“Well jes’ what have we here.”
Chad Larmy, better known as Frog, twisted on his bench at his comrade’s remark and set his bulging strabismic eyes toward the bar, where a handful of men were perched on stools like ghosts in the eerie light. Frog looked at them unblinking, then turned back to his companion, his eyes imploring in two directions at once and his wide flat jaw working as though it would grind through his perplexity. “Jes’ what’s that you seen there, Jim?”
Jim Crow squinted his gray eyes toward the bar. “Nothin’ but yon pilgrim, bearded and in the bent-rim hat with that there feather stickin’ out.” Frog twisted in his seat again, his thin limbs holding him rigidly to his turning, as he peered helplessly. He sat wrenched like that until his companion grew impatient. “Well? Don’t ogle for Pete’s sake. You seen him or ain’t you?”
Frog turned, shrugged. “Sure, I guess I seen him. What about him?”
“You ain’t seen him once or twice before?”
“I reckon I might coulda.”
“All them big spookey eyes for nothin,” frowned Jim, shaking his greasy head.
“Hell, Jim, I don’ keep tabs on e’erybody as walks inta this place!”
“Well maybe you oughtta. Might could pay off one day. Now you just take our pilgrim here. I done seen him before—se’ral times at that.”
“Well what of it?”
“What of it! He don’t live in Walla Walla, does he, Frog?”
“Nossir, I don’t reckon he does.”
“Nor nowheres hereabouts?”
“Couldn’t say for certain, but... I reckon not.”
“Well, sure as hell he don’t come from no other town just to enjoy the unrivaled prospects of our lovely little frontier city!”
“Heck, Jim, prolly not.”
“Then I say he lives out there in them woods.”
Frog blinked heavily three times. “Likely so he does, Jim,” he said, scratching his head uneasily.
“Jes’ so.”
“Well, hell Jim, lotsa folks live out there in them woods...”
Jim leaned in. “Listen, Frog. That fellow comes down here maybe once, twice a month. Stops in at ol’ Randal’s and comes out countin’ cash. Jes’ walks into this here joint like it weren’t nothin. Fills hisself up there on that whiskey, smokes hisself a fine cigar or two, purchases his possibles at the general store. And not only, but once I seen him take tools, Frog. Shovel, pick. Loaded ’em all up onto that sad nag a’ his. And then i’s back to the woods with him.”
“Tools, is it…? Well, but say, Jim, jes’ how do you know about all this?”
“I done followed him once.”
“Well, why’d you ever do a thing like that?”
But Jim spoke as if no question had been. “Never carries nothin’ with him to town, or leastwise, nothin’ you could clap your eyes on. I seen him. I’s just him and that ol’ horse a’ his, looks like’s about to keel o’er and die.”
Frog worked his jaw left to right like a pendulum. “I still don’t git it, Jim.”
Jim signed and shook his head. He leaned in and stared hard at his companion, and when he spoke it was in a whisper. “What’s he tradin for the coin, Frog? And what in hell’s name he need shovel and pick fer?” Frog blinked.
They sidled up behind the stranger at his empty whiskey tumbler, set themselves one on either side of him like a pair of guardsman about a criminal and nodded to him amiably. He looked at them uneasily, from one to the other, his bearded mouth hanging half open, but nodded curtly in return. “Name’s Jim Crow,” said the one, reaching out a calloused hand. “Horace Smith,” the man replied, passing his cigar from one hand to another and making a limp handshake in return, his shy eyes glancing shiftily at the man beside him.
“This here’s Chad Larmy. E’eryone calls him Frog, though—and you should, too, ’lest you go confoundin’ folk,” Jim continued, and, reaching all the way across the stranger between them, gave his slight companion such a slap on his back that Frog almost fell off his barstool. “Well, we seen you here drinkin’ alone, and bethought ourselfs that it weren’t none too neighborly of us to let no stranger come in here and drink all by his lonesome.”
“That is mighty kind of you,” murmured Horace. The cigar twisted uneasily between his fingers, its smoke curling upward in whorls. “And what’ll you gentlemen be having?”
“Why, we are pleased to follow your custom, mister. You been drinkin’ whiskey from the looks? Then it’s whiskey for us, too, George, a glass each for Frog’n me. Say, what is it our friend’ll be havin’ here, exactly?”
The bartend, a straight-backed funereal looking man, cleared his throat. “Bourbon, Jimmy.”
“The ol’ tangleleg?”
“Nossir, pure Kentucky.”
Jim lifted his eye brows and opened his his mouth and nodded slowly, letting out a low whistle. “Well, now,” he said, “well now. That is somethin’ beyond our reach, ain’t it Frog? Yessir. Oh, we’re simple folk, me’n Frog. Men a’ simple means. George, you just git our new friend here another glass of that there fine Kentucky. For me and Frog you line up the usual. Hell, we ain’t partic’lar.”
“I’ll be having whatever these two gents are,” put in Horace quickly, and the bartend, looking skeptically at him a moment, nodded dryly.
“Well now,” smiled Jim, working his bearded jaw and leaning in to peer at Horace, “ain’t no reason to lower your high sights on account of us’n two. Don’t you so much as mind us here, you hear? We cain’t afford none of that fancy stuff ourselves, but we sure don’t mind putting up for a Godfearin’ pilgrim, now and then. Ain’t that right, Frog?”
“That sure is right, Jim.” Frog’s head worked swiftly on his neck, nodding as though some spring lever had been loosed in his body. “Sure is.”
“There will be no need,” insisted Horace with a quick gesture of dismissal. “I was... but getting my taste of it.”
The bartend looked at them a moment. “That’ll be three bit, then” he said, and set to.
Jim shrugged and chuckled as though at some joke secret to himself. He bit his lower lip and let it loose with a swift snarling motion of his teeth and jutted out his jaw and scratched his cheek with its grizzled black beard, then set his beefy hand flat on the dark rough wood of the bar. His fingers began tapping on it in a strange flapping motion, irregular, arhythmic. The bartend brought their drinks and laid them out before them as though counting heads. The glass of them shimmering in the lamplights and the poorman’s whiskey within glowed like some jewel far beyond its worth and endowed it for an instant with a flame, some wayward spurt of sunfire that these men would now consume and make a part of themselves. Jim reached forth automatically and lay his hand about the glass. “Say, stranger, whereabouts you from?”
“Way back east.”
“I reckoned, from your talk. And jes’ what might a Easterer like you be doin’ out so far West?”
“But passing through.”
“Sure, lotsa folks pass through Walla Walla! Ain’t that so, Frog? Easterers, southerners, notherers down from the uplands… Forty-niners, Mexicans, Chinamen, mountain men—hell you name it. Why, I even seen me a free slave or two. Yessir, Walla Walla is a reg’lar sluice for folks. Slowed down a sight since the gold rush went sour, I reckon, but in its day it was like a river. Only—I reckon I seen you before. Or ain’t I?”
Horace glanced at him with his shy eyes, betraying a momentary surprise. “Could have done,” he allowed slowly.
“Well, I’m downright certain of it. I forget a lotta things, friend, but never a face. Why, our ol’ boy here, he’s been passin’ through Walla Walla now for some time, Frog,” said Jim loudly, setting a friendly hand on Horace’s shoulder, which seemed to make the man strongly uncomfortable. “Done passed through four or five times aready, by my reckonin’. Say, there, friend, how is it you said you made your livin’?”
Horace’s eyes flitted about before him and fell back to his empty glass. “Trapping,” he replied shortly.
“Ah, trappin’! An’ what now? Fox? Bear? Whistle pig?”
“Beaver, mainly.”
“Beaver! Well, now, ain’t that funny, Frog? Yessir, that is right funny. Happened to speak to a man not three days back, an ol’ timer in these parts, you know the sort. Useta trap a lot round here. You know what he tol’ me? Tol’ me the damndest thing, he did. Tol’ me the huntin’ was better than the trappin’. Still, he said a man could trap just about anything he wanted out here—coneys, muskrat, e’en bear, fox and wolf, but that them beavers had done runned out, and some time back at that. Damnedest thing he e’er seen, he said. Damndest thing.”
Horace clenched his jaw and looked forlornly at the bottles on the shelves before him, assorted along a wooden shelf, the dark blue and tobacco brown of them and gold-rye of them. “Well,” he said softly, “a man has to know where to look.”
“Yessir,” said Jim. “Yessir, precisely. Jus’ where to look. That is so. But then—din’t you say you was just passin’ through?” He tilted his head back and scrunched his brow and looked at Horace over his cheeks, but Horace only stared before him solemnly like a man awaiting some judgement. “Now now,” continued Jim suddenly chuckling, “I don’ mean to pry there. Say, Frog, I git the sense our friend here would like to be let to his privacy. You git that sense? A man of few words and self-reliance. I can appreciate that. Well, here’s to your health, stranger—and to them beavers, wherever it is you aim to russle ’em up.” And with that, he lifted the glass before him in salute, as Frog and then belatedly Horace did as well, and downed the mixture at a gulp, in chorus more or less with the others. Jim set the glass heavily upon the pinewood counter with the sound of a miniature gunshot, letting his breath out as though with this dubious substance inside of him he might breathe fire; then he offered his hand once more to Horace, who took it again limply in his own, and set upon the counter four coins, instructing the bartend to keep the remnant; and with that Frog and Jim retreated to their table, and sat upon their benches, with Frog cheerful as ever and chattering on about some trouble with the soles of his boots now that the silence had overtaken Jim, as though the conversation with the stranger had never taken place, or its import altogether evaded him.
“Say, Jim,” he said at length, “where’d you talk to that there ol’ timer? The one about the beavers… I ain’t heard that about beavers hereabouts!”
“Ain’t no damn ol’ timer, you blame fool,” muttered Jim, running his fingers absently over the high grain of the table and gazing embers into the back of the man at the bar, whose unease could even at such a distance be felt.
You have just read the second chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. If you want to receive new chapters directly via email, please —