Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II Page 12

  “Not today you ain’t,” said the quartermaster. “He’s got himself a right busy schedule.”

  Hooch grinned nastily. “Oh, his schedule ain’t too busy for me.”

  “It sure is, Hooch. He said it real specific.”

  “I reckon he might think his schedulers too busy, boy, but I reckon it just ain’t so.”

  “Suit yourself,” said the quartermaster. “Want me to unload the four barrels I got here?”

  “No I don’t,” he said. Then he shouted at his pole-boys, most specially at that Mike Fink, cause he looked to be the most likely to do murder if need be. “Anybody tries to lay a hand on that whisky, I want to see four bullet holes in their body before we chuck him in the water!”

  The poleboys laughed and waved, except Mike Fink, who just sort of screwed his face up a little tighter. That was one mean old boy. They said you could tell which men had ever tried to wrassle Mike Fink, cause they got no ears. They said, if you want to get away from Fink with one ear still on your head, you got to wait till he’s chewing on your first ear and then shoot him twice to distract him while you get away. A real good riverboy. But it made Hooch a-little nervy to think what Fink might do if Hooch didn’t have a payroll for him. Bill Harrison was going to pay for this whole load of likker, or there’d be real trouble.

  Walking into the stockade, Hooch noticed a few things. The sign was the same one Harrison put up four years ago; it was getting ratty-looking now, weathered up, but nobody changed it. Town wasn’t growing either. Everything had lost that new look, and now it was plain shabby.

  Not like the way things were going back in Hio Territory. What used to be little stockade towns like this were turning into real towns, with painted houses, even a few cobbled streets. Hio was booming, at least the eastern part of it, close on to Suskwahenny, and folks speculated on how it wasn’t far from statehood.

  But there wasn’t no boom going on in Cathage City.

  Hooch walked along the main street inside the stockade. Still plenty of soldiers, and they still looked to have pretty good discipline, had to give Governor Bill credit for that. But where there used to be whisky-Reds sprawled all over the place, now there was river-rat types, uglier-looking than Mike Fink, unshaved, with a whisky stink as bad as any likkered-up Red ever had. Four old buildings had been turned into saloons, too, and they were doing good business in the middle of the afternoon.

  That’s why, thought Hooch. That’s the trouble. Carthage City’s gone and turned into a river town, a saloon town. Nobody wants to live around here, with all these river rats. It’s a whisky town.

  But if it’s a whisky town, Governor Bill ought to be buying whisky from me instead of this business about only wanting four barrels.

  “You can wait if you want, Mr. Palmer, but the Governor won’t see you today.”

  Hooch sat on the bench outside Harrison’s office. He noticed that Harrison had switched offices with his adjutant. Gave up his nice big office in exchange for what? Smaller space, but—all interior walls. No windows. Now, that meant something. That meant Harrison didn’t like having people look in on him. Maybe he was even afraid of getting himself killed.

  Hooch sat there for two hours, watching soldiers come in and out. He tried not to get mad. Harrison did this now and then, making somebody sit around and wait so by the time they got in they was so upset they couldn’t think straight. And sometimes he did it so a body’d get in a huff and go away. Or start to feeling small and unimportant, so Harrison could do some bullying. Hooch knew all this, so he tried to stay calm. But when it got on to evening, and the soldiers started changing shifts and going off duty, it was more than he could stand.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded of the corporal who sat at the front desk.

  “Going off duty,” said the corporal.

  “But I’m still here,” said Hooch.

  “You can go off duty too, if you like,” said the corporal.

  That smart-mouthed answer was like a slap in the face. Time was these boys all tried to suck up to Hooch Palmer. Times were changing too fast. Hooch didn’t like it at all. “I could buy your old mother and sell her at a profit,” said Hooch.

  That got to him. That corporal didn’t look bored no more. But he didn’t let himself haul off and take a swing, neither. Just stood there, more or less at attention, and said, “Mr. Palmer, you can wait here all night and wait here all day tomorrow, and you ain’t going to get in to see His Excellency the Governor. And you just sitting here waiting all day is proof you’re just too plain dumb to catch on to how things are.”

  So it was Hooch lost his temper and took a swing. Well, not a swing exactly. More like a kick, cause Hooch never did learn no rules about fighting like a gentleman. His idea of a duel was to wait behind a rock for his enemy to pass by, shoot him in the back, and run like hell. So that corporal got Hooch’s big old boot in his knee, which bent his leg backward in a way it wasn’t meant to go. That corporal screamed bloody murder, which he had a right to, and not just from the pain—after a kick like that, his leg would never be any good again. Hooch probably shouldn’t’ve kicked him there, he knew, but that boy was so snooty. Practically begged for it.

  Trouble was, the corporal wasn’t exactly alone. First yelp he made, all of a sudden there was a sergeant and four soldiers, bayonets at the ready, popping right out of the Governor’s office and looking mad as hornets. The sergeant ordered two of his boys to carry the corporal to the infirmary. The others put Hooch under arrest. But it wasn’t gentlemanly like that last time, four years before. This time the butts of their muskets got bumped into Hooch’s body in a few places, sort of accidentally, and Hooch had him some boot prints in various places on his clothes, can’t say how they got there. He ended up locked in a jail cell—no storage room this time. They left him with his clothes and a lot of pain.

  No doubt about it. Things had changed around here.

  That night six other men were put in lock-up, three of them drunks, three for brawling. Not one was Red. Hooch listened to them talking. It’s not like any of them was particularly bright, but Hooch couldn’t believe that they didn’t talk about beating up no Reds, or making fun with some of them or something. It was like Reds had practically disappeared from the vicinity.

  Well, maybe that was true. Maybe the Reds had all took off, but wasn’t that what Governor Harrison hoped for? With the Reds gone, why wasn’t Carthage City prosperous, full of White settlers?

  The only inkling Hooch got was something one of the brawlers said. “I reckon I’m broke till tax season.” The others whooped and hollered a little. “I got to say I don’t mind government service, but it sure ain’t steady work.”

  Hooch knew better than to ask them what they meant. No need to call attention to himself. He sure didn’t want word getting around about how he looked all beat up the night he spent in jail. That kind of idea starts spreading and pretty soon everybody thinks he can beat a body up, and Hooch didn’t reckon to start all over as a common street brawler, not at his age.

  In the morning the soldiers came for him. Different ones, and this time they wasn’t so careless with their feet and their musket butts. They just marched Hooch on out of the jail and now, finally, he got to see Bill Harrison.

  But not in his office. It was in his own Governor’s mansion, in a cellar room. And the way they got there was peculiar. The soldiers—must have been a dozen of them—just marched along behind the house, when all of a sudden one of them dashed over, flung up the cellar door, and two others half dragged Hooch down the steps. Cellar door slammed shut almost before their heads were clear of it, and in all that time the soldiers just kept right on marching, as if nothing was happening. Hooch didn’t like that at all. It meant that Harrison didn’t want anybody to see that Hooch was with him. Which meant this meeting could get pretty ugly, cause Harrison could deny it ever happened. Oh, the soldiers knew, of course, but they all knew about a certain corporal who got his knee bent the wrong way las
t night; they weren’t about to testify on Hooch Palmer’s behalf.

  Harrison was his old self, though, smiling and shaking Hooch by the hand and clapping him on the shoulder. “How are you, Hooch?”

  “I been better, Gov. How’s your wife? And that little boy of yours?”

  “She’s healthy as you could hope for, a refined lady like her being out here on the frontier. And my little boy, he’s quite a soldier, we even stitched him up a little uniform, you should see him strutting on parade.”

  “It’s talk like that makes me think I ought to take a wife someday.”

  “I heartily recommend it. Oh, here, Hooch, what am I thinking of? You set down, set down right there.”

  Hooch sat. “Thanks, Bill.”

  Harrison nodded, satisfied. “It’s good to see you, it’s been so long.”

  “Wisht I’d’ve seen you yesterday,” said Hooch.

  Harrison smiled ruefully. “Well, I get busy. Didn’t my boys tell you I had a full-up schedule?”

  “Schedule never used to be full for me, Bill.”

  “You know how it gets sometimes. Real busy, and what can I do about it?”

  Hooch shook his head. “Now, Bill, we’ve lied to each other just about long enough, I think. What happened was part of a plan, and it wasn’t my plan.”

  “What are you talking about, Hooch?”

  “I’m saying maybe that corporal didn’t want his leg broke, but I have a feeling his job was to get me swinging at him.”

  “His job was to see that nobody disturbed me unless they were on my schedule, Hooch. That’s the only plan I know about.” Harrison looked sad. “Hooch, I got to tell you, this is real ugly. Assaulting an officer of the U.S. Army.”

  “A corporal ain’t no officer, Bill.”

  “I only wish I could ship you back to Suskwahenny for trial, Hooch. They got lawyers there, and juries, and so on. But the trial has to be here, and juries around here ain’t too partial to folks who go around breaking corporals’ knees.”

  “Suppose you stop the threats and tell me what you really want?”

  “Want? I ain’t asking for favors, Hooch. Just concerned about a friend of mine who’s got himself in trouble with the law.”

  “It must be something real sickening or you’d bribe me to do it instead of trying to strong-arm me. It must be something that you think I wouldn’t be willing to do unless you scare me to death, and I keep trying to imagine what you think is so bad that you think I wouldn’t do it. It ain’t much of a list, Bill.”

  Harrison shook his head. “Hooch, you got me wrong. Just plain wrong.”

  “This town is dying, Bill,” said Hooch. “Things ain’t working out like you planned. And I think it’s cause you done some real dumb things. I think the Reds started going away—or maybe they all died off—and you made the stupid mistake of trying to make up for all that lost likker income by bringing in the scum of the earth, the worst kind of White man, the river rats who spent the night in jail with me. You’ve used them to collect taxes, right? Farmers don’t like taxes. They specially don’t like taxes when they’re collected by scum like this.”

  Harrison poured himself three fingers of whisky in a tumbler and drank off half of it in a single gulp.

  “So you been losing your whisky-Reds, and you been losing your White farmers, and all you got left is your soldiers, the river rats, and whatever money you can steal from the United States Army appropriation for peace-keeping in the west.”

  Harrison drank the rest of the whisky and belched.

  “What that means is you’ve been unlucky and you’ve been stupid, and somehow you think you can make me get you out of it.”

  Harrison poured another three fingers into the glass. But instead of drinking it, he hauled off and threw it into Hooch’s face. The whisky splashed in his eyes, the tumbler bounced off his forehead, and Hooch found himself rolling on the floor trying to dig the alcohol out of his eyes.

  A while later, with a wet cloth pressed against his forehead, Hooch was sitting in the chair again, acting a lot more meek and reasonable. But that was because he knew Harrison had a flush and his own hand was just two pair. Get out of here alive and then just see what comes next, right?

  “I wasn’t stupid,” Harrison said.

  No, you’re the smartest governor Carthage ever had, I’m surprised you ain’t King. That’s what Hooch would’ve said. But he was keeping his mouth shut.

  “It was that Prophet. That Red up north. Building his Prophetstown right across the Wobbish from Vigor Church—you can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence. It’s Armor-of-God, that’s what it is, trying to take the state of Wobbish away from me. Using a Red to do it, too. I knew that a lot of Reds were going north, everybody knew that, but I still had me my whisky-Reds, them as hadn’t died off. And with fewer Reds around here—especially the Shaw-Nee, when they left—well, I thought I’d get more White settlers. And you’re wrong about my tax collectors. They didn’t run the White settlers off. It was Ta-Kumsaw.”

  “I thought it was the Prophet.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Hooch, I don’t have much patience these days.”

  Why didn’t you warn me before you threw the glass? No, no, don’t say nothing to make him mad. “Sorry, Bill.”

  “Ta-Kumsaw’s been real smart. He doesn’t kill White folks. He just shows up at their farms with fifty Shaw-Nee. Doesn’t shoot anybody, but when you got fifty painted-up warriors all around your house, these White folks didn’t exactly figure it was smart to start shooting. So the White farmers watched while the Shaw-Nee opened every gate, every stable, every coop. Let them animals go on out. Horses, pigs, milk cows, chickens. Just like Noah bringing beasts into the ark, the Shaw-Nee walk into the woods and the animals trot on right behind. Just like that. Never see them again.”

  “You can’t tell me they never round up at least some of their stock.”

  “All gone. Never find even their tracks. Never even a feather from a chicken. That’s what run the White farmers off, is knowing that any day, all their animals can disappear.”

  “Shaw-Nee eating them or something? Ain’t no chicken smart enough to live long in the woods. It’s just Christmastime for foxes, that’s all it is.”

  “How should I know? White folks come to me, they say, Get our animals back, or kill the Reds what took them. But my soldiers, my scouts, nobody can find where Ta-Kumsaw’s people are. No villages at all! I tried raiding a Caska-Skeeaw village up the Little My-Ammy, but all that did was convince more Reds to leave, didn’t even slow down what Ta-Kumsaw was doing.”

  Hooch could imagine what that raid on the Caska-Skeeaw village was like. Old men, women, children, their corpses shot up and half-burnt—Hooch knew how Harrison dealt with Reds.

  “And then last month, here comes the Prophet. I knew he was coming—even the whisky-Reds couldn’t talk about nothing else. Prophet’s coming. Got to go see the Prophet. Well, I tried to find out where he was going to be, where he was going to give a speech, I even had some of my tame Reds try to find out for me, but no dice, Hooch. Not a clue. Nobody knew. Just one day the word went through the whole town, Prophet’s here. Where? Just come on, Prophet’s here. No one ever said where. I swear these Reds can talk without talking, if you know what I mean.”

  “Bill, tell me you had spies there, or I’ll start to thinking you lost your touch.”

  “Spies? I went myself, how’s that? And do you know how? Ta-Kumsaw sent me an invitation, if that don’t beat all. No soldiers, no guns, just me.”

  “And you went? He could’ve captured you and—”

  “He gave me his word. Ta-Kumsaw may be a Red, but he keeps his word.”

  Hooch thought that was kind of funny. Harrison, the man who prided himself on never keeping a promise to a Red man, but he still counted on Ta-Kumsaw keeping a promise to him. Well, he got back alive, didn’t he? So Ta-Kumsaw was as good as his word.

  “I went there. Must’ve been every Red in the whole My-Ammy cou
ntry there. Must’ve been ten thousand. Squatting around in this old abandoned cornfield—there’s plenty of them in these parts, you can bet, thanks to Ta-Kumsaw. If I’d had my two cannon there and a hundred soldiers, I could’ve ended the whole Red problem, then and there.”

  “Too bad you didn’t,” said Hooch.

  “Ta-Kumsaw wanted me to sit right up front, but I wouldn’t. I hung back and I listened. The Prophet got up, stood on an old stump in the field, and he talked and talked and talked.”

  “You understand any of it? I mean, you don’t talk Shaw-Nee.”

  “He was talking English, Hooch. Too many different tribes there, the only language they all knew was English. Oh, sometimes he talked in that Red gibberish, but there was plenty of English. Talking about the destiny of the Red man. Stay pure from White contamination. Live all together and fill up a part of the land so the White man will have his place and the Red man will have his. Build a city—a crystal city, he said, it sounded real pretty except these Reds can’t even build a proper shed, I hate to think how they’d do at building a city out of glass! But most of all, he said, Don’t drink likker. Not a drop. Give it up, stay away from it. Likker is the chain of the White man, the chain and the whip, the chain and the whip and the knife. First he’ll catch you, then he’ll whip you, then he’ll kill you, likker will, and when the White man’s killed you with his whisky, he’ll come in and steal your land, destroy it, make it unfit, dead, useless.”

  “Sounds like he made a real impression on you, Bill,” said Hooch. “Sounds like you memorized the speech he gave.”

  “Memorized? He talked for three straight hours. Talked about visions of the past, visions of the future. Talked about—oh, Hooch, it was crazy stuff, but those Reds were drinking it up like, like—”

  “Whisky.”

  “Like whisky except it was instead of whisky. They all went with him. Pretty near all of them, anyway. Only ones left are a few whisky-Reds that’re bound to die soon. And of course my tame Reds, but that’s different. And some wild Reds across the Hio.”