In the foyer behind the curtained door a man in gartered sleeves sat at a small table in the niche under the stairway, talking to a man in a bowler hat who sat astraddle a reversed straightback chair, smoking a cigar and massaging his knuckles. He wore a pistol on his belt. At the foot of the staircase behind him was a doorway into the alley.
The garter-sleeved man was the teller. He patted the tabletop and said, “It’ll cost you two solid dollars, boys.” The bowlered man scrutinized them as they paid. The gartered man asked their preferences and Allenbeck said he was in the mood for a redhead. From a wicker basket holding a variety of poker chips the teller extracted a white one with the number four painted on it and handed it to him. “Give this to the nig-gerwoman upstairs,” he said. Allenbeck winked at John and took the steps two at a time.
John wanted a quadroon but was told all three were busy and likely to stay that way a while, so he asked for a blonde but both of them were occupied too. The teller suggested a Chinese girl, a Celestial darling fresh off the boat and only just turned thirteen years old, a virgin, practically. For such freshness he would only have to pay one more dollar. John handed it over and was given a blue chip bearing the number thirteen.
“I’ll hold that there bootknife till ye come back down,” the bowlered man said. John met the man’s eyes. The bowlered man grinned and shrugged. “You aint got to give it to me, boy, but it aint goin upstairs.” John slipped the knife out of his boot and laid it on the table. Without taking his eyes off him the man said, “Thank ye kindly.”
On the upper landing a hugely fat and yellow-eyed Negress sat in a wide rocking chair flanked by a low wooden box holding a collection of poker chips. She took John’s and glanced at it. “Room number eight,” she said. “Lass on the leff.” She tossed the chip into the box and gestured through the open door into the narrow and dimly lighted hallway flanked by numbered doors on either side.
The hall lay empty but the thin doors hardly muffled the moans and curses of men in the wallows of passion. A pair of shutters that opened onto a balcony at the end of the hall was closed against the clamor in the street below. Passing the second set of doors he heard Allenbeck’s voice from the room on the right, number fifteen: “Easy, dammit! Suck it gentle, you red bitch!”
Halfway down the hall the door to number twelve abruptly swung open and a glowering fat man wearing only his trousers and boots stepped out muttering, “Goddamn little cunt!” He called, “Hey, auntie!” and John glanced back to see the black woman lean forward in her rocker and peer in at them. The fat man beckoned her and said, “Get on over here and see about this, goddamnit!”
As he passed the open door of number twelve John glanced in the room and saw a girl lying on her back on the narrow bed with her eyes closed and her short green satin chemise up high on her hips and exposing the patch of blonde hair between her legs. He took two more paces and stopped and came back and looked in again and saw that it was his sister Maggie.
He looked down the hall at the Negress who was still in her rocker and was tucking a fresh chaw in her jaw and appeared in no hurry to come see what the fat man wanted. The door to number four opened and a man in a goatee came out and adjusted his coat and planter’s hat looked at them and then strode down the hall. The Negress was on her feet now and stepped into the hallway and then she backed out again to give the man room to go by her.
John’s breath was lodged in his throat. He looked back into the room and told himself he was wrong, it wasn’t her, could not be her. But he knew it was.
The fat man looked at him and said, “Little bitch. I get in there and ask her does she want a drink. She was fairly wall-eyed already, so I shoulda known better, but she says sure, so I hand her my pint of rum that’s near half-full and turn around to hang up my coat and shirt and I hear her bubbling that bottle like a sawmill nigger. I mean she drained it, friend. Not five seconds and it was gone. I said, ‘What the hell you doing, little girl?’ and she gives this shit-face grin and her eyes roll up in her head and she falls on the bed. I like to thought she was dead but the little bitch’s only drunkern hell is all. If these bastards think I’m paying to hump some passed-out little dipso cunt who drank all my hooch they best think again.”
She lied, John thought. She lied, she lied, our lying goddamned crazy mother.
“Listen, friend,” he said to the fat man, “I’ll trade you. You can have mine in number eight. She’s a three-dollar special, a Celestial, thirteen years old, practically a virgin, they say. Me, I like it when they’re out cold.” It was the only explanation that leapt to mind. His heart was racing, his mouth dry. He wondered what he thought he was going to do.
“What you want?” the black woman said as she came up to them.
The fat man looked askance at John. “You like them passed out? Shit, son, that’s like humping the dead. It aint no fun in that.”
“It’s what I like. Look here, mister, I’ll throw in a dollar for the deal.” He dug out a silver dollar and handed it to the fat man, thinking that if he did not accept it he would offer him all of the rest of the money he had, about four dollars. And if the fat man still refused he would stomp the son of a bitch to pudding.
“Why you all standin here for?” the Negro woman said.
The fat man held the dollar like a poker chip he was not sure he wanted to bet. “You must got a hell of a hankering, son.” He took a look down the hall toward number six. “A Chinee girl, you say?” He looked at the dollar in his palm again and smiled and put it in his pocket and said, “Deal.”
“What you mens doin?” the Negro woman said. “Caint be goin from one room to another. Aint allowed.”
The fat man went back in the room for a moment and then came out and said to her, “You just get back to your chair, auntie, and mind your own damn business.” He walked over to number eight and went in and shut the door behind him.
“Is my business,” the Negress said, looking hard at the door and then at John.
John stepped into number twelve and started to close the door but the big woman easily held it open with one hand and peered around him at the girl on the bed. “That girl be drunk again? Mista Boland gone whip her ass good.”
“Listen, dammit, I don’t care she’s drunk,” John said. “Just let us be.” He was ready to punch her if she did not release the door.
“We see bout this,” she said and lumbered off toward the landing.
John shut the door and stepped over to the bed and looked down at Maggie. She was breathing through her mouth and smelled like she’d been pickled in rum. He touched her face gently, marveling at the reality of her. He stroked her powdered cheek and saw that under the powder a cheekbone was lightly blued with a bruise. There was a small fresh scab in the corner of her mouth and a front tooth had been chipped. Her legs showed a few yellowed bruises. Her pubic hair was neatly trimmed. He stood there for a long moment staring at the compact lips of her vulva before becoming aware of his arousal and flushing hotly and quickly tugging down the hem of her shimmy to cover her sex.
His mind spun. He had no idea what to do. The front balcony was a good fifteen feet above the sidewalk. He could make the drop himself but never with Maggie in his arms. He could go downstairs and get Edward but then how would—
Bootheels came thumping down the hall. He went to the door just as the man in the bowler hat strode up, his face as tight as the fists at his side. He still wore the pistol on his belt. Behind him came the big Negress.
“What the hell are you—” the man started to say, and John interjected, “Listen, mister, she’s bad hurt! Somebody done stuck a blade in her gut! She needs help real bad!”
The bowlered man shifted his eyes to the girl in the room and in that instant John drove an elbow into his face with all his weight behind it and nearly lost his own balance as the man’s head snapped back against the doorjamb with a loud crack and his legs went out from under him and he sat down hard and his bowler rolled away. John snatched the pistol from the man’s belt and jumped back and pointed the gun at the black woman who had turned and started for the stairs and said, “Stand fast, mammy.” The pistol was a fancy silver-mounted Kentucky dueling model and its .54 caliber ball was capable of removing a sizable portion of her head.
The Negress turned and folded her arms over her great bosom and stared at some point just to the side of him. “I aint studying nothin or nobody,” she said.
The man on the floor moaned and gingerly fingered his face. Blood streamed from his mouth and ran down his arm and crimsoned his white sleeve. He worked his tongue slowly in his mouth and let two teeth drop to the floor in a bloody web of spit, then looked up at John and said, “Bruck ma yaw sumbish.”
He braced himself against the jamb and started to get to his feet and John clubbed him with the pistol barrel behind the ear and the man crumpled without a sound and lay still. John took the man’s purse and looped it onto his own belt and then swiftly searched him for his bootknife but it was not on him. The door to number three opened and a man poked out his head. John showed him the pistol and the man’s head vanished and the door slammed shut.
“Pull him in here,” John said, gesturing for the woman to drag the man into the room. The Negress did it, laboring as much to squeeze her own bulk through the door. She seemed to fill the room. John sat on the bed and told her to put Maggie over his left shoulder and the big woman draped the girl over him facedown like a sack of flour. John stood up with Maggie’s arms and hair hanging down his back and her legs dangling against his chest. He held her against him with his free hand tight on her exposed ass and jostled her, shifting her weight to set it more securely. He told the woman to pull Maggie’s shimmy down but the garment wasn’t long enough to cover the girl’s bare buttocks completely and so he ordered her to remove the shirt from the man on the floor and wrap it about the girl’s waist. She did it and then John told her to sit down and stay put if she knew what was good for her.
He was hoping for Allenbeck’s help but when he got to number fifteen the door was open and a redhaired girl sat naked and alone on the bed. She gaped at him dumbly and put her hands over her breasts. A door opened down the hall behind him and a fully dressed man stepped out and glanced from the girl on his shoulder to the pistol in his hand and quickly retreated into the room.
He felt Maggie’s belly spasm against his shoulder as she retched and warm vomit ran down the back of his pants leg and he heard it splatter on the floor and smelled its acrid stink. He shifted her weight once again and went out onto the landing. The music and babble from the front room seemed louder now, but even through the din he could hear laughter and voices from the niche below the stairs. The alley door at the bottom of the stairway seemed vastly distant. He was midway down the stairs when a laughing man came into view and looked up and saw John pointing the pistol at him and his laughter caught in his throat.
“What, Stevie?” a voice asked. “Big Bertha looking down mean at you?”
The garter-sleeved teller and a lean and mustached man with a pistol at his waist appeared beside the man named Stevie, both of them smiling, and then they saw John on the stairs and lost their smiles.
He aimed squarely at the armed man’s face and said, “Hands behind your neck, friend. I mean quick.” The man glowered, hesitated, and then complied. John kept the pistol on him as he descended the rest of the stairs and told the man named Stevie to turn around and put his face to the wall and lace his fingers behind his neck. To the teller he said, “Take your friend’s pistol there and tuck it in my belt and be quick and careful about it.”
The mustached man stepped back from the teller as if to deny him the weapon. John stepped forward and backhanded him across the face with the pistol barrel. The man dropped to his knees with both hands over his broken nose and blood running through his fingers. John readjusted Maggie’s weight on his shoulder and said, “Do it.” The teller took the pistol from the man and gingerly slipped it into John’s belt. It was a fine Kentucky model fitted with a percussion lock.
A man came in through the curtained door from the front room and looked at each of them in turn and put his hands up without a word.
John told the teller to open the alleyway door, then ordered them all to get down on the floor and sit on their hands. When the mustached man took his hands from his nose the blood gushed over his mouth and chin and onto his shirt. His eyes were pouring tears and flaming with pain and hatred.
“I’ll shoot the first sonofabitch who sticks his head out this door,” John said. He backed out into the alley and kicked the door shut.
The near end of the alleyway abutted the brightly lighted street in front of The Hole World Hotel and throngs of people were passing by. He hastened toward the darkness in the other direction, his heart pounding, his ears straining for cries of alarm and shouts of pursuers, but all he heard were the sounds of revelry in the street behind him and a low rolling rumble of advancing thunder.
The shadows stirred like living things in the rapidly shifting light of a quarter-moon rushing through gathering storm clouds. He followed the alley across a narrow lane without even glancing toward the voice that called, “Four bits for your package, cap’n,” or at the men who laughed in response. Now the alley wound behind clusters of lightless buildings and rows of double-storied derelict warehouses and the moon abruptly disappeared in a scud of heavy clouds and in the enveloping blackness he almost walked into a stone wall. For an anguished moment he thought he was in a cul-de-sac and would have to retrace his steps and then he realized the alley branched to the right and left. He could not get his bearings and felt thoroughly lost and was certain a posse was closing on his heels like silent tracking hounds. Then a steamboat horn groaned hoarsely from somewhere off to his right. He cursed himself for a panicky fool and set out toward the sounds of the river traffic. He bore toward the horns and bells and whistles, wending a crooked course through the dark back-alley world of vague shapes and impenetrable shadows. There came a longer and closer roll of thunder. He made his way through washes of litter, stumbling on chunks of brick and discarded lumber, bumping into broken crates. He waded through layers of slippery reeking garbage. Chittering rats scurried over his boots. A dog growled in the darkness. He felt eyes watching from the deepest recesses, heard muffled coughs in the shadows, muttered curses, startled gasps. Passing by an adjoining alley he heard the urgent pantings of sexual coupling.
The alley was suddenly lit brightly white by a shimmering flash of lightning and the ghostly instant revealed a black woman naked but for her shirt sprawled on a heap of refuse, her teeth bared in a rictus under the rats feeding on her eyes. And then the world was black again and an explosive blast of thunder staggered him so that Maggie almost slipped from his grasp.
Scattered raindrops began to fall as he emerged from the alley on a street fronting the river. He slipped the pistol under his coat and into his belt, next to the gun he’d gotten from the mustached man. He was surprised by the ache in his hand, so tightly had he been gripping the weapon. He stood there pondering, raindrops smacking on his hat brim. The thing to do was get off the streets until Maggie regained her senses, then make their way to the livery at the Tchoupitoulas docks where they’d stored their outfits and wait for Edward to show up or find him already there.
Lightning flared and thunder cracked and now the wind picked up. Men hurried to ships moored at the wharves or to taverns along the street. He thought he spied a hotel sign down the street to his left and so he headed that way. A pair of men in the loose shirts of rivermen were about to enter a saloon but paused at the door to watch him pass by. He became aware that the shirt around Maggie’s hips had slipped down to expose most of her ass and he pushed it back in place. He heard the sailors fall in behind him. “Looks well bored with his company, don’t she now?” one said, and the other lewdly laughed. John drew a pistol and turned and pointed it at them and they stopped short. “That’s all right then, bucko,” one said, raising his hands in a gesture of wanting no trouble. They turned back to the saloon and gave him a grinning rearward glance and went inside.
Midway down the block an overhanging sign swaying and creaking in the wind announced The Mermaid Hotel, a small and shabby two-floor establishment whose grimy front window bore the faded pronouncement, SPIRITS—FOOD—ROOMS. He entered a nearly deserted taproom as the rain suddenly swept up the street in a torrent. Except for a man sleeping with his head on a tabletop, there was no one in sight but two men rolling dice at the bar. One of them was bearded and clothed in the manner of a riverman and the other was the boniface and said yes, he had a room for the night. One dollar. The men’s eyes roved boldly over Maggie’s bare legs.
“That your parrot?” the bearded man asked with a grin.
“My sister. She’s sick.”
The bearded man laughed and gave a broad wink. “Right you are, boy. I’ve had me some pretty sisters with the rumhead sickness a time or two meself.”
“She is my sister,” John said. The bearded man smiled broadly and nodded and said, “Well now, course she is.”
The room was upstairs, one of six in a narrow hallway lighted dimly by a wall-mounted lamp. The hall resounded with erratic snores and was ripe with the malodors of unclean men. The innkeeper led him to the room and went in first and lit the oil lamp on a small bedside table that also held a washbasin and a pitcher of water. A small brass bed with a stained pungent mattress was the only other furnishing in the room. The lamp flame fluttered in the glass, jumping to the breeze blowing through a door open onto a narrow balcony overlooking an alley. The boniface closed the door shutters against the spray of rain. John stooped and angled his shoulders to let Maggie slide off onto the bed. He nearly cried out at the relief to his cramped muscles. The shirt had fallen free of the girl’s hips again and the boniface’s bright eyes were fastened on her exposed pudendum. John pulled down the hem of her shimmy and the man smiled at him and shrugged and left.
Her breathing was deep and regular but she made no response when he sat on the edge of the bed and shook her by the shoulders and gently slapped her cheeks. He’d never seen anyone so insensibly drunk, not even Daddyjack. He soaked the shirt in the water basin and washed the streaks of vomit off her face and arms. Her damp hair looked dull and felt greasy and he recalled that she had always prided herself on her cleanliness and the sheen of her gold hair most of all.
He shook her again and her breasts jiggled freely under the thin shimmy. He stared at them. Then looked over his shoulder at the door. Then gingerly touched one. Pressed it lightly. Felt of its firm softness. His blood thumped in his throat and his chest tightened. For years he had harbored such shameful secret yearnings….
Sweet Jesus! He jumped up from the bed covered her legs with the damp shirt. You rotten son of a bitch! What in hell’s wrong with you! He was suddenly desperate for a drink. He went to the door and looked out into the dim hallway. Snores and farts and sleep babblings from the other rooms. The door had a swivel latch on the inside but there was no lock on its outer side. He closed the door behind him and went to the end of the hall and peered over the landing rail and saw the bearded man and the boniface still at the bar and no one else about.
He went downstairs and asked for a bottle of Nongela. A look passed between the boniface and the bearded man but he made nothing of it.
The boniface said he had to get the Nongela from the storeroom in the rear and suggested that John take some food back upstairs with him. “She’s like to be hungry when she wake up,” he said. “They love you forever if you feed them. I can have my scullery boy to lay out a plate of bread and cheese.”
It occurred to John that Maggie might not have eaten for some time and some food at hand when she came around would be a good idea if she wasn’t too hungover to eat. From this end of the bar he could easily keep watch on the stairs while the plate was made ready. “All right,” he said.
The boniface said fine, he’d be right back, and he poured John a large glass of whiskey on the house to sip at while he waited. The bearded man said it didn’t look like the rain was going to let up anytime soon so he might as well quit waiting and just get on back to his boat and to hell with getting soaked. He tossed off his drink and said so long and set out the front door into the downpour.
The rain struck like flung gravel against the front window and thunder quavered through the wooden counter under his elbows and the air was sharp with the smell of lightning. He drank the whiskey and watched the stairs and the minutes passed and then he remembered the balcony outside the room’s shuttered door and wondered if it ran the length of the building and maybe even all the way around it.
He spun off the stool so fast it twirled on one leg before toppling and he took the stairs three at a time and had a pistol in his hand and then recovered sufficient presence of mind to come up on the door quietly, the crash and drum of the storm covering the creak of the floor under his boots. He paused at the door and pushed it gently but it held fast. He cocked the pistol and stepped back and then kicked the door hard with his bootsole and the latch snapped loudly and he rushed into the room and there the sons of bitches were.
In the quavering light of the oil lamp the rain-drenched boniface stood slack-mouthed just inside the open shutters with his fingers at the buttons of his pants. The bearded man was between Maggie’s wishboned legs with his soaked shirt plastered to his back and his pants bunched around his booted feet and his pale ass driving hard and he gaped big-eyed over his shoulder at John and stopped humping and raised up on all fours as the boniface whirled and darted out the open shutters and ran away along the balcony.
John thrust the pistol within inches of the bearded man’s face and pulled the trigger and the flint sparked but the gun did not fire. He threw it aside and grabbed for the other pistol under his coat but the man lunged and caught him by the shirtfront and the second pistol slipped from John’s grasp as they tumbled to the floor in a snarling embrace. Though hindered by his pants tangled about his ankles the man rolled on top of John and got both hands on his throat and began strangling him with red-eyed fury. John worked his hand between them and found the bearded man’s bare balls and clenched his fingers around them with all his might and yanked hard and felt the scrotum rip free and blood rush hotly over his fist.
The man screamed. His hands left John’s throat and he fell on his side and clutched his torn nutsack. John scrambled to his knees and caught him by the hair and shoved his head back and punched him in the Adam’s apple and the man’s face instantly purpled and he gagged horrifically. John stood and grabbed him by the collar with both hands and dragged him out onto the balcony and into the pouring rain and pulled him to his feet and shoved him over the railing.
The man fell into the darkness without sound and struck the muddy ground with a dull splash. Heaving for breath, John leaned over the rail but could not see him in the blackness below until a shimmering blue flash of lightning showed him lying on his belly with his face half-buried in the mud and his bare ass gleaming and his legs crossed at the ankles where his trousers were twisted round them. Then the alley went black again and John wanted to spit down into it but his bruised throat could not hawk up saliva. To swallow was torture. He stood at the rail and let the rain wash the blood off his hands. In the next flare of lightning he caught a glimpse of the drain pipe running down along the corner of the building, the pipe the bastards had shinnied up.
He staggered back into the room and closed the shutters. The floor was slick with blood. He retrieved the percussion pistol and went to the open doorway and saw that the hall was still deserted. The snores persisted, the sporadic mumblings of sleeptalk. He supposed that screams and the sounds of fracas were so commonplace at The Mermaid Hotel as to rarely attract notice. He closed the door and checked the flintlock and saw that the primer powder was wet. The percussion pistol was still nicely dry.
Maggie was yet unconscious, spreadlegged on her back, her blonde pubic patch glistening, her shimmy bunched above her breasts. Her nakedness seemed profound. Had he not seen it with his own eyes he would not have believed a woman could be so drunk that she was unaware of being ravished. He gazed on her for a long moment before hastily pushing her legs together and again readjusting the shimmy and covering her thighs with the shirt.
He dismissed the idea of putting her back on his shoulder and going in search of another hotel. If the boniface wanted to even the score for his friend in the alley it would be best to stay put and make the man come to him rather than try to get out of the place while carrying Maggie. Even if the boniface recruited confederates, he knew John was armed. They’d not be likely to rush into the room and risk a ball in the teeth.
He felt a rushing sense of elation that he could not have explained to anyone. He damn sure had a tale to tell Edward. And where the hell were you while I was busy savin our sister’s hide is what I want to know.
He cleared off the small table and set the lamp beside the bed and then braced the table firmly against the door. He balanced the basin and pitcher at the edge of it so that any jar of the door would topple them to the floor in warning. He took off his sopping coat and shirt and wrung them and put the shirt back on and hung the coat on the bedpost to dry as best it could. Then he got in the bed and sat facing the door and with his back against the wall, the cap pistol in his hand and his leg against Maggie’s flank. The front of his pants was damp and stained with blood. He wanted to take off his boots for comfort but felt readier for trouble with them on. A minute later he thought to blow out the lamp to give himself cover of darkness and make a better target of anyone who might suddenly open the door and frame himself against the light of the hallway.
For the next hour he sat keenly vigilant, his eyes fully adjusted now to the darkness. Lightning sporadically flickered blue-white against the shutter louvers. He heard nothing other than the relentless splash and rumble of the storm. He now felt certain that the boniface would not pursue the fight. He had also become intensely conscious of Maggie’s pressing warmth. He tried to think of other things, of the sights he’d seen between Florida and New Orleans, of his first view of the Mississippi, of anything but Maggie lying beside him in near nakedness. But the harder he tried to ignore the feel of her flesh against his leg the keener his awareness of it.
He looked at the shadowed shape of her, at the easy rise and fall of her breasts. He spoke her name and patted her cheek and gently shook her shoulder. She groaned lowly and rolled onto her side facing away from him and the shirt fell away from her legs and her bare buttocks snugged against his hip. He said her name again and stroked her hair but she did not move nor alter her breathing. He put his hand over her breast. Caressed it through the smooth satin. Felt the nipple draw tight. He startled himself with his moan.
How many times back in Florida had he sneaked up to the river on warm days when she went there to bathe and watched as she splashed naked in the shallows and lathered her breasts and fingered their pink tips and stood in the thigh-deep water with her eyes closed and slowly soaped herself between her legs? She wasn’t yet thirteen years old the first time he spied on her but he could never afterward be near her without wanting to put hands to her. He had ached to touch her, kiss her, to fondle her little breasts and stroke her pretty legs. To put his face in her hair and rub his cheek on her belly. To kiss her blonde sex.
His self-loathing had nearly consumed him. Only the lowest, sorriest, most worthless son of a bitch on two feet could ever look on his own sister that way, could have such damnable hankerings as his. In the early months of watching her from the bushes with his throbbing cock in his hand his disgust with himself was so great he thought of hanging himself from a stable rafter. He’d pin a note to his chest: “Not fit to live another day.” But over time he’d learned to accommodate his self-disgust by simply enduring it to the point of familiarity. Yet he’d sworn to himself he would never touch her in any such way as he yearned to. Would never behave toward her as anything but a good brother. Would look out for her and protect her as a good brother should.
Liar! Goddamn dirty liar! You ‘re as much a liar as your goddamned mother. It’s the same low blood in both you, low and mean and not worth a rat-damn.
He laid the pistol by and turned on his side and ran a hand over her hip and caressed her bare rump. He insinuated his fingers between her legs and felt of the fuzzy nestling warmth there, and now the sudden slickness. The ripe smell of her sex closed over him like a net. His erection pulsed painfully in the stricture of his trousers. He cursed himself under his breath and unbuckled his belt, undid his buttons, shoved his pants off his hips. His phallus bobbed free, aching to its roots.
No, goddamnit, don’t! DON’T, you bastard you damned bastard….
He might as well have commanded the storm to cease banging at the shutters. He moaned as he entered her from behind, sliding in smoothly and deep, pulling her tightly against him and almost immediately spasming, crying out as if spilling the devil’s own milk….
He clung to her for a time, stupefied with horror.
Then extracted himself and hoisted his pants and buckled his belt and sat up against the wall. She stirred and mumbled slurringly and rolled over and snuggled into him with an arm over his hips.
For a time he sat unmoving, feeling the rhythm of her deep respiration against his leg, his own breath raw and tight in his throat.
God damn me.
It was his only thought. God damn me.
He had no idea how long he’d been dozing when he opened his eyes in the dark and immediately felt the difference in the way she was breathing and knew she was awake. He stared down at the dark shape of her and his heart jumped as she abruptly pulled away from him and said in a strangled voice, “Who’re you? Who?”
“Don’t be scared.” It was all he could think to say. The effort of speech pained his throat.
“Who are you?” Her voice had a hysterical edge. “Where is this? Where?”
“Hold on a minute, just hold on.” He reached down and groped alongside the bed and found the lamp and brought it up and dug a box of matches from his pocket and struck four duds before one flamed. He lifted the glass and lit the wick and the room was cast in weak yellow light.
She was huddled at the foot of the bed, staring at him, arms crossed tightly over her breasts, legs folded under her. Her face was puffed and her eyes red and wide and uncomprehending.
“It’s me, Maggie. Johnny.”
Her brow knit as if she’d been asked a strange question.
“Johnny,” he repeated. “Your brother.” He held the lamp closer to himself.
Her eyes roved over his face, searched his eyes intently, lingered at his mouth. “Johnny,” she said dully. She abruptly put her thumbnail between her teeth and bit on it and immediately pulled it away again and folded her arms tightly once more. Her eyes were on him but somehow did not seem to be truly looking at him.
“Maggie, don’t you recognize me?” The look in her eyes was frightening. “I’m your brother, goddamnit. Johnny, I’m Johnny.”
And then she said “Johnny,” almost as an exhalation. And smiled.
His heart leaped. “Yes! Oh Jesus, Maggie, I thought … we thought you were…. She said … momma, I mean … she said—” He stopped short at her sudden laughter. It was hollow and toneless, as unnatural as the awkward set of her smile and the vague focus of her gaze.
“She said he killed you,” she said, smiling unnaturally, crookedly. “She said he killed both you all is what she said.”
“Maggie—”
“No, no, she did, she did!” Now her eyes widened and then she leaned toward him and said in a breathless rushing whisper, “She used to talk to me when nobody else was about. She told me he was crazy and beat her awful all the time and was going to kill her and so she was going to run away and did I want to go and I said yes, yes, yes, and she said for me to sneak out at night and take his horse and wait at the place upriver where me and her used to go to get mussels and not to move from there no matter what till she showed up. I took some food and matches and stuff and waited and waited for I don’t know how many days. I was so awful scared at night. I was sure a painter would eat me, or a gator. Finally I couldn’t just wait anymore and I started back to home. Then I saw smoke from over where the house was and I could hear him yellin way off somewhere, yellin and cussin. I was too scared to go look so I went back to where I was spose to wait and I waited and waited I don’t know how long. And then I heard a shot and then another one and I was so scared. And then she finally showed up and she was all beat up and her dress was all tore and she had Foots and Remus and she … she told me …”
Her look seemed to fix upon him clearly for a brief moment and she put her fingers to her mouth.
“What happened?” he asked gently. She looked all around the room. “After she showed up,” he said. “What did you all do then?”
She turned her vacant eyes back toward him and her fingers moved down to her breast. “She said he killed you. Both you. Said you went lookin for me and when you got back you all got in a argument and he shot the both you dead. She said we had to get away quick before he found us and killed us too. We rode and we rode. We slept in the woods. She had this big butcher knife. She made me wait in the woods outside Mobile while she went in town and sold one of the mules and then we could pay to sleep in a inn ever now and then and buy us some food. But mostly we slept in the woods. Ever time we saw somebody comin down the trace we got off into the bushes and hid.”
Now her eyes widened fearfully at some vision in her head and her rasping whisper dropped lower still and he had to lean forward to catch what she was saying. “In Missippi these men come on us in the woods, these three men. He had a number twelve on his eye, the biggest one did. He grabbed her by the arm and she cut at him with the butcher knife and he twisted her hand and her arm cracked just like a stick. He laughed at her and pulled her down on the ground and pushed up her skirt and did it to her. This other one who smelled like dead fish, he did it to me and I hollered it hurt so bad. Then the other one who looked part nigger did it to me. Then the biggest one. He hurt the worst of all. I thought I’d die. She kept tellin me not to cry, not to give em the satisfaction, and all the while they’re takin turns on her too. When they finally quit I couldn’t stand up. I was all bloody. It felt like I was all tore up inside.”
As she spoke she was rocking slightly and cupping her sex with both hands as if holding to a wound, her eyes wide with the envisioned memory. John felt as if his chest might burst with his rage.
“Her hand was twisted funny and all swollen but she never did cry, she never did. They were drinkin and laughin and said they were goin to sell us to a whoreman in Narlens. They put a rope round her neck like a dog and tied me sittin up against a tree. I musta fell asleep cause next thing I knew it was nearly daylight and the one looked part nigger was layin on his back with his pants around his knees. His throat was cut open and the ground was dark red all around his head and between his legs where she’d cut off his thing. The rope leash was lay in there and she was long gone on the best one of their horses. Nobody never heard nothin. The other two cussed a blue streak when they saw what happened and I started to cry cause she’d left me behind. The fishy one started kickin me and cussin me and the big one told him to stop or I wouldn’t be worth nothin in Narlens. But he kept on and said he was gonna make me pay for what she done to Larry who I guess was the nigger one. The big one grabbed him away from me and they started fightin. The big one got the fishy one around the head and twisted it and you could hear his neckbone when it bust.”
“Damn him!” John said. “I wish I’d killed him, Maggie, I do! The other ones too—all the sonsabitches!” And he thought: Listen to you, you no-good piece of filth.
She looked at him narrowly and then rubbed her eyes hard with her fingertips. And then went on, less hurriedly now, her eyes fixed on the space of bed between them. “We rode all day ever day and he said he wouldn’t put his thing in me no more so I could heal up down there and he could get more money for me. But ever night he made me … made me, you know, put my mouth on him. At first I about choked, but after awhile I got so I could do it all right except when he’d let go and I felt like I was drowning. He—” John punched the mattress between them with such sudden ferocity she flinched and gave him a puzzled look. And then she went on: “He give me whiskey. Said it’d make everything easier. The first time, I drunk it down quick just like I’d seen him do and it came right back up through my nose and burned so bad I couldn’t see for the tears. He thought it was real funny. He showed me how to drink it in little bitty sips till I got used to it. He had me drink with him ever night when we made camp, and after a while I guess I got to like the way it burned its way down to my belly and made my lips get all numb and not care about nothin. He’d laugh when I got so I couldn’t walk straight. Sometimes he played on his mouth organ and I’d dance all around the fire.” She paused again, still staring into the space between them, and seemed to smile slightly. “One night I took off all my clothes while I was dancin and he clapped like he was at a show and called me darlin and kissed me on my mouth for the very first time.”
Now she looked up and past him and her face darkened and her words came faster. “Then we got to Narlens and he sold me to Boland for one hundred dollars. Told me he was gonna miss me awful bad and he kissed me goodbye. I was so surprised and all confused because right away I missed him so much I couldn’t hardly breathe. I come to feel like nobody could hurt me when I was with him. When he left I cried and I cried till Boland took a strop to me to make me quit.”
She brushed brusquely at her tears as if they were pestering flies. She stared fuzzily at him for a moment, then showed a twisted smile and said, “Say, you aint got maybe a little somethin to drink?”
He looked at her for a long moment, unable to find words to tell her what he was feeling. “No. Wish to hell I did.”
She yawned hugely and swayed and caught hold of the bedpost. “Jesus,” she said tiredly. She curled up beside him and accommodated herself, nestling her blonde head on his lap.
“What was his name?” John asked. “The one who sold you like you was some slave girl on the block.”
Her words were muffled against his thigh. “Twelve. Big ole twelve on his eye….” And then she was asleep.
His own fatigue weighed heavily on his burning eyes and he lowered the lamp to the floor and settled himself supinely and readjusted Maggie’s head to the hollow of his shoulder. The thunder was now a distant growling and the lightning had ceased flashing against the shutters and the rain had eased to a light patter.
Don’t think on it. Think of how you found her and got her away from there. Think of how she’s all right. She’s all right because you did good. Don’t think on the other. Things just happen sometimes. Aint nobody’s fault. Things just happen. She anyhow don’t even know. Nobody knows. Nobody but you. Leave it be and don’t think on it, you no-good rotten son of a whore bitch….
In the gray dawn the door burst inward and sundered the little table and sent the basin and pitcher clattering across the floor and a trio of city constables rushed into the room. Maggie sprang from the bed with a shriek and ran smack into the clutch of the boniface standing at the door. John groped wildly for the pistol as he came off the bed but it slipped away from him as the lead man struck him with a truncheon. He took the blow on the shoulder and countered with a punch to the man’s throat. But now one of his arms was seized and he was hit hard on the ear and he saw stars and his knees went loose and as he staggered backward he caught a glimpse of the boniface doubled over in the doorway with his hands at his crotch and Maggie vanishing into the hall. The man gripping John’s arm had him by the hair as well and was shouting at him in French and John punched him full in the mouth an instant before a rifle buttplate drove into his face and his nose went numb and he fell on his ass and boots kicked at him and he clubbed at a knee with the heel of his fist and then white light flashed in his head and the fight was done.
He came to consciousness on the floor of an iron-barred prison wagon clattering over the cobblestones. Pain pounded in his skull with each heartbeat. The benches on either side of the cage were full of men in manacles, and the few who glanced his way did so without curiosity. He became aware of the chains on his own wrists and of the press and weight of other men sprawled on the floor with him. The pain of his head flared redly as he sat up. He had to struggle to free his leg from under a large, reeking, unconscious man who was naked but for his shirt and socks. On one of the benches sat a man who was completely naked, covering his hairy privates with his hands and looking chagrined. He gingerly felt his nose and winced at its bloated tenderness. He probed the back of his head and felt a raised and tender mass under a sticky mat of hair. His fingers came away bloody and now he saw that his hand was swollen and imprinted with teeth. A man on a bench chuckled and then looked away when John glared at him.
The sun was risen just above the rooftops and blazed brightly in a cloudless sky, but the chill of encroaching winter was in the air. One of the constables rode seated at the rear of the wagon, just outside the cage, and John recognized him as the one who’d hit him with the truncheon. Two more policemen rode up front in the wagon seat, one of them driving the yoke of oxen, the other the officer in charge. When the officer turned to say something to the driver, John saw the bruised and bloated lips of the one he’d punched in the mouth.
When they arrived at the city prison they were led from the wagon in their clanking chains into a dimly lighted passageway and they passed under a huge portcullis of heavy lumber and into a bare yard surrounded by high stone walls manned by armed guards. There they had their manacles removed as they were processed into the prison ledgers and then they were ordered through a set of double iron gates into the prison block and the gates thundered shut behind them.
Nearly two weeks passed before he was taken before a judge who asked how he pleaded to the charges of theft, assault, and intent to commit murder. Not guilty John said. He scanned the sparse courtroom crowd but did not see Edward in it.
The officer in charge of the arrest testified that on the night in question he and his deputies had been summoned to the Mermaid Hotel by the proprietor, who told them that he and some friends had found a man lying in the alleyway behind the hotel as they were returning from an evening on the town. By the proprietor’s account, the victim was a guest of the hotel named Gaspar Smith. He had been barely conscious but able to tell them he’d been attacked by the defendant, also a guest of the hotel, after an argument over a fille de joie. The defendant had been about to take the girl into his room when Smith happened into the hallway and offered her a better price. A fight ensued and the defendant mutilated Smith horribly in his manly parts and then attempted to kill him by throwing him from the second-floor balcony of his room. The proprietor and some friends had conveyed the victim to the nearest surgeon and then called upon the constabulary. When the officers went to the defendant’s room to arrest him he resisted and had to be subdued by main strength. There had been a girl in the room, yes, but she absconded during the struggle with the defendant. The proprietor had identified her to them as a young prostitute often seen plying her trade along the riverfront streets. And yes, they had gone to interview the victim in the lodging house where he was recovering from his terrible wound as well as a broken leg. He proved to be one Gaspar Surtee, a known thief who had several times served brief sentences in the city prison. M. Surtee would not, however, be present to testify in court. Two days previous he had gotten in a fight with a fellow resident at the lodging house and the other man had beaten Surtee to death with his own crutch.
The bowler-hatted man—whose name was Joseph Barbato and whose speech was yet so severely hindered by his broken jaw that he was obliged to write down his answers to the court’s questions—and the mustached man, whose name was Willard Moss and whose nose now angled decidedly to one side, both testified that earlier on the evening in question John had not only robbed them of their pistols and money but had viciously assaulted them as well. Their stories were corroborated by the teller who’d worn garter sleeves that night and gave his name in court as Harris Wilson.
Testifying in his turn John called his accusers liars and explained how he had rescued his sister from the brothel in The Hole World Hotel. The court listened to him intently until he was finished. Then the prosecutor turned to the judge and spoke briefly in French. The judge nodded and then turned to John and asked him why his sister was not present to testify on his behalf. John said it was as the constable had told them, she’d run away while he was being arrested, and he had no idea where she might have gone. The judge eyed him narrowly and then turned to the prosecutor who arched his brow and shrugged.
John glanced from one to the other and hurriedly said that even if he couldn’t prove that Surtee had been attacking his sister, the constable himself had said that Surtee was a known thief, and since no one questioned that Surtee had been thrown from the balcony of John’s room, the least that could be reckoned about the man’s presence there was that he was set on thievery. Surely a man was within his rights in attacking a thief he found in his quarters.
The judge raised an eyebrow and turned to the prosecutor, who clasped his hands behind him and fixed his gaze on the floor at his feet The judge regarded John solemnly for a moment and then leaned back and looked up at the ceiling and pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the bench. Then he sighed heavily and looked down at John again and pronounced him guilty of petty theft and minor assault and sentenced him to three months in the city prison.
In the sameness of his days the time passed slowly. He worked and ate and slept and dreamt. Dreamt of Daddyjack pointing at him in accusation. Of his mother standing over Daddyjack’s dead body and laughing down at him. Of his brother walking along dark cobblestone streets with a pistol in each hand, calling his name in the shadows. Of Maggie dancing and swirling her skirt and showing off her pretty legs. Of her sitting on the porch with her heels up on the railing and himself sitting on the steps below and sneaking glances up under her dress and her catching him at it and smiling and letting him look. Dreamt of hiding in the bushes and watching her bathe in the river shallows. Of watching her kneeling at a log on the riverbank and being humped from behind by a bearded stranger who in the next instant was Daddyjack. Dreamt of the courtroom of his conviction where the judge was now Daddyjack as well, fresh scrubbed and robed in black and blackpatched over his missing eye and looking down on him not unkindly. Saying, “I aint forgivin you now or later, boy, you know I aint, but ye best remember what-all I taught ye if ye gone have any honor about yeself at all. Remember: you can die hangdog or with a ready dick. It’s all the real choice a man got in the world.”
The block he’d been assigned to was roused before daybreak every morning and fed a breakfast of bread and molasses and coffee before being manacled by the ankle, two men to a chain, and taken out and put aboard a prison wagon. Every day they were driven to a different part of the city and put to work cleaning the streets and alleyways and ditches. They were prohibited from speaking to one another as they shuffled along in pairs, their leg chains rattling, one man of every pair wielding a spade and the other carrying the canvas collection sack, the bored guards trailing behind with shotguns in the crooks of their arms. They daily filled the sacks with all manner of refuse, with offal, with dead dogs and cats, with rotted meats and produce. Sometimes they found a dead baby in the alleyway garbage, and whether the infant had been discarded dead or alive none would ever know.
Most of the local residents scarce took note of them, so commonplace were the prisoner collection crews. Occasionally a bevy of girls just come of age might happen by, nudging each other and giggling behind their hands and blushing furiously at the prisoners’ salacious leers and broad winks. Packs of schoolboys taunted them and sometimes made a game of dashing up in a crouch to touch their leg chains and dart away again. One day a boy ran up to touch the chain manacling John to a hardbark graybeard with a “T” branded on one cheekbone and the graybeard spat expertly between his teeth and hit the boy square in the eye and all the convicts laughed to see the kid scamper away with a wail. “What ye damn well get!” one of the guards called after him.
The graybeard’s name was Lucas Malone. John ofttimes found himself manacled to him for the day’s work. Malone was more likely than most to violate the rule of silence whenever the guards were beyond whispering range—remarking salaciously on the attributes of one or another of the females to pass on the street, making jokes about the guards, sometimes simply cursing the weather, the early mornings now so cold their hands and feet ached, some days so windy it seemed their ears might freeze and break off.
John’s acquaintance with Lucas Malone was further fostered by their proximity in the prison block where they held claim to adjoining pallets at one end of their long narrow cell. On his first night in the cell John discovered that the length of the floor was askew and every spill of a slop bucket or errant portion of piss ran down the stone floor to the lower end of the room. A hierarchy had therefore been established whereby the toughest inmates had their pallets at the higher and cleaner end of the cell and the weakest had to endure life at the filthy nether level. At the time of John’s arrival the higher floor was held by Lucas Malone and an inmate named Hod Pickett, but after one night of sleeping in the soaking reek of the low end of the cell John went to the other end and carefully looked from grinning Lucas Malone to slit-eyed Hod Pickett before deciding that any graybeard who had been able to hold his claim to the highest portion of floor against all challengers must be uncommonly ferocious, and so he challenged Hod Pickett instead. Fifteen minutes later one of John’s eyes was badly swollen and his lips were bloated hugely and his knuckles were puffed to the size of bird’s eggs. But Pickett was unconscious and had to be dragged to the other end of the floor along with his pallet and would not be able to see clearly through either eye for days to come nor to take a deep breath for the pain of his broken ribs and it would be weeks before he could again swallow properly or talk coherently for the punches John had landed to his throat. Lucas Malone had helped John arrange a pallet adjacent to his own, chuckling the while and remarking: “Bedamn, boy, if you aint but a wildcat. I guess the only way I’da whupped you is to kill you.”
John learned that Lucas had lived the greater part of his life in various highcountry regions of his native Tennessee and had made his way chiefly by working other men’s land. He was vague about his legal troubles back home except to say he’d had a few. He did admit to departing the state posthaste following a poker game in which a fifth king mysteriously appeared in the deck to turn tempers nasty and a man ended up dead on the floor.
“All I ever hankered for was a grubstake to buy me a plot of land to work for meself,” he told John. “I kept hearin Texas was the place for prime land at a cheap price and that’s where I was headed when I got thowed here.”
He’d come down on a flatboat from Memphis and immediately on landing in Dixie booked his passage on a steamer to Galveston. But the boat would not be shipping for another three hours and so he decided on a stroll through the Quarter. He’d not been in town an hour when he stood confronted on the sidewalk by an outraged man at whose wife Lucas had boldly winked as they’d passed on the sidewalk. The man’s suit and high hat looked expensive, as did the wife’s lacy dress and parasol. A crowd of onlookers quickly gathered as Lucas rejoined that if the fellow didn’t want anybody winking at his wife he ought instruct her not to smile so invitingly at strangers as she had at him. When the furious fellow raised his cane as if he would strike him, Lucas punched him on the jaw and sent him sprawling. The man’s head hit hard on a cobble and he was unconscious for five days before he came out of it. The pending murder charge was put aside and Lucas drew six months in the city prison for major battery. He was due for release but two weeks before John.
For his part John told Lucas Malone that he and his brother had been heading for Texas to seek their fortune but got separated on their arrival in Dixie City. When he was searching for Edward in the Old Quarter one night he was attacked by a pair of robbers. When the constables showed up to break up the fight the two thieves charged that John had earlier that evening stolen their pistols from behind the bar in a tavern and they had simply been trying to get the guns back. The constables seemed familiar with the robbers. John swore he saw winks of complicity pass between them. Lucas Malone shook his head in commiseration and said it was a damn shame that so often in this world the innocent suffered while the guilty ran free. And then they grinned hard at each other.
They became friends over the following weeks, though John never spoke of his family save sparingly of Edward, and Lucas Malone revealed none of his past but for entertaining accounts of sexual trysts with mountain girls and epic brawls with rivermen. A few days before he was due to be released, Lucas suggested they make their way to Texas together.
“Might could be your brother’s headed there already and ye’ll find each other,” he said. “But I hear tell the road to yonder’s bad with highwaymen. A compny of two’s less likely to get waylaid than a man alone. I’ll wait for ye to be let go and we’ll set out together. What say?”
John said fine with him. Lucas said he’d be waiting for him at the Red Cat Tavern, which stood in an alleyway off the west side of the Place d’Armes, at six o’clock on the evening of the day he was let out. John said he’d be there.
Two weeks later he was restored the thirteen dollars he’d had in possession on his arrest and turned out into a gray day blustering with a norther. The trees shook under low-scudding clouds and shop signs clattered on their chains above the sidewalks. He tugged down his hat and dug his hands in his pockets and trudged through a razorous wind and entered the first gun shop he came upon. A half-hour later he was again striding through the icy wind, a charged .54 caliber flintlock pistol tucked in his waistband under his jacket flap, the piece guaranteed against malfunction by the Acadian smitty or his money back. Thus prepared did he arrive at the alleyway door of The Hole World Hotel.
Holding the pistol ready under his jacket he slowly pushed open the door and entered the little foyer and saw no one. He eased forward until he could see under the stairway niche and found the little table unattended. The low volume of laughter and conversation from the main room bespoke few patrons at this early hour. He ascended the stairs slowly and was two steps from the upper landing where the rocking chair stood empty when the big Negress came out of the hallway and saw him. She stood fast and shook her head slowly in resignation of ever understanding the folly of the human heart.
He stepped up close to her, the pistol still hidden, and whispered, “She in the same room?”
The Negress’ smile was small and sad. “You boy,” she said.
John brought out the gun. “I aint foolin any moren last time, auntie. Where’s she at?”
The door of one of the near rooms opened and the man named Harris Wilson, he who had worn the sleeve garters that night, came out into the hallway, tucking his shirt into his pants and hiking his suspenders onto his shoulders. He shut the door and turned to the hall landing door and saw the pistol pointed at his face from three feet away and he went absolutely still.
“Where’s she at?” John said.
The man blinked into the muzzle of the gun. “Where’s who?’ And now looked from the pistol to its holder and saw John and said, “Oh,” as recognition showed in his eyes. “That girl, you mean, the one you taken away. Hell boy, she didn’t never come back here.”
“Not on her own, I wouldnt reckon,” John said. He cocked the pistol.
The man’s eyes went wider and he put up his palms as if he might fend the bullet. “Listen now—listen! She aint here, I swear she aint!” The fear in his face was stark. John thought he might be remembering his false testimony in court.
“Let’s have us a look,” John said. He gestured for the Negress to precede them into the hallway. “You open up ever door, mister,” he said. “Open it up and stand there and I’ll have a look over your shoulder. If that bowler-hat sonofabitch is takin his pleasure in one of these rooms like you just were, I aint about to stand square in a doorway and make a target for him.” He pushed the man ahead of him to the first door on the right, number 16.
“Bowler hat?” the man named Wilson said. “You meaning Barbato? Shit boy, he’s dead.” He glanced back at John. “I aint lying. He stepped out to take a piss one night and didn’t come back. Coupla days later they found him floating in the cattails downriver with the garfish feeding on him. Somebody’d cut his throat is what happened.”
“Damn shame,” John said. “I was hopin to do it myself. Open the door.”
“I want you to know, son,” the man said, “he said he’d kill me if I didn’t say like he wanted me to in that courtroom. It’s the only reason I—”
“Open that door.”
The man quietly opened the door to reveal a naked mulatto whore standing beside the bed who looked out at them with neither surprise nor curiosity. Wilson closed the door and they moved on to the next one. They looked in every room and nine of them were empty and only in four of them were the girls within at work and none of them was Maggie. Three of the men were so engrossed in their pleasure they were not even aware of their brief audience at the open door. The fourth glared at them from over the head of the girl ministering to him with her mouth and said, “What the hell?” and Wilson quickly shut the door again. The idle girls in the other rooms looked out at them as if they’d been staring at the door since before it opened and would continue staring after it closed again, would go on staring until the next patron came in to have his pleasure.
“The other girls be here by five o’clock,” Wilson said, “if you be wanting to see them too.”
He knew she would not be among them. Knew now they hadn’t caught her and she was most likely long gone. He slipped the pistol in his belt and headed for the stairway.
Wilson and the Negress stood on the landing and watched him go down. “I known a thousand young fellas thought they in love with a whore,” Wilson called after him, “and it’s about the most pitiful thing in the world, if you pardon me saying so. Hell boy, it’s no telling where she be. Texas maybe. It’s lots of girls going to Texas cause the army’s there and it aint a whore alive don’t believe but the army’ll make her rich.”
At the livery on Tchoupitoulas where he and Edward had put up their horses and stored their longarms and possibles he found nothing belonging to either him or his brother. The stablebuck recalled nobody named Edward Little nor fitting John’s description of him, nor was he holding any messages for anybody named John. He said the boy who worked the place at night would be in after supper if he wanted to ask him about it. But he did not want to wait all day for a boy who wasn’t likely to know anything about Edward either.
He made his slow way to the Place d’Armes, holding his jacket close around him, the icy wind cutting his cheeks and stinging his eyes. In this town full of people and loud talk, full of laughter and music and the smells of good cooking, he felt alone and adrift. If Edward had left town he surely would have pushed on to Texas, as Lucas said. And maybe that Wilson sonofabitch was right and Maggie had gone to Texas too. But what if one of them was still in town? What if they both were? He looked all about him as if he might spy one or the other walking along the cold windy streets. He checked an impulse to howl.
The early evening darkness was closing fast as he arrived at the Place d’Armes and entered the warm and smoky confines of the Red Cat Tavern and breathed of its redolence of spirits and pickled foods. The place was raucous with shouted conversation and the toot-clink-and-twang of a skiffle band. He heard the voice of Lucas Malone calling, “Johnny boy! Here!” and spotted the graybeard at the bar. He felt himself grinning as he made his way through the crowd and toward the brighteyed old rascal. “Welcome to the free world, lad!” Lucas yelled as they clapped each other on the shoulder.
Lucas called to the barkeeper for a cup and poured out a drink from his jug and pushed the cup to John. “Drink up, boy! Ye got a ways to catch up to me!” He made the happy claim of having been drunk for the entire two weeks since his release from the city prison. He swung the rum jug by its fingerhole handle up onto the crook of his upraised arm in the manner of a riverman and tilted his elbow upward to take a deep draught. John gulped down his drink and Lucas poured him another.
The talk in the tavern was mostly of war and the talk was loudly eager. As they put down one drink after another John came to learn that Texas had been annexed at the end of December and that the U. S. had claimed its southern border at the Rio Grande, where the Texas Republic had for the last ten years said its border was. But the Mexicans said the U. S. be damned. They insisted as they always had that the border was more than a hundred miles north at the Rio Nueces. President James Knox Polk had likely figured that would be the Mexicans’ attitude and was probably glad to hear it. Everybody knew Mr. Polk was set on expanding America’s western border to the continent’s western reach and was therefore out to acquire every foot of Mexican soil that lay between Texas and the Pacific. It seemed of little matter to him whether he bought that property with dollars or took it in blood through a war inspired by the border dispute. His ambition was widely shared by his countrymen. One New York magazine editorial had quite recently claimed that it was America’s “manifest destiny,” its divinely sanctioned mission, to establish American sovereignty from sea to shining sea. Back in midsummer Mr. Polk had sent General Zachary Taylor down to the mouth of the Nueces at Corpus Christi with almost four thousand regulars, over half the U. S. Army. Now here it was February and there they still were. But the rumor was everywhere that Old Zack had gotten his orders to move down to the Rio Grande and would any day now start marching south.
“And we’re gone be right there with Old Rough and Ready when he do, by God!” This last bellowed by a drunk sergeant in the company of a tableful of comrades sitting near the bar. They were the loudest patrons in the Red Cat, crowing without pause of the thrashing they intended to give the Mexicans, the glory they would reap for self and country, the honor they would every man of them carry back home. Even through the haze of rum now swirling round his head John was aware of Lucas’s frequent sidelong glares at the boasting bigmouths. And now one of the soldiers took notice of Malone’s hard look and said something to a large comrade at his side who then looked over at Lucas with narrowed eyes. The graybeard looked at them each in turn and spat disdainfully on the floor. At that moment John realized how much he was himself aching for a fight. As the two soldiers stood and advanced on them with aspects of ready malice he felt his spirits rise.
“Say now, grandpa,” the bigger one started to say, “who the hell you—”
Lucas’ punch sent him running backwards to crash into his fellows’ table and upset it as he fell to the floor.
John kicked the other soldier in the balls and as the soldier bent forward with his hands at his crotch he drove a knee in his face and felt the man’s nose give way with a satisfying crunch.
Now the rest of the soldiers came at them in a rush and some of the patrons fled the tavern and raised a hue and cry on the street as Lucas snatched up a stool and swung it two-handed against a soldier’s head and the man dropped like a sack of feed and John went down under a snarling knot of cursing punching kicking soldiers and there came the high piercing shrill of a whistle as he felt his fingers digging into a screaming man’s eyes and tasted blood from the ear between his teeth and then sparks were bursting in his head and then he saw and felt nothing more.
He woke to the pain of a jaw that felt somehow offset but he could bear the pain of working it and so knew it was not broken. His ribs ached with every breath. He was sitting against the wall of a narrow room with a malodorous muddy floor and a heavy portal whose small barred window was gray with dawnlight. It wasn’t the city prison but it was without question a cell and his heart sagged with the realization that he was once again in jail.
A groan from the shadowed floor beside him. The effort of turning his head sent grinding pain through his neck. It was Lucas Malone stirring, groaning again, sitting up with the slow careful movements of an aged man. He looked at John with blackened bloodshot eyes as he worked his tongue carefully in his mouth and gingerly inserted two fingers and withdrew a tooth. He gazed upon it with a miserable grimace and John saw the new gap in his top row of teeth.
The room held three other men, two of them sprawled unconscious, the other sitting close by Lucas and looking at them with no trace of interest. There now came a loud rattling at the heavy wooden door and a lock clacked free and the door swung open to reveal a sprucely uniformed army sergeant who filled the doorway and stood scowling upon Lucas and John.
“You sorry bastards are in the garrison stockade,” the sergeant said in a rasp. “Two of them you busted up last night are recruits just yesterday got here from Fort Jessup. One’s lost an eye and the othern’s brains are leaking out his busted skull. He’s like to die before the day’s done. He do, and both you’ll be charged with murder, since it’s no telling which a you did the busting.” John and Lucas exchanged hangdog looks.
“Now hear me good,” the sergeant said, “cause I aint saying this but once. I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about either a you any moren I do about them stupid shitheads you done ruint, but you bastards put me two men shy of my quota for the boat to Texas and I’ll be goddamned if my ass is gonna get chewed because of it. So mark me now. I can hand ye over to the city prison till you stand trial and get sent to some penal camp in the swamps for the next twenty years where ye belong—or you can sign up to take them two’s place and be off to Texas this afternoon. You fuckers like to fight, let’s see you fight the fucken Mexicans. Now then, I’ll ask ye but once: what’s it to be?”
The man beside Lucas started to rise, saying, “Hell with these snip-jacks, I’ll take the army over a damn prison camp.”
Lucas Malone caught him by the collar and jerked him back and his head hit the wall with a solid thunk and he crumpled and lay still. Lucas stood up and looked down at John. “What the hell, Johnny lad. Army’s a sight bettern prison for damn sure.”
John hesitated but a moment before shrugging and putting up his hand. Lucas took it and pulled him to his feet and they grinned crookedly into each other’s battered face.
“All right, then,” the sergeant rasped. “Come along.”
They signed the standard certificate of enlistment for a five-year term of service:
I န DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR, THAT I WILL BEAR TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THAT I WILL OBSERVE AND OBEY THE ORDERS OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE ORDER OF THE OFFICIALS APPOINTED OVER ME, ACCORDING TO THE RULES AND ARTICLES OF WAR.
The sergeant added the requisite notation on the certificate that he had personally inspected the above named recruit prior to the application of his signature and found him “entirely sober when enlisted.” He then took them before a rheumy-eyed surgeon just roused from sleep whose breath even at a distance of half the room was a miasma of whiskey and whose gaze wavered once over each of them before he signed their enlistment forms in attestation that he had carefully examined each recruit and that “in my opinion he is free from all bodily defects and mental infirmity that would in any way disqualify him from performing the duties of a soldier.”
By noon of that day they were outfitted in new uniforms and carrying Jaeger rifles slung on their shoulders. They accompanied the sergeant and a half-dozen other recruits, a couple of whom looked younger even than John, to a public house down the street where the sergeant bought the first round in honor of their new membership in the United States Army. His name was Lawrence and he proved an amiable drunk. In his cups he professed to be a veteran of San Jacinto and regaled them with tales of their great rout of Santa Ana’s army and the slaughter they wrought in vengeance for the Alamo and Goliad.
“We kilt a thousand of them greasy sumbitches in twenty minutes,” he said. “They was down on they knees saying ‘Me no Alamo! Me no Alamo!’ Hell, we just run our bayonets through they lying mouths. Some a the boys took to docking ears and noses and just generally cut em up a goodly bit. They was hacked-up Mexicans everwhere you looked. Some said you could hear the flies from a mile away. Course it wasn’t none of us about to bury them stinking halfbreeds and so after a coupla days the smell got so rank Houston had us to move the camp upwind of it. When the war comes I expect you boys’ll kill a good many more since you’ll be down there where’s there’s a good many more of the sumbitches to kill.”
There were exclamations among the recruits of “You damn right!” and “Watch me how many I put down!” Not a man among them had a doubt that war was imminent, and they toasted the sergeant and told each other the soldiering life was the best there was. Sergeant Lawrence smiled and said they might want to reserve judgment on the soldiering life till they’d seen the elephant for themselves.
“Elephant?” a young recruit said, eyes rolling with drink. “Jiminy! Is Mexico got elephants?”
The sergeant smiled and said, “I hear tell it’s some there.” Most of them had come to know the vogue phrase “to see the elephant” as a reference to novel adventure, especially one that failed to live up to expectations, and John and Lucas joined in the general ridicule of the boy’s ignorance.
Sergeant Lawrence now suggested they take advantage of the cathouse upstairs while they had the chance. “I hear tell Mexicaner poon is right nice stuff, but it’s like to be a while afore you boys get ye a chance at it.”
They had not known of the brothel upstairs and were all of them hurrying for the stairs even as Lawrence was still talking.
John’s girl was a pretty blackhaired Cajun missing a front tooth. She had a heavy accent and the thickest pubic bush he’d ever seen. He relished the springy feel of it under his hand, against his belly. Her taste was of riverwater and he couldn’t get enough of fondling her breasts and the swells of her hips and buttocks, kissing her, tonguing her thick nipples. She was a goodhearted girl who had not long been in the business and she smiled on his hunger and said she guessed it’d been a while, huh. When he entered her for the second time she giggled and clutched him to her and said nothing about having to pay again.
That afternoon Lawrence led them down the docks to a waiting steamboat where some forty other recruits were already on board and hooting at them to hurry along, goddamn it. Sergeant Lawrence got them aboard and waved farewell from the dock as lines were cast and whistles shrieked and the steamer set out downriver under thick plumes of purple smoke arcing from its stacks.
They entered the open gulf under a brilliant blue sky full of screeching white seagulls. “Well old son,” Lucas said, staring back at the receding delta, “I reckon we off to see the elephant, sure enough.”
In command of the party of recruits was one Lieutenant Stottlemeyer who generally kept to his quarters and left the troops’ daily training to a Sergeant Frome. Frome roused the men every morning before daybreak and as soon as they had done with their mess he put them out on deck to drill the morning long as the dark shoreline slowly and easily lifted and fell on the north horizon. Occasionally a man broke ranks to run to the rail and cast up his breakfast to the sea. The early part of each afternoon was given over to washing clothes and cleaning gear, to learning military organization and regulations and general orders and the chain of command. Then came rifle practice off the stern. They shot at bottles and tins bobbing in the steamer’s wake and they made bets and John won most of them. He gained a quick reputation as the deadeye on board. Following the shooting session the men were put to cleaning their rifles and then ordered into formation and Lieutenant Stottlemeyer would come out to make his afternoon weapons inspection. That done, the day’s duties were at an end but for those assigned to the night guard. Each day’s posting of the guard roster met with grumbling from those whose names were on it, and no one grumbled louder than Lucas Malone.
“What in the hell we guardin against?” he carped. “We’re out on the damn ocean, for the love of Jesus! Anybody really think some Mexican’s gonna swim out here to this boat and sneak aboard and cut your throat in the middle of the night? Bad enough we spend ever damn morning marchin around like we gonna impress the Mexicans to death, but this guardin against nothin but the seagulls aint but a lot of stuff, you ask me.”
To which Sergeant Frome would invariably respond: “Aint nobody askin you, Malone. And you best get holt a that loose tongue.”
To which Lucas Malone’s invariable response would be to wait until Frome turned his back and then stick out his tongue and pinch it between two fingers and cross his eyes and give a twisted lefthanded salute. The other recruits would burst out laughing and Frome would whirl about to see Lucas affecting to study his fingernails.
John thought he himself might be the only man on board who liked guard duty in the dead of the night. He liked being alone on deck when the passing sea was silverish purple under the moon and the sky was a riot of stars. Every now and then some large swimming thing broke the surface hard by the ship and trailed a greenyellow fire. The only sounds were of the paddles churning through the water and the stays humming in the saltwind. Since his first look at the ocean back in Pensacola he had wondered if he were perhaps a seafarer at heart. In these solitary hours of watching the night sea rolling by he thought he surely was.
Two weeks out of New Orleans they were struck by a norther that blacked the sky for the next two days and raised eight-foot swells the color of lead. The steamboat rose and dropped and the wind howled in the craft’s every crevice. Waves burst white over the decks. Most of the troop became seasick at the boat’s first marked undulations and by the end of the storm’s first day the whole vessel reeked of vomit. Like most of the other recruits Lucas Malone kept to quarters with his head hanging over the edge of his bunk and sporadically added to the coat of puke on the deck. Even some of the crewmen were unable to keep food on their roiled stomachs. Among the recruits only John and a fellow named Jimmy Zane who’d been a lighter crewman along the Mississippi coast were not bothered by the steamer’s relentless pitch and roll. They went topside and clung to the rail and hollered with delight as the seaspray stung their faces and the wind tossed their hair wild. They then went below to the galley laughing and shivering in their dripping clothes to warm themselves with cups of hot coffee.
On a bright clear morning a week later they were anchored outside the shallows of Corpus Christi Bay and across from the wide sandy bight where lay the mouth of the Nueces River. Even before they’d come around the barrier islands and hove into view of the mainland they’d seen the dust and smoke rising off the seven-month-old encampment of General Zachary Taylor’s army of 3,500 men. Beyond the camp lay the town of Corpus Christi itself, whose population had swelled from 2,000 before the arrival of the army to tens of thousands now. It had become a sprawling enterprise of whiskey sellers, outfitters, thieves, gamblers, whores, sutlers, and troupes of entertainers. And the larger the town had grown the worse had become Taylor’s problems with drunkenness and brawling among his troops and a general erosion of discipline in the ranks.
They lowered into lighters to be conveyed across the bay. As they closed in on the river landing they saw that the camp was in high commotion. Work details were busy everywhere, striking tents, loading wagons, hitching them to teams of oxen and mules, lining them in formation, wrangling and saddling horses. The air was clamorous with blatting regimental bands and barking dogs, shrilling horses and bellowing men. The sense was of chaos barely contained. The helmsman laughed at the recruits’ excitement and said, “You boys here just in time to get moving with Old Zack to the Rio Grande. Second Dragoons done left yesterday.”
“The Rio Grande!” a recruit said. “Is war been declared?”
“Not yet it aint,” the helmsman said with a blacktoothed grin. “But some Mexican shoot you in the head afore it is you gone be just as dead.”
They were met at the landing by a personnel officer and his assistants who swiftly processed each man’s papers and assigned him to a unit and directed him to one of a handful of waiting company sergeants. John and Lucas and the Mississipian Jimmy Zane were among five assigned to Company A of the Fifth Infantry. They were turned over to a short hard-faced master sergeant named Kaufmann who ordered, “Fall in, goddamnit, and follow me.”
He led them through the dusty hubbub of the massive but orderly process of an army readying itself to march a long way. They wended through a maze of tents still standing and around groups of soldiers tending to their equipment who hooted at them and called “New fish!” at their passing. At the perimeter of the officers’ billets Master Sergeant Kaufmann told them to stay in place and then went to one of the large tents and announced himself and was granted entry. A few yards away in a small roped-off square a hatless soldier stood on a barrel with his hands tied behind him and a handlettered sign hung round his neck. The sign read I AM A JACKASS. Lucas Malone called to him: “Say bucko, what was it ye done to earn youself that place of honor?” The hapless soldier made no response but only stared glumly at his feet.
A minute later Kaufmann reemerged in the company of a young captain whose hat was set at a rakish angle. He stood before them with hands clasped behind him. His boots shone black and his brass buttons gleamed, “I am Captain Merrill,” he said, “commanding officer, A Company, Fifth Infantry. I welcome you and have but one thing to say to you and I say it with all possible fervor: Soldier well. We have no place for the man who will not soldier well. We have no tolerance for him, we have no pity. So soldier well and trust in the Lord. That is all. They’re yours, Master Sergeant.” He turned on his heel and went back in his tent.
John glanced at Lucas Malone who cast up his eyes. Kaufmann barked, “This way!” and ushered them to a supply wagon where they were outfitted with full field packs and powder flasks and pouches of ammunition for the Jaegers. He then led them to A Company’s position and introduced a beefy man named Willeford as their platoon sergeant. The platoon was busy packing gear and few men gave them notice.
“Before I turn you over to Sergeant Willeford,” Kaufmann said, “I want to make something real clear to all you. Any a you steps one goddamn foot out of line I’ll kick your ass black and blue and that’s a fucken promise. We gone have a war to fight real soon and we got no goddamn time for foolishness. Do what you’re told and do it smartly. I got no use for peckerwoods aint able to be a proper soldier.”
Jimmy Zane leaned over to John with a small grin and whispered, “Kiss my ass if it aint one damn bossman or another making threats at us.”
Kaufmann heard him. He stepped up to him and because Jimmy Zane was almost as short as he was he did not have to crane his neck as he usually did when he was face-to-face with a man. “I guess you don’t hear too good,” he said. “Or maybe you just can’t be bothered to pay attention.”
Jimmy Zane smiled lazily. “I hear all right,” he said.
Kaufmann drove his knee up hard between Jimmy Zane’s legs. The recruit’s eyes bugged and his mouth fell open and Kaufmann punched him in the stomach with his whole shoulder behind the blow. Jimmy Zane’s slung rifle slipped from his shoulder as he fell to all fours. His face turned darkly purple and he could not breathe. The rest of the platoon had quickly gathered about with faces avid for a violent entertainment.
Willeford stepped between Kaufmann and Jimmy Zane and said, “Hold on, Bill, it’s enough. Christ, he’s new fish, he didn’t know no better. You taught him plenty just now.”
Jimmy Zane was at last able to pull in a breath and he promptly vomited. Kaufmann pushed Willeford aside and squatted beside the gagging recruit and grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back so he could look him in the face. Jimmy Zane’s eyes were bloodshot and tearful. His belly convulsed again and vomit welled from his mouth and ran off his chin.
“Next time I’ll go hard on you, boy,” Kaufmann told him. “Ye best remember it.” He released him and stood and looked at the other new men and said, “That holds for all you. It’s warning to you as much as—”
“Atten-HUTY!” someone shouted, and every man drew stiffly upright but for Jimmy Zane, who remained on hands and knees, still gasping and puking by turns.
“At your ease!” The voice was gravelly and almost bored. John turned and beheld General Zachary Taylor, Old Rough and Ready himself. He knew him on the instant, this famous hero of the Florida Indian wars, had seen his ink-drawn likeness in newspapers, on posters in New Orleans. Gray and weathered he was, with a face that looked hard enough to blunt a hatchet, wearing his farmer’s outfit of straw hat, checked gingham coat, pants of dirty burlap. He was mounted sidesaddle on Old Whitey—the horse’s name known to every man in camp—and flanked by a coterie of a half-dozen officers. He leaned forward and spat a streak of tobacco, then nodded at Jimmy Zane and said, “What’s troubling that man, Master Sergeant?”
Kaufmann stepped forward and saluted smartly. “Naught but a dose of discipline, General. Man was insubordinate. He’s new fish, sir, but it aint no excuse.”
Taylor regarded Kaufmann carefully and slowly nodded. He looked at Jimmy Zane now gaining his feet. “Son,” he said gently, “look up here.” Jimmy Zane lifted his red eyes and wiped vomit from his chin with his sleeve.
“Now boy, you look to have a proper wit,” Taylor said. “So I reckon you’ll understand me when I say there’s damn good reason for a chain of command and only a purebred fool tries to rattle it. An army without discipline is no more than a mob, and mobs don’t win wars. Follow orders, son. Follow orders and do your duty. I know you’ll make us proud.” He put the white horse forward and the other officers heeled their mounts after him.
Kaufmann looked hard at Jimmy Zane and pointed a finger at him in final warning and then turned and strode away. As the crowd of spectators broke up, a corporal called out to Jimmy Zane, “Welcome to the Yoo-nited States Army, new fish,” and several soldiers laughed.
Watching Kaufmann go, John said, “I believe somebody ought beat down that little bullying bastard.”
Lucas said, “I’d like to be that somebody, what I believe.”
Working alongside their new comrades that afternoon they found it was as the young volunteers in Baton Rogue had said: there were men in this army whose English they could barely understand, men who spoke the language not at all and could understand none of it save basic military commands. The English spoken in the ranks was tangled in a dozen accents. The brogue of Eire was commonplace. The ranks abounded with Irishmen fled from the Famine and landed among a people who loathed them for immigrant Catholic rabble and posted signs on their establishment doors: “No dogs or Irish allowed.” In Boston and Philadelphia and Saint Louis, Catholic churches had been burned in riotous protest against the waves of papist potatoheads washing up on American shores. Only the army offered the newly arrived Irishman a ready place, as it did other foreigners as well—Germans mostly, some French, a few Swedes and Dutchmen, and men whose place of origin and native tongue would ever remain a mystery. Some of these immigrants knew only the soldier’s trade and would have come to the ranks in any case, but most had no trade at all and enlisted solely of economic need. Naturally their patriotism was held suspect and they were often found wanting by their native-born Protestant officers. And so naturally they suffered the greatest portion of punishments. And so naturally they were many of them embittered.
As they busily struck and rolled tents Jimmy Zane’s muttered curses about Kaufmann met with derision from his new platoon mates. “Shitfire,” a soldier from Kentucky said, “that warnt nary punishment. I knew a feller in the Second Infantry was made to sit astraddle a sawhorse with his hands tied behind him and a twenty-pound weight hung on each foot. Made to sit like that for twelve hours. Said his balls and asshole ached for a month after. Said ever time he took a piss it stood him on his toes. Know what for he got punished thataway? Laughing. He laughed during roll call.”
Another told of punching a sergeant who’d kicked him for being slow to rise from his bunk one morning. As punishment he was fined six months’ pay and made to carry a thirty-pound iron ball everywhere he went for the next two months. “It was chained round me waist, it was, so I couldnt set the bloody thing down for a fucking minute except I sat on the ground and laid it beside me. It was a job to take a piss, I tell ye. Had to do it on me knees. End of the day me back was sore as a whore’s with the holding of it. It give me arms like Hercules and the back of an old man, it did. Hell, a knee in the walnuts is nothing to carrying that iron ball for two goddamn months.”
“You think that is fucking punish?” a soldier with a heavy Prussian accent asked him. “Look to here what happens for I hit a sergeant.” He stripped off his shirt and exposed a back crosshatched with pink ropy scars left of a flogging endured more than a year before. “This is twenty lash,” he said. “I seen some have forty. Fifty. I seen some die.”
“Why’d you hit him?” a young recruit asked.
The Prussian looked at him as a parent upon a slow-witted child. “Because he is deserving it is why.”
A private named O’Malley showed them his outsized thumb knuckles, the consequence of being hoisted to his tiptoes by his bound thumbs and let to hang that way for two hours with a gag in his mouth. “Most times they’ll do ye by the wrists and then it aint so bad,” he said. Someone asked what he’d done to get that punishment and he said he couldn’t quite remember. “I was bloody drunk at the time but I have a wee recollection of some son of a bitch calling me a damned Catholic cannibal.”
They heard too all about the “yoke,” an iron collar weighing eight pounds and fitted with three prongs, each a foot long. “After the first coupla hours it feels like your neckbone’s about broke,” said a soldier bearing a “T” brand under one eye. “And just try sleeping with one a them things round you neck.”
Commonplace was the buck and gag, whereby the malefactor was made to sit on the ground with his heels drawn up against his buttocks and his hands tied together around his knees and a stout stick positioned under his knees and over his arms and a gag placed snugly in his mouth. One among them told of being bucked and gagged on the same long pole with three friends for an entire day and night in near-freezing weather. They were guilty of failing to return to camp at the end of an evening’s pass and then coming in drunk the next morning. “When they finally set us loose from that buck we couldn’t hardly stand up. I thought my back would be crooked the rest of my days. I thought my hands would hang to my knees forever. And sitting on that cold ground gave me a pile the size a your thumb, I aint lying.”
“You see now, new fish,” a soldier said to Jimmy Zane, “that wasn’t hardly punishment ye got from Kaufmann. The sarge just wanted your attention is all.”
They were on the move before daybreak in the rising dust of hundreds of wagons and draft animals and thousands of marching feet. The bands blared “Hail Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The infantry sergeants sang cadence and Mexican muleteers cracked their whips and exhorted their teams in profane Spanish amid the rumble of hooves and clatter of wheels, the rattle of armament and harness rings. They followed the Nueces westward, away from the coastal marshlands and out to the firmer ground of the prairie and there made their turn south. Mexican sheepherders fifteen miles downcountry felt the ground quiver under their feet and spied the dust raised by the coming of the Yankee killing machine and made swift signs of the cross.
The first few days were clear and mild, the evenings pleasant. John saw his first armadillo and Lucas snatched it up by the tail and they marveled to discover that although its back was armor-plated its belly was softly furry. In exchange for a portion of it for himself a Mexican drover that evening dressed it and roasted it on a spit and basted it with a chile sauce and John and Lucas agreed it tasted somewhat like pork but was more savory. The army fed too on the wild cattle ranging in the brush and though its meat was found tough and stringy it was yet beef and the men were grateful for it. At night the line of campfires stretched for miles under a black-silk sky spangled with stars. The melodies of the regimental bands carried through the camps. The generals’ Negroes entertained with banjos and bones and dancing and singing. Especially popular was their rendition of “The Rose of Alabama.”
They learned now, John and Lucas, that there were women traveling with the supply train. Camp women they were called. They did some of the cooking and most of the laundering and all of the nursing and made themselves useful in sundry other ways. All of them had husbands in the ranks because regulations permitted only soldiers’ wives to accompany the entourage. According to Sergeant Willeford most of them were devoted wives willing to work for the army simply to be near their husbands. But some were outright whores as profit-minded as the enterprising soldiers they’d married strictly for the sake of business. When these soldiers went to visit their spouse at the supply train in the evenings they took with them several comrades eager to pay two dollars each for ten private minutes with the accommodating wife. “Most popular supply in camp, don’t you know?” said Willeford. According to him, Old Zack and his officers had known of this thriving enterprise the whole while it existed at Corpus Christi and saw no reason not to let it accompany the army to the Rio Grande. They approved of it on the principle that it was good for morale. “And they mean they own morale as much as anybody else’s,” Willeford said. “What I hear, the general’s always Rough and Ready to have a visit from Mrs. Borginnis in his tent.”
His reference was to Sarah Borginnis, wife to a sergeant of the Seventh Infantry and known throughout Taylor’s army as The Great Western because like the famous transatlantic steamship of that name she was a wonder to behold. She was said to be on her fourth husband and was renowned for her cavalier attitude toward conjugal fidelity. She was partial to soldiers and never hesitant to bestow her favors on any she took fancy to, and Willeford’s claim that Old Zack himself was one of her predilects was a favorite rumor of the Army of Occupation. Yet she never took money in exchange for her affections, and her legion of admirers would thrash any man who called her a prostitute. Not that she required any man’s protection. She stood over six feet tall and was reputedly strong as a mule. Just a few days previous and in front of a dozen witnesses she had punched a civilian wrangler unconscious for his loud complaint that her jackrabbit stew was so godawful it could be a Mexican secret weapon to poison every American in the ranks. The Great Western, it was said, had a damn fine sense of humor about everything except her cooking.
John got his first look at her one night when she came to the Fifth Infantry camp to deliver a fresh load of laundry and was greeted with rousing cheers. She was darkhaired and alluringly configured with a narrow waist between rounded hips and ample bosom and her mouth was wide and sensual and quick to pucker in a kissing gesture in response to the soldiers’ hallos. Her face might have been pretty but for a dark scar across her chin and another that traversed her right brow in a thin white line to the corner of her eye and held the lid slightly closed. The muscles of her forearms stood like cords under the rolled sleeves of her shirt and her hands were large and rough-knuckled. She accepted a fresh pipe of tobacco from one of the soldiers and John stood leaning against a wagon several yards removed and watched her smoke and banter with the group of riflemen. At one point she caught him looking at her and smiled and winked and he felt himself flush and turned away. He heard her laughter and cursed himself for a damn fool and looked her way again but she was now taking leave of her admirers, waving and saying so long. Then she caught his stare and winked again and was gone.
They moved steadily downcountry on the Camino del Arroyo Colorado. The land had gone flatter still, softer of sand. The trees were fewer and the chaparral thicker. The sun was relentless. Each passing day Lucas Malone glared at the barren countryside and cursed the name of every man in Tennessee who’d told him of Texas’s fertile wonder. They pressed through a sandstorm that blew without pause for most of a day. Their eyes were raw and their lips cracked and the backs of their necks sunburned and peeling. Tempers got short and raw. Fistfights broke out round the night fires and the scrappers were bucked and gagged till dawn. They went more than two days without coming on water and their barrels were near exhausted when they at last arrived at a muddy creek and replenished themselves. They slew dozens of rattlesnakes every day. They were stung in the night by spiders and scorpions. A man bitten by a tarantula went into a spastic delirium and had to be tied with ropes and put in a wagon until he at last regained his senses. Their fingers and lips were stung swollen by the tiny spines of the prickly pear’s sweet red fruit. There was much muttered cursing in the ranks about the meanness of the country.
They were six days from the Rio Grande the next time he saw her. He was sitting in a fireside poker game with four other men of the company, including a tall copperhaired one they called Jack who was winning the biggest hands. John was a dollar ahead when the Borginnis woman showed up with another delivery of laundry and again stayed to chat awhile with some of the men over a pipe. He was watching her and did not hear the call for cards. The fellow called Jack was dealing, and in irritation he leaned over and lightly rapped John on the head with his knuckles and said loudly, “Wake up, boy! You’ll not be finding any cards in yonder teats now, will ye?’
The Borginnis woman looked their way and laughed and John felt a surge of furious embarrassment. He abruptly kicked the dealer in the chest with the heel of his foot and toppled him backward. Both of them jumped to their feet and stripped off their shirts and squared off. A loose and raucous ring of spectators immediately formed about them, some in the crowd brandishing flaming chunks of firewood to better illuminate the fight. Bets were called and taken and still more soldiers were running over from neighboring camps as the first punches flew.
Jack the dealer was muscular and lithe as a gymnast, fast and bigfisted. In his fury John swung wildly, missing with roundhouses, and then suddenly saw stars and went sprawling. The surrounding crowd whirled about him like a firelit carousel and he heard cheering and exhortations and tasted blood. He scrambled dizzily to his feet and the dealer came at him again, shoulders hunched and fists pumping, smacking into his arms and shoulders and forehead, driving him back into the crowd that parted for them, closed around them, followed after them yelling for blood.
The dealer was a smooth and practiced pugilist and was carrying his hands lower now, so confident was he. He jabbed to the eyes, hooked to the ribs, crossed to the head. The punches struck sparks in John’s head and he backpedaled and counterpunched awkwardly as he tried to clear his vision. Some in the crowd exhorted, “Hit him, new fish! Hit him, goddamnit!” But the cheers were chiefly for the dealer and somebody hollered, “Don’t be toying with the lad, Jack! Put him down and be done with it!” The crowd laughed and Jack the dealer grinned widely and landed a quick left-right to John’s head.
Now came the Borginnis voice clearly and loud—”Handsome Jack darlin! I’ll be treating the winner to a fine time, I will!”—and the crowd cheered its approval. Handsome Jack’s eyes flicked sidelong in the direction of her voice, and in that instant John hit him a solid right to the neck and a left to the jaw that staggered him. And then the two were toe-to-toe and slugging with both fists and blood flew off their mouths and eyes and the onlookers were raging for them to kill each other.
But now a guard detail with fixed bayonets came running to break the crowd apart. The officer in charge was one Captain Johns who swatted at the combatants with his saber to separate them and he gashed Handsome Jack’s head and sliced open John’s cheek to the bone and they let off punching each other and turned on him. Captain Johns blanched and backed away and commanded, “Stand fast, Riley, damn your eyes!”
But Handsome Jack Riley came on with blood streaming from his hair and John saw murder in his face. The captain slashed at Riley and cut his fending hand and then fumbled for the pistol in his belt but John lunged and seized his arm and grabbed away the gun as Riley wrested the saber from him and the disarmed captain staggered backward and fell. Riley stepped toward him with the saber poised to run him through but just then a trio of guards with brandished bayonets rushed between him and the fallen officer. The sergeant-at-arms ordered them to drop the weapons or die where they stood. John let the pistol drop but Riley seemed to debate the order for a moment before breaking the blade over his knee and contemptuously tossing the pieces aside.
They spent the night gagged and bucked to the same pole on a flatwagon placed in the very center of the encampment where they would be on full display to everyone at reveille. At the moment the camp was asleep but for the guards walking their posts and the tall shadowy figure that now approached the flatwagon and was halted by a guard who stepped out of the shadows nearby. The figure leaned in to the guard and their silhouetted faces seemed to meld together for a moment and John heard an unintelligible whisper and the guard hissed, “All right, dammit! But only for a minute. And stay low!” He walked off into the farther shadows and the other figure climbed up on the flatbed and crouched before them and they saw it was The Great Western. They could not see her eyes in the shadow of her hatbrim but her grin was wide and white in the light of the quarter moon.
“I known you for a hellion, Handsome Jack Riley,” she whispered, putting a hand to his face, “and I’ve loved you for your bold ways. But now”—and she turned to John—”who is this other fearless rascal here, I want to know?” He flinched when her fingers touched the wound on his cheek that yet seeped blood through the surgeon’s stitches. She dabbed at the blood beads with the hem of her skirt and kissed the cut and said, “You’ll carry this scar to the grave, you will,” and then gently kissed him on the upper lip just above his gag. She mopped at Riley’s bleeding scalp and kissed him too and stroked his face with one hand and John’s with the other. “You two aint scared of neither Saint Peter nor Old Nick, are ye? Look at ye! Look at them eyes on ye both!”
Her breath had quickened and now her fingers left their faces and John felt her hand between his legs and he was instantly engorged. She grinned hugely at him and then at Riley. “You two rascals! You’ll go to hell itself with a hard-on, won’t ye?” She fumbled with his trouser buttons and released his erection and then attended to Riley for a moment and then she had a hand on them both and was grinning from one to the other and she hadn’t stroked him a dozen times before John grunted into his gag and gushed hotly over her hand. She giggled like a girl and leaned to him and kissed his upper lip and then a moment later Riley groaned in his release and she kissed him too. She dried her hands on her dress and rebuttoned their trousers. Then she gently touched their faces again and whispered, “You two!” And then she was gone.
For a minute they sat unmoving. John thought he might have imagined the whole thing. He thought he might be addled from Riley’s punches or the sword gash on his face. Now Riley made a snuffling sound and John turned and saw Handsome Jack staring at him with bright wet eyes and for a moment he thought Riley might be strangling on his gag, or was perhaps crying. And then he knew it was neither. Handsome Jack Riley was laughing. Laughing into his gag. John tried to say, “You’re a crazy son of a bitch” but it came out sounding like “Ooo-ayhee-un-ick” and Riley snuffled more loudly still and the tears spilled down his face. And then John too was snuffling with laughter and feeling his eyes fill hotly and having trouble breathing around the gag for the mucus flooding his nose, and they were both like that, laughing into their gags and weeping with mirth until their bellies ached and their eyes were burning and they thought they would choke to death on their laughter.
By midmorning of the following day they’d been tried and convicted and sentenced to forfeiture in pay—three months’ pay for John, five for Riley—and to carry a thirty-pound ball and chain for the next twenty-five days. They were furthermore prohibited from speaking to anyone for the remaining six days of the march and were firmly gagged to ensure they did not. Riley’s extra fine was levied against his destruction of United States Army property in the form of Captain Johns’s saber. Their punishment could have been much worse, but because neither man had actually struck Captain Johns, and since there were dozens of witnesses ready to testify that Johns had bloodied both of the accused with his saber and they had simply been trying to defend themselves, and since Captain Johns had wide reputation as a harsh disciplinarian, the adjudicating officer, Colonel Belknap of the Eighth Infantry, decided that there had been no assault on the captain but only a gross insubordination toward him.
The ball each carried was attached to an ankle by a four-foot chain. They carried it first under one arm and then under the other as they marched along, shifting their slung rifle to the opposite shoulder each time, pouring sweat with the lugging of the extra weight under the broiling sun. They were made to march at the rearmost of the company where the raised dust was thickest and breathing was even more difficult than already rendered by their gags. Sweat ran off their battered faces in muddy rivulets and soaked their gags and they tasted dirt and their own raw exudates. They were careful not to look each other’s way too often because each time they did they started laughing and choking.
Only at mealtimes were their gags removed, and then a guard was posted over them to enforce silence between them as they ate. Once, when the noon meal guard drifted away a few yards to borrow tobacco from a passing friend, Riley hissed at John to get his attention and then whispered, “What’s your name, lad?”
John told him. Riley said, “I’m John too. John Riley. But they mostly call me Jack.”
“Handsome Jack, what I hear,” John said. His smile pained his face and felt thick and twisted.
Riley grinned awkwardly and put fingers to his own swollen face. “I aint feeling so terrible handsome this moment, no thanks to you.”
“You’ll get no apology from me, damn ye. These lumps on my face are your doing.”
Riley chuckled. “The lumps aint nothing to that cut on ye cheek. At least mine’s in my hair, I can hide it under a hat.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Aye. It’s no proper way to treat men like us. The fools ought to give me a command, not be chaining me to a damn cannonball.”
“Maybe Old Zack will see the error of his ways and make you a company commander tomorrow,” John said.
“It wouldn’t be the most foolish order he ever gave,” Riley said. “I was a sergeant, you know. One day this lieutenant fresh as a shavetail mule and twice as ignorant tries telling me the best way to set up a six-pounder gun. Me! I’d already forgot more about artillery than that wet-ears will ever know. Anyhow, one thing led to another and he calls me an arrogant Mick, he does. Well then, he tripped somehow and fell in the mud in his spanking new uniform, don’t you know, and didn’t everybody laugh at him. Next thing you know it’s me that’s blamed for the fool’s clumsiness and there go my stripes.” He spat to the side as if ridding his mouth of a bad taste.
“I tell ye, Johnny, I hate these sonsabitches. Back in Michigan I thought I was joining an army what knew the true worth of a man, an army where a man could make a life’s work for himself, sure. Jesus, what a fool! All these bastards see is me Irish. It’s what they see in you too. I doubt ye be from the sod yourself, but tell me, where’s your da hail from, eh?”
“County Cork he always said.”
“Aye, sweet County Cork, I know it well. I should have guessed it, for it’s in your bearing, tis. I tell ye, Johnny, they know ye for the Irish rogue you are, no matter you don’t sound it. And they’ll keep ye down for it, they will.”
Riley’s tone was offhand but John sensed the fury that underlay it. And sensed too the truth of what he said.
Now Riley smiled. “But how about that big bold Sarah now? Aint she a prize?”
“She do know how to boost a man’s spirit in his time of sufferin,” John said.
“Spirit? Hell, man, it wasn’t me spirit she boosted!”
They snorted and tried to stifle their laughter. The guard heard them and hurried back and told them to shut up. They fell to their bowls with their spoons but every time they traded glances one or the other would laugh abruptly and spray a mouthful of beans.