The Car (15 page)

Wayne shook his head. “Man, the Duke?”

Waylon nodded. “But I like the pizza part and getting an early start.” He started walking ahead of them, as if the bit in the bar had never happened, his step light. “What are we going to do tomorrow?” he asked over his shoulder to Terry.

“I don't know. Anything. You know, about what to look for or anything.”

“What do you want to know about?”

Terry frowned. “I'm not really sure. Maybe, you know, what it was like, really like out here. Back before cars and highways and all of it. Maybe back when it was just Indians and cowboys. . . .“

“It never was,” Waylon said. “Indians and cowboys. It was Indians and soldiers. This whole place, from here to Portland, the West—it was like Vietnam. A war.”

“Then that,” Terry said. “I want to start early and see something that would show me what that was like. What is there to see?”

Wayne said nothing and for a time Waylon didn't, either. Terry thought he was going to remain silent all the way to the motel room. But just as they stepped off the curb to cross the street to the motel Waylon stopped.

“Custer.”

“What?” Terry bumped into his back.

“The height of it, what happened out here—it has to be Custer. The Custer battle.”

“Are we close to that?”

“Half a day of driving, if the weather is good.”

“Then that's it,” Terry said. “We'll go there tomorrow.”

T
HEY STOOD ON A HILL
next to a group of small white stones and a large monument, a beautiful rolling prairie spread out before them, low and covered with knee-high grass leading down to a river lined with trees. It was all thick and green and soft. Meadowlarks sang around them and it was midafternoon and Terry tried to think of what it must have been like.

“The stones are where the bodies were found,” Waylon said. “All white. They all looked white to the soldiers who came and found them. White against the green grass. Several men said that. They stopped a mile away and asked each other what all the white pieces were—they thought they were bits of paper. Scrap. Garbage. But it was the bodies. . . .”

The Custer battlefield.

They had gotten up early, well before daylight, after watching bad movies and eating pizza and going to bed before ten—this time Terry and Wayne slept on the floor and Waylon won the toss for the bed.

There had been no rain and they had driven across the Wyoming prairie with the sun warming their backs. There had been almost nothing to see until they pulled into Sheridan and had a hamburger, then fifty more miles up the highway, the Cat wheeling along in back of the Harley until they entered Montana and came to a sign that pointed up to the small hill.

“It seems like such a—I don't know, small place.” Terry looked down the hill to the river. There were white markers scattered down a shallow ravine and he thought,
They died along the way, died trying to get up to this hill.

“It
is
small.” Waylon nodded. “Everything moved on horses then, slowly, and there was no artillery. Just guns and arrows. You had to be close to hit anything. All just a small engagement.” He snorted. “Think of it. In the Gulf War with Iraq more people were killed in the first seven minutes than died in all of the Indian wars with all of the tribes and all the armies and civilians on both sides. . . .”

A tour came along, tourists following a guide. There was a building at the battlefield headquarters, where tour guides gave talks, and the three of them had stopped to hear one of the lectures and look in the museum. There were guns and pictures—there was even Custer's jockstrap in a case—but it didn't seem to mean anything to Terry until they walked up the little asphalt path with rattlesnake warning signs to the battle site itself.

The stones,
Terry thought,
the white stones.
It was like seeing the bodies to him.
Two hundred and eighty some men just gone. In less than an hour, probably.

“Snuffed,” Wayne said, as if reading Terry's thoughts. He measured the ground with his eyes—to Terry it seemed like an engineer or scientist studying the ground—and nodded. “They must have thought they could hold if they got up here. Good terrain, high ground. Drop the horses and get down in back of them. . . .”

“Too many,” Waylon interrupted. “Way too many Indians. Thousands. And smart. While the light was going on, Crazy Horse took a big group of warriors back around the hill to cut off retreat and they swarmed up and over Custer and the rest of his men before they could set up a reaction. Bad fields of fire, bad perimeter . . .”

“. . . bad luck,” Wayne finished.

“That, too. All the bad luck there is.”

“Poor bastards.”

Waylon nodded. “Nobody won this one.”

“What do you mean?” Terry turned from the stone marking the mass grave at the top of the hill. “I thought the Indians won. . . .”

Waylon shook his head. “Maybe this fight. But the battle set off a public reaction across the country—around the world. They lost any hope of a good settlement—if there ever was a hope. The United States came after them with whole armies, slaughtered them, drove them to the ground after the Custer battle.”

“But wasn't it all the white man's fault?” Terry sat on a small corner of the monument.

Waylon nodded. “They broke treaties, took everything from the Indians—but it wasn't these soldiers who did that. It was prospectors, railroad tycoons, bankers—that's who stole the land. And these soldiers were sent to deal with it. Hell, most of them didn't even want to come out here. Irish immigrants trying to find the pot of gold in America, and the recruiters talked them into coming west. Custer's desertion rate was sometimes over ten percent per month. The soldiers were the losers. And the Indians, of course.” He looked at the body markers, the prairie dropping around them. “Only the bankers won. And the politicians.”

They spent the rest of the day at the battlefield, later moving down to the points defended by Reno and Benteen.

“They made it here,” Wayne said. “Look at the shallow pits they dug when they established the perimeter. It was a bad defensive position but they made the best of it, and they held. Like it could have been another Custer but they held. . . .”

Terry smiled. Wayne seemed to be thinking like Waylon, in military terms and jargon. “You talk like it happened yesterday.”

Wayne nodded. “Some things never change. They had different weapons. But they still had to have a perimeter, defensive positions, fire power, interlocking fields of fire. For the grunt it's always the same, no matter when.”

Waylon nodded but didn't say anything, and instead led the way through this secondary battle site.

There was a small circular walk that led around to posts with written information on them, pointing to the different aspects of interest. Reno and Benteen had come in from different angles with their men, supposedly to support Custer, but they had run into overwhelming forces.

“One of the scouts said there were so many hostile Indians that the soldiers couldn't carry enough bullets to kill them all,” Waylon said. “There might have been two, three, maybe even four thousand warriors—maybe ten or fifteen warriors to each soldier. Maybe more. And these guys held.”

“How?” Terry looked down to the river. There were ravines, gullies for the Indians to use for cover. “Why didn't they run over these men like they did Custer and his men?”

Wayne laughed but there was no humor in it. A soft sound mixing with the meadowlark songs and soft buzz of flies. “Because they didn't want to. . . .”

Waylon nodded. “That's part of it. They worried that other soldiers were coming—bigger forces that would wipe them out. And they were right. So they fought here for the day, then gathered up their wounded and dead and left.” He pointed to a range of snowcapped peaks in the distance. “Up there. They ran into the Bighorn Mountains and hid.”

The peaks looked mysterious, beautiful. Terry had been watching them all day. “Can we go there next?”

“Into the Bighorns?” Waylon turned. “Into the mountains?”

“Yes. Could we go see them?”

“It's up to Wayne,” Waylon said. “It's his pick next.”

Wayne wasn't listening to them. He was looking down the slope to the Little Bighorn, the river winding peacefully through the trees. “They say Reno like freaked, man.”

Major Reno was the man commanding one of the groups that was supposed to support Custer.

“He did,” Waylon said, nodding. “The man next to him took one in the side of the temple and his brains blew all over Reno's face. He couldn't handle it and started screaming, lost control completely, and his men took off, ran up this hill. . . .”

“Just from that? A hit on somebody else?” Wayne asked.

“Yeah.” Waylon nodded. “That, and about a zillion Indians coming at him.”

“Man, just a wound and he freaks.”

“The kid wants to go into the mountains next,” Waylon said. “You up for that?”

“What?” Wayne was still looking down at the river. “Oh, yeah. Sure. We'll head back down to Buffalo and cross there, get up in the high country.”

“Cowboy country,” Waylon said.

“Real cowboys?” Terry asked. Outside of a movie now and then he had never thought of them much. “Are there still real cowboys?”

“Right on,” Wayne said, laughing. “Maybe we can find you a rodeo. Get
with
the guys with the big hats.”

“And horses?”

“We'll try.”

“Far out,” Terry said.

Waylon and Wayne looked at each other and smiled.

T
HEY DROVE THE HIGHWAY
back south down into Wyoming and at the small town of Buffalo they exited onto a smaller highway and stopped in town for the night at another motel.

“We can always camp,” Waylon said. “Right now we're fat and it's going to rain.”

Terry stood next to the car in the motel parking lot. It was late afternoon and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. “I don't see any rain.”

“Old war wounds,” Waylon said. “Aches and pains. The pressure is changing, which makes me ache, which means a front is coming in, which means it's going to rain. Besides, it always rains in the mountains.”

“Ahh . . .” Terry nodded. “I should have known.”

“Known what?” Wayne had parked Baby under an overhanging roof.

“About the rain coming.”

“Not soon,” Wayne said. “Four hours, at least.”

“You, too?” Terry smiled. “You've got old war wounds?”

Wayne grimaced. “Hell, I
am
an old wound.”

“I feel,” Waylon said, throwing his pack into the motel room, “I feel the need for food.”

“Café,” Wayne said. “Down the street to the left. I saw it coming in.”

Terry felt it as soon as they entered the café—a quickness to the air, a sudden tension. It was a narrow diner-type of building, a counter with stools and three booths. A man with a greasy T-shirt worked in back of the counter, cooking and waiting tables.

He nodded at the three of them when they came in but said nothing. Waylon slid into a booth and Terry moved in next to him, Wayne sat opposite them with his back to the rest of the diner.

There were four men in each of the other two booths, all cowboys, all relatively young, all in the same group, and apparently all drunk. Or near it. They had been talking, but as Terry and the two men came in the diner they stopped and watched the three of them sit down.

“Whoooeeee,” one of them said. “They let anything into this diner.” The speaker was wearing a large black cowboy hat—they were
all
wearing large black cowboy hats—and he stood to see better, talking to the man in back of the counter. “Don't you control it better than this? Letting this kind of thing in here?”

“Sit down, Carly—you're just bein' a no account.”

“The hell I am. Look at 'em—that one is a biker. I don't eat with bikers. And the other one is probably a flatlander. God knows what the pup is. . . .”

Wayne was sitting still, both arms lying loosely on the table, holding a menu he'd taken from behind the napkin holder. He couldn't see the man talking but didn't seem to care what he was saying.

Waylon had looked up once but had gone back to reading his menu as well. To Terry both men seemed calm and unconcerned.

Terry was mad. They were insulting and rude and loud and stupid. “Why don't we go someplace else?” he asked. “We don't have to eat here.”

“Don't sweat it,” Wayne said. “They're just kids blowing. It don't mean nothing.”

Waylon nodded. “All talk.”

And for a moment it seemed Waylon was right. The cowboy's friends toned him down and things started to settle. The owner came from behind the counter with an order tablet. “I'm sorry about that.”

Waylon shrugged. “Just kids . . .”

“They're bull riders. They were here for the rodeo yesterday. They've got two days to wait until the next one in Casper so they've been partying.”

“It happens.” Waylon held up his menu. “You ready to take orders?”

The owner nodded and they ordered hamburgers and fries and malts—were in fact nearly through ordering when the man who had been bad-mouthing them came up in back of the owner.

“You don't need to take their order,” he said. “They were just leaving—weren't you boys?”

At this Wayne looked up. “I don't like that word.”

“What word.”

“
Boy.
”

“Well, hell,
boy,
you don't like it maybe you ought to do something about it.” He pushed the owner sideways out of the way. “When you feel froggy, leap.”