Jim didn’t have to watch to know what he was doing. He knew the sound. He smoldered.
After Ezra was done with the whore from Fort Laramie, Jim said, “Don’t forget, our fortune is right outside. I’m sure you want your half when this is all said and done.”
Since they’d been holed up, there had been an unspoken rule that they didn’t talk after they went to bed. Too intimate. Jim had broken protocol, but he was still seething.
“I said I was sorry for sayin’ that, Jim. Just forget it.”
“You could have left anytime. We could have squared up and you could have left.”
Ezra said, “It’s a cold one tonight.”
“You can leave tomorrow if you want,” Jim said. “I’ll get those plews down myself and I’ll sell ’em and send you your share wherever the hell you wind up. Just leave word at the fort where you want the money sent.”
Ezra sighed. “You’re like a dog with a rag in its mouth, Jim. You won’t let go.”
Jim closed his hand around his knife, and went to sleep that way.
Lines of snow, like jail bars, formed across the top of his blankets.
The next morning, Jim kept his eyes closed and gripped the handle of his knife while Ezra coughed himself awake, hacked phlegm into a ball in his mouth, and got the fire going.
Ezra spit the gob onto the grate and said, “Lookit that thang burn. Jim, come lookit this thang.”
Jim threw his covers aside, sat up, said through gritted teeth, “I’m leaving. I’ll be back come spring.”
Ezra stroked his beard and squinted at Jim. “How you going to cover two hundred miles in the snow to get to Fort Bridger?”
Jim gathered and tied up his ropes as a backpack and filled a leather sack with half the pemmican. He grabbed his possibles sack from a peg and stuffed it with half their powder and lead.
“Take more if you want,” Ezra said.
“This is fine. I’ll manage.” Jim couldn’t even look at Ezra. He couldn’t look at his rheumy eyes or filthy union suit or scraggly beard because he knew if he did he’d kill the man right there. Gut him, and toss the carcass outside for the grizzlies.
“The only way down is through the Pawnee winter camp,” Ezra said. “They might not like that.”
“Ezra,” Jim said, hands shaking, “get out of my way.”
“You want breakfast first?”
“Ezra, get out of my way.”
“Just because I spit in the fire?”
“That and every other damned thing.”
Ezra stepped back as if slapped.
As Jim pulled on his buffalo coat and clamped his red fox hat over his head, he heard Ezra say to his back, “God be with you in your travels, Jim. I’m going to miss you, my friend. We had some mighty great years together.”
Jim plunged outside with his eyes stinging. He convinced himself it was due to the blowing needles of snow in his face.
Through the howling wind he thought he heard Ezra’s voice, and he turned.
The wind whipped Ezra’s words away, but Jim could read his lips. Ezra said, “We’re victims of our…”
Jim ignored the rest.
The Pawnee winter camp was massive, stretching the length and width of the river valley. There were lodges as far as Jim could see on both banks of the frozen river. Smoke hung low over the lodges, beaten down by the cold. Hundreds of ponies milled in corrals and Jim could hear packs of dogs yelp and bark. Because of the snow and cold he rarely saw a Pawnee venture outside their tipis and when they did it was a quick trip, either to get more wood, water from a chopped square in the ice, or to defecate in the skeletal buck brush.
From where he hunkered down in the deep powder snow on the top of a hillock, Jim tried to plot a way he could avoid the encampment and continue his trek. It had been four days and he’d eaten nothing but pemmican — meat, fat, and berries mushed together into frozen patties — and he was practically out of food. He’d found no game since he left the cabin, not even a snowshoe hare. He’d tried to eat the skin-like underbark of cottonwood and mountain ash trees like elk did, but the taste was acrid and it gave him no energy. A cold breeze from the valley floor brought whiffs of broiled meat, puppy probably, and his mouth salivated and his stomach growled.
He knew from his years in the mountains he was a few days away from death. He had no horse, no food, and he hadn’t been able to feel his toes for twenty-four hours.
And he cursed Ezra once again and thought of going back. But he knew if he did, Ezra would have to die, because he couldn’t spend another minute in the man’s presence. Ezra had always been just a hair over the line into civilization and it hadn’t taken him long to slip back and become an animal again. A filthy pig. Jim wondered why he hadn’t seen it before, how close Ezra was to comfortable savagery. He imagined Ezra back in the cabin, eating his own leg.
It would be nightfall soon. The winter camp would go to sleep. If he could find their cache of meat, and steal a horse…
It took a long time to get back to the cabin. Jim didn’t know for sure how many days and nights, but he guessed it was over a week. Most of the time, his head had been elsewhere, for hours at a time, and he sang and chanted and cursed the world and God and those Pawnees who had filled him full of arrows and murdered him for sure.
He lurched from tree to tree on columns of frozen rock that had once been his legs and he peered out at the pure white of the sky and the ground through his left eye because his right was blind. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his rifle and his possibles sack. He thought his knives were still in their sheaths under his buffalo coat, but he couldn’t be sure and he didn’t look.
Jim scooped up snow and ate it as if it were food and it kept his tongue from swelling and cracking. He’d fallen on a snowshoe hare that was still warm from being killed by a bobcat and he pulled what was left of it apart and ate it raw.
He thanked God it hadn’t snowed hard since he’d left, because he could follow his own trail back most of the way.
And he thanked Ezra when at last he smelled woodsmoke and meat cooking and there was the cabin, and the fur shack, and the corrals.
Jim wept as he approached the front door and pounded on it.
“Who is it?” Ezra asked from inside.
Jim couldn’t speak. He sunk to his knees and thumped the door with the crown of his head.
The door opened and Jim fell inside. For the first time since he’d left, he felt warmth on his face.
And Ezra said, “You don’t look so good, Jim.”
Through the violent, roaring, excruciating pain that came from his frostbitten skin thawing out, Jim had crazy dreams. He dreamed Ezra had shaved, bathed, and put on clean clothes. He dreamed Ezra had re-chinked the logs and fireplace until they were tight with mud and straw and had emptied his chamber pot, swept the floor, and put the cabin in order. He dreamed Ezra awakened without hacking or spitting or even talking.
He thought, I’m in heaven.
But he wasn’t.
Jim painfully rolled his head to the side. Ezra was sitting at the table, finishing his lunch of roast Emily. Ezra’s face was shaved smooth and freshly scrubbed. His movements were spry and purposeful. His eyes were clear and blue.
Ezra said, “I didn’t think you’d come back. I thought you’d make it to Fort Bridger because you’re just so goddamned stubborn.”
Jim couldn’t speak. The pain came in crippling waves.
“I got the arrows out, but your flesh is rotten, Jim,” Ezra said. “You know what that means.”