Last One Standing Page 4

  ‘He pulled the fuse out,’ the man said, and shot Liu. The bullet hit Liu in the chest and knocked him backwards. The man walked towards Liu, levering back the hammer on his revolver. He looked down at Liu, seemingly studying Liu’s shocked eyes. The man smiled. Then he shot Liu a second time.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jack called from the basket hanging hundreds of feet over the green canopy that had looked so soft and inviting from such a height.

  The man sighed. He turned the cylinder of his revolver so that the hammer rested on one of the empty chambers and he slipped the revolver back in his holster. Then he walked over to Liu’s fire where there was still a pot of rice and fish bubbling. The man picked up three burning sticks from the edge of the fire and carried them over to the rope that held up Jack’s basket. He made a little tripod of the burning sticks beneath the rope and watched as the flames flickered in the breeze, appeared to die, and then caught again. The man saw how the flames started to blacken the rope, and he waited until the rope itself started to burn. He watched a while longer.

  Then he grinned and walked away.

  ‘Liu was my cousin,’ Jia said. There were tears in her eyes, but not so many that they spilled over onto her cheeks. I could tell it was a story that she had told, or at least experienced many times. She looked at my mother and then she looked at me. ‘Jack was my father,’ she said.

  ‘And the man?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  ‘The man was Moose Schmidt,’ Jia said.

  Chapter 5

  We’d finished dinner but we still sat at the kitchen table. I asked Jia how they had known the man who had killed her father and her cousin had been Schmidt.

  Jia told how her father had still been alive when rescuers found him, broken and tangled amongst the rocks and trees at the base of the cliff. Before he died, he described the man that had been looking over the cliff edge. Daway Ma, who had been in the next basket along had seen him, too. Other men told how Moose Schmidt had been working in the camp, but he disappeared after that incident. And later, in his early travels across the Territory, Schmidt boasted about the killings, too.

  ‘And me?’ I said. ‘How . . . Why?’

  ‘My mother,’ Jia said. ‘You met her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She told me that your father was the only one who ever came close to killing Moose Schmidt.’

  My mother said, ‘Sam would still be alive if all he’d had to do was kill that man. I believe your mother wanted Schmidt alive.’

  ‘Yes. That is true. But now . . . Me . . . I just want him dead.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I said.

  My mother stood up and put a pot of water on the stove in the corner, her back to Jia and I. She hated the idea of my going after Schmidt, but had long been resigned to the fact that one day it would happen. It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in me, but she knew – more than I did – just how evil, resilient and slippery Schmidt was. To my mother the whole thing felt pre-ordained, like one of those ancient Greek tragedies. I could see it in her eyes some days that she thought she had already lost me, but that it just hadn’t happened yet.

  Jia said, ‘That’s why I came. I know you want to go after him, too.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘There’s talk.’

  My mother turned and looked at me. She didn’t need to say anything. I knew what she was thinking, and she I. If there was talk about my intentions and Jia had heard such talk, what were the odds that Moose Schmidt had heard it too? Not that I was going to shoot Schmidt in the back, but a certain amount of surprise would have been a good thing.

  ‘Together,’ Jia said. ‘We will succeed.’

  ‘You wear a gun,’ I said. ‘And that thing you did to Morgan Taylor. . . .’

  I was intrigued about Jia’s capabilities, but I was also keen to reassure my mother that together Jia and I might indeed succeed.

  Before Jia could answer, the street door opened, and a moment later the kitchen door.

  Amos Bowler was one of my mother’s boarders – at the moment her only boarder. A short man who always wore a blue suit and a bowler hat. I don’t know what his surname really was, I just called him Bowler because of that hat. His cheeks were red as if he had been hurrying, or drinking. Or both.

  ‘Oh you’re here,’ he said, looking at Jia and I.

  ‘Good evening, Amos,’ my mother said. I said hello, too. Then I introduced Jia who stood up and did that little bow from the shoulders again.

  ‘I heard about you,’ Amos said, smiling at Jia. Then he turned and addressed my mother.

  ‘Nash Lane and Morgan Taylor. . . .’

  ‘I know,’ my mother said.

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘I know what happened.’

  Now Amos looked at me. ‘He’s coming after you. Nash Lane, I mean.’

  ‘I guessed he wouldn’t be able to leave it.’

  ‘Soon as he can stand up,’ Amos said.

  ‘Can’t he stand up?’

  ‘He keeps falling over. You did something to his balance, by all accounts.’

  ‘It’s probably drink,’ my mother said. I could hear the water starting to bubble on the stove.

  ‘No. They say he sobered up quick enough after the fight,’ Amos said. ‘But he can’t walk more’n two steps without needing to hold on to something.’ He looked at me again. ‘He’s really mad. I mean, really.’

  ‘He initiated the trouble,’ Jia said.

  ‘Don’t doubt that,’ Amos said. He looked at Jia and pulled a face as if he didn’t really want to say what he was about to. ‘Morgan Taylor ain’t happy either. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nash doesn’t come after Cal with a gun. But Morgan Taylor says he has other plans for you.’ Amos’s uncomfortable expression grew a little more strained. ‘He says you’re a Chinese whore and there’s only one sort of thing a whore understands.’

  Jia blushed a little. Maybe it was anger.

  ‘He can try,’ she said. I don’t think she knew she was doing it, but her hand moved as she spoke and rested on the gun that she still had strapped to her waist.

  ‘They’ve got friends,’ Amos said. ‘My advice would be to lay very low for a while.’

  For a moment the kitchen was silent, then my mother said, ‘Who would like coffee?’

  When I had been younger and my father had spent time at home there was a place he used to take me – and sometimes my mother, too – for an overnight camp. It wasn’t that far from St Mary’s Gap, just a couple of hours ride, but it was far enough for it to be an adventure for a young boy.

  It was a tiny settlement that had long been abandoned in a hollow with trees and hills surrounding it. A creek flowed not far from the edge of the settlement. My father said it had been a surveyor’s camp that had one time been in the middle of nowhere. There were several log cabins – and the fact they were all aligned nicely in a square and the walls were straight and the roofs solid and they had windows did suggest surveyors, or at least some group of people with attention to detail and pride in their workmanship. There was a privy built over a deep drop hole, and a hundred yard trench that had been dug to divert the creek. In one of the log cabins there was still a pile of tangled rusting chains – not normal chains, but chains with long straight links. Surveyor’s chains. There were some old picks and spades, too. Rabbits had colonised the place and the shooting – and eating – was good. They were fun times, if infrequent and few.

  Jia and I collected our horses from the livery mid-evening and around two in the morning we prepared to slip quietly out of St Mary’s Gap and head towards that camp.

  My mother hugged me, and after a slight pause as if neither she nor Jia quite knew the etiquette, she hugged Jia too.

  I told Ma that we wouldn’t be long and she gave me that look again, the one that tried to instil belief in me and in herself, whilst still feeling the weight of fate bearing down upon us.

  I asked her about Nash Lane. What would she do or say,
if – when – he came around.

  ‘Don’t worry about Nash,’ she said. ‘I can handle him. I’ve been handling him for years.’

  Then Jia and I rode out beneath the soft moonlight, with one intent: to kill a man.

  Chapter 6

  When we were far enough clear of St Mary’s that our voices wouldn’t carry on the cold night air I asked Jia what had happened with her mother. The story I’d heard was that Moose Schmidt had shot her in the back. Was this true?

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ Jia said. ‘My mother’s name was Yu Yan. It means beautiful smile. My mother was very beautiful.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We lived in a province of China where the war was bad and my father and my uncle and a few others took us away. We travelled long time and eventually we made it to London where there were other Chinese. We were happy there and we should have stayed but we were poor and it was a hard life. Stories came in about gold in America and many of the men decided to go. They would send for us when they had made their fortune – and they did indeed send money and we thought it was only a matter of time.’

  ‘He ended up working on the railroad,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. When the money stopped we were puzzled for many months and then a letter arrived and we knew what had happened. Many men died in accidents, but this was murder.’

  She added, ‘In our culture such a thing has to be avenged.’

  ‘In any culture.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We let the horses find their own way and set their own pace as we rode north. I looked across at Jia, but in the darkness I couldn’t see her face. To our right there was already a little blue light in the sky, but it only served to make Jia – who was riding on that side of me – even darker.

  ‘My mother was what we in China call, Wu.’

  ‘Wu?’

  ‘Yes. Here you would call her . . . I don’t know. Maybe a witch.’

  ‘Your mother was a witch?’

  ‘Yes. Well, no. It’s not the same thing. Wu is good. Ku is the bad side. My mother was Wu. She could heal people. She was good with needles.’

  I looked at Jia’s silhouette against the lightening sky. It had always been hard to understand the Indians out here in the Territory. Their world, their beliefs, their behaviours seemed impossible to comprehend sometimes. Now here was someone from the other side of the world bringing more confusion into my life. For a moment I felt very small, very insignificant, and very ignorant.

  ‘Needles?’ I said.

  ‘I will show you if the need arises.’

  ‘You are Wu, too?’

  ‘A little. But I followed my father more.’

  ‘And what was he?’

  ‘He was a fighter.’

  A witch and a fighter. I smiled in the darkness. Moose Schmidt might have a surprise coming yet.

  Jia said, ‘We were too far away for my mother to be able to make a difference, so we came to America, too. New York.’

  ‘And from there your mother went to Natchez,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But this all took a long time. From New York my mother arranged for some men to find Moose Schmidt. It was from one of them that your father’s name came up.’

  ‘My father was known in New York?’

  ‘The man sent a message to New York with your father’s name. He told my mother that Moose was too elusive. Maybe even too terrible. He said no one could bring him back alive. The man said something like: well, maybe Sam Johnson could. And that’s when my mother came to find your father.’

  ‘If only she’d wanted Moose dead.’

  ‘Yes. But she wanted to be the one.’

  ‘To kill him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I thought of that beautiful and exotic woman my father and I had met on the banks of the Mississippi. It was hard to believe that she would have been able to kill anyone, let alone actually want to.

  ‘After your father, she tried a few more men, but no one could catch Moose Schmidt. He was like a demon, or a ghost, my mother said. One day she woke and she said she’d had a vision, or a dream, and that she saw what had to happen. She had to go after Moose Schmidt herself.’

  ‘She went herself, despite all of the men failing?’

  ‘She’d seen herself killing him in the vision. She wasn’t scared.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘In her letters she told how she had got close to him. It wasn’t long ago. It was late last year just before the snow. He was living in a town called Three Oaks. My mother arrived in the town and contrived to meet him, look at him, and make eye contact. After that, she made sure she met him often. He was uneasy about her – although I don’t think he knew why. If he ever spoke about killing my father, he did so dismissively. I mean, he didn’t speak to my mother on the subject. My mother once asked someone else to question him about it, and he said, “Those Chinamen? That was nothing. There were thousands of them. What was two? Hell, you want to come after me for a killing come after me for something worthwhile.”’

  The first rays of the sun were stretching up over the eastern horizon now. Jia’s face was golden in the low light. She was looking straight ahead. Her profile was strong and proud and she was so pretty I could have stared at her for a long time.

  The abandoned settlement wasn’t far now. If I remembered rightly it was just over the next rise. The idea was to sleep a while, on account of we’d had no rest this night, and then formulate a plan. I’d said we should go towards Green Springs because that’s where One Leg Hawk was. One Leg had always been a good source of news about Schmidt. I think he wanted to kill Schmidt as much as I did and as much as Jia did. So Green Springs was the plan. But in the light of what Jia had said, Three Oaks was an option, too.

  ‘My mother’s wanted to get Moose alone,’ Jia said.

  ‘Brave woman.’

  ‘She was. She quickly built a reputation helping people with pain. You know, the needles?’

  ‘The needles,’ I said.

  ‘She supposed a man who had lived the life that Moose had lived must have some pains that wouldn’t go away and she asked someone, maybe the same man who had asked Moose about the killings, to mention my mother to him, to say how she could help him. My mother could make pain vanish.’

  I wanted to ask, was Yu Yan going to kill Moose with needles? But I refrained. It wasn’t a night for joking.

  Jia said, ‘Moose was apparently open to the idea. He did have a bad limp from a wound that had never healed properly and gave him much trouble. But something spooked him. I think he went to visit my mother and he saw something in her eyes. If we have a weakness in our family,’ Jia said, and she looked across at me and her face was again in darkness, although I knew the rising sun was illuminating my face now, ‘it’s that our eyes give too much away. I don’t know what happened inside his head – maybe he started thinking about the killing of those Chinese men all that time ago – but a few days later he shot my mother in the back.’

  ‘There were witnesses? I mean, people know it was him?’

  ‘I know it was him,’ she said. ‘He killed my father, and he killed my mother. I’m the last one standing now.’

  ‘I’m here, too,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Yes, you are.’

  A ray of sunlight caught her smile. In the quarter light of such an early dawn I could see that it was a sad smile.

  We slept in a dry hut, warm under our blankets, and in the late morning when we woke I made a fire and I started cooking meat and potatoes. When Jia came outside, she brewed tea from leaves that she had brought with her.

  ‘I was going to cook you a rice breakfast,’ she said, tasting the food I had made. ‘But this is good. Thank you.’

  ‘Rice?’

  ‘I have some with me. Rice, ginger, dried fish. You might like it.’

  We looked around the camp and I explained how once upon a time this had been a wilderness, a frontier, and back then no one had known what lay beyond. I told her stories of my camping tr
ips with my father and my mother and she said, ‘I like your mother. She’s beautiful. But she’s strong, too.’ Then she smiled, and said, ‘I see her in you.’

  I think I might have blushed.

  I was still young enough and, I suppose, shy enough around women that I needed to divert the subject away from my own attributes, so I quickly asked Jia about her gun. She looked at me and I knew she understood exactly why I was manoeuvring the conversation in another direction. She smiled, her eyes crinkled mischievously, and I wondered about all that life experience she had recounted and how it gave her a confidence that I liked. I liked a lot.

  She slipped the revolver from her holster and handed it to me. It was smaller than my own Army Colt.

  ‘I was given it in London,’ she said. ‘I believe it was made there.’

  ‘Five shots,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they’re all empty?’

  She smiled and shrugged. ‘I have powder and balls in my saddle-bag. . . .’

  ‘With the rice,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, with the rice. But I don’t fire the gun very often and my uncle, who gave me the gun, said that the powder would get damp if I loaded it and didn’t use it. It was damper in London than it is here.’

  The gun had a lovely blue finish to the metal and a walnut grip. I lifted it and, despite it being empty, pointed it away from us. It was something my father had always been insistent on. I squeezed the trigger and was surprised to find it was a double-action, albeit a stiff double-action.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. Mine was one of the older single-action types. ‘Are you good with it?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s hard to pull. But it’s reassuring to have.’

  ‘Yes. A gun always is.’ I gave her the revolver back and she looked at it with a bit more interest than she had shown prior to handing it to me. ‘It’s amazing to think it comes from London, from halfway round the world.’

  ‘That means I come from all the way around the world.’