minds with the glory of American lightning.”
“You mean your lightning.”
“Of course, my lightning. And yours too. That is the last thing I came to tell you. You are to have a writing credit for the picture.”
“Fuck your writing credit. Keep my name off the picture.”
Chance falls back in the chair. He smiles to himself, to the wall, to Fitz. “Harry,” he says, “you can’t deny your responsibility, pretend you had no hand in this. Even Judas played a part in Christ’s teaching. Have you forgotten our conversations? I cannot emphasize enough how important they were to me. To speak to someone with the intelligence to understand what I was saying, someone who could grasp my ideas in a way that Fitz could not – that gave me the faith and heart to continue. And then the way you played McAdoo, discreetly, delicately, so he hardly realized the hook was in his mouth – well, Fitz couldn’t have done it and neither could I. I have no doubt that I have you to thank for McAdoo.” He pauses for a moment, head tilted back, weighing what he is about to say. “Earlier, when I said I had never needed you – I confess that perhaps that was not quite the whole truth. Honesty forces me to concede that. But when you said you didn’t have the talent to write my scenario, you were right. I didn’t know that you were right; I only felt betrayed. But your betrayal gave me the resolve to finish what you had started. Put another way: Could Christ have endured the cross without Judas’ face hung in the sky before him? And yet I am able to forgive you your treachery, to acknowledge your help and your assistance.” He looks directly at me, expecting thanks for his forgiveness. When it doesn’t come, his bright blue eyes cloud with obscure emotion, or perhaps it is only a haze of fatigue. “You may wash your hands of me, Harry, but not your part in my picture. That is for the record.” He gets to his feet. I sense his reluctance to leave, to finish with me despite his exhaustion. He does not want to let me go. But in the end all he has to say is, “I will see that you are provided with a ticket for premiere night. All of Hollywood will be there. I intend to see to that.” He moves toward Fitz and the door.
“All of Hollywood but me!” I shout at his back. “I don’t want your ticket!”
He stops, turns back toward the bed. One hand fumbles in the air, trying to summon the words. “But of course you want it,” he says at last, mildly. “Because you will want to see what you have done.”
Then the two of them are gone.
29
Outside it was full dark. They sat in Farwell’s trading room in the wan radiance of a single kerosene lamp turned low and smoking on the counter, shadows towering on the log walls whenever one of them got up and helped himself to the bottle of red eye resting on a hogshead. Now and then a trickle of dirt sifted down and sprinkled the floor whenever Frenchie Devereux shifted position on the sod roof up above where he sat sentinel. Four more men were posted at each corner of the stockade.
Farwell sat perched on a sack of flour, doleful head in his hands. Hardwick had made it plain to him that tomorrow the wolfers were pulling out. Farwell knew if he elected to stay behind he would be killed by the Indians for his part in this day’s doings. Moses Solomon was abandoning his post, too. His relations with the Assiniboine had never been good, and his position was every bit as precarious as his competitor’s. Some white man was going to have to pay for the thirty-odd corpses the coyotes were picking over. The two traders planned to haul what goods they could back to Fort Benton in Red River carts, burn the posts and any remaining supplies to keep them out of the hands of the Indians. Hardwick’s nasty temper had put paid to a winter’s work.
The Englishman’s boy sat on the floor beside the Eagle’s body, which was shrouded in a buffalo robe lashed tight with rawhide thongs. Across the room, crazy Scotty was squeezed in a corner, peering terrified over the top of his writing book. The rest of the men diced on a blanket on the floor, sniggering like schoolboys at the sounds coming from the back room while Hardwick cracked wise. “Lord, listen to that old steam locomotive chug. Maybe you ought to go in there and throw a little coal in his boiler, Harper, so’s he can finally get where he’s going.”
The Englishman’s boy would get the invite next. He was considering on what his answer would be. When she was offered to Scotty and he shook his head no, Hardwick took offense. “Why the hell not?” he’d wanted to know.
The Scotchman had hugged his knees like they were his sainted mother, saying softly, “I am a gentleman. The definition of a gentleman is one who never causes pain.”
“Don’t you go high and mighty on me,” said Hardwick.
“I am a gentleman,” Scotty whispered back.
Hardwick slapped his face. “Get in there.”
“I am a gentleman.”
Each time he refused, Hardwick slapped his face again, repeating, “Get in there. Get in there.” In the end he even latched onto his collar and dragged the Scotchman scuffling on his hands and knees halfway across the floor. Only when the Scotchman began to weep was Hardwick satisfied and, laughing, let him creep back to his corner, where he huddled himself up sobbing, meek as an orphan.
The Englishman’s boy was of a mind to answer the same as the Scotchman, but then he weren’t crazy. His twin, the old cold black anger, was sitting up in him touchy as a ripe boil. Hot and sore as the lance gash stiffening on his ribs. Maybe he daren’t risk Hardwick prodding that boil with his dirty finger. Maybe he ought to take his walk to that back room, because if Hardwick laid a hand on him he wouldn’t go Gentle Jesus like the Scotchman had. There’d been enough blood spilled today. He’d had his sup of it.
The train in the back room was building speed. He’d heard a winter of huffing, puffing racket like that in the whorehouse in Sioux City, Iowa. Late November, cold and starved, he’d knocked at its door because it was such a fine and promising big house. Might be the rich people biding there would let him chore for a hot meal. The woman who answered the door said, “What you want, Raggedy Andy?” He explained and she set him a job of work splitting stove-wood. That wintry morn the axe-handle bit his fingers like cold iron but he hung to it until he’d chopped her a goodly pile of butts and even shaved her a cache of kindling wood. Then she fed him buttered bread, creamed and sugared porridge. He’d swallowed three bowls of it.
That’s how he came to work in a knocking shop. For a place to sleep by the kitchen stove and three squares, he chopped wood, hauled washing water for the whores, curried and harnessed Beaky Sal’s driving team. Beaky Sal liked to tour around town in a cutter of an afternoon, to blow the smell of spunk out of her nostrils, she said. The only cash money the Englishman’s boy had ever touched was tips. Some fancy man might send him to fetch cigars, or a crew of river rats a bucket of beer from the saloon. If he moved sprightly they’d toss him a penny. Once he even run for a bag of peppermints for an old broadcloth pillar of respectability afraid to go home to his wife’s roast- pork supper with the smell of sin on his breath.
One thing he could testify, if whores had hearts of gold they was only gilt and flaked easy. Beaky Sal’s girls was mostly German whores, and they fought day and night, screeching Dutchy talk until he believed there was a rusty file running to and fro in his ears. Their line of work made them too free and easy in their manners to his taste; some would lift their shifts and squat on the chamber pot when he was sweeping their room.
No, he hadn’t found no gold there excepting Selena. Her daddy had sold her to Beaky Sal for twenty dollars when she was but a child of twelve and he was passing through Sioux City, bound for the Montana gold fields. He was a widow man and Selena only baggage slowing him in the race to fortune. He might have kept her, he said, but she was hard of hearing and that was a trial – at his age shouting wore him down.
Selena was skinny as a barked rail, but Beaky Sal figured if she fattened her she could charge the boys a premium for something young and fresh. But Selena didn’t fill out and the boys preferred the fat, red, German whores because they would play-act jolly and the best Selena could manage was to look like-an undertaker’s wife. The boys said she made their peckers droop like wet wash hanging on a rainy day. So Beaky Sal turned her into a whorehouse drudge, boiling sheets and slopping chamber pots. All the whores seemed to think she was their own personal slavey; they’d squawk for this and that, pinch her and cuff her for any mistake she made, sometimes just out of pure cussedness. One afternoon, a Kentucky whore who called herself Beulah Belle started pulling Selena’s hair in the kitchen because the washing water wasn’t hot enough for her liking. When she was at it, he’d come in with an armful of stove-wood, dropped it in the box and kicked Beulah Belle square in the arse.
Word got around he could kick like a Missouri mule and so the whores let up on Selena some. He supposed
