Far Bright Star (10 page)

17

W
HEN HE WOKE
in the morning the only sound was the husking of the wind. He imagined he was near the end of a dream and presently he’d awaken with a start and see the walls of his tent, hear the snorts of horses.

He lay on a sougan and a tarpaulin shelter rigged to block the sun. A wet cloth lay damping his forehead. He vaguely remembered the palm of a hand tilting his head and water wetting his face and leaking into his mouth, bathing his swollen tongue. His lips were wet and his face burned and cooled at the same time.

Teddy squatted beside him, his rifle held to his chest pointed at the sky. His back was crossed by bandoleers of ammunition, his one vanity a yellow silk binding his long black hair. A canteen sat in the sand easily within reach. A ways off his brother sat in a canvas chair he’d unfolded beneath a white cotton umbrella. He could see his brother’s black boots. They were knee-high leather boots and he wore them with a woolen insert around the knee so they wouldn’t rub.

His brother had a rifle across his lap and was eating canned salmon as he read a magazine. When he was finished he tossed the can, licked his spoon clean, and slid it into the top of his boot where he carried it. He wet a finger with his tongue, turned a page of his magazine. He then slipped sunflower seeds into his mouth where he cracked them with his teeth and spit away their husks while he continued his reading. When his mouth was empty he reached into his pocket and took out another handful of seeds and fed them into his mouth.

However injured Napoleon might be he was not sure, but he was contented and fulfilled and replete in the constancy of his brother’s reading and spitting, in the presence of Teddy squatting beside him. He tried to say something. He was trying to get his thoughts right and fashion them into words, but what do you say when you are born out of death?

They said nothing to him. They asked him no questions and made not a sound. He later learned they’d ridden seventy hours, day and night, without stopping. They started with a cavvy of the best horses laddered behind them and changed horses frequently, cutting the expended ones loose in the desert. First Sergeant Chicken and Ten Square did the same. Bowman, Goudge, Merrill, Little, Hubert, Fat Mouth, Gauly, Taylor, and Wheeler all with supreme skill in the handling of horses ferried out fresh relays as they sliced off vast reaches of the high desert in search of the missing patrol. There were now dozens of blown horses they’d discarded in their search, dropped dead or still wandering the desert land.

They maintained a watchful gaze that passed over him and into the beyond and would not presume to look at him for how broken, burned, and undignified his being. His brother and the Apache waited silently for a sign from him, so little of what is called life was left inside him. They would’ve waited the rest of that week if necessary and if he didn’t recover only God knows what his brother might’ve done.

As far as he could tell, he lay in the middle of nowhere. He was aware of a presence, the wall of stone, the depression where he sheltered, but nothing else except emptiness. He reached with his hand and flailed to find the seep of water that saved his life, but he could not find it. The ground was hard and dusty and only rock and no evidence that it’d ever been otherwise. There was no water where he lay and the water he thought he found was made in the gentle mind that was easing him into his death. His mind was so like a ghost inside his head. He could feel the daggers of sunlight through the tarpaulin, death’s hand still trying to touch him.

He groaned at the thought, so close it was, and Teddy turned and silently held a canteen to his lips and tipped it forward. The water trickling into his mouth seemed to need itself. He lifted a hand and tipped a guzzle into his mouth until he was choking and water was spiking in his nose. When he began to shake Teddy withheld more until he collected himself. Then he let him have a sip more.

“What day is it,” he managed to say.

Teddy shrugged—how should I know? Why would I care to know?

“How long,” he asked, meaning how many days gone by.

Teddy flicked three fingers in the air. Three days. That long.

He closed his eyes and opened them and when he did Teddy had turned away, the yellow silk an extraordinary color at the back of his head.

Teddy continued his vigil. He looked to his front and then left and then right. It wasn’t caution but habit. He was like the wild animal, stalking his prey while at the same time being preyed upon. Teddy held few illusions of innocence and experience, right and wrong. He was here and passing the time and coldly indifferent to both time and place.

“He murder anyone looking for me?”

Teddy looked at him and then away. It was a pointless question. We murder them or they murder us.

He knew he was safe. The Apache held sight beyond the horizon. His brother claimed their sight was 361 degrees and their vision took their sight over the curve of the earth. The Apaches were never found and never discovered. They did the finding. They did the discovering and when called upon they did the silent bloody work that was necessary.

For Teddy this life was just killing time until he could enter the next life and his paradise in the underworld where he’d live forever and never have to die again. There he would find all good and tasty things to eat and there would be water and there would be an abundance. In the underworld, life would go on much as it did in this life, but it would be a better life than this one because there would be no more meaning to comprehend. There would be no purpose, no reason, no significance, no concern. He’d scout and hunt and fight, but in the underworld these would just be something to do and unnecessary and what a relief that would be.

After a while he awoke to the sound of a horse riding hard. It was Sergeant Chicken. He rode a paint and behind him dallied another paint, a high-white, blue-black sabino. The horse was white stockinged to above the knees and wore a jagged white pattern on the belly and flank. There were white markings on its face that extended past its eyes. Later he would learn those eyes were blue. The blue-black sabino was a ghostly horse, its markings, as if an afterthought, half conceived, half executed. The horse was bone and wrung-out muscle and still it was a beautiful and, the way it carried its head, an equable horse. It made him think, What a pretty horse.

Sergeant Chicken leaned down from his saddle. He spoke to his brother and pointed to where he’d come from. Then, leaving the sabino behind, he hied off again in the direction from which he’d appeared.

The sabino looked down at his brother who’d resumed leafing the pages of his magazine.

It was a long time after that a wagon pulled by a team of mules, the swingletrees rattling and traces flying, trundled into the place where he lay. In the bed was a pallet of straw between square blocks of ice wrapped in woolen blankets. The many hands were then lifting him over the sideboards and settling him on the cooling pallet of straw. Over this they rigged the tarpaulin to keep him cool and keep out of the burning sunlight. When they lifted him he lost his breath as he felt to fly and only in shade did he catch his breath. How empty he felt the hollows of his bones, as empty as windblown ash.

His brother reached over the closed tailgate and gently clasped his head in his hands and their faces were so close. He looked up into his brother’s suntouched face. His brother’s eyes were blue and gray and sharp and his face as always was mask to his thoughts. He could smell peppermint.

With the touch of his brother he felt collapse the last structures inside him. He could still feel death’s weight. It was the only feeling he knew. His eyes watered and he tried to speak but his brother gestured — you shouldn’t talk.

“Where were you?” he struggled to say.

“Please forgive me. I am sorry.”

“You are forgiven,” Napoleon sighed, and then he said, “There was a time I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

“Sometimes you think it’s special because it’s happening to you, but it’s not.”

Then his brother told him it was waiting to happen and it would have happened to anyone, but it was he who was there when it happened.

“I am not dead yet, am I?” he said.

“Someday. But not yet.”

His brother then told him how he was taking a nap when in his sleep it came to him that something terrible-bad was happening.

Napoleon opened his mouth to speak, but his jaw cramped and he could not close it.

“I knew right then,” his brother said, easing closed his mouth, and told him he pulled on his boots and fetched the Apache and they began to ride.

“I knew you would know,” he said.

“You’re alive,” his brother said.

“I don’t know if you could call it that.”

“I thought I lost you.” His brother smiled.

His brother told how the meat wagons went to rendezvous and there was nothing there. They waited around and then the storm came and they barely made it back. But by that time he was already in the saddle.

“I am the only one?”

“You’ll feel better after a cool bath and long drink,” his brother said, but Napoleon made no response because he was not so sure that would be the case.

“Bandy?” he said.

“No sign.”

“He had a chance,” he said, and his brother shrugged. Maybe.

Overhead the sky was deep and from where he lay he could see the mountains blued in the distance. Fields of white cloud moved west to east shadowing the land. He put his hands in front of his eyes on the off chance someone should see him weeping for the grief and tranquillity, the stillness and humility he felt inside his mind.

By this time Sergeants Ten Square and Big Chow had converged on their location and the tarp was lashed secure. His brother stepped away, gave the order and the mule skinner called out. There was the rattle of harness and a jangling lurch and they were moving, and his brother and the Apaches took him away from there as if their business done and they owned all the time there was and every place it occurred.

In the days to come he’d tell his brother everything that happened. He’d tell him about the sandstorm and how they dismounted and formed a line and then came the blood horse. How Turner was shot in the guts and there was a double-barreled shotgun and that was the end of Turner, and Stableforth shot in the mouth and Extra Billy turning on the machete when a bullet cut him down. He’d learn there was no sign of the old man he’d doctored for gangrene and left to be found waiting by the road for the wagons.

“There ain’t no albinos,” his brother would say of the horses.

“That’s what I thought,” he would say, and his brother would think about what he said and after a while he would speak again and he’d say, “Extra Billy was kilt twice,” as if it should not be overlooked or forgotten.

“The old man?” he asked again.

“I tell you there weren’t no old man.”

He would remember waking up in the Sibley tent, his bloody feet soaking in a basin of water. The light of a huge half-moon was crossing the pellucid darkness and graying the inside of the tent were the shadows of the passing men against its walls. There was an orderly breaking ice with a hatchet, crushing it and filling ice bags with screw tops. He was surrounded by them. He felt a hot flush run through him and then shivered from their cold. Beneath his cot were more cooling blocks of ice giving up their cold and melting into the thirsty earth. There was a watermelon in a washtub, a porcelain water pitcher and basin.

“What in hell?” he said, and the orderly looked up at him with wide anxious eyes. He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He felt as if something was shattered inside him. He felt hot and cold and experienced a fit of hard-shaking chills followed by nausea.

“What are you doing?” he demanded to know.

“I was tol’ to keep you cooled down and the flies off’n you.”

“Find me some spurs,” he said. “Saddle my horse.” But he began to shiver again and could not stop himself and his teeth were chattering.

Outside the wall of the tent he could hear them talking.

It was said he ought to be dead is what he ought to be.

“How many was killed?” another voice said.

“All of them,” the first voice said.

“It’s a miracle he ain’t dead.”

“Yes. It’s a fucking miracle.”

He could smell the cigarettes they smoked and wished for one. Then he slept again. For how long he did not know. His body stank with sweat and burned dead skin. At least he knew he was not now dead.

18

T
HAT FIRST NIGHT
sleep was difficult and spent in vague, deep, and inaccessible dreams. He knew he was at the depth of his physical decline and on the verge of his recovery. He began to shiver from the sun’s poisoning and could not stop himself. Soon his whole body was quivering and his teeth clacking and he cried out for how painful the shuddering movement that racked his body. He felt himself to be coming apart with the force that struck his joints and could not help but cried out in agony.

His brother called to him, saying his name and he wondered where he’d heard the name before and then he recognized it as his own.

His brother left his cot and lay down on top of him, covering his body with his own as if to keep him from flying apart. He worked his arms around him and squeezed and held him, his face in his neck until the jarring shakes relented and he could collect himself. They came on again and swept through him with a ferocity that left him panting and helpless.

The repetition of the ordeal exhausted him and he had all he could do to smoke the cigarette his brother shaped for him. The strong black tobacco dizzied him and gave him some peace, but he could not help himself and he moaned with the slightest movement, with each return of the judders, and he knew his body would cry with ache in the morning.

From outside the tent came a light and the murmur of voices. A Coleman lamp had been lit and turned down low and two old troopers were smoking and drinking and remembering their horses. He fell to sleep again and passed into a second sleep and this one took him into the dead of night and through to morning. When he woke it was to the familiar hum and din of the army. He remembered waking in the desert and the yellow silk that bound Teddy’s black hair. He remembered being lifted into the wagon, being held in the night in his brother’s arms.

Teddy sat on a stool at the tent opening. The way his shoulders and arms moved he was working horsehair. He was content to lie still and watch Teddy’s back, the weaving movements of his shoulders and elbows. When they brought fresh blocks of ice, Teddy picked up his stool and stepped aside with his flow of strands that they might haul in fresh blocks to place under his cot. He closed his eyes that they should think him asleep.

But Teddy wasn’t fooled and sent for his brother and when he came he brought a cup of sweet sugary coffee, a waxed paper full of hot biscuits, and a basket of eggs. He unfolded the canvas chair and sat down beside the cot. He took out his tobacco and rolled him a smoke and after lighting it, placed it between Napoleon’s lips.

His brother said nothing and in his presence there was no curiosity. There were no anxious questions as to the battle, the killed and missing men, or the days he experienced in the desert.

Napoleon held up a hand, a preface to saying something, and then he let his hand back down—the best he could do.

His brother leaned over and took his chin in the perch of his hand and studied his thinned and haggard face. Both Napoleon’s eyes were blackened and his lips were split, crusted and swollen. His cheeks were raw and yellowed with blisters.

“I see you got scratched up pretty good,” his brother said, but the only sign of concern he could read in his brother’s face was the constant tonguing of a toothpick he chewed when he was not smoking a cigarette.

“You okay?” his brother asked, cocking his head to one side. “You ain’t cuckoo?”

“Do I look okay?”

“No. You look like death warmed over,” he said, letting go of his chin and sitting back in the canvas chair.

“I feel like it,” he said.

“You made it,” his brother said. “You get to do everything one more time.”

“It’s a regrettable thing.”

“They were brave horses,” his brother said.

“Bandy and Extra Billy,” he said. “It is my shame to have lost those men.”

The affair had been worse than tragic; it had been stupid. He needed to ease his heart. He could not help himself in this moment.

“I see your meaning well enough,” Xenophon said, but still, he himself regretted more the loss of the mounts.

“I want to be dressed,” he said, and heard his voice break like a child’s.

After his brother helped him stand from the cot he held erect for some seconds and then with a groan he collapsed to the floor, upsetting the cot and the canvas chair, the coffee and biscuits. His collapse was so complete his brother could not catch him in his falling and he felt his cheek split open.

His brother kneeled down and righted the cot and lifted him to his feet that he could lie back down.

“Got any more bright ideas?”

“No.”

Xenophon bandaged his bleeding cheek and washed him and put liniment on him to soothe his leg and arm joints.

“Bad things happen in this world,” his brother said.

“Do you believe it will be any better in the next?”

“What next?”

Xenophon worked hard trying to make the pain come out of Napoleon as if his body was just another body to be worked on, like the body of a horse, but it was a stubborn pain he worked and not wholly of the body. If the pain was inside the mind it could be seen through the depths of the eyes, just like a horse. No one knew when or how the pain could get there, but a pain that found its way into the mind was to be feared the most because pain in the body was treatable and could be worked out of a man or a horse. But when the pain found its way into the man’s mind, or the horse’s mind, it was impossible to tell.

He lifted his head to watch his brother’s attempt to relieve his body, to restore some peace to his aching bones and muscles and skin.

“They were not Villa’s,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“There were Yaquis with them.”

“Then who were they?”

“I believe they were their own army themselves.”

His brother was running his hands over him, finding the pain’s hot joints and each time he did he made fists and sank them deeply into his burned flesh. Why he was doing this he did not know. The pain had no location and his skin was agony when touched. His face stiffened under his brother’s heavy hands and more than once he moaned and had to catch his breath.

His brother paused and sat back and when he returned to his work his touch was lightened.

“That feels good,” he said.

“No, it don’t,” his brother said.

From the basket his brother took an egg. He broke the egg and dishing the yolk from one shell to the next he let the raw albumen pour from the shells onto his burned skin where it smoothed and gelled.

“Try and sleep some more,” his brother said.

“I have nightmares.”

“What kind of nightmares?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Is it the kind of thing you want to remember?”

“No,” he said. “Probably not.”

“You’ll take it to bed with you for a while,” his brother said.

One after another he cracked the eggs and held the yolks inside their shells and let the cool albumen slide onto his skin and then he covered him with a thin clean sheet.

“Did you ever think of getting married?” Napoleon said.

“Did I ever say I did?”

“No.”

“You marry a wife you have married trouble.”

“That’s what I thought.”

That day and night there was a turmoil in his mind. He’d seen worse, he just couldn’t remember when. But this time there was a sureness taken from him, a carelessness and a sureness when it came to his being. He could not explain it. He was still an able and confident man, but something had slipped away from him and left behind was an emptiness he could feel inside himself. He was entering into a new and strange life. Was it brought on by the unfortunate events in the desert, or was it waiting for him all this time and an experience and condition inevitable?

When he awoke, inside the tent was sably darkness. At first he was unsure of his surroundings, but then he recalled where he was. He remembered Extra Billy lifting a bloody fist to his smiling lips and tipping his fist as if a whisky glass. He shooed the thought away and another, shot through the jaw and his mouth a mixture of teeth and bone and flesh, the face skin blown open and the working muscles revealed.

On a plate beside his cot was a hamburger sandwich and there was a pitcher of water. His cheek felt tight and knotted. When he touched it he could feel coarse horsehair stitches where he’d broke it open. His brother or Teddy, both of them horse doctors, applying their needle and rough technique to his cut face while he slept.

He remembered a sheltered place with mud walls, an ancient place built on the ruins of an earlier civilization, a fairly well-traveled road, an approach to a mountain pass, but a place he had never been before. Such places are scattered across the deserts of the world, but where was this one? Could it be they went back in time and only he was allowed to return?

Arbutus howled from beyond the wall of the tent. He thought, What beautiful dreams the insane must occasionally have: the violin, the green apple, people who love each other, people who gaze hopefully, people who forgive, God.

He could make out his brother’s form on the cot beside his own. He lay with his hands behind his head and made blue cigarette smoke. He rarely slept in his cot and usually slept with the horses.

“Are you awake?” Napoleon said.

“You’re not dead yet?”

“No. Not lately.”

“Good.”

“Koons?”

“Koons? He died.”

“Let me share that cigarette,” he said, and his brother reached it over to him.

The memories began again to take him. He knew he died out there and when he died the old world died with him, but it made no difference because the new world would likewise be a world of killing and in most ways indistinguishable from the old world.

“Preston,” Napoleon said.

“He was a complete bastard, that one. May he go to the hot place.”

His brother lit another cigarette from the one they’d been smoking and they shared this one too.

“Now what are you thinking?” his brother said, spitting a fleck of tobacco from between his teeth.

“Nothing. I was just away in my mind.” He shrugged his shoulders. The question meant little to him. There was no meaning in any of it.

“Can’t remember?”

“No. Not really,” he said, and it was true, he could not.