The Englishman’s Boy Read online

  Alarmed, I rise to my feet. “Mr. McAdoo? Mr. McAdoo? Are you all right?”

  The head slowly lifts from the cold iron; the head slowly turns. His voice is gentle, bleak. “What you want from me, son? Who are you?”

  The voice beckons me, I feel myself fading out of the lamplight, drifting into the tar-papered gloom surrounding the stove. At the far end of the bunkhouse, I catch a stain of light seeping through the one dirty pane of glass, puddling on the board floor. The swallows rustling under the eaves purl like running water. We are face to face now, the black eyes glitter at me. I say, “I’m not the police.”

  “Hell, I know that. I weren’t born yesterday. I been christened, son.”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Newspaper writer?”

  “I used to be. But not any more. I write books now. I want to write a book about the Old West. Everyone tells me you’re the man to talk to. That you have the stories. A writer needs stories. They all said talk to Shorty McAdoo if you want the real dope, the truth.”

  Surprisingly, my little encomium angers him. “I ain’t interested in all that old dead shit. I know the truth.”

  “It’s history,” I say, lamely. “It’s something we all ought to know.”

  “Then go talk to Wyatt Earp. He’s living in the vicinity. He’ll put you up to your ass in history. He’s full of it.”

  “I don’t want Earp. I want you.”

  “And I don’t want to get mixed up in all that shit.”

  “All what shit?” I demand, exasperated. “What shit are we talking about?”

  “Lies.”

  The two of us stand in the middle of an empty bunkhouse staring at one another. The pool of smudgy light shivers on the floor as, outside, a cloud blows across the face of the sun.

  “Lies are the last thing I’m interested in.”

  “Go away,” he says.

  “So how are you going to get to Canada? Grow wings and fly? You’re broke. I’ll offer you good wages just to sit and talk to me. A stunt man gets paid seven and a half dollars a day to risk his neck. I’ll pay you that much money to sit in a chair and talk to me. What could be fairer?”

  “You pay me seven and a half dollars a day? What kind of stunts do I have to do for a stunt man’s wages?”

  “No stunts. Just agree to my terms. You’ll have to allow me to take down whatever you say – word for word. In shorthand. So that my publisher can read for himself what you tell me, to judge its potential with the public. If he decides there’s money to be made publishing your stories he’ll negotiate to purchase the rights to them. Any money you receive up until that point will be money paid for your time alone. Do you understand?” McAdoo begins to scrub his face with his hands. I read it as a sign of indecision. “High wages, Mr. McAdoo. Just to tell the story of your life.”

  “Ain’t no story to my life.”

  “That’s not so, Mr. McAdoo. There’s a story to every life.”

  “Tell them yours then.”

  “You were there. You can provide the straight goods on how it was.”

  “Hot and thirsty and hard was how it was. Like it always is. Copy that down in your goddamn book.”

  “Easy money.”

  “I don’t favour easy money. Too much easy money flying around this part of the world. I ain’t seen much to recommend it. Nothing so hard as easy money.”

  “What is it you mistrust? Me? My motives?” I take Chance’s expense money out of the inside pocket of my jacket, remove ten dollars and place it on the top of the stove. I am careful to let him catch a peek of how much money remains in the envelope. “I said I’d pay for your time. I’ve taken a piece of your time, Mr. McAdoo. I’ve also imposed on your good will and hospitality.” We are both looking at the money as if expecting it to kindle on the stovetop. “If you agree to give me more of your time, you’ll be paid. You want to call it off at any time, call it off. No strings attached.”

  “Don’t go telling me that,” he says, a bitter edge to his voice. “I’m an old whore. Just listening to you talk – my pussy’s already sore. I can guess how it’s going to smart you ever manage to haul yourself aboard and commence to fucking me full bore.”

  “No one has any intention of fucking you, Mr. McAdoo. You will get every penny you’re owed. In fact, I am prepared to advance you fifty dollars right now. To demonstrate good faith.”

  McAdoo hasn’t touched the money yet, but he’s looking. “He’s a rich man then – this man you’re working for?”

  “He is a gentleman of ample resources. More important, I have trust in his integrity.”

  “My daddy had a saying. We all share and share alike. Rich man has all the ice he wants in summer. Poor man all the ice he wants in winter,” comments McAdoo.

  “Maybe it’s time you had a little ice in summer,” I say, flicking several more bills out of the envelope. I put them down beside the ten-spot on the stovetop. “There’s the advance I spoke of – fifty dollars. You could take it and run, but I’m banking you’re a man of your word.”

  “And all I do is talk?”

  “Seven and a half dollars a day. Payment in full at the end of each and every day. If I feel your stories don’t fulfil expectations, I’ll break it off. You can do the same. No hard feelings, no recriminations.”

  “But you going to ask me questions,” says McAdoo. “I know it.” At the prospect he sounds sorrowful.

  “That’s right. I’ll ask questions. That’s my job, persuading you to answer them. But if you won’t – there’s nothing much I can do about it, is there?”

  McAdoo picks the ten dollars from the stove, leaving the fifty where it lies. He holds the ten-spot out to me. “This money I earned today,” he says, “take it and buy me some crackers, some cheese, a couple cans of sardines. Buy me some tobacco and cigarette papers. And canned peaches. I admire the taste of canned peaches in heavy syrup. You buy me all that and bring it back to me tomorrow.”

  I can barely fence the elation I feel out of my voice. “All right.”

  As an afterthought, he adds, “You might get me a bottle of whisky. I ain’t had a tot for a month.” He smiles mischievously. “Whisky might loosen me up for my sermon tomorrow. But if I’m short on money after you get the other supplies, forget the whisky.”

  “If you are, I’ll advance you on the whisky.”

  “The hell you’ll advance me. I’m not going on tick to the company store.” He shoves the fifty dollars at me roughly. “Take that back.”

  I fold the money back into the envelope. “Then we’ve got a deal?”

  “One-day-at-a-time deal. You bring me my groceries tomorrow and we’ll talk a while. Try it on for size. See how the pig flies.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  We shake hands formally, punctiliously. The swallows returning to their nests as night falls whir louder and louder under the eaves.

  “I look forward to tomorrow,” I say.

  “What I look forward to is them peaches,” says McAdoo. “Don’t you go and forget my heavy-syrup peaches.”

  We part at the stove. My hand on the door, I hesitate, meaning to ask, What time should I come? But seeing what I see, I say nothing. McAdoo stands, head worshipfully bowed to the stove iron, in a chill, vertiginous embrace. Behind him, the light in the lamp is flagging, glowing orange in the glass chimney.

  I let myself out. It has begun to rain, big cold drops splash down, faster and faster. I hold my coat closed at the throat, hobbling as fast as I can toward the waiting Ford. Despite the burned house, the burned barn, the scorched windmill, I could sing for joy. Besides, the rain is washing it all from sight.

  9

  The next morning the wolfers began the construction of rafts to ferry supplies, saddles, guns, and sundry gear across the Marias River. One group of men limbed and chopped deadfall while another dragged the logs to the river’s edge where Frenchie Devereux lashed them together with rawhide and bits of rope. Hank, who had quit his hunger strike after one ni
ght of famine, sat plugging himself with bacon and beans until Hardwick sauntered up to him and handed him an axe with the remark, “Here’s an old friend of yours, Farmer. Shake hands.”

  By early afternoon the pack horses had swum the ford and were hobbled on the other side awaiting reloading. Three rafts piled with goods were launched and poled to the opposite bank, then poled back to freight more cargo. Sediment turned the current rich and thick as liquid chocolate; it ran with a steady, strong force which twisted and twined under the surface like muscle and sinew flexing beneath skin.

  With the final load piled on the last raft, Scotty peeled out of his boots and clothes and flung them aboard as it pushed off. He stood naked on the bank with a weird grin pasted on his face, looking like he was ready to embark on some schoolboy prank, devilishly flout all the headmaster’s iron proprieties. Frenchie Devereux, Trevanian Hale, and Ed Grace galloped their horses into the river in a sheet of spray, plunging them into a race with the raft, leaving behind the last two of the party, Hank and Scotty. When the boys on the far bank saw what was up, they hopped about waving their arms, hollering, and snapping off pistol-shots into the blue sky as the rafts-men bent their backs to the poles and the riders whooped on their surging horses.

  Devereux’s horse was a hands-down winner. It came clambering spiritedly up the trampled mud of the ford, the only stretch of riverbank for several hundreds of yards where steep cutbanks did not overhang the water, Devereux clinging to its back like a leech, his shoulder-length black hair and drooping moustache strewing water, sopping buckskins moulded to his lean body. Cantering his wild-eyed horse around the grinning men he shouted, “Frenchie Devereux! He run the buffalo, he! He run the river, he! Goddamn son of a bitch, eh?”

  “Goddamn catfish, he!” Hardwick yelled back at him, pointing to Devereux’s moustache. “Goddamn Missouri salmon, he! If the whores in Benton got a look at you now, Frenchie, they wouldn’t have you in their beds. They’d have you buttered in the frying pan!” All the men hooted and roared with laughter as Hardwick crooked his thumb across the river to Scotty, jaybird-naked in the hot afternoon sunshine. “A whore don’t care for no limp catfish whiskers,” he said. “She’s after the bait old Scotty’s dangling.”

  Just then the Scotchman leapt up on his thoroughbred and rode it bareback into the river, for all the world a Schoolbook myth, rider on the frieze of the Parthenon, gleaming white and confident, head of his horse with cocked ears and distended nostrils parting the brown water like a brave figurehead on a brave ship, Hank following gingerly in his wake. Halfway across the river the Scotchman even slipped off the horse, playfully grasped its tail, and was taken in tow for several yards before letting go and swimming the last ten yards to shore, white arms rising and falling in radiant spray as he pulled himself confidently through the brown water.

  Meanwhile, Hank’s horse had balked in the shallows, swinging its head from side to side in dismay, snuffling the water as the hired man whipped its flanks and drummed its barrel with his heels. Slowly, step by step, the old white horse reluctantly allowed itself to be goaded into the stream, whinnying to the horses on the far bank as the water lapped its belly and chest. Then, suddenly, the riverbed dropped off, throwing the white horse headlong into the current with a mighty splash. For an instant, only the heads of horse and man could be seen, bobbing in the grip of the current like flood debris; then the arched neck of the horse, the chest of the man broke upward, awash in filthy water and fear.

  Scotty, reaching the opposite bank, turned, the blue-white marble gleam of his body sheathed in a coat of silt. The Englishman’s boy stood in his stirrups for a better look. Devereux swore an oath in French.

  Each time Hank swung the horse in the direction of the knot of men waiting on the bank, the plug would flounder vainly for a few moments, then surrender to the current and be swept further downstream. Already rider and horse had been carried past the ford to where cutbanks stooped over the river, sheer faces of eroded clay and exposed tree roots clawing the air, precipices too steep for a horse to scramble up them and out of the water.

  The Englishman’s boy knew it for bad, deep trouble. Hank knew it too. He kept trying to jerk his horse around and abreast the stream, back to the landing spot. But its head kept swinging downriver like a compass needle north, back to the path of least resistance.

  Lifting a white and stricken face to the riverbank Hank called imploringly, “God Almighty, boys! Help me or I’m a goner!”

  Devereux, Hale, and the Englishman’s boy booted their horses to the river’s edge but they shied and reared; having swum it once, they would not take it again. The other ponies, spooked by the rearing horses, trampled about in confusion and balked at entering the stream. One last time, Hank tried to turn the white horse, failed, and despairingly flung himself out of the saddle, chopping the water with short frantic strokes. The Englishman’s boy guessed all Hank’s swimming had been done in a rain barrel. He was using himself up fast.

  Hale shook out a rope and spun a loop into the river. It didn’t come near reaching the failing swimmer. Ed Grace and Charlie Harper struggled through the confusion of horses and shoved off in one of the rafts, but in their hurry they upset it and spilled into the shallows, had to watch the clumsy craft spin out of reach.

  They all froze in silence. Watched Hank giving out, his arms feebly clawing the river, his tipped face smeared by a glaze of water and sun. Watched the white horse, now under the overhang of the cutbank, squealing and desperately pawing the face of crumbling clay, sliding back down the slippery slope and crashing back into the river. The whole sluggish dream of doom, blind face gasping for breath, sharp burst of birdsong in the willows, heat trembling trapped between cutbanks, the overpowering, sickly-sweet odour of blooming wolf willow, cousin to the musky, cunning, creeping smell of death. The whole slow playing-out of man’s bitter nightmare portion.

  Then they heard a splash to their right. Saw Scotty in the water, swimming hard. Saw Hank go completely under, all but for one hand scrabbling and tearing at the air for a hold, then shoot back to the surface, buoyed by the last desperate kick of panic, pale exhausted face disbelieving and bewildered. Saw Scotty grab him from behind as he was sinking for the second time, forearm under the jaw, rolling the dead weight on to its back, heading for the bank, shouting, “Kick, man, kick!” Coming on in jerks, slowly, struggling in the unforgiving grip of whatever clutched their ankles, whatever dragged them down, whatever poured water into their gaping mouths, stopped their nostrils, wrapped their limbs in lead and futility. They were ten yards from touching bottom and it was a coin toss. Four men waded out as far as they could and stood tensely waiting. In the terrible expectant stillness they could hear the hollow panting, the groans racking the swimmers, sounds like a woman labouring to give birth. They beckoned, whispered encouragement under their breath as the small waves slapped against them. “Go it, Scotty,” they whispered. “That’s the lad.” “Just a bit more.” “Come on, sport.”

  And then the two were almost within reach, half-under, sunk like water-logged timbers, rolling in the wash. Devereux leaned out, Ed Grace clutching his belt, and snatched a sleeve.

  Half-carried, swooning with exhaustion, the swimmers sloshed through knee-deep water. Scotty set foot to solid ground, took three shaky steps and sank to his haunches, sat with head hanging between knees, arms hugging shins. Hank staggered on a little further, arms slung over Devereux’s and Grace’s shoulders, then dropped to his hands and knees, retched, crawled away from his puke, retched again, and fell on his face, hugging the earth, knotting his fingers in the short grass.

  Vogle came riding to the ford along the top of the cutbank, towing the white horse back upstream with a lariat dallied to his saddlehorn. While it had battered itself against the steep bank like a fly against a windowpane, he had managed to toss a noose around its neck. He pulled ashore the stumbling, spent, mud-smeared horse. Hardwick ran his eyes over it quickly, shouldered himself through the gang clustered aroun
d Hank, halted over the sprawled figure. He nudged him with his boot, but the farm hand squirmed against the soil, mewling like a baby somebody was trying to pluck from its mother’s breast. Hooking a toe under him, Hardwick turned him turtle and Hank lay blinking up into the sun, teeth chattering between blue lips.

  “Three blind mice, three blind mice,” Hardwick began to croon, bending over Hank like a mother bends over a cradle. “See how they run, see how they run, / They all run after the farmer’s wife, / Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.” The men threw uneasy, surprised glances to one another as Hardwick sang in a mocking falsetto to the man spread-eagled on the ground. His voice kept rising higher and higher. “Did you ever see such a sight in your life / As three blind mice?” Then, as abruptly as he had begun, he broke off, peered hard into the face of the man whimpering with fear and rubbing the back of his hand back and forth across his blue lips.

  “Ever see such a sight in your life as this blind mouse?” Hardwick inquired coldly.

  Evans cleared his throat. “You can see he ain’t well, Tom. Give the man a chance.”

  Hardwick lowered himself on one knee beside Hank. “He ain’t a goddamn man,” he said fiercely. “If the best part of him hadn’t run down his momma’s leg he’d have been a rat, but instead she had to squeeze out a little blind cheese-eater mouse.”

  “I feel bad,” said Hank. “Real bad. I near drownded.”