The Shirt On His Back (32 page)

'And your name
is Escher? We read two of Franz's letters, that we found in his father's coat,'
January added, when the big man glanced around at him with the sudden menace of
a startled bear.

'Escher.
Ignatius Escher.' Manitou tilted his head as if trying to recall the name. 'I
shoulda known they'd come after me.'

Manitou had
hidden his gear in crevices high up in a shoulder of granite that thrust up
through the trees, just below the backbone of the hills. Most of it he left
cached, only saddling up his big cinder-gray mare for Hannibal and
Veinte-y-Cinco to ride, while Shaw and January rode the two mules. The trapper
himself walked, leading the way on what January guessed would be a wide swing
north to lose the Omahas. He couldn't see that Manitou being afoot would hinder
their speed much. The man was tireless - or else, reflected January, he himself
was so exhausted from days of living rough, eating berries, fighting swollen
rivers and being beaten into submission by infuriated Indians, that any
exertion was enough to leave him unmanned. The only possessions the trapper
removed from the cache were his waterskins and a couple of parfleches of
pemmican, which January felt he could have devoured by himself without sharing,
rawhide sacks and all.

The moon was
down, the night jewel-clear. Even with his eyes accustomed to darkness and
starlight, January could barely make out the shapes of the pine trunks as black
columns in an indigo abyss. The first birds were waking.

After a long
time of moving in silence, with Manitou scouting ahead, the trapper came back
to the main party and January heard him say to Shaw, 'We got company?'

'Not as I can
hear.'

Manitou grunted.
Then: 'I gotta thank you for passin' up that shot at Franz. It woulda been a
beaut.'

'It would,'
agreed Shaw, as if they were speaking of shooting out a candle at two hundred
and fifty yards. 'Tom woulda taken it. An' died.'

'He would.'

January thought
about the hard, thin face and dark-gray eyes bitter as aloe in the firelight.
Not only died, but taken us all with him, without a thought.

'I will have to
tell him,' went on Shaw quietly. 'An' I fear that when I do, I'll have lost two
brothers, 'stead of one.'

They rested
shortly after sunup, Hannibal and Veinte-y-Cinco sliding off their single mule
and falling asleep almost as their feet touched earth.

Manitou said to
Shaw, 'You sleep, too—'

The Kentuckian
nodded once, lay on the apishamore he'd pulled off his mule and slept, all
without ever letting go of his rifle.

January
staggered on stiffened legs to pull bunches of dried grass, as Manitou was
doing, to rub the mules's backs. 'Tell me about old Bodenschatz.'

A week ago,
January would have accepted that he wasn't going to get a reply, but he knew
now that the trapper was just calling his memories together and trying to
remember words. 'He had a shop in Ingolstadt,' said the trapper at last. 'All
the professors at the University would go to him for chemicals. He'd been
everywhere in the world and was always getting things - plants, strange salts,
poison mushrooms, dried bugs. Mina kept track of it. Mina was his treasure.
Franz had got a job in Munich - accountant for the firm that imported the old
man's chemicals - and married the daughter of one of the clerks there. I never
met him. Mina seldom spoke of him, though he'd write her every day, twelve an'
thirteen pages sometimes. Mina . . .'

The trapper
slipped a rope around his brindled mare's neck, knotted the other end to a tree
to let her graze. 'Mina wanted to study medicine. She'd have been a fine
doctor. Maybe the first mad-doctor with brains and a soul. Her father hired me
as a tutor for her, 'cause we all of us knew, to get into the medical classes
she'd have to be half again better than the best of the men. Mina was the first
- the only one - who could talk about this . . . this whatever it is, that
happens to me when I get angry . . . when I get angry past a certain point. Not
like it was something / could help if I'd just be a better person, or if I
prayed, or if I tried harder . . . She said, it was like the bad fairy had put
a curse on me, an' we just needed to figure out a way to dodge around that
curse when it came on. Like it wasn't somethin' / was doin' 'cause I was ornery
or bad. It was just what it was.'

He rested his
arms along his mare's back for a time, huge fists bunched together and his lips
resting against them, looking out through the trees at the great sweep of the
valley to the west, filled with the lilac of the mountains' shadow. Ten or
twelve miles off, January could make out the isolated shape of Grindstone
Butte, that he and Shaw had passed in their search for Clarke and Groot's
party. The ford they'd taken must be almost due east.

'Did she use
pain on you?'

'No.' Manitou
shook his head, with an expression, even in retrospect, of mild surprise. 'No,
not after the first. Well, she'd take my hand and take a little pinch of skin
on the back of it, 'tween her nails, an' twist it - it was like bein' bit by a
ant - an' say my name. An' I'd think:
that's Mina
there ... I can't scare her, so I gotta hang on.
An' I'd look into her eyes an' it was like her sweet soul was a lantern for me
to follow in the dark.

'An' it was a
good thing she could do that,' he went on after a moment, settling on one of
the smaller steps of the rocks behind which they'd camped. "Cause in
Ingolstadt, it seemed like these spells would come on me more an' more often.
It was the people, I think. There was just too blame many people. In the town,
at the University, gettin' underfoot, kickin' their dogs, beatin' their horses,
bein' stupid ... In Lucerne, half the time we spent up with Mama's relations in
the mountains, I could go for days without seein' more than the same two or
three shepherds. In Ingolstadt . . .'

He shuddered, as
if the old university town, with its moss- grown cobblestones and steep-roofed
medieval houses, had been the place where he'd been tortured, and not some
Indian camp in the Rockies. 'Like I told you before,' he said. 'I just ain't
fit to be around humans. Maybe a bad fairy did put a curse on me, when I's too
little to notice. An' I suppose I was a fool - we were both fools, Mina an' me
- to go thinkin' somethin' wouldn't happen.' He closed his eyes, seeking the
blindness that he had sought, January guessed, every day for the past ten
years.

'I don't even
remember what it was. Just remember wakin' up in my lodgin's with my head
hurtin' worse than I thought pain could go, an' blood crusted on my hands, an'
the police comin' up the stair tellin' me . . .' His voice faltered. 'Tellin'
me I'd . . .'

January put a
hand on the big man's arm, and Manitou sat silent, eyes closed to the morning
light that streamed up the valley, flashed gold now on the tips of the pine
needles.

'They put me in
a madhouse.' The trapper turned his face from the distant river, met January's
eyes. 'They said I wasn't sane enough to be judged. I heard later, Franz an'
his father both swore before the judges that I was as sane as the next man an'
had never had no problem about gettin' angry before . . . It was only my
parents, an' two of the other students at the University, an' some of my
grandpa's shepherds, tellin' of what I'd been like from childhood, that kept me
off the gallows. Had I been better, to have hanged?'

He folded his
hands again, pressed the heavy knuckles to his lips. 'I swear to you, I have no
answer to that. I hope I killed no one when I escaped the place, but to be
honest, I have no memory of that either, and every time I dream it, it's
different. It's as if one day I was bein' walked to that 'laboratory' of theirs
to get more needles stuck through my neck, and then I was waking up in a goods
yard in Regensburg, wearing clothes I didn't recognize.

'I thought about
going back,' he went on quietly. 'But I'd been there two, maybe three months .
. . and I couldn't make myself do it. I thought about killing myself. I
couldn't do that either. I was only twenty-two. I made my way to Marseilles,
found a boat to New Orleans. I'm not happy,' he added simply. 'I don't think a
man like me is ever happy. But to live in a world where it's only animals, and
the rocks and the sky—'

He drew a deep
breath, his face peaceful, like a man who comes from bitterest cold to a fire.
'I swear to you, it's the closest I can get. I should have known they'd follow
me.'

'Do you remember
killing Klaus Bodenschatz?'

Manitou had shut
his eyes again; now they flared open, earnest and troubled and without a trace
of anger in their gold-flecked brown depths. 'I didn't kill him.'

January opened
his mouth to make the obvious reply, then closed it again, recalling that sense
of seeing some piece of a puzzle fall into place . . . 'Did you break his leg?'
he asked.

Flecks of color
came up under the mountaineer's heavy tan, and he looked away. 'He had
pistols,' he said. 'I saw that fool lantern of his a mile away and thought it
might have been you, or one of those numbskulls that were out all over the
hills that night followin' Beauty and the Dutchman. Bodenschatz put a ball in
my arm 'fore I ever saw him. He had a second pistol, and I knew I had to get it
from him fast . . .' Some memory flickered for a moment like the reflection of
that speck of lantern fire in his eyes.

'I was angry,'
he added, more softly. 'At that pissant Blankenship. At you, as I thought,
comin' after me. At all them damn cretins tramplin' all over the hills tryin'
to find their way to the one best beaver stream in the mountains . . . Doesn't
matter.' He shook his head, like a bull in fly season, goaded beyond enduring
by a thousand biting demons that he could not see. 'Anger comes over
me ...
I hurt him . .
. pretty bad, I think. His bones was like dry sticks.' For an instant his face
convulsed: shame and pain and grief at what he had done. 'But I never took a
knife to him. I splinted up his leg and tore up his shirt to bind his ribs
with, for I'd broke a number of 'em. Then I made a shelter for him, under that
big deadfall, and made a fire, and give him my own shirt, for I could smell it
was comin' to rain again.'

From the blanket
beside him Manitou picked up his second parfleche, half-emptied, and handed it
to January, who had to force himself to stop eating the pemmican lest he devour
everything and leave nothing for the others. Their companions still lay like
the dead on the apishamores spread on the ground: Shaw's bare arms and hands
criss-crossed with makeshift bandages from his torn-up shirt; Hannibal and
Veinte-y-Cinco clung together in sleep like some tattered Hansel and Gretel,
adrift in a forest that neither could hope to survive. January wondered who was
taking care of Pia back at the camp.

'Did he wake?'
he asked at length.

'Nah.' The big
man sighed. 'I thought of wakin' him, to ask his forgiveness. But I was riled
from the fight an' could still feel the thunder spirit scratchin' to get out. I
knew the old man had to be with someone. He musta come into the camp that day,
maybe seen me when I fought you. I had to get away from him, where I couldn't
see him: with the fire burnin' before him, he'd be safe enough. I thought I'd
move on, soon as it got light. Him an' Franz - I figured it'd be Franz with him
- would be easy enough to lose in the mountains.'

He sat for a
time, looking out into the still blue cold of the dawn woods. Then: 'I laid
down, but the only thing in my mind - like a voice whisperin' stronger an'
stronger - was that it'd be so easy to go back ... I got my horses an' went to
where I knew Silent Wolf was camped. Silent Wolf is a medicine man, as well as
the war chief.'

The trapper
turned his arm, as if through the elk-hide war- shirt, the blanket capote, he
could see the scars of a hundred slivers of fatwood, driven under the skin and
lighted to bring his soul back from the frontiers of homicidal madness. 'I told
him what I need to do, to keep that thunder spirit on its own side of the
fence. He'd done it before. Blackfeet are good at it. The best.' His hand
brushed his body, as if recalling every one of those shocking scars that
covered him as if it were a blessing. 'Time we're movin',' he added and glanced
at the gold sunlight as it washed across the rock escarpments behind them, the
twilight below dissolving into color and brightness. 'You feel up to it?'

'As opposed to
sitting here,' said January, rising, 'I could run all the way back.'

While January
bridled the mules - stiffened muscles, knife cuts and bruises shrieking with
every move - Manitou woke Shaw, Hannibal and Veinte-y-Cinco, who split the last
of the pemmican among them. Day was growing bright and chill. Shaw looked out
over the valley, toward the ford and the stumpy red-brown thumb of Grindstone
Butte: 'What's our chance of makin' the camp by tonight?'