daubin’.”
“Just don’t you go falling asleep with that whore, Reuben!” Titus replied every bit as sternly as he had been told, then giggled as Nina came over to him to begin pulling off his jerkin.
She guided him over to her pallet on the floor all of the three steps it took to get Titus there, then nudged him backward. On his back, head dizzied, he sensed her pulling at his wet moccasins, then the bottoms of his canvas britches. His head felt lighter and lighter, as if it might just screw itself off his shoulders and go floating right up through the low roof he fixed with a stare as he fought down the rising intimidation of his troubled stomach.
Just about the time he felt her cold, fleshy hands wrap around his penis, Bass tried rolling onto an elbow, growling, “I’m gonna be sick.”
She flew off him so fast he was amazed, struck at the way she moved for being so large. Nina reached over, snatching up the chamber pot that sat nearby, and stuffed its fragrant opening right under his face. It was there she held his head as he screwed up his face at the horrendous stench that filled his face and mouth. Titus emptied his stomach in one explosive lurch.
“That’s a good boy,” she cooed to him, running her fat, oily fingers over his forehead. “You just go ’head and fill that up if’n you need to.”
His belly knotted up another half-dozen tries at wrenching itself free from its moorings in his gut, and then he was done. As he rocked uncertainly atop that single elbow, Nina took the chamber pot to set it in the corner, turned, and got back down on her knees over him, her hands wrapping around his softening flesh once more.
He looked up at her and smiled, gradually collapsing backward while the world slowly went warm and black.
Unable to part the blackness that enveloped him like a suffocating hood, Titus instead let his head hang as he shuffled blindly beside the one who was dragging him along, lunging forward beside him a step at a time. As much as he wanted to wake up, he couldn’t. For all he knew, the big whore was dragging him off—maybe it was even one of those who had hollered at her from the bar a while back. They’d get him to the other side of the flatboat, away from the wharf, stab him—then throw his body into the harbor.
He wouldn’t be able to swim—wasn’t all that good at it anyway. Hell, he wasn’t even walking for himself right now, getting pulled along as he was. And if they pushed him into the Mississippi, he was bound to die. Sober, he might well fight his way through most any water if he had to. But not like this. Titus knew he’d sink like a boundary stone, struggling only a little before he sank all the way to the bottom of the river—unable to stroke and paddle. Hell, he couldn’t even open his eyes!
It was still black. As black as it would be on the bottom of the river where these killers hid the bodies of the men they robbed. They stumbled over something. A man grunted. Then Bass was wheeled suddenly, his shirt ripping.
If he was lucky, Titus thought, they’d slit his throat first, maybe shoot him in the head. No, they wouldn’t do that. Too much noise. Just slit his throat, and then he’d never reach St. Louis to see if Levi Gamble had made it there last summer.
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
He felt the rumble of angry speech in the chest of the man who held him against his side.
“That’s my friend you got there.”
Titus wondered about that. Who was this friend of the one who slung him around again and took a few steps back toward the far voice? Sounded just like Root’s.
“I seen you afore, ain’t I?” the one holding him growled.
“Maybeso,” the far voice said. “S’pose you put that boy down and come on over here in the light. Then you can take a good look at me.”
The one carrying him lurched forward another step, then stopped. “Say, now—lookee there. Just what you got in mind to do with that big sticker, you ugly son of a bitch?”
“Told you, put that boy down.”
“He a friend of yours? Whyn’t you say so in the first place?”
His senses all firmly dulled, Bass nonetheless felt his body flung toward the far voice, tumbling, colliding with a man who tried to step out of his way as Titus hurtled past, limp arms and legs akimbo. When he struck the hard- planked floor, it was with enough force that his eyes blinked open in shock at the sudden blow.
Above him for a long moment he watched a candle lantern sway precariously, its dirty-yellow corona swishing this way and that above the two shadows grappling between the two dark walls at his feet. Then he remembered: this was the narrow canvas hallway strung between the half-dozen cribs. The grunting pair rolled through the foot of one of the walls, gouging at eyes and pulling at hair for all they were worth.
Within that invaded crib a woman’s falsetto shriek rose above a man’s low, angry curse as the combatants tumbled back from the canvas wall, rolling toward Bass.
He blinked, wanting to see, make sense of it all, slowly clawing his hands up the canvas wall, pulling himself to his bare feet.
One of them was yelling names, sprawling atop the downed man, holding his opponent with one strong hand gripping the throat and the other raised above his head in a cruel fist. But the other arched his back violently, unseating his enemy to immediately begin hollering out for help of his own. Names that, though muffled in his foggy mind, snagged a familiar chord within Bass:
“Ovatt! Kingsbury!”
Titus knew them. Ungainly, he lunged forward a step, stood there wobbling, ready to take another when the voice ordered him:
“Back off or I’ll gut you like I done a hunnert afore you!”
Bass pitched to his hands and knees again.
“Christ a’mighty, they’re gonna kill the boy!”
Someone was behind him as suddenly as he tried to pull himself up once more. Whoever it was grabbed hold of Titus, tearing his old shirt nearly off his shoulders as they dragged him aside and lunged past him into the fray. Now he wasn’t sure how many there were as another kicked him aside and hurtled into that heap of grunting, cursing bodies … when the whole mass of them reversed direction in a blur, wheeling over him in cries of pain and gasps of exertion, that great roiling beast of many arms and legs careening this time toward the parlor, where women shouted and screamed in hysterics.
In that distance wrought of fog and the spiderweb of time distortion made sticky by his drunken stupor, Bass heard clay shattering—its aftermath echoed by the high-pitched, feral screech of a man’s voice—sounds of some frightened, cornered animal. More and more hard body blows delivered against muscles and bone, each like a maul cracking against the tough, tight grain of newly felled hickory. At each blow came an accompanying grunt of pain.
Then the sudden, blinding flare of a muzzle flash, brightening the whole of that end of the parlor where the first pair of cribs began. Someone screamed, and a body crashed through the canvas siding with a great ripping of coarse cloth. The man scrambled and attempted to rise—but sank slowly back, crumpling to the floor.
Root’s voice thundered down upon him, “Watchit! That bitch’s got a gun!”
Lurching to his knees, Bass felt his head complain, blood throbbing against one temple, then the other, side to side like Mississippi trashwood adrift inside his skull—battering this temple with shrill pain before tumbling for the other. He grew thirsty immediately: his mouth tasted as if he’d been sucking on the bitter contents of a hog’s gallbladder as he tried to speak, desperate for the attention of the shadows lumbering back and forth before him.
“I’ll slit your throat, whore—you don’t drop that gun of your’n!” Kingsbury threatened with a snarl.
Gazing up, with all his strength struggling to focus on the lunging shapes of lamplit shadows, he found them: Annie Christmas—all six feet eight inches of her—swinging a big horse pistol about, clutched in both hands, that skinny Hames Kingsbury clinging to her back like a tick on an ox, his wiry arms locked around hers as she careened past Titus, headed wildly toward the mahogany bar, and toppled against the wall behind it. As she came closer, all Titus could think to do was to lash out with his feet. He tripped Annie, the pistol flying into the dark as she pitched forward against the bar, toppling it against the wall behind with a crash and clatter of glass and clay and tin.
Kingsbury stuck to her like a cocklebur as they landed in a tangle. With a grunt she lay still beneath the
