The Englishman's Boy (13 page)

“You got to watch your step in these lonesome parts,” he remarks. “I blame these picture people. Every lazy no-account’s heard how they’ll pay you five dollar a day to stand in a crowd, holler and wave your arms. Easy money, no work, they think. Flame for the wrong kind of moths. A week ago I come in here and some ugly son of a bitch and his head lice is laying in my bed. Drifter. Clear out my bunk,
I said. Know what he done? Give me a big smile, fiddled out his cod and asked for a suck. If I didn’t run the bastards off, this place’d be just the same as one of them goddamn downtown missions. I’d be lying awake of a night listening to old men bugger each other. No thanks to that music. This is my home.” He pauses. “And I don’t recall offering you no invitation.”

“Point taken. You didn’t.”

“That’s right. I didn’t.” He waits.

I light a cigarette, my hands are trembling. I pass McAdoo the pack.

“Obliged,” he says. “This is my first in a goodly time.” He wolfs down the smoke, makes to return the package.

“Keep them,” I say.

He presses them into my palm. His fingers feel like they’ve been whittled from something cold and hard, like ivory.

“What I mean is, keep them, you’re a long way from supplies,” I say by way of apology.

“I make out fine. I come here with supplies,” he declares. “Coffee, dried peas, beans. I planted me a truck garden, some of it’s showing now. There’s quail abouts, and rabbit for flesh. I shot a small doe last month. There’s still some deer in this country, not many, but some.”

“You’re living wild then.”

“Hell, a roof ain’t wild. This ain’t living wild.”

“Tobacco doesn’t grow wild for the picking,” I say. “You take it.”

He doesn’t object this time, just tucks the cigarettes away in his shirt pocket. But I guess he feels his need has compromised him. He says angrily, “I tell you this Hollywood is one sour pot of milk, can hardly see it for the flies.” He gets to his feet with a savage jerk of the shoulders and moves to the stove. In a barely audible voice he remarks, “Nothing colder’n a cold stove. Why’s that? I get a bad headache I always lay her on a cold stove.” He stoops over, presses his forehead to the stove, his hands loosely cupped around the swell of the fire-box. A strange, oddly disturbing sight, as if he is resting his head on a woman’s breast, his hands on her hips. Consolation. The
old man doesn’t stir. I can hear my watch measuring the stillness. Maybe he’s faint with hunger.

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
 

T
he 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 night 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.