The Englishman's Boy (38 page)

With the white men between them and the Assiniboine, the wolfers sat their pawing, stamping horses, holding fire. The Indians pursued on foot, little patches of black musket-smoke puffing into the air as they ran and fired, ran and fired. They were reloading fast,
shaking powder into the barrels of their guns and spitting bullets into the muzzles, in their haste omitting to use wadding, so their shot did not carry far or accurately.

Hammond reached the wolfers and bellowed, “Run for cover, boys! The coulee! The coulee!” as he galloped by, heading for the narrow gulch which lay like a wound in the breast of the prairie. But the nervous wolfers held their ground on whinnying, panicked horses.

A row of tense white faces shimmered sidelong in the eye of the Englishman’s boy. He heard harsh, whispered curses directed at no one; shouts of encouragement to Hardwick that Hardwick could not hear. Distance and time were mirages, bending and shimmering like the hot air. Closer yet farther. Sooner yet later.

And then Hardwick and Farwell
were
upon them. Hardwick waving them back to the coulee. The line swung as one, as prettily orchestrated by terror as a practised cavalry manoeuvre on a parade-ground square. They whipped their mounts into a headlong gallop which in moments brought them churning down into the cutbank where Hammond cowered, a cataract of heaving horses, clouds of dust, men jolting in saddles.

By the time the Englishman’s boy dismounted, the narrow confine of the crevice was ringing with rifle-fire. He picked out Grace’s blue-handkerchiefed head and ran to him doubled over, jerking his horse down the shallow coulee bottom after him. He could hear someone screaming, “They’re coming! Lord Jesus, they’re coming!” He flung himself down beside Grace. Here the coulee was only four feet deep, forming a natural rifle pit.

Dragging himself up on his elbows, he surveyed the ground he’d just covered in precipitous retreat, an open expanse dotted with clumps of wolf willow and sage. Over this the Assiniboine were advancing from patch of cover to patch of cover, firing their muzzle-loaders, reloading, then skittering and zigzagging their way forward to discharge another shot. Behind them the camp was emptying, women rushing children and infants into thick timber which, once it closed on them, resumed its placid front.

Already the Englishman’s boy could count three of the attacking
Indians lying broken on the landscape like dolls hurled to a nursery floor. Ten yards from the lip of the coulee Farwell’s wounded mule lay on its side, its head rising and falling as the strength bled out of it with every pump of its heart.

“Your mouth’s hanging open,” Grace said. “Close it and fire.”

In that instant, the Assiniboine let loose a volley and swept up out of the willow and grass with sharp, piercing cries. Fox-fast and fleet, they shredded the screen of gun-smoke issuing from their muskets with their charge.

The Henrys began to bark up and down the coulee like a pack of hounds on the scent. The Englishman’s boy was firing fast, the sweat pouring into his eyes in a blinding, stinging rain. For a terrible second, he believed the Assiniboine were going to pass unscathed through the hail of bullets, pour into the coulee stabbing and clubbing. But the attack ripped apart, like rotten cloth. The abrupt sprawl of men into the sage stunned the Englishman’s boy. They dropped like all the deer he had ever shot cleanly and fatally. The attack stuttered, hesitated, the Indians withdrew in confusion. A cheer went up in the cutbank.

The Englishman’s boy slid down the face of the slope, pulled off his derby, mopped his brow with his sleeve. His mouth was bone-dry. He’d tried to draw a bead on those twisty, slippery figures but they’d leapt and dodged so as to freeze his finger on the trigger. In the end, he’d only pointed and fired, pointed and fired. He didn’t think he’d got himself one.

Hardwick was walking up and down the trench, asking each man, “How many rounds you got left? How many rounds?”

Grace answered tersely, “Enough.”

Hardwick took one glance at the bandoliers looped over the shoulders of the Englishman’s boy and passed on.

John Duval was calling for water. Hardwick shouted, “Nobody drinks yet! We don’t know how long we’re going to be pinned down here! Water’s rationed!”

The Englishman’s boy dug a pebble out of the side of the cutbank, put it in his mouth to suck. The blistering heat roiled in the coulee.

The wolfers pricked their ears. Out there, someone was chanting. It ran toward them like a wave, washed over them, receded, swept forward once more.

“Death song,” said Grace to the boy.

The men crouched in the coulee, gripping their guns, listening to a man preparing to die. The chant rose and fell, rose and fell. Suddenly it stopped. In the distance, a man stood up out of the scrub, straight as a lodgepole pine. It was First Shoot in his wolf-skin cap. The wolfers began to fiddle with their sights, adjusting them for the range. First Shoot didn’t give them time enough to sight him. He pumped his musket to the sky three times, sprinted forward. The Soldier’s Society soared up out of the grass like a covey of birds. A second force of hostiles gushed up behind them, older men not so fleet, not so agile as the first, all of them whooping.

This time, the Assiniboines did not skirmish forward, discharging their weapons. It was a pell-mell assault, a dash of supple swiftness, a foot race to the coulee. The speed, the audacity of it stunned the men huddled there. The Assiniboine came pelting forward, leaping sagebrush, veering and twisting like a hunting wolf pack, quick, terrible.

A sheet of flame scorched the air. The death-song singer did not break stride; it was as if the muzzle flashes were a curtain of beads, insignificant, to be brushed aside. He drove on, hot, direct as fire burning down a fuse to a powder keg. Fifty yards, forty.

Then the powder keg exploded. The curtain refused to part. His heels skidded out from under him, kicked up, flesh fountaining in a spray of blood. The white men worked the levers of their rifles madly, shot swinging through the warriors like a heavy scythe mowing hay, everywhere the human grass shivered when it met the sharp blade, wavered, fell in a windrow of bodies.

The Indians broke and fled.

A shout went up in the coulee, punctuated by rebel yells. Random shots spat on fleeing backs. An Assiniboine fell, staggered to his feet, was scythed again.

The surviving Indians retreated to an opposing coulee from where they began to lay down fire. Now in a defensive position they had
time to prime and load with calculation. The use of wadding gave them greater range and accuracy. Despite smooth-bore, single-shot weapons, their numbers made for a steady, debilitating sniper fire which penned the wolfers in the coulee. Whining, whistling shot kept them ducking. A ball struck a stone near the Englishman’s boy and he felt a sting of splintering lead on his cheek. It began to drip blood.

They knew they were trapped. The sun glared and burned, roasted them. Fear sank its claws in their tender, smitten skins.

26
 

“I’
ve got to get out of this picture,” I say.

Rachel Gold and I are sitting on a blanket gazing at the Pacific Ocean and a stretch of beach which once doubled for the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments.
It isn’t really a day for the beach – overcast, the water riding under the horizon line grey and mud-coloured, but today I want her undivided attention and an empty beach offers few distractions.

“Jesus, Harry,” she says, “you scheme your ass off to get this job and then you want out? What’s this about?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Write what he wants.” I can’t get into explanations. I can’t confess how scared I am. I can’t tell her that if I write what Chance wants, there’s every likelihood I’ll have a hand in attaching Shorty McAdoo’s name to a lie. After Chance’s bizarre performance at the party, I can guess at the savage, distorted, paranoid lens through which this picture is going to be shot, guess at what crazy, politically “visionary” message he thinks the movie will deliver. As he’s said all along, this picture isn’t
supposed
to be just another Western. To do what he requires wouldn’t just be a betrayal of Shorty, but of Rachel, too.

And myself.

Rachel is being her usual hard-headed, practical self. “You’re not Leo Tolstoy, Harry. You’re a scenarist. Somebody hands you the
measurements and you cut the cloth. This shouldn’t come as news to you. Write what he wants, for Christ’s sake, and have done with it.”

The shore is deserted, not another soul in sight. The breaker-washed sand gleams like hot asphalt packed by a steamroller, flat, smooth, oily-looking. Waves monotonously assault the glistening beach, rolled banners unfurling liquid flags to a steady, muffled drumbeat. Sitting on the blanket with her feet tucked up under her, Rachel is tiny, porcelain-white and serious, a Victorian doll.

“Chance is nuts,” I say.

“This is news? Everybody who runs a studio is nuts. You’ve got to be. Mack Sennett has a bathtub in his office. Carl Laemmle’s son follows him around with a lard pail in case his old man needs a piss. Lasky and Thalberg hire a scenarist who thinks the filming of
BenHur
is the fulfilment of a prediction by Nostradamus. Need I go on?”

“This is different.”

“Different how?”

I shrug and announce, “Politics.” Immediately I wish I hadn’t.

“What, politics? You vote Democrat and he votes Republican? These are not irreconcilable differences, my friend. I don’t hide I’m a socialist and he hasn’t fired me yet.”

I don’t mention the Jew-hate. I don’t know how to tell her about that.

“I’ve been thinking of quitting,” I announce.

“What can I say? If your artistic sensibility – which I’ve yet to see any evidence of – is getting seriously bruised, quit.”

“What if he won’t let me quit?”

“Let you? What’s let you? We had an Emancipation Proclamation in this country. He can’t stop you from quitting.”

“I have this feeling he’s not going to let me out of this. He’s always been very secretive about this project. Only three of us really know what it’s about. Chance has been getting more and more paranoid about this picture.”

“You’re scared of him.”

“Goddamn right I’m scared of him.”

“You leave him so he puts it out you’re unprofessional, a bad
writer. Who will listen? Everybody in the business has him pegged as a joke. He gives you a bad report card – it’s likely to come off as a glowing recommendation.”

“You forgot Fitz,” I say. “That son of a bitch is capable of anything. Fitz might get something into his head. He’s like the crazy, loyal servant in Murnau’s
Nosferatu.
Devoted to the master.” I look out to sea. The waves are rolling forward in relentless reiteration, repeating themselves over and over, like my worries of the past few days. The sky is turning denser, greyer, like cheap blotting paper, fibrous with skeins of cloud. Around me I can feel the air growing heavier, moister, closing in. “Chance sent me away to rework the scenario. But now I’ve seen the picture he wants to make through his eyes – I can’t do it. It’s a hallucination, not a movie. A Western
Nosferatu.
It won’t work. And when it doesn’t, he’s going to want somebody to blame. I’ll be the candidate.”

“Then maybe you’re right to quit before your name appears in the credits. In this town, a writer’s first picture goes bust, it’s likely his last.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got to consider my mother. What do I do? Quit my job and when the rent comes due at the nursing home let her get pitched into the state asylum? I’ve investigated. They’re worse down here than they are in Canada.”

“Find another job.”

“Where am I going to find another job pays one hundred and fifty a week? Nobody is going to hire me for that kind of money. Maybe nobody is going to hire me at all. With my responsibilities I’ve got to consider that.” I rummage nervously in the picnic hamper I’ve packed; not for a sandwich, for the gin. I offer the vacuum flask to Rachel first. “Drink?”

She shakes her head.

“You’re turning down a drink?”

She studies the leaden ocean. “I’ve been feeling out of control lately,” she murmurs.

I take a swig. “I thought you were the lady who said she liked feeling out of control.”

“It could be I didn’t say exactly what I mean. I do like feeling out of control. I like excitement. But if you’re out of control all the time then maybe something is controlling you. If that makes any sense.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure I don’t feel the same. Out of control. Or in somebody else’s control. But I’ll tell you one thing, whatever it is, I don’t like it. It feels bad.”

“Don’t make so many plans, Harry,” she says. “In my experience, plans have a habit of hoisting you on your own petard. Too much calculation can get you into trouble. If everything doesn’t fall into place, you fall out of it.”

I sit with the flask of gin in my hand. “That book Chance gave me – did you read it?”

“In a manner of speaking. My French is not as good as you assume it is. And this book, it wasn’t light reading. Very philosophical, in the French fashion.”