The Englishman's Boy (23 page)

“He points to me, says something to his friends in Indian gab. The way they laugh ain’t encouraging. He shoulders his pony into me and taps my hair with his quirt. In a big, loud voice he puts what I take to be a question. I’m guessing something along the lines of, What you doing spoiling my air and my scenery?

“By the Christ, thinks I, by the Christ. These lads are Blackfoot. I’d heard plenty of how they done woodhawks and hunters along the
Missouri. They didn’t leave no pretty corpses. Lot of dead men with their own dicks stuffed in their mouths.

“Red and Yellow Face gives me another flick with his quirt and makes some remark to his boys that sets them laughing fit to bust a gut. I suspicion what’s funny is me plastered in hog muck. Man’ll do most anything to save his precious skin and I did. Down I goes on hands and knees, sticks my rump in the air, lets loose a squeal to wake snakes, and starts rooting like a pig in his pen. Lord, the look on those Indians’ faces. They’d never seen the like. But when the surprise slid off them they howled with laughter. That was a favourable sign. Nobody likely to murder you when they’re laughing at you.

“Old Red and Yellow Face was pointing at me and saying the same word over and over. The other two kept nodding their heads yes, yes, every time he said it. I speculate Old Red and Yellow Face was a man of the world, been to the white man’s forts, seen his pigs. Every time he said the word, I nodded and grinned and grunted all the louder. I even pitched myself in a good-sized mud-hole and rolled for him, wriggled on my back, all four trotters up in the air. Your Indian’s got a natural contempt for the pig, but this was right up their alley, watching a white man do pork proud.

“What they didn’t know I was up to, rooting through the slop on my hands and knees, wiggling my hams, was I was looking for that revolver of mine. Playing pig got my snout close to the ground. And when I found that Colt, I aimed to knock Red and Yellow Face and his brethren off their ponies like they was turkeys setting on a rail fence.

“So I kept oinking, and praying, Please God let me lay hands on that gun. Once or twice I thought the boys might be losing interest so I sat up on my haunches like a fat old boar and made windy, wet farts with my lips, or flopped my hands up alongside my head like they was pig ears. When they was roaring with joy I’d get back on the hustle again, covering ground looking for the Colt, the Indians heeling their horses behind me, not wanting to miss nothing.

“My spell of sickness had weakened me considerable though.
Wasn’t long before I was feeling mighty dogged out, but I says to myself, Keep moving, you got to keep moving until you get that gun. Over and over I said it. And that’s what I done, went on sinking my wrists in gumbo, the mud sucking the strength out of me, leaving my arms so wearisome heavy it was all I could do to pull them free. Keep moving, I said, you got no hope but that gun.

“Everything squeezing in, your eyes begging for a flash of shiny metal, and this noise in your head like a saw whining through wood. And that’s the sound of your own breath, but you got to keep moving, keep moving. Your eyes start to haze, like blood dripping into water, one drop at a time, each drop spreading, and the water going misty, then cloudy, then bright, until there ain’t nothing but bright blood, and then you get a new notion – that that noise is the sound of a saw chewing through your heart, the blood spurting deep down in you with every stroke, slowly inching up in you until you drown in it, drown in your own heart’s blood.

“And I did. I drowned. Keeled over. Sank. I had strength but for one thing, fumble for that knife in my boot top. Pick away, pick away went my fingers but they wouldn’t close on it. Then I knew it was all over. Just lay there panting, hog waiting to be butchered. Lay with my face in the mud and waited for them to come, do what they done to those woodhawks on the Missouri, cut me down to size one piece at a time.

“It was unholy still. A still kin to the still of an empty house, but bigger and stranger. Empty world, it said. I waited. Nothing come. I rolled over, staggered to my feet. I’d have swore there weren’t another soul in a hundred miles. Indians was gone, like smoke in a wind.

“Couple of hours I walked in circles looking for my pistol. Where there’s three Indians could be more. Found my hat. Found a dead prairie chicken laying where the hail had killed it. Sight of that, hunger came over me so fierce I pulled the feathers off it, ate it raw where I stood. It’d been one long stretch since I’d took food.

“Found my hat, found the chicken, but never found the Colt. When candle-lighting come, I turned south and tramped for the border.
Walked like a dead man. Walked all night. Sun rose and I found the third thing, my horse stepping south too.”

There is a long pause. I hear him suck at the reefer but no light shows; it has gone out in his fingers. I lift my pencil from the paper but he starts to talk again, his voice no longer deliberate and hard, but mournful and echoing like it had begun.

“Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so’s to find their creature spirit,” he says. “That’s where they learned it, in the wilderness.”

I ask what he means by creature spirit.

“Creature spirit,” he reiterates. “Spirit they shared with some creature – grizzly spirit, elk spirit, coyote spirit, crow spirit. Hardship and the country taught them it.” There is another pause. “What you make of mine?”

“Your what?”

“You ain’t been listening, have you?” he says.

The next morning I type up a transcription of the interviews. In the end, I send only the last one because it has about it the ring of naked honesty that Chance is after. I believe it marks progress, shows how McAdoo, under my prompting, is slowly moving nearer and nearer to what we are seeking – the truth.

That night as I am getting ready for bed a knock comes at my door. There is a note from Chance by messenger. The note reads:

16
 

C
hance’s curtly dismissive note about the McAdoo interview recounting the thunderstorm on the prairie and his playing pig for the Indians leaves me feeling idiotic and abashed. It worries me even more when the next week’s worth of transcripts is passed over unacknowledged and uncommented upon. I am not pleasing Mr. Chance.

I berate myself for my stupid assumption that words on the page can convey what I have learned about McAdoo. Which is that he has something he needs to tell. What this is I can’t say, but I sense the weight, the pressure of it behind everything he said that night. Words on the page are not capable of communicating this. It had been the burial, the drawing in of night, the incessant wind, the way McAdoo held himself in the chair, the flick of the boot slamming closed the stove door, the sudden darkness, the voice playing scales in the darkness, beginning flat as dictation, then growing troubled, self-questioning. All this I suddenly see as more important than what he said; the
feel
of the night was its meaning.

That’s why what I’ve given him seems to Chance inadequate, pedestrian, a labour of diligence rather than imagination. But I am not just an unimaginative stenographer. I am not. To use Chance’s favourite word, I have intuited whatever is to be got from McAdoo will not be got for the asking, simply, easily. It will have to be won.

Shorty McAdoo is no braggart. Chance could find a hundred cowboys here in Hollywood who, in a few hours, could tell enough colourful lies to fill any number of movie screens. But Chance’s ambition is to go beyond entertaining lies, to make a great film, a truthful film. That is what he has set his heart on. And I want to tell him only delicacy and patience will extract the truth from Shorty McAdoo.

I have my pride. It galls me that Chance might have written me off, that I might be underestimated, unappreciated, misunderstood. I need to meet with him face to face and explain all this, or at least talk to him on the telephone.

The problem is I can’t reach him. When I phone his office, his receptionist says he is busy and can’t speak to me. I’m beginning to suspect Fitzsimmons has given her orders not to let me talk to Chance.

I need some kind of breakthrough with McAdoo. So I buy the pistol.

“What’s this?” demands McAdoo.

“What does it look like?” He refers to the revolver I bought in a pawnshop in L.A., hoping it would be useful in coaxing a revelation out of him.

“That ain’t what I mean. What I mean is, why you showing it to me?”

“I want you to teach me to shoot.”

“Put that away before somebody gets hurt.”

“Come on, Shorty. You know about guns. That first day I came here, the day you went back to the bunkhouse and put your jacket on – I saw the pistol in the waistband of your pants.”

“You wouldn’t have, I didn’t intend you to. And in case you didn’t I showed it to you. Remember?”

“So it was a warning?”

“I’m a careful man.”

“Teach me to shoot.”

“I ain’t a shootist. Never was.”

“You said you intended to knock those Indians off their ponies. What did that mean?”

“Means I was in fear of my life.”

“Sounds like fancy shooting. Sounds like a shootist to me.”

“That close, you just point and squeeze. It’s much of a muchness to pointing your finger.” He points his finger at me by way of illustration.

I proffer the revolver to him. “Show me.” For a moment, I’m sure he is going to refuse point-blank, but he takes it, weighs it in his hand. Then he sweeps the muzzle up and down in broad strokes, like a painter running a brush up and down a picket fence, smooth and calculated. Repeating this action several times he says, “Wait here,” and strides off. It is obvious from the length, the deliberation of each step that he is pacing off a distance. I begin to count to myself, seven, eight, nine. McAdoo halts, swings back to me. “Don’t you move now, Harry,” he warns me.

The sharp, flat crack, the spray of dirt pattering on my right pant leg seem simultaneous with the movement of the pistol barrel. Again, the glint of the barrel travelling through the hot sunshine, the loud pistol report, the eruption of dirt by my left boot.

I stand locked to the spot, a weightless sensation in my bowels, my head dizzily adrift. His voice snaps me back into focus. “Just point and squeeze,” he says mildly. “Point and squeeze.”

“For the love of Christ, Shorty!”

McAdoo casually ambles back to me, the pistol dangling loosely by his side. My eyes don’t leave the revolver until we are face to face again. “There’s your lesson,” he says, holding up the gun innocent in the palm of his hand. “Take it.”

I take it because the weapon seems safer in my hands than in his. My tongue is cracked leather in a dry wool sock.

“I ain’t no shootist,” he says quietly, “but here’s a fact. A carrying piece has got but one business. That business is man-killing.”

I am having trouble with my tongue, it feels numb.

“This gun ain’t about fancy shooting, it’s about stomach. This gun ain’t got but one earthly use but dropping a man. A man who can see your face and whose face you can see. It ain’t no play toy. I knew boys could shoot the pips off a playing card with one of these, boys could dance a tin can around a yard like it was on a string. Hotter than slick shit in July as long as nobody put the wind up their ass.” He takes me by the shoulder and points to the scarecrow Wylie has planted in the garden. Ragged overalls and a pillowslip stuffed with straw on which a lopsided face has been scratched with a piece of coal. “I just put a little wind up your ass. Now point and squeeze,” he says.