Heaven Is a Long Way Off Read Free Page B

bar. But Skinny and Stout were dancing now, and apparently having a good time.
    A pretty woman held out her hand to Sam, smiling. She was smiling, and she said something in her language, probably asking him to dance.
    He couldn’t help looking lingeringly at her breasts. “No,” he said.
    She said whatever it was again, and reached out and fingered his hair. Women always seemed to like Sam’s white hair.
    â€œNo,” said Sam again, and took her hand away. He wished he wanted to touch a woman, hold a woman, lie down with a woman.
    She turned to the next man without a hint of regret. It was Robiseau, one of the French-Canadians, and he whirled away with her. Sam thought of Robiseau as Merry One Tooth, for the number of dentures he had in the upper front, which he showed off in a perpetual lunatic grin.
    When Merry One Tooth danced off, his wife glared after him. Then Red Shirt came up and motioned to her, and she danced off with the chief. Robiseau winked at her.
    At least half the trappers now were bouncing along, and both trapper wives were dancing with Mojave men.
    Polly changed the tune to a sea shanty, a slow capstan song that would give all the men a chance to ease the women close:
    When Ham and Shem and Japhet, they walked the capstan ’round,
    Upon the strangest vessel that was ever outward bound,
    The music of their voices from wave to welkin rang,
    As they sang the first sea shanty that sailors ever sang.
    â€œDon’t you want to dance?” said Hannibal.
    â€œThink I’ll turn in,” said Sam. Away from temptation, he thought, and with my memories.
    â€œSure.”
    As Hannibal disappeared into the darkness, Sam wondered if his friend wanted a woman. Probably so. Even magicians liked sex.
    He stretched out on his blankets, reached to where he knew Coy would be, and scratched the coyote’s head. In the dark, when he couldn’t see, the smell and sound of the river were stronger. He remembered the brute force of its current—pound and splash, spin and suck. Its whirlpools pulled him to its bottom and to sleep.
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    S AM LOOKED AT his arms, which were all scratched up. Sweat was running into the scratches—the August sun felt like coals in a woodstove. He frowned across at Hannibal, who grinned. Hannibal’s arms were probably worse than Sam’s.
    They were standing ankle deep in the river cutting more cane for the two rafts. It took a lot of float power to carry twenty-three people and their cargo across the swift, turbulent Colorado. This gear included barrels for water, blacksmith tools, tomahawks, traps, kegs of gunpowder, and much more. There were the trade goods for Indians. And the trappers bore their own gear. A typical man had a rifle, a butcher knife, two horns for powder, a blanket, an extra pair of moccasins, and a pouch containing a bar of lead, a tool for making the lead into balls, a patch knife, a fire-striker, char cloth, and so on, altogether another ten percent of his body weight.
    Sam and Hannibal shouldered the last loads of cane on both shoulders and labored upstream along the bank. When they got to where the other men were binding the cane into the rafts, they dumped their loads and sagged onto the ground.
    Coy mewled. He often seemed to pity men doing hard labor.
    The Mojaves were gathered around to see the trappers off. Red Shirt was there, Francisco, Skinny and Stout, Spark, seemingly most of the village, hundreds of men, women, and children. Partly, Sam supposed, they wanted to see how the trappers built a cane raft. With trappers working and calling to each other and Mojaves talking, everything was hubbub.
    â€œCaptain,” called Sam. Smith looked around. Whenever Sam addressed Diah in an official way, he called him by title. “Hannibal and me, we’ll swim over with the horses.”
    â€œYou?” Jedediah asked at large, “Who’s a strong swimmer?”
    â€œMe!” said Hannibal and Virgin at