Paradise Sky

  “They could come up behind us,” Cullen said.

  “Two men, one on either side of the creek, could hold them off pretty damn good cause we got the cover and the better shooting position, and they ain’t Apaches. We done dealt with some of the best sneakers there is, so these boys don’t worry me the same.”

  “We got to come out of here eventually,” Cullen said.

  “That’s true,” I said. “And they got to decide how many men they want to lose before we do.”

  “They could rush us,” Cullen said.

  “They could, but I bet they won’t. We got to wait until the right moment and roll out. I think we might do better to leave the wagon. Make some reins and bridles out of those lines, put the women on the wagon horses, get you on Satan with me, and creep out of here like a medicine show.”

  “I don’t know,” Cullen said.

  “Damn it, Cullen. I’m trying to be on the ups about this. Quit putting a weight on my head.”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  The rain was starting now, lightning was blasting away, the thunder was still rumbling. The rain was cold, and it rolled off my hat and run down the back of my shirt and made me tremble. I was thinking that with the clouds growing thick, maybe we could steal out under cover of darkness, but the constant lightning flashes made that tricky. I was turning all this around in my mind, trying to figure the odds, when I seen someone coming on horseback, all alone, sitting ramrod straight in the saddle. It was an old horse, and it walked with its head down. It rambled here and there and finally set a course toward us.

  “What in the world is he thinking?” Cullen said. He propped the Spencer against the bank and took a bead.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  On came the rider, stiff in the saddle, dark as night, hat pulled down over his eyes. His arms dangled at his sides. There was a flash of lightning, and in that quick glow I could see the reins was tied to the saddle horn and there was a big pole fastened to it, too; the rider was fixed firmly against that saddle horn and pole. I saw all this in that flash. Saw, too, that he was a colored man, and the wind carrying his stink, along with another flash of lightning, announced that it was Cramp.

  The horse trotted right up to the bank. I stood in front of it so I wasn’t being sighted by a rifle, took the reins, and guided the horse down into the shallow creek bed, Cramp wobbling in the saddle.

  I tied the horse to the back of the wagon, nodded at the China girls in the rig, and hustled back to my spot and peeped over the bank. There was shapes of men and horses out in the distance, lights from the town flickering behind them.

  “There’s your friend,” a voice called out from among them. “Bury him somewhere else. You done gonna fill up our cemetery with all them men you killed. We don’t want no more trouble, now. We’re giving you your chance. You go, we’ll leave you alone.”

  I hadn’t planned on going back for Cramp. I had done my best, and the whole promise had been a dumb one to begin with. This was as good a time as any to make our retreat. They had opened the door and wanted us to run through it. Course, I didn’t believe that part about letting it be over and done with.

  “Go on, then,” I yelled loud as I could. “And we’ll leave you be!”

  “All right, then,” said the voice. They turned their mounts and rode back into town, a clutter of riffraff walking after them, lightning flashing fast and furious, thunder echoing, rain coming down in cold, dark sheets.

  What we did was we skedaddled.

  Me and Cullen cut Cramp down and put him in the back of the wagon with the women. It wasn’t a thing they liked, and they let us know in a burst of China talk, except for the ugly one, who said, “Why not leave him?”

  “Say what, now?” Cullen said.

  “Why not leave him here?” she said.

  “We got that,” I said. “But you speak English?”

  “We all do,” she said.

  “You speak it so it makes sense.”

  “I have had more experience.”

  “So why didn’t you say something before?” I asked.

  “I was waiting to see how things were,” she said. “I learned to speak English in missionary school and to be quiet in any language. Missionaries liked to take a stick to you if you talked in a way they didn’t like. I think they just liked to paddle little girls.”

  “Well, here’s how things are,” I said. “I was going to leave old Cramp back there, but now that we got him, we’re going to get out of here fast as we can, cause they are a pack of liars and will most likely be on us by daybreak.”

  And that’s what we did. Cullen took the old, broken-down horse Cramp had been tied to, and Peg Leg, as I had come to know her, took the wagon lines and drove it on down the creek until there was a break in the trees and a gradual slope where she could drive it up and onto the prairie. The rain was still coming down; it had knocked our hats near flat on top and bent the brims down. The women didn’t have hats, but they had produced umbrellas I didn’t know they had. One of the women sat up by Peg Leg and held the umbrella over her head and her own while Peg Leg drove the wagon. The others protected themselves, scrunching under their umbrellas as best they could.

  We rode across the prairie into wet darkness. A streak of lightning ripped the sky so wide and white I went blind for a moment. The lightning struck the ground, and there was a flare of fire from some mesquite bushes out there, then the fire and bushes smoked white from the rain. It made me more than a little nervous to be out there in the naked world with all that lightning and us its only targets.

  Only good thing I can say about that night was the rain took some of the stink off Cramp’s body, which was starting to swell in places and fall into itself in others.

  Right before the night ended, the rain stopped and the sunlight edged up like a busted apple. As the day seeped in I saw three men riding at us. They was coming slow but steady. Cullen was riding beside me on that skin-and-bones horse we had taken, and I said, “They have sent three riders.”

  “I can see that. Seems stupid of them, considering what you did to all them men back there. I ain’t never seen anything like that, Nat. I just thought you was a badass in the Apache fight, but you done come into your own.”

  “Think I just surprised them, but I bet these three ain’t cowards like them was, all except that Chinaman. He was a game rooster.”

  “Hired killers?”

  “Most likely,” I said.

  “We going to stand and fight?”

  While I was figuring on that, one of the men raised a white flag tied to his rifle and rode a piece toward us. He was a fat man with a big head and a little derby hat and a red kerchief around his neck. He was wearing a greasy buckskin shirt and black-and-yellow-checked pants.

  He stopped when he was within earshot, said, “Can I have a palaver with you?”

  I cupped my hands over my mouth and called out to him because I wanted them other two to hear me, see that I was making the rules here. “Drop that rifle and ride forward some more, and keep your hand away from your pistol.”

  He dropped the rifle and the flag on the ground and come on toward us. I told Cullen to stick and rode out to meet him. When we was about ten feet apart, I reined my horse in, said, “This will do.”

  “We been sent to hunt you down and kill you,” he said.

  “We’ll see how that works out for you.”

  “We don’t want to do that,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No, cause we think it might not turn out as well as we’d like. We seen all them you killed by your lonesome, and we figure you to be a fair hand with a gun. What we was wondering is, could we just say we killed you and you not come back anymore?”

  “I’ll deny such a thing for the obvious reason. I’m alive.”

  “So we got to shoot it out?”

  “Why don’t you say you couldn’t find us? That gets you off the hook.”

  “We was paid twenty dollars apiece to
kill all of you,” he said.

  “That’s a lot of work for twenty dollars apiece, considering you might not be going home again.”

  “But they did pay us twenty dollars,” he said. “You know how it is, honest day for an honest dollar.”

  “And you know how it is with being dead,” I said. “Ain’t none of them dead folk make it home for supper.”

  He studied on that a moment and gently reached for his derby as if to take it off.

  As his fingers touched the brim, I said, “If there is a gun in that derby, you’ll be dead before you get it off your head.”

  “All right, then,” he said, and left it on.

  “My name is Nat Love,” I said, “and it would do you best not to lie about killing us. The lie about not finding us I can live with. My pride doesn’t care for the other.”

  I know how that sounds. Small of me, but I felt exactly that way.

  “Ah, hell,” he said. “We’ll just say you all got away.”

  “Good. I see you or them other two again, I’ll kill the lot of you.”

  “They’re gonna think we was chickenshits,” he said.

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  That didn’t set right with him, but he considered on things, probably recollected on the stories about how I had killed all them men with my revolvers, which as I have said was mostly because they didn’t know what in hell they was doing. To be honest, I think some of them might have shot their own comrades trying to kill us, so it’s possible I’ve given myself a shade more credit than I deserve.

  He licked his lips, nodded. “Guess we’re settled, then,” he said, rode back to where he dropped his Winchester, got down out of the saddle, slowly picked it up, and remounted. I watched him carefully, having pulled my own rifle from its boot and laid it across my saddle. The man rode back to join the others. I rode back to the wagon, pulled up next to Cullen.

  “You think he’ll say we run off?” Cullen said, having heard our conversation.

  “He’ll say he killed us all, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him by agreeing. I have come to the end of catering to white folks.”

  “I don’t really care so much one way or the other,” Cullen said.

  We watched them ride well out of sight, then we turned and headed on toward the northeast.

  13

  After a couple of days I come to think we wasn’t being followed and they had gone back to Ransack to tell whatever lie soothed them. We was moving toward the Texas Panhandle, and there ain’t no more desolate stretch of empty land than that. Coming from East Texas, I thought West Texas was bleak, but that northern part was sad on the eye and the mind; it wouldn’t surprise me that anyone that lived out that way did so because their horse died there or their wagon broke down. I couldn’t see no other reason for wanting to be there on purpose.

  We got in a rhythm of traveling by night, sleeping in the day. Those China girls turned out to be right friendly, which was good, because the nights could be brisk. I found out the one with the wooden leg was called Wing Ding, Ling Ding, or some such, though as soon as I thought I was getting a handle on her name she’d laugh and correct me. In the bedroll she was prone to stretching a man’s back to the breaking point and leaving splinters on one outside thigh; she really needed to sand that thing down. The ugly one turned out to be a real pistol. After a few nights of us taking turns and doing our pleasure with them all, we spaced ourselves better, due to weakness setting in.

  We pulled the cover over the wagon during the day, when we was doing business in there, and the way we done it was me and the girls would stand outside of the wagon modest-like and talk about what we could understand from each other, and I do remember having quite a conversation once about beans. The ugly girl’s name was Wow or some such. She was a good English speaker. She had read some books, some of the same ones Mr. Loving read. She knew, too, about a fellow whose name for a while I thought was Corn Foolish but finally came to realize was Confucius. He turned out to be some wise Chinaman and had a saying or two for just about every situation. Soon as you thought you was getting the hang of old Confucius, he’d turn on you and would mean something other than what it seemed like he was saying, or so Wow explained. I figured if a man had something to say, he ought to just go on and say it and not make it some kind of puzzle. I can honestly say I didn’t care for him much, though the two of us never met, which can make a difference in your opinions.

  Now, I suppose you’re wondering about Cramp and where he was during all this time, and the situation is like this. About two days out no one could stay in that wagon but him. He was the sole owner of the wagon bed, and he commanded his area by stench. We finally pulled him out and dug a hole with some tools in the wagon and buried him. Turned out Wow knew a few Christian words, though she was what she called a Buddhist, and we buried him with those words and a rock on his well-covered hole and moved on. Had we done that early on, even without Wow’s words, we would have been a sight better off.

  That wagon was full of all manner of goods, the Chinaman having been a man of commerce. We got rid of our soldier trappings, as there was clothing in the wagon we could wear. We made our way toward the Dakota Territory, for no other reason than we had heard while at the fort that there was strikes of gold and silver there and that even a colored man could make a large stash. Frankly, it seemed as good a direction as any. In time the old horse they had sent out with Cramp on it began to wear down, and I felt bad about it, cause it was a sweet old horse and would nicker ever’ time you got up close to it. It was friendly and would push its nose against you to be petted. But it got real weak, and I had to shoot it. We ate part of it. I had to not think on who I was eating to enjoy it. After that, Satan kept an eye on me, had a brisker step, and held his head high just to make sure there wasn’t any confusion on his health.

  One time, after we had traveled all night, we pulled the wagon to a stop just as the morning got bright and put the cover up. But as we was about to crawl in the wagon, Cullen said, “Look yonder.”

  Out there on the prairie we could see what looked like a dark sea rolling in with a loud rumble. After a bit of watching, we seen it was a sea of fur. Buffalo. They stretched far as the eye could see. They was right close to us, and we kept our spot, least we might somehow stir and stampede them. We watched them cross near us, and I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was seeing was something that was soon to be no more. It wasn’t but a few years beyond that when near every buffalo that had walked the earth was dead. Some of them buffalo was killed for food, some for hides, and finally just for sport, to be left rotting on the prairie. It was partly done out of greed, and partly for no other reason than to deny the Plains Indians breakfast and supper. It was the destruction of the Indians’ on-the-hoof grocery store, and it done them in surer than smallpox-diseased blankets or repeating rifles.

  We needed meat, and we watched for at least an hour as they passed, and then we shot a straggler on the end who looked as if he had already hurt a leg bad enough he would soon be for the wolves. Them buffalo, big and mighty as they are, was also dumb. They didn’t seem to understand what the shot was about. If they missed the old boy on the end, there was no note of it we could see. Maybe at the end of the day one of them would turn and say, “Hey, boys, where’s Bill?”

  We skinned that buffalo out, made a cook fire using dried buffalo turds, which burned real good but smelled, as you might guess, like dried buffalo shit. We cooked some buffalo hump and stripped out some of the meat and salted it with the wagon supplies. Later on during the trip we ate it. The salt cured it enough it didn’t rot, but I got to tell you, it was hardly worth the thirst it gave you; watering holes was far apart. There was plenty of goods in that wagon, but one of the ones we had to scrounge for was water.

  Still, all in all, that trip was one of the finest and most measured times of my life. With those China girls and us taking turns in the wagon, living off the land, laughing and hooting and such, Wow telling
me about this and that she had read, it was one of the greatest pleasures of my life. The trip took us a long time, from the inside edge of West Texas, across the Panhandle, on through Indian Territory—without seeing any Indians—climbing up to South Dakota. Those days and nights seemed to float by like turtles in the river.

  Before we actually seen the town we seen the hills, and they was thick and dark with trees. Along the hills a considerable fire had raged, gnawing up wood like a fiery beaver. I later learned that burned-up dead wood was how the town got its name.

  We smelled the place before we come up on it. It was the stink of sewage tossed in the streets and that which had run down from outhouses built on higher land. As we come nearer you could add to that body odor and sweat and whiffs of cooking smells and a waft of burned wood breezing down gently from the trees on the rise above us. That burn smell, compared to the other, was a kind of refreshment.

  There was a main road that was so muddy and deep with washouts it made the wagon jump as it come along. We had to pull ourselves to the side to keep from being crushed by an ox team that was rolling out of Deadwood, most likely on its way to gather fresh supplies of some ilk or another. The team was led on foot by a stout woman with a big old whip and a dress that hung over her boots, except for the toes. Her boots and dress was splattered in mud. It was quite a train of critters and wagons and such, and when it passed us we continued into town, though calling it a town seems overly polite, like calling a pimp a gentleman.

  The buildings was thrown up willy-nilly along the sides of the street, as if some drunk had been given lumber, hammer, and nails and told to go at it. A few buildings had seen paint at one time or another; some rambled nearly into the street, as if they was trying to slink across it and into the hills and return to timber. Here and there were clusters of lumber due to some buildings having toppled like stacks of dominoes. A number of houses had low-slung wooden fences built around sad gardens where weeds grew and bugs lived, though I figured them bugs was embarrassed at their quarters.