The Bully of Order by Brian Hart

bit it off. She screamed, and everyone fell over themselves and watched the blood. The party was ended.
    The dead man left with Burheim and the whores. Tartan counted his pay and was glad at what he found. Dr. Haslett arrived, and after stitches and drugging, Bellhouse was deemed among the living. Tucked into one of the many beds, Tartan stayed near his boss, mourned his own drunk, embraced the rising pain behind his eyes. Word was passed on, a boy on the stairs. The vote was in their favor, charter expanded, membership dues forthcoming. All success, all victory. Huzzah.
    After the long sleep and the slower waking, Bellhouse’s mind seemed to be in the wind. He confided to Tartan from his yeasty sickbed that he wished to sever his own hand because he feared he was going berserk and might kill himself. A killer’s hands look comic clutching bedsheets.
    But Bellhouse soon erupted from his invalidity and murdered Toker, used his horn-handled knife, slid it up under the jaw and made the simpleton’s eye bulge out. Tartan hauled the body out of town on the back of a borrowed mule and sunk it near Preacher’s Slough. The Spanish whore with the man’s haircut disappeared from town, and Bellhouse wasn’t the only one that looked for her.
    Not so guiltily Tartan collected his pay twice due to his boss’s injury, and as soon as he could he put some room between the two of them. Shows like that, the one at the hall, were enough to fade his soul to nothing, to bile. He’d had questions for himself, questions that he’d been afraid to ask, and now he knew: the black mouth of hell would have him. The price of debauchery was absolute, and absolutely everything would be absorbed by it. It had to be. No one could bear this kind of pain. His being was a rotten tooth, and he wanted it extracted, dropped in the pan, marveled at, and finally chucked or crushed under a boot heel. That is to say, he wanted to die.
    Then Dr. Haslett sent him a note that gave him a purpose, and if not that, at least a destination. Tartan’s cousin had died—not his actual cousin, but a friend from his Chicago childhood. He had been born Chad Wutherstrom, but people in the Harbor knew him as Oly Knox. Dr. Haslett told Tartan that he’d fallen from his springboard and lodged a splinter deep into his knee. A month later he was dead. Tartan hadn’t seen Wutherstrom since Christmas, when they’d gone fishing for bluebacks. He assembled everything he thought he might want and hired the Indian, Cherquel Sha, to ferry him upriver.
    At their destination Sha tipped his packs onto the bank, barely clear of the waterline. Tartan stood and wondered how he’d carry everything. Sha’s outstretched hand confronted him. Tartan reached in his pocket and dropped the crumpled wad into the canoe. It was three, but they’d agreed on five. Sha stuffed the bills in his jacket pocket.
    â€œWhy you need so much shit?” the Indian asked.
    â€œI’m wondering the same thing.”
    â€œPlenty of time to wonder while you’re sweatin yer ass off playin the mule.”
    â€œI’ll get you the rest next time I see you.”
    â€œNo, you won’t. Go on yer walk, Dickerson.”
    â€œNot my name.”
    The Indian grinned and pushed off, and with one graceful sweep of his paddle he was in the current and gone. He hadn’t said so many words during the whole trip, kept calling him Dickerson. Tartan believed that a man who didn’t speak was more than halfway to being a great man, but he didn’t like being teased, less when he didn’t comprehend the method.
    The parcels of food, bedroll, rifle and shotgun; he thought he might be able to lash it all to a couple of decent-sized tree limbs and drag it like he’d seen in the army. Failed career number four. The Indians hauling bodies and babies and everything they owned, skid on, antithetical to the railroad, the whole of their world the same