White Desert Read online

  His eyes went to his empty sleeve, an involuntary movement. He snatched them back. They had begun to adjust to the light. “Them rolling-block rifles are built for buffalo. A Winchester would of did as good and I’d still have both wings.”

  “You were robbing the bank. I don’t suppose he had time to make a better choice.”

  “I never robbed no place. I take care of horses. I got horse blood in my veins. My grandfather stole a thousand horses from the Comanche.”

  “The man with the Remington didn’t know that. All he knew was someone was hollering that the bank had been robbed, and a dozen or more men were galloping away, busting caps at everyone that stood between them and the town limits. You were the one he got a bead on.”

  “I have a bad spirit.”

  As he said it, his face showed expression for the first time. He wasn’t being ironic or avoiding the subject. He was addressing the issue of why that bullet had found him while all his companions had ridden free, addressing it with the resignation of a man who had been born blind or deaf or deformed. Then the expression was gone, evaporated like a drop of water in a desert.

  “You and your spirit might have had a better chance if Bliss or Whitelaw or any of the others had bothered to stop and give you a hand up. They left you there to die.”

  “Only I didn’t.”

  “No thanks to them,” I said. “Thanks to them the U.S. government is going to bury you inside these walls when your time comes. What’s left of you.”

  He said nothing.

  I joined him in that for the better part of a minute, which in those surroundings you timed with a calendar. During that time I discarded entirely the idea of offering him a break on his life sentence. He wouldn’t have believed it even if it were true. He had retreated into a redoubt where hope of any kind was as destructive as bullets. That came from the part of him that was Creek. You could take everything away from an Indian, even his life, but you couldn’t destroy him the way you could a white man, because when you stepped back to give him room to imagine anything less than the worst, he didn’t take it. What had seemed natural when I discussed it with Judge Blackthorne in his chambers faded away in that dim cell.

  “Bliss and Whitelaw are in Canada,” I said. “They looted a village on the Saskatchewan and burned it to the ground. I’m on my way up there to give the Mounties a hand tracking them down. You know that will happen. All we have to do is follow the trail of burned buildings and corpses. You can shorten it and get in a lick for what they did to you in Butte.”

  “Why should I shorten it? Every less person left breathing on the outside makes rotting in here a little easier.”

  I sat back and folded my arms. I knew that would irritate him. His would be going numb with the elbow locked straight. “Do you think your name ever comes up when they’re talking? More than likely it doesn’t. They’ve forgotten you. Maybe not, though. Maybe thinking about you spread out in the dust with your arm stuck on by a thread makes them laugh. Did they ever laugh about the people they killed? My bet is they did. They’ve killed more times in five years than the Jameses and Youngers did in fifteen—and stolen a whole lot less money. They have to be getting something out of it. What do you want to bet they serve you up with all the rest when they’re stretched out around a fire up north?”

  “What do you want?”

  He snapped out the question at the heels of my little speech. I was surprised and a little disappointed; I’d begun to build up some respect for him, and what I’d said had seemed pretty transparent even to me. But then I hadn’t been left naked in a black hole for twenty-eight days with nothing but my thoughts for company.

  “I’ve read everything the newspapers have to say about Bliss and Whitelaw,” I said. “It didn’t take long, and most of what I read I didn’t believe. Journalists are just liars who can spell. I wouldn’t go lion hunting without knowing first what they eat and where they sleep. The only one who can tell me that is another lion.”

  “You don’t have to know how to spell to know how to lie. I could just stretch a parcel of blankets and finish out my time in the hole entertaining myself thinking about you trying to wrap yourself up in them.”

  “You could. You won’t. You hate your old partners a deal more than you hate me.”

  “I only just met you,” he said. “I been hating the law all my life. That’s a big hate and I won’t have no trouble at all fitting you in.”

  I unfolded my arms and rested them on the table. “Why don’t you just start talking and let me worry about sorting out the lies from the gospel.”

  “I got to warn you, I’m pretty good.” But he wasn’t listening to himself. His eyes had retreated even farther back into his skull, searching the darkness there for glittering bits of the past. “I was running with these boys from Texas, not one of them worth the sweat it took to chop ’em up for compost. Fat Tom was always blowing about how tight he was with Lorenzo Bliss back in Amarillo. Johnny Dollar bet him a double eagle Bliss didn’t know him from Garfield. Well, everybody but the law knowed Bliss was catching up on his whoring in Buffalo, so we drifted down there to see him call Fat Tom a liar and maybe hook up with his outfit.

  “The barkeep in this rathole where we wound up pointed out Bliss drinking under a big sombrero at the back table. Fat Tom told the rest of us to stay put at the bar till he gave Lolo the office and wobbled on over. Lolo, that’s what anyone called him that called him at all, though we didn’t know that then; we thought Fat Tom was just being Fat Tom. The two of’em started talking low, and I don’t know what Tom said, but knowing him I reckon he was jackass enough to say something about Bliss’s mother being a whore—you know, to poke his memory about how they knowed each other—because Lolo stood up with a big old bowie in his hand and just kind of gutted Fat Tom like a catfish. I remember he give the knife a twist when he pulled it back out and Tom’s heart came out with it. It didn’t look near big enough for a big fat man like Tom, just a mess of red gristle no bigger than a potato. Anyway somebody started hollering for the law and we all cleared out. We all happened to head in the same direction. You could say I came to run with Bliss and Whitelaw on Fat Tom’s introduction.”

  “I thought they’d be more particular.”

  “Well, they was just getting started. I reckon now they ask for letters of character.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Bliss’s temper has cooled down since Amarillo. What about Whitelaw’s?”

  “Oh, Charlie’s the thinker. He put up with his family for eighteen years before he got around to hacking them to pieces. Fat Tom might have lived another thirty minutes if it was Charlie in that saloon.”

  “My guess is Whitelaw does all the gang’s planning.”

  Swingtree nodded animatedly. He was enjoying himself now. “If it was up to Lolo, he’d gun everybody in sight, then turn out their pockets for change. But don’t get to thinking that means he don’t run the ball when it opens. He’s got the reflexes of a diamondback. Charlie’d be dead a hundred times over if it wasn’t for Bliss. He is always thinking when he ought to be doing.”

  “Jack Sprat.”

  It was an absentminded comment; I didn’t expect an unlettered breed to pick up on the reference. But his mother must have read to him, because he bobbed his head up and down again and his eyes had come back from the shadows, nut brown and bright.

  “They are hell together,” he said. “They wasn’t nothing till they met, just a couple of bad hats rolling along, waiting for somebody to stomp ’em flat. Split them up and that’s what will happen. Only you’ll get dead trying to split them up.”

  Captain Halloran entered. “On your feet, ’breed. One more minute’s another week in the hole past your two months.”

  I wanted to hit him with the table, and I might have if I thought I were going to get anything out of Swingtree that was as good as I’d gotten. (I might have anyway, for no other reason than that the Hallorans of this world could only be thus improved.) But I was in a good mood,
and I let him take the prisoner out the way he’d brought him in.

  The mood faded when I spotted a second guard standing in the corridor. He was half Halloran’s age, barely more than a boy. The smooth brown barrels of his sawed-off shotgun made him older.

  “What was that story about sitting outside the crossfire?” I asked. “Either one of those barrels would kill us both.”

  There was no humor behind the captain’s handlebars. “We don’t get a lot of time to practice our marksmanship.”

  6

  The clerk who filled my order for bacon, beans, flour, and coffee at the general mercantile, a goat-faced Scot named Kilmartin, informed me my best route to Canada from Deer Lodge lay along the Rocky Mountain Trench, a trough of lowland between the Flathead Mountains to the west and the Swan and Galton Ranges to the east. He traced the path with a thick-nailed forefinger on a map tacked to the back wall that might have been drawn up by Lewis and Clark.

  “That takes me thirty miles out of my way, with the Rockies still to be crossed,” I said. “What’s to stop me from cutting through that creek pass up north? After that it’s all tableland.”

  “That’s Métis country. You know Métis?”

  “French Indians. I had a transaction with one in Dakota a few years back. I never did work out if he was Christ or Satan.”

  “That sums up the breed. Talk is they’re fixing to go to war with Canada again over land. When the Mounties crack down, which they’re bound to do anytime, the Métis will bolt back this side of the border to regroup. I would not want to be in their path when they do.”

  “I heard it was the Cree making all the trouble.”

  “Aye, them as well. Their aim is to stop the Canadian Pacific from laying track through buffalo country. If they attack at the same time as the Métis, there won’t be Mounties enough to go around. You’re sure you don’t want to winter in Montana?”

  “I’m sure I do. But I haven’t put aside enough to retire just yet. How high is the creek in that pass since the thaw?”

  “I’ve not heard. With luck ye’ll drown. Them frog Injuns like to take their time with captured lawmen.”

  I paid him for the provisions and the advice, loaded the gray, and struck out for the pass that led to the tableland.

  It was bone cold but dry. The sky was a sheet of bright metal, with the Rockies’ white-capped peaks bumped out on this side as if an angry god had kicked in the sheet with his foot on the other. I’d brought along a small pot of lampblack and smeared it beneath my eyes to cut down on the glare. Tiny icicles pricked inside my nose, but there was no wind, and the sun lay across my shoulders like a warm shawl. I rode with my bearskin unbuttoned until dark, when the chill came in with the suddenness of night in the mountains. My fingers were numb, and my hands were shaking uncontrollably when I finally got a fire going. Every time I started a long trek in the northern winter, I had to learn all over again what I’d known most of my life. Live and learn, my father, the trapper, used to put it. Die dumb.

  I got up at first light with every muscle in my body screaming, fed the horses, fried bacon in the skillet I’d been carrying for ten years—stolen, along with a couple of other things, from my last ranch job in lieu of two months’ pay—poured boiling coffee down my throat, and picked my way through the foothills along Salmon Trout Creek, shining like quicksilver with splinters of ice glinting in the swift current. The debris along the banks told me I’d missed a honey of a flood by a week or so, but it was still swollen. In places only a strip of level ground three feet wide separated the shoulder of a hill from the water and I got off and led the sorrel mustang and the shaggy gray to avoid a bath. I don’t swim any better than the odd petrified stump. I reached the pass around noon, and by the time dusk rolled in I was in the tablelands with nothing between me and the Dominion of Canada but a hundred miles of Montana Territory.

  I made good time my first day clear of the pass, but a fierce squall late the next morning forced me into the lee of an old buffalo wallow to wait it out. The flakes, flinty little barbs of ice, swarmed in the gusts—at one point I swore they were blasting from four directions at once—and swept away sky and earth in a white wipe. I hobbled the sorrel and the gray to prevent them from drifting before the wind, turned up the bearskin’s collar, tugged down the badger hat, tied my bandanna around the lower half of my face, and sat hugging my knees with my back against the wallow’s north slope, breathing stale air and putting the devil’s face on the cue ball that had shot me to this remote pocket of the earth. I fought sleep, but I must have lost, at least for a few minutes, because I dreamed that a blizzard hit Helena so hard and stayed on for so long that Judge Blackthorne was forced to chop up his billiard table for firewood.

  By then the squall had passed, leaving me tented with snow to my knees. I stood and shook it off. The brief storm had spread a white counterpane from horizon to horizon; even the firs and cedars were bent like old men beneath its weight. The horses, stupid, pathetic creatures, had managed despite their hobbles to move a hundred yards away from the shelter of the slope. The ice caused by their own spent breath had pulled their lips back from their teeth to form death’s-head grins. It fell away in sections when I tapped it with the butt of the Deane-Adams. I fed them handfuls of oats to restore their body heat, stroking their necks and telling them in soothing tones that I was going to sell them for steaks to the first starving Indian I met. Only the mustang appeared to understand. Its eyes went hard as marbles and it snickered.

  The rest of that day was an uphill push through drifts nearly as high as my stirrups. It was just a taste of the country I was headed for, where the snow fell twice as hard for days instead of minutes, and the wind struck with the force of God slamming shut the pearly gates.

  I came across my first fence the afternoon of the next day. It was four strings of barbed wire without a gate in sight, but I was pretty sure I had drifted off the road. I turned in what seemed a likely direction, followed it for several miles, and was beginning to think I’d made the wrong choice when I spotted smoke from a chimney.

  The chimney belonged to a small cabin built of pitch-pine logs with a steep shake roof stacked with snow. Behind it, three times as large, stood a barn with proper siding, altogether a more expensive construction; but then, it was built to shelter wheat, not just people. A plank sign leaned against the post to the left of the gate before the house. I had to take one foot out of its stirrup and kick loose the snow to read the hand-painted legend:

  DONALBAIN FARM

  BUYERS WELCOME

  TRESPASSERS SHOT

  MARAUDEURS ETRE FUSILLE

  I leaned down to unlatch the gate and started through, leading the gray.

  “Turn right around, ye damn toad-eating savage!”

  I drew rein and slacked off on the lead. I couldn’t remember when was the last time I ate a toad, but since a greeting like that is generally backed up with something more substantial than invective, ignoring it did not seem the best course.

  The sun was just above the log shack and square in my eyes. I shielded them with my forearm. There was a shrunken solid something under the overhang of the porch, a little darker than the shadows, vaguely man shaped; and it was holding something at shoulder height.

  “This here’s a Springfield musket,” said the man on the porch. “If ye don’t turn around right noo, I’ll put a fifty-eight-caliber ball straight through you and knock doon a barn in the next county over.”

  Well, you have the idea. His Scots brogue was heavy enough to sink to the bottom of a peat bog. It’s as hard to spell as it is to read, so I’ll lay that part to rest.

  “Hold on,” I called out. “I’m a federal officer.”

  There was a silence long enough to make the horses fiddle-foot to stay warm.

  “Say something more!” demanded the man on the porch.

  “To hell with this. It’s too goddamn cold to sit here and make a speech.” I started to back the sorrel around.

  “Come on
ahead,” he said then. “Ye don’t sound like no frog I ever heard.”

  Close up, he was a brown and gnarled fencepost of a man in a faded flannel shirt and heavy woolen trousers held up with suspenders. A black Quaker beard ringed his seamed face and bright, birdlike eyes glittered in the shadow of his shaggy brows. When he got a good look at me he lowered his weapon, which wasn’t a Springfield at all but a Henry rifle with a brass receiver.

  “Whoever sold you that firearm was pulling your leg,” I said.

  “I traded the musket for the Henry and a case of ammunition in ’78. I made worse mistakes but not lately. If ye wasn’t what you said ye was and ye’d known the ball wouldn’t reach the damn gate, I’d be deader’n Duncan.” He screwed up his face, bunching it like a fist. “Ye got papers?”

  “No papers.” I had the badge ready. I tossed it to him. He caught it one-handed—a surprise, for I had him pegged at past fifty—looked at the engraving, and tossed it back. “It don’t mean much, but I’m satisfied you ain’t one of them damn bloodsucking Métis.”

  I didn’t pursue that. “I’m bound for Canada. If you let me camp on your property tonight and cut through in the morning I’ll thank you.”

  He scratched his chin through his whiskers. “Feed you supper for a dollar.”

  “I’ll make my own.”

  “No sense us both eating alone,” he said after a moment. “You can bed down your animals in the barn. Spread your blanket there. I’ll fill the basin out back of the house. I got a pot of venison stew on the stove. That’s my dollar’s worth of good works for law and order.” He uncocked the Henry.

  “The sign means what it says. Buyers are welcome; the wheat or the farm, it don’t matter which. I lost my taste for the life when my Marta died.”

  The orange glow from the coal-oil lamp on the table filled the lines in Donalbain’s features, increasing his resemblance to the young man in the sepia-tinted wedding photograph that hung on the wall behind him in an oval frame. We were drinking sherry from an old green bottle, using barrel glasses with bottoms as thick as sadirons. The venison stew sat pleasantly in my stomach.