Cry of the Hawk (50 page)

The old mountain man turned for a moment, reaching out to snag Hook’s coat and pull him along. “C’mon, dammit.”

“Shell Woman!” Shad cried again in Cheyenne as the two white men trotted through the confusion. Man and woman, child and old one alike turned in amazement to watch the two white men zigzagging through their newly claimed camping ground heaped with the scattered lodge skins and parfleches and bundles of private riches.

A few yards ahead, he watched a woman lift her head, then turn fully around with a jerk. Surely it was Toote. She reached out to tap the person beside her, who bent over at the bundles atop the travois they had just dropped from a weary pony. The second woman stood almost a full head taller than Toote, who began running, full speed toward her husband.

“Rising Fire!” she called out in English, her arms opening as they collided in a swirl of snow.

Surely that must be the daughter, Jonah figured, watching the second, taller woman hurry forward now, pushing back her wolf-hide hat that caped her shoulders above the blanket capote. He could claim to have seen only her back of a time, and not much of that really, when she went stalking off in anger at her mother and white father months gone the way of spring and summer and autumn now.

The three embraced, the women bouncing on the toes of their buffalo-hide winter moccasins, snow swirling up their blanket-wrapped calves. Shad glanced over his shoulder, finding Hook standing there.

“C’mere, Jonah. You remember Toote,” Sweete said as the woman nodded. “And this is my daughter. You see’d her before—but never met proper. Her name’s Pipe Woman.”

Only then did she raise her eyes to him, capturing his attention with their almond luster. Then looked away, glancing up at her father. Asking something quietly in Cheyenne.

“Jonah Hook,” Sweete told her.

She looked at the tall, rail-thin white man again for but a moment. Only as long as it took her to smile and say, “Jo-naw. Jo-naw Hoo-oucks.”

This was the
reason she did not like most white men.

They pawed at her with their eyes. Some of them lunged close enough that she smelled their stinking breath, the stench of their unwashed bodies. Young warriors bathed frequently. Young, arrogant white men did not.

By now Pipe Woman was old enough to know what the white men wanted with her. This would be her twenty-first winter. Long ago she had come to understand what men and women meant to one another beneath a buffalo robe, when their hands ran up and down one another’s bodies, tasting, licking, kissing, feeling, sweating in rhythm with each other.

She had grown up sneaking looks at her parents across the fire pit whenever her white father returned to the lodge of her full-blood Cheyenne mother. And their union had often filled her with confusion: as much as she hated her white blood, she loved her father and all he had meant to not only Shell Woman, but to his daughter as well. He was the only white man she had ever tolerated.

Many looked at her with undisguised lust in their eyes, licking their lips, lurking close with the smell of whiskey strong about them, their bloodstained, greasy wool-and-leather britches straining beneath the rigid hardness of their flesh as they tried rubbing against her. So it was that in young womanhood Pipe Woman had learned where first to strike a man whose hands she did not want mauling her breasts or pinching her bottom. One swift, sure blow to that swollen flesh that a man ofttimes let rule him.

More than once Pipe Woman had had to fight men off. She did not understand this power of her beauty yet. As much as her mother and father told her, still she did not fully realize the power it held over men, both her own, and the white man.

This stinking gathering place was filled with them. Soldiers in their dirty, mud-crusted uniforms soaked with melting snow. Unwashed civilians in their unwashed clothing, smelling of old fires and stale tobacco and meals spilled and smeared and forgotten. Both kinds seated at the small tables in this dingy, smoke-filled room where the walls themselves reeked of whiskey and worse.

Again Pipe Woman wondered why it was that a man who came equipped so well for peeing did not take the trouble to walk outside of such places as these and pee on the ground. Instead, she remained mystified, so many of these white men chose to pee where they stood, in the same room where they smoked and drank, and traded.

That’s why she was here. Her mother had sent her to the sutler’s for some hard candy. Sweete had brought coffee, but had been unable to find any hard candy for Toote along the trail the three men had ridden northwest from Fort Larned. It was a special craving Shell Woman suffered, from the time she was a child and experienced her first taste of hard candy given her by a trader on the upper Missouri River. From that moment, she was hooked something fierce.

So it was this third afternoon since the arrival of the women at Laramie that Shad had come down to the post with Pipe Woman and Jonah Hook. The men turned off to see the peace-talkers, and Pipe Woman was sent on to the post sutler’s place, to buy Shell Woman’s hard candy before the three of them returned to the Cheyenne camp where Toote was involved with a special supper: elk loin and marrow bones and fry-bread.

“Ain’t you a pretty little thing.”

Pipe Woman turned away from the man as he loomed toward her out of the dingy, smoky haze. The smell of him turned her stomach. And staring at the stinking hole in his face made her all the sicker.

She stood her place at the counter, waiting for the clerk to finish with a soldier.

The foul one came slowly around to her other side, his eyes moving down, then up her body.

“I’ll bet you know how to make a man mighty happy, don’t you, squaw?”

She did not understand all the words he said. There was some English she knew, learned from her father. Yet the meaning of the words spoken by this smelly man got across to her all the same. Pipe Woman refused to look at him.

“Bet that body of yours under that coat is all soft and warm and willing to let a good man show you just how he can make you happy too, little squaw.”

She glanced over at the side of the room where the tables and chairs sat—that part of this place given over to the white men who drank whiskey and became mad from it. They were, by and large, quiet and attentive at this moment. Watching her. Watching him too.

She looked in the other direction. The clerk nervously continued helping the young soldier. He wanted no trouble, and was doing everything he could to ignore her problem.

Then his dirty hand was on her arm, at her elbow. She stared down at the dark crescents beneath the long, cracked fingernails. Pipe Woman turned to face him as her right hand shot up, slapping him full force. The noise of that flesh against flesh weighed heavy in the smelly room where the white man drank himself crazy.

But as quickly her left arm was hurting—at both the elbow and the shoulder.

The man with the stinking breath had twisted and spun her about, pinning her arm behind her, raising it as she bent over, yelping as the stabbing pain took her breath away. His left hand now grabbed her hair at the crown of her head, yanking back slowly. He showed pleasure at the hurt he was causing her.

“Shit, fellas,” he said near her ear, “I’m new in your country here. But it sure looks like these squaws out in these parts like to play with a man just the way the squaws do back down to the Territories.”

“These are Sioux, and Cheyenne Injuns out here, mister,” one of the others said, all but his voice obscured by the murky, smoky haze. She did not know what face spoke. The pain was so great in her shoulder now that she saw stars blink before her eyes.

“What the hell that mean?” asked her tormentor.

“Just figured you’d wanna know these Injuns don’t just lay down for a white man out here the way they maybe done for you down in the Territories.”

“What you trying to say, mister?”

“Nothing,” replied the voice quietly.

“Just so you know,” her attacker said, dragging Pipe Woman away from the counter toward the smoky part of the room, “them squaws back down there don’t always lay down and spread their legs just ’cause a white man wants to rut on ’em.” He smiled wickedly. “You just gotta convince ’em how bad they want what you got to give ’em!”

He took his hand from her hair and reached around to tear open the flaps of her capote, the colorful woven sash falling to the floor at her feet. His long-nailed fingers dug at her firm breasts. With her heels, Pipe Woman tried kicking backward at his shins. He yanked upward on her arm, making her cry out, and dug his fingers into her breast brutally. So hard the first tears came to her eyes. Pipe Woman cursed those tears for betraying her.

“I’m used to taking a squaw where I want her,” the man said.

“Take her outside,” someone suggested. “Least do that.”

“All right,” he hissed at her ear, breathing heavily behind it. “Yeah, that’s the least I can do for you fellas. Since I am new out here. I’ll call you when I’m done—and any the rest of you can have what’s left when I am.”

She could feel him now, that rigid hardness pressing in behind her, near the tops of her buttocks. He was a tall man, and younger than her father.

He lifted her off her feet, starting her backward for the door when a sudden blast of cold air told Pipe Woman that someone else had come in.

“Say you! Hold that door open, mister!” her tormentor called out.

He shuffled her toward the cold draft that said he was drawing her closer to the door.

“Pipe Woman?”

Thinking she recognized the voice, the young woman was only sure when her attacker turned slowly.

“You know this squaw, mister?”

“Yeah,” answered Jonah Hook, taking his eyes off her face and looking into the man’s.

“She any good?” he rasped, then laughed humorlessly.

“Doubt she’s been with a man at all.”

She could feel his entire body tense at that. “How you so sure?”

“Cheyenne women like that. Go ’head. Put your hand down there between her legs. Yeah, down ’round her waist. Feel that rope. That’s a belt she’ll cut off for the man she’ll marry.”

Pipe Woman could feel the man’s breathing go shallow, hard and shallow. He was growing more than excited.

“She’s a goddamned virgin!” he said greedily. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

Hook put out his empty hand. “I guess I didn’t get it across to you. She ain’t for you to use.”

The stranger stopped shoving her toward the door, his attention on Hook. “Where you from, Reb? You one of them poor white trash we whipped in the war?”

“You didn’t whip me, mister. I’m still standing here—waiting for your yellow-bellied kind to show me how you fight a man. You’re pretty tough with a woman. But your kind gets all yellow and runs when you gotta fight a man.”

“I figure I’ll take care of you—then have my fun with the squaw here.”

“Your kind never learned any manners around a woman, did you, Yankee trash?”

“This red slut ain’t no woman. She’s a goddamned Injun whore—and I’m just lucky enough to be her first man. Now—if you know what’s better for you, why don’t you just wait in line when I’m done, you ugly Gentile.”

“Gentile,” Hook repeated. “Seems I remember some folks calling me that before.”

“Chances are—you rubbed up against Mormons. And come out losing against the power of God. Like I said, Reb—I’ll whip you good tonight and leave you for the dogs to chew on come morning.”

“You’re a lot of talk with a Injun girl between us, Mormon,” Hook said.

Pipe Woman watched Hook pull open his coat, the big handle of his pistol sticking out now, looking huge like a deer hoof.

Her attacker was silent for a few moments, breathing hard, probably considering. Then he shoved her forward a step, closer to Hook.

“Something about you bothers me, mister.”

“Maybe because I come to hate Mormons.”

The man shook his head. “Naw—it’s them eyes of yours. Swear I seen eyes like that before. Yeah—almost like you could be kin to some other poor Secesh trash we burned out down in Missouri.”

She watched Hook swallow hard, his eyes narrowing as he asked, “Missouri?”

“You know the place, do you? Well, let me tell you about this hardscrabble farm we come on,” he hissed. “Folks there without no man to take care of ’em. Years back. Kids all got the same yellow eyes like yours, mister. Especially the girl. What’s she now? Maybe ten—eleven years old. Just about prime for rutting, don’t you think?”

“Maybe you ought’n hold your tongue, before you get it cut out of your throat.”

“Oh, you is it? It’s you gonna do the cutting? I don’t think so. So let me tell you we took that girl and her mama and two young boys and—”

“Let the Injun girl go now.” Hook breathed out slowly.

“You want her for yourself, mister?”

“I want to know where you got my daughter and wife. Then … I’m going to kill you.”

He laughed, like the quick, high bleet of a sheep. “You better be real good with that hog-leg you got stuck in your belt—because I’m quick.”

“Let the girl go now.”

“Yeah,” he breathed heavily, almost in a curse of a whisper. “I’ll let her go.”

His hand came away from her breast, with a sudden rush of blood to her flesh after so long beneath his clawing grip. Then he released her wrist and her arm fell, limp, tingling with the rush of circulation returned to its entire length.

“G’won now, Pipe Woman.”

“Nice name,” the Mormon said, pulling apart the flaps of his coat.

“Take it outside!” yelled someone from behind Hook.

“Go now, Pipe Woman!” Hook repeated, urgently, motioning toward the open door where the snow swirled.

She saw that Hook never took his eyes off the one who had grabbed her, so she was not sure he would know she had left. Only when she stepped through the doorway into the darkness filled with cold, icy, dancing snow … and slammed the door behind her.

She was running, running through the deep snow, sprinting through the patches of darkness and lamplit brightness—heading back to her mother’s lodge, breathless, hurting, scared—

—when she heard the gunshots throb profanely into that winter night, behind her.