Dance on the Wind (80 page)

“It were the horse, that goddamned horse again,” Washburn growled low, almost under his breath.

Bass turned from punching up the fire, asking, “What horse?”

“The white one, goddammit!”

Titus tossed a last piece of firewood into the stove and latched the iron door as the tiny cell began to warm almost immediately. A little smoke leaked from that chimney—but he decided he could stuff some more chinking in it come a warm day when the whole of it cooled off enough for him to get up there and work on it.

“I don’t know what white horse you’re talking about, Isaac,” Bass admitted as he settled before the man, watching Washburn’s throat work greedily at the whiskey again. “Slow down on that a minute and tell me ’bout this here white horse of your’n.”

“Same white horse. The one it’s allays been,” he repeated, his tone angry as he swiped amber drops off the hairs of his mustache that hung over his lips like a worn corn-bristle broom.

“Cain’t be your white horse,” Bass said finally, wagging his head slightly in confusion. “That pony you brung in weren’t—”

He whirled his head on Titus to interrupt with a warning
growl, “I damn well know that son of a bitch jug-head pony ain’t white. You blamed idjit—I ain’t talking about
it,
cain’t you see?”

Titus eyed the green whiskey bottle, saw that it was less than half-full already. “Tell me what you want me to see, Isaac.”

Then Bass glanced over at the piggin between their pallets, noticing they had only another two bottles of whiskey out of all of that they had bought last week. They had been drinking a hell of a lot of the stuff, ever since he had been on the mend and Washburn had taken to teaching him all that he knew about life in the Indian country.

“Ain’t ye ever heerd tell of the white horse, Titus? Surely ye have. I tol’t ye ’bout it, ain’t I? Must have—many, many a time.”

“I … can’t rightly remember—”

Isaac’s eyes were glazing already in stupor. “Glass said he seen the horse once’t too. Tol’t me hisself. See’d it fer nights in his dreams afore he bent over to take him that drink at the river.”

Bass started feeling his skin go cold. “On the Grand?”

Washburn nodded. “Saw that thar’ horse in his dreams, he said—many a night afore the sow grizz chawed on him.”

Swallowing hard, Titus watched Washburn gulp down more of the whiskey from the bottle’s dull-green glow in the orange firelight. Titus’s tiny cell smelled of fresh hay and cold sweat—from the both of them. It was the smell of fear. Nothing less than pure fear of the unknown, the unseen.

“Glass saw a white horse in his dreams?”

Washburn took the bottle from his lips, licked them with the tip of his tongue as he stared at Bass with eyes that seemed as black as cinders. Deep circles of liver-colored flesh sagged beneath the man’s eyes. Made them look almost like sockets in a skull. He sucked on that snaggletooth a moment, then said quietly, “I see’d that horse too, Titus.”

“W-when?”

“Yest now,” he whispered, belched, and stared down at the bottle in his hand. It began to tremble at first. Then
the more it shook, the more frightened Washburn became until he grabbed hold of the bottle with his second hand and with both of them held it out for Bass to take.

Seizing the whiskey from Isaac, Titus welcomed a chance to swallow some for himself. When he had that satisfying burn coursing all the way down his gullet, Bass finally asked, “This ain’t the first time you seen it neither, is it?”

“Said it wasn’t.”

“Damn,” Bass muttered.

“Damn right,
damn”
Washburn echoed. “Know what that means?”

What should he say? What could he say? All he did eventually was shrug a shoulder and try to grin as he replied, “Means you and me’ll just have to stay out’n the way of bears, I s’pose.”

Washburn snorted, wagging his head. “It ain’t yest the b’ars, Titus. That white horse … it’s an ol’, ol’ legend. B’ars don’t mean shit in that legend.”

Titus squirmed uneasily, his eyes flicking out to the doorway’s darkness. “All right—s’pose you tell me the legend.”

At first the trapper eased back on his pallet, stretching out on his back, one arm crooked over his forehead, covering his eyes. “A man what sees a white horse in his dream … that man gonna die.”

Bass let it sink in as he stared at Washburn for a long time. Then he eventually tried to cheer his friend. “We all gonna die sometime, Isaac.”

Washburn rolled up on an elbow and glared at Bass angrily. “Means a man’s gonna die
soon.”
He plopped over onto his back once more.

“Glass didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“He didn’t die,” Bass retorted. “Not after he saw his white horse. Shows that’s just a bunch of bunk.”

For some time it appeared Washburn thought on it; then from beneath his arm he said, “He came no more’n a ha’r away from dyin’, Titus. That close.”

“But he didn’t die, Isaac. So forget the white horse—”

“It’s differ’nt: Glass didn’t die ’cause the Almighty
wanted him to take his revenge on them what left him!” Washburn blurted in interruption. “The Almighty’s the only thing what saved Glass from dying when the white horse come to call him out.”

“That what you think you seen? A white horse called you out?”

He snarled, “My time’s comin’, goddammit.”

“You stay out’n them whiskey houses, now, Isaac,” Bass suggested. “We’ll keep clear of the Injuns once we head west on the Platte—”

“It don’t matter, Titus.”

“You can damn well make sure none of it matters ’bout that white horse, don’t you see? Just be careful and watch out—”

“It don’t matter—none of what I try to do. My time to go is my time,” Washburn grumbled. “These here dreams mean to tell me I lived out my time an’ the white horse is come to call me out.”

“A man don’t have to—”

“I told ye!” Washburn bellowed, then went on in a quieter voice as he turned his back on Bass, facing the wall, and yanked his blankets up to his shoulders. “It don’t matter if’n I’m here in St. Louie … or if’n I’m out thar’ on the prerra. It yest don’t make a good goddamn no more now.”

For the longest time Bass stared at the man’s back, what he could make out of Washburn’s form in the fire’s dull light emitted from the grating on the stove door. He took himself a long, last drink of the whiskey, snugged the cork back in the neck, and settled it in among the other two in the piggin against that back wall of his cell.

Easing back, he rerolled his old blanket coat into a pillow for his head. Closed his eyes. Letting images swim before him. Conjuring up how that white horse must look. But the creature simply refused to take shape.

Instead, what swam behind his eyelids were images of the last few weeks with Isaac Washburn. What revelry they had shared! Haunting the grog houses, watering holes, and those stinking knocking shops where all manner of delights to the flesh were to be found—they roamed the back streets and alleyways down close to the wharf, where life
lay closer to the earth—with little hope of sanctity. In those cold hours before dawn they would stagger home in the drizzle to collapse upon their blankets and sleep until Troost came in at sunrise to angrily kick Bass’s foot.

“You went out an’ done it again,” the livery owner would grumble. “Get rid of that son of a bitch, Titus Bass—or he’ll be the end of you.”

“You gonna throw me out’n my job?” Bass always asked, bleary-eyed.

“I thought about it,” Troost would reply. “But not yet. Get up and put in your day. And then we’ll see.”

So he did. Young enough that the whiskey tremors and the hard-liquor hammers in his head were not near cruel enough to keep him prisoner in that bed after a long night of chasing numbness, a long night of seeking release buried deep within the moistness of some faceless other who bit and clawed and screeched with her delight at his utter ferocity.

None of them knew. Not a one of those whores had any idea it wasn’t she who made him such a beast. Whatever it was, Titus didn’t know. Only that the longer he waited to be gone, the more he felt like some caged animal, trapped there in St. Louis. As if his leg were snared in one of those square-jawed traps he crafted for the two of them, caught and held as he strained to be gone, to be out there, to be reaching for the horizon.

“Not yet,” Washburn always said, drunk or sober, when Bass prodded him to be about leaving. “Not yet we go.”

So they drank and whored, and they fought—back to back many times. Fists up in those ear-biting, eye-gouging contests to which Titus was no stranger. A healthy letting of blood, he always figured. A good row only made them all the thirstier for the whiskey and apple beer, hungrier for a skinny one of an evening, perhaps a big and fleshy one the next night. Over the weeks Washburn had even developed his own favorites, and of them—one in particular.

“A young one,” he called her, “barely old ’nough out of her schooldays.”

Titus knew better, for the whore had been working
one brothel or another for better than ten years now. But what mattered was that Isaac was content with her, happy to consider her but a slip of a child—no matter that she weighed that much more than Washburn himself.

“I like havin’ all that sweet, slick hide on a woman to grab on to when I’m ruttin’,” he would explain to Bass. “When she gets to goin’ under me, less’n I got some of that hide to grab on to, an’ a lot of it too—that damn li’l girl’s bound to heave me off!”

Isaac wasn’t alone in finding a favorite. For Titus she was a recent arrival: a quadroon imported upriver from New Orleans, her skin the palest brown, almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the lower Mississippi itself.

First time Titus saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine, she wore tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair dark as a moonless midnight, a velvet choker with a whalebone brooch clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her quickened pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, it was no wonder Titus came away from her so many nights wearing the tiny blue bruises and teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, from shoulder on down to the flat of his belly. After swearing she was his favorite early one morning as Washburn pounded on the door and hollered that he was ready to head back to the livery, she reached up to pull a scarf down from a peg in the wall beside her narrow, shortposted muley-bed.

“You take this,” she commanded as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.

He knew not what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”

“My scarf,” she said, taking it from him to unknot. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”

“Where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s hammering on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.

“I don’t have no people no more,” she said. “But I want you to be somebody special to me.”

“I will be, always be,” he vowed, and let her tie the
scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.

He wore it knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her, when he could afford her, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at her from across the smoky room where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while, only her eyes asking why it was not he who was raising her skirts and rubbing her legs then and there in the tavern, panting to take her back to her little room.

More and more he and Isaac had other things to do with some of Titus’s money.

There were blankets and trade goods, vermilion and beads, mirrors and hawks-bells, coffee and sugar and flour they were laying by as the time to go drew nigh.

“We have to leave afore June,” Washburn warned. “Time we get across’t the prerra, it’ll be fall. An’ winter don’t wait long to come down on that kentry. Be ready to turn yer back on all of this come June.”

So Bass worked on more traps when he could get away with it, sneaking in that time over the forge among the other jobs Troost had for him to do. What with all that he owed the blacksmith, Titus dared not fail to give full measure to Hysham Troost. Bit by bit, week by week, the livery owner gave over the coins he had been saving for Titus through all the years gone by. And with each week’s payday Hysham warned that the money was disappearing far faster than Bass was earning it. Pretty soon, Hysham warned, Bass would be back to nothing but waiting on his next pay.

Far too much whiskey, and the women, for him and Washburn. Sweating the alcohol out of his pores every day over the forge while the trapper sat and talked endlessly about this piece of country, or that stream, this beaver valley, or that pass—all the landmarks Titus struggled to keep straight in his head each time Isaac drew a crude map on the clay floor there beneath the bellows, there beside the anvil where Titus sweated out the whiskey he had paid such good money for the night before.

Hour after hour Isaac told his stories of the animals
and the sky. How the land went on and on for as far as a man’s eye could ever hope to see—right into tomorrow, if you really tried.

They needed extra locks for their rifles, at least one spare for their pistols. Then too, a small, coarse sack of lock springs and screws, lock hammers, and several pounds of fine French amber flints. Slowly that tiny cell Titus had called home for so many winters grew even more cramped as the partners acquired everything they would need to winter up come the time they struck out for the far mountains.

“You’ll need a saddle soon,” Isaac said one afternoon. “An’ a horse too.”

Titus hadn’t thought about that, but he supposed Washburn was right. “What about you? We ought’n get you something better’n that pony.”

“That Injun pony do me jest fine, Titus. Ye’ll see—what when we get to Injun kentry. Injun pony best, mark my word on it.”

The day’s work complete—counting what Troost expected him to do and what time he could squeeze in forging traps and rifle parts, harness and bits for their horses—Washburn led them upriver from the wharf a ways. There they smeared pennyroyal on their exposed flesh at ankles and wrists and necks to keep off the seed ticks, then took a belt ax to blaze a blond mark on a tree, no bigger than the width of Titus’s hand, before pacing off the proper distance and toeing a line in the soft earth coming alive with the thick green springtime carpet.