The Sisters Brothers (22 page)
Read The Sisters Brothers Online
Authors: Patrick Dewitt
Which was that there were now a half-dozen Indians milling about the camp, rummaging our bags, inspecting the horses and donkeys, and generally searching through our possessions for anything of value they might keep for themselves. The moment I breached the tent an Indian holding a rifle gestured with the barrel that I should sit beside Charlie, and I did this. Neither my brother nor I were armed, our gun belts sitting coiled beneath our saddles on the ground, as was our habit when we were bivouacked. But even if Charlie had been armed I do not know that he would have pulled his pistol. He sat to the side, staring into the flames, casting the rare glance at our visitors but not wanting any part of them.
The bucket of gold sat between us, and I believe this might have gone undetected if Charlie had not attempted to hide it under his hat, which the Indian with the rifle saw and was made suspicious by. He crossed over and tossed the hat aside; his expression was unsmiling and remained so even when he discovered the bucket’s contents. But he found it interesting enough that he called for the others to abandon their investigations, and now they were all squatting around the fire and peering into the metal container. One of them began to laugh but the others did not like this and told him, if I am not mistaken, to be quiet. Another looked at me and addressed me brusquely; I thought he was asking where we had got all the gold. I pointed to the river and he stared at me contemptibly. They emptied the bucket, pouring out equal shares into calfskin bags until it was empty. After this they stood and discussed some serious matter or another, pointing at Charlie and me as they spoke. The Indian with the rifle entered into Warm’s tent and gasped. To think of it now, this seems most un-Indian-like, him gasping like that. But he really did do it. He gasped just like an old woman and all but fell out of the tent, his hand clamped over his mouth, his eyes wide with fright and scandal. Shooing his people backward, away from our camp and toward the river, he described what he had seen in the shelter, and they all turned and hurried off into the darkness. I found it odd they did not take our pistols or horses or lives, but it was likely they thought we had some manner of plague or leprosy. Or perhaps they decided the gold was treasure enough.
‘Warm’s dead,’ I told Charlie.
‘I am going to sleep,’ he said.
And do you know, this is just what he did do, too.
I put Warm into the ground in the morning, with no help from Charlie, though he was once again petulantly present for the burial itself. Warm’s lone bag was filled with his diaries and papers and I searched through these for the formula’s recipe but could not understand hardly any of what he had written down, this owing less to my ignorance of science and chemistry than to his penmanship, which was atrocious. Finally I gave up and rested the books atop his chest before filling him over with sand and earth. I made no speech this time, and decided I would not mark either one of the side-by-side graves, which I have since wished I had done, illustrating some connection between them as loyal friends, and also mentioning their accomplishments on the river. But I was feeling melancholic and obscurely hexed or obstructed and wanted badly to move on; and so the moment the grave was filled, Charlie and I mounted our horses and left, with the tent standing and fire still smoking. Looking back at the camp I thought, I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself. So that they would not starve to death I had untied Warm’s horse and the donkeys. The horse did not move but the donkeys followed after us. I fired a shot over their heads to scatter them and they ran downriver. They were naked, without any sign of ownership on them, and their stumpy legs swiveled back and forth so quickly and efficiently it did not look real to me.
We took a northwesterly route and arrived in Mayfield three days later. During all this time of riding, Charlie and I had little to say to each other, though when we spoke we were civil and not unfriendly about it. I believe he was wondering whom he might be for the rest of his life; and in a way I was wondering the same thing about myself. Reflecting on the last few days I had passed I told myself, If this was indeed my last bit of work, it is just as well to bow out in so dramatic a fashion. I decided I would pay my mother a visit just as soon as I was able, if she was in fact still alive; and I had many invented, conciliatory conversations with her, each of these ending with when she reached her crooked arm over my neck, kissing me above the line of my beard beneath the eye. The thought of this made me tranquil, and the ride to Mayfield, despite our recent hardships, was as pleasant as could be expected. At what was roughly the halfway point I said to Charlie, ‘Your left hand is still faster than most men’s right.’
‘Most isn’t all,’ he answered, and we returned to silence.
My thoughts about the Indians stealing the gold were complicated. It seemed appropriate in some way that we should not have it—had I not felt a sense of remorse when I hefted that bucket? But I doubt I would have been able to pontificate with such detachment if there was not the pile of gold waiting for us under the stove in Mayfield, a sum that represented for me the realization of all I wanted to be changed in my life. So when I smelt smoke on the wind a mile or two outside of town, I was inhabited by the most powerful type of dread and apprehension. In the time it took Charlie and I to get to the hotel, my feelings pushed past worry and on to anger, which gave way to miserable acceptance. The hotel was burned to the ground, as were the surrounding buildings; in the rubble I spied the potbellied stove, and it was toppled. I stepped through the ash and blackened timber, knowing our treasure was gone, and when I found it to be unrectifiably so I turned back to Charlie, sitting with hunched shoulders on Nimble in the middle of the sun-blanched road. ‘Nothing,’ I called.
‘Drink,’ he called back, which was just as sane and thoughtful a reply as I had ever heard him speak. But with the hotel gone there
was
nowhere to get a drink, or nowhere to sit and become drunk, and we were forced to buy a bottle of brandy from the chemist’s and to empty this in the road like common rascals.
We sat on the walkway across from the remains of the hotel and stared at it. The fire had gone out days before but smoke still rose up here and there in wriggling ghost-snakes. When the bottle was half gone, Charlie said, ‘Do you think Mayfield did it?’
‘Who else?’
‘He must not have left at all, but hidden himself away, waiting for us to go. I suppose he got the last laugh then.’ I admitted he had and Charlie said, ‘I wonder where your girl is.’
‘I had not thought of it.’ For an instant I was surprised by this, then not.
A person appeared down the road and I recognized him as the weeping man. He was leading his horse, tears streaming down his face, as usual. He did not see us or take notice of us; he was speaking lowly to himself, in a state of catatonic devastation, and I found myself intensely annoyed by him. I picked up a rock and threw it. This glanced off his shoulder, and he looked at me. ‘Get away from here!’ I said. I do not know why I disliked him so. It was as though I were chasing a crow from a corpse. Well, I was drunk. The weeping man continued on with his miserable voyage. ‘I don’t know what to do next,’ I admitted to Charlie.
‘Best not to think of it just now,’ he counseled. And then, bemusedly: ‘Would you look at this? It is my own true love.’ It was his whore approaching. ‘Hello, what’s-your-name,’ he said happily. She stood before us looking damp and raw and red-eyed, the edges of her dress dirtied, her hands trembling. She drew back her arm and threw something at my face. It was the hundred dollars I had left her to give to the bookkeeper. Looking down at the money on the ground, I began to laugh, though I knew it meant the bookkeeper had died. I thought, It must not have been that I loved the bookkeeper, but that I loved the idea of her loving me, and the idea of not being alone. At any rate there was nothing in my heart like sorrow, and I peered up at the whore and said to her pitiful face, ‘And so what about that?’ She spit and walked away and I picked the coins up from the ground. I gave Charlie fifty dollars and he dropped it into his boot, his pinkie arched elegantly skyward. I dropped mine into my boot as well, and we both laughed as though this were the pinnacle of modern comedy.
We were sitting fully in the dirt now, and the bottle was nearly empty. I think we would have passed out and slept in the road but Charlie’s whore had gone and gathered all the other whores, who presently stood over us in a pack, looking down with scandal and outrage. With Mayfield and then the hotel gone, they were all of them fallen on hard times, with perfume no longer trailing over their heads, their dresses no longer crisp and folded stiff with starch. They started in on Charlie and me, saying unkind things about our characters.
‘What a pair.’
‘Look at them on the ground like that.’
‘Look at the gut on the one.’
‘Other one’s hurt his hand, looks like.’
‘No more killing stable boys for him.’
Over the din, Charlie asked me confusedly, ‘What are they so upset about?’
‘We chased away the boss man, remember?’ To the whores I explained, ‘But we didn’t burn the hotel down, Mayfield did. At least I think it was him. But I am sure it wasn’t us.’ This only served to make them angrier, however.
‘Don’t you talk about Mayfield!’
‘Mayfield wasn’t so bad!’
‘He paid us, didn’t he?’
‘He gave us rooms, didn’t he?’
‘He was a bastard, but he wasn’t half the bastard as you two.’
‘You two are the real bastards.’
‘The genuine article, that’s the truth all right.’
‘What should we do with these bastards?’
‘These bastards.’
‘Let’s get them!’
Now they came upon us, overpowering and pinning us to the ground. Through the wall of bodies I could hear Charlie laughing, and I also found this humorous at the start, but my amusement gave way to upset when I found myself unable to move, and as I watched the darting hands of the whores empty my pockets of all my money. I began then, and so did Charlie start to struggle and berate the whores, but it seemed the more we fought the stronger they became. When I heard Charlie scream out in pain I felt truly panicked—his whore was grinding her heel into his injured hand—and I bit the whore closest to me through her dress, sinking my teeth into her rank and ample belly. She became enraged by this, removing my pistol from its holster and pointing it at my skull above the brow. Now I lay completely still and silent, and the look of hatred was so vigorous in her eyes I was expecting at any moment to witness that bright white light from the deep black pit of the gun barrel. But this never came, and the whores, having had enough, wordlessly climbed off and left us, taking with them our pistols and cash, save for the hundred dollars we had dropped in our boots, where they luckily had not thought to look.
I passed out in the dirt and sun in the half-dead town of Mayfield. When I awoke it was dusk and the peculiar girl from my prior visit was standing before me. She had a new dress on, and her hair was just-cleaned and wrapped in a fat red bow. Her hands were clasped daintily to her chest and there was an expectant air of tension about her. She was not looking at me but to my side, at Charlie. ‘It’s you,’ I said. She made a quieting gesture, then pointed to my brother, who was holding a water-filled mason jar. At the bottom of this was a swirling dust devil of black granules and I saw that the girl’s knuckles were flecked in the poison, as before; when Charlie brought the jar to his lips I knocked it away from his hand. The jar did not break but landed in a pit of mud. The water drained away and the girl made a sullen expression at me. ‘Why did you do that?’
I said, ‘I have wanted to talk with you, about what you told me before.’
Staring distractedly at the jar, she said, ‘About
what
did I tell you before?’
‘You said I was a protected man, do you recall it?’
‘I recall it.’
‘Can you tell me, please, am I protected still?’
She watched me, and I knew she knew the answer but she did not speak.
‘To what degree am I protected?’ I persisted. ‘Will it always be so?
She opened her mouth and closed it. She shook her head. ‘I will not tell you.’ Her dress hem spun in a wheel as she turned and retreated. I searched around for a rock to throw at her but there were none within reaching distance. Charlie was still watching the jar, propped in the mud. ‘I am damned thirsty,’ he said.
‘She wished to kill you dead,’ I told him.
‘What, her?’
‘I saw her poison a dog before.’
‘The pretty little thing. Why in the world would she do that?’
‘Just for the evil joy of it, is all I can think.’
Charlie squinted at the purpling sky. He lay back his head and closed his eyes and said, ‘Well, world?’ Then he laughed. A minute or two passed, and he was sleeping.
END INTERMISSION II
Charlie had his hand cut off by a doctor in Jacksonville. His pain by this time had lessened but the flesh had begun to rot and there was nothing else but to remove it. The doctor, named Crane, was an older man, though alert and steady; he wore a rose in his lapel and from the start I had faith in him as a person of principles. When I spoke of my and Charlie’s financial straits, for example, he waved away my comment as though the notion of receiving a wage was little more than an afterthought. There was an incident when Charlie produced a bottle of brandy, saying he wished to get drunk before the procedure, which the doctor was against, explaining that the alcohol would cause excessive bleeding. But Charlie said this made no difference, he would have his way and nothing in the world would stop him. At last I took Crane aside and told him to give Charlie the anesthetic without telling him what it was. He saw the wisdom in my plan, and after successfully sedating my brother everything went as well as such a thing can. The operation took place in the candlelit parlor of Crane’s own home.
The rotting had crept beyond the wrist and Crane made his cut halfway up the forearm with a long-bladed saw manufactured, he said, specifically for severing bone. His forehead was shining with perspiration when he was through and the blade of the saw, when he accidentally touched it afterward, was hot enough that it burned him. He had laid out a bucket for the hand and wrist to drop into but his aim or placement was off and it landed on the floor. He could not be bothered to retrieve this, busy as he was caring for what remained of Charlie, and I crossed over and lifted it myself. It was surprisingly light; blood dripped freely from the open end and I held this over the bucket, gripping it by the wrist. My touching Charlie’s arm like this would not ever have happened when it was attached, and as such I blushed from the foreignness of it. I found myself running my thumb over the coarse black hairs. I felt very close to Charlie when I did this. I placed the hand and wrist standing upright in the bucket and removed this from the room, for I did not want him to see it whenever he awoke. After the surgery he lay on a tall cot in the center of the parlor, bandaged and drugged, and Crane encouraged me to take in the air, saying it would be many hours before Charlie was conscious again. I thanked him and left his home, walking to the far edge of town, to the restaurant I had visited on the way to San Francisco. I sat at the same table as before and was received by the same waiter, who recognized me, and asked in an ironic voice if I had returned for another meal of carrots and stalks. But after witnessing the operation, and with dried droplets of my brother’s blood decorating my pant legs, I was not hungry in the least, and asked only for a glass of ale. ‘You have given up food entirely then?’ he said, snuffling into his mustache. I found myself offended at his tone and told him, ‘My name is Eli Sisters, you son of a whore, and I will kill you dead where you stand if you don’t hurry up and serve me what I asked for.’ This brought the waiter’s gawking and leering to an end, and he was cautious and respectful afterward, his hand atremble as he placed the glass of ale before me. It was out of character for me to lash out in so common and vulgar a way as this; later, as I walked away from the restaurant, I thought, I must relearn calmness and peacefulness. I thought, I am going to rest my body for one full year! Here was my decision, and one that I am happy to say I eventually realized, one that I thoroughly relished and basked in: Twelve months of resting and thinking and becoming placid and serene. But before this dream-life might come to pass, I knew, there was one last bit of business I would have to see through, and which I would see through on my own.