. Otherwise he would have moved camp at last light. Easy as fooling prairie chickens.

“Boys killed all of them in the Rikers party, heh? Same way. Sneak up in the dark. Redheaded little girl, too. Got that scalp? Bet you do.”

Thomas did.

“Tale is, it was you at the telegraph station. The boy described you. Raped his mother, did you?” Flat Jack shook his head, not deliberately like a person, but frenetically like a dog. “Bad business.”

“And this child heard it was you over to Platte Bridge Station. Hit that doctor over the head, liked to killed him. You boys are getting yourselves a reputation. We might just put an end to that reputation today. Afore you get legendary.”

“Old Mac’s a good beaver. You oughtn’t to turn out as rotten as you did, Thomas.”

“What you plan to do, old man,” answered Drewyer, “talk us to death?”

Jack fell silent for a moment, and his features turned somber. Then he drawled it out. “When Sergeant Gray sees what scalps is in your possibles, I imagine he’ll see fit to forget the rules about prisoners. And who’d ever know? Except the buzzards and the coyotes.”

They were still tied back-to-back, but standing now. Three soldiers sat around them, trying to look casual but jumpy as bridegrooms. Sergeant Gray and Flat Jack stood erect next to the two prisoners, handguns at their sides. Sergeant Gray meant to make a proper execution of it, being a man who did things properly. He had an erect military bearing—boots, belt, and weapons shining.

“Who’d have thought it would be a fancy dresser?” snarled Drewyer.

Thomas wanted to yell at Drewyer to shut up, but he said nothing. Thomas didn’t give a damn for Drewyer’s act of indifference to the muzzle of a gun. But he was right about Gray. The sergeant laid out their scalps, fourteen between them, and their vials of morphine and hypodermic needles. Gray turned mottled above the neck of his uniform shirt, all liver-colored and gray. He actually lectured Thomas and Drewyer about addiction to drugs before standing them up to shoot them.

Thomas had begged for his life. He had appealed to the friendship between his father and Flat Jack. He had cowered. He had cringed. He had blubbered. He had shamed himself. He was silent now, roped up tight against Drewyer, only because he was worn-out with it.

Sergeant Gray said something sharply. Wearing an odd half-smile, two steps off, Flat Jack raised the pistol toward Thomas’s head. Without looking, Thomas knew Gray was holding on Drewyer’s head. Gray spoke again—words were no longer making sense to Thomas, were only random chirps in the roar inside his head. He saw Flat Jack’s thumb cock the pistol.

Sergeant Gray made three sharp sounds in cadence. Thomas’s world ended in an explosion.

“He shit his pants,” snickered Flat Jack. Meticulous Sergeant Gray turned away, nose wrinkled.

Thomas felt the next slap sting. As though separately, he felt his head and neck twist violently. Slowly he swam upward toward the world.

Flat Jack slapped him again, brutally.

Thomas opened his eyes. Flat Jack was smirking at him.

“Your
compañero
is dead,” Jack said. “You’ve got a little cut where the wadding hit.”

Thomas was swamped in incomprehension. Flat Jack grabbed his head and turned it sideways.

At first Thomas saw random color and shape. Then color and shape gathered meaning. Drewyer lay there, his head half blown away. Thomas rolled to his knees and vomited.

Cut by wadding, Jack said. That meant he put in powder and patch but no ball. Explosion without missive. He took his hat off—bloody where the wadding went through.

“We’re just gonna leave him on the ground,” said Jim. “He deserves it.”

“Why?” asked Thomas. The question sat there between the men, eternal as the wind, ultimate as the sun. No one knew what it meant, and everyone knew.

Jack took Thomas’s head and pushed it sideways. There stood Smith, his face set and grim.