“C’mere, Jonah. You remember Toote,” Sweete said as the woman nodded. “And this is my daughter. You see’d her before—but never met proper. Her name’s Pipe Woman.”
Only then did she raise her eyes to him, capturing his attention with their almond luster. Then looked away, glancing up at her father. Asking something quietly in Cheyenne.
“Jonah Hook,” Sweete told her.
She looked at the tall, rail-thin white man again for but a moment. Only as long as it took her to smile and say, “Jo-naw. Jo-naw Hoo-oucks.”
They pawed at her with their eyes. Some of them lunged close enough that she smelled their stinking breath, the stench of their unwashed bodies. Young warriors bathed frequently. Young, arrogant white men did not.
By now Pipe Woman was old enough to know what the white men wanted with her. This would be her twenty-first winter. Long ago she had come to understand what men and women meant to one another beneath a buffalo robe, when their hands ran up and down one another’s bodies, tasting, licking, kissing, feeling, sweating in rhythm with each other.
She had grown up sneaking looks at her parents across the fire pit whenever her white father returned to the lodge of her full-blood Cheyenne mother. And their union had often filled her with confusion: as much as she hated her white blood, she loved her father and all he had meant to not only Shell Woman, but to his daughter as well. He was the only white man she had ever tolerated.
Many looked at her with undisguised lust in their eyes, licking their lips, lurking close with the smell of whiskey strong about them, their bloodstained, greasy wool-and-leather britches straining beneath the rigid hardness of their flesh as they tried rubbing against her. So it was that in young womanhood Pipe Woman had learned where first to strike a man whose hands she did not want mauling her breasts or pinching her bottom. One swift, sure blow to that swollen flesh that a man ofttimes let rule him.
More than once Pipe Woman had had to fight men off. She did not understand this power of her beauty yet. As much as her mother and father told her, still she did not fully realize the power it held over men, both her own, and the white man.
This stinking gathering place was filled with them. Soldiers in their dirty, mud-crusted uniforms soaked with melting snow. Unwashed civilians in their unwashed clothing, smelling of old fires and stale tobacco and meals spilled and smeared and forgotten. Both kinds seated at the small tables in this dingy, smoke-filled room where the walls themselves reeked of whiskey and worse.
Again Pipe Woman wondered why it was that a man who came equipped so well for peeing did not take the trouble to walk outside of such places as these and pee on the ground. Instead, she remained mystified, so many of these white men chose to pee where they stood, in the same room where they smoked and drank, and traded.
That’s why she was here. Her mother had sent her to the sutler’s for some hard candy. Sweete had brought coffee, but had been unable to find any hard candy for Toote along the trail the three men had ridden northwest from Fort Larned. It was a special craving Shell Woman suffered, from the time she was a child and experienced her first taste of hard candy given her by a trader on the upper Missouri River. From that moment, she was hooked something fierce.
So it was this third afternoon since the arrival of the women at Laramie that Shad had come down to the post with Pipe Woman and Jonah Hook. The men turned off to see the peace-talkers, and Pipe Woman was sent on to the post sutler’s place, to buy Shell Woman’s hard candy before the three of them returned to the Cheyenne camp where Toote was involved with a special supper: elk loin and marrow bones and fry-bread.
“Ain’t you a pretty little thing.”
Pipe Woman turned away from the man as he loomed toward her out of the dingy, smoky haze. The smell of him turned her stomach. And staring at the stinking hole in his face made her all the sicker.
She stood her place at the counter, waiting for the clerk to finish with a soldier.
The foul one came slowly around to her other side, his eyes moving down, then up her body.
“I’ll bet you know how to make a man mighty happy, don’t you, squaw?”
She did not understand all the words he said. There was some English she knew, learned from her father. Yet the meaning of the words spoken by this smelly man got across to her all the same. Pipe Woman refused to look at him.
“Bet that body of yours under that coat is all soft and warm and willing to let a good man show you just how he can make you happy too, little squaw.”
She glanced over at the side of the room where the tables and chairs sat—that part of this place given over to the white men who drank whiskey and became mad from it. They were, by and large, quiet and attentive at this moment. Watching her. Watching him too.
She looked in the other direction. The clerk nervously continued helping the young soldier. He wanted no trouble, and was doing everything he could to ignore her problem.
Then his dirty hand was on her arm, at her elbow. She stared down at the dark crescents beneath the long, cracked fingernails. Pipe Woman turned to face him as her right hand shot up, slapping him full force. The noise of that flesh against flesh weighed heavy in the smelly room where the white man drank himself crazy.
But as quickly her left arm was hurting—at both the elbow and the shoulder.
The man with the stinking breath had twisted and spun her about, pinning her arm behind her, raising it as she bent over, yelping as the stabbing pain took her breath away. His left hand now grabbed her hair at the crown of her head, yanking back slowly. He showed pleasure at the hurt he was causing her.
“Shit, fellas,” he said near her ear, “I’m new in your country here. But it sure looks like these squaws out in these parts like to play with a man just the way the squaws do back down to the Territories.”
“These are Sioux, and Cheyenne Injuns out here, mister,” one of the others said, all but his voice obscured by the murky, smoky haze. She did not know what face spoke. The pain was so great in her shoulder now that she saw stars blink before her eyes.
“What the hell that mean?” asked her tormentor.
“Just figured you’d wanna know these Injuns don’t just lay down for a white man out here the way they maybe done for you down in the Territories.”
“What you trying to say, mister?”
“Nothing,” replied the voice quietly.
“Just so you know,” her attacker said, dragging Pipe Woman away from the counter toward the smoky part of the room, “them squaws back down there don’t always lay down and spread their legs just ’cause a white man wants to rut on ’em.” He smiled wickedly. “You just gotta convince ’em how bad they want what you got to give ’em!”
He took his hand from her hair and reached around to tear open the flaps of her capote, the colorful woven sash falling to the floor at her feet. His long-nailed fingers dug at her firm breasts. With her heels, Pipe Woman tried kicking backward at his shins. He yanked upward on her arm, making her cry out, and dug his fingers into her breast brutally. So hard the first tears came to her eyes. Pipe Woman cursed those tears for betraying her.
“I’m used to taking a squaw where I want her,” the man said.
“Take her outside,” someone suggested. “Least do that.”
“All right,” he hissed at her ear, breathing heavily behind it. “Yeah, that’s the least I can do for you fellas. Since I am new out here. I’ll call you when I’m done—and any the rest of you can have what’s left when I am.”
She could feel him now, that rigid hardness pressing in behind her, near the tops of her buttocks. He was a tall man, and younger than her father.
He lifted her off her feet, starting her backward for the door when a sudden blast of cold air told Pipe Woman that someone else had come in.
“Say you! Hold that door open, mister!” her tormentor called out.
He shuffled her toward the cold draft that said he was drawing her closer to the door.
“Pipe Woman?”
Thinking she recognized the voice, the young woman was only sure when her attacker turned slowly.
“You know this squaw, mister?”
“Yeah,” answered Jonah Hook, taking his eyes off her face and looking into the man’s.
“She any good?” he rasped, then laughed humorlessly.
