The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 24



In the same instant that January stared, rather stupidly, at the place where the fiddler had lain - how many minutes since last he'd looked? - he felt the blade of a knife slide between his bound wrists and part the rawhide like kitchen string. Beyond his feet he could glimpse Shaw lying suspiciously still . . .

The hoofbeats strengthened in the darkness - the fire's glow had sunk to a red flicker no bigger than a hat - and the camp guard all looked in the direction of the sound. The other warriors rose, waked by the sound, gathering to welcome Charro Morales - Frank Boden - as he rode into the camp . . .

And more silently than January could have imagined possible for a man of his own size, he rolled into the darkness where hands unseen were waiting to cut the thong that bound his ankles. A hand took his arm, guided him, stumbling, between trees of which he was barely conscious. He glanced back, saw that Shaw had disappeared from where he'd been an instant ago.

Someone pushed Goshen Clarke's brass-studded rifle into his hands.

The grip on his arm tightened - stand . . .

He saw ahead of them the moving shadow of a bear, ambling between trees where a feather of moonlight glimmered. Turning his head, he saw Shaw then - or Shaw's angular silhouette against the reflection of the war camp's fire. Since those first days of travel up the Platte, every man in the wagon-train - and later every trapper he'd ever spoken to - had cautioned him: don't stand by the fire, you 'II show yourself up . . .

And there was Charro Morales - Frank Boden - in his bright Mexican jacket and his town boots, standing by his horse, next to the fire, lit up as Bo Frye had been lit, gesturing and arguing with Iron Heart with the red-gold gleam painting him against the night behind him. January was conscious that this was what Shaw was looking at too, small head turned like a raptor bird's, the slouched lines of his body clumsy-graceful as a very old tomcat's as he brought up his rifle, for a perfect shot that he couldn't miss . . .

And that would bring every warrior in the camp after them, afoot and within fifty feet of where they'd lain bound a few moments before.

You can kill anything with one shot, Tom had said.

You owe me, and you owe Johnny . . .

There wasn't even the chance to say: Don't . . . because they were close enough yet to the Omahas that someone would have heard.

Shaw stood for all of three full seconds with his rifle raised. Then he lowered the barrel, turned away, touched January's arm with one hand to move them all on up the hill.

January could hear the sawing pain of Hannibal's laboring breath, and, in a moment's whisper of moonlight, he recognized that thin silhouette between the trees. He heard also the susurration of heavy fabric: Veinte-y-Cinco. In another blink of moonlight - they were following the trees, back east along the coulee - he made out the heavy shoulders and bear-like head of Manitou Wildman.

Manitou led them up the dry creek-bed at the bottom of the gully - pale boulders, jumbled stone that wouldn't hold tracks. January caught Hannibal's arm as the fiddler stumbled, the drag of his weight - even perceived through January's own aching exhaustion - telling him that his friend was at the end of his strength. 'Go,' the fiddler whispered, and staggered again. 'You'll never get away—'

January tightened his hold. 'Rose will kill me if I make her find another Greek tutor.'

'I'm not fooling.'

'Neither am I.'

'Please,' panted Hannibal, and he made an effort to plant his feet. 'I've never been anything but a waste of air and boot leather. Please don't make me die with my last thought being that I caused the deaths of the only people I care about—'

'If I have to carry you January doubled his fist in his friend's face - 'it's going to slow me down. But I'll do it.'

'I got horses up top of the draw,' rumbled Manitou. 'I'm guessin' Iron Heart's gonna head straight north after you into open country. He may not. Left Hand - brave that fetched Boden just now from the camp - brung him news that had him spittin' nails.'

'What news?'

'Somebody been an' burned one of the Omaha lodges at the rendezvous. Dunno what was in it—'

'I do.' Hannibal gasped for breath, hand pressed hard to his ribs. 'I think that was Morning Star, and the lodge she burned was the one where Iron Heart and Bodenschatz were keeping the poison.'

'Poison?'

'The poison Franz Bodenschatz and his father were going to put in all the liquor at the rendezvous to serve Iron Heart's vengeance on the white man,' replied January quietly. 'In exchange for Iron Heart's help in killing you.'

Manitou paused for a moment in his long stride, looked back at January, silent as his namesake, the great spirit-bear, in the starlight. It was too dark to see any expression on his face, but January heard him, very slightly, sigh. Then he turned and moved on.

After a long time he said, 'They say you're a doctor, Winter Moon.'

'A surgeon,' said January. 'I've studied medicines, but it's not my trade.'

'Ever done mad-doctorin'?'

'I've known mad-doctors.' January grimaced at the recollection of the asylums he'd visited, in France and in Mexico. Remembered the patients twisting and groaning in the so-called 'Utica crib', like a coffin wrought of bars; remembered the way the lunatics would cry and plead not to be put into the 'swing', and the surreal 'water cure' that left the half-drowned victim temporarily incapable of any manifestation of their insanity, whatever voices might be screaming at them in their wandering brain. 'I never had the impression that any of them were doing anything more than guessing.'

They climbed in silence, following a ridge of rock up the side of the draw now, toward one of the outcroppings of granite that studded these arid hills among the trees.

'She could bring me back,' said Manitou at last, very softly, into the stillness. 'Mina could. Mina Bodenschatz. Only one who could, when I'd go blank.'

They moved across the boulders, moccasins soundless on the granite. Wind breathed down on them the smell of cloud; the air was clammy and cold.

'Silent Wolf says -' Manitou's slow voice fumbled at the words - 'when I was born, at the same time and same place a thunder spirit came into being and got trapped up in my flesh. Makes as much sense as anything else I've heard. Lot more than those mad-doctors in Munich.'

'You've been to mad-doctors, then?'

'Oh God, yes. My parents never would consult with 'em when I was little, when anger'd set me off an' I'd do things I didn't remember . . .'cept in dreams. I was six or seven, first time. Then not again 'til I was eleven. Air catches fire—' His big hand gestured, trying to find expression, and the movement flinched and caught, as it had by the ashes of the Blackfoot campfire, like he had a wound in his arm. 'I wake up, hours later, head hurtin' like I don't know there's human words to tell it. I'll sometimes dream about what I did, maybe not 'til years later . . .' He shook his head. 'I never have dreamed about Mina. Some nights it feels like I'm gonna. Those nights I get myself drunk.'

'Do you know what happened?'

'I know what they said at the trial. By the time I was fourteen I figured out I could use pain to bring myself out of it. I'd heat the top end of one of my mama's knitting needles in the fire, brand myself on the inside of my arm or on the thigh. If I caught it quick enough - 'tween the time somethin' would set me off, an' the fire closin' in around my vision - I could pull out of it. Pa was a doctor in Lucerne. We moved down to Nuremberg, I think so they wouldn't be around his family or Mama's - so they wouldn't know about me. But he said

Mama did, too - everyone would know there was somethin' goin' on, if I didn't be a doctor, too.'

'You're Swiss, then?'

'Yeah.' In the sing-song German of the south, he added, 'It's been ten years since I spoke German, but when I dream of the Alps - of the shepherds who worked for Mama's family they all speak it, and I can still understand.' In the darkness, for an instant, January heard the smile in the mountaineer's voice.

'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.'