Heaven and Hell (92 page)

He said it with the officer's tone and the officer's challenging stare. Magee fumed. Gray Owl gazed at the bright water, full of foreboding.

He

won't know me-, Charles thought as he stalked along the creek bank. Not with this beard down to my belly. He was thinking of Gus but it applied equally to Elkanah Bent. He couldn't imagine how Bent looked after ten years. It was immaterial. He just wanted to get the boy away safely. That was the most important issue, the boy.

The spring air was gentle as a woman's hand. It reminded him of similar days in Northern Virginia when hundreds of poor boys died in
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sunny meadows and glades. Those thoughts, and what Gray Owl said about Gus being marked, put a bitter taint on his anxiety.

He saw the post oaks ahead. Beyond them he glimpsed a structure of mud brick. Smoke drifted out of a chimney at one end, like a twist 582 HEAVEN AND HELL

of sea-island cotton pinned to the sky. Charles thought he heard a child's voice. His hand on the Spencer grew white.

He tried to purge himself of fear. Impossible. His heart lubbed so hard it sounded like an Indian drum in his ear. He knew he would probably have one chance, no more.

He crouched and peered from behind a post oak. He almost cried at the sight of his son seated on the ground doling corn kernels to the raccoon one at a time. The raccoon took a kernel in his forepaws and stood on his hind legs like a paunchy little man in a mask while he ate the kernel. Then he wobbled over to Gus for more. The boy fed him with absolutely no trace of pleasure on his sad, gruel-colored face.

Even from a distance Charles saw the scabbed-over cuts and the bruise around Gus's eye. The boy's feet were so filthy Charles almost thought he was wearing gray stockings. Gus sat in the dirt near the front door of the whiskey ranch. The door was closed.

Charles saw a handsome chestnut horse and two mules in the corral at the end of the building. He saw the outbuilding where the squaw had gotten the eggs, and he heard a hen flutter and cluck. The loudest sound was the gurgling of Vermilion Creek.

He almost couldn't move because of his worry that he'd make a mistake. He tried to forget the size of the stakes and look at the situation as some kind of abstract problem. It helped, a little. He counted five, and on the last count stepped from behind the post oaks into the open, where his son could see him.

Gus noticed him. His mouth flew open. Fearing he'd cry out, Charles put a hand to his lips to signal silence.

He could tell the boy didn't recognize him, a stranger popping up in the wilderness, beard and hair matted, eyes sunken. He held perfectly still.

Gus dribbled the remaining kernels on the ground but he made no sound.

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The raccoon loped forward and began to feast. Charles kept every sense tuned for other noises--a voice, a door's creak. He heard nothing but the water. He took three long strides toward his son, raised his hand, and motioned, a great hooking sweep toward his chest. Come here.

Gus stared, clearly anxious about the stranger now. Charles wanted to shout, tell him who he was. He didn't dare. He gestured again. And a third time.

Gus stood up.

Charles was jubilant. Then the boy began to back toward the building, keeping his eyes on the stranger.

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Oh God, he's scared. He still doesn't know me.

Gus sidestepped toward the closed door, ready to dart inside. Desperate, Charles crouched and laid his Spencer on the ground. He extended and spread his arms. The muscles were so tight he shook from shoulder to wrist.

Somehow the inviting outstretched arms reassured the boy. His face changed, showed a hesitant smile. He cocked his head slightly.

Charles said in a loud whisper, "Gus, it's Pa."

Wonder spread over the boy's face. He started to walk toward Charles.

The front door of the whiskey ranch banged open.

Bent was yawning as he stepped out. He wore an old plug hat and Constance Hazard's teardrop earring on his left ear. His claw-hammer coat shone as though grease had been spread on it with a knife. He was older, paunchier, with seams in his face, and scraggly eyebrows, and thick uncombed hair hiding the back of his neck. His left shoulder was lower than his right.

Bent saw Charles and didn't know him. Charles snatched the Spencer and leveled it at Bent's grimy waistcoat, which was secured by one button. "Hands in the open," he said loudly, standing.

Bent lifted his hands away from his sides, peering and blinking at the wild man with the rifle. Charles started forward--slow, careful steps.

Bent's brambly eyebrows shot upward.

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"Charles Main?"

"That's right, you bastard."

"Charles Main. I never thought you'd follow me into the Territory."

"Your

mistake." Charles halved the distance between the post oaks and the house, then halted. "I know what you did to George Hazard's wife." Bent reacted, stepping backward, startled. "I can see that you hurt Gus. I don't need much of an excuse to splatter your head all over that house. So don't even breathe hard. Gus, come over to Pa.

Now!"

He watched Bent rather than his son. The boy couldn't grasp his sudden release. As if to test it, he looked at Bent and took a step toward his father. Two steps. Three.

An Indian woman in a dirty buckskin shift came out the door carrying a bucket of night slops. She had a sleepy, sullen look. Charles thought she resembled someone he'd met when he rode with Jackson.

Then, stunned, he realized it was Green Grass Woman.

She saw him, recognized him, dropped the slops and screamed.

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Gus spun around, alarmed. Bent jumped, and in an instant he had the boy.

Charles's head filled with denials of what he saw. Bent was smiling, the old sly smile Charles remembered with such loathing. Bent's begrimed hand clamped on Gus's throat. His other hand came out of his coat pocket with a razor. He shook it open and laid the shimmering flat of it against Gus's cheek.

"Put your guns down, Main." Charles stared, his forehead pounding with pain. Bent turned the blade. The edge indented Gus's cheek.

The boy cried out.

Bent held him fast. "Put them down or I'll cut him."

Charles laid the Spencer in the shale in front of him, and his Army Colt beside it. "Now the knife." He added his Bowie to the pile. The sight of Charles unarmed pleased Bent. His smarmy smile broadened, became almost cordial. Failure pressed on Charles like an invisible block of granite.

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"Pick up those things, you bitch. Main, step to the side. More-- more--"

Green Grass Woman ran toward the weapons in a kind of crablike crouch. As she took them up, she gave Charles a pleading look and spoke in English. "He said it was a trader's boy, a bad trader."

Charles shrugged in a bleak way. "What are you doing here?"

"She used to belong to the owner of this place," Bent said. "I sell her. She'll hump man or beast for gin, but you won't have the pleasure. I have other things in mind." His face wrenched. Charles remembered how crazy he was. "You bitch, hurry up!" The cry echoed away. The wind blew.

Bent eyed Charles and giggled. "Now, Main. Now we're going to enjoy this unexpected reunion. I'm going to give the orders. You'll obey them to the letter unless you want this child to bleed to death before your eyes. When I say forward march, you come this way and take two steps through the door. Not one or three, two, keeping your hands raised at all times. Any mistake, any disobedience, I'll slit him."

Bent could barely contain his good humor. "All right. Forward-- march."

Hands above his head, Charles walked to the house.

Magee strode away from the pecan trees carrying his rifle in the crook of his arm. The wind fluttered the wild turkey feather in the band of his derby.

Gray Owl called out, "He said wait."

"He's been gone too long." Magee kept walking.

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"Wait. That was his order."

Magee broke stride. Stopped, stared across the bright water at a pair of redbirds swooping in the sunshine. With a fretful look down Vermilion Creek, he turned and slowly walked back to the tracker wrapped in his blanket.

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The room reminded Charles of a sutler's. The dirt floor bore the imprints of boots, moccasins, bare feet. Dark lumps of cold food scummed the tops of two tables. The chair where Bent ordered him to sit creaked and swayed when he put his weight on it.

Then he saw the crookedly hung portrait. He stared at the woman for about ten seconds before recognition went off in his head like a shell.

"That picture--" He had trouble enunciating clearly. Fear for Gus dulled his mind, slowed his reactions. And coming on the portrait here, he felt propelled into some unreal place, some world where anything was possible, and nothing was sane.

With effort he finished the thought. "Where did you get it?"

"Recognize the subject, do you?" Bent laid the knife, the Spencer and the Army Colt on the plank bar, then carefully positioned the open razor within easy reach.

"My cousin Orry's wife. It's a bad likeness."

"Because it's her mother. A whore in New Orleans. A quadroon."

Bent took a coarse, heavy rope from a box beneath his shelf of bottles.

"You don't act surprised that she's a nigger."

"I know Madeline has black blood. But I never expected to see a picture like that."

"Nor find me, I venture to say." Bent was all false politeness.

"Hands together, raised in front of you."

Charles didn't respond. Bent struck him with his fist. Blood leaked from Charles's right nostril. He raised his hands and Bent looped the rope around his wrists.

Charles's mind was still sluggish, awash with rage against this stubbled, crippled man who moved with obvious discomfort. He raged i§6

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at himself, too. He'd failed outside. His mistake would cost his life. He saw it in the feverish shine of Elkanah Bent's eyes as Bent looped the rope a third and fourth time.

All right, his life was forfeit. But there was Gus.

Bent's color was high. Constance's teardrop earring swayed like a pendulum gone wild. Bent had pierced his earlobe to hold the post.

Green Grass Woman, so soiled and sad, watched Charles with unconcealed pity. It prickled the hair on his neck, that look. She knew what was coming. She clutched Gus -to her side, protecting him while she could.

The boy gazed at him with eyes so dull Charles wanted to weep.

He had seen the same lack of life in the eyes of wounded young men the night after Sharpsburg. He had seen the same whipped-animal stare in aging black men who feared jubilo, freedom, as much as they feared a master.

But Gus was not yet five years old.

Bent snugged the rope and knotted it. Charles had been exerting pressure against the ropes, but Magee's trick didn't seem to have gained him much slack. Another defeat.

"Do you know how I think of myself?" Bent asked pleasantly.

Charles let the hate pour. "Yes, Orry told me. The new Napoleon."

He spat in the dirt.

Bent smashed his fist in Charles's face. Gus hid behind Green Grass Woman's hip.

Breathing noisily, no longer smiling, Bent said, "Did he also explain that he and Hazard ruined me at the Academy, and in Mexico?

Destroyed my reputation with lies? Turned my superiors against me? I was born to lead great armies. Like Alexander. Hannibal. Bonaparte.

Your tribe and Hazard's kept me from it."

Bent wiped a ribbon of saliva from his lip. Charles heard birds chirping outside the closed door. The cold ashes on the hearth had a familiar woody smell. The world was lunatic.

Bent picked up the razor and lightly passed the blade over the ball of his thumb. His smile returned. Reasonably and persuasively, he said,

"I do think of myself as America's Bonaparte, and it's justified. But I'm forced to be watchful because every great general is besieged by little men. Inferior men, jealous of him, who want to pull him down.

Tarnish his greatness. The Mains are like that. The Hazards are like that. So I am not only the commander, I'm also the executioner. Rooting
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out plotters. Betrayers. The enemy. Hazards. Mains. Till they're all gone."

"Let my boy go, Bent. He's too small to harm you."

"Oh, no, my dear Charles. He's a Main. I've always intended that 588 HEAVEN AND HELL

he die." Green Grass Woman uttered a low sound and averted her head.

"I planned to wait several months, until you'd given him up for lost.

Then, when I killed him--"

"Don't say that in front of him, goddamn you."

Bent snatched Charles's beard, yanked it up, forcing his head back.

He laid the razor against Charles's throat. "I say whatever I please. I am in command." He edged the razor deeper. Charles felt pain. Blood oozed. He closed his eyes.

Bent giggled and withdrew the razor. He cleaned the blade in the armpit of his coat.

Charming again, he said, "After I disposed of him, I planned to send you certain--parts, so you would know. Several fingers. Toes.

Perhaps something more intimate."

"You fucking madman," Charles said between his teeth, out of control, starting to rise from the chair. Bent grabbed Gus's hair. The boy yelped and pounded small fists against Bent's leg. Bent slapped him, knocked him down, kicked his ribs. Gus rolled on his side and clutched his stomach, whimpering.

"Stand up, boy." Bent boomed like a revival preacher. How many men lived in that perverted body? How many different voices spoke from that one crazed brain? "Stand up. That's a direct order."

"Don't," the Cheyenne girl said. "Oh, don't. He's so little--"

He slammed her in the stomach with his fist. She fell against the wall, clawing at the rough logs, knees scraping the dirt. "You'll be the next for execution if you say another word." He flourished the razor over his head, silver steel death. "Up, boy!"