Far Bright Star (12 page)

21

T
HE CAMP IN MORNING
was a lowing and braying racket. They woke at four and were under way by five, the dull pallid gray of the dawn filtering its shuttered red light into the darkness. The horse he rode that morning was the Blue horse, the high-white blue-black sabino with the two blue eyes. Whereas the Rattler horse was the spirit of evil, the Blue horse was friendly and could not help but seek affection. It wished to be petted and nibbled him with its lips until he did.

His brother rode a powerful seventeen-hand chestnut, a brown-coated horse with a long mane and tail. The chestnut was a most skillful and well-knitted animal and he’d not seen a more handsome clean-built and graceful horse. With the subtlest gesture of hand the horse made right and left and stopped on a dime. It cut turns like a knife and did not so much run as it flew and danced. He smiled and wondered how long before the animal would disappoint and fall out of favor.

In the past he was often mistaken for his brother but not any longer. His face was cut and broken and changed forever and now it was only his own. And something else—it was as if the aura of the brothers was broken, the mysterious nimbus of their remote autonomy had been breached. For most men this was troubling. The brothers were so capable they made other men lazy and dependent. Other men were now emboldened: the envious and resentful, the invidious. These were the men who remembered every slight, every warning, every reprimand. These were the fatuous, the strivers, the self-opinionated. They were the mediocrity that knows nothing higher than itself and in their minds they’d been mistreated and were now the aggrieved.

This he sensed as they rode out that morning. If his brother sensed it also, he did not know. If he did he would not have cared. A man to him was less than a horse and not more than a dog or a toad. So deep were his convictions in this regard they were beyond the comprehension of all but the Apache or the horse itself, or the dog, or the toad.

They broke from the plain and were following a small alkaline streambed, dry and dusty, in the direction of a distant grove of cottonwoods. They’d left behind the train tracks, the cartage road, the abandoned hacienda when late that afternoon a dry storm broke and day lightning struck clean as a razor. Breathing on this day was as if breathing the air of a furnace and he could not help but continually shade his eyes with his hand and stare at the horizon as if he knew what was there and waiting to be seen.

All that morning they’d set a hammering pace, the horses’ bodies lathered with oily sweat. Only when the sun was getting well up in the sky he swung their trail in the direction of a stone tank where they watered. They could have stopped at noon or pushed straight on through.

He let the stop be enough to rest the horses. A great wave of hot air swept by, filling their lungs with heat. The moment was so hot that to breathe deeply was to choke and cough.

“It’s hot today, just plain hot,’” someone said.

“Hot? I think it’s damn cold myself. I wish I had my blanket,” someone answered.

Some half-wild horses came to the edge of a hill. They caught his brother’s eye and he stopped. The horses stamped and snorted and stepped in their direction. He knew his brother would leave off the search and go after them if he thought even one of interest. The horses fluttered and panicked and ducked away and there being none of particular interest he let them go.

All that morning Xenophon stayed close by his side, for the most part silent unless someone needed a bawling-out.

“I am sick of wet-nursing these fucking neck riders,” he said, “every one of them.” Looking for the body of this man, he could not think of a more foolhardy way to spend his time.

“What time is it?” Napoleon asked him when he’d calmed down.

“Noon, I’d say. Why?”

“I’m tired.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“No. I don’t think it’s the kind of tired you get over.”

He was tired. He wanted a room and a goose-down bed. He wanted a square meal, a shave, a hot bath. He didn’t know what all he wanted beyond that, but he knew what he didn’t want and he didn’t want what he had and he didn’t want where he was. He wanted to think clearly again and live without the guilt he felt for losing the men: Bandy, Extra Billy, Stableforth, Turner, and even Preston.

“What made you come out here?” Napoleon asked him.

“I do not want these brainless bastards ruining any of my horses.”

This is what his brother said, but he suspected another reason and one having to do with his own understanding of the men they rode with, the men in their command with prospects of bounty.

“It takes little carelessness to disable a horse,” his brother said. “You care for the horse first and yourself last.” He was strangely enough their greatest defender and yet capable of working them to an inch of their lives. But he asked no more of the horse than he asked of himself.

Napoleon held a palm to his forehead and stared intently at the land before the horizon where a flash of light had shown. They climbed the red sun-baked rocks of the plateau and with a pocket mirror signaled across the valley. It wasn’t long before a signal came back.

“There’s something there,” he said.

The Blue horse crabbed sideways and he looked to where his brother was pointing and he saw it too. There was a critter walking backward dragging a half-eaten carcass. It was a feral dog or a coyote, maybe a wolf. But there was something else and it was the strangest thing he saw. It was not important, but he could not tell what it was.

It was here the Jenny found them, buzzing overhead with the intention of spotting and directing their way.

His brother turned in the saddle as the column closed, the Smith boys coming up first.

“Smith,” he said.

“Yessir.”

“Not you. The other Smith.”

“Yessir!”

“You do not hit that horse,” he bawled at the soldier, and raising an admonitory finger, he said, “That horse has a muscle cramp. You get off that horse and you walk it out.”

“I miss that old Rattler horse,” Napoleon said.

“That horse were as sure footed as a mule,” his brother said.

“I hope we don’t find it,” he said, meaning the worst.

“Tell me again about the horse she rode.”

“It was a beauty,” he said. “About the most beautiful horse a horse can be.”

“I would love to see that horse someday.”

“It was a gifted horse.”

“A royal horse.”

“What do you think that was back there?”

“You saw it too?”

“Yes.”

“Just one of those things.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The first one they found they could smell the decay a mile away. The flensers had been at work. His naked body looked parboiled by the sun. He was hung upside down from the stark white branch of a dead cottonwood. He’d been belly cut and leg cut and his skin dragged off him so a whole other body shape sharing the one head hung down below.

On the rocks around the man were perched the vultures. They carried the scavengers featherless head and neck. They were not moving because when they looked at the men on horseback they only saw scavengers like themselves.

“Do you think he’s one of ours,” one of the troopers was saying.

“I wouldn’t know how to tell,” another said.

“He’s too tall to be a greaser. How tall would you say he is?”

“I can’t tell. He is upside down.”

“It’s still the same length, you fucknut.”

“Whoever did this needs to bounce at the end of a rope.”

“I just hope he was dead,” the Baldwin-Felts agent said.

“If he were what would have been the point?” his brother said.

“An artist with a knife,” Goudge said. “I’ll give ’em that.”

“This needs to be investigated,” the Baldwin-Felts agent said. “They can’t do that to an American.”

“When are you going to get your head out of your ass?” Xenophon said as he rolled a cigarette.

“That ain’t one of us. I think it’s the dynamiter,” Napoleon said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Just a feeling. He signed on and took their money and didn’t know what he claimed to know. I’ll say one thing. He didn’t lack for hide.”

The chaplain and the photographer drew closer. The chaplain stooped down on one knee and began to pray at the feet of the boy dynamiter. The Jenny flew over, its engine coughing.

When the chaplain stood again, he said, “Nothing is so solemn as a man’s last moments of life.”

“He’ll just be a hole in the ground, is all,” Napoleon said.

When the chaplain protested he told him to take his form of mental illness somewhere else. The photographer was already returning with the weight of his equipment on his shoulder.

“What do you want to do, sir?” one of the troopers asked him.

He nodded toward the Baldwin-Felts agent. “How about this body?” he said. “Will this one do for you?”

“Not if it isn’t him.”

“Cut him down and bury him,” he told the dismounted troopers. The photographer asked for a moment as he erected his tripod, his camera fixed on top and the men held back so the photographer could do his work.

Miles in the distance his brother glassed a column of vultures riding what little eddies the upper air afforded. He yelled out for the men to come on and get the work done of cutting the man down. He could tell his brother’s agitation as it was translated to the chestnut whose broad hooves cut patterned didoes in the dirt.

“Goudge,” Napoleon yelled, “get it done. We’re wasting time,” and then he turned the Blue horse and was following his brother who’d broke for the vultures.

The gyring vultures guided them on and after a long time they came across another dead, a Yaqui in rictus clutching an open gunnysack at the mouth of a canyon. There was a rattlesnake fastened to his face, its fangs set deep, attached to his cheek. The outriders had already arrived and were crouched on their haunches and staring into the man’s claggy, dead eyes.

“He’s dead all right,” one of the outriders said.

“He’s jined the dead,” the other one said, looking up at them. “Snake bit him.”

“That’ll mean fewer idiots around,” the first one said.

He led them on and soon they entered into the canyon. The air by moment was burdened with the stench of death. As the rock walls rose and closed he felt again to be entering the whelm of his greatest loss and it wasn’t long before they found three more and these were their men and there were horses too, the Rattler horse amongst them. He looked out at the sight before them.

Great swarms of flies occupied the air of the killing floor. They buzzed and lit and stung. Someone behind him swore softly. Then they all fell silent, taking their own hard looks.

Napoleon dismounted and stood again in the hard place where he’d fought and lost. He felt to be migrating close up under the sky, how terrible was this moment on earth when the earth split open and devils poured out.

They’d been stripped of their tunics and trousers, their boots and hats and weapons and the horses of their shoes and furnishings. They were naked and their sun-drained and waxlike bodies torn open where coyotes and vultures had been at them. Their bodies looked parboiled and then baked in the sun. They had certain characteristics that men have, but they were not like men at all. The scene was prehistoric, a windswept abattoir, silent music playing through the ravaged rib cages. After the first time you looked at them they were not hard to look at.

He kneeled down and laid his hand on the fine flat shoulder of the Rattler horse. The magnificent horse had given him all that it had to give. There was nothing more he could have asked.

“That would be Turner,” Napoleon said.

“How do you know?” the agent asked.

“A double-barreled shotgun don’t leave much face bone.”

In some places the earth was no more than spilled powder and in other places the sand was hard and the black of lacquer.

He went on to identify Stableforth, the back of his skull blown away and Extra Billy, whose head was broke open. Someone had taken the time to knock out his brains after he was killed the second time.

Life had been separated from matter and all that was left now lay before him exposed and lifeless. He knew too much and he’d seen too much. It was enough. He took out a paper and his tobacco and with steady hands he rolled a cigarette.

“Look up there,” someone said, and they all turned to look and to see another festooned with vultures. He hung from the rock wall, high up, his legs and arms spread wide and his chest pushed out with the contour of the rock. They could make out the bony haunches and the stringy arms. His eyes were dry holes in his head and the rock beneath his bare feet was a long ragged stain of black. It was Bandy, who tried to climb away like he was told.

That boy, he thought, was ignorant as an egg.

Men began shooting the vultures, errantly introducing enough lead into the boy’s body to make it dance on its bindings.

Wheeler, his rage barely in check, flew at them until they stopped and then it was Wheeler who climbed the wall and lowered down the ragged and tattered and newly shot being that was his friend. He would not let anyone help him in this work. He cradled him gently in his arms and insisted in wrapping him in an oilcloth to take him back for a proper burial.

Napoleon watched Wheeler in his work. He flashed on a future when there would be a world of such figures. They would be found upon rocks such as this one or lying in the mud or forest or desert. They’d be floating to the bottom of the ocean. They’d be boys and women and children. They’d be young men. But who would be left to find them? The old men, that’s who. The old men will endure.

Bandy, Extra Billy—they were good men, he thought. Beyond the frailties of moment and personality they were men who would fight to the last measure and what more could you ask of a man? They had no illusions of invincibility. They insisted upon no right to innocence.

“They were good men,” Napoleon finally said aloud.

“They were,” his brother said, and mounted the chestnut and turned the horse in the direction from which they’d come.