Stories (2011) (101 page)

I pretty much let the horse go how he intended, except I had
hold of the reins and was ready to snap them into play if a reason come up. I
hadn’t gone far when I seen that there were a couple of white fellas, about
twenty feet apart, sittin’ their horses, rifles at the ready. It was all I
could do to play my part. One of the white fellas said. “There’s the dead
nigger. That other coon didn’t want him no how.”

Then the other one said somethin’ that made my butt hole
grab at the saddle.

“Let’s see we can shoot that hat off of him.”

That gave me pause.

The other one said, “Naw, we got to be quiet,” even though
they was about as quiet as two badgers wrestlin’ in a hole.

The horse I was ridin’ went between them, and it was all I
could do not to put my heels to that nag and ride like hell, but I stuck to my
plan. I rode right on through and nobody shot at me.

hen I was out of their range, about twenty minutes, I
figure, I took the reins and gave the horse a little nudge, so that he’d move
out faster but not take to runnin’. I went on like that for awhile, and when I
was clear enough, I put my heels to the horse and rode right on out of there,
kind of gigglin’ to myself and feelin’ smarter than a college fella. I figured
sometime come mornin’, they might even get brave enough to go up there and find
Cramps takin’ his long nap, the other horse tied and waitin’.

The horse I had wasn’t up to snuff, and pretty soon it was
limpin’. They probably knowed that was the case when they tied Cramp on it. I
got off and took the reins and led it and tried to figure on a new plan. The
plains out there went on and on, and pretty soon I’d have to slow down more for
the horse, and maybe shoot it and eat some of it, but then I’d be on foot with
miles in front of me.

I stopped leading the horse, bent down and looked at its
foot. He wasn’t in bad shape, but he wasn’t in good ridin’ shape either. I
found a wash and led him down in there, and with the reins wrapped around my
hand, I lay down and slept.

It was high noon when I awoke, and hotter than a rabid dog’s
breath. I walked the horse out of the draw, and then I did the only thing I
could think to do. I started leadin’ the horse back toward Hide and Horns,
takin’ the long way around.

It was night when I come up on the town. I could see it laid
out down there and there were lights from lanterns and it looked even bleaker
to me now than it had at first.

I went on down there, coming up the back way, where the
Chinamen were gathered. I found a little scrub bush and I tied the horse up
there so he wouldn’t wander into town, and then I got my saddle and guns and such,
and threw the saddle bag over my shoulder and toted the saddle with the
Winchester and the Sharps tied off on it, my free hand near my revolver. I
walked on down into the Chinatown part, and veered toward the tent where I had
seen the crippled China girl go in to make my food. I strolled in like I had
good sense. It was dark in there, and I fumbled around in my pocket lookin’ for
a match, until I realized I was wearin’ Cramp’s jacket and mine was tied to the
saddle I was carryin’. A light went on in the place suddenly, and I dropped the
saddle and the revolver sort of hopped into my hand, but it was a lit match
with a China girl face behind it. The cripple. She was down on one knee and her
nub, about waist high to me lookin’ up.

I said, “I don’t want no trouble.”

“Black man,” the cripple said.

“That’s me,” I said.

Then there was movement, and she was crawlin’ across the
floor cause she didn’t have her leg strapped on. She lit a lantern and the room
jumped bright, and there were all the Chinese girls. The wash pot girl and the
other four, includin’ the cripple.

It was a pretty big tent, but it was stuffed with all manner
of stuff, includin’ pallets where the girls did the rest of their work, which
was haulin’ all the men’s folk’s ashes, as they say.

“I need a good horse,” I said, “and I need ya’ll not to say
nothin’, cause I’d rather not shoot a woman. You savvy.”

“Savvy,” said the most beautiful of the girls, who seemed
too small and delicate to be real, and far too young.

“I got Yankee dollars to pay for it, and I got my own
saddle.”

“We go too,” the little one said.

“What?”

“We go too. Get horse. We take wagon.”

“Wagon? Why don’t you just bring a goddamn band and a clutch
of clowns. No.”

“We get horse, we go too,” the cripple said.

“Damn,” I said. “Listen. Tell you what. You get me a horse
and I’ll ride out, and then you bring the wagon along, and I’ll be waitin’ on
you. Riders don’t come with you, and I end up havin’ to shoot it out, then I’ll
travel with you until I can get you to another town. Course, what’s the
difference between there and here?”

“We go back to China,” said the cripple. I had come to
realize the other two girls didn’t speak enough English to even understand what
I was sayin’. The cripple was the valedictorian of their class.

“Got news for you ladies, it’s a long ride to the Pacific,
and I don’t think you can sail that wagon across.”

“Get to San Francisco,” the cripple said. “Figure from
there.”

“You know San Francisco?”

“We come there,” the cripple said. “Think we have Chinese
husbands. Big trick. We have to do big fuckin’. Not let us go. I try to go. Man
shoot leg off with a shotgun, knock out a tooth.”

I thought, damn, a leg ain’t enough, he had to have a tooth
too.

I sighed. “All right. I’ll go back to what I said. I’m in a
tough spot here, and you may think I’ll ride away and leave you, but I try to
keep my word unless there just ain’t no way it can be kept. I can get out of
town easier by myself, and then you can bring the wagon. But how you gonna do
that? What’s the excuse?”

It took them awhile to process that, talkin’ to each other
in Chinese, and I had to tell it different a couple times before they
understood me. But it come down to me gettin’ a horse, and them waitin’ until
daylight and sayin’ they had to go out to the prairie to gather up dried
buffalo shit for fires. Buffalo shit will burn pretty good, it’s dried a fair
amount, but it has one drawback. It smells like burning buffalo shit. Still,
it’ll keep a person warm.

Then again, I reckon I didn’t set out to tell you this story
so you could know how to warm yourself and cook with dried buffalo plops.

“You think they’ll believe you?” I asked.

“We do all time,” the cripple said.

“All right,” I said. “That’ll do. Just don’t try and trick
me, cause I won’t like it.”

“No trick,” she said.

They got me a good horse, and I got rid of Cramp’s jacket
and put on a brown shirt the girls gave me. I put my saddle on the horse, and
took my guns and rode on out. I went way out, like I told them, givin’ them a
kind of guide to where I planned to go.

I wasn’t an entirely trustin’ soul, so I actually went a
little farther east than I told them, found a place where I could sit a horse
down in a draw and see up over the lip of it. That way I could make sure they
didn’t send someone else out to get me for some payment.

It got along mornin’, and I had dozed on the ground with the
reins of the horse clutched in my fist, and when I awoke it was already turnin’
off hotter than a stove fire.

I heard hooves movin’ in my direction, and I got up and
looked between that little gap in the draw and seen it was the bunch that had
ridden out after me, and they was leadin’ the horse I had left, and they had
Cramp’s body tied behind it with a long rope bound to his ankles, and they was
draggin’ him along face down.

At first I thought the China girls had done me in, and that
this bunch was lookin’ for me, and then I got it figured right. They was just
now comin’ in, finally snoopin’ out that I had snuck off on them in the night,
disguised as Cramp. I counted them. There was twelve.

Now, I tell you, I try to be practical, but lookin’ out
there and seein’ Cramp being dragged along that, even though I didn’t know him
even a little, made my blood boil. I knew all I had to do was let them ride out
of sight, back to town, then I could either wait on the China girls or not. It
was the way to go, and the truth of the matter was, Cramp wasn’t any of my
business and I didn’t know what he’d done to get folks mad at him in the first
place, but I knew it didn’t take much when you was a colored man. It could be lookin’
at a white woman, or cuttin’ a surprise fart in the street, and that’s all it
took for you to be thought of as uppity, and if there’s one thing a lot of
white folks can’t tolerate, it’s an uppity nigger. We was supposed to know our
place, and I was thinkin’ on all of this, and get madder and madder, and most
of my common sense began to leak out of my head like water. Without realizin’
what I was doin’, I got on my horse and put the reins in my teeth, put the
Sharps under one arm and the Winchester under the other.

Now, they’ll tell you can’t hit shit shootin’ like that, and
I’ll tell you right off, that’s mostly true, but most shooters ain’t me. I’ve
gotten so good with a gun I can shoot right smart with any kind of weapon under
almost any kind of condition. That don’t mean I don’t miss, but I hit a lot
too, and if I got a still shot, I can knock the dick of a horse fly.

I rode out and dug my heels into the horse, went to ridin’
right at them, takin’ them from the side. There was twelve of them, but they
didn’t’ see me until my guns barked, and the first shot with the Sharps hit one
of their horses, which was an accident, I might add, and the horse went down,
throwing him. I dropped the Sharps, since it just had that one load, flipped
the Winchester into my right hand, and took to firin’. With four shots I killed
three. They started poppin’ off shots then, the ones that had figured out what
was happenin’, and by then I had come in amongst them. I twisted my head, and
with those reins in my teeth, I made my horse twirl, and using both hands on
that Winchester, I fired as fast as I could, and four more was down, and one
horse was limpin’ off with a bullet in his head, another unintentional, I might
add.

I fired the Winchester until it was empty, and then I rode
up on one of them that had fired six shots off and hadn’t hit me or even come
near me. He looked like he was about to scream with fear and he was snappin’
the empty revolver like bullets might suddenly appear in the chambers. I swung
the empty rifle and clipped him off his horse. I wheeled, and then there was a
barrage of shots, and my horse went down and I went to rollin’. When I come up,
I had my revolver in my hand, and I started firing, dropping two more, hittin’
them both as they rode up on me. I fired at the others, not hittin’ anyone
else, which meant I was probably tired.

The ones that was left bolted and rode off, which was good,
cause my revolver was empty.

I ran over to my dead horse and got a couple loads for the
Sharps out of the saddle bags, and ran back to where I’d dropped the Sharps,
scrounged around till I found it. Then I ran got down on a knee and loaded the
Sharps and leveled it off.

They were far out now, but I took windage with a wet finger,
beaded that fifty caliber, called them sonofabitches, and fired. As is often
the case, it seemed like a long time before the bullet hit. In fact, I was
already startin’ to reload, when one of the riders threw up his hands and went
flying off. The other just kept ridin’. He was way out there, but I had the
Sharps ready, and I aimed high to let the bullet drop. I fired. I got him
somewhere near the back of the head and he fell off, his horse still runnin’.

I know all this makes me sound a mite god like, but, true
story. No lie. I killed everyone of them sonofabitches. It made me wonder how
I’d managed to let one of them that had come up on me with Cramp get away. But,
hell, even the gods nod.

But the gods don’t bleed. I did. I had been hit. Didn’t know
it right off, but I started hurtin’, and looked down at my side and seen I was
bleedin’. I lay down on the ground suddenly, and closed my eyes and the sun
didn’t feel all that warm anymore.

“You not dead,” the crippled China girl said.

“No?” I said. “I feel dead, and maybe buried, but I still seem to be among the
livin’ Chinese.”

I was lyin’ under a wagon and the cripple was down there
with me. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t. She said, “No. Sit. Stay.”

I had a dog I talked to like that. I felt my side. It was
bandaged up.

“We got to go,” I said. “They’ll be after me.”

“You all shot up,” the cripple said.

“That I am,” I said.

“Rest a day. Have chop suey. Pussy. Feel better.”

 “I’m sure. But that rest a day part, not such a good idea.”

I lay for awhile anyway, not having the strength to do much
else. I probably laid there much longer than I thought, but finally I woke up
and crawled out from under the wagon. The other Chinese girls had pulled a tarp
over the frame of the wagon, and made a kind of traveling tent out of it. They
had two horses tied on the back. One of the girls was missin’. I asked the
cripple about that.

“Washie girl. She stay,” said the cripple. “She make good
money washie clothes.”

I managed to walk around and gather up my goods, saddle and
saddle bags and weapons, and found the horse that had been draggin’ Cramp. I
cut the old boy loose and looked at him. He had asked me not to bury him out in
the lonesome, but the thing was, he was lookin’ pretty ripe, and I come to the
conclusion I had done my best, and he wouldn’t know the prairie from a place
under a church pew. The girls helped me dig a hole, as they had shovels and all
manner of equipment in the wagon, and I wrapped him in a blanket and put him
down.

I was bleeding pretty good by the time I quit, and I had
been wrong about them knife wounds being all healed up. A couple of them was
leakin’. I said, “We got to get movin.”