The Joshua Tree Read online

Reeds

  that

  cut

  And riding back you’d hurry, though the booze beat hard inside your head, to catch up with a couple of riders up ahead; company’s better than being alone and there isn’t much choice. And stop to tighten your cinch and a bullet’d cut into your saddle – would they have thought you were going for the saddleboot? – and your horse takes off and you for cover behind some rocks. And with dark you hear a prospector banging by on his tin-pot one-blanket mule and you take up with him. But there’s no sign of them two or your horse. Till you find back at Scotty’s camp the next day that Chief Jecopa of the Paiutes in his stovepipe hat had taken in the horse and they’d been getting ready to go out for your remains.

  Rocks

  that

  crush

  Like Tully Canyon, George Ratford’s saloon. Sees you and Scotty after a long drought, extra long ’cause your mule fell off a cliff, earthquake perhaps, and every last bottle was broke. Raw whiskey on empty stomachs, no time to eat, and treating all the women to champagne. And Scotty rides off with your rifle and whiskey’s the only way to trap him and you’d like to be getting on after him. So you’re back into the bar on your horse, twelve hundred pounds, just a couple of bottles but they give you four to get you on your way, and all twenty of them Swedes took off already for fear the bullets’d start buzzing.

  Or Janice. Miss Acton when she got off her little horse and was asking for Mister Scott. With pink lace flowers in her big black hat. Straight by train from New York society, with her eyes so green and gold – would the clear waters in the sunrise off Ellis Island be like that? And by stage and by pack train from Rhyolite, over the Grapevines, down across Death Valley, and up into the Panamints to find Scotty’s Mysterious Mine just to show him he can’t skalawag a woman, whatever the men’ll think.

  Pits

  that

  trap

  “Scotty’s away, M’am, gone to New York on mine business, but I’d be more than happy to have the honor to show you around and you’re welcome to stay.”

  “For a Choctaw you speak English very well, Mister Speare. I know of you, you are Mister Scott’s head scout.”

  Careful, Willy, careful does it.

  So she stays on at your camp. How many days has it been? It all seems one. Riding up the black willow canyons, up onto the skylines, over to Gopher Mine, abandoned now, to show what a mine looks like. (It’s not hard to hide a Mystery Mine which ain’t. Keep a close eye on her pack crew, Panamint, wouldn’t want them finding us out, one way or other.) Up to Tin Mountain top where the snow still lies and you can see Whitney and Telescope and Furnace Creek down in the Valley and south to the Mohave. And you’ll tell her tales of the emigrants’ bones in the Valley and of cowboying and cougar-hunting in the Rockies and of the Walapais, and maybe of rodeoing at Chloride – not easy to show off much on a burro or one of your mules, and her little horse is all skin and bones and she’s sorry she’s brought him for she sees now how the burros who were scrawny on camp garbage back at Rhyolite are thriving on the greasewood and the cactus that her horse won’t touch. Maybe you’ll get her a rabbit up there in the scrub oak and you’ll roast it to liven up the sourdough bread and the fancy canned grub she’s brought. Spring water, almost taste the gold, can you?

  Cane

  Cactuses

  that

  tear

  Careful, Willy. So you’re a Choctaw, and like as not it’s better that way. More exciting, and with the long hair and beard, and easier than the talk of Russia and Boston balls . . . Jenny, Jenny . . . And the girls at Chloride, or maybe Rhyolite, whooping up with the whiskey and the petticoats and the frilly drawers and the soft sweet things and the giggles and the kind of fainting and the shame. Miss Acton, Miss Janice, and then she doesn’t seem to mind if it’s Janice, from the distance of a real live Choctaw. Janice, who can snuggle a bit, who can laugh in your eyes, twist a braid into your hair, call you quaint so saucily.

  Where the pine needles lie soft in the dry grass, the lizards snip up crumbs. Would she? One last day, to show her the Paiute campsite where they’d come to work their Lost Mine and bury their treasure. The wine she’d brought singing in the brain, the sun so warm and the air so still. Would she?

  O Spider

  Woman

  Her fingers fumbling to find her hat pin, “It’s stifling under this silly hat, help me Willy.”

  give him

  Strength

  to find the

  Sun Father

  The pink wispy sticks to your rough fingers like to briars. How her hair tickles on your wrists, can she feel the heat of your breath on her downy neck? Would she, would she lean back now against you? Oh how strong you are! Close her eyes with that light far smile on her red red lips, the pulse beating on her throat. Lying against you, sleeping in Eden, and you trembling to keep off the swelling and the thrusting that she would feel. Would she?

  Her hand stirring in her sleep, finding yours, lifting it gently to her breast, sliding your fingers in the buttons. Her legs, the brown skirt so wide she’d ride astraddle and still it’d reach to her little ankles on either side. One leg draws up, the knee to the side, the foot in against the other thigh under the skirt. Opening, and maybe ever so little a lifting. Her other hand, would it? Searching for yours, finding, carrying you to her, pressing. If you move, though, if you move.

  “You forget your station, your place, Willy Speare. You will take me to camp now.”

  Jenny, Jenny, down by the river bank.

  in his

  Turquoise

  House

  under

  the

  Pity, Willy, pity for them.

  You’ll be all right, you’ll always be all right. Like the mountain quail that’ll wait for the good years, like the desert flowers that’ll come back with a good rain however foreign soles may have crushed them. The foreign ones with their hidden curse, the outsiders, the city ones, the East, who would suck off the honey without touching the seed. They who dream of differences, superiorities, because they’re afraid, won’t hear man whooping with the buzzards and the sand devils, would put him in little boxes, all buttoned up.

  Tree

  past

  the

  Poison

  Wait, Willy, you’ll see, like you know you will. You’ll unbutton a few of those boxes, and you’ll show them what’s station, and you’ll not care nothing left for their differences. And you’ll be back in the desert and you’ll bloom with the rains while they’ll shrivel sterile in the smoke.

  So she’ll sleep a last night in the dugout Scotty and you made for special guests and maybe she’ll learn in her dreams why the snake with its tail in its mouth is for an Indian the night and the day of life. Roger, who lives under the dugout’s adobe wall; no need to rattle and flick your tongue and show your fangs, unworthy of your poison. Gently, Roger boy, up on your plank and Willy’ll take you out into the afternoon sun. And you’ll be sidling up, rubbing on a boot, at sundown for your plate of whiskey, and faithful you’ll be slipping back under the warm adobe for the night. Circle in her dreams, Roger boy, couldn’t but do her a piece of good.

  And you’ll be off Willy in the morning black, and she can come too if she cares with her burros and her saloon boys who wouldn’t know pyrites from the Tsar’s crown, or borrasca from jewelry rock. They’ll be burying Old Man Finley down at Manse, and you’d be there, women or no. So she’ll sing over the remains with her high-class voice, and be stuck up that it’s the first female voice singing in the Valley – which wouldn’t be at all true, but let the history fellows straighten that.

  She goes east, you go west, back to the Panamints, where the mountain wind’ll blow clear the perfumes, where velvet is mine-profits gravy and lousy rich is ore. Windy Gate Pass.

  his

  Charm

  They’ll near get you there, Scotty boy, at your Battle at Wingate Pass, you still nearer Willy, though you be forty mile off. It’ll be Janice Acton to g
et you off, in a way, and maybe that’s to be her parting shot, who controls things even out in San Bernardino, or maybe it’s her best regret. Janice who’d touched you to her in the mountain sun.

  It’s steady, see; it may claw a bit at the album, with its calluses and its twisted joints, but it’s steady as the oil flame, see?

  against

  the

  Thieves

  The Battle of Wingate Pass. You’re in your luck still, Willy my boy, forty miles off, at your camp, for you’ll not be seeing much more of Scotty after Lone Willow. Lone Willow at the entrance to Wingate Pass, where you’d finally split with Scotty, ended the Under the Box Car agreement. Down in Daggett, that agreement. Scotty and you at that hotel where you’d agreed that when the deal went through with Johnson you’d be getting the two thirds and Scotty the one third. And Scotty with his fool ideas: though it was getting dark he’d for going outside and down to the train yard where he’d crawl in under a box car with you after him and scratch his hieroglyphs to make our contract, couldn’t hardly write, but Willy, you’d taught yourself.

  So now he’d be wanting the two thirds and you’d be telling him to go to hell. And that’d be the end of it, right there at Lone Willow. And you’ll be forty miles off from Windy Gap.

  First you’ll know’ll be Sheriff Ralphs trying to serve some sort of warrant on you at Ballarat and you’ll have nothing of it. But he’ll get you later. Twenty-seven days in the San Bernardino jail. While Scotty’s off scot-free on his Mysterious Mule, or some such.

  his

  Magic

  against

  Scotty there, harder pressed still, now that you’d pulled out. They’d be wondering the more without Cherokee Speare who’d show more’n a few claims of his own without no mystery. And they’d come out to see for themselves this Mystery Mine they’d bought. Hard pressed plenty. Easterners with the financing and the experting and the engineering. Sinclair, Delisle Sinclair, and that Owen fellow from Australia, and A. Y. Pearl from New Hampshire, and Johnson of course who’d kept Scotty out of jail before, and there was Scotty and his brother Warner, and Bob Black, all whiskeyed up. Quite a pack train, heading up Windy Gate. Not more’n a few hours, it was, after Jack Hartigan, the deputy sheriff under your friend Ralphs, had been pot-shot at. You’d never thought they’d gone cahoots, though.

  the

  Arrows

  Come afternoon and Scotty sends Bob Black up ahead to locate the water hole and get fixing camp, plan to head up the next day to the Mystery Mine. Not long before the lead begins to fly and there’s whoops and Warner gets one bad; the whiskey’s paid. So they’d had enough, with his piles of high grade he’d showed’m and the tailings in the distance on the mountainside he’d pointed out. And Warner bleeding heavy. Call it a day, head back. Bob shows up and his rifle’s hot and he claims he’d shot it out from behind with couple or three masked fellows, drove’m off before worse could happen, who hadn’t probably never seen such fancy gents in the Panamints.

  Wasn’t on the program, Warner shot like that, nor for Sinclair to get so suspicious and get Ralphs to swear out warrants. Back to Daggett, scared but kind of angry. And Warner bleeding bad. But Scotty’s not so drunk that he can’t try to turn that to his favor, with his headlines in the L.A. Examiner: “Aids Brother in Rain of Lead – Stands Before Ambuscade and Defies Four Hidden Assassins.” And his thousand dollars to the doctor of the California Hospital who’ll pull Warner through.

  Hero Twin

  that

  fails

  him

  So they’ll pull you in too, for who’d heard of Scotty without Speare for more than a few years now? And there’ll be Scotty too for the night. But Johnson has him out quick and he skips off fast to Washington and Oregon and San Francisco and Saint Louis. With his Mysterious Mine Show and he’d go right on the stage with his burro and his tin pan and his campfire; fat, though, so’d be hard to take full serious. Saint Louis, that’s where he’d be with the show, drunk so’s he fell and bust his gun and yelled shit at the audience and said they could have their money back ’cause he’d not go on.

  And was it from Oregon, while you was cooling in the San B’doo jail, that he sends a telegram asking for you to come join the Taylor show?

  So’d be Janice Acton, who’d heard tell of your plight, who’d turn up Judge Bledsoe, R. E. Bledsoe, or was he a Judge only later when you’d be fixing to sell out to Boston? With all his golden talking, had Judge Oster convinced. Forty miles away. And then they’d find the shooting was in Inyo County instead who’d refuse to try the case at all . . . Janice, your best regret, your hand or Willy’s?. . . O Jenny, Jenny!

  Charm

  that

  forgets

  its

  power

  It’ll be today they’ll let you out. Twenty-seven days is cool enough. There’s a room or two above at the back of the saloon. Temptation’s tempting and her thigh’s big round as a pig’s belly. Twenty-seven days and there’s no Cherokee as white as you and maybe just it’s time to trim up a bit, with your hair dragging so’s you trip on it and your beard getting splashed when you piss. And after the barber’s done with you, so chilly ’round the neck and your chin all naked like the saloon girl’s rump. All giggles she’ll be, husky with the black hairs on her chin, and all the petticoats to corral. There’ll be a bitter taste about your heart, though, and you’ll wonder who this is so sweating beneath you.

  You’ll be thinking of her, heading back for Death Valley, stopping over at Coso Hot Springs, and with help from whiskey and the boys you’ll mold her in mud and salt with her great breasts staring at you through their cherry nipples. You’ll sit at her feet and they’ll photo you, with your hair all slicked and your mustache all curled and your eye looking out on the world secret proud.

  Magic

  that

  could

  die

  They’d tell you how Owen, fellow from Australia, died not long after Windgap. Scotty’d camped down at Lone Willow, give Warner a rest, get some blood back. Drinking heavy all round, Owen like every day for weeks. And he with the heavy fat he’s carried before. How he’d bedded by a bale of hay and the next morning they’d worried him to jitters saying he’d slept on the bad-luck side of the bale, dangerous. They had him in the wagon, layed out, all deflated from the workings of the whiskey, moaning in his sleep. Hot like a griddle, twenty-five miles up toward Granite Wells. And he woke up and yelled out murderous to Pearl that he was bleeding to death, all warm and wet underneath. But it wasn’t blood but his gut all emptied from the shits; the sun and whiskey and the fear when the lead was flying the day before can do it. Got him a nurse when pulled in to town, shipped him to L.A., to the Hollenbeck Hotel. He told the police he had a story, a big story to tell, but they shipped him under escort to New York. Couldn’t even recognize his wife and children and he just up and died, up in New Hampshire. Story with him. Scotty’s luck again.

  eternal

  Spider

  Woman

  give

  Is it then you’ll meet Arthur Jakewell again? Another one you and Scotty’d four-flushed. To show him where the Mystery Mine’s at. Packed out from the Nevada camps, through Death Valley. His grubstake to his last penny. Showed him the hidden grade, salted good as ever, but kind of steered clear of the Mine, “Being followed, can’t afford to show the way, government land so’s no claim, secret even from such a fine fellow as you, Arthur Jakewell. Virgin gold, almost, for the picking.”

  Strength

  to your

  Hero Son

  against

  himself

  And on across the Panamints, down into Inyo Valley, back into Death Valley, and through Windy Gap again, and Black Pass to Barstow. He none the wiser, you two fed and traveled free. And not to leave enough alone Scotty’d pawned Jakewell’s horses to landlord Parks for board and drinks. Poor Arthur boy’d not believe it in the morning, a writ of attachment served by friend Constable Stuchberry, when he came t
o take his horses, and landed in jail for two days for resisting an officer while Scotty swore he’d keep him in for six months, Easterner, looking for adventures, eh, well here’s one.

  So, help him, Willy, nice sort of fellow, you know your way about a bit with the San B’doo law enforcers where they’d shipped him by train. D.A. Hugh Dickson, and that Waters’ll get him out. Poorer and the wiser, after you’d talked Scotty from leaving him out on the desert with only a few pounds of grub.