Chapter Nine
The roof over the attic was pitched and gave Klaus the sense the walls were closing in on him. That feeling, he thought wryly, was not entirely unwarranted. It was easy, however, to imagine the world would remain at bay so long as he stayed here, hidden on the second floor of the good doctor’s ranch.
The doctor had excused himself this morning to go on some excursion to a nearby town. There had been a rash of babies lost to midwifery, which made the rustic obstetrician a highly-valued commodity in these parts. He occasionally slunk off at strange hours of the night, which made Klaus think there was a chance his operations regarding pregnant women had a darker, perhaps illegal side. Not that Klaus would be the one to impeach on the old man. He might need his services here sometime soon. Any day now one of Susan’s octoroons could waddle over to the Kaserne, heavily weighted with his seed and demand to see the father of the bastard.
As for the subject of fathers, did his father or one of his somnambulant guards know where Klaus was hiding? He cradled his bad arm with his good one and thought about it. There was a distinct possibility the rapping he heard coming from downstairs was Rainer or even Adolph Pferdmann himself, here to haul the prodigal son back to his father’s court.
Footfalls made the wooden steps whine, too soft by far to belong to one of his father’s heavies. The door opened and the doctor’s live-in maid was standing there.
“Good morning sir.” She set his breakfast tray on a table beside his bed and went over to the window.
He watched her form shift beneath her black woolen outfit. He clenched and unclenched his fists, resisting the urge to grab a mound of derrière, fall face first into a debasement that would make either Rimbaud or Wilde blush.
“Dr. Paige says you could stand some air.” She opened the shutters.
He thanked God he hadn’t had a drink in days. The light would have been unbearable.
“At least a couple hours’ worth,” she said. “Too much more and you’ll catch a draft.”
She turned to face him. His chance to grope her had passed.
“How is the arm mending?”
He attempted to lift it in the sling. “A waste of cloth needed for the war effort. I’ve already healed.”
She giggled, amused by his attempt to muster pride. “Ah, best not to rush such things. If it fuses wrong, you’ll be crooked.”
“I’m already crooked.” He massaged his head with his free hand.
“Will there be anything else?”
She was too young and nubile to want to spend her day commiserating with an invalid. He looked at her, apple-cheeked and vigorous, the ballet-like poise of a swan from the curve of her spine all the way to the vase-like wending of her porcelain neck.
“Yes,” he said, remembering the knock. “Who was that at the door?”
“Oh,” she said. “There is an item of express mail for you. I left it on your tray.”
Klaus ignored the sowbelly and cabbage floating in a chicken stock broth on the plate. He wondered who could have known he was holed up here, and had then decided to send him an item of mail. He held the letter in his hand, readying to tear it. He stopped, and looked at her. There was anticipation in her eyes, an only natural desire to eavesdrop. He wondered if she had perhaps held it up to the light after it had been hand-delivered.
Quickly realizing her mistake, she excused herself and closed the door on her way out. Klaus Pferdmann tore the envelope and read the letter inside. It was written on thick watermarked stationary. It said:
Herr Pferdmann,
Though our steamer has left your lovely shores, we must remind you that you are now in arrears to Midwest Gaming Concern for $2000. You should also not take our departure as carte blanche to remain in arrearage. If we have agents who are capable of delivering letters to you where you are hiding, you should be able to infer they are equally capable of delivering more forceful messages. A copy of a signature displaying your penmanship on a credit marker for the above sum has been enclosed. If you wish to contest the charges, you have until―
He folded it and set it on the table. He attempted to sit up, forgetting for the moment that he could not brace himself with his bad arm. His elbow locked and he fell from the bed to the ground with a thud. He moaned, and a bird lost from its migrating flock came to land on the windowsill.
He did not have $2000 dollars, and, even if he did, he would be carrying his hobbled form over to one of the whorehouses about town at this very moment. Perhaps he would not head directly back to Black-Eyed Susan’s. It was best not to carry on like a slave-master ravishing his own private stock. Maybe he could go out to one of the finer houses of ill-repute, the kind where a letter of introduction was required to even step into the lobby.
He held the note in his clammy hands. Teardrops stained the paper, leaving clear acidic blots. He attempted to continue reading, but failed to get all the way through another sentence.
We have taken the liberty of sending an inquiry to your employer Hessian and Habsburg-
Then he would soon take the liberty of flinging himself from a bridge. His father had nearly destroyed him for his former recklessness, without the added incentive of knowing his son’s gambling debt. The thrashing would be even sounder with that kind of motivation to feed his father’s rage. Klaus attempted to grit his teeth, suppressing sobs, fearing he might bring the maid back up the stairs, and that she would find him slumped in this broken posture.
Should you wish to arrange for an alternate form of payment, our collections bureau might be willing to assess any properties, holdings, or raw goods in exchange for―
Klaus’s eyes dried. Alternate form of payment? He lifted himself back up onto the bed with his good arm and thought about it for a moment.
* * * *
Which one of his crimes had it been, then, that had landed him here? Bertram smelled the odor of blood streaming from his own muscles, wafting from where his skin and blood dripped from the edge of the razor pike. Clever bastard, whoever had laid it here. He watched his belly rise and fall, accommodating the wood running through him. He gripped the spear with both of his hands, trying to hoist himself off the impaling stick.
He slid back down, closed his eyes. Whatever happened, however it ended, Bullethead Bertram would not beg for his life. To make a mistake of this caliber, of this consequence. He could have retired comfortably years ago. It was better to die on the trail and be devoured by the elements rather than to die in town among men.
He searched around his body for the spyglass. He saw it lying just out of reach, trapped between the prayerful hands of murderous spikes. Just moments ago he had held this island in his glass, scanning from one end to the other. There had been no sign of the red man or men. It was possible more than one had gathered under the sun on this island, even though the poster bore only a physical description of the one.
He had seen a young woman, however, sitting by a fire with her back to him, the lone form visible on this Kansas corridor rock barely fit to call itself an island. She was tending a steaming Newcastle pot which rested on a bed of red cinders. The smell of boiling crab had floated across the island to where he was crouched with the field glass. Bertram had closed the contraption moments later. His plan of attack was formed as easily as the deduction that led him here. There was only one thin strip of land leading to the island, which was otherwise bordered by water. He could not swim, and had no choice but to move forward.
The young woman had not stirred once as he approached, which was fine with him. He would grab her and go without the redskin. Taking a partial bounty on the return of the daughter would have been worth more than enough. He could forego the rest of the bounty as long as he did not have to battle the savages. His aversion to them could not be properly called a fear, though, since he had killed more than his fair share of them. It was simply, for whatever reasons, he preferred to kill men who looked and fought like him, whose faces were white and whose steel was European. There was an old saying he and a small band of others lived by. In counting war coup, Mexicans and Indians didn’t count.
He had moved with headlong force for the last couple of days, and continued to rush implacably across the land, toward the girl, convinced this was to be the hour when he would intercept her. His certitude added to the natural surprise of plummeting a full story into a dank pocket of air just a shade beneath the ground. The rib-shattering pain had seared through his spine, and sent dancing cataracts of white light popping like firecrackers behind his eyes.
That had been only minutes ago. Now, above him was only a circle of blue sky cut from the dirty, root-laden hole. He knew he would die soon and could not help but smile.
* * * *
On the rocky land up above, Half-Man walked over to the fireside. He snatched the horsehair from the top of the skeletal remains he had found in the cave, and he then tossed the putrid corpse toward the shoreline. He finished braiding the fine withes tied to a nearby tree and then went over to the hole. His prey was trapped there on the bed of spikes.
“Hello there, big beaver,” he said to the trapped man.
“Hello, red man. Care to have my pelt?”
Half-Man laughed. Wicked and white, this one, but with strength of heart.
“Make sure to say a prayer over me before sending me to the spirit in the sky,” the man said.
“Oh,” Half-Man asked. “Have you done right by your Jesus?”
The impaled man coughed. “Plenty killed. No children, except one on accident. I can count the women on ten toes.” Raindrops of blood splashed his cheeks and streaked across his face. “What’s your name?”
“Half-Man.”
“And,” the man said, “Half-What?”
Half-Man didn’t answer. He lowered the rope. “Pull yourself up.”
“No strength.”
“Then just hold on. I’ll pull.”
The trapped man grabbed the rope, and Half-Man’s back muscles tensed as if he were furiously pulling a dugout along white rapids. As the hunter emerged from the mouth of the hole, hollowed through but free of the spike, he grunted.
“What was that?”
“A buffalo fall,” Half-Man said, dragging him over to a tree, where a pile of twigs sat.
The man coughed up a bit more blood. “Ha, buffalo fall. You are an old one. I knew it.” He shook his head. “Mi casa su.” He giggled.
“Are those bees?” he asked.
“These,” Half-Man said, feeding another thorny stick in one side of the man’s back and out the other, “are Sarvis berry twigs.”
An eighth or ninth thorn pierced the man’s back. Fat-bellied red teardrops poured profusely, lubricating the ropes Half-Man tied to the thorns piercing the white man’s muscles.
Half-Man took the ends of the rope he had loosely wrapped around the tree trunk, and now wound them more tightly around the sturdy tree. He dragged the dying white mercenary and pushed him forward, away from the trunk, until the lines were taut and the tree’s gravity pulled the man back toward it, stretching the ropes tight, which in turn pulled the white flesh like Indian Rubber.
“Now,” Half-Man said, “I want you to run. If you can break free, you may have your life.”
The man attempted to turn his head so he could see the Indian. “I wish you were in front of me rather than behind so I could spit in your eye.”
Half-Man kicked him in the center of his back. The man’s knees locked, and he stumbled forward, inadvertently tearing a leathery layer of flesh from the top of his back. As he jerked, he jumped forward, a rush of thrombosis-laden adrenaline healing his pain with the pure terror of his beating heart. He ran for the shore, the dermal layers shredding like thin slices of prosciutto under a butcher’s blade, his back fat coiling on itself like the lid of a can as it is peeled open.
He fell down into the malarial foam of the water of the shore. His face was in the river, but he was already dead and could not drown.
Half-Man stooped, held the sheet of flesh which was at least as long as the scroll the Founding Fathers had written upon. He held the bloody skin toward the sun, whose light was dense enough to shine through one side, clear to the other.
He looked to the dead man. He had displayed too much stony pride to give the redskin any satisfaction. Half-Man needed to hear a white man whimper and scream out into the sky. Now he had to honor this dead white man in the manner of his people and give him some form of burial.
No doubt other white men would come. His tribe had dismissed the first Old Men they had seen as an aberration, rather than the first number of an advancing party. Half-Man would not make that mistake again. He walked over to the buffalo fall and began covering it with grass.
* * * *
Welcome to Praetorian Barracks a hand-painted wooden sign read. It was hard to tell where the Army base ended and where the town hosting it began. Moments after arriving, Butch had taken Crib, his hogtied prisoner, to the stockade where he was classified a mutineer and locked into an empty cell with a hole dug into the center of the floor.
A few hours later, as the sun began to set, two Union soldiers came with a turnkey to escort Crib from his cell and into the interrogation wing. Butch stood in the room, with his arms folded, posting himself against the far wall and basking in Crib’s pain as each blow landed. One of the guards gave Crib a sound knuckle-dusting, while the other one dunked his head into a halved Chianti cask filled with cold water.
“C’mon,” the guard said, pulling Crib by his hair. “You expect us to believe your coconspirator was eaten by a bear? Humbug to your nonsense.”
Crib struggled to catch his breath. The sad irony was this was the first water to touch his skin in weeks. He hesitated to mock them with his thanks, however. They were liable as not to drown him.
“What about Hoover?” Butch said. “We never found him either.”
“Hoover...” Crib gasped. His chest burnt, heaved.
“Yes,” Butch said, walking over to his once friend, held by the other two men. “We never accounted for him. We like all of our casualties to receive Christian burial, and we want to see our shirkers punished.”
Beads of water slicked Crib’s spine. He struggled to gain some purchase on the cement with his wet boots. “Hoover,” he said, remembering. “He’d managed to somehow skewer himself with his own Enfield blade.”
Butch’s lower lip curled. One of the two men holding Crib snorted.
“Balderdash,” Butch said. “Hoover possessed more esprit de corps in one toe than you did in your whole body, you cur. He tried to stop you from fleeing, and you killed him.”
“Sock him one good,” a jailer said.
“Yeah,” the other said. “Give him a pair of raccoon eyes to match that rodent soul.”
“One better,” Butch said. “Bring out Miss Bathory.”
They lifted the cask and dumped the rest of the bucket’s contents onto Crib. He shivered. The mildew on his shirt was now frozen to an itching icy patch. It was slow scaphism, these weeks of dirt collecting while being on the run and he too preoccupied to have his proper toilet. Crib had planned to take a wash in the backyard of the swing-station, when his old comrade had found him there.
What was it to the Butcher if a few boys turned tail? Crib and more than a handful of the others had grown up in fault-line states. They had been only a few congressional filibusters away from fighting for the other side in the war.
One of the guards now opened a door to the outside and pushed his prisoner through it. The smell of pasture-trod manure and pig detritus filled Crib’s lungs, billowing on a cold gust, which tore through a thin shield of briar and trees on the sloping side of a brown hill.
The other prisoners already outside, drenched in blood and cold, sulked their way through the muddy pen, picking their feet up and struggling to extricate themselves from the mire, too tired now to distinguish between what was dirt and what was dung. In either event, the soil would reclaim them all soon enough. A rooster worked his way through their ranks, pecking and doing a bandy strut between their bare feet.
They wore strange collars, flat like stockades but mobile, versatile enough to accommodate their march to nowhere. Crib struggled to understand the mechanism of the devices locked around their throats. His vision blurred.
He felt malnourished. His lips and gums had been burning for weeks, and he wondered if he had somewhere contracted scurvy. It had been too cold for fruit to grow of late.
“Here you are,” Butch said. “The burdens of soldiering were too onerous to wear around your neck. Try this on for size.”
One of the others helped him put it on. He felt his shoulders give, a concave sagging as the weight shifted over his core. What felt like dull hobnails poked his neck from all sides of the wooden collar. Reflexively, he struggled to adjust. There was something about the pain that made him feel if he edged ever so slightly to the right or to the left, everything would be aligned and he could sleep.
The feeling he might somehow escape the pain of the nails was a deceptive one. The pain was there any which way he squirmed, and it grew as he struggled to turn his head in the direction of the laughter.
“How’s that?” Butch grinned.
Crib noticed he could not turn his neck without turning his whole body, unless he wanted to feel a raw tearing, a metallic zip that stroked his throat from ear to Adam’s apple. No sooner had he laid murderous eyes on Butch, where he was situated between the second and third rungs of the corral fence, than he felt himself jerked into line with the other two men.
He was now the end in a chain, linked by manacles to the fore. The turnkey came outside, removed a mouth harp from his pocket, and blew a tinny rendition of reveille. “Gentlemen...”
“What is this?” Crib addressed the man in front of him.
“Drill and Ceremony,” the man said.
“No talking in ranks,” the turnkey growled. “Column left. March!”
The lead man in the ranks, dazed from hunger pangs, slipped in the mud and all three of the men collided, making a disordered sound like a squeezebox in the hands of a novice. The guards laughed. Crib could hear Butch laughing the loudest.
“Good times,” the Butcher said. “Just like at old Slumgullion. You remember Slumgullion? Hey, Crib?”
The prisoners struggled to their feet. The first and second had somehow managed to lock their nails together. They struggled to pull them apart. There was the sound of rust scraping, followed by a short tug-of-war. No one emerged the better for it, with each feeling the spring and recoil of breaking free and then the sudden jabs of the dull nails banging against already-red skin. The front two men had been bleeding for some time, while Crib’s skin was just beginning to break.
“That’s right,” Butch said, lighting his corncob. “You ain’t a PFC anymore. You’ve been demoted to buck private. You’ll be lucky enough to make it out with an ‘other than honorable conditions’ discharge.”
A gray rain began to fall. The turnkey began to play an especially lachrymose song on his mouth harp.
“That’s right maudlin there, if you don’t mind me saying so,” Butch declared.
The three men continued in the circle, their wills broken like a herd of castrated bulls. The sound of distant fusillade broke through the rain, shrapnel resounding with a curious echo as it exploded through the moisture, fire at war with water in an elemental struggle.
Crib secretly hoped the rebels broke the line. He understood now why that woman in the town all those weeks ago had fed the Union boys to her brood of spotted swine. He understood loyalty to the Stars and Bars and allegiance to Dixie. He cared for neither side now, and wished to live only long enough to see Butch die. He was willing to trade an eternity in Hell if only he could bear witness to a Bowie slowly drawing along the hayseed’s throat, leaving a gaping hole so the red dumpling of his Adam’s apple would spill out into the mud. The other two men in the Bathory collars could then help him claw the bastard’s eyes out.
James turned from the line, hurting himself and the other two men in the process, but accepting the sting of his own blood in order to lock eyes with Butch. The farm boy was nothing, a petty baked apple slice of sadism. Crib wanted him dead so badly that even though Butch had a gun on his side, he seemed to feel fear when he locked eyes with Crib.
Another blast sounded from above the hill side. Smoke, a choking black cloud too thick to have come from a campsite, blew down into the grassless valley. The turnkey put his harp back into the breast pocket of his coat.
He looked at Butch. “Let’s line us up some Rebs and have target practice.”
Butch hopped down from the fence with both feet, splashing into the mud. “Jim Dandy idea there, brother. I’m going to pick myself out a couple prime cuts of gray back and smoke them real slow.”
The men disappeared inside.
“Hey,” Crib said to the man in front of him. “Why don’t we all work together to hop the fence?”
“Look up,” the man in front of him said, “but do it slow-like.”
All three of the men went to lean on the far side of the fence. To the east was the garrison proper while to the west was wide-open country. Crib lifted his head upward and felt a scraping at the back of his neck, harsh as the fingernails of a jilted lover. There, mounted in the sky, he saw a man with a Gatling repeater.
The man at the front of the line spoke. “Them things are hell to transport, and they’ll jam if you so much as get a shirt fiber in the barrel, but when it works, it works, brother.”
“Yep,” the second one concurred. “I seen them shoot a building clear to the foundation, melted their barrel down to hot iron, too.” He sighed. “Shit, I’m hatching maggots under this damn collar.”
“Well,” the lead man said, “count your lucky stars. At least you’ll have something to eat if they forget about us entirely.”
The first one spat. “Hell, they don’t even treat dogs this bad. I’ve been stuck between shit and sweat, from the very start of things.”
What had been a light drizzle of rain was now a wall, a sheet falling with the speed and force of a guillotine. From the center of the garrison, what sounded like a church bell rang out, competing with the clatter of thunder and cannonball for the ears of the townspeople and soldiers shrouded under the eaves of buildings. Several soldiers, leading a dazed woman, walked into the center of town, shouting loudly.
Their voices were drowned by a volley and return sortie of musket and ball clapping on the field to the West. More men joined the group crowding the girl, finding themselves conscripted in the momentum. They all came to stand around the two soldiers who had first started the commotion with the brown-haired woman between them.
Her petticoat was shredded, revealing one fulsome breast. The darkened areola of her other breast was pressed against the wet under dress. She seemed catatonic, bent to the will of whoever held her hand. She was limp and moved only when turned by one of the men.
The three prisoners worked their way over to the side of their corral facing the scene. The lookout in the tower up above shifted his sector-of-fire, wheeling his Gatling and orienting it toward the three men with their bleeding necks.
“So these two bums say we can have her for the night,” one of the men said, “to do our laundry.”
Cackles drowned out the sound of cannon. “How much will she charge to wash what’s mine?” A man spoke for all of them.
“She is two dollars a head according to the man at the top of the hill.” The soldier holding the girl pointed toward a spot beyond the ken of the prisoners. Crib hoisted himself between the second and third rung of the corral fence, tightening his chain.
“Steady boy, you’re driving me nails deeper than the savior’s himself.”
“Sorry,” Crib said. Since he was already up here, however, he made no effort to get back down. There was no chance of seeing above those soldiers and their slouch hats and bayonets. The other two prisoners slinked up onto the fence in tandem. They had grown coordinated enough, learning from painful experience to avoid the bloodiest slashes that could arise from miscommunications of movement.
Someone tried to grab her exposed breast and the soldier holding her slapped his hand away. “Just a moment, boys. Here’s how this goose is going to get plucked, cooked, and fucked. Archer will take your money, and I’ll write your names. Then, we’ll all line up and form one long skiff, from bow to stern.” The soldier pulled a stub pencil and small stationary booklet from inside of his kersey trousers, hoisting his suspenders to reach it. “Don’t worry. We will all reach our destination as long as no one rocks the ship too hard.”
“Yeah,” the other soldier said. “No bragging to any of the other companies when you’re playing rummy in the billets. She’s going to be pretty raw from one-tenth of a regimen. No need to pile on.”
“I’ll be,” Crib said.
“What?” One of the other two spoke.
“Nothing,” he replied. “It’s just, I think I may have seen her mug before.”
The corrugated door to the jail opened. The collared men turned around to see their old friends returning.
“Supper on?” The turnkey looked to his companion. “I heard bells ringing.”
“Maybe,” Butch said, “somebody’s getting married.”
Both Butch and the turnkey wandered to the edge of the fence and saw the fully bare-breasted girl. They no longer were interested in punishing violations of the Uniform Military Code of Justice or in even tormenting their prisoners to pass the time. They hopped the short fence and joined the throng of waiting men, a cluster of bodies yearning to feel the warmth of the light which they could not help but extinguish by their very natures. It was as if she were disappearing in the swell of the blue woolen sea, and they were left with only themselves to cradle. Their groping turned to toeholds and life-and-death grappling, a struggle to see who would form the head and tail of the Pullman train steaming from one side of the tunnel all the way into hell, never to emerge.
The three men watched from the fence, dogs banished to the edge of the glowing fire where a glazed chicken roasted, and they could only hope for scraps. They knew they could not even hope for that. They had all been taught from boyhood women were for the men who stood and fought, not for the runners.
“It can’t be,” Crib said, but he knew it was her, the girl from the poster.
“Look at them,” the man with the larvae hatching from his neck said. “Dirty bastards. Makes me think we should have left this land to the English.”
“Or the savages,” the other one said.
The two soldiers who had brought the girl to camp held her legs wide apart, midwives of Mammon. The first man finished, dropped his coin into an upright Carbine socket.
“Worth every penny,” he announced, hitching his trousers as he walked down the line. “Tight as a peach-pit, she was.”
“She won’t be by the time I get a hold of her,” someone near the back groused.
Laughter slinked through their ranks. Some enterprising woman from the town began pushing her chuck wagon down from the slope into the valley. As she passed the three men, the hearty smell of ground beef simmering in porridge tormented them bodily. Crib hadn’t eaten anything real in days. He yearned to sit down, but the knives in his neck said no.
The woman with the wagon began ladling out beakers of stout broth swimming with carrots and celery.
“Look at that witch and her boiling stew,” one of Crib’s conjoined burden said. “Looks like something out of Macbeth.”
A cannonball streaming a lithe flaming tail skyrocketed above the valley and blasted through the roof of a house on the opposite hill. The men in the valley paid it no mind. There had been too many shells which had strayed too far wide or short for any of them to even entertain the idea one might land flush in their camp and reduce them all to termites on a cindered log. The line snaked forward and the carbine chalice filled.
Crib’s friend to the right spoke. “I hope General Lee pushes all the way to the capital and he takes Senator Lincoln’s scalp.”
“President Lincoln,” his other Siamese partner amended.
“Sorry, I ain’t been up on politics these last few years. Any paper I get goes straight to toiletry. That’s the Gospel.”
Crib said nothing. His eyes were on the shining metallic ring balanced between the second and third fence post, where the turnkey and his old salt “Butch” had passed a moment ago. He jerked his burden toward the key so fast he toppled and brought his compatriots to the ground.
“You idjit, you’re going to decapitate me!”
“Yeah,” the other one said, struggling for footing. “I ain’t into these Marie Antoinette hijinks.”
It had hurt him as bad as or perhaps even worse than it had hurt them, but James had the key in his hands. When they heard his collar snap open, all was forgiven. A thin lashing of red traced the circumference of his neck, like the stain of ringworm a doctor’s curative had banished. He rubbed the raw skin and could only imagine how much worse the other two must have felt.
“Hurry up.”
“Yeah, we both know them boys ain’t got enough man in them to keep that poor hussy busy for too long.”
Crib unlocked the second man’s bonds. A fly soared from its incubation with thin translucent wings a-flapping. Crib unlocked the other man and then dropped the keys in the mud. To the east, all semblance of a line had dissolved into a pride of wolves fighting for the same gnawed bone. The men scuffled, and the girl was invisible. Crib looked to the Northwest, to the tower, unmanned and heavy with Gatling. The other two men followed his eyes.
Not a solitary word was necessary. They wove through the fence quickly, slipping in the mud. The sky drove the rain downward with the force of railroad spikes. Crib began ascending hand over hand up the rope-ladder to the tree house. There was a holdup behind him.
“You pussyfooting, tender-toed waste of a man!”
“I can’t do it, Abe. I’m a scared a heights.”
“It’s alright,” Crib said. “This’ll only take two, if that.”
He made it to the top and held his hands out to help pull the other man up. They moved forward, toward the gun. The Gatling he had seen a few months ago, installed at the edge of Slumgullion, had been mounted on wheels. This one rested on sandbags, which were on the verge of disgorging their load due to nearly six inches of standing water in the small square. Little wonder the previous occupant had been so eager to give up the post and join his friends below.
“Have you fired one of these before?” His friend, the one who had been growing flies a moment before, spoke.
“No,” Crib said. “I watched a demonstration with a prototype about a year back at Slumgullion.”
“Where?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Crib said, putting his hand on the crank. He tilted the clustered barrels, bunched like a gang of stacked arms, down into the pit where some twenty men were assembled. He had no idea how many shells he had to his name in this strange gun, and he could only pray that he did not knick the girl when he let loose.
“Ready?” He looked to his companion.
Crib’s knees were freezing in the standing water gathered in the tower, despite the awning which should have shielded it from the rain. His partner did not answer him, and so he began to turn the handle.
The skirmish beyond the hill, where a few dozen men let loose with probing volleys of muzzle shot, was nothing compared to what this one gun unleashed on its own. Crib turned the handle and it blasted forth a controlled, metronomic hailstorm of steel eager to devour. It obeyed his command, each chamber moving in a clockwise manner across the twelve o’clock position, an entire platoon of genuine Praetorian loyalty, the equal of perhaps twenty men who could choke and ramrod four shots per minute.
It ate the men in the valley, piece by piece, taking tentative chews like a bayou gator mistaking an arm for a large bass, a head for a fisherman’s chum. It ate them and spat their blood, chamber by chamber, forcing shells backwards in a steady stream. An arterial red mist splashed upward, meeting the rain and forming pinkish clouds. As he turned the handle, Crib could feel each shot shuddering through his body, each dud and each missile slamming home with its spoken intent, and he thought this is what it must have been like to ride a train after decades of clopping along on a mustang.
This is what it felt like to be a red warrior with a tomahawk who one day met a French man. The man slid him a strange piece of steel..
“Here, try this.”
Considering the intoxication that heated every one of the bones in his body right now, this is what it had felt like to be handed a glass of amber scotch or potato vodka after a lifetime of nothing but stream water.
He drank deeply, so deeply in fact he didn’t notice when a shell bounced out of the repeater and down the shirt of his chief-second sitting in the muddy water behind him.
“Ah!” The brass burnt the man, and Crib’s friend jumped impulsively, banging his head on the ceiling.
Crib, his heart still pumping blood, continued to obey the beating organ and he rotated the lever, cranked as if he had just discovered the sinful joys of self-love, bored and back on the farm some fifteen years ago.
The gun slid on empty rounds and smoke, and below, Butch looked up from his place in the dead and moaning pile, with just enough life left in his body to pull an Army-issued pistol from the dead turnkey’s holster. He tilted it toward Crib, who released his hold on the Gatling and did his best to stand in the gearbox, sticking his head out like a gopher taunting the farmerfarmer.
He looked into the dark barrel of the gun, pleading with the bullet to come out and play, to end him into the next realm since he had already seen all the adversity this one offered, and he had conquered it. Butch squeezed on an empty cylinder and fell back onto the crush of bodies before he could even try the next chamber.
Crib exhaled. The man behind him inspected the raised flesh of his newly-heated scar. “I done been branded for life. I’ll stick to muskets from here on out. Though I’ll readily admit, you did a right pretty job with them boys down there.”
“Sure did,” someone said.
They followed the sound of the voice below, since they could not see him through the smoke. As they descended, a mild fire began to spurt through the sea of blood and water up on the hill. The sounds of war’s eternal arguments continued to fall on two sets of deaf ears. The smoke gradually began to lift like fog from the surface of a lake. It rose to join the clouds as they began to part in honor of the rising moon. Stars burst through the purple quilt of the sky and lit the blood-caked trio. Crib’s hands shook.
One of the other two gents rifled through the pockets of a dead guard and handed him a readymade cigarette. “What kind of real soldier don’t roll his own cigarettes?” He let his strike-anywhere hover over the end of Crib’s smoke. “It seems kind of fey and New York-style, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Crib shook his head. “I don’t mind.” He wasn’t sure what they were talking about. The last few minutes had been a concentration of action too dense for words to properly do the trick at this moment, or maybe ever again. He dragged the cigarette, the best he had ever tasted, and he let the ashes fall.
Then he looked over at Butch, wasted and filled with shot, arms splayed like the evil doppelganger of a crucified Messiah. As much as he had wanted him to suffer a moment ago, he was now only relieved he was dead. There was no hatred left, not even the desire to go over there and spit on him.
Except, there was supposed to be something else. He couldn’t remember, shrugged. “So,” he said. “Where and what next, then?”
“North,” one of them said. “The Great White North. Ice fishing, maple syrup, Eskimo women...”
“And no extradition,” the other one said, a bit more practically. “Our last mistake was thinking we could furlough ourselves and somehow remain in the country. ‘Taint happening, gentlemen.”
He held out his hand for his friend to pass him another one of the dead man’s readymade stock. He smoked absently, and then thought of something.
“Hey, you suppose that little girl-child got caught in the crossfire?”
“No telling,” his friend said.
The paper cigarette fell from Crib’s hand and began burning the straw at his feet.
“Oh, hey,” the man next to him said, misreading his new friend’s distress. “Don’t wallow in it too long, brother. This is war and it happens. Nobody could have managed that monster you were riding up in the tower.”
“Amen,” the other one said. He and his friend stood. “Well, we’d better get to moving. Some unit’s going to come rolling through here looking for someone to blame it on. I sure as hell don’t want to have to explain why I’m the last man standing.”
Making the invitation more explicit, the other one spoke to Crib. “Are you coming, brother? It’s cold as a bunion in a holey sock up there, but there’s plenty of whale blubber to keep a man warm.”
Crib dug between the bloody straw at his feet, found his cigarette, the cherry still breathing. “No,” he said, “that’s alright, boys.”
“Okay then. Don’t smoke any loco weed. It grows natural here and you’ve already been through it.”
“Yeah,” Crib replied, “but I think I may have finally passed to the other side.”
They parted company on this cryptic note. Crib searched his pocket with a stiffening arm and brought the roll of paper from the side of his leg, where sweat had glued it until the sheet had dried and began chafing. He coughed, wondering whether it was going to be pneumonia or tuberculosis they carved on his tombstone. Loving Father and Brother were out. Maybe mama could fib, make a couple of concessions and put Loving Son. There was no harm in refusing to speak ill of the dead no matter how poorly-mannered they had been in life.
He unfolded the WANTED poster and began kicking bodies away to his left and right. He found the girl, dead and holding her arms outward, attempting to reflect the span of some angel she had seen a moment before she went. It did not look like it was a graceful end. Judging from the insignia and instrument of the man lying on top of her, he had been a bugler. He had his musician’s blouse still cinched and buttoned, but his pants and long-johns were pushed down to his ankles, where they were wadded around his hairy calves, in a pile with a snaking belt. His posterior was a mound of ill-formed pinkish clay, spotted with saddle sores and pimples, fuzzed over with a weak tuft of blond hair.
Crib pushed him off the girl. His waning erection tilted toward the sky like a poorly-watered flower. Her stomach, thighs, face, hands, and hair were splashed with seed, a glaze coated thickly enough to put a baker’s confection to shame. He closed her blood-spattered legs and folded her bruised arms. He pulled her bloomers up and smoothed her tattered petticoat.
He looked up toward the top of the hill. No sign of anybody. Her slime-drenched pimps had probably high-tailed it soon after the first report of the Gatling. James turned toward the tower and saw it ablaze. The wood was beginning to buckle under an infestation of bright flame.
It was only a matter of time before the structure toppled and the whole of the camp went straight to hell.
The cartridge socket brimmed with cash and coin. No doubt some of them had been unscrupulous enough to pass a bit of counterfeit which they had minted on their knockoff Gutenberg presses back home. Crib scooped it all together and put it down his shirt where it assumed the form of an especially prosperous potbelly.
The Christian thing would have been to burn all the ill-gotten gains or to donate them to the local Methodist sanctum. There were now cumuli of orange, yellow, and deep red dancing raggedly where the tower once stood.
“Well, shit,” he said.
He held the poster up to her face, just to slake his growing curiosity and to confirm his hunch, a hunch he was surprised his mind had nourishment enough to form. Sure enough, the girl who was worth a heft of silver crowned with a fine dusting of gold was the same one sitting here, dead and raped.
Crib threw his cigarette short into the flaming tower with a deft little flicker. What now? Canada and its icy expanse held no appeal. He did not want to see his mother or sister. He did not want the women or the wine the bloodied money inside of his shirt could bring. Some of the Chinaman’s opium might work, sail him from the shores of his mortal coil all the way into an astral realm where he could fly cross-legged into eternity.
If he lacked the gumption to follow through with death by poppy, the future was going to be one long grim slog. The questions now began to pop with the implacable regularity of the Gatling that had sent the men on to Judgment’s call. He could take some article of hers to the nearest station to let all concerned know she had met her end.
He was lost, and then her eyes opened and gathered him in. He realized from the expression on her face that he must have looked like hell. She seemed to realize the same.