Savage Love Read Online Free Page B

Chinamen’s tent and went to ground there taking the bottle, which, when he looked again, was empty. At nightfall the girl joined him, bringing another bottle, and they drank together, then slept or fell unconscious. In his sleep, he heard the dead Chinamen whispering together under the reservoir water, speaking of the country whence they had come, of women they had loved, of poems they had once memorized, and of regret at not being alive. He woke and stumbled outside to piss and pissed against a tree and tripped over a tent peg and roared around the camp naked and sweating and feeling as if he had fallen into a fire he was that warm. Around him the forest seemed to glow. Stars glowed. It seemed to him the days and nights had reversed their orders. The girl appeared at the tent flap, swaying uncertainly in her boots, in his wife’s last dress. He kicked her back into the buffalo skins, and when she tried to rise, he slapped her down, and then slapped her once more to inspire affection. Then he fell upon her with an untidy passion, not actually entering her, for she was ignorant and unhelpful in that regard, and presently reached the end of his desire in an onanistic paroxysm of shakes, grunts and incontinent dribbles. In that moment of sweet black forgetfulness he somehow recalled a singsong ditty his mother had crooned. At least he thought it was his mother, having no other memory of her save for the voice and the words. Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy / and we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow .
    They met a tinker driving a garishly tricked-up John Deere freight wagon drawn by four snow-white Spanish mules with tin bells on their collars and periwinkle-coloured tassels nodding above their heads. Coming from the goldfields, the tinker’s cart was light in goods, bouncing high over the ruts, but pregnant with the implication of cash money. Afrighted at the sight of the two asymmetric strangers who, yes, seemed almost to glow with a nimbus of menace, the tinker pulled a dragoon revolver that needed two hands to sight and shoot, and even then, with his nerves and the mad kick of the gun, he was only able to wound one of the Indian horses and a mule. With his third bullet, he shredded his foot, after which he became resigned to his fate. He said, “I will give you my money, but I know you are going to kill me surely.” The stranger said, “Every man goes some time. Now’s yers.” The tinker said, “You are God’s Hand. My foot hurts somethin’ fierce. Do it quick.”
    In Leesburg , he sold the ponies, horses, mules, furs, buffalo gun, and various tools and artifacts he had collected along the way to a blacksmith at a quarter of what they were worth, which immediately attracted suspicion and notoriety, not to mention the fact that the blacksmith recognized the white mules and wondered where the tinker had got to. He bought two fresh horses and a pack mule and saddles and tack for all three and stabled the animals at a livery. He bought new clothes for himself and Good Luck and a Henry repeating rifle to go with the Sharps and then a pound of yellow cheese, white onions, beef jerky and a bottle of whiskey and retired with the girl to a hotel, where he had a tub and hot water brought to the room. He lay in the tub sipping whiskey , peeling and slicing the onions and eating them like apple quarters between bites of cheese. He bade the girl scrub his back with a rag, but she left off after a pass or two and presently he felt her strange tongue at the back of his neck, then licking water off his earlobe. He tried to kiss her, but she squirmed away. He had a hard-on now and tried to make her grasp it. But she would not come near. He drank more whiskey, and as the water was growing cold, he rose, wet and sickly white except for the leathery tan of his hands and face, stepped dripping to the bed and took the quilt to dry himself. Then he threw the