Chapter 10

Complaining about the onset of a headache, she drank some morphine before they left.

He told himself that it was curiosity which kept him following her, curiosity about what her next trick was going to be. He did not want to get involved in any further trouble between her and the photographer, yet something, as before, drew him on.

She paused as they were leaving. "There's something funny going on."

"How's that?"

"I saw Jim over at the courthouse. He was talking to Heck Thomas."

"The marshal?"

"That's right."

"Jim's up for trial, isn't he? On bail?"

"That's right .... J don't know, maybe it's nothing."

"What are you thinking?" She put a finger to her lips.

"I guess I don't need to say. It's silliness."

They went to the photographer's studio where Blue Duck had seen Prettyman earlier, and Belle barged right into the backroom looking for him. He was there buffing a stack of copper plates, which he continued to do after she began talking.

Blue Duck hardly heard what she said he was so surprised by her reasonable and apologetic manner. She approached him with the deference of a salesman. The photographer continued vigorously rubbing plates one after another with a piece of lamb's wool. He held up each one inspecting its sheen and pretended to be scarcely aware of her. His foot was bundled up in a ragged dressing. He went to the high windows and pulled shut a thick curtain, plunging the room into darkness. Belle went quiet until he lit a candle, and Blue Duck saw an instant of confusion in her eyes as if she thought the photographer was trying to pull something. But he was simply going on about his business. He poured iodine crystals into a cylinder and began sensitizing the copper plates.

Blue Duck almost admired Prettyman. He wasn't a bad man, certainly. A little bit huffy but certainly no coward or fool. When he finally spoke it was not in direct response to her. "Will you please stand back. These fumes are poisonous."

She moved back a few steps into the shadows. "All I'm saying to you, Mr. Prettyman, is that I will give you ample recompense for whatever damage I caused. I was in a state. You saw me on the road. A woman with her bosom exposed to God and all the world is not a steady woman. I'm sure you can understand that...."

"Madam"--eyes on a plate--"I do not care to hear of your stability or lack of it."

"I said I'll pay you for the plates and the doctoring."

"Pardon me, but I will not be advised further by you in this matter."

"You put up a five-hundred-dollar reward on me. Well I'm bringing myself in and I'm offering to pay you one thousand dollars: the five hundred you'd have paid for the reward plus five hundred cash for the trouble I caused you."

He glanced at her over the candle.

"That's a thousand cash. I guess I owe it to you. I owe it and I'm gonna pay it, and that'll be that as far as I'm concerned. It's worth it to me not to have to hire a lawyer and waste my time in court. All you have to do is go over to Heck Thomas and tell him you're dropping the charges."

He went on about his plates, taking them from the tube one at a time and holding them over a limy-smelling brew in a shallow bucket. He was not going to be intimidated by her.

"Of course the other way -I mean if you was to keep up this reward and al---it'd be a mess and I imagine a pretty good one. A person can't sit on their butt with somebody trying to sic the law onto them. I'm just saying that now, I ain't threatening you." She went on, and after a while Blue Duck could see the photographer's stubbornness falter a little. If not impressed, he was at least surprised by her reasonable attitude. It was of course his pride more than his foot that she was offering to pay back, and she was suggesting that if he did not accept her bargain his pride might find itself more imperiled than it had already been.

"And one more thing. I realize that I agreed back there that you could take a few pictures of me. I made that deal with you and broke it because of the mood I'd fell into. Well I can see how that would get your goat. What I'm offering in addition to a thousand cash is for you to go on and take that picture of me. I'll sit for you. I hate it worse than hell, but if you can get it over with, I'll put up with it."

Prettyman did not respond. In the candlelight he continued to move plates back and forth from the iodine to the lime solutions. Blue Duck could see that she'd found his weak point. He stood in the darkened room behind her while she pleaded reasonably. Despite her mollifying tone, tension was building up. She was a little like a mother who is sweet and motherly up to a point, then might just do anything. Her reasonableness teetered on the edge. Without saying anything, Prettyman eventually put away the plates and loaded the tripod camera with one that was prepared, opened the curtain and set an armchair before a flat backdrop.

"All right," he said, "I have a great deal to do today, but I will take a portrait. Mr. Blue Duck, will you sit?"

"It's not up to him," Belle snapped.

''I'm asking him to sit," Prettyman said. "His physiognomy is interesting. Please take this chair. Mrs. Starr, you can stand beside him here."

"He wants both of us," she said.

He bustled around imperiously, ordering them to alter their postures, move their hands, Blue Duck to leave his hat on, Belle to remain expressionless -as though by each direction further restoring the pride that had been wounded on the road to Catoosa. The exposure took five seconds, and he required them to sit for two more in case plates had been ill prepared or they moved during the exposure. Belle went along with him without further comment, but it was apparent by her drained looked that either she was just barely able to stand this or the morphine had taken hold.

After they had finished she produced five hundred dollars, counted it out hand to hand and laid it in one tottering heap on the table. It was most of Joel Mayes's initial payment. "We're just about even now, mister. I've done right by you. Drop the charges and you get five hundred more." She smiled wanly. "What are you going to do with the pictures?"

"It depends on how attractive they are. If they are good I may sell them to an album about the west. If they are imperfect I will throw them away. They are of no use to me personally."

Her smile melted. She was again teetering on the edge, but she restrained herself. ''I'll see you around."

Outside the studio, she hurried down the street at such a pace that Blue Duck had trouble keeping up with her. At a saloon on First Street she went in and drank down a couple of belts of whiskey. Elbow on the table, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and looked at him. "All right, I've kissed his ass. Now maybe we can get something done."

Back at the hotel, she sat propped up in bed worrying and staring and talking to herself. She seemed to fall into an almost delirious condition, dulled, mind wandering. Blue Duck understood from some of her disconnected remarks that she was fretting about tonight when J. B., presumably, would show up at Parko's with some guys to talk about the Cherokee scheme. She had taken enough morphine and whiskey to knock herself out but instead just sat there propped up looking awful. When he spoke to her she either stared at him in silence or said something irrelevant.

He sat beside her on the bed with a newspaper. She made him uneasy. Pale even through her dark skin, mumbling to herself, she seemed to be in a daze. In the time he'd known her, she hadn't acted this way before. Her usual control-the wariness and cunning -had receded into a fragile vagueness. Her eyes were dim, strange, stupid.

For just a moment he remembered -or almost remembered something from his childhood, eyes like that. When everyone was hungry . . . Those days were like old dreams that he could never fully recall, and it always slightly turned his stomach to try . . . . The eyes were those of an old woman. She was no good and being left to starve. She walked sometimes on her knees. Her teeth were gone, hair cut short, legs gashed and scarred from some past time of mourning. Her eyes blinked a lot. What else? It was just a face. He had no memory of her name or where she died.

He could not read the newspaper. When he left the room she glanced up at him through what appeared to be a great cloud of worry and distractedness. She said nothing.

He walked the town brooding. His life was ordered. He treasured his rituals. He worked, he read books, he kept his house as clean as any white person. She threatened those certainties. The Cherokee scheme was ludicrous. Worse than that was something about her, the way she was. It was to be expected that she both reminded him of the schoolteacher and seemed her opposite; that was understandable. But she did more than that.

It was that she was hopeless. Even before seeing her drugged and stupid just now he had sensed it. He should know about that, after all-something in the heart that one has given up.

So why was he following her? Was it because she was that way -cut-free, poison, moving faster than life? He didn't know.

He wandered the streets without attending to his direction. The streets were of brick or macadam, Garrison was of wooden blocks, busy this hour with commerce. He ended up heading toward the old officers' quarters that stood squarely at the end of the avenue (where Zachary Taylor had lived), and on from there toward the old Butterfield Road.

It was a pretty nice town, really. He had even thought of setting up practice here, but that was not realistic. Fort Smith was a white town, after all. Dark skin was not an asset in the outpost from which the whites "kept order" in the Indian Nation. An Indian dentist in Fort Smith would not do well unless he stayed down on Coke Hill and catered only to Choctaws and blacks, and he wouldn't move here to live on Coke Hill.

The population of the town was around eight or nine thousand, he guessed. Somewhere he'd read that the population of Oklahoma was 61,000 in 1888, but that already this year it had doubled and was heading toward tripling. The Indian Nation was staggering under the influx of whites. Soon the separate domains of the tribes would be shattered by the pressure of growth. The idea of trying to hold back the flow of those settlers was hopeless. The Cherokee were the strongest of the Five Tribes, and if the best strategy they could come up with to protect their borders was hiring a small band of outlaw ruffians to harass the boomers and their financiers, then there was little hope indeed.

Oklahoma would be a state soon. This town was building its bridge across the Arkansas River just in time to lose its dominion over the Territory. There was already talk of a federal court in Muskogee. Judge Parker would become obsolete--a prospect hard to imagine.

Blue Duck was not as pained by the white takeover as were some in eastern Oklahoma. His own dark skin had been no asset in the Cherokee or Creek Nations as long as he was known to be of a western tribe, for as Belle had said, an eastern Indian hated nothing so much as a western, unless perhaps another eastern, the Creek and Cherokee having lived in enmity for decades; or unless it was another faction of one's own tribe--full bloods against breeds, noble class against common people, treaty party against resisters --or unless Negro, who were numerous in the Territory and at the bottom of every heap, having been slaves to the eastern Indians and, except for the mysterious gentle Seminole, treated worse by them than by southern whites, although not quite so badly as by the horse Indians, who had regularly kidnapped slaves from the easterners and sold them back for ransom -one of the causes of a lingering hatred between the civilized tribes and the Comanche, Sioux, Crow. . . . There was no end to it. Whether the whites or the Indians ruled seemed irrelevant. Pile a bunch of people together --white, brown, red, black--and they'd find plenty of reasons to hate each other.

He'd been walking on dirt for a while, out Rogers Street, which branched toward central and southern Arkansas. There were several plantation homes out this way which he'd never seen before. Come to think of it, he'd never been past the barrier that this town provided between the Indian Nation and the eastern states. He sometimes wondered what the east was like. He read books and so probably had a better idea than most, yet still it was a mystery. To be in a city like New York or Boston -that would be nice. Or even to visit the southern lands, the home country that fewer and fewer old people talked about nowadays -the green and lush forest land, easy town life, crops that grew by themselves -a loss to him not because he had any blood claim on those lands but because of his nostalgic temperament. An orphan of the west, he lived on this border dreaming of the east.

He stood at the front gate of a white, columned home. Children played in the yard. A mammy sewing in the shade of an oak tree glanced up suspiciously at him.

They had been right, after all, to cast him out. He had been a cat amidst dogs. There had been a silly mistake in his birth. And in private moments when he let his mind wander freely, it seemed that the schoolteacher had prepared him for another place, a second birth that would never be possible. To live among civilized people. What would that be like? Morning until night, people who were not falsely civil-who did not act civilized but were civilized. She had been that way despite a somewhat stiff nature. She put him at ease and allowed him to talk. She brought him warm things. She talked of high and distant matters. He would not say that the Indian people he had been mistakenly born into and wandered with across the grasslands were barbarous, but as the coyote he had been on the periphery of their ways. He did not learn them. She was the first to really teach him, and what she taught had become the pleasures, weaknesses, the secret core of his life.

The mammy had glanced up several more times and was now walking toward him. She stopped ten feet the other side of the gate.

'What you want? You got something to deliver?"

He shook his head.

"Well then get on."

He smiled at her, pushed up the brim of his hat. "I was just noticing how pretty this house is." "'Pend on which way you looks at it," she grumbled. "Now get on. Mrs. Kelly says don't allow no characters round the yard."

"Characters."

"That's what she said."

"You think I'm a character, grandma?"

"I ain't no grandma."

"Well I ain't no character then." He smiled.

"Get on anyway. I'm busy." She turned and walked back to the children, gathered and took them into the house.

He remained at the gate looking through. It didn't bother him. Very little bothered him. There were advantages to orphanship. One's investments must eventually be put in distant accounts. The foolishness, the pettiness roll like water off a duck's back.

But now he had to turn back to town, and there were things there that did bother him. What had Belle to do with his secret world? She was its opposite. If he was going to take a "vacation" from work, what in the hell was he doing it in this way for? Pedaling the drill, wielding the hypodermic, molding vulcanite teeth, packing arsenic in dead nerves, mixing up gold fillingshis daily work was better than following her from mess to mess. He walked on vigorously back into town, shunning the slow streetcars.

The meeting that night was held in a room above Parko's saloon. J. B. showed up with four men. John Hotsie was a fullblood Choctaw, squat, taciturn at the start, of indiscernible age, with a round face and an awkward manner. Belle slapped him on the back and reminisced about some horse thieving they'd been involved in together. Hotsie smiled, embarrassed, making vague comments until certain particular horses were mentioned, then he began talking with loving and detailed appreciation about the animals whom he remembered individually by marks on their bodies, musculature -talking to her as long as she'd listen and when she wouldn't any longer, talking on to whoever else would hear him about bays and ponies and sorrels and Morgans and forty-dollar horses and seventy-five-dollar horses and horses that could not be bought at any price, only stolen, and on and on talking like a drunkard about horses, horses, horses. He was Choctaw all right.

Ralph Bunch was apparently the youngest man there. He had very pale skin and black hair, and the habit of spitting through his top front teeth. He did it frequently both when silent and when talking, in the latter case punctuating his sentences or adding emphasis at the end, bowing his head slightly and spitting with great ease and accuracy. He was a cold-blooded sort of man, who for some reason appeared to Blue Duck to belong in another time and place -not this town, this year, but some other, whether in the past or future he could not guess. He held his body and shoulders hunched over, and with his pale pure skin and blackest hair, somehow gave an impression that he was capable of sudden extreme actions.

They milled around drinking whiskey for a warmup. No one asked any questions yet. Belle was waiting for Jim July to show up. The piano rinky-tinked up through the floor. The room smelled of kerosene, tobacco, whiskey, nervousness. J. B. sat leaning back against the wall chewing a cigar, talking to Crick Watson. Watson was a cowboy. He walked like a cowboy, so awkwardly that his legs seemed deformed. He was pleasant and quiet, maybe fifty years old, plenty old enough to have ridden the Goodnight and Loving and the other northern drive trails (which had been closed now for three or four years because of the railroads), to have eaten a lot of dust in his trail life and worried about a thousand thunderstorms and crossings and prairie fires, to have ridden night herd on many a cold wet night -performed all the tasks and surmounted all the crises that tempered a real cowboy. He had long shaggy hair down over his ears. He listened with apparent seriousness to J. B.'s conversation.

Blue Duck talked with Maynard Evans, who was the only one here Belle didn't already know. He couldn't get much of a fix on the man except that he had a venomous mouth and acted mean as a sow.

When Jim July came in the door, Belle went to him immediately and began talking in a hushed, private, worried way -which was kind of irritating. Blue Duck had no reason to be here, after all. He had only come because he was afraid that she might not make it through the evening. Having been in nearly the state he'd left her in when he went on his walk, she'd only barely managed to get herself together to come. He advised her not to, which ticked her off enough to get her here. So far, she was kind of giddily on top of things. She was friendly and talkative with a shadow of craziness in her face -the dulled flamboyant glaze.

She talked passionately to Jim. He was drunk. Eventually she gave up on him. "Hey! I guess we can get started now." She paused while conversation petered out. "First thing I got to know, are there any big mouths in this room?"

"Only one, Belle," Ralph Bunch said, spitting.

"Well good. Because if there are any other big mouths here, that'll be bad for our little enterprise. I guess you boys know we're going to talk about breaking the law."

"No!"

"That's right Ralphie, and it'll be one mean son of a bitch on whoever carries a word of it outside this room. I mean not just to the law but to your hot sweetie or your wrinkled old momma or anybody else. That's what I have to start out with. Are yall with me so far?

"Next I got to repeat, we're going to talk about breaking the law. If any of you don't want to talk about that subject, you got a case hanging over you or something, I'll advise you to just melt away and forget this tea party. I mean now. It won't hurt you none. I'll wait for you to think on that one a minute."

"What's the idea, Belle?" Watson asked.

"I'm offering you seven bucks a day each, plus an equal split of profits."

"Seven, did you say?"

"That's right. Seven the minute you sign on."

"Where's the pencil?" Watson said.

"Take it easy Crick," she laughed.

"Easy hell, you're talking seven times anything I ever earned."

"What's the plan?" Hotsie asked.

"None of you leaving? ... Okay. We're going to the north Territory, maybe across into Kansas, and try and run out some of the trespassers in the Cherokee Outlet."

"Boomers?"

"That's right, boomers and maybe some boomer moneybags."

"Who's that?"

"You'll have to settle for the main idea right now, John. I guess you can understand that." Hotsie frowned. "We're being paid by the Tribe. I'm making a little more because I'm putting my name to it. But anything big we knock over, you'll get a fair bite. Ain't nothing tricky or sneaky about it. Whatever I can't explain right yet, there's a solid reason for it. I'm just feeling you boys out."

"What in the hell is this?"

The room fell quiet. The voice sounded angry.

"What's the question, Mr. Evans?"

Evans snorted. "Question? The question is what in the God damn hell are you talking about? J. B. comes and brangs me to this God damn nigger saloon, puts me up in front of a woman talking what don't make no sense. Who in the hell are you?"

"If you don't know who I am, it's not likely I can tell you." Evans looked at her for a minute. "I know your shittin name. Who are you talking for?"

"Herself," Jim July slurred. "She don't talk for nobody but herself." Evans looked outraged. "Who's heading up this operation is what I'm asking."

“I am."

"Well God damn!" he exploded in incredulous laughter. The other men shuffled around some. "I don't have anything against a woman, I figure ever man ought to own at least one of them. But what in the hell kind are you?"

Belle stood there with a lantern on the table before her. She glanced at July but said nothing. Eyes tired, silent, she seemed to give up for the moment, receding into herself at exactly the time when her wit was most needed.

"No!" Maynard blustered on. "I like a good one. You know I heard about a schoolteacher out in the Territory, there was a tornader comin and she fell onto the schoolhouse floor and that there wind whooped around so as to strip off her clothes, stripped off ever thread she was wearing. Didn't flatten the walls or kill nobody, just sucked that woman aloose of ever thread on her body. Storm passed and she stood up nekkid." He looked around wide-eyed to see if everybody was as amazed by his story as he was.

Belle continued to stand there looking at nothing, lantern light cast up her rough face, hands dead at her sides. The mood of the place was getting very confused.

Blue Duck acted without thought. He arose and opened the door leading downstairs, picked the man Evans up by his shoulders and rammed him out of the room. He banged and rattled down the stairs, the piano downstairs stopped, and a long sad moan came up from the landing; when it started up again

Belle looked at Blue Duck with a smile creeping onto her face.

"Where'd you get that cull?" she asked J. B.

He shook his head.

"Son of a bitch is right, you know," July said. "This idea is as full of gas as a plowhorse's asshole." "Why don't you wait until you're straight, Jim. Right now you're a little bit cockeyed, I'd say."

"Oh you would?"

"We have some things to talk about, all of us. You hold off for a while...." ''I'm straight enough to know that you're going out there to get some people killed for that no-good boy."

"What's that?" Hotsie asked.

"What boy?"

Belle put a hard look on Jim. "That's right, and you were straight enough to talk to Heck Thomas today. What'd you and him have to discuss, Jim?" "That's my business," he hissed, getting about half as drunk in a second. "Uhh ..." Crick Watson scratched his jaw and held a finger up as though to speak.

"Jim went to see the marshal today," Belle said. "I saw him walk into the office. I'm just curious about what the subject of conversation was."

''I'm trying to straighten up a rap. You know that."

''I'm just wondering how you're doing it. You wouldn't be making any funny deals, would you?"

"God damn you. Don't you talk to me like that. You're just trying to change the subject. I've seen the way you work. You're gonna ride out there and get your ass full of turkey shot because of that boy you carry on with like a God damn ..."

"That's enough," Belle said.

"What is all this?" Ralph Bunch spat onto the Hoor. Hotsie was still frowning darkly. Even J. B. looked vexed. The meeting was threatening to break into complete confusion.

"Spend a week at Younger's Bend and you'll know what it is,"

July lowered. "A week and you'll know good. Stay there a few months and you'll be screaming with it. Talk about the old days gone. Talk about how it used to be out there. If that's the way it used to be ..."

"What's he talking about?" Crick Watson asked.

"Drunk," Hotsie said. "Drunk as an Indian."

Jim spoke in Cherokee, face swoozy with anger, whiskey

"Go through one after another. Always talking about the real ones. The originals. I get to put it where Cole Younger put it. So God damn what? Who else puts it there? What other kind of God damn dirty use do you put it to? Got this Comanche dentist now. What's next? You tell him the truth? You tell him the facts? Any of it? Just carry him along for a while, he'll catch on."

"Did you make a bargain with Heck Thomas, Jim?"

"Whatever I do is my business."

"Not when it's me that's part of the bargain."

"You've been through more bargains than a forty-year-old mule."

"Get out, Jim."

"I'll tell you one more thing. You asked me if I knew Laura Ziegler. I know her. Sure I do. Everybody knows her. I even know how your boy got to know her, who first introduced her to the stupid son of a bitch. Your daughter Pearl Starr introduced her. That's at the Riverfront Hotel where she's selling it for five bucks a job. Which I don’t blame her for, not a bit. If I was her, I'd rather do that than live in that insane asylum you call Younger's Bend."

"Get out Jim. I've said it twice now."

"Say it three times and put it up your ass."

"You're getting real ugly, Jim."

"Eat my cock, you dirty bitch. And don't start giving me that I'll-mess-you-up shit. Only messing up you ever do is out of both ends -your mouth and your cunt."

Belle shook her head. "God, boy, what have you been drinking?"

Blue Duck was surprised by her. She was not fierce and quick like before. She was stunned, uncertain. Was it reference to her children--Ed Reed, Pearl-that always made her strange like this? Jim was berserk, drunk on more than whiskey. She descended into a chair and looked out over the lantern.

Blue Duck acted again without premeditation. "We can get on with the basics if you boys want to hear about them. . . ." Embarrassed, frowning, looking confused, they were all glad to hear someone else talk. They coughed and nodded, yeah, sure ....

Blue Duck started talking. He talked about the boomers and the law and the Cherokee problem with the cattle lease. In the dignified, quiet way that he employed to tell people they needed false teeth he rambled on and tried to smooth over what Jim July had breathed into the room. They all acted like they were listening hard but in fact were obviously not. They seemed to appreciate that someone was talking.

Belle interrupted, looking at Jim, "I'm just wondering how bad you must have gone to get up that much poison."

"You talk about me going bad, you dirty mother? I've had it. I'm leaving your shit." He looked at Blue Duck. "You better think about it real good, Mr. Dentist. Put your mind to it. Because something stinks out there. Something real funny. You understand that?"

"I understand. I'm asking you to leave now. Do you mind?"

"You hear me?"

"I hear you."

Jim stood up swaying blowsy-faced over the table.

"You'll be dead in a week."

"What'd he say?" Hotsie asked. "I don't speak Chalakki."

"I said you'll be dead in a week," Jim said in English. He leaned forward at Hotsie. "Fiopa tapa."

"Thanks for the free advice. We'll be seeing you," Blue Duck said.

Belle spoke very dimly, almost below hearing,

"You're lying about Pearl."

"Oh? Why shouldn't she? Couldn't take care of herself any other way with you squeezing her to drop the kid. That's what kind you are."

Belle sat there, diminished, quiet, with the lamp in her eyes. Blue Duck tipped his hat at July. "Thanks again. We'll be seeing you."

"I'm going." A certain complacency settled into his face, as though for now he had satisfied his pride. "Keep your fork clean -which'll be hard in present company. And just remember that after the shitass way you acted, Jim July did you a favor." He headed for the door.

"Jim ... Ji-im ..." It sounded almost like a lamentation. He stopped but didn't turn. "Pearl's in Kansas," she said.

"Pearl's riding some drummer over there about eight blocks across Garrison." He pointed with an arching finger. "I've heard she's a pretty popular piece of ass. They all get a kick out of the fact that she's Belle Starr's daughter. Be seeing you around.”

Jim clunked down the stairs. Belle remained seated, staring at the lantern. There was another embarrassed silence. Blue Duck finally started talking again. "I apologize for the confusion, gentlemen. That young man was, uh, drunk, as you could see. He apparently wanted to start a fight. I'm glad that we managed not to have one. Now we've discussed the basics. If, uh, there aren't any more questions."

Ralph Bunch shook his head and spat. "Je-sus."