In the Rogue Blood (14 page)

Two weeks later he was restored the thirteen dollars he’d had in possession on his arrest and turned out into a gray day blustering with a norther. The trees shook under low-scudding clouds and shop signs clattered on their chains above the sidewalks. He tugged down his hat and dug his hands in his pockets and trudged through a razorous wind and entered the first gun shop he came upon. A half-hour later he was again striding through the icy wind, a charged .54 caliber flintlock pistol tucked in his waistband under his jacket flap, the piece guaranteed against malfunction by the Acadian smitty or his money back. Thus prepared did he arrive at the alleyway door of The Hole World Hotel.

Holding the pistol ready under his jacket he slowly pushed open the door and entered the little foyer and saw no one. He eased forward until
he could see under the stairway niche and found the little table unattended. The low volume of laughter and conversation from the main room bespoke few patrons at this early hour. He ascended the stairs slowly and was two steps from the upper landing where the rocking chair stood empty when the big Negress came out of the hallway and saw him. She stood fast and shook her head slowly in resignation of ever understanding the folly of the human heart.

He stepped up close to her, the pistol still hidden, and whispered, “She in the same room?”

The Negress’ smile was small and sad. “You boy,” she said.

John brought out the gun. “I aint foolin any moren last time, auntie. Where’s she at?”

The door of one of the near rooms opened and the man named Harris Wilson, he who had worn the sleeve garters that night, came out into the hallway, tucking his shirt into his pants and hiking his suspenders onto his shoulders. He shut the door and turned to the hall landing door and saw the pistol pointed at his face from three feet away and he went absolutely still.

“Where’s she at?” John said.

The man blinked into the muzzle of the gun. “Where’s
who?’
And now looked from the pistol to its holder and saw John and said, “Oh,” as recognition showed in his eyes. “That girl, you mean, the one you taken away. Hell boy,
she
didn’t never come back here.”

“Not on her own, I wouldnt reckon,” John said. He cocked the pistol.

The man’s eyes went wider and he put up his palms as if he might fend the bullet. “Listen now—
listen
! She aint here, I
swear
she aint!” The fear in his face was stark. John thought he might be remembering his false testimony in court.

“Let’s have us a look,” John said. He gestured for the Negress to precede them into the hallway. “You open up ever door, mister,” he said. “Open it up and stand there and I’ll have a look over your shoulder. If that bowler-hat sonofabitch is takin his pleasure in one of these rooms like you just were, I aint about to stand square in a doorway and make a target for him.” He pushed the man ahead of him to the first door on the right, number 16.

“Bowler hat?” the man named Wilson said. “You meaning Barbato? Shit boy, he’s
dead
.” He glanced back at John. “I aint lying. He stepped out to take a piss one night and didn’t come back. Coupla days later they
found him floating in the cattails downriver with the garfish feeding on him. Somebody’d cut his throat is what happened.”

“Damn shame,” John said. “I was hopin to do it myself. Open the door.”

“I want you to know, son,” the man said, “he said he’d kill me if I didn’t say like he wanted me to in that courtroom. It’s the only reason I—”

“Open that door.”

The man quietly opened the door to reveal a naked mulatto whore standing beside the bed who looked out at them with neither surprise nor curiosity. Wilson closed the door and they moved on to the next one. They looked in every room and nine of them were empty and only in four of them were the girls within at work and none of them was Maggie. Three of the men were so engrossed in their pleasure they were not even aware of their brief audience at the open door. The fourth glared at them from over the head of the girl ministering to him with her mouth and said, “What the hell?” and Wilson quickly shut the door again. The idle girls in the other rooms looked out at them as if they’d been staring at the door since before it opened and would continue staring after it closed again, would go on staring until the next patron came in to have his pleasure.

“The other girls be here by five o’clock,” Wilson said, “if you be wanting to see them too.”

He knew she would not be among them. Knew now they hadn’t caught her and she was most likely long gone. He slipped the pistol in his belt and headed for the stairway.

Wilson and the Negress stood on the landing and watched him go down. “I known a thousand young fellas thought they in love with a whore,” Wilson called after him, “and it’s about the most pitiful thing in the world, if you pardon me saying so. Hell boy, it’s no telling where she be. Texas maybe. It’s lots of girls going to Texas cause the army’s there and it aint a whore alive don’t believe but the army’ll make her rich.”

At the livery on Tchoupitoulas where he and Edward had put up their horses and stored their longarms and possibles he found nothing belonging to either him or his brother. The stablebuck recalled nobody named Edward Little nor fitting John’s description of him, nor was he holding any messages for anybody named John. He said the boy who worked the place at night would be in after supper if he wanted to ask him about it.
But he did not want to wait all day for a boy who wasn’t likely to know anything about Edward either.

He made his slow way to the Place d’Armes, holding his jacket close around him, the icy wind cutting his cheeks and stinging his eyes. In this town full of people and loud talk, full of laughter and music and the smells of good cooking, he felt alone and adrift. If Edward had left town he surely would have pushed on to Texas, as Lucas said. And maybe that Wilson sonofabitch was right and Maggie had gone to Texas too. But what if one of them was still in town? What if they both were? He looked all about him as if he might spy one or the other walking along the cold windy streets. He checked an impulse to howl.

The early evening darkness was closing fast as he arrived at the Place d’Armes and entered the warm and smoky confines of the Red Cat Tavern and breathed of its redolence of spirits and pickled foods. The place was raucous with shouted conversation and the toot-clink-and-twang of a skiffle band. He heard the voice of Lucas Malone calling, “Johnny boy! Here!” and spotted the graybeard at the bar. He felt himself grinning as he made his way through the crowd and toward the brighteyed old rascal. “Welcome to the free world, lad!” Lucas yelled as they clapped each other on the shoulder.

Lucas called to the barkeeper for a cup and poured out a drink from his jug and pushed the cup to John. “Drink up, boy! Ye got a ways to catch up to me!” He made the happy claim of having been drunk for the entire two weeks since his release from the city prison. He swung the rum jug by its fingerhole handle up onto the crook of his upraised arm in the manner of a riverman and tilted his elbow upward to take a deep draught. John gulped down his drink and Lucas poured him another.

The talk in the tavern was mostly of war and the talk was loudly eager. As they put down one drink after another John came to learn that Texas had been annexed at the end of December and that the U. S. had claimed its southern border at the Rio Grande, where the Texas Republic had for the last ten years said its border was. But the Mexicans said the U. S. be damned. They insisted as they always had that the border was more than a hundred miles north at the Rio Nueces. President James Knox Polk had likely figured that would be the Mexicans’ attitude and was probably glad to hear it. Everybody knew Mr. Polk was set on expanding America’s western border to the continent’s western reach and was therefore out to acquire every foot of Mexican soil that lay between Texas and the Pacific. It seemed of little matter to him whether he bought that property
with dollars or took it in blood through a war inspired by the border dispute. His ambition was widely shared by his countrymen. One New York magazine editorial had quite recently claimed that it was America’s “manifest destiny,” its divinely sanctioned mission, to establish American sovereignty from sea to shining sea. Back in midsummer Mr. Polk had sent General Zachary Taylor down to the mouth of the Nueces at Corpus Christi with almost four thousand regulars, over half the U. S. Army. Now here it was February and there they still were. But the rumor was everywhere that Old Zack had gotten his orders to move down to the Rio Grande and would any day now start marching south.

“And we’re gone be right there with Old Rough and Ready when he do, by God!” This last bellowed by a drunk sergeant in the company of a tableful of comrades sitting near the bar. They were the loudest patrons in the Red Cat, crowing without pause of the thrashing they intended to give the Mexicans, the glory they would reap for self and country, the honor they would every man of them carry back home. Even through the haze of rum now swirling round his head John was aware of Lucas’s frequent sidelong glares at the boasting bigmouths. And now one of the soldiers took notice of Malone’s hard look and said something to a large comrade at his side who then looked over at Lucas with narrowed eyes. The graybeard looked at them each in turn and spat disdainfully on the floor. At that moment John realized how much he was himself aching for a fight. As the two soldiers stood and advanced on them with aspects of ready malice he felt his spirits rise.

“Say now, grandpa,” the bigger one started to say, “who the hell you—”

Lucas’ punch sent him running backwards to crash into his fellows’ table and upset it as he fell to the floor.

John kicked the other soldier in the balls and as the soldier bent forward with his hands at his crotch he drove a knee in his face and felt the man’s nose give way with a satisfying crunch.

Now the rest of the soldiers came at them in a rush and some of the patrons fled the tavern and raised a hue and cry on the street as Lucas snatched up a stool and swung it two-handed against a soldier’s head and the man dropped like a sack of feed and John went down under a snarling knot of cursing punching kicking soldiers and there came the high piercing shrill of a whistle as he felt his fingers digging into a screaming man’s eyes and tasted blood from the ear between his teeth and then sparks were bursting in his head and then he saw and felt nothing more.

He woke to the pain of a jaw that felt somehow offset but he could bear the pain of working it and so knew it was not broken. His ribs ached with every breath. He was sitting against the wall of a narrow room with a malodorous muddy floor and a heavy portal whose small barred window was gray with dawnlight. It wasn’t the city prison but it was without question a cell and his heart sagged with the realization that he was once again in jail.

A groan from the shadowed floor beside him. The effort of turning his head sent grinding pain through his neck. It was Lucas Malone stirring, groaning again, sitting up with the slow careful movements of an aged man. He looked at John with blackened bloodshot eyes as he worked his tongue carefully in his mouth and gingerly inserted two fingers and withdrew a tooth. He gazed upon it with a miserable grimace and John saw the new gap in his top row of teeth.

The room held three other men, two of them sprawled unconscious, the other sitting close by Lucas and looking at them with no trace of interest. There now came a loud rattling at the heavy wooden door and a lock clacked free and the door swung open to reveal a sprucely uniformed army sergeant who filled the doorway and stood scowling upon Lucas and John.

“You sorry bastards are in the garrison stockade,” the sergeant said in a rasp. “Two of them you busted up last night are recruits just yesterday got here from Fort Jessup. One’s lost an eye and the othern’s brains are leaking out his busted skull. He’s like to die before the day’s done. He do, and both you’ll be charged with murder, since it’s no telling which a you did the busting.” John and Lucas exchanged hangdog looks.

“Now hear me good,” the sergeant said, “cause I aint saying this but once. I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about either a you any moren I do about them stupid shitheads you done ruint, but you bastards put me two men shy of my quota for the boat to Texas and I’ll be goddamned if my ass is gonna get chewed because of it. So mark me now. I can hand ye over to the city prison till you stand trial and get sent to some penal camp in the swamps for the next twenty years where ye belong—or you can sign up to take them two’s place and be off to Texas this afternoon. You fuckers like to fight, let’s see you fight the fucken Mexicans. Now then, I’ll ask ye but once: what’s it to be?”

The man beside Lucas started to rise, saying, “Hell with these snip-jacks,
I’ll
take the army over a damn prison camp.”

Lucas Malone caught him by the collar and jerked him back and his head hit the wall with a solid thunk and he crumpled and lay still. Lucas stood up and looked down at John. “What the hell, Johnny lad. Army’s a sight bettern prison for damn sure.”

John hesitated but a moment before shrugging and putting up his hand. Lucas took it and pulled him to his feet and they grinned crookedly into each other’s battered face.

“All right, then,” the sergeant rasped. “Come along.”

They signed the standard certificate of enlistment for a five-year term of service:

The sergeant added the requisite notation on the certificate that he had personally inspected the above named recruit prior to the application of his signature and found him “entirely sober when enlisted.” He then took them before a rheumy-eyed surgeon just roused from sleep whose breath even at a distance of half the room was a miasma of whiskey and whose gaze wavered once over each of them before he signed their enlistment forms in attestation that he had carefully examined each recruit and that “in my opinion he is free from all bodily defects and mental infirmity that would in any way disqualify him from performing the duties of a soldier.”