The Englishman's Boy (43 page)

“Of course, my lightning. And yours too. That is the last thing I came to tell you. You are to have a writing credit for the picture.”

“Fuck your writing credit. Keep my name off the picture.”

Chance falls back in the chair. He smiles to himself, to the wall, to Fitz. “Harry,” he says, “you can’t deny your responsibility, pretend you had no hand in this. Even Judas played a part in Christ’s teaching. Have you forgotten our conversations? I cannot emphasize enough how important they were to me. To speak to someone with the intelligence to understand what I was saying, someone who could grasp my ideas in a way that Fitz could not – that gave me the faith and heart to continue. And then the way you played McAdoo, discreetly, delicately, so he hardly realized the hook was in his mouth – well, Fitz couldn’t have done it and neither could I. I have no doubt that I have you to thank for McAdoo.” He pauses for a moment, head tilted back, weighing what he is about to say. “Earlier, when I said I had never needed you – I confess that perhaps that was not quite the whole truth. Honesty forces me to concede that. But when you said you didn’t have the talent to write my scenario, you were right. I didn’t know that you were right; I only felt betrayed. But your betrayal gave me the resolve to finish what you had started. Put another way: Could Christ have endured the cross without Judas’ face hung in the sky before him? And yet I am able to forgive you your treachery, to acknowledge your help and your assistance.” He looks directly at me, expecting thanks for his forgiveness. When it doesn’t come, his bright blue eyes cloud with obscure emotion, or perhaps it is only a haze of fatigue. “You may wash your hands of me, Harry,
but not your part in my picture. That is for the record.” He gets to his feet. I sense his reluctance to leave, to finish with me despite his exhaustion. He does not want to let me go. But in the end all he has to say is, “I will see that you are provided with a ticket for premiere night. All of Hollywood will be there. I intend to see to that.” He moves toward Fitz and the door.

“All of Hollywood but me!” I shout at his back. “I don’t want your ticket!”

He stops, turns back toward the bed. One hand fumbles in the air, trying to summon the words. “But of course you want it,” he says at last, mildly. “Because you will want to see what you have done.”

Then the two of them are gone.

29
 

O
utside it was full dark. They sat in Farwell’s trading room in the wan radiance of a single kerosene lamp turned low and smoking on the counter, shadows towering on the log walls whenever one of them got up and helped himself to the bottle of red eye resting on a hogshead. Now and then a trickle of dirt sifted down and sprinkled the floor whenever Frenchie Devereux shifted position on the sod roof up above where he sat sentinel. Four more men were posted at each corner of the stockade.

Farwell sat perched on a sack of flour, doleful head in his hands. Hardwick had made it plain to him that tomorrow the wolfers were pulling out. Farwell knew if he elected to stay behind he would be killed by the Indians for his part in this day’s doings. Moses Solomon was abandoning his post, too. His relations with the Assiniboine had never been good, and his position was every bit as precarious as his competitor’s. Some white man was going to have to pay for the thirty-odd corpses the coyotes were picking over. The two traders planned to haul what goods they could back to Fort Benton in Red River carts, burn the posts and any remaining supplies to keep them out of the hands of the Indians. Hardwick’s nasty temper had put paid to a winter’s work.

The Englishman’s boy sat on the floor beside the Eagle’s body, which was shrouded in a buffalo robe lashed tight with rawhide thongs. Across the room, crazy Scotty was squeezed in a corner, peering
terrified over the top of his writing book. The rest of the men diced on a blanket on the floor, sniggering like schoolboys at the sounds coming from the back room while Hardwick cracked wise. “Lord, listen to that old steam locomotive chug. Maybe you ought to go in there and throw a little coal in his boiler, Harper, so’s he can finally get where he’s going.”

The Englishman’s boy would get the invite next. He was considering on what his answer would be. When she was offered to Scotty and he shook his head no, Hardwick took offense. “Why the hell not?” he’d wanted to know.

The Scotchman had hugged his knees like they were his sainted mother, saying softly, “I am a gentleman. The definition of a gentleman is one who never causes pain.”

“Don’t you go high and mighty on me,” said Hardwick.

“I am a gentleman,” Scotty whispered back.

Hardwick slapped his face. “Get in there.”

“I am a gentleman.”

Each time he refused, Hardwick slapped his face again, repeating, “Get in there. Get in there.” In the end he even latched onto his collar and dragged the Scotchman scuffling on his hands and knees halfway across the floor. Only when the Scotchman began to weep was Hardwick satisfied and, laughing, let him creep back to his corner, where he huddled himself up sobbing, meek as an orphan.

The Englishman’s boy was of a mind to answer the same as the Scotchman, but then he weren’t crazy. His twin, the old cold black anger, was sitting up in him touchy as a ripe boil. Hot and sore as the lance gash stiffening on his ribs. Maybe he daren’t risk Hardwick prodding that boil with his dirty finger. Maybe he ought to take his walk to that back room, because if Hardwick laid a hand on him he wouldn’t go Gentle Jesus like the Scotchman had. There’d been enough blood spilled today. He’d had his sup of it.

The train in the back room was building speed. He’d heard a winter of huffing, puffing racket like that in the whorehouse in Sioux City, Iowa. Late November, cold and starved, he’d knocked at its door because it was such a fine and promising big house. Might be the rich
people biding there would let him chore for a hot meal. The woman who answered the door said, “What you want, Raggedy Andy?” He explained and she set him a job of work splitting stove-wood. That wintry morn the axe-handle bit his fingers like cold iron but he hung to it until he’d chopped her a goodly pile of butts and even shaved her a cache of kindling wood. Then she fed him buttered bread, creamed and sugared porridge. He’d swallowed three bowls of it.

That’s how he came to work in a knocking shop. For a place to sleep by the kitchen stove and three squares, he chopped wood, hauled washing water for the whores, curried and harnessed Beaky Sal’s driving team. Beaky Sal liked to tour around town in a cutter of an afternoon, to blow the smell of spunk out of her nostrils, she said. The only cash money the Englishman’s boy had ever touched was tips. Some fancy man might send him to fetch cigars, or a crew of river rats a bucket of beer from the saloon. If he moved sprightly they’d toss him a penny. Once he even run for a bag of peppermints for an old broadcloth pillar of respectability afraid to go home to his wife’s roast-pork supper with the smell of sin on his breath.

One thing he could testify, if whores had hearts of gold they was only gilt and flaked easy. Beaky Sal’s girls was mostly German whores, and they fought day and night, screeching Dutchy talk until he believed there was a rusty file running to and fro in his ears. Their line of work made them too free and easy in their manners to his taste; some would lift their shifts and squat on the chamber pot when he was sweeping their room.

No, he hadn’t found no gold there excepting Selena. Her daddy had sold her to Beaky Sal for twenty dollars when she was but a child of twelve and he was passing through Sioux City, bound for the Montana gold fields. He was a widow man and Selena only baggage slowing him in the race to fortune. He might have kept her, he said, but she was hard of hearing and that was a trial – at his age shouting wore him down.

Selena was skinny as a barked rail, but Beaky Sal figured if she fattened her she could charge the boys a premium for something young and fresh. But Selena didn’t fill out and the boys preferred the fat,
red, German whores because they would play-act jolly and the best Selena could manage was to look like-an undertaker’s wife. The boys said she made their peckers droop like wet wash hanging on a rainy day. So Beaky Sal turned her into a whorehouse drudge, boiling sheets and slopping chamber pots. All the whores seemed to think she was their own personal slavey; they’d squawk for this and that, pinch her and cuff her for any mistake she made, sometimes just out of pure cussedness. One afternoon, a Kentucky whore who called herself Beulah Belle started pulling Selena’s hair in the kitchen because the washing water wasn’t hot enough for her liking. When she was at it, he’d come in with an armful of stove-wood, dropped it in the box and kicked Beulah Belle square in the arse.

Word got around he could kick like a Missouri mule and so the whores let up on Selena some. He supposed that’s why she went sweet on him. That and the candies and buttons. She was such a poor and winsome gal he couldn’t but help feel sorry for her. Sometimes when he’d got a tip, he’d buy her a pennyworth of hard candy. He knew she had a sugar mouth. Beaky Sal was always slapping her silly for putting her fingers in the sugar bowl.

Selena weren’t like him. Every bit of hardness he’d ever been handed, he’d put on the back shelf and stored. But hardness seemed to pass through her like light through a windowpane. She didn’t hold a particle of the anger he held. Not a particle. She stored sugar like he stored hate, let the sweetness out bit by bit. Her mouth tasted sweet. She didn’t favour you with a smile but seldom, but it was all the sweeter for it. Not one of them broad, false, whorey smiles, just a small and gentle and knowing one. She knew. By Christ, she knew.

He might yet be in that whorehouse if the Englishman Dawe hadn’t hired him out of it. He’d been setting on the stoop sharpening Beaky Sal’s butcher-knives when the Englishman pulled up in full daylight, arrayed in all his finery, bent on some fun with a sporting woman. He’d stopped at the step on his way in, picked up one of the knives, tested it on the ball of his thumb.

His daddy had said nobody could edge a knife like him. Once he’d whetted a blade you could split a curly hair with it, follow every kink
and twist top to bottom. Dawe asked him if he could skin. Skin a grasshopper, he told the Englishman. The Englishman said he was going west to hunt the buffalo, bear and deer and goat, mountain lion and mountain sheep. He was going to carry them skins back with him to old England and for that he wanted a prime skinner and somebody to tote his guns. Gun-bearer he called it. They would have adventures, he said. The pay was ample.

So the Englishman’s boy signed on with him. He promised Selena he’d be back for her, back with his pockets full of English gold. She’d have a new dress to sew her buttons on. She’d eat white bread and honey, drink lemonade. He’d carry her out of this place.

He took her for a walk so’s he could shout it to her.

“When?” she said. “When?”

“Ever so soon as my pockets are full of English gold.”

The way things had fallen out, he knew he weren’t going to make it back.

John Duval came out of the back room, settling his suspenders. Hardwick hollered, “All goods satisfactory or money back!”

“I ain’t complaining,” said Duval, strutting to the whisky like a turkey cock.

“Well,” said Hardwick, “age before beauty. Now it’s the youngster’s turn. Nothing a youngster likes better than a pony ride.” They all laughed. “Look at him over there, stiff as a hoe-handle.” They all looked. The Englishman’s boy got to his feet. They followed him with their eyes to the back room, watched him push aside the blanket, go in.

A guttering tallow candle threw the only light. The naked girl lay sprawled on her belly on a pallet on the floor, her face buried in the blankets. She didn’t move, not even to lift her head to see who or what had walked into the room. The place was empty except for a stool kicked over on its side. The Englishman’s boy picked it up and sat down on it.

The blue-black hair spread on her shoulders. The soft hollow of the small of her back, the curve of her buttocks had their effect on
him. He wished she would make some effort to cover herself, but she lay like a dead one. She weren’t though. He could see her rib cage rise and fall like the breast of a dove.

He sat for a short spell and then, so his voice wouldn’t carry to the men outside, said softly, “I ain’t intending you no hurt. I’ll just stop quiet here a short piece.” No sooner was it delivered than his explanation made him feel a fool, talking English to a squaw girl who couldn’t understand. She didn’t stir to his voice, lay like she was deaf as Selena.

He didn’t know where to put his eyes, that slim coppery red body roused him something shameful. Glancing around the room, he located her clothes bundled in a corner. He stole carefully over, picked them up. Once they were in his hands he knew it was a mistake, because he dare not go near her to give them to her. He sat back down on the stool and untwisted the dress in his lap.

Five pretty buttons he’d bought Selena for her dress. Shell buttons shining rainbowy. Twisted them up in a scrap of paper found laying in the road, so’s to give her the surprise of opening it.