Cry of the Hawk

“Never had so much to smile about, I s’pose. There was a time or two that last few months where I got to wondering if I’d make it through butchering out another buffalo. We was always bringing our meat in, and it disappeared quicker’n we could shoot and gut and skin.”

“You sure had a bad mouth on you there the last few months.”

“What you expect—up to my elbows in blood ever’ day. Smelling like a gut-eater all the time. Even caught myself turning up my nose at my own smell, Jonah. Come a time or two the wind shifted.”

“We do smell like two of the prairie’s finest, don’t we?”

“You reckon there’s a place a man can get some of this washed off?”

He looked up, then down the one street that Abilene boasted beside the newly laid track. “One of these watering holes bound to have some water they can heat up for a man wanting to scrape some prairie stink off him. C’mon.”

In minutes they were standing at a low bar, watching the approach of an ugly barman.

“Most fellas just like washing the dirt down with some of my whiskey,” he told the pair of buffalo hunters. “I suppose for a dollar I could get them out back to heat you some water you two could swish around in.” He shrugged and turned. “Follow me.”

They pushed past a blanket hung over a crude doorway, passing into a steamy, warm room where two stoves were crackling, pumping out plenty of heat. Beads of moisture popped out on Hook’s forehead, just standing there, his eyes peering through the foggy gloom.

“Hey! Get over here!” the barman ordered, then turned to whisper to the two men. “This bunch ain’t bad as a lot I’ve seen—ugly as sin and stupid to boot. But they do what I tell ’em, and they keep the place clean.”

Jonah watched two middle-aged squaws appear out of the gloom of lamplight and steam. Dark stains covered the fronts of their hide dresses, from sagging breasts to the soaked moccasins they wore on their feet.

“We take in laundry,” the barman explained, then smiled as if in need of no more explanation. “And if the price is right, either one of these ugly sisters can clean a man’s plow right proper. Damn, but Injun women is good in the blankets.”

He reached over and squeezed a woman, one hand on her rump, the other rubbing a breast. She looked at Moser and Hook with a faint smile, as if already figuring out what they had come for.

“No, they want to wash,” said the barman, loudly, as if the women were deaf just because they did not readily understand his English. “No poking now.” In sign with his hands and gyrating hips, he made the women understand that it was not fornication the customers had come for—but some of the squaws’ hot water instead.

“That’ll be two dollars,” he said.

When Jonah had paid him, the barman bent down and gave one of the squaws a sloppy kiss on the mouth, then turned through the blanket doorway, proud of himself as the woman wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and grimaced. The two squaws looked at the pair of men, wrinkling their noses slightly at the stench in the close room. Hook could tell that the smell of the buffalo hung heavy about them both. He pinched his fingers on his nostrils and made a wrinkled face to show he agreed with them.

Both old squaws smiled, then signaled the white men into the far reaches of the low-roofed back room, where they were shown low wooden tubs on the floor, filled with half-dirty water, a scum of soapsuds drifting on the surface. Jonah dabbed a finger into the water.

“Least it’s warm, cousin. You take that’un.”

“We gonna undress in front of these women?”

“They ain’t women, Artus. They just two old squaws.”

Jonah dropped his britches and hurried out of his boots. When he had his longhandles off, the rifle and the belt gun handy beside the tub, he stepped in and settled himself. “Now don’t this feel good. I ain’t had something like this soak in … last time was before I walked off to join General Price.”

“You been smelling a might gamy, that’s for—”

Jonah looked up when Artus stopped talking suddenly. Out of the foggy haze lit with two hissing oil lamps emerged a third woman, younger than the other two and the closest thing to pretty Jonah had seen in years. He swallowed hard, looking at the way her black hair gleamed in the saffron light as she pulled the hood from her head, her proud breasts pressed against the buckskin dress as she dragged the blanket capote off her shoulders.

“Lordee, Jonah—I didn’t figure on taking a bath in front of a girl.”

“She … she ain’t a girl, not rightly.” From what he could see, she was something damned closer to being a woman.

Now she flicked her shy eyes at them both, then bent to pick up the bundle she had carried in with her. Clothing, secured in a snow-stiffened canvas bag. One of the old women came over to her, talking in a foreign tongue. The girl set her bundle aside and went to a stove, where she picked up a steaming kettle. From it she poured a little hot water in Jonah’s tub, warming the water for the white man.

“You out—wash clothes,” she said brokenly.