The Shirt On His Back (12 page)

'You play the
pi'anna,
Ben?' Stares of
disbelief from those who hadn't been party to last night's interchange with
Stewart. Like most white men, they assumed that anyone his size would have
spent his life picking cotton.

'For the best
whorehouse in New Orleans.' This happened to be true, though January's brief
stint at the Countess Mazzini's quim emporium the previous Fall hadn't been his
usual venue. But it got a better reaction, he reflected, than if he'd said he
played regularly for the New Orleans Opera House. Young Mr Miller, he
reflected, wasn't the only one to alter details to make a better tale.

In a slow bass
rumble, like a man struggling to remember what human speech sounded like,
Wildman said, T can box.'

It was like
hearing that Kit Carson could dance the minuet.

"Sides,'
added a young New England trapper named Boaz Frye, 'Manitou's a fair fighter,
long as you don't get him mad.'

'Yes, and I've
heard that same thing about grizzly bears.'

'If that's all
that's bothering you,
amicus meus -
Hannibal appeared at his elbow and accepted another tin cup from Veinte-y-Cinco
- 'why, there isn't a man in this camp who hasn't killed a grizzly with his bare
hands. Just ask them. Waugh,' he added politely and slugged back the contents
of the cup.

January's eyes
met Manitou's, but found no expression in them that was readily decipherable.
Manitou only stood, his head a little down, like a bull buffalo startled by
something he'd heard and making up his mind whether to charge or not. And yet,
January knew, from his own days of studying 'the sweet science' - as boxing was
called - with an English professional in Paris, that there was no quicker means
to open a door to conversation with a man than a clean, hard fight with no ill
feelings involved.
You can't lie
on the stage,
they'd said at Colonel Rory's boxing salon.

Dancers he'd
known said the same thing of their own 'sweet science'.

'Come on, Ben,'
urged Jed Blankenship, and he slapped January's arm familiarly. 'We already got
money on you.' He'd spilled his last two or three drinks down his buckskin
shirt- front, and his breath would have killed trees at thirty paces. 'You
ain't scared of him, are you?'

'Are you?'
January countered.

Jed grinned
slyly. 'You just gotta know how to handle him, is all.'

'Good,' said
January. 'I'll fight him if you'll do it first.'

Blankenship
blenched visibly under his tan, and everyone cheered.

'Suits me,'
Manitou rumbled.

Blankenship's
dark-blue eyes darted from side to side like a man contemplating physical
flight, and Prideaux whooped, 'Jed today,' over the yelling, 'and Ben tomorrow.
Wouldn't want to take Manitou's edge off,' he added with a wink.

There was very
little danger of that. Men were already shoving Blankenship across the path
toward the dusty contest- ground, and Pia was collecting plews and recording
bets with the businesslike briskness of long practice. January - detained by
the crowd at the bar - didn't even make it to the front of the mob that
surrounded the fighters before the combat was over. One moment he was
struggling to get through the wall of backs, and the next, it seemed, everyone
was jostling their way back to the bar and Manitou was putting his new checkered
shirt back on, with Jed sprawled before him unconscious
and suspiciously
unbruised - in the dust.

January knelt
beside him and saw his eyelids move.

He was faking a
knockout.

'Did you think
he wouldn't?' inquired Veinte-y-Cinco as plews and plew-sticks changed hands
before the bar. There wasn't a lot of exchange, since nobody had bet on Jed to
win. All the wagers had concerned how long it would take Wildman to knock Jed
out, and one or two optimists on Wildman killing his opponent - and, January
heard later, eating him as well. 'Hell, Jed bet
himself
to lose.'

'He found a
taker
?’
asked Hannibal incredulously.

'Goshen Clarke.
The man'11 bet on anything.' Veinte-y-Cinco shook her head, counted out
red-and-yellow markers from the AFC, blue-and-reds from the Brits, reds from
Morales and Company (not that the Mexican trader
had
a Company) just
down the path, Pete Sharpless's red-white-and-blues, and blue-and-yellows from
Gil Wallach . . . 'He gets the Dutchman
well, the
Dutchman's squaw, really - to keep his money for him, so he'll have enough to
buy powder and ball. It's the only reason their whole outfit hasn't gone into
debt to the AFC years ago.'

It was true,
January reflected, that every time he'd passed a horse race or a shooting
match, if the Beauty wasn't a participant, he was deep in conversation with
whoever was keeping track of the wagers. If Clarke wasn't playing poker on some
crony's blanket, or at little Pia's faro table, he could be found in one of the
Indian camps playing the Hand Game - which consisted of chanting and switching
a carved fox-bone from fist to fist in rhythm until the gambler tried to guess
which fist it was in. It reminded January of a game he played with his little
nephew Chou-Chou, only these men played it drunk for 'Made Beaver' at six
dollars a plew.

'Jed was saying
it's 'cause he wanted tomorrow's fight to be fair.' Pia cocked a bright dark
eye, like a squirrel's, up at the adults. She was a little thing, skinny like
her mother, and ordinarily clothed in a mix of men's cast-offs and women's, her
long black braids making her look like an Indian child. 'But I don't think
that's what Mr January meant, was it, when he said Jed had to fight first?'

'That's what
he's saying?' January felt the tips of his ears get hot with anger, that he
hadn't thought of that when he'd come back with his stipulation.
Of course it sounded like I didn't want to fight. .
. 'That I said he had to fight first because I thought he'd soften Manitou up?'

And Shaw, who'd
left Clopard on guard over the store and ambled down too late to catch any of
the proceedings, repeated Veinte-y-Cinco's earlier question: 'Did you think he
wouldn't?'

Pia added
wisely, 'Nobody believes him. But he's got seventy-five dollars on you
tomorrow, Mr J.'

'Almost makes me
want to lie down the way he did.'

'An' what odds
are they offerin',' inquired Shaw, leaning his bony elbows behind him on the
bar, 'that that teetotal Indian Agent of Grey's, that's on his way up here, is
gonna turn up dead 'fore he makes the camp?'

His eyes met
Veinte-y-Cinco's, asking what she had heard, and she leaned her own elbows,
like him, on the bar at their backs. 'Slim ones, pilgrim,' she said. 'Slim
ones.'

T
he
boxing match with Manitou Wildman - set for noon of the following day - almost
didn't take place after all. Sufficient sums were involved that the gamblers
were insisting on an hour when no chance ray of sunlight would take either
fighter in the eyes. But an hour before the sun reached zenith, Veinte-y-Cinco
came breathless and shaking into the Ivy and Wallach store tent with the news
that Edwin Titus had been seen a few minutes before taking Pia into his
quarters. '
Take a walk,
Mick tells me.' The woman turned her head, as if she could see back to the AFC
camp.
'Take a walk
,
just like that.
Come back in an
hour,
he says—'

Shaw said, very
quietly, 'Jesus,' slung one rifle on his back and picked up the other. 'You
watch the place,' he ordered Jorge on his way to the horse line. Silently,
January fetched his own weapon and followed. John McLeod, who'd been at the
back of the tent talking to Gil Wallach about mules, whistled to a couple of
the Canadian trappers; Prideaux and his camp mates joined the group as they
were saddling up. January hoisted Veinte-y-Cinco on to the rump of his horse
behind him, and close to thirty men rode downriver to the AFC camp.

'Titus, he never
comes around for none of us girls,' Veinte- y-Cinco whispered, clinging to
January's waist. 'He says we got the pox—'

January guessed
this to be true, something which made faithfulness to Rose less difficult,
notwithstanding the protective sheaths on sale at the store. The corollary to
that fact - that, as a child, Pia was probably the only female in the AFC camp
who wouldn't be poxed - had already crossed his mind.

And while Titus was
not exactly Mick Seaholly's boss, without the Controller's financing - and his
protection on the road - the saloon keeper would never have been able to get
his liquor and his girls up to the Green River from Taos. Certainly, he would
not be able to do so in future years.

And, anyway, it
was known throughout the camp that Mick Seaholly would sell his own sister for
the price of a Long-Nine cigar.

Unlike the
Indian women, the Taos girls had nothing to offer the mountaineers in the way
of camp-keeping, moccasin- making and the endless ancillary work of preparing
beaver skins for the market. Their chief value lay in that they were cheaper
than buying an Indian bride, and you didn't have to be constantly giving
presents to their families.

They had no
families.

Only Seaholly.

And, in
Veinte-y-Cinco's case, Pia.

Through his
back, January was aware of the woman's trembling. Without Seaholly's
protection, it wouldn't be long before a woman on her own would find herself
selling her body for pemmican - to those who simply didn't drag her down to the
cottonwoods for free. January knew women in New Orleans who'd have greeted the
situation with a shrug ... or a demand for a cut of the proceeds.

The posse found
Edwin Titus outside his tent, faced off against Hannibal Sefton . . . and
Manitou Wildman. Seaholly, slouched nearby, would clearly have dealt with the
fiddler had Wildman not been looming silently at his elbow. 'You heard the
girl, Sefton,' Titus was saying impatiently. 'She's perfectly willing—'

'She's perfectly
dosed to the hairline with opium—'

'Are you
suggesting that I held her nose and poured it down her throat? I could have you
up for libel.'

'In what court?'
retorted Hannibal. 'If there's no law against raping a drugged child, there's
certainly not any statute against my saying so.'

'You have to go
back to New Orleans sometime, Sefton. And when you do, you'll find—' He turned
his head as Shaw, January and McLeod dismounted and strode toward the tent;
January saw his thin mouth twist with anger. Then at once it smoothed as
Veinte-y-Cinco ran forward—

'
Pia!
Corazon!
’

Seaholly grabbed
the woman by her arm. She wrenched at his grip, and Titus laid a hand on her
shoulder: 'Senora Vasquez, thank Heaven you have come!'

While
Veinte-y-Cinco stared at him, startled speechless at this turnabout -
didn't she think that's what he'd say if she showed up with
armed force?
- McLeod almost spat the words, 'Damn it, Titus, I knew you
Yanks were scoundrels—'

'Scoundrels?'
Titus's head jerked back in melodramatic shock. Then, his face changing, 'Good
God, man!' he thundered. '1 find the poor child staggering about the camp -
ill, I assumed, for surely no man here is so debased as to deliberately give
liquor to a girl of her years - and you
dare
to suggest—?'

Hannibal,
looking as if he'd just heard the Serpent of Eden claim that Eve had pinned him
down and spooned applesauce down his throat, slipped past Titus and thrust the
tent flap aside. In the shadows January could see Pia lying among the buffalo
robes on the Comptroller's cot, her long black hair unbraided over her
shoulders in a silky cloak, her shift loose and drawn up to her thighs. She was
giggling, but when Veinte- y-Cinco ran into the tent she held out her arms,
sighed: 'Mama!'

'They say no
good deed goes unpunished,' proclaimed Titus, in tones of bitterest reproach.
'Had I not brought the child here, God knows who would have found her. Yet,
instead of thanks, I am accused of . . . Good God, McLeod, will you listen to
yourself? Get the little tramp out of here, Madame,' he added as Veinte-y-Cinco
supported her stumbling daughter past him and into the open. 'For that matter,
I should like to know where
you
were, when someone was feeding that poor child liquor.'