Chapter 24

He found his horse again and rode eastward. The trail was fresh with tracks, but of more than one horse. It was a guess that July was still heading for Fort Smith. He could be going south into Choctaw country or he could have gone immediately westward. Blue Duck had a hunch, though, that if July had done what it appeared he had done, he never needed a warm bed more than tonight.

He rode all out. The sun rose, the earth heated beneath him and he scarcely noticed it. He floated above the trail, the day happening without him. His mind was not sensation but thinking, all thinking -about what he was doing and why. It was like something in one of his books. An event that people imagined. There was anger in him but not much. He did not feel it yet. He was more bemused than enraged, more curious than swallowed up. It seemed like a necessary act to follow Jim July, but he was not dying to wring the man's neck. It had to be seen about, but it was strange that he should be the one.

The horse was hungry and thirsty and at some point in the late afternoon near to balking, but he was following a set of fresh tracks from a horse that was moving fast now, and if his own horse winged and faltered and breathed like a locomotive he did not care. He was four or five miles from the place where the trail left the Canadian when he came to a barb wire gate that was partly sprung and trampled and had blood on two or three of the top row barbs. Down the trail through a row of shacks, he headed straight on without stopping to ask questions of the dirty children and baby-draped mothers who stood out front. Tracks here got lost in the confusion of local traffic, but he had a strong enough feeling now -the Missouri gate back there confirmed it -that July was ahead and running for a reason.

From a lope he cut down to a walk. The horse would be lucky to make Fort Smith at any pace. He wondered about July going to Fort Smith. Maybe there was something besides a warm bed there, some other deal. Perhaps a deal with the U.S. marshal that involved more than just information. In which case there was more than one reason to be following him.

It was still possible that Ed Reed had done it. July might just be running from the scene. The boy had every reason, after all. But something in his manner made it seem unlikely, and something else that Blue Duck wasn't clear on.

The horse remained beneath him to Red Land, where he noticed that the sky was moving into the last of sunset -serene over the Arkansas River. For a dollar the ferryman was able to remember July, and that he was no more than a half-hour ahead.

In Cottonwood he looked for a lathered-up horse but there was none. It was about three miles to Paw Paw, which consisted mostly of Choctaw saloons -shacks with tin roofs and log walls. It was on another bend of the river, and required another ferry to get across to Fort Smith. The five or six saloons at the edge of the Paw Paw bottom had a look of impermanence about them, as if constructed out of driftwood from upriver Hoods, and in this position on the edge of the plain likely at any time to become driftwood again when the water got high.

In front of one of them he found the horse that he'd been following all day, lathered up and chilling in the night breeze off the river.

He tied his horse at a trough. Up the moonlighted street, ghostly shapes stumbled and muttered from one riversmelling heap of logs to another. Paw Paw was on the fringes of Fort Smith -even more ragged fringes than Coke Hill. The better-off class of townspeople preferred that Indians and Negroes and poor whites cross the river here to do their distasteful deeds. There were knife and cock fights, even an occasional duel, although that was going out of style. Paw Paw was a miniature of the Territory -outlet for what was vile and resource for income.

Needing a drink pretty badly, he aimed for the shack at the end of the street, farthest from July's horse, but knew somehow before he had got in the door that he'd made a mistake, as did the bartender, an immense man in an apron who yelled--did not pronounce but yelled--before Blue Duck had fully appeared in the door that he was to leave his gun at the bar, twice booming out that declaration before Blue Duck had clearly seen July sitting at one of the two tables in the room with a deck of cards and drink in front of him and a bedraggled woman hanging at his side hunched over and laughing soundlessly into his arm. He looked sober. He said nothing.

"I know what you got in your pocket, buddy. Don't reach for it." July smiled. The woman lifted her head and with her back still hunched over turned her face toward Blue Duck, irritated.

"Better go powder your face, honey," he said.

"What's the trouble?" July's hands remained visible for the moment.

But when the bartender lumbered out from behind his short counter. "Unstrop that gun, Indian. Any fighting, you'll do it outside" He came across in front, July threw over the table and pulled off two shots and the fat man was looking at his shoulder, hit, and the woman was screaming. Blue Duck went down at the end of the counter, but there was no way he could shoot. The bartender was making a play for something behind the counter, but two more shots and he grunted and was rolling, more or less, toward the front door. The woman's screams had become systematic, like some sort of whistle on a train. July had her by the hair and was keeping her for insurance, but the policy was backfiring: she kicked and screamed and partially knocked away the table and Blue Duck took one intentionally wide shot and July fired his remaining bullets wild, and Blue Duck lunged out from the bar into July's belly. Pummeled on the back of the head and neck and shoulders but without leverage, he was able to grapple the gun and twist it away, but now they were on the floor and July had the scrambling energy of somebody ten years younger and with twice the desperation of Blue Duck. He was all knees and elbows and flurries of fists and then he had a stick -a dowel? -in his hand and Blue Duck took it on the shoulders and face and fell backward and even as he hit the sand floor and was kicked in the jaw and knocked close to insensible he realized as clearly as if engaged in some abstract meditation that quickness was the key here and if he did not get quicker fast he was going to lose his ass. He crawled away from the kicking and stood up, stumbled and almost toppled over backward again, head buzzing like a summer night, but then he was using his feet to kick back, conscious enough to keep July away from the guns behind the bar, and it was becoming a full-fledged kicking fight, the Creek mean with his legs and Blue Duck trying to gain time for himself to clear his head, circling, on the defensive, reading July's expression which was blank and all-out, no questions or doubts. He was fighting for one purpose.

They kicked alternately, one in attack and one in retreat, then they kicked at the same time, furiously, like children bruising each other's legs; he tried to knock July down but could not. July caught his foot and twisted him over backward and was onto and all about his face again, Blue Duck could not even tell with what -fists, the dowel, kicking? -and he crawled and scrambled in retreat under the table that was still standing, but July went for the bar again -a sawed-off shotgun -and only the pause in cocking it allowed Blue Duck to get up and knock it away as the barrel roared. That set him off. Somehow it was the thing that did it -that and the recognition of what July's deal in Fort Smith was -again odd in occurring to him now out of the smoke and ringing of the shotgun, but the fact was so very simple that it could have chosen almost any moment to come clear in his mind -and July was after him with a whiskey bottle now, but it had all added up to set him off, and the quickness that he had abstractly cogitated a moment ago came out of his bones, and they were on the floor grappling for eyes and kneeing at testicles and somehow the fact of it -the simple fact -made him angrier by the second. He managed a fist-stunning blow to July's face, and the younger man hustled again for the bar on all fours, and Blue Duck came after him and kicked him in the gut hard enough to turn him over, eyes bugging out, and kicked him in the face and kicked the breath out of him and perhaps a few ribs.

"Heck Thomas is waitin for me over there -" This after he could talk, just the thing he shouldn't have said, the thing to confirm Blue Duck's suspicion.

He kicked July again, lightly, almost exploratorily, as if toeing a carcass to see if it was alive, and he grunted, "He's waitin for me right now on the other side of that river. And he ain't the only one...."

Blue Duck kicked him in the face. "You son of a bitch." July found his face with his hands and spat out teeth and blood and Blue Duck kicked him in the gut again. "You trash." He got his gun from the floor and when July got his breath and tried to crawl away he jammed it into his ass, jammed it hard up partly through his pants, and July screamed like a woman.

"They know! I did it for them. If anything happens to me ..."

"You keep saying the wrong thing." Blue Duck spoke quietly enough. "All that to get out of a horsetheft rap? Are they going to pay you, too? What are they going to pay you?"

"I didn't have any choice ...." Blue Duck jammed it another couple of inches up the bushwhacker's ass.

"It wasn't me, God damnit, it was the Cherokee deal, the deal with Mayes, Thomas got orders from higher up."

"You'll have orders from higher up real soon, don't worry." He cocked the gun. There was no question in his mind as to whether he was going to blow the scum apart, no doubts, even a kind of delectation in making the moment last longer. "Any questions before I do the humane thing?"

July drooled blood and chips of teeth and whimpered, and Blue Duck felt the awfulness of it before he did it, before he squeezed the trigger, felt it somewhat as the dentist might feel it, the man who worked for a living and swept his house -arid in that pause decided not to dignify the punk with execution.

He withdrew the gun and brained him. Surveying the room, he got his hat and started to leave, but it occurred to him that he should help July fulfill his appointed rounds. He threw him over his shoulder, trundled him down to the ferry and dropped him on the deck.

The ferryman came out of a shack and squawked at him, "Ain't no more tonight."

"Take this bum over and unload him. I'll give you five dollars."

"Five?" the ferryman squawked. "Ain't dead, is he?"

"I don't think so."

July moved an arm and suddenly jerked up his head, eyes glazed. "Come to Tulsa sometime. I'll make you a pair of false teeth for eight bucks."

He turned and plodded back up the sand and found his horse shivering in sweat. Clusters of people formed in the street gossiping about the fight. He did not want to stay here. But the horse wouldn't last long tonight, so he rode back to Cottonwood, bought a bed and died in it.

He woke up to a bad-tasting mouth and took two shots of whiskey for breakfast. He worked on the horse for a while, rubbing him down and cleaning out the burrs. He was a poor excuse for an animal. Yesterday had about done him in.

He tried to think of which direction to go. Tulsa was out of the question; they'd have him within a week. He was cut free whether he liked it or not. He could slip through Fort Smith and head on eastward. It had been his ambition for so long to go east. . . . But there were things still to clear up. He thought of her dead. He thought of her alive. The boy would have to make the trial. He saddled the horse and headed west.

End