Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [64]
It was soothing too how Mariam might almost rhyme with Mary Ann. But neither of these women was on hand today. Henri followed Forrest across the street, keeping half a dozen paces back, but still pulled forward by the vortex of the other man’s movement. Forrest kicked open the door of the tailor’s shop. Lieutenant Gould had been stretched out across a sewing table, and the men from the quartermaster’s office were trying to staunch his wound with wads of cotton batting which the tailor had in store. Doctor Wittke had also come to attend him. All scattered when Forrest burst into the room, roaring and drawing back the hammer of Henri’s revolver with his thumb, except for Wittke, who only stepped back and said, calmly enough, “General, you have no need to kill him now, for he will surely die of the wound he has already had of you.”
When Gould jumped up to run away the blood from his stab wound spurted out in such a jet that Wittke had to step aside so that it would not splash on his clothes. Forrest leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger and the box of the little room filled up with powder fumes. Over the deafening concussion Forrest was howling, “No damn speckled sonofabitch can kill me and live!”
Gould had fallen sideways across the back doorstep. All thought him shot dead until he jumped up, ran across the back yard, sprang over the waist-high fence that enclosed it and kept on, flinging his heels up high behind him. Forrest, with as much agility, pursued, letting off a couple more uncharacteristically wild shots as he closed the distance.
Cautiously, Henri stepped down into the back yard of the tailor shop, which was half–grown up in dandelions going to seed. His eye was on the wall of the house across the alley, where Forrest’s first stray round had flaked a corner off a brick. Young Sammy Milton sat on his tailbone below, holding his left leg up by the ankle and peering at the underside of his calf, where the ricochet had left a red furrow.
“That’s nothing to worry about,” Henri remarked. “Only a crease. You’re barely even bleeding, Sam.”
“That’s all right for you to say,” Milton squeaked. Henri kept going down the alley.
Four houses over from the tailor’s, Gould had run out of breath and blood and lay facedown in a patch of bitterweed. Onlookers made a semicircle behind Forrest, who probed the body with the toe of his boot.
“Kin ye credit this sorry little piece of shit has put the final end to me?”
“No,” said Henri, swinging his leg over another thigh-high fence to come from the alley into the yard where the others were gathered.
Forrest rounded on him. The black hole of the pistol barrel aimed with his eyes. Henri tried to count the shots Forrest had let off during the chase: possible as many as four but certainly less than six. The rage was still on him but it did not burn so brightly as before. And after all Henri already knew that no dark cylinder of Forrest’s six held his own death today.
“What’s that ye say?”
“No,” said Henri. “Nobody has put an end to you yet, General. You are not hurt so bad as you believe.”
Forrest’s eyes enclosed him then, large and dark as craters on the moon. As if they could pierce and probe out all his secrets, especially those Henri most fervently wished to remain undiscovered. He tried to return the stare with the same penetration, to know even as he was also known. But Forrest was a long puzzle. A hard one. A chanpwel might shed her skin and take the air and shrink herself enough to slip between the atoms building Forrest’s skull and discover all the workings