The Last Crossing (26 page)

“You will act as Mr. Straw’s corner?”

I nod.

“Mr. Ayto will second me. I propose my brother Charles as timekeeper. Are you agreeable?”

“No objections.”

Charles says, “I want no part of this ridiculous farce.”

Custis looks him straight in the eye. “Keep the time, Mr. Gaunt.” Charles hesitates, then nods, giving way to Custis’s forceful stare.

“Strip your man.” The Captain turns on his heel and walks to his place with Ayto.

I grab Custis by the arm and lead him out of their earshot, talking fast. “The Captain’s been schooled in the game. It’s why I asked for London Prize Rules. Next thing to a barroom brawl. Everything allowed but kicking, biting, and head-butting. He looks to be fast on his feet, so catch hold of him anywheres you can, clamp to him, pick him up and throw him to the ground. Make sure you land on top of him. Land heavy. You might stove in a couple of ribs.” I start unbuttoning Custis’s shirt, jerk it off him. He peers down at himself and folds his arms over his chest, covering up. He don’t want Lucy Stoveall to see him naked, paunch and baby titties, white and wobbly. Old. I smack his arms to bring him back to business, to make him listen. “Hit with the back of your hand so as not to break a knuckle. Don’t chase him, not with them gimpy legs of yours. If you’re catching it bad, drop to your knee. Man goes down, round is over, and you got thirty seconds to recover.” Custis gives me a look that says he won’t take a knee. I grab the hairs on the nape of his neck and pull hard so he remembers. “Not a one of the best of the old pugs didn’t go to his knee to save himself. No shame, Custis. Remember. Go down.”

“You figure him to whip me, don’t you, Aloysius?” he asks. Custis has read my face. If the Captain were trained by a disciple of Daniel Mendoza, Custis’s prospects ain’t good. But I hold my peace. You don’t tell a man he’s going to take a beating just before he sets foot in the ring, it disheartens him. “You’ll do fine – if you catch hold of him,” I say.

“Well, I been whipped before,” Custis sighs gloomily.

The Captain’s eager to start, flinging his arms impatient back and forth across his chest. “Is your man ready, Mr. Dooley? Or does he care to reconsider and make an apology?”

“Well?” I ask Custis. “I’d think about saying I were sorry. No harm in it.”

Custis clenches his teeth, that’s his answer. I throw my jacket to the ground. “Scratch,” I say, pointing to it. “Gentlemen, one foot to the coat and bear up.” Charles holds a pocket watch open, Lucy Stoveall huddles beside him. Grunewald and Barker lean forward and peer. Ayto shouts, “Slash him, Captain!”

I signal to Charles. “First round!” he cries, and I hurry to Custis’s corner.

It’s bad. Gaunt is quick and light on his feet as a waterwalker bug. He raps Custis’s face like a door, short, sharp jabs, and retreats. He been taught well, lets Custis come to him and catches him coming, then dances aside, and smacks him on the kidneys when he blunders by.

“Stand ground!” I shout to Custis. “Don’t let him draw you!” Custis takes heed, plants himself. The Captain circles him, cocking his eye at the red splotches he’s painted on Custis’s face. Custis snatches for a handful of hair, but comes up empty.

Ayto hoots and laughs. Grunewald and Barker join in. Gaunt bores away, the smack of his fists on Custis’s face is like a butcher slapping steaks on a counter. He drops Custis straight to the dirt and stands astride him.

“Give him room, Gaunt! Back to your damn corner! End of round!” I shout.

Custis’s sitting dazed on the ground, a bad cut over his right eye streaming blood. The Captain points. “First claret,” he says with a laugh, and saunters back to his corner. Ayto claps his back and congratulates him. I heave Custis to his feet. He’s groggy, pouring blood. I pinch the cut as tight as I can. “Listen to me, the next time he shoots a facer at you, hit him with your wrist bone on the inside of his arm, just above the elbow. Like this.” I show him how to chop Gaunt. “You might be able to break his arm and end this thing.”

Custis ain’t paying me no mind. He’s staring at Lucy Stoveall and she’s staring back. The flowers she picked lie in a bright heap at her feet. Custis’s right eye’s juicy and puffy, already squeezing shut, but I reckon he owns a even more tender spot. Straw don’t like to be shamed, lose his dignity, and anybody can read Lucy Stoveall’s thoughts from the look on her face. She’s thinking, Why, you poor old stubborn fool.

“Next time the Captain pastes you, go down and stay down. Don’t come to scratch.”

“No,” he says, so quiet I can scarce hear him.

Charles Gaunt calls out, “Second round!” He don’t look happy saying it.

“Go down and stay down,” I remind Custis.

This time, the Captain toys with Custis a good five minutes, playing all the tricks, drumming Custis’s ribs to make him tuck his arms, then up to his face, twisting punches so as to split Custis’s skin on the eye sockets. He slashes him like he would with a razor, mashes his viz to a swimming, bloody bog. Then the Englishman steps back, his work pure pleasure to him, measuring Custis for the next shot. When it comes, a rattling blow to the head with his hip behind it, Custis’s legs fold. Down he sinks, slow and dreamy to his knees, arms sagged at his sides. I got to lead him, half-blind, off the field. “We’re throwing in the towel,” I say. “Enough’s enough.”

Custis sucks wind like a rotten-lunged consumptive, can’t catch his breath. Lucy calls out to me, waving her arm. “Stop him! Don’t let him go on!” Custis’s head snaps up at the sound of her voice. He wipes his bloody eye with his forearm and lurches up. The Captain’s waiting with his foot on scratch. Charles calls a new round in a faint voice. “We ain’t answering!” I shout, holding Custis by the belt, but he tears himself loose and sways towards the Captain.

They’re face to face, fists milling when Custis rushes the Captain surprising sudden, snatches hold of the Englishman’s windpipe. With the Captain caught fast in his fist, Custis’s legs churn, he leans all his weight behind his stiff arm and ploughs him backwards. Hurly-burly he drives the Captain, faster and faster, until the Captain smacks into one of the Conestogas so punishing hard crates crash and the wagon rocks on its wheels.

The charge has near done Custis in. He’s just laying there against the Captain, gulping air, dead weight pressing the Englishman to the wagon box, fingers still knotted on his throat. The Captain’s face is one big mulberry birthmark, stringy veins popping out on his forehead. He plucks at Custis’s fingers, trying to pry his hand off.

Custis raises his head from the Englishman’s breastbone and clubs him on the temple with his fist. Once, twice, three, four times.

Someone hollers, “Foul! Foul!” and out the corner of my eye, I see Ayto rushing up behind Custis, a stick of firewood in his hand. He
lays into the back of Custis’s legs with it like he was chopping a tree. Down Custis goes.

I run for Ayto, but Grunewald and Barker come between us. They’re slung all over me, dragging me back. Ayto’s still bellowing, “A foul! He fouled the Captain! Everybody saw!”

“Hold and hit is fair! London Rules! You cowardly, backstabbing son of a bitch!” I holler.

The Captain is doubled up hacking, hand to his windpipe. I look about for Custis and spot him on his hands and knees, crawling towards my jacket on the ground.

Custis Straw heading for scratch.

Maybe because I’ve gone so still, eyes following him, they all turn and look. Custis is raising himself upright, bit by bit, gingerly. He wobbles, but he stands.

“Scratch,” he says.

Nobody stirs. Not Ayto, not Grunewald, not Charles, not Lucy. Barker’s still got his arms wrapped about me. The Captain lifts his head slowly, hand pressed to his throat.

“Scratch!” Custis repeats. Good and loud.

But Lucy Stoveall’s louder. “Give it up, Mr. Straw!”

Barker looses his grip on me. The Captain takes his hand from his throat and starts to walk forward, cold and deliberate. Perfidious Albion, my Da used to call England.

I shout a warning. “Custis!” But the Captain is already on him swift and savage, crumples him with a hail of blows.

Then Lucy Stoveall is there between them, shrieking at the Englishman, “Are you blind! Step back! He’s had enough!” Custis fumbles up against her skirts and buries his face in them like he’s a child hiding from some terrible sight. Custis clings to her legs because there’s nothing else to cling to. “This is done! This is finished!” she screams.

“No,” Custis mumbles. “Scratch.”

“Mr. Straw, you’re finished.”

He lifts his bloody face up to her. “I’m not finished.”

I sail my hat into the ring. It lands with a crow hop. “The towel!” I shout. “We throw in the towel!”

Custis jerks away from Lucy, walks to my hat on his knees, flings it back at me. “Scratch,” he says.

He puts one hand on the ground to steady himself, tries to lift himself. He can’t. I run to him. “Aloysius?” he asks.

I bend down to him. “Yes, Custis, it’s Aloysius.”

He paws at my shoulder. “I can’t see you too well.”

I lift him to his feet, sling his arm over my shoulder. He’s walking peculiar, stepping high, like he fears a stalk of grass could trip him. “That was good of Lucy Stoveall. What she done. Taking my part,” he says, and faints dead away.

J
erry Potts forges into the night with fierce, hot determination. Ayto has shamed him, kicked him like a pot-licking dog. He must get far away from the sight of Ayto’s fat face so it doesn’t badger him into sending the man to smile up at a coffin lid.

Killing an American would bring him before a white judge and he wants no part of that. A year ago, two Blackfoot were murdered in Fort Benton and the law looked the other way. But when the Blackfoot took their revenge on Malcolm Clarke in the valley of the Prickly Pear, the army was called out, and Major Baker’s troop of cavalry fell on the village of Heavy Runner on the Marias. A hundred and seventy Blackfoot, most of them women and children, were put to sleep that January morning, smothered in burning teepees, shot and hacked to pieces. It did not matter that Heavy Runner was a friendly, had never harmed a white man. A price must be paid and the price was a hundred and seventy Blackfoot for one white man. Buckets of blood for a cupful.

It is a bad memory, but the worst part of it is Joe Kipps. Kipps, a Blackfoot half-breed like himself, scouting for the whites, leading Major Baker down on his mother’s people, sitting on his horse and never lifting a hand to stop the soldiers while they dyed the snow red with blood.

Is this what a half-breed must do now? Turn his back on one portion of himself? Sell himself to the strongest side? Take white
money and sniff a trail for them like a dog? He is finished with that.

What finally made up his mind to leave the English was the Captain’s sudden decision to abandon the route to the whisky posts and make for the Sand Hills. Barker had dropped an innocent remark about the country of the big dunes and the Captain had become all ears, full of questions, on fire to see the Sand Hills. The Captain and his brother had argued over this a long time, but in the end Addington Gaunt had got the last word as he always does. A short excursion of several days. What does it matter? he had said.

So let him find the dwelling place of the dead, the country of skeletons for himself. All the Captain thinks about is the book that Ayto is to write that will make the Englishman famous. Famous for what? Traipsing over a small piece of ground, his wagons stuffed with goods like a sutler’s store. What is the Captain’s journey compared to the one Bull’s Forehead made? Nothing.

Sixty years ago, the Blackfoot, hungry for horses, had gone on a raid far to the south, past the big Salt Lake, deep into unknown lands. They had no one to guide them, nothing to rely on but their wits and courage. Potts can see them travelling by night, crossing the territory of many Indian nations; fighting some, singing and feasting with others. For a year they had suffered much hardship and danger until they reached the place where the Spai’yu, the Dark White Men lived, and where it was rumoured there were many ponies. There in Spai’yu ksah’ku, they hit the Dark White Men hard, ran off many fat horses and mules. They had crossed a thousand miles for Spai’yu horses, and they had travelled back a thousand miles to bring them home. No one would ever write this story in a book, but that did not make it any less true. He and Dawson had seen with their own eyes weapons taken from the bodies of the dead Spai’yu, weapons that the Americans and English had never traded in the north, steel lance heads, a thin-bladed sword that bent in your hands, sprang back with a twang, that had beautiful flowers of gold decorating the blade. Dawson called this long knife a rapier, said it was made from the best steel the white men could forge, a steel called Toledo. He said it proved Bull’s Forehead had reached Mexico.

Bull’s Forehead was an old blind man when he told them this story, but the many strange things he had encountered on his trip were still bright in his mind. The bitter Salt Lake, the Indians who lived like white men in houses made of clay, had impressed him deeply. What amazed Bull’s Forehead most were the caves he had seen high up on cliff faces where, long-ago, Indians lived the life of bank-swallows. Bull’s Forehead had said he did not know if those Indians could fly like birds, but he supposed they must have been able to.