Clair Huffaker: The Cowboy and the Cossack

“Well, I guess that’s fair enough.” The drink was starting to warm and help my gut the way the fire was helping my right side, at the angle I was standing to it.

“Like what just happened before.” Keats sipped from his cup again. “Poor old Dixie lost.”

“Well, he shouldn’t have pushed Sammy.”

“But don’t you see, we all knew he was weaker, for having picked on Sammy’s weaknesses?”

“Sure. Sort of.”

“Give me a little more.” Keats put out his cup and I poured from a bottle that was near us on a rock near the fire. “That’s damn good,” he said, tasting thoughtfully. “Jack Daniel’s, Distillery No. 1, 1866. Great bourbon.”

I looked at the bottle in the light of the fire and said, “Goddamn! You’re right. You’re a damn good guesser!”

“That wasn’t such a good guess. It was a truth based on knowledge, which in turn was based on many years of happy and often heavy drinking.”

“Oh, t’ hell with you, that’s really somethin’!” Despite still being chilled by the cold, I couldn’t hold back a kind of genuine enthusiasm. “T’ even guess the year you gotta be smarter’n hell!”

He raised his shoulders slightly, dismissing this. “I was talking to you about weakness before. And the strongest man I was thinking about has the greatest weakness.”

“Who?”

He said quietly, “Shad.”

“You shouldn’t talk about Shad an’ bein’ weak in the same breath!” I said angrily.

He gestured with his left hand, raising it as high as he could, to about chest level. “I love the sonofabitch as much as you do, Levi, and I’ve even got a few more years of seniority there than you. But his great strength is what makes his greatest damn weakness. He’s too strong to change his mind. Too strong to see something from someone else’s point of view.”

I had flared up before, but one thing both Shad and Old Keats had taught me was to always try to calm down, and I did my level best now. I took a deep breath. “Old Keats, sir, Shad can do anything!”

Keats took another drink, a long one, and looked at me with eyes as sober as two iron spikes driven into a railroad tie. “This deals with what I told you before about seein’ or not seein’ this giant land.” His bad left hand came up and pointed at me again, in a tough but still friendly gesture. “Sometimes it’s hard t’ know, or to ever properly establish, Levi. But all of us, always and always, find in this world exactly what we set out t’ give to it.”

I stared hard back at him, trying to make my eyes like iron spikes too. “Well, what the hell, then! Shad always gives everything!” My own iron spikes were starting to melt already, because there was no way for me to stay mad for long at Old Keats.

Keats now lowered his eyes for a moment, then nodded. “He always has—up until comin’ here t’ this damn Russia. But he’s got a hate for it that he may get back times ten.” He put his cup down and started rubbing his hands together. “By God, the blood’s startin’ to flow again. We just may live for a while longer, after all.”

“Hey, boss!” Sammy the Kid yelled from off on the other side of the fire where he’d been helping the sailors finish unloading our supplies. “Everything’s ashore!”

The men from the Queen started rowing back in the last small boat as Shad came into the firelight from the side near where the cattle were huddled.

“Good luck!” one of the crewmen shouted, and some of us yelled “So long!” or whatever back. Then, after a silence, another sailor called with a certain warmth in his voice, “Cap’n Barum speaks for all of us! He thinks you’re all daft!”

Since it wasn’t really a tough line, some of us yelled back in a friendly way, “Get a horse!” and “Fuck you!” and things like that.

And then the man’s voice came across the water again, fading in the distance. “He speaks for us! An’ he said if he wasn’t born a sailor, he’d rather be a cowboy!”

It was too late to holler anything back by then, and what he’d yelled was kind of touching anyway, so we just waved by the light of the fire, and then stood around the flaming driftwood, kind of quiet.

And then Shad said thoughtfully, “Been takin’ stock of the cattle, an’ a lot of ’em are too cold from that water t’ make it through the night.”

The way he said that grim thing you could tell he was worried, but that he more than likely already had thought of the problem and had some kind of an answer to it.

“Them ’as made it’d be sicker’n hell,” Slim agreed. “What you got in mind, boss?”

“Fire an’ bourbon brought us around okay,” Shad said, kind of musing. “We can’t build enough fires to warm them, but we can get some booze into ’em. So we’re gonna break out all the grain we brought ashore and make that herd the most potent mash they ever ate in their widely traveled lives.”

“Ya’ mean get ’em drunk?” Mushy asked.

“Just pleasantly,” Slim told him with a small grin. “Not enough t’ make any shameful scenes or nothin’.”

“Hell,” Mushy went on, “we ain’t got nowheres near that much bourbon.”

“They’ve got booze in Vladivostok,” Shad said. “We’ll roust ’em out and if need be buy every bottle in town.” Then he started telling us what to do.

A BUNCH of curious Russians who lived on the outskirts of Vladivostok had begun to gather just outside the light of the fire to look us over. While the other hands, working under Slim, started hauling gunny sacks of grain up closer to the fire, four of us went over to talk to them. There was Shad and Old Keats and Shiny Joe and me, and we were leading two pack mules to take on into town.

These Russians were mostly short and stocky, and all of them were timid, shying away as we came closer to them. But Keats called out a word that sounded like “ Tuhvaritch ” a couple of times and that sort of settled them back down.

Old Keats was carrying a lantern in one hand and his book on Russian in the other. Shiny and I brought up the rear, leading the mules.

“Ask them if they talk American,” Shad said.

Old Keats thought hard and then said, “ Gahvareet Amerikansky ?”

Those in front stared at him like he was crazy, and a couple of them toward the back snickered slightly.

“Stupid bastards,” Shad grumbled. “Not one of ’em talks American!”

But then one broad-shouldered young man near Keats answered something in a low voice.

Old Keats was as excited as a kid. He almost yelled, “I understood him! He said he speaks Russian!”

“That’s a godsend,” Shad said dryly. “We found a Russian who speaks Russian. Tell ’im what we want, an’ that we’ll pay for it.”

It was an uphill job for Keats, but he finally managed to explain to them, mostly through the young man, that we wanted all the tubs or big pots or kettles we could get. He used his hands a lot to describe the biggest size possible.

When this was done and all of them were finally nodding and saying “ Dah ,” the four of us started on into Vladivostok.

It was a dumpy, dark, deserted town, with narrow dirt streets going up and down and curving around every which way. The houses and small buildings were made of plain unfinished wood planks, most of which seemed to have been nailed up by carpenters who had failing eyesight. Once inside the town, you got the feeling there wasn’t a straight line left in the world. But still and all the houses must have been built securely, because once in a while high winds would come shrieking in off the ocean that would have knocked anything flat that wasn’t pretty sturdy.