The Ballad of Black Hawk and Billy the Kid, Page 3

  Now, I’m quick. I’ve always been fast with a gun; I can pick a target, draw, and shoot in one smooth motion. But even I could barely follow the Native American’s hand as it moved in a quick X…and sliced away twelve inches of braided leather.

  The Native American stepped toward the cowboy. I don’t think he realized he was missing the end of his whip. He cracked it again…and the Native American cut another length off the whip. Beneath the sombrero I saw the cowboy’s eyes widen in surprise and perhaps fear. He tried to crack the whip again, but the weapon was at least eighteen inches shorter than he was used to, so he missed. And as he dragged the whip back, the Native American slashed another chunk away as he darted forward astonishingly fast. I saw the butt of the knife come up, and then the thick curved handle struck the cowboy under his chin. His teeth clicked like jangling coins, and he actually rose off the ground and sailed through the air before collapsing in a cloud of dust. The remains of his whip curled around him like a dead snake.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I called out, “how did you disrespect them?”

  “I was buying supplies in this one’s shop…” The Native American nudged one of storekeepers with his boot. His accent was odd: cultured and educated, with perhaps a touch of the East Coast to it. “Solider boy and whippersnapper seemed to think they should be served before me. We had words.” He tossed the long knife away, retrieved his hatchet and knife from the ground, and tucked them into his belt. When he looked at me, the last of the evening sunlight turned his dark eyes to copper coins. “I didn’t really need your help, though I appreciate the offer.”

  “Oh, I know that. You were doing just fine when I arrived. Whip might have stung, though.”

  “He’d have caught me once or twice maybe, before I got to him.”

  “Leather whip like that will leave a nasty scar.”

  “I heal real quick,” he said. He nodded into the gathering shadows. “My horse and pack mule are down here, loaded up and ready to go. We should get out of here.”

  “We? What makes you think I’ll be going with you?”

  The Native American smiled, teeth white in the gloom. “When these four wake up, do you think they’ll admit they were beaten by someone like me? Or do you think they’ll describe someone who looks just like the Wanted posters of Billy the Kid?”

  “Does everyone know me in this town?”

  “You’re getting to be famous, Billy. And famous gets you dead.”

  “I’m only passing through,” I said. “I just stopped to get some supplies.”

  “I’m guessing neither of these shopkeepers will sell to you. Where were you headed?”

  “West.”

  “So am I,” he said. “Where to, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “To the Valley of the Gods, in Utah.”

  “Heading in that general direction myself.”

  I felt something cold and sour settle in the pit of my stomach. “There’s a coincidence,” I muttered.

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  5

  Billy: “Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak,” he said as we rode out of town.

  I looked at him blankly.

  “But you can call me Black Hawk of the Sauk.”

  “Never heard of the Sauk,” I told him.

  “From way north of here, close to Canada.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  Black Hawk didn’t even look at me. “No, I am not.” His arm swept wide, taking in the incredible landscape before me. “This land is my home. But I am far from my tribe,” he admitted.

  “In my experience, a man leaves his home because he’s running from something, or he’s in search of adventure,” I said.

  “Or perhaps because he is chasing something,” Black Hawk said.

  I couldn’t disagree with that. I’d done all three in my time.

  We rode in silence, moving down a trail running parallel to the newly laid train tracks. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the first of the stars speckled the skies to the east. The temperature dropped as the light faded, and I pulled my horse blanket over my shoulders. Black Hawk seemed unaffected by the chill.

  “There’s a sheltered hollow about a mile up the track,” Black Hawk said. “We’ll make camp there. There’s no reason to risk the horses by riding at night.”

  I squinted into the gloom. I could not see anything. “How do you know there’s a hollow up ahead? Is that some Sauk tracking thing?”

  “I am sure I could make up something,” Black Hawk said with a grin. “Maybe about being able to see in the dark, or being able to distinguish the ancient pathways in the earth…or I could simply tell you that I’ve been camping out here for the past few days.” He glanced sidelong at me. “You can see the sort of reception I get in town.”

  “You get that a lot?”

  “Often enough. People see someone like me and think I’m scouting for a war party.” He glanced at me again. “Like when they see a cowboy with two six-shooters on his hips and a rifle on his saddle, they think he means trouble. You get that a lot?”

  “Often enough.” I grinned. “Though in my case, it’s usually the truth.” A sudden thought struck me. “Why didn’t those men pull guns on you?”

  “Guns are no longer allowed within city limits,” he said. “You surrender them at the sheriff’s office when you ride in, collect them when you ride out.”

  “I’ve heard that’s the law in Tombstone and Deadwood now.” I jerked a thumb back at the town. “Guess if they’d had guns, it might not have gone so well for you.”

  Black Hawk smiled. “I’m not that easy to kill.”

  Something about the way he said it—confident, but not boastful—made me believe him.

  ***

  The hollow was exactly where he said it would be, a deep depression in the ground, surrounded and enclosed by high rocks on all sides, with just a single entrance. It would be easy to defend, but equally easy to get trapped in.

  Black Hawk rode ahead of me, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking: he knew he was riding with a notorious outlaw—the press loved to call me notorious—but he acted as if he had not a care in the world. He didn’t strike me as foolhardy, but no sensible man showed his back to a stranger. I spent my life sitting with my back to walls, always making sure I was the last in a line of riders. Simple precautions, but they’d kept me alive this long.

  I was feeling uncomfortable, almost as if events were slipping away from me and I was losing control. I liked to think that I made my own decisions, but now I was beginning to wonder. I mean, what were the chances of Calamity Jane riding into Fort Sumner, meeting me, and knowing how to interpret my map? What were the chances of encountering the priest on the steps of the church in Albuquerque…who then directed me to the spot where Black Hawk was being attacked…. which led to me riding into the night with a man I’d only just met.

  If I were a religious man, I’d have been thinking that maybe my poor mother was right and it was all God’s will. It was almost as if someone or something was directing me.

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked Black Hawk as I rode through the narrow gap that led into the hollow. My voice echoed off the stone walls on either side, sounding louder than I had intended.

  The Sauk slipped easily off his mount and led her and the pack mule laden down with supplies to the back of the hollow. He looked over at me as he stripped off their saddles and dug out feed bags. “That’s an odd question, Billy.”

  “Reckon I’ve never asked it before,” I admitted.

  “So why now, and why ask me?”

  I shrugged. I knew I sounded foolish even as I said the words. “Starting to feel like I’m one of those puppets on strings. A
nd someone is pulling my strings. It’s not a nice feeling.”

  “I can give you two answers,” Black Hawk said. “Only one will be true. You can choose to believe that you have free will and that you are in charge of everything you do and say, that you are, as the English say, captain of your own ship.”

  “Well, I do believe that…,” I began, but Black Hawk pressed on.

  “Or I can tell you that the threads of your existence are there from the moment of your birth. As you go through life, you weave some of those threads together into the pattern of your life. However, other threads remain untouched. Call them missed opportunities, or roads not taken.”

  “Sounds about the same.”

  “It’s not. Because sometimes, someone—or something—will reach into that weave of threads and pluck or twist one you haven’t touched and set your life in a new direction.”

  “That sort of suggests this someone or something is plucking at those threads to achieve a specific end, adding their own design to my pattern.”

  He nodded, concentrating on brushing down his horse. “That’s a reasonable conclusion.”

  I watched him work on the horse and then the mule while I struggled to put my thoughts into words. They say you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats animals, but I’ve known plenty who treated horses and dogs far better than they cared for any human.

  “So…so what you’re saying is that this someone or something who was plucking at those threads was doing it because they were able to see the future. And that’s just plumb impossible…”

  Black Hawk laughed, a deep, mellow sound. “Billy, when you have lived as long as I have, you’ll soon come to realize that nothing is impossible.”

  “You don’t look that old.”

  “I’m older than I look,” he said, and I thought I saw an incredible sadness flicker across his face. “Tell me,” he asked suddenly, “did you ever come across a one-handed man on your travels?”

  My breath caught in my throat. I took my time before answering, because I wanted to be sure just who Black Hawk was talking about. “Saw lots of maimed soldiers…,” I began.

  He silenced me with a sly smile. “I’m talking about a young-looking man, with a hook in place of his left hand.”

  The feeling of panic rolled right over me, and a sour ball bloomed a heavy weight into the pit of my stomach. “How would you know that?” I asked, mumbling because my tongue suddenly felt too thick in my mouth.

  “So you saw him?”

  I felt a wave of heat race up my body. For the first and only time in my life, I swayed on my horse, and I think I might have fainted right off it, but Black Hawk caught me, lifted me down, carried me as if I weighed nothing, and propped me up against the wall of tall standing stones. I distinctly felt the heat they were still radiating from the day’s sunshine. The Sauk plucked the canteen from my saddle, opened it, and poured brackish water down my dry throat.

  “I’m going to take that as a yes,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve seen him also. He appears and disappears like a wraith.”

  Sitting with my back against the stones, I watched Black Hawk tend to my horse and then expertly prepare a fire in a depression in the center of the stone-enclosed hollow. “I’m not going to cook tonight,” he said. “The odor will carry for miles. And who knows what it will call.” He produced a brown paper package from his saddlebag and I recognized the distinctive yellow Arbuckles’ label. “But we can have some coffee. You look like you need it.”

  I nodded. “You’ve seen him too? Got a half circle of metal, like a scythe, in place of his left hand.”

  “That’s him,” Black Hawk said. “I was a boy when I first encountered him. At first, I thought he was a dream; then I came to believe he was a Paissa, one of the magical forest people. In time I came to understand that he was a real person…although perhaps person is not the right word for what he is. How old were you when you first saw him?”

  “I’m not sure. All my life I’d dreamed of a hooded man with a silver hook in place of his left hand. Can’t really say that they were nightmares because they never really frightened me. Growing up, moving from place to place, New York to Indianapolis, Wichita to Santa Fe and then on to Silver City, I sometimes caught sight of someone who looked like him: a figure on the other side of the street, someone passing by outside the window, a glimpse of metal. But you know, when you have little food or just bad food and stale water, you can sometimes see things.”

  The rich aroma of coffee wafted across the chill night air. I breathed it in, and the normal, ordinary odor helped to settle me. I sometimes wonder if that’s what Black Hawk was trying to do.

  Black Hawk: No, I was just making coffee.

  Billy: “When did you meet him in person?” Black Hawk asked.

  “How do you know I met him?” I asked, and then answered my own question. “Because you met him also.”

  “Saved my life on more than one occasion.”

  “Mine too. I was maybe fifteen when I first met him in the flesh. My mother was dead and my brother and I were starving. I was caught stealing food and sent to jail in Silver City. The hook-handed man appeared outside my cell and, without saying a word, opened the doors and helped me escape. He led me out of the jail, and when I turned to thank him, he’d vanished. Maybe two years later, he turned up in Arizona and helped me get away from Fort Grant prison. I saw him, as clear as I see you, but I’m not sure I can remember anything about him, except for his eyes, which were bright blue. He never spoke.”

  Black Hawk handed over a steaming mug of coffee. I reached for it, but the cup was almost untouchably hot, though it didn’t seem to bother him. I wrapped my hands in the blanket and took it from him. I breathed in the smell, and it was strong enough to clear my head.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “What is he, is a better question,” Black Hawk said. He sipped from the scalding cup and grimaced. “Needs eggshells.”

  I know a lot of cowboys added eggshells to their coffee to improve the taste, but I was never a big fan of that method; I always managed to end up with a mouthful of brittle shell.

  Black Hawk: Then you’re missing a treat: eggshells makes for a sweeter cup of coffee, cuts down on the acidity.

  Billy: “Who is the hook-handed man?” I asked him again.

  “I’ve heard him called many things, but he calls himself Marethyu.”

  I tried saying the word. I’m fluent in Spanish, I can trade in French, and I can get by in a few of the Native American dialects, but I’d never heard anything like it.

  “It is an old word. It means Death,” Black Hawk said.

  6

  Billy: “Marethyu. Death,” I repeated, focusing on the coffee, which had cooled enough to drink. I can say, without fear of contradiction, that it was one of the best cups of coffee I’d ever tasted, or maybe it was just that in that particular moment, every sense was heightened.

  Black Hawk: No, it was just a really good cup of coffee.

  Billy: I tried to gather my whirling thoughts.

  “You’ve got questions,” Black Hawk said. “I had the same questions. But first, there is something you should know.”

  “I’ve got a feeling I’m not going to like what I’m about to hear.” My heart was starting to beat harder, but I think that might have been the coffee.

  “Marethyu sent me to Albuquerque to find you.”

  “Find me!” I couldn’t keep my voice even. “That’s impossible. I didn’t know I was going there until less than a week ago.”

  “Remember those threads I mentioned, the ones that are occasionally twisted and woven into new patterns?”

  I nodded.

  “Welcome to the new pattern. Marethyu did some weaving.” Black Hawk poured himself another cup of coffee. “About ni
nety years ago, I set out on a mission…”

  “Whoa! I think I misheard you…,” I stammered.

  “No, you did not. I said ninety years ago, not nine or nineteen. Billy, I was born in 1767 or thereabouts. This year, I will be one hundred and thirteen years old. I’m not looking too bad for my age, am I?”

  “One hundred and thirteen?”

  “I am immortal, Billy,” he said very simply. “If I keep my head and do not suffer a catastrophic injury, I could, potentially, live forever.”

  “I know what immortal means.”

  Night had fallen now, and the small fire was dying. The only light in the circle of stones came from the glowing embers, and they turned Back Hawk’s eyes into red spots in the darkness. For some reason, it never even crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, this Native American was crazy. There were a lot of really strange people in the West. Some were unhinged before they came out here, drawn by the empty spaces and the vast landscape. Others were driven into a type of insanity by the bad food, terrible drink, the loneliness, or a combination of all three. But I instinctively knew that Black Hawk was none of these.

  Was I scared? Not in the slightest.

  Black Hawk: Not even a little bit nervous?

  Billy: Was I even surprised? Not sure about that either. At night, when you’ve got nothing else to do, cowboys gossip and tell tall tales, so you become accustomed to hearing the oddest things. And as you travel across the West, you come up against all manner of fantastic Native American lore, mixed in with stories from the English, French, Spanish, Scottish, German, Italians, Scandinavians, and Irish who’ve come here. Then you add in the African lore, South American folktales, and Chinese myth, and you get a rich stew of stories. The West is littered with myths and fragments of legends from those countries, and it all rolls together to form a new mythology.