The Englishman's Boy (28 page)

The Englishman’s boy had taken his knife out of his boot and was jabbing it in the sod. He looked up at Grace. “What you telling me? You don’t like being left with Evans in command?”

“Hell, no. At least Evans showed some sense faced with a cannon. All winter I’ve been listening to Hardwick rag him about turning tail. He says the foreman of the jury ought to have seen to a guilty verdict – Judge Brass or no Judge Brass. Shoot the bastard where he sat, Hardwick says.”

“And get blowed to scraps?”

“Hardwick does things hot-iron,” was all Grace said.

The Englishman’s boy twisted his knife in the earth. “So what is it you saying?”

Grace glanced around him to make sure nobody was listening, tapped the boy on the knee. “What I’m saying is that you and me are like that half-breed – he isn’t white and he isn’t Indian. It’s a tough place, betwixt and between. I’m not a Baker man and nor are you. Maybe we’re going to get caught in the middle at Farwell’s post,” he said significantly. “The only reason I’m here with this godforsaken crew is to protect my share of the money from those wolf skins. You’re here because Fort Benton’s too hot for you. Neither of us has
any reason to get shot for I.G. Baker. I’m not a man who has a taste for blood. Hardwick is.”

The Englishman’s boy wiped the knife blade on his pants.

“We could light out tonight,” said Grace urgently, “when Hardwick’s gone. Evans won’t follow us.”

“You do what you like,” said the Englishman’s boy.

“There’s no point going on my own. In this country, a man needs someone watching his back. Two repeating rifles are better than one.”

“And where we going to go? I ain’t welcome in Fort Benton.”

“There’s whisky forts spotted all over this country. We could make for Fort Kipp, Fort Slideout, Fort Conrad, Fort Whisky Gap, the Robbers’ Roost – you name it.”

The Englishman’s boy remained stubbornly silent. His reaction altered Grace’s mood; when he spoke again the pleading tone was gone, replaced with a sad resignation.

“I was born in old Ontario,” he said. “My mother had a piano in the parlour. We had books. One of them had a picture in it of a centaur –” His head bobbed up. “You know what a centaur is, son?”

The boy shook his head.

“A being, half man, half horse.” He stopped, began again, explaining. “I’ve been knocking around this country ten years – it changes a man. But I’m not all the way there yet. I’m not Tom Hardwick. I’m betwixt and between – half civilized, half uncivilized. A centaur.”

The Englishman’s boy waited for Grace to go on, but he was finished. “If I was a centaur, I could ride myself out of here,” the boy said. “But I ain’t. I’m mounted on Tom Hardwick’s horse. If I ride out of here on his horse, that makes me a horse thief. Horse thieves hang. I’d sooner take a bullet than have folks gawking at me while I kick and dangle.”

“So you won’t go?” The question was a formality.

“I won’t go. But if you want, the deal we made still holds.”

“It holds,” said Grace. “We’ll watch each other’s back.”

At dusk, they filed into the trees. Grace said it was a quarter to nine by his pocket watch, but the sky still held a little light. They climbed
through a stand of lodgepole pine, winding amid the slender limbless trunks, straight as spear-shafts, which culminated in crowns of branches which lent the. pines the appearance of bottle-scrubbing brushes. There was little undergrowth and the forest floor crackled dry and sere under the horses’ hooves. The air held no taint of rot, of fungus, of mould, was odourless, except for the occasional furtive, astringent whiff of sap or pine needles.

Earlier, Vogle had discovered a deadfall that formed a natural breastwork and it was behind this they camped, unsaddling and hobbling their horses, unpacking gear, spreading blankets in a hushed, deepening gloom. Evans nominated two men as advance pickets for the first watch, and two more as reliefs. The first sentries glided off down the slope, flitting through the trees and ashen light like spectres.

Needing a piss, the Englishman’s boy strolled away from the camp to politely make his water. Despite the lateness of the hour, everywhere birds were calling to one another in the treetops, a cascade of urgent, piercing cries, succeeded by sombre, dolorous chirps which seemed to float, prolonged, thirty feet above where the lodgepole pines waved their heads in the breeze.

He stopped to listen. The shoulder of the hill acted as a windbreak; down here all was dead calm, the air still warm with the heat of the day, but overhead the pines whispered and sighed like a sickroom. It recalled to him the hotel room in which the Englishman, John Trevelyan Dawe, had surrendered up his spirit.

The boy shook himself free of that thought, drifted on, moving farther and farther from camp. The widely spaced pine grew blacker by the minute as the light died in the sky, turning into columns of ebony. Darkness was gradual and sudden both, a stealthy movement turned peremptory – simply
there.

He arrested himself in his tracks, fidgeted his pecker out of his pants. Above the hissing of his water on the ground, off in the distance, he heard a burst of duck squabble. Was something else besides himself moving in the night? Indians? A grizzly?

Now that he was still, he heard the thin whining of mosquitoes,
like an itch in the brain, and their stings prickling his back, his face, his hands like the touch of nettles, a savage cloud inseparable from darkness itself, a cloud against which he could only blindly flap his hand and curse. He buttoned up in haste, and began to blunder back to camp, stumbling over the tree roots veining the ground. Once he cast his eyes up to the forest roof and there was the moon, bouncing along in step with him, jarring and bobbing its lunatic face at him through the treetops.

He tripped and fell, scrambled to his feet with his Colt drawn. He could hear himself panting, hear his feet slithering in the slippery pine needles as he turned a circle, the barrel of his pistol holding the trees at bay. That’s when he saw it. An old gullied washout running straight and true like a well-worn wagon track down the slope. The moon’s onslaught of pallid light was turning the tide of darkness – or maybe his eyes were only accustoming themselves to it. He stared hard, until it seemed to shimmer in the dimness.

A road offering itself. But he knew better’n to take an offered road. There weren’t no straight tracks out of the trees, only the path you won yourself, squeezing and dodging, twisting and turning, doubling and backtracking, slipping through where you could. That was all, slipping through where you could.

The Englishman dead. Only God Almighty himself might know how that sorry-ass Hank had ended. Today he’d seen Scotty scribbling in that writing book, like Dawe had done, going so blamed quick you wouldn’t believe it. Writing ever so much faster than ever any man could even think. So what was he writing?

And Grace. Grace with his head tied up in a hanky like a bandage, asking him to take flight with him. Grace pretending there was some straight road the two of them could sashay down. Grace would have him hanging straight, straight down on the end of a rope, like the geese his Pap used to string up to age, hang until they dropped off at the neck.

There it was still, a road pointing off somewheres. Right enough, it give him a clutch in the throat. It hurt him with its straightness and
its promise. It hurt him with its moonlight prettiness. But he knew it one better. He knew there weren’t no straight roads.

And so he slipped away, fugitive amid the pines, the passage of an animal, sure and deft now, his feet no longer awkward, but moving soft and certain in the soft and uncertain forest mulch.

He woke to the drumming of a woodpecker. Dawn was breaking. He stood up in his clothes and went to the breastwork. In the trees farther down the slope, he could see fine ground-mist unwinding skeins of white yarn. All around him men lay completely swaddled in blankets, even their heads were covered. It had been a bad night. Even in the midst of a swarm of mosquitoes Evans had allowed no smudges to be lit for fear of giving away their position. All night men and horses had suffered torment, the horses having the worst of it. The Englishman’s boy had listened to them stamping their hooves in frustration, the wild, hissing rustle of their whisking tails. After four or five hours, they had begun to groan hollowly, a deep, sonorous, dumb complaint against their misery. When the Englishman’s boy crawled out of his bedroll and went to his mount, he could see its eyes rolling wildly and flashing in the darkness. A comforting hand run down its neck came away wet with blood.

He did what he could. After he saddled the gelding he took the two blankets of his bedroll, wrapped one around the horse’s neck, draped the other over its hindquarters. Then he lay back down on the ground in his clothes.

He might have slept as much as an hour. Leaning now against the wind-toppled timbers of the natural barricade, he could feel how puffy his face was, his left eye almost swollen closed by the insect bites.

Someone was hacking and spitting behind him, someone else muttering. The wolfers were rousing themselves. He smelled match sulphur and pipe tobacco.

Soon they were back on the flat, where Hardwick had instructed them to await him. One hour, two hours passed; they acquired a
discouraged and sullen air, like a school party abandoned in strange surroundings by their teacher.

Then someone shouted. Hardwick was coming.

Hardwick had not seen any of their horses in the Assiniboine camp. They would spend Sunday at Abe Farwell’s post.

20
 

F
rom Chance’s quarter all is silence. I am beginning to wonder if I haven’t blown a golden opportunity, spilled the milk. The problem is I don’t know because I can’t get in touch with him. That is the frustrating thing, the uncertainty. Two nights ago I drove up to his house in the hills intending to beard the lion in his den, but when I got there I found the iron gate to his grounds was locked. Although I thought about it, I knew it would be too ridiculous to leave the car in the road and grapple my way over the gate to get into the property. Given my leg, probably it was impossible.

Yesterday I called his office again and asked to speak to him. After a brief interlude during which I could hear papers being shuffled on a desk, the receptionist said, “Your name is not on the list of people from whom Mr. Chance will accept calls.”

“You tell him Harry Vincent is on the line. He’ll take my call.”

“Mr. Chance is occupied. I’ll put you through to Mr. Fitzsimmons.”

“I have nothing to say to Mr. Fitzsimmons. I wish to speak to Mr. Chance.”

“That is impossible. Perhaps you would care to leave a message?”

“Here’s my message. Give him two names. Harry Vincent and Shorty McAdoo. If I were you, I’d see that he gets them.”

I sat down to wait for Chance to return my call. He didn’t; Fitz did. He was ready to skin me alive.

“What did Mr. Chance tell you? Keep it fucking confidential. And you, you asshole, you throw McAdoo’s name at a receptionist.”

“I thought it might catch his attention. Nothing else has lately.”

“Don’t go
thinking.
You ain’t paid to think. You’re paid to do what you’re fucking told. And another thing. When Dorothy tells you Mr. Chance is unavailable, understand what that means. It means you are to get the fuck off the telephone – Mr. Chance doesn’t have time for you.”

“Or maybe it means you gave Dorothy orders not to put my calls through. I heard mention of a list. What’s the list about, Fitz?”

Fitzsimmons ignored this. “And where do you get off telling Dorothy you don’t want to talk to me? That’s an insult. You’re an insulting little prick, Vincent. For one-fifty a week, you talk to me. You got that?” He paused. “I tried to tell him you was an insufficient man. Insufficient in every way. But he had one of his –” he searched melodramatically for the word “– one of his
intuitions
about you. But you don’t produce results, do you?”

“Who’s complaining? Mr. Chance? Or you?”

“Maybe both of us.”

“You make it sound as if the two of you are one and the same thing.”

“Near enough.”

“Then how about if I submit a letter of resignation? See if it makes Mr. Chance as happy as it would obviously make you.”

I could hear him breathing ominously into the mouthpiece of the phone. His delay in answering made me think it hadn’t been a bad tactic to call his bluff. Very quietly, each word weighted with emphasis, he said, “No, you ain’t going to quit.”

“Why’s that, Fitz?” I asked, feeling I had gained the upper hand.

“Because it’s inconvenient for you to quit. That’s why you ain’t going to do it.”

“Inconvenient for who? You?”

“Maybe inconvenient for your ma in that expensive nuthouse. She wouldn’t like it in one of them state-run hospitals. I know. I had a cousin worked in one. The stories he used to tell.”

How did he know about my mother? It frightened me. Then I got angry. “Don’t go putting my mother in your gob-shite Irish mouth, Fitz! Do you hear me?”

All he did was laugh his rasping, gravel-grinding laugh. Transmitted over telephone wires it was even more terrifyingly expressionless than delivered in person, in the flesh. “Or what?” he said. “What you going to do, Vincent? You’re all yap, like one of them little lap dogs. A little pussy-warmer pup, that’s what you are. Yap, yap, yap. Don’t make me sick. You ain’t going to quit on us because we ain’t going to let you. Besides, think about Ma Vincent. Think about your Jew girl friend.”