The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (14 page)

He handed the canteen back. “In any unsettled land, the names of towns come from the pioneers who settle them, from colorful incidents that happen, from legends, or sometimes from the topography.”

Not knowing what that last word meant, I just said, “Yeah?”

“Translated, some Siberian towns are called Too-Far Mountain, Pancake Flats, Broken-Jaw Creek.”

“Hell, sounds kinda like some names back home.”

He continued, growing thoughtful. “As for Uporaskaya, there’s a legend around that name. When it was first settled, a man there was reputed to be the most stubborn man in the world. The other few people there, his friends, decided to move out. But he’d planted some pumpkins, so he wouldn’t go. He was working in the pumpkin patch as the others left, and a couple of them, knowing that he would be all alone, called out that he just
had
to move with them.” Rostov paused. “Since he’d been told he
had
to move, the stubborn fellow
wouldn’t
move. He wouldn’t move at all. He just stood there stubbornly, without ever moving one bit. And finally the pumpkin vines started to grow up
around his legs. They grew until at last, in time, the vines reached his throat, and they strangled him to death where he stood.”

He looked at me as he finished the legend, and I could see that he was trying to tell me two things at once. “Well, he sure was one stubborn bastard,” I said. “A hell of a lot more stubborn than my Shad.”

He was pleased at my jumping the gun on his story that way, but he was still serious. “For the sake of all of us, I hope you’re right.”

“Another thing,” I said with as much innocence as I could, “if the Russians made up that legend, they musta had some pretty stubborn fellas themselves.”

He gave me a quick, hard look. “Meaning?”

I kind of chickened out. “Oh, nothin” Then I added, “But you were sayin’ before about the difference between thinkin’ an’ talkin’, an’ actually doin’. He actually
did
turn the cattle.”

There was another quick, iron-hard look. “His message about ‘heads rolling’ was arrogant and hostile.”

I’d already gone about far enough, but I managed to build up enough courage to say quietly, “An’ your reply, sir?”

He studied me for a long moment with those piercing eyes.

And then he spurred on ahead.

That night we camped closer to the cossacks than ever before. There was just one small spring for water, so the two fires, with the spring shared in the middle, were only about fifty feet away from each other.

“Christ!” Dixie muttered later, as we were sitting around our fire. “Every time ya’ wanna git a goddamn cup a’ water, ya’ have t’ rub elbows with some goddamn cossack!”

“Shoot,” Slim snorted. “Think how worried they must be for fear a’ catchin’ some excruciatin’ an’ fatal disease from a scabrous rebel like you.”

Sammy the Kid said, “Why don’t they go camp by their own spring? I say fuck ’em!”

Some of the others nodded and grunted in agreement.

“All of ya’ just relax.” Shad stood up. “Slim, let’s go take a look at the herd an’ night riders.”

A moment later the two of them rode off.

I’d already told Shad the reason we’d made the detour earlier that day, and he knew right off that it made sense. All he’d done was to say gruffly, “Rostov shoulda sent you back t’ tell me. We’d a’ made an even wider circle.”

All along, of course, I’d kept Shad up on most of the things that were said and that happened to me while I was with the cossacks. I’d mentioned the line about the puppy barking and the wolf biting, though I didn’t include the fact that I was the butt of it. And I’d told the story of the swans, and things like that. However, that night I hadn’t brought up the legend of Uporaskaya because it just didn’t seem like too good of an idea right then.

Now, with Shad and Slim gone to check out the herd and the men that were on duty, the rest of us were just sitting quietly.

Then, from over at the Russian camp, there came the soft sounds of that musical instrument of theirs. For the first time, at this nearer distance, I could see that it was Ilya who was playing it. A few of the cossacks around the fire started humming with deep, quiet voices along with the tune that he was strumming gently on the strings.

“Goddamnit!” Dixie grumbled. “Now they’re gonna keep us awake all night with that infernal racket!”

“I think it’s kinda nice,” I said.

“We can fix ’em!” Sammy the Kid reached for his guitar and hit a couple of loud chords. Then he started a fast, noisy version of “De Camptown Races,” and Dixie and some of the others went to singing that peppy song with a whole lot more enthusiasm than talent.

It was clear as hell that our camp was dead set on drowning out their camp.

Disgusted, Old Keats called out, “That’s stupid! Why don’t ya’ all just shut up!”

But he didn’t have enough authority to make it stick.

And then, from the Russian camp, where damnere all of them had now joined in their song to drown us out in turn, I heard Rostov’s voice giving a short command.

Their music stopped abruptly, and Sammy and our singers were suddenly left out on a musical limb that was loud and unmelodious as hell.

“De Camptown Races” sort of stumbled to a stop about where somebody was puttin’ their “money on the bobtailed nag,” and Sammy gave up playing.

“Well,” Dixie said, “I guess we showed them.”

Shad and Slim rode back up and dismounted, and Shad walked closer in toward the fire. We could see he was mad, and Sammy put his guitar away quickly.

“If we ever do run into any Tartars,” Shad said, “there’ll be no need of guns. You dumb bastards can sing ’em t’ death!”

Everybody went to bed pretty fast about then, but within most of them there was still a general feeling of resentment and downright hostility toward those nearby cossacks. And it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that the cossacks were feeling the same way toward us.

It exploded just after breakfast the next morning.

Dixie had gone over to the spring where Shiny Joe and Link were filling their canteens, and at the same time three or four cossacks came up to their side of the spring to fill some water bags.

One of the cossacks, Yuri, looked at the two black brothers and said something to his friend Vody, and they both laughed.

It may have been an innocent remark or otherwise, but Dixie took it as being otherwise. “What the hell’re you laughin’ about?” he growled.

“Aww, take it easy,” Link said. “They dunno what you’re sayin’ anyway.”

“Nobody,” Dixie snarled, “makes fun a’ my friends just b’cause through no fault a’ their own they happen t’ to be niggers!”

That was kind of funny because Dixie was the most prejudiced fella who ever walked. And, in an unfortunate way, it got even funnier. Sergeant Razin, Nick, was one of the cossacks there. He looked at Dixie and said as quietly as he could in his rasping accent, “No one is making fun of you niggers.”

Not even knowing what the word meant, he’d accidentally cut Dixie to the quick by calling him a nigger too, and from there on it started getting unfunny real fast.

“Nigger!” Dixie roared. “Me?” And he put one foot forward into the shallows of the spring to swing his fist across and hit Nick on the jaw. That was sort of like hitting an oak tree, and it probably hurt Dixie’s fist more than Nick’s jaw, but Yuri and Vody were already lunging across the spring at Dixie. He went down beneath them and Shiny Joe and Link jumped in to help Dixie. Nick and the other cossacks splashed through the spring to join in, and in about three seconds, with cossacks and cowboys hurtling in from both directions, it was a full-scale riot that was getting closer to killing with each flying second.

Some of the participants were really getting hurt, and aside from the furious, swirling mass of fistfighting and rassling, cowboys were suddenly starting to grab for their guns and cossacks for their sabers
.

Yuri, with his head lowered so all he could see was a pair of chaps, hit me in the stomach as I came running up, and an instant later Natcho, Big Yawn and Chakko charged by me like a three-man battering ram, knocking him to the ground as they joined the main battle. Yuri leaped up and was the first cossack to get his saber out.

Shad appeared beside him, revolver in hand, and knocked the saber out of his hand with the gun, then swung the gun in a backhanded blow that knocked Yuri flat again. Then Shad raised his gun and fired three times into the air.

At those three roaring blasts everyone was brought up short and the fighting suddenly stopped.

Even Nick, who’d been busy strangling Dixie in the spring, now let go and stood up, soaking wet. Dixie, choking and gasping for breath, sat up half in and half out of the spring.

Rostov, who’d been out of camp a little ways, galloped up now and dismounted.

Nobody was moving, but there was still a tension and anger among all the men there that you could actually feel in your skin, like hot, stormy weather.

Rostov’s blazing eyes swept over us. “Who started this?”

Shad put his gun away and said flatly, “One a’ my men.”

The fight was over, but if it just got left like that, with the mean and bitter feelings we all had now, there’d be scars of anger on both sides that wouldn’t ever heal. And there was no possible way to say anything, or do anything, that could somehow make things right between our outfit and the cossacks.

Except for one thing.

And that’s the thing that Shad did.

Yuri was just getting up, and he now stepped forward to pick up his fallen saber.

But Shad reached down and picked it up for him. With all of the men watching, he slowly put his left hand out in front of him. Then, without a word, but with all the quiet meaning in the world, he drew the razor-sharp edge of the saber across the back of his own wrist, cutting it so deeply that his blood gushed out and flowed freely.

After that, paying no attention to the bleeding, he tossed the saber slightly into the air with his right hand, caught it by the blade, and offered it back handle first to Yuri.

The saber had drawn blood.

Yuri and Shad looked at each other for a long, stony moment.

Then Yuri finally nodded, understanding, and though his outside expression didn’t change much, you could see that on the inside there was a new and growing respect for our boss. He and
all the other cossacks were getting an insight into the caliber of the man that Shad was.

Yuri took his saber and, silently accepting Shad’s blood on the blade, slowly put it back into its scabbard.

And somehow, by a strange magic in that quiet, strong thing that Shad had done, none of us around that spring there felt much like enemies anymore.

No one had to say anything about that sudden kind of a warm feeling Shad had caused. We all just felt it.

I had a hunch Rostov felt it most. He was still sore about the fight, but he was looking at Shad in a slightly different way, his original, hard anger now tempered almost involuntarily by something else. If I’d had to name just what that something else was, I’d have made an educated guess, knowing Rostov, that it was a small, almost begrudging touch of admiration.

Shad then turned and started back to camp, and fifteen minutes later the herd was moving through the early morning sunshine and some faint low-valley mists, on its way north again, toward Khabarovsk.

CHAPTER TEN

I
N
A
way, that fight had made us closer. During the next few days, even though we generally camped along streams that ran damnere forever on a roughly east-to-west basis, small tributaries of the Ussuri, our camps at night just somehow managed to get a little nearer, and nobody seemed to mind it a whole lot.

Old Keats used to say that the more men were really men, the more they were like little boys. And sometimes they had to just naturally knock each other down, just to sort of get a general feeling about each other.

In any case, we weren’t quite so much total foreigners, back and forth, as we’d been up until then.

One night I finally got around to telling our outfit about why the cossacks all wore those scarlet-red vests, so that if they were hurt in a rough battle their blood wouldn’t show up so much. And even Dixie didn’t make any fun of that idea.

On the contrary, he said, “That ain’t too bad of a notion, all in all. Half a’ bein’ on top a’ the other guy is just showin’ him you ain’t hurt or scared.”

Shiny Joe looked at his brother, Link, with the kind of a look that would normally require a wink, but between them the understanding was already inbuilt. “You sure did that the other mornin’ in that fracas, Dixie. When that big cossack sergeant was holdin’ your head under the water, you didn’t say one damn thing t’ give him any hint that you were in trouble.”

“That’s very hilarious,” Dixie said. “But the whole damn thing wouldn’t a’ happened except that I was stickin’ up for you two goddamned niggers.”

But that was all in fun, and nobody was in the least bit mad at anybody else.

Rufe, sitting by the fire, tossed a small piece of wood into it. “I said it before, an’ I’ll say it again. They’re both a hasty an’ a heavy-lookin’ bunch, them cossacks.”

Shad was chewing a small wad of tobacco. He shifted it slowly in his mouth, glancing at the cossack camp nearby. “I ain’t about t’ issue you fellas red vests,” he said. “Hopefully you’ll have enough brains not t’ go around gettin’ yourselves hurt in the first place.” His tone of voice was just about as tough as ever.

I couldn’t help but think that Shad was a strange and unusual case. He was sure as hell a kind of an all-around genius in his own ways, and yet on the other hand it wasn’t too difficult for me to picture him standing for a whole long time in a pumpkin patch in Uporaskaya.

Rostov and I spent the next afternoon crossing some almost endless, low rocky hills a mile or so ahead of the herd. He was making it a point to learn every little bit I knew about longhorns, and we’d somehow gotten onto the subject of their coloring.

“There’s an old Western sayin’,” I told him, “that longhorns come, solid or speckled or painted, in every single color of the rainbow.”