Savage Love Read online

  Upriver, the land was scabbed and scotched with abandoned hydraulic mining works, dammed creeks, banks and hillsides scoured of trees and water-blasted, with gullies and fans of silt destroying the graceful curves of the old channel. He killed three Chinamen damming a creek to feed their water machines, leaving their bodies floating face down in the icy pond. In examining their campsite, he found bottles of whiskey. He opened one, tilted it back, swallowed half without stopping to breathe, neatly capped the bottle again and returned to looting. Presently he discovered buffalo-robe bedding in the Chinamen’s tent and went to ground there taking the bottle, which, when he looked again, was empty. At nightfall the girl joined him, bringing another bottle, and they drank together, then slept or fell unconscious. In his sleep, he heard the dead Chinamen whispering together under the reservoir water, speaking of the country whence they had come, of women they had loved, of poems they had once memorized, and of regret at not being alive. He woke and stumbled outside to piss and pissed against a tree and tripped over a tent peg and roared around the camp naked and sweating and feeling as if he had fallen into a fire he was that warm. Around him the forest seemed to glow. Stars glowed. It seemed to him the days and nights had reversed their orders. The girl appeared at the tent flap, swaying uncertainly in her boots, in his wife’s last dress. He kicked her back into the buffalo skins, and when she tried to rise, he slapped her down, and then slapped her once more to inspire affection. Then he fell upon her with an untidy passion, not actually entering her, for she was ignorant and unhelpful in that regard, and presently reached the end of his desire in an onanistic paroxysm of shakes, grunts and incontinent dribbles. In that moment of sweet black forgetfulness he somehow recalled a singsong ditty his mother had crooned. At least he thought it was his mother, having no other memory of her save for the voice and the words. Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy / and we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow.

  They met a tinker driving a garishly tricked-up John Deere freight wagon drawn by four snow-white Spanish mules with tin bells on their collars and periwinkle-coloured tassels nodding above their heads. Coming from the goldfields, the tinker’s cart was light in goods, bouncing high over the ruts, but pregnant with the implication of cash money. Afrighted at the sight of the two asymmetric strangers who, yes, seemed almost to glow with a nimbus of menace, the tinker pulled a dragoon revolver that needed two hands to sight and shoot, and even then, with his nerves and the mad kick of the gun, he was only able to wound one of the Indian horses and a mule. With his third bullet, he shredded his foot, after which he became resigned to his fate. He said, “I will give you my money, but I know you are going to kill me surely.” The stranger said, “Every man goes some time. Now’s yers.” The tinker said, “You are God’s Hand. My foot hurts somethin’ fierce. Do it quick.”

  In Leesburg, he sold the ponies, horses, mules, furs, buffalo gun, and various tools and artifacts he had collected along the way to a blacksmith at a quarter of what they were worth, which immediately attracted suspicion and notoriety, not to mention the fact that the blacksmith recognized the white mules and wondered where the tinker had got to. He bought two fresh horses and a pack mule and saddles and tack for all three and stabled the animals at a livery. He bought new clothes for himself and Good Luck and a Henry repeating rifle to go with the Sharps and then a pound of yellow cheese, white onions, beef jerky and a bottle of whiskey and retired with the girl to a hotel, where he had a tub and hot water brought to the room. He lay in the tub sipping whiskey, peeling and slicing the onions and eating them like apple quarters between bites of cheese. He bade the girl scrub his back with a rag, but she left off after a pass or two and presently he felt her strange tongue at the back of his neck, then licking water off his earlobe. He tried to kiss her, but she squirmed away. He had a hard-on now and tried to make her grasp it. But she would not come near. He drank more whiskey, and as the water was growing cold, he rose, wet and sickly white except for the leathery tan of his hands and face, stepped dripping to the bed and took the quilt to dry himself. Then he threw the girl — boots, dress and all — into the tub and said, “Now it’s yer turn. Wash yerself. You stink.” She dragged off his wife’s last dress and then the boots and the wooden feet and crouched shivering in the shallow grey water with her arms across her breasts. He slugged whiskey from the upended bottle and examined his pecker, flicking off pebbles of smegma beneath the foreskin, stood and pissed a long arc into the tub and laughed and said, “That’ll warm ye up.” But he saw that she was weeping and could not evade him or escape the tub without the purchase of her feet.

  The complexity of the situation, the misfire of his drunken overtures, now self-seen as awkward, if not moronic, enraged him. His first impulse was to strike, but unwitting, the impulse transmuted to his limbs became something else. He lifted Good Luck roughly from the tainted water, wrapping her in the quilt, and fell to examining the scars of her stumps, which he rubbed dry with a sheet, disturbed by the innocence of her pudenda fully displayed for him in the act of mercy. The scars were angry, puckered, purple lines etched clumsily into the whiteness of her flesh. “Do they fret ye?” he asked. She shook her head. “Some blistered,” he said. “I will find ye better boots.” He tipped water from the boots and dried them and dried the carved feet, pulling the sheets from the bed and using them to sop up the water. Then he left the boots to air with the sheepskins hung on the back of a chair, rolled Good Luck in the quilt with a pillow under her head, and said to sleep. He blew out the lamps and sat in his new shirt in a captain’s chair by the glass window with the Henry and a box of shiny brass cartridges, felt for the brass follower with his fingers, drew it up against the spring to the top of the barrel, twisted the magazine open, and counted a dozen cartridges into the tube. Then he twisted the magazine closed and eased the follower down to the last cartridge lest the snap of the new spring accidentally set off the primers.

  He stirred ere dawn, convinced he was being watched through the glass window where he had carelessly slept. He remembered the blacksmith’s fleer as he counted out the money. He remembered the bones emerging from the snow, the burned-out wagons, the desolate campsites, the litter of corpses along the road coming up, the accumulated calculus of carnage vexing toward him, low breathing and indistinguishable motions just beyond his senses. Stop and die, he thought, slipping out of the hotel the back way to strangle the blacksmith in his sooty bed above the forge and retrieve the horses and tack. Flames from the burning smithy illuminated their backs as they rode away, long black shadows preceding them, deforming in the ruts, pursued by the slobber and shriek of horses in their panic, the thunder of guns as men shot the trapped horses through the burning stable walls. He said to the girl riding out, “I don’t believe y’ve ever seen a body kiss before.” She shook her head. “What strange world were ye a-born in?” And then he said, “I kilt the horse-shoer because he was blabbing about us.” And then after a silence, when they had left the last of the Leesburg townsite and diggings behind and had seen nobody but a nigger with a wooden yoke and two steaming buckets of night soil, he said, “I don’t believe yer ever going to speak to me.” She shook her head. “I don’t take it personal,” he said. She wore a black full skirt hiked up to get her legs across the saddle; her boots cut into her flesh just below the knee and her thighs were bare except for the lace-hemmed lavender pantalets in the morning twilight. She had a warm wool coat, a knitted cap and a scarf and seemed, on the whole, pleased with herself.

  Epithalamium

  The weather held. They travelled fast at first, heading east from Leesburg, taking the saddleback pass over the Beaverheads toward Bloody Dick Creek and the Wisdom River, mostly avoiding the common trails and mining settlements because he felt at a disadvantage in the midst of a crowd and did not think he was riding faster than his legend. He killed now and then but tried to be prudent and reasonable in his depredations. “Why are you a-killing me?” one asked. �
�Because I am the Hand of God,” he said. “Bullshit.” Blam. One man he let go when the Sharps hung fire three times in a row. “Speak well of me,” he said. “I will. Thank ’ee.” One man said, “God help you. Kill me, but save my wife and childers.” “I can’t do that,” he said. “May we say a family prayer first?” asked the man. “A short one, I hain’t got all day.” Blam. Always following the spring freshets swelling the creeks in the dry valleys in the shadow of noble mountains. And everywhere they found derelict sluices, dams, ditches, flumes, tailing pools, abandoned cabins, all evidence of the gold rush where the placers had petered out. “Are ye a preacher?” he asked. “No.” Blam. “What do you want a preacher for?” “To get hitched.” “Haha. That’s a good ’un. To the crip?” Blam.

  He rode toward the smoke-heaving blast furnaces of Bannack with a short string of stolen horses packed with loot, gold dust in his pockets, leaving Good Luck in camp in a spring-flower coulee stippled with pines where they had chanced upon a hot-water pool, the boulders and moss beds round about littered with eagle feathers, stone arrow points, beads and bits of bone left by the Indians. Dandling her legs in the pool to ease her stumps, she seemed like a whole girl, half smiling and twitching as the bubbles erupting from crevices below tickled her scars. And he thought were she to speak, it would complete the illusion. But then he thought, She does not speak because she sees her life as a dream, a nightmare, which, if she speaks, will only turn real. In town he listened to stories about himself in saloons where brave men spoke loudly of Vigilance Committees and hangings, in the company of other brave men, voices sounding of brass. But they made him anxious, every hand turned against him, even if they didn’t know it was him, and there were too many to shoot. He bought three steers of a Christian stockman starting a spread on the Grasshopper Creek to drive ahead as a disguise and made for the coulee with coffee, a ribbon for the girl and whiskey bottles clinking in his saddlebags. Then, hidden from the eyes of men, he threw himself naked into the springs, scorching his skin pink, breaking the surface with a shout. He uncorked the store whiskey from his packs and stretched on a moss bed with Good Luck as the sun went down. He helped her shed her boots and clothing and coaxed her into the water. She gasped and flung her footless legs around him, her ribs sliding inside her skin each time she breathed, her small breasts like upturned cups, jewelled with water drops, slippery against his chest. She burrowed against his neck and licked and sucked his skin. “I ain’t a tit,” he said, attempting to kiss her, but she would not. Then, with the heat of the spring water and the excitement of their parts rubbing together, he shot his load into the seething effervescence, cried out a cry of pathos and dismay, and seemed to fall into a black pit. Coming to himself, he heard the mother voice, the words. Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy / and we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow.

  Then it was summer, rainless and arid, except high in the mountain ranges where snow yet clung in the sawtooth creases. They pushed their steers up the dusty stage road that ran from Fort Hall to the placer fields at Alder Gulch and Helena, lazily working their way north but watchful, driving the steers to the river to drink when they descried the thunderous clatter of the freight wagons drawing near. It was far too crowded, he thought. Up every creek, fork and gulch, he found the detritus of human occupation. At every stream bend, a Chinaman with a pan, dipping for gold. Furtive Indians hunted in the cottonwoods. On the four quarters, black smoke rose from the furnaces. Stages ground by like clockwork, stations for changing horses measured every fifteen miles. Teamsters thrashed their long trains up and down the roadstead, leaving a fine white dust to settle like mortuary lime. Painted signs nailed to posts marked the forks, made poetry of commerce. Dark Horse, Puzzler, Blue Wing, Polaris, Argenta, Hecla, Queen of the Hills, Pandora. Industrious avidity, he thought. Busy and inquisitive as rats, he thought. It wasn’t that he was against the making of money, but he hewed to a desperate and higher calling, a dark path bequeathed him in the cornfield at Antietam, which rendered his character contemptuous.

  He held to the high mountains on his left and presently veered away from the Wisdom River, following a tributary in a narrow, sere valley. Some distance off the trail and out of sight up a gulch that had barely been touched by placers, they discovered a cabin and pole barn and an acre cleared of everything but stumps and wildflowers, and beyond, among the sparse pines, beef cattle foraging. The owner and his wife politely took them in for the night. He shot them after dinner and stored the bodies in a convenient cold cellar made of rock slabs, chilled by a mountain spring that bubbled out of a crevice. He turned his steers loose amongst the others, and because he paid them no mind, they disappeared up or down the cold, splashy creek. Then untold days passed and he wished for that Plott hound of the prior winter, for there were bears about and he wanted to hunt. The girl unscrolled a buffalo robe and lay naked, save for boots, in the cleared field when the sun shone, turning dusky brown so her eyes smouldered and her bleached hair was like a white flame. He discovered a six-month-old newspaper from St. Louis in the cabin and read to her in bed by candlelight. Pronghorns concoursed in the cleared field in the twilight gloom ere dawn; he shot one when they needed it. A lonely prospector with a mule and a donkey, a twelve-month growth of yellow beard and no teeth to speak of stumbled upon the homestead one sunspill afternoon. He said, “That girl is like enough half Indian parading without drawers. I could do er. I could.” And then he said, “No, I ain’t a preacher, but I read the Good Book when I were a sprout and have took the pledge at camp meetin’ to go teetotal when I am not drinking.” Blam. His body went into the cold cellar with the others.

  He rode to Butte to sell stolen horses. He did not like the open country there, the buffalo prairie and the dry gulches filled with abandoned placer equipment and the scattered settlement of mean log houses, slanted frame buildings leaning together, the skeletal remains of the silver smelter, and nary a place to conceal himself. In the saloon next to Hauswirth’s Hotel on Main Street he heard how a Vigilance Committee at Last Chance Gulch had captured him twice but he had escaped both times by trickery or infernal magic. A Mormon bone collector hunting buffalo kills had spied him slaughtering a human corpse far north in the Flatheads. When he checked on the return trip, parts of the body had been chewed on. After asking nine people in that depressed and irreligious town for directions, he tracked down a placer miner name of Skloot who once had been a preacher, was an undertaker on the side and could also cure the toothache with a red-hot wire. Skloot had five children out of eighteen born and introduced a young wife Priscilla Skloot who was his second wife after the first succumbed in giving birth. “How far did yer say was yer camp?” asked Skloot. “About five mile. You’ll be back ere nightfall.” After they had ridden fifteen miles, Skloot said, “I know who ye are. I should have known from the start.” Skloot was working on his portly successful look and his horse wore a bloom of frothy sweat. He had brought a Bible, a shotgun in a saddle holster and a half-dozen boiled eggs for his lunch. The stranger rode behind him now but sidled up to offer him a slug of store whiskey, which the preacher took willingly. He said, “My first drap in six years. I believe the occasion requires it.”

  They were both tight when their horses clambered up through the cleared field to the cabin, the keynotes of roast antelope, woodsmoke and some other noxious, unidentifiable odour drifting down to welcome them. Bees hummed in the wildflowers. Skloot tumbled from his horse dismounting and trembled upon his back with one foot caught in the stirrup. He said, “I have drunk with the Devil and now I will die and speak with Jesus on the same day. That must be the record.” “Just get up and say the words,” said the stranger, handing him the Bible. He opened another bottle and handed that over too. He carried the preacher’s shotgun in the crook of his elbow. Good Luck leaned against him, her hands braced on her sticks, her face blank and hairless, her hairless eyelids lizard-like, eyes like blue stones, her pox scars like craters, her general air
uncanny. That much had not changed since he first clapped eyes on her. “Is she a squaw?” asked Skloot. “What’s wrong with her?” “Many have died for asking,” said the stranger. “I’m sure they have,” said Skloot, sucking on the whiskey and gradually working his way upright with the aid of the stirrup and saddle straps. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I believe the abbreviated version of the order of service will suffice. Do you two want to get married?” “She can’t talk,” said the stranger. “Good enough,” said Skloot. “I now pronounce you man and wife, all square and legal, and may God help me for what I have just done.” The stranger squeezed the girl’s hand. That was all. He said, “Come with me. I want ter show ye something.” He led the preacher along the faint convexity in the pine needles to the cold cellar where the stone entry buzzed with bluebottles. Skloot’s eyes watered from the stench. The girl followed on, swinging upon her sticks, her hair a flame like the head of a torch. The light was lingering toward dusk. The stranger stood by as Skloot stooped to peer inside where a dozen or more swollen green bodies lay stacked like cordwood, in a state of putrefaction so horrific that they seemed to be melting, their juices funnelling together and emerging into a pool amongst the ferns and quartz boulders just outside the hellish door. Hundreds of flies lined the sides, lapping and rubbing their feet in the sludge like holy pilgrims. Skloot reeled away, but not able to take his eyes off those carbonizing corpses, their infernal hutch, he slipped, landing smartly on his portly ass, scrambling backwards, still staring. Then he wrenched up his shirt-tails and threw them over his face, gasped and cried out, “Dear Lord, please shoot me now. Get it over with. Stop this persecution. I cannot bear the waiting. I wish to God I had not seen that.” “I ain’t going ter shoot ye,” said the stranger. “I just wanted to show ye. Ye could have slept with them tonight, but ye did me a good turn. It’s nigh dusk. Ye should mount and kick up for home ere my resolution falters.” And then he added, “Ye will send a committee back for me, I know. I expect it. But they shall not find me. And this night will be in yer heart forever.”