Savage Love (4 page)

Then it was summer, rainless and arid, except high in the mountain ranges where snow yet clung in the sawtooth creases. They pushed their steers up the dusty stage road that ran from Fort Hall to the placer fields at Alder Gulch and Helena, lazily working their way north but watchful, driving the steers to the river to drink when they descried the thunderous clatter of the freight wagons drawing near. It was far too crowded, he thought. Up every creek, fork and gulch, he found the detritus of human occupation. At every stream bend, a Chinaman with a pan, dipping for gold. Furtive Indians hunted in the cottonwoods. On the four quarters, black smoke rose from the furnaces. Stages ground by like clockwork, stations for changing horses measured every fifteen miles. Teamsters thrashed their long trains up and down the roadstead, leaving a fine white dust to settle like mortuary lime. Painted signs nailed to posts marked the forks, made poetry of commerce. Dark Horse, Puzzler, Blue Wing, Polaris, Argenta, Hecla, Queen of the Hills, Pandora. Industrious avidity, he thought. Busy and inquisitive as rats, he thought. It wasn't that he was against the making of money, but he hewed to a desperate and higher calling, a dark path bequeathed him in the cornfield at Antietam, which rendered his character contemptuous.

He held to the high mountains on his left and presently veered away from the Wisdom River, following a tributary in a narrow, sere valley. Some distance off the trail and out of sight up a gulch that had barely been touched by placers, they discovered a cabin and pole barn and an acre cleared of everything but stumps and wildflowers, and beyond, among the sparse pines, beef cattle foraging. The owner and his wife politely took them in for the night. He shot them after dinner and stored the bodies in a convenient cold cellar made of rock slabs, chilled by a mountain spring that bubbled out of a crevice. He turned his steers loose amongst the others, and because he paid them no mind, they disappeared up or down the cold, splashy creek. Then untold days passed and he wished for that Plott hound of the prior winter, for there were bears about and he wanted to hunt. The girl unscrolled a buffalo robe and lay naked, save for boots, in the cleared field when the sun shone, turning dusky brown so her eyes smouldered and her bleached hair was like a white flame. He discovered a six-month-old newspaper from St. Louis in the cabin and read to her in bed by candlelight. Pronghorns concoursed in the cleared field in the twilight gloom ere dawn; he shot one when they needed it. A lonely prospector with a mule and a donkey, a twelve-month growth of yellow beard and no teeth to speak of stumbled upon the homestead one sunspill afternoon. He said, “That girl is like enough half Indian parading without drawers. I could do er. I could.” And then he said, “No, I ain't a preacher,
but I read the Good Book when I were a sprout and have took the pledge at camp meetin' to go teetotal when I am not drinking.” Blam. His body went into the cold cellar with the others.

He rode to Butte to sell stolen horses. He did not like the open country there, the buffalo prairie and the dry gulches filled with abandoned placer equipment and the scattered settlement of mean log houses, slanted frame buildings leaning together, the skeletal remains of the silver smelter, and nary a place to conceal himself. In the saloon next to Hauswirth's Hotel on Main Street he heard how a Vigilance Committee at Last Chance Gulch had captured him twice but he had escaped both times by trickery or infernal magic. A Mormon bone collector hunting buffalo kills had spied him slaughtering a human corpse far north in the Flatheads. When he checked on the return trip, parts of the body had been chewed on. After asking nine people in that depressed and irreligious town for directions, he tracked down a placer miner name of Skloot who once had been a preacher, was an undertaker on the side and could also cure the toothache with a red-hot wire. Skloot had five children out of eighteen born and introduced a young wife Priscilla Skloot who was his second wife after the first succumbed in giving birth. “How far did yer say was yer camp?” asked Skloot. “About five mile. You'll be back ere nightfall.” After they had ridden fifteen miles, Skloot said, “I know who ye are. I should have known from the start.” Skloot was working on his portly successful look and his horse wore a bloom of frothy sweat. He had brought a Bible, a shotgun in a saddle holster and a half-dozen boiled eggs for his lunch. The stranger rode behind him now but sidled up to offer him a slug of store whiskey, which
the preacher took willingly. He said, “My first drap in six years. I believe the occasion requires it.”

They were both tight when their horses clambered up through the cleared field to the cabin, the keynotes of roast antelope, woodsmoke and some other noxious, unidentifiable odour drifting down to welcome them. Bees hummed in the wildflowers. Skloot tumbled from his horse dismounting and trembled upon his back with one foot caught in the stirrup. He said, “I have drunk with the Devil and now I will die and speak with Jesus on the same day. That must be the record.” “Just get up and say the words,” said the stranger, handing him the Bible. He opened another bottle and handed that over too. He carried the preacher's shotgun in the crook of his elbow. Good Luck leaned against him, her hands braced on her sticks, her face blank and hairless, her hairless eyelids lizard-like, eyes like blue stones, her pox scars like craters, her general air uncanny. That much had not changed since he first clapped eyes on her. “Is she a squaw?” asked Skloot. “What's wrong with her?” “Many have died for asking,” said the stranger. “I'
m sure they have,” said Skloot, sucking on the whiskey and gradually working his way upright with the aid of the stirrup and saddle straps. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I believe the abbreviated version of the order of service will suffice. Do you two want to get married?” “She can't talk,” said the stranger. “Good enough,” said Skloot. “I now pronounce you man and wife, all square and legal, and may God help me for what I have just done.” The stranger squeezed the girl's hand. That was all. He said, “Come with me. I want ter show ye something.” He led the preacher along the faint convexity in the pine needles to the cold cellar where the stone entry buzzed with bluebottles. Skloot's eyes watered from the stench. The girl followed on, swinging upon her sticks, her hair a flame like the head of a torch. The light was lingering toward dusk. The stranger stood by as Skloot stooped to peer inside where a dozen or more swollen green bodies lay stacked like cordwood, in a state of putrefaction so horrific that they seemed to be melting, their juices funnelling together and emerging into a pool amongst the ferns and quartz boulders just outside the hellish door. Hundreds of flies lined the sides, lapping and rubbing their feet in the sludge like holy pilgrims. Skloot reeled away, but not able to take his eyes off those carbonizing corpses, their infernal hutch, he slipped, landing smartly on his portly ass, scrambling backwards, still staring. Then he wrenched up his shirt-tails and threw them over his face, gasped and cried out, “Dear Lord, please shoot me now. Get it over with. Stop this persecution. I cannot bear the waiting. I wish to God I had not seen that.” “I ain't going ter shoot ye,” said the stranger. “I just wanted to show ye. Ye
could have slept with them tonight, but ye did me a good turn. It's nigh dusk. Ye should mount and kick up for home ere my resolution falters.” And then he added, “Ye will send a committee back for me, I know. I expect it. But they shall not find me. And this night will be in yer heart forever.”

1910, Sellwood, Oregon

They lived now in a two-storey clapboard house on Umatilla Street within sight of the Willamette River, rented two rooms on the second floor to lodgers, kept a garden, laying hens and a cow, and were noted for their exceptional aloofness. The old man worked at the M & H Foundry on 13th Street that manufactured parts for the Sellwood Car House and other railroad concerns in Portland but had suffered a stroke some time before and was
only kept on as a sweeper out of charity and fear. He could no longer speak except in garbled syllables, the left side of his face drooped, his eye leaked, and evenings he sat on the porch in a wicker rocker with his hands on his knees, his fingers picking at the fabric of his trousers, his eyes bearing outward at some inscrutable distance, seeing what no one else could see. Only the new motor cars puttering by in the street seemed to excite in him a special admiration; Sundays he rode the ferry to Portland to look at the electric street lights whose fierce and mysterious flame fascinated him, though he could never explain why. And yet there was still something furious and wilful in his look that gave men pause.

Good Luck always sat inside at the window where she could watch him, her face hidden by the chintz curtains, reading the newspaper with spectacles by an oil lamp or knitting or mending for the lodgers, for which she charged extra. She wore starched shirtwaists with pearl buttons up to her throat and black skirts and walked with the aid of two vine-twisted mahogany canes with elk-antler handles. The canes and the boots she wore — handmade reinforced Spanish calf-leather boots that laced up to her knees — were the only luxuries in the otherwise spare and
spartan house. The boarders were Miss Adeline Frick, a schoolteacher, and Francis Ward, a law clerk, both of whom were anxious to move on for reasons they could not specify aside from the prevalence of bad dreams in that house, the cold, silent and remote atmosphere, and the aura of threat which seemed to clash with the manifest fragility of their hosts.

One evening late in the summer, a stranger knocked. Dinner was on the stove, the boarders were not yet in for the night. The stranger showed her a badge, said he was a policeman from Helena, Montana, that he wanted to speak to them of an old case about which they might have information. He was wearing a suit and a fedora with the brim neatly snapped down at the front. He carried a carpet bag, which he left on the porch by the rocker. He was robust but limped, dragged a chair to the dining table but sat awkwardly, one leg unable to bend at the knee, and dealt out newspaper clippings like a deck of cards, yellowed clippings, curled like leaves, from Arco, Leesburg, Bannack, Dillon, Butte, Virginia City, Coeur d'Alene and Spokane, dating back as far as the 1870s. The clippings were full of sensational stories: a disappearance here, charred bones discovered there, mutilated corpses, mining camp massacres, isolated homes burned, dismemberments, cannibal rites and ghastly, inhuman practices. The old man crouched at the head of the table, his puttied face sad as a clown's, gnarled, scarred hands on his knees, apparently oblivious or worse, not present at all, but seething inwardly, on the half-cock with no one able to pull the trigger. In fact, he heard everything. He thought, You stop and you die.
But this was the inner voice of a will that had lost the power of action without great forethought and deliberate steps. He was thinking how best to rise from his seat and repair to the cellar, where he kept his guns. His eyes rose to meet Good Luck's gaze, which remained opaque, her epalpebrate eyes sinister, the pox scars splashed across her face like stars. Once he had spelled them out with a book in the candlelight. Alwaid, Etamin and Thuban.

The policeman was maybe thirty but youthful, excited by knowledge, not caring so much for justice or punishment but wanting to be the one who put the puzzle together. In Spokane in 1874, he said, a derelict nigger, who confessed to a dozen acts of arson and mayhem, had been charged, convicted and hanged before a Baptist minister from Butte came forward with a tale that seemed to exonerate him. The preacher had met a vagrant couple, the girl crippled in both legs, the two of them giving off an appalling and horrific odour of otherworldly malevolence, a whiff of the demonic, as though they had ridden together from out of the Land of the Dead, where, as he thought, they had no doubt returned. The stranger had conversed with the preacher; the girl had no words, it seemed. The stranger gave the preacher a parable, grisly enough to scare him half to death, into a haunted and impeccable silence. The preacher
's exact words were, “He drug me to the Gate of Hell and let me look inside.”

The young policeman's notebooks tumbled out of his pockets onto the table, the pages dense with pencilled interviews, transcribed reports, rumours, legends, theories. He had uncovered numerous sightings of this identical couple, a man with a crippled girl, from Arco up to the Salmon River and thence to the old post road connecting the Oregon Trail to the goldfields of Montana; from Butte, where the preacher had met them, to the Boise gold diggings; and on into Washington, chance sightings mostly, fleeting and from afar, the couple caught drifting just at the world'
s periphery, but the two of them together so peculiar, enigmatic and uncanny that they remained fixed in memory long after the mundane had faded. It was as if they existed within the order of dream, more real than real, though the trail they left was clear and palpable enough. He had himself examined boxes of bones. And yet no one knew them.

The policeman watched Good Luck press herself up from the table, gather her sticks and limp to the kitchen to tend the dinner. His cheek twitched in a half smile of barely repressed triumph. The old man grunted and signalled for a notebook and pencil. His hand trembled as he carved the letters on the ruled page. “Did ye bring a gun?” he wrote. The policeman unlapped the tail of his coat to show his holster and the pistol tucked inside. The old man strained to see. “It's a Colt, military issue,” said the policeman. “Forty-five-caliber semi-automatic, loaded with hollow points, seven in the clip.” The old man grunted again, satisfied. “How did you get yer wound?” he wrote. “The Battle of the Malalag River, 1905. We were clearing the Cotabato Valley. A Moro sniper blew up my knee. How did you know?” The old man couldn't answer. He wanted to talk about the cornfield when the Texians
marched in to plug a gap in the line with their bodies and succeeded, not some skirmish with ill-armed savages in the god-fuck Philippines. Good Luck pushed a serving trolley through the kitchen doorway with a coffee pot and cups and dinner plates, cutlery and a water jug. The old man hunched over the notebook, licked his lips and wrote again, hesitating over the letters. “What do ye intend with us?” The policeman was at the old man's elbow now, craning his neck to read the words, his fingers reaching to tilt the page to the light. Good Luck set a cup at his place, but he took no notice. Then she snatched the butcher knife and plunged it into his throat, searching for the artery, a freshet of spermy red blood bubbling out. The policeman gasped, but the old man had an iron grip on his wrists, and for a fatal moment he could not but gaze unapprehending at the hand that gripped the knife and the knife handle and the current of blood staining Good Luck's shirt sleeve. And then the light began to ebb like water going out, he felt unutterably defeated by things, he had grasped the secret but in the instant of his dying it escaped him, in the instant of his death he guiltily remembered spying on his mother naked before the washstand mirror, in the instant of his dying he was embarrassed.