American Odyssey

Book 2: Ghost Rifle Western

by Max McCoy

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Max McCoy, the Spur Award-winning author of Damnation Road, continues his American Western saga of the Ghost Rifle as the violence and bloodshed the weapon has caused return to haunt the man who created it …
THE WEAPON AND THE WILDERNESS
Ten years have passed since Jack Picaro lost his Ghost Rifle—the firearm he invented, the one that never missed its target. The loss of the rifle calmed the hellraiser in his soul. Instead of returning to the gambling halls and whiskey bars
of St. Louis, Jack has spent the last decade as a fur trapper in Wyoming’s Wild River Range, married to Sky, the daughter of an Arikara war chief.
Then, after helping rescue U.S. soldiers captured by Crow Indians in the Rocky Mountains, Jack hears the familiar bell-like report of his Ghost Rifle. Determined to retrieve his deadly property, he travels deep into Lakota territory, facing down
old enemies—and resuming old sinful habits—unaware of what awaits him when he eventually returns home to his family.

Release date: February 22, 2022

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Jack Picaro would not know it for many years, but the day the aspens turned to gold on the side of the mountain behind the lodge would be the last happy day of his life. There would be other days, to be sure, in which he would find gratification in food or drink or women, fleeting amusement at the turn of a card, or some grim satisfaction in placing a rifled ball through the heart of an enemy. He would be free, and he would be feared, but never again would he be happy.

In seasons to come he would think about that day and count the details, each of which seemed mundane when lived but which would turn a distant gold in memory. He had awakened in the cool and dark of early morning, with Sky sleeping beside him beneath the elk robes, and he had reached for her warmth and drawn her close. She had protested the awakening, in a sleepy mixture of French and Arikara, but had slowly yielded. He would recall the smell of her hair, and softness of the skin on the nape of her neck, and the roundness of her breasts. He was gentle, for she was with child.

After, he sat up and rested his elbows on his knees and stared into the shadows.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

Sky reached out and touched his cheek.

He flinched.

“Toothache,” Jack said.

She asked him to show her where. He took her hand and guided her fingers to his upper jaw, below his right cheekbone. The flesh was swollen and warm.

“It must come out,” she said.

There were many long moments during which Sky listened to his breathing in the dark.

“No,” he said with finality.

Jack said he would pack the cavity with a pinch of gunpowder and the pain would go away and things would be all right. Sky made some small disapproving sound and gathered herself and said she was climbing downstairs to sit inside the circle of stones she had placed in front of the lodge and watch the sun rise over Stinking Water River.

“Stay,” Jack said. “It’s cold outside. It is warm here.”

“I’m being cooked,” Sky said. “You place twice as much wood as is needed to bank the fire for the night. You make the place into a sweat lodge. That is the problem with your kind.”

“My kind?”

“The waisachu,” she said. “You are a wasteful people.”

“But you are mixed blood,” Jack said. “You slander only yourself.”

Jack could feel Sky’s frown in the darkness.

“It was not my choice,” she said.

“And it was my choice?” Jack laughed.

“You shift between nations as it suits,” she said. “Now you are Basque, then you are French, but always you are American. You have American hungers and yet you choose to live here at the world’s edge far from the feasts of any nation.”

“My hungers are dangerous.”

“You are a wicked man,” Sky said. “But I love you still.”

Then she placed the fingertips of her right hand upon his thigh, as she had done a thousand times before in the morning.

“I traveled,” she said.

“Tell me of your dream,” Jack said as he always did.

“Lost in a sea of white sand,” she said. “It was not a place I have been, but a place I heard of once. It is far from here, along the black road, and nobody lives there, at least not anymore.”

The black road was the road to the west, to death.

“The setting sun had come to earth and everything was burned by its fire—the trees, the animals, even the rocks, which were melted.”

“Were you burned?”

“I was a ghost and could not be burned.”

“You were too warm in the night,” Jack said. “It was only a nightmare.”

“No,” Sky said. “I was a ghost.”

“You’re not a ghost,” Jack said.

“We will all be ghosts, soon enough,” Sky said. “But you had somehow made the sun come to earth and made ghosts of us all.”

“How?” Jack asked, suddenly interested.

“You had found the number of it.”

“That makes no sense,” Jack said.

“Dreams have their own truth,” Sky said. Then she again gathered herself to watch the sun rise and listen to the birds.

“Stay here,” Jack said. “It’s cold.”

“I’m being roasted,” Sky said. “And living in this box makes me ill. Shadows gather in the corners and it makes me ill to look into them.”

“You’ll freeze.”

“I need the embrace of the roundness of the world.”

“You will be seeking warm corners again when the cold bursts the trunks of the trees.”

“That is moons away,” she said.

“As you will,” Jack said. “But you will miss me when you begin to shiver.”

“You weave words like the baskets my people make to trap fish,” Sky said, pausing at the top of the rough-hewn ladder to downstairs. “But there is none here but ourselves and no strange fish to snare. Speak truly to me, Jack, for we are at the edge of the world with only each another for the long winter.”

“People mean trouble.”

“People mean coffee and whiskey and salt and powder and lead,” Sky said as her bare left foot touched the top rung of the ladder that led below. “And all of the other things we cannot make for ourselves.”

“We have meat year-round and fruit in the summer and warm robes in winter,” Jack said. “And we are free. That is enough.”

He could hear her hands and feet on the ladder and the loft seemed suddenly darker.

“Sky?” he called. “What was the number of the sun?”

But she had already gone.

Jack stared into the darkness for a long while after she had gone, feeling the throbbing in his jaw. He wished there were whiskey, or even tobacco, but those things were weeks or months away, likely bundled on the back of a mule trailing behind some free trapper hundreds of miles beyond the mountains. The early morning was so quiet that Jack could hear the blood pulsing in his ears, and the sound reminded him that for every human being there is a finite yet unknowable number of beats. The thought of an unwinding clock at the center of his chest made him melancholy, and he pondered the echo of measures long past, the beats that marked times and faces he would never see again. This stirred a deep agitation within him, because memories were painful. Twelve years ago, when he had made his retreat to this spot along the Stinking Water, he had vowed to leave the past buried with the unreachable dead.

“Enough,” he said, although it was more of a growl than a word.

He stretched out his right hand, and his fingers found the polished grip of the single-shot pistol that was always nearby while he slept. His fingertips traced the lines of the walnut and across the chill of steel and brass and on to the roughness of flint. He picked up the gun and, still on his back, pointed it aloft, his hand trembling with its weight. His mind went back to a night many years before, not long before he quit St. Louis, when he dueled at a place called Bloody Island. Then, even though drunk, he had brought expertise and dash to the affair of honor. Now, he aimed at nothing and everything in the darkness, wishing that one could kill one’s own demons with the same tools used to dispatch enemies. But that was only possible as a world-ending act of annihilation.

“Damn it, Jack.”

He lowered the gun.

He sat up and flung the robes from his naked body. There was much to be done before winter came clawing at the lodge door, and perhaps today he would go to the snow-covered meadow beyond the boiling springs and seek a fat elk. The animals would be in rut and not yet scattered to the lower elevations to escape the cold of the mountains. But first, he required coffee.

When the coffee pot was boiling furiously, Jack used a piece of hickory notched on one end to catch the bail and removed it from the oven-like hearth. Then, using a scrap of leather to protect his fingers, he tipped the pot and poured a cup almost to the brim. The coffee bubbled and swirled in the tin cup, and the comforting aroma of coffee filled the kitchen. Then Jack sat down at the stout table, the coffee at his elbow. A sliver of early sunlight had found a crack in the wall, and it rippled like fire across the floor, up onto the table, across his arm, and danced upon the cloud of steam rising from the cup. Jack stared at the beam, transfixed by its beauty and transience, and for a moment he felt his soul as that scimitar of light cleaving the morning dark in the kitchen of the lodge.

He had recreated this traditional Basque wood-and-stone combination house and barn from his childhood memory, adding his own touches as needed for life along Stinking Water River in the Rocky Mountains. He had named the lodge Hell’s Gate, because the richest man in the world, John Jacob Astor, who had made his fortune in the fur trade, had an estate in New York called “Hell Gate.” Jack laughingly said that he felt like the richest man in the world, because he lived as he pleased, so his lodge would have a similar name—and because the Stinking Water Valley was the entrance to a mysterious region of geysers and boiling springs that sometimes stank of sulphur.

The first floor of the building was stone, the walls fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle from boulders found nearby, and the top floor—where they slept—was timber. Attached to the rear of the first floor was a small wooden stable, and Jack’s workshop and forge. A wide porch with a stone floor ran three-quarters of the width of the front, which faced the river below. The pitch of the cedar-shingled roof was steeper than those he knew as a child, so that snow in the depth of winter would not easily collect and crush the roof. Still, once or twice during the coldest months when the snow clung to the roof, he had to clamor about with a long cord, with Sky holding the other end, to cut the snow in chunks, and let it slide to the ground. It had taken ten years to build the lodge, and still it was unfinished. Jack had rebuilt the workshop three times already, attempting to improve on the bellows in order to get a hotter fire, and the fireplace twice, to give it a better draw and improve the niche for an oven. All he needed was the iron door, which he might someday be able to trade for—or forge himself, given enough scrap.

One day, he imagined, he would buy, or trade for, yeast starter and real flour made from wheat or oats. Until then, he could only dream of rising bread. It was the smell of his grandfather’s kitchen; it was the smell of home.

Beneath the lodge was a dugout cellar, where they stored smoked meat and sometimes fish and vegetables in season. It was also the place where Jack had instructed Sky to hide if strangers came.

When the coffee had cooled enough to drink, Jack pulled a ledger book from a shelf that was within arm’s reach of the table. He had traded the book for some repairs to the lock of an ancient musket a Crow warrior had brought him years ago, and he did not ask about the drops of blood that flecked the book’s cloth cover. Crows and the Blackfeet warriors and sometimes the Shoshones who were often at war in the Stinking Water Valley and beyond, and trappers and others of European stock, generally avoided the area, but Jack managed a delicate neutrality by providing gunsmithing services to all without favoritism. But now it had been fourteen months since a visitor had come to the lodge, and their supply of the things they could not make or gather for themselves was nearly exhausted.

In the book he sketched, first in pencil and then in ink, details of mechanisms he could only imagine because he did not have the materials necessary to make them reality. The plan he had been working on for the last month was of a mechanism for a repeating rifle. Such firearms were not unique in Europe, although most were impractical because of complicated recharging mechanisms that required arm power to cycle and reliance on flint or wheel ignition, which did not lend itself well to multiple shots. The best of the repeating arms relied not on gunpowder but on the power of compressed air—even Lewis and Clark relied on one. This had gotten Jack to thinking about the massive spring-like power of suddenly expanding air, and while he had no interest in a firearm that did not use gunpowder, it occurred to him that every firearm, when fired, had a considerable force of expanding gas in its breach that could be used to actuate a reloading mechanism. As Jack sketched how he imagined the articulating lever would function inside a receiving chamber, he did not hear Sky enter.

“We have enough coffee for two or three more pots,” she said. “After that you will have to rely on sumac tea.”

Jack made a face.

“Some trapper will come along soon with goods to trade for a few small repairs,” he said. Jack knew he was low on powder and lead as well, but did not mention it. “Or they may have tea. Proper tea, not undrinkable stuff made of leaves.”

“Or you may have to learn to do without.”

“A trapper always comes,” he said.

“How long has it been since the last?”

“Long,” Jack said. “Months. Eight or nine months, perhaps.”

“It’s been fourteen months,” Sky said.

“No . . .”

“I have counted the moons,” she said. “It has been fourteen months. That is a very long time to be without, by ourselves. We have been without flour for more than a year. The coffee only lasted so long because I am very good at rationing.”

He put his right arm around her waist and pulled her to him. Her hip fit comfortably against him and her unbound hair brushed his cheek. The sun had moved, and the shaft of light that had split the kitchen was forever gone now.

“I have no aptitude for doing without,” he said.

“What has made you so moody?” Sky asked.

Jack ignored the question.

“You have been too long with only me for company,” she said.

“What nonsense.”

She looked at the open ledger with its drawings and calculations and notes written in Jack’s precise hand. She ran her left hand over the page, as if her fingertips could read the language of ideas.

“This is something new,” she said.

“It is only a sketch,” he said. “Something I dreamed.”

She looked at him with unblinking eyes.

“The things you dream are more real to you than I am,” she said. She started to turn the pages. Jack put his hand on hers.

“Don’t,” he said. “There are things not yet to be revealed.”

“I will never be able to compete with the visions inside your head,” she said flatly. “You carry an entire world inside you that I will never be a part of, never even able to glimpse except in the shadows of your sketches.”

“None of us share that,” he said. “I cannot peer into your mind.”

“You do not need to,” she said. “You have seen every mile of my world, from the rivers and the villages to the places where the old ones have gone to die. My world is the mountains and the sky and the autumn breeze among the aspens. Your world is beyond where the sun rises and I will never know it, in this life or the next.”

“You could,” Jack said. “We could follow the Yellowstone to the broad Missouri and put in a pirogue and drift all the way to St. Louis before the river freezes. You speak English and French better than most of the people I knew there and you would find many other Catholics, like yourself, and they would take you in.”

“And you would be arrested the moment you set foot in the city and be hanged for murder,” Sky said. “That is the truth, is it not? So for you to give me your world you must sacrifice yourself and leave me with strangers. No, I will stay here at the gates to the mountains with you and your life in the city named for a king will forever be a mystery.”

“There is no mystery to it,” Jack said. “The city is a cruel and brutish place.”

“All places are cruel and brutish,” Sky said. “It is the nature of the wolf to kill and the antelope to submit. So it is that some men are wolves and others antelopes. You are, and have always been, the wolf.”

Jack smiled.

“Then how can you love me?” he asked. “Your religion teaches that killing is a sin, that it is better to turn the other cheek, that the wolf shall live with the lamb. I have killed many men, I have never turned my face away from anyone, and I am fond of mutton.”

It was an old argument, and Jack enjoyed it.

Sky shook her head.

“You are a rebellious child,” she said. “A dangerous one, but a child still.”

That is not what his joints told him on the coldest mornings, Jack thought.

“I will go out today and bring back meat,” Jack said. “Come with me and we will linger where the boiling spring meets the river, as we once did. After resting for as long as it suits, we’ll continue to the upper meadow to hunt. It is easier to dress the animals when you help.”

“It is already too late in the day,” Sky said.

“The day has hardly begun.”

“To hunt the upper meadow, you should have been moving by first light.”

“We have our robes, and the canvas,” Jack said. “The weather is yet tame. We could spend the night away, as we used to.”

“The cliffs scare me,” Sky said. “They belong to the twilight nation.”

“You speak of them as if they live still.”

“They are neither alive nor dead, but shadows upon the earth.”

“Come,” Jack said. “You can sleep away from this wooden box. We will take meat and drink warm blood and remind ourselves that we are not yet shadows upon the earth. We will celebrate the coming of another winter, together.”

“We will need gifts for the people of the cliffs.”

“Then gather your gifts,” Jack said.

Shortly after, when Jack was outside preparing to saddle the animals, as the sun warmed his face and the breeze carried the scent of pine, he felt the passage of the years and the slow drawing of the curtain that revealed the mystery of days to come.

A billowing column of steam marked where the boiling spring met the snowmelt-filled river. The bank was low here and rocky, and a spit of gravel curved out into the river and was lost beneath the cloud. Jack had stripped away everything except his blue wool shirt and was waiting, with a rifle held easily in the crook of his left arm, for Sky to join him.

The horses were staked higher up the bank, and Sky was standing between them. Jack’s horse was ’Clipse, a coal black stallion. The gray horse was the mare Sky called Smoke. After speaking in low tones to the horses and gently touching the forelock of each, she walked down the bank and followed the gravel bar toward Jack. In what seemed one motion, she removed her belt with the elkhorn-handled knife in its scabbard, the wooden cross hanging from a red and white zig-zag pattern of Arikara beadwork around her neck, and slipped her antelope skin dress over her head. She dropped her clothes on the gravel and stood there with her rounded stomach and smiled. She had a chipped front tooth, an accident from childhood.

“Damn,” Jack said, “I never thought I’d ever see anything as pretty as the aspens on the side of the mountain. But I was wrong.”

A driftwood log with many branches lay near the end of the gravel bar and Jack nestled the rifle in a pair of forks. Then he took off his shirt and spread it on top of the rifle to keep the sun from glinting on the metal.

Sky touched his chest in the same manner she had touched the horses.

“You are turning gray,” she said.

“Men do at this season of life,” he said. “I am thirty-three.”

“But there’s only a touch at your temples,” she said.

“It was the same with my father,” Jack said, taking her hand in his. They crept barefooted to the edge of the water, testing the temperature. Sky said it was too hot, so they went a few yards downstream, into the cloud.

“Yes,” she said.

They waded into the water. A mallard hen scooted noisily from the middle of the cloud to the safety of the grass on the far bank. Sky laughed, then she took another step and her foot didn’t find the bottom. She fell until the water reached her chin. Jack lunged and put his arm around her waist and pulled her up to him.

“What would I do—”

She pressed her forefinger against his lips.

“Don’t,” she said. “Be here, with me. Now.”

She kissed him.

Jack drew back slightly.

“The tooth,” he said.

Sky frowned.

Jack probed at the molar with the tip of his tongue, then winced in pain.

“You fool,” Sky said. “It must come out.”

“Not without whiskey,” Jack said.

“You are only prolonging your pain,” Sky said. “And perhaps hastening your death.”

“It’s nothing,” Jack said.

“That makes you flinch as if burned.”

“Later,” Jack said. “We’ll speak of this later.”

“We will,” she said. “Or I will take some of your gunsmith tools and pry it out myself, whiskey or no.”

She kissed him again, this time more gently.

Jack felt the warm water swirl around his legs and the cool air brush his chest and Sky’s moist lips against his. In that moment he forgot the shame of his past and how the coffee was nearly gone at the lodge and his frustration at being only able to sketch the things he wanted to make with his hands. For now, the world they shared was enough and more, and Jack felt his spirit rise and dance with the mist over the river.

Sometime later—it could have been five minutes or an hour, because time had lost track of Jack—the mallard hen made a racket and beat her wings and took off from the water fifty or sixty yards downriver. Then came the sound of the horses shuffling, and Sky gripped his forearm and gave a little shake.

“I hear,” he said softly.

“Crows?” Sky asked.

“We would have heard nothing,” Jack said. “Some slinking thing. Wolves, perhaps.”

Jack started slowly toward the gravel bar.

“Stay here,” Sky said.

“We cannot afford to lose the horses.”

“’Clipse would kick them to death.”

“But not before throwing the stake,” Jack whispered. “I’d rather not chase a horse down today. Besides, it might not be wolves.”

Sky began making for the bank.

“Stay here,” he said. “If there’s trouble, swim to the other bank and hide in the trees beyond.”

She nodded.

Jack moved slowly through the water and, when he reached the gravel bar, crouched low and inched his way toward the driftwood where the rifle was hidden. He was out of the cloud now but dared not rise up for a look around, for fear of giving away his position. When he came to the driftwood and flattened himself on the river side of it, he carefully reached up and grasped the shirt and th. . .