Paradise Sky

  A Chinaman we hadn’t seen before, kind of fat with a greasy pigtail, come out from behind a big barrel that was blazing with enough fire to light up the ground around us. He waved his hands at us. I reined to a stop. He said. “Want girl?”

  “Say what, now?” I said.

  “Sell girl for cheap, you want.”

  The girls came out of the shadows and into the firelight. One was perched on a wooden peg leg and had a crutch to help her, and she was by far the comeliest of the three, though she could have used about ten gallons of water and a bar of lye soap to set her straight. There was two other China girls, and they wasn’t of the appearance to hurt anyone’s feelings, either, though they walked as if they had been horse-hobbled. They wore enough powder and rouge and such to paint the whole Sioux Nation. A fourth showed up, and she was so ugly she could have chased a bobcat up a tree, but then again maybe I wasn’t one to talk. She didn’t have the same kind of stunted walk but moved same as anyone else. I was later to learn this was because them other gals had their feet bound since they was children to make them small and to make their movements littler and their opportunities for running away slimmer. The bobcat chaser had not had the same experience.

  “Half woman, she cheaper,” said the Chinaman. “Five penny.”

  I realized he meant the woman with the wooden leg.

  “Actually, she’s more than half a woman,” I said. “Way more.”

  “Then cost more,” he said, leaning toward Cramp, holding his nose as he did. “Friend on blanket, he have to clean first. Stink up girl.”

  “We got other plans for him,” Cullen said.

  “Yeah, he’s past interest in such things,” I said. “And we’re going to pass on your offer. Though we could use some food.”

  “Got chop suey,” he said. “Good. Ten cents.”

  “That’s more than the woman,” I said.

  “Chop suey not have wooden leg.”

  “Thought we were burying Cramp,” Cullen said.

  “I haven’t the strength,” I said, and I meant it.

  The Chinaman paused to study Cramp. “Man dead.”

  “Nothing slides by you, does it?” I said.

  “Not going to get better,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said. “He won’t.”

  The Chinaman studied me for a moment. “Still want food?”

  “Sure. But ten penny for two meals.”

  The Chinaman studied on my offer. “Okay. Put dead man away. Come eat.”

  I looked back at Cullen. He shrugged.

  It may seem harsh, but we parked Cramp and his travois over by a sort of lean-to, because the only thing I could think on clearly was getting my stomach wrapped around some chow.

  We tended to Satan. He was tired and hungry himself. I was able to buy some oats from the Chinaman at a dear price and will admit to taking some of the money from a bag worn around Cramp’s waist. I had become his gravedigger and his banker.

  When Satan was unsaddled, fed, and watered, I combed him down with equipment borrowed from the Chinaman, and then me and Cullen sat down on the ground to eat. We had to pay first, and we did, and the chop suey was only a little better than the horse meat we had eaten after the Apache fight. I came across a chicken foot in the bowl and what I thought might be a mashed calf’s eyeball. I fished these out and ate the rest of it without too much study on it and even paid for seconds for both me and Cullen.

  After we chowed down, we saddled Satan and hooked Cramp and the travois up. I turned to the gal that was perched on the wooden leg, said, “Where’s the nearest graveyard?”

  She stared at me.

  “We need to bury him,” I said, pointing at Cramp.

  I waited to see if she spoke American, and she did, or at least understood it enough, because she pointed right down the street. All we had to do was go on forward until we got to it, it seemed. The Chinaman came over and cuffed the cripple alongside the head, knocking her down in the dirt. He said something fast to her in China talk. Then in English to us: “I do talking,” he said.

  “There’s no call for that,” Cullen said.

  “My woman,” he said. “I give talk. Not her. She for sale. She do as I say.”

  “Well, you lighten up there,” I said. “That ain’t called for. I was the one spoke to her.”

  To show us who was in charge, he went over to a hunk of wood with an ax in it, pulled the ax out, and came back. “I chop wooden leg off,” he said.

  “No, you won’t,” I said.

  “I chop your leg off.”

  “You won’t do that, neither.”

  “His leg,” he said, motioning at Cullen.

  Cullen said, “I need these legs.”

  I rested a hand on my Colt, measured my words so he could understand me. “You hurt her, I will shoot a hole in you. If you live, you will wake up with that ax lodged in your ass so deep it will take all of the town and a team of big mules to pull it out. You savvy?”

  He backed up. I reached down, helped the girl to her feet, and gave her the crutch.

  The Chinaman said, “She go to work.”

  Away went the China girl on her wooden leg and crutch, under the tenting and into the little hovel. I figured I had done what I could and might have made matters worse for her. The Chinaman smiled at us like it was all a big joke and went back to the chunk of wood and slammed the ax into it. I tried to borrow a shovel and a lantern, but our recent dealings had soured him on us. I ended up paying him two bits to rent both. With those and Cramp in tow, we led Satan up the street toward where the cripple had said the graveyard was.

  A little breeze came down off the prairie, and it lifted Cramp’s stink and blew it along the street and gave it some serious authority, and before long a promotion. As we come to the end of the street we seen there was a slight rise at the end of it, and on that rise there was a wood-slat fence, and inside the fence was some crosses and large, flat rocks that had been set on edge for headstones. There was a cluster of trees at the back of the graveyard, inside the fence, and I figured those had been planted there, as they looked to be struggling and not of the land’s nature. Another long, hot summer and they wouldn’t be no better than posts for clotheslines.

  I looked back and seen the Chinaman going down the street into the town, chattering loud enough we could hear him all the way up the hill, though what he said didn’t mean a thing to us, as none of it was American.

  The front of the fence was open, there not being any gate, as few wanted in and none could come out. We pulled Cramp to the back of the graveyard, where the row of trees was, and picked a spot. Cullen held the lantern while I started digging. It seemed as if the more I dug the more Cramp smelled, and that helped me dig faster.

  I had put on my old army jacket as we come into town, hoping that might elevate our status, though it hadn’t, and now I paused and unbuttoned it and went back to my work. I had dug about two feet down and two feet wide when Cullen said, “We got some folks coming, and I don’t think they’re coming to pray over the body.”

  They was led by the Chinaman, who had a lantern in one hand and the ax in the other. The men with him was white folks, and they was coming at a good and determined clip. Including the Chinaman, I counted eight.

  “I knew this was a bad idea,” Cullen said.

  I stuck the shovel in the ground, said, “Set the lantern over to the side. Not in front of us, and not behind us.”

  Cullen did just that. Now, Satan was nearby, and so was my loop-cock Winchester, but I didn’t want to make a lunge for it and get the ball rolling when it might not be necessary. I had the Colt and the LeMat on me, both of them fully loaded. I was hoping if blood got stirred they would be enough to calm the situation.

  When they was into the graveyard and about twenty feet from us, they stopped walking. The Chinaman took a step forward and waved the ax with one hand. “I tell them no Chinaman, no niggers here.”

  “You scoundrel,” I said. “You rented me the shovel and
the lantern. You’re just mad because I didn’t want you slapping that crippled girl around.”

  “Not bury nigger,” he said.

  One of the white men, a tall, bearded fellow with a hat so big you could have hidden a horse under it, and suspenders that pulled his pants near under his armpits, said, “This here is a white graveyard. Christian soil.”

  “What if he’s a Christian?” I said.

  “He’s got to be a white Christian,” one of the other men said. “You others got your own heavens, if you even go.”

  There was a grumbling agreement from the crowd on this matter, as they seemed to have given it some serious speculation at some point or another.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll take our dead man and go. No harm done.”

  “You got on a Yankee jacket,” said the tall, bearded man.

  “We just got mustered out of the soldiers,” I said. “We ain’t fought in no war except against Indians.” It came to me right then that my idea about status had been a stupid one. A black man in uniform in Texas didn’t have no status. Fact was, that jacket was like painting a bull’s-eye on my back, a fact I should have considered but hadn’t.

  “I fought against them colors,” the man said, nodding at my jacket.

  “We ain’t shot Southerner a one,” I said.

  “I say we lynch them, even the dead one.” This from one of the other men, a fellow that looked as if he had gotten his jaw broken at some point and it had grown back crooked.

  “If we carry him on, no harm done,” I said. “But he’s starting to stink, so we thought he might need some ground, and he asked for a Christian burial in a Christian graveyard, and here you have it.”

  I noticed one of the men in the back was edging to our right. He had a shotgun, which at that range was sure enough a deadly weapon. It could take both me and Cullen out, kill Satan, and kill Cramp all over again.

  I don’t know what come over me, but all of a sudden I was through talking. My hand went quick for Mr. Loving’s Colt. I thumbed back the hammer and fired. I hit the fellow with the shotgun a smooth shot in the forehead, and whatever was between his ears that he had been thinking with was knocked out the back of his head.

  Then they was all moving.

  The Colt, which I had cross-pulled, was in my right hand, and now I cross-drew the LeMat with my left. I was firing them both, moving to the left, then to the right, ducking down, twisting, and firing, shooting as fast as I could, and somehow in the midst of my speed I can say I was taking my time, too. I was willing and accurate, and they was scared and wild.

  Bullets cracked near me. I seen Cullen out of the corner of my eye, heard him say, “Ah, shit,” and he toppled over. And damned if that Chinaman, who had stood right up front with that ax in one hand and the lantern in the other, didn’t sort of come unstuck from the night. He dropped the lantern, cocked back that ax, and rushed me. I had mostly shot around him, the ones with guns being more my concern than him. I had fired quick, sometimes two shots to a man. I had emptied the Colt and the nine-shot LeMat. I had just enough time to flick the lever on the LeMat to the shotgun position, and as the Chinaman came up on me, I fired. It was a hell of a blast, and it tore a hole in his chest and put him on his knees. He chopped out at me. The ax went right between my legs but missed my vitals. He was held up by the ax for a moment, leaking his insides, until I kicked his hand loose. He came forward on his face then, his heels sort of snapping up in the air, throwing some graveyard dirt with them.

  I went over to Satan, who hadn’t even so much as moved. Wasn’t no figuring that horse. I reckon he was trying out all possibilities. I pulled the loop-cock Winchester off his saddle and went over and found Cullen lying on his back. I knelt down beside him and looked for a wound. A bullet had only grazed him across the head and had knocked him out. I said, “Hell, Cullen, you ain’t hardly touched. You fought Apaches, and now you’re lying on the ground taking a nap and I’m shooting it out.”

  I helped him up and got him steady on his feet.

  It was then that them four China girls came up out of the dark, rattling along in a little wagon with loops of thin wood over the back of it and a striped tarp that was pulled down off of it and gathered at the rear of the wagon in a wad. The wagon was pulled by a couple of horses. It was the cripple driving the wagon. The others was in the back, and they had carpetbags with them that was near their size. It was like they had been ready and waiting for just such a moment. They said almost together, “We go with you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “We seen what you do,” the cripple said. “Kill them all. You bad men, and we need bad men. We cook. Give free pussy.”

  “We can’t take you with us.”

  “They kill us,” said the cripple, who seemed to be the mouthpiece for the three of them, but I noted the ugly one seemed to be paying right smart attention, and this was a thing that would matter later. “His brothers, they take us and chop us up. Make chop suey.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “He done it before,” said the crip. “You ate some white man tonight. No Chinese girl yet. But white man.”

  I sorted that one around in my bean, said, “You mean that wasn’t a calf’s eyeball?”

  “No calf’s eyeball.”

  “Hell,” Cullen said. “It tasted all right, though. Salty, but all right.”

  The cripple kept talking. “Fat man sleeping. Chun kill him with ax. He do the same to you, he got chance.”

  “He won’t,” Cullen said, nodding at the Chinaman on the ground.

  Down below in Ransack there was starting to be a stirring. White men and Chinamen was both moving in our direction. I said, “Cullen, you was a buggy driver. Can you drive a wagon?”

  “I can,” he said.

  Cullen climbed up, edged the cripple aside on the driver’s seat, and took the reins.

  I looked out across the dark prairie, seen a storm was coming. Lightning was working its way across the sky in angry yellow slits, and thunder roared like big cannons. I could see the shadows of a fine and rare stand of trees down there, about a quarter mile away, most likely along a little creek.

  “Take the wagon into them trees,” I said, “and don’t spare the horses. Get down in the creek bed if you can. You can hold out better there.”

  “What about you?” he said.

  “You worry about you and them women,” I said.

  Cullen turned the team, started across the prairie, clattering away, urging the horses on. From where I stood it seemed to me that wagon and those horses was hardly touching ground. I could see those China girls bouncing around in the back like they was popping corn in a greasy skillet.

  There was a half dozen mounted men riding my way, followed by a bunch of screaming lunatics on foot—whites, mostly, and some Chinamen, all of them on the run and sounding like someone had invited them to a free dinner of boiled eggs and hog leavings.

  Still holding my Winchester, I leaped on Satan’s back, hoping after the day Satan had been through he still had some serious horse left in him.

  12

  Satan was a black grass fire shoved by the wind, the fastest, smoothest-running critter I’d ever climbed on. He left those horses and riders that was after us like they was standing still. Compared to him, Pegasus was a nag. And for a change he wasn’t trying to buck me off or bite me or kick me to death.

  That quarter mile melted away. As I come up on the trees, I seen the wagon was pulled down into the creek mostly, but the tail end of it was still sticking up. I could hear Cullen yelling to the horses, “Go on” and such, and gradually the wagon bumped over the bank and out of sight and into the shallow creek, which wasn’t really any more than a trickle of water.

  I rode Satan down in there, flung myself off of him, led him into a run of trees alongside the bank below the firing line. I tied him off and took the saddlebags of ammunition and climbed up with the Winchester and found me a spot. That posse of men was coming
and would soon be on us.

  I beaded along the Winchester and shot the horse in the forefront of the line through the chest. It went down, and so did the rider. It was a bad thing for the horse but a good thing for us. The rider struck the ground so hard on his head I could hear his neck crack like someone had stepped on a clay pot. He got up, crawled in our direction for a short ways, determined that wasn’t a good idea, and like a dog looking for a place to lie down, turned about on his hands and knees a couple times, then flattened out and didn’t move. All the while he had done this with his head at an odd angle, like he was trying to look back and see if his asshole was properly centered. I think his neck finally come loose of something it needed, and it done him in.

  The others had already turned their horses and rode back in the direction of town. They stopped about halfway there where they met up with all the men on foot that had been running behind them. They grouped up to consider their situation. I turned and seen Cullen had climbed up on the edge of the bank with the Spencer. I could see the women in the wagon down below.

  “I think you discouraged them, Nat,” Cullen said.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know I’ve given them enough of it,” I said. “I was them, I would try and flank us. Though they’d have to come down through the trees or along the creek if they did that, and that still ain’t positions to their good.”