Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

We departed without burying them, although Sergeant Grafton drove a fence post into the earth outside the shed and hung upon it the tarnished silver crucifix that had encircled the neck of one of the women. We hurried along, agreeing that our orders called us away, agreeing without speech that what hurried us was what we left behind. After much of a day’s hard riding, we entered swampy ground that sucked at the hooves of our horses and that worried the sergeant. He sent me up a tree to survey the landscape, and I saw solider ground to our west. We rode toward it, suffering much from insects not much larger than fleas that anguished our horses and flew in at our nose and mouth and eyes. As we climbed, they diminished, although the pitch grew steep and we led rather than rode the horses.

“What does this go to?” the sergeant asked me.

“Nothing pleasant,” I said.

“In specific?”

“I haven’t any idea,” I said.

“Then please find out,” he said, stopping us and sending me to a slender poplar that swayed as I went up. “Stop,” the sergeant called, and I did. “Why burden yourself with the rifle?”

“It is what accompanies me up trees, Sergeant.”

“See that it doesn’t go off.”

Despite the low crotch of the tree, because we had climbed a good distance, I was able to make out, instantly, motion in a copse a little more than three or four hundred yards from us. I used my telescope, and the sergeant hushed them, knowing that I used it only for a stalk. I enjoyed working with him; he was professional, and he offered me deference when the matter at hand concerned my work.

He looked up, waiting. I looked down to him and nodded. I presented the four fingers of my right hand, and he nodded. They led the horses back from the tree, and they readied their weapons. They would shelter behind a stone outcropping we had passed, calming the tethered horses and preparing to rescue or reinforce me.

I looked back, through the telescope, at the four men in their encampment. They seemed to have no horses, or to have left them somewhere. I could not find their mounts after sweeping the landscape, so I looked once more with the telescope and then replaced it in my kit. Now I looked upon them with my telescopic sight. I checked the arming of the Sharps. I selected the first of them, a man in an Indian squat some small distance from the others. I would take him and then quickly find a second target where the three of them waited.

Waited for what? was forming in my mind as I found the first one again and sighted him in. I looked down at a man in a blue shirt rimmed at the armpits by the salt of his sweat. His trousers were of buckskin, and his boots, I saw as I swept the glass down his body, were cracked and one was caked with dung. I wondered where their horses were.

Waited for what? I swept up to his head for the placement of my shot, and I looked into his telescopic sight.

Waited for him to take me.

They did not know I was me. But they knew me. You’re your actions, and those they surely knew. They had been hunting me, perhaps in more than one party.

His companions waited for him to take me. He did. We fired at once. His ball must have struck the trigger guard or the metal at the breech. The rifle, at my shoulder and just below my right eye and right temple and right cheek, exploded into my face. I might have hit him, I realized much later, for they fled rather than come after me to see if they needed to finish. I did not fall from the tree, I realized later. I hung in the crotch, screaming. I heard myself. The metal of the mechanism, the splintered wood of the stock, were driven back into my face, as was, of course, the powder of the percussion pellet set upon the nipple. My face was the site of an explosion, yet my hearing was unaffected. I heard myself as I screamed and screamed, wiping at the teeth and gums and slices of face that fell upon my tongue as I made my undignified noises.

“Here we come,” said Grafton, soothing even from a distance. “Here we come,” he called, like a father to his frightened child. “We’re coming,” he called from the base of the tree. I went by wagon the rest of the way, rolling home inside a dream I dreamed was dreamt by someone else. After coming to consciousness, and begging for death, which I was not granted, I tried to imagine whose dream it had been.

I was wrapped in bandages and blind, because they did not know at first if my eyes were affected; but they had left an aperture at the mouth for breathing and speech. I used it when someone came into what I thought of as the dream to press my shoulder and ask how I fared.

“You could kill me,” I said.

There was a pause, and then the hand was removed from my shoulder.

I said, “You could easily—”

“Yes,” a stranger’s voice replied.

OFF ELIZABETH STREET, AT THE HARLEM RAILROAD embankment, where a kind of tunnel burrowed into a hill of earth and cobbles — the gandy dancers for the line stored sledgehammers and ties and spikes there, for use in making repairs — I was walking late, having trotted about early as well. I was tired of walking, but not, I thought, tired enough to sleep. So I had stopped at Uncle Ned’s on the Bowery, at that time a notorious gathering place for gamblers, slaggards too filthy and used to be kept in a respectable house, and, of course, members of gangs like the Rabbits and the Ikes (who called themselves the House of Isaac — as nasty a bunch of Jews as the Rabbits were cannibal Irish). In front of a disused shop once specializing in trusses and like medical devices, and across from the embankment, I came, perhaps a little dizzy from dark rum, upon two white men beating a Negro. He dodged and wheeled, so I knew that he wished to resist; and, as he was burly and fit, broad of shoulder and lean of hip, with long, thick arms, I knew that while he chose to protect his head and face by shielding himself, he had deemed it wise not to give the account of himself of which I believed him capable.

“Hold still, Mose, and let me thrash your woolly head,” the fatter of the two whites grunted. He slapped at the Negro with a thick black cane. He panted and sweated, and his face, in the gaslight at the corner stanchion, gleamed in oily unhealth. The other fellow, sturdy but short and quite narrow, swung what seemed to be a leather sap and, from its appearance of weight in his small hand, might have been filled with shot, or rock salt.

The fat one swung, this time with both hands, and he caught the Negro at the junction of neck and shoulder. The Negro went to his knees and seemed inclined to remain there. His breath was deep and uneven, whether from debility or fear I could not tell. I wanted to know. I wanted him to tell me.

“Gentlemen,” I called, stopping just behind the smaller one. “Are you certain you have the numbers and the weapons you require? Or should I round up five or six armed men to pitch in and defend you from this fellow?”

The littler man, his sap up, turned to challenge me. I assessed his waxed mustache, his silk waistcoat and bright tan shoes. He said, “God almighty, what are you?”

“What you are not,” I said.

“If you must involve yourself. This nigger was told to have a wagon-load of textiles here tonight, and he brings us himself but not the goods. We are out money, cloth, and reputation. A deal’s gone dead, and he’s to be punished. If, as I say, it’s your affair.”