The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (6 page)

“Like what just happened before.” Keats sipped from his cup again. “Poor old Dixie lost.”

“Well, he shouldn’t have pushed Sammy.”

“But don’t you see, we all knew he was weaker, for having picked on Sammy’s weaknesses?”

“Sure. Sort of.”

“Give me a little more.” Keats put out his cup and I poured from a bottle that was near us on a rock near the fire. “That’s damn good,” he said, tasting thoughtfully. “Jack Daniel’s, Distillery No. 1, 1866. Great bourbon.”

I looked at the bottle in the light of the fire and said, “Goddamn! You’re right. You’re a damn good guesser!”

“That wasn’t such a good guess. It was a truth based on knowledge, which in turn was based on many years of happy and often heavy drinking.”

“Oh, t’ hell with you, that’s really somethin’!” Despite still being chilled by the cold, I couldn’t hold back a kind of genuine enthusiasm. “T’ even guess the
year
you gotta be smarter’n hell!”

He raised his shoulders slightly, dismissing this. “I was talking to you about weakness before. And the strongest man I was thinking about has the greatest weakness.”

“Who?”

He said quietly, “Shad.”

“You shouldn’t talk about Shad an’ bein’ weak in the same breath!” I said angrily.

He gestured with his left hand, raising it as high as he could, to about chest level. “I love the sonofabitch as much as you do, Levi, and I’ve even got a few more years of seniority there than you. But his great strength is what makes his greatest damn weakness. He’s too strong to change his mind. Too strong to see something from someone else’s point of view.”

I had flared up before, but one thing both Shad and Old Keats had taught me was to always try to calm down, and I did my level best now. I took a deep breath. “Old Keats, sir, Shad can do anything!”

Keats took another drink, a long one, and looked at me with eyes as sober as two iron spikes driven into a railroad tie. “This deals with what I told you before about seein’ or not seein’ this giant land.” His bad left hand came up and pointed at me again, in a tough but still friendly gesture. “Sometimes it’s hard t’ know, or to ever properly establish, Levi. But all of us, always and always, find in this world exactly what we set out t’ give to it.”

I stared hard back at him, trying to make my eyes like iron spikes too. “Well, what the hell, then! Shad always gives everything!” My own iron spikes were starting to melt already, because there was no way for me to stay mad for long at Old Keats.

Keats now lowered his eyes for a moment, then nodded. “He always has—up until comin’ here t’ this damn Russia. But he’s got a hate for it that he may get back times ten.” He put his cup down and started rubbing his hands together. “By God, the blood’s startin’ to flow again. We just may live for a while longer, after all.”

“Hey, boss!” Sammy the Kid yelled from off on the other side of the fire where he’d been helping the sailors finish unloading our supplies. “Everything’s ashore!”

The men from the
Queen
started rowing back in the last small boat as Shad came into the firelight from the side near where the cattle were huddled.

“Good luck!” one of the crewmen shouted, and some of us yelled “So long!” or whatever back. Then, after a silence, another sailor called with a certain warmth in his voice, “Cap’n Barum speaks for all of us! He thinks you’re all daft!”

Since it wasn’t really a tough line, some of us yelled back in a friendly way, “Get a horse!” and “Fuck you!” and things like that.

And then the man’s voice came across the water again, fading in the distance. “He speaks for us! An’ he said if he wasn’t born a sailor, he’d rather be a cowboy!”

It was too late to holler anything back by then, and what he’d yelled was kind of touching anyway, so we just waved by the light of the fire, and then stood around the flaming driftwood, kind of quiet.

And then Shad said thoughtfully, “Been takin’ stock of the cattle, an’ a lot of ’em are too cold from that water t’ make it through the night.”

The way he said that grim thing you could tell he was worried, but that he more than likely already had thought of the problem and had some kind of an answer to it.

“Them ’as made it’d be sicker’n hell,” Slim agreed. “What you got in mind, boss?”

“Fire an’ bourbon brought us around okay,” Shad said, kind of musing. “We can’t build enough fires to warm them, but we can get some booze into ’em. So we’re gonna break out all the grain we brought ashore and make that herd the most potent mash they ever ate in their widely traveled lives.”

“Ya’ mean get ’em drunk?” Mushy asked.

“Just pleasantly,” Slim told him with a small grin. “Not enough t’ make any shameful scenes or nothin’.”

“Hell,” Mushy went on, “we ain’t got nowheres near that much bourbon.”

“They’ve got booze in Vladivostok,” Shad said. “We’ll roust ’em out and if need be buy every bottle in town.” Then he started telling us what to do.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
BUNCH
of curious Russians who lived on the outskirts of Vladivostok had begun to gather just outside the light of the fire to look us over. While the other hands, working under Slim, started hauling gunny sacks of grain up closer to the fire, four of us went over to talk to them. There was Shad and Old Keats and Shiny Joe and me, and we were leading two pack mules to take on into town.

These Russians were mostly short and stocky, and all of them were timid, shying away as we came closer to them. But Keats called out a word that sounded like “
Tuhvaritch
” a couple of times and that sort of settled them back down.

Old Keats was carrying a lantern in one hand and his book on Russian in the other. Shiny and I brought up the rear, leading the mules.

“Ask them if they talk American,” Shad said.

Old Keats thought hard and then said, “
Gahvareet Amerikansky
?”

Those in front stared at him like he was crazy, and a couple of them toward the back snickered slightly.

“Stupid bastards,” Shad grumbled. “Not one of ’em talks American!”

But then one broad-shouldered young man near Keats answered something in a low voice.

Old Keats was as excited as a kid. He almost yelled, “I understood him! He said he speaks Russian!”

“That’s a godsend,” Shad said dryly. “We found a Russian who speaks Russian. Tell ’im what we want, an’ that we’ll pay for it.”

It was an uphill job for Keats, but he finally managed to explain to them, mostly through the young man, that we wanted all the tubs or big pots or kettles we could get. He used his hands a lot to describe the biggest size possible.

When this was done and all of them were finally nodding and saying “
Dah
,” the four of us started on into Vladivostok.

It was a dumpy, dark, deserted town, with narrow dirt streets going up and down and curving around every which way. The houses and small buildings were made of plain unfinished wood planks, most of which seemed to have been nailed up by carpenters who had failing eyesight. Once inside the town, you got the feeling there wasn’t a straight line left in the world. But still and all the houses must have been built securely, because once in a while high winds would come shrieking in off the ocean that would have knocked anything flat that wasn’t pretty sturdy.

About our only greeting was from some occasional unfriendly dogs, who barked from a distance and slunk away growling if we passed by up close.

And then we saw a few lights from windows in a small building down closer to the water. There were three sleepy little horses that looked like undersized mustangs tied up outside, and there was a small hand-painted sign hanging over the door.

“What’s it say?” Shiny asked Keats, staring at the strange, meaningless lettering.

“Hell,” Keats muttered, “could be Chinese for all I know. But I think it’s a bar.”

We tied the mules to the hitching rail near the horses and went into the small building.

Old Keats looked around and said hesitantly, “I guess this is one a’ those bars without a bar.”

We were in a plain, poorly lighted room with nothing more than six or eight wobbly tables and some rickety chairs in it. Sitting at a table near the corner were three men in flea-bitten fur hats and thick brown homespun coats that came down to their ankles. They were all dressed enough alike to maybe be in
some sort of uniform. They were drinking something that looked like water, and all three of them stared up at us with just barely controlled shock, paying particular attention to Shiny and his jet-black skin.

Then a fat man came out of a back door and we saw our first familiar sight in Russia because he was wearing a filthy grease-stained apron that had probably been white some years back.

“Thank God,” Keats murmured. “A bartender.”

Seeing us, he stopped short. Then overcoming his surprise, he started slowly toward us, asking some kind of a question in a deep, rasping voice. Like the others, he seemed particularly fascinated by Shiny.

Keats said just one word, so I remember it all right. The way things turned out later I’d sure as hell have remembered it anyway. He said, “
Vautkee.
” Then he added to us, “That’s their name for whiskey.”

The bartender waved us to a table and went back out the rear door. As we were sitting down he came back quickly with a bottle full of colorless liquid like the Russians in the corner were drinking and four glasses. He put it on the table and Shad poured a glassful. “Hope this stuff ain’t as weak as it looks.” There was a silence in the room as he lifted the glass, looked at it, sniffed it, and then shrugged. “Sure don’t smell like much.” The bartender and the three men in the corner were frowning at him with close, curious interest.

“Well,” Keats said, “try it.”

Shad raised the glass to his lips and downed it in two, or maybe three, gulps. I couldn’t tell exactly because at one point his throat seemed to become briefly paralyzed. He finished it all and put the glass down without a word. I could tell by his dead-set face he was either awful thoughtful or suffering something fierce. As Shiny pointed out later, Shad “looked like an iron man who’d just swallowed a large cannon ball.”

“I think,” Shad said finally, in an unusually husky voice, “this may serve our purpose.”

“How ’bout us tryin’ it?” I asked.

Shad just nodded, and I poured for Keats, Shiny and myself.

“Well, here’s how,” I said to them, raising my glass.

But the way I did it wasn’t how at all.

I took one gulp and thought I’d die right there on the spot for sure. Pure, burning fire started scorching and searing down my throat at the same time that a massive flood of salty tears surged up around my eyes.

Gagging as slightly as possible and forcing the nearly blinding tears back with fast, hard blinks, I put the drink down. Shiny was putting his nearly full glass back down too, not hardly breathing at all.

“Embarrassin’,” I gasped.

Shiny just nodded, not yet able to speak.

Between short, mercifully cooling gulps of air, and trying to joke away my own failure as a drinker, I at last managed to tell him, “You almost went white there, Shiny—or at least gray—if I can make light of the subject.”

Shiny swallowed slowly and then said, “Any—any color’s better’n pale green, like you.”

Old Keats had finished his entire glass, and without any noticeable side effects at all he shook his head admiringly. “Now that, by God, is one hell of a drink!”

“Tell him that we want t’ buy a lot of it,” Shad said.

“
Vautkee, ochen horosho
!” Keats said to the bartender, pulling up a chair and gesturing for the man to join us.

The fat man sat down, but he was suspicious and uncomfortable.

With the help of a newly poured drink and his language book, Old Keats went into an earnest conversation with him, using his hands and checking back and forth in his book from time to time. The bartender stayed unsmiling, just short of being hostile.

Finally Keats turned to Shad. “He and a couple of friends make it themselves for the whole town. I think he’s got about
fifty bottles here, and a keg of it at his house, I think. Which is about another forty bottles, I guess.”

“Tell ’im we’ll take it all.”

“I already did, I think. But I think what he’s curious about now is how much’re we gonna pay him. And what kind of money.”

Shad took a silver dollar out of his pocket and tossed it on the table. “In American dollars like this.”

The fat man picked up the dollar and examined it closely on both sides, frowning. Finally he pointed at a part of the coin and said something to Keats, who started looking through his book.

At last he said, “He wants t’ know what that thing in the lady’s hair is, with those spikes above it.”

“It’s a headband that says ‘Liberty.’” Shad leaned forward impatiently. “Tell him what it means and tell him that’s a word no goddamned Russian could ever understand in the first place!”

“The hell with all that, Shad,” Keats told him. “I’m havin’ a hard enough time already!”

After another few minutes of searching the book and talking, Keats said, “He’ll sell his
vautkee
, I think. But I think he thinks we’re tryin’ to cheat him.”

Shad stood up, angrily shoving the chair away behind him. “How the hell can we be cheating him? We haven’t talked money!”

Keats, equally angry, said, “Cool off! I think he thinks we’re tryin’ to buy his whole supply for that one dollar!”

Shad hesitated, taking this in, and then said, “Oh. Well, tell him we’ll give him one dollar for every one bottle.”

Keats explained, pointing at the dollar and the bottle on the table, and for the first time the fat bartender began to nod eagerly and say “
Dah
” in such a way that you couldn’t help but know it meant “Yes.”

About half an hour later Shad and I got back to the camp with one of the mules packing forty bottles. The Russians Keats had talked to on the beach had brought maybe fifty big
containers. There were washtubs, large earthenware pots and even wooden and iron barrels that were cut in half sideways, probably to catch rainwater or to feed stock. But by the time we got back, there wasn’t a Russian in sight any longer.