here. Show them to whomever you need to show them. Any questions, Lieutenant?” Cooke slides a flat oilskin pouch across the desk to Molloy.
Molloy sets his mug on the general’s desk and takes up his orders. I may wake up and have dreamt all this, he thinks. Delirium tremens. The Bust Head horrors. “May I ask why I’ve been chosen for this, General?” The words feel dense and slow in his mouth but the general does not seem to notice. Or does.
Cooke smiles. “Custer has no use for you and I’ve got no one else I care to spare for such a task. And you happen to be here, Lieutenant.” He crushes out his cheroot and turns to a file of papers on his desk.
Where this train was heading all along, he thinks. No good end to such a task and I am the perfect fit for it. And Kohn. Poor Kohn. I’ll cut him loose. “What if . . .” Molloy hears himself asking. “What if it was Indians, sir? What if—”
“A neck for the noose, Lieutenant, and you can pick your regiment for transfer.”
Careful. Be careful, Molloy thinks, what you wish for. A drink now.
“I will need . . .” he hears himself saying. “I will need Kohn promoted to sergeant, sir. He deserves it and this job for you will require it.” Molloy does not know how but he feels it important in some way. Sergeant’s pay and the respect to go with it.
Cooke says, “Give me the orders.”
Molloy hands them back and Cooke opens the flat pouch, removes the paper from within and scribbles two lines across its bottom.
“WILL I BEGIN PACKING, Captain?” Kohn asks.
Molloy gazes vacantly across the wide street that functions as a parade ground here at the Post of Omaha. The flagpole at the center of the ground must be a hundred feet high, the tallest thing in the Territory. The vast flag requires a stronger breeze to make it snap out proud over the plains and for now it hangs a flaccid tangle of stars and stripes.
“Lieutenant, Kohn, for the love of God.”
“I haven’t been promoted yet, sir.”
“I keep you as my orderly under sufferance, Kohn. I don’t keep you for your wit. And you have been promoted. As far as sergeant. As far as you’ll go in this army I’m afraid.”
“Yessir.”
“Did you not hear me, Sergeant Kohn? You’ve been promoted. On Cooke’s orders.”
“Thank you, sir.” Kohn looks at Molloy and decides he does not believe him.
“You are an ungrateful lout of a Cleveland Jew corner boy, Kohn, with no manners or grace about you.”
“I will talk to the quartermaster for supplies, sir.”
“Have you a cigar, Kohn? I find myself in need of the goddess tobacco’s balm.”
Kohn takes from inside his tunic one of the small cigars the captain likes, knowing that when Molloy begins to speak like a poorly written stage play he is nigh fully drunk and unreachable. It is as if he has let another man into his head to do the talking for him. Nothing of the captain’s self in it. The drink talking. Molloy often says to him, Don’t mind me, Kohn, ’tis the drink talking. The shores of Ireland in his words more than usual when he says it, presenting another voice to the world, this one some cap-tipping Galway peasant. Neither voice the captain’s own, the one Kohn respects and admires and rarely hears anymore. He strikes a match, cups it and lights Molloy’s cigar.
“I’ll make for the quartermaster. And we could use another man with us, sir.”
“May the strength of three men be in our journey.”
“Yessir.”
Molloy turns to Kohn. Life bustles about them in the cool autumn air, the headquarters post in Omaha much more a part of the town than most in the army, built within the town itself so that soldiers and civilians mingle and go about their business taking little notice of each other. A platoon marching drill. Wagons. Suited bankers blustering on the capitol house steps. A rasping saw somewhere, the syncopated rapping of hammers on nails. Nails for the coffin-maker.
Molloy always thinks this when he hears hammering, sawing, though America rings with the sounds of construction, of carpentry. Always building something in this country, destroying one thing and raising up another. Homesteads, hotels, banks. Coffins. Filled my share of them, God forgive me. He always thinks this too.
“And what, pray tell, Daniel, have you heard of our journey? What scuttlebutt have you gathered? More than I have, no doubt.”