Far Bright Star (13 page)

“This is where it ends,” he said.

“Do you not remember anything more?” the agent said.

“We were on a trail and we got off the trail somewhere.”

“Do you not remember where?”

“If I could remember, I wouldn’t do it on your account,” he said, his patience with this man now exhausted.

“I don’t like it,” the Baldwin-Felts agent said.

“What do you like?” Napoleon said.

The Blue horse was behind him, thrusting its nose, smooth as silk, under his elbow. He turned to it and rubbed its forehead. The horse lowered its head until it was pressed against his chest and he stroked its glossy neck.

“Leave it alone,” Goudge said to the Baldwin-Felts agent.

“Leave it alone? How can he not remember?” The agent persisted.

When the detective would not relent his brother turned the chestnut horse fiercely and spurred forward. He rode hard the short distance he’d traveled, pulled up, and came off the animal in one motion.

It was not his brother’s way to reason, or argue. His brother struck the agent and struck hard as if the man was just another animal wandering the earth and then he walked away to where the chestnut stood patient and quiet.

The agent lay stunned on the ground nursing the side of his head already glowing with the red bruise that would turn blue and then purple. Goudge went to him and helped him onto his feet. He sputtered with outrage and threat.

“He tried to kill me.”

“You ain’t dead, are you?” Goudge said.

“No.”

“Then he didn’t try.”

“They don’t turn the other cheek, mister,” the first Smith said.

“They ain’t even got an other cheek,” the second Smith said.

He knew they’d never find Preston’s body and it was pointless to try. His body would be dragged for miles, dragged until there was nothing left at the end of the rope. Who knew that his body wasn’t still being dragged and what little of it remained was just now wearing out and dropping away and disappearing forever.

Did they really want the truth, especially this truth? Perhaps it is so; people cannot bear the mystery of disappearance. But Preston’s disappearance, however unbearable, was better than the truth.

Blowing their way was a dirty smoke and soon they could hear its crackling on the air. From over sky distance came the sound of a grinding engine. The engine coughed and sputtered and went out. To the north the photographer had caught fire to the brush and to the south the Jenny had gone down beyond the sun-tinted mountains.

There was a mottling of western light. The deaths of the men was an episode closed, their remains wrapped and trussed in a tight bundles, their bodies as light and fleshless as kindling. When the moon rose that night, the stars in the sky were red as blood and they were a long straggling troop returning from their mission. The pilot of the Jenny, his leg in a splint rode with them. Some men watched the stars in their coming while others sat on their horses asleep, their shoulders folded and heads bobbing. It was late that day, long past darkness, when they sifted past the fixed sentinels and back into camp. The arc lights crackled on the perimeter and then they went out.

22

M
OST PEOPLE WANTED
to be someone or something else but not him, not his brother. They never thought they were anything but what they were. They were cavalrymen and life on horseback was the only life they knew, and yet on this night he went to see the General, to tell him he was leaving.

“Home?” the General said.

“I’d like to see my father,” he told the General.

“What about your brother?”

“Just me.”

The General lifted his glasses and settled them lower on his nose that he might look over the tops of them. The two brothers were his intractable men. They were his worst soldiers but his most loyal, most dependable, most efficient, most lethal men. He could not have stood a hundred men like them because that was not how armies were made, but two, or five, that did nicely.

The General took up a piece of paper and an ink pen and asked him when he signed on, how many years ago, but he could not remember.

“A long time ago,” the General said, and began writing.

It was last year the General lost his family: his wife and his little girls. They burned to death at the Presidio while he was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. It was in January Villa killed American mine engineers on the Chihuahua train and then two months later he’d attacked Columbus, New Mexico.

The General put down his pen and leaned over to blow the last ink dry. He took off his rimless spectacles and let them dangle at the ends of his fingers. He watched the General moving his lips as he read the orders he’d written. He put his finger on the line he was reading to hold his place before looking up. His eyes became very bright and shined in his head as if he’d seen the unseen.

“They say,” he began, “that young people think they can’t die. They do not understand its potential. I disagree. It is simply the fact that young people are stupid and thank you for that because we need them to fight our wars.”

“Some come back alive and some don’t.”

“I was wondering if, when you are in that place, you know anything.”

“Which place would that be?” Napoleon said.

“Heaven. Hell. Does it make much difference?”

“No. I don’t believe it does.”

“Either way I guess they know now.” The General set down the letter and took out a cigarette and struck a match. He had a habit of lighting a match and holding it while he talked and forgetting to use it and then lighting another.

“Is this for good?” he asked, seeming to come from a trance.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Have you ever thought about getting out altogether?”

“I can’t say that I ever have.”

“We’ve had some times,” the General said.

“We have.”

“I would be honored if you would have a drink with me.”

The General took a bottle from a locker and two glasses and for a time they were just two old men, raw boned and hollow bellied, in the company of each other.

“I should like to meet your father some day,” the General said, holding up his glass.

“My father?”

“Yes.”

“He surely had himself some times.”

“Tough old birds back then.”

“They took a lot of killing.”

“This god damn goose chase is a discredit to war.”

“I hear that.”

“Will you be back?” the General asked him again.

“I have not thought about it,” he said, and then he said, “I suppose it depends on what I find.”

“Do you think there’s a lot left to find?” the General said.

“I would say we’ve already found plenty,” he said, and the General agreed.

They finished their drinks and stepped outside into the night. Parked beside the General’s quarters was an automobile, a Dodge five-passenger touring car.

“Have you thought about how you are going?” the General asked.

“I thought to hitch a ride on a truck.”

“Take this car,” the General said, and he agreed to do so and thanked him.

“Do you know how to drive it?”

“No.”

“Do you want a driver?”

“No. I’ll figure it out,” Napoleon said.

The two men drew near together, and each leaned in to grasp the other’s hand. They held the handshake and then they stepped back, and his orders secure in the breast pocket of his tunic, he turned and walked away.

As he made his way back to his tent he made one last pass through town. In the window of a shop the photographer rented were newly printed postcards on display. The photographer must’ve worked all night to have the silvery images of the dead first ready. In the air were cooking smells and the smell of the latrines and coal oil and when the air changed it was tainted with a burning smell.

At the corner to an alley he heard a faint whistle in the darkness, someone calling to him. He cocked his head and held it there without moving as he sorted out what drew his attention. He turned his head and more distinctly he heard the whistle again. He followed the sound, a young boy, down a dark weedy path that wove between buildings.

He stopped and listened to the blunt tap of a cobbler’s hammer. He watched a woman washing clothes beneath the laddering light of the moon. There was the sound of a foot-powered wood lathe. The boy whistled again and he knew how he knew the boy. It was the boy who shined his boots. He followed him down the path where he met with the smell of raw sewage and creosote, the stink of human sweat, cold blood, and caked fat. They passed a pair of gaunt and scraggly dogs that were tearing at a wet gunnysack trying to get at what was inside. Another dog slanched into his path on the way to the wet gunnysack. There was a woman milking a goat, its head was turned and its face was in her neck. The woman’s eyes were like wet silver in the darkness and he realized she was blind.

The boy paused at a cross path and waited and when he caught up the boy moved on, more quickly and deeper into the labyrinth of walls and fences and garden plots. In the light of the open door he could see a woman nursing an infant. He did not know why, but the woman’s look was intent and she was staring at him. She seemed to know him and this knowledge unsettled him. Sitting beside her was an old woman gone in the teeth dandling a baby. The old woman was quick eyed and threw him a nod in the direction he was going and then looked away.

They traced a long adobe wall and finally came to tall doors set in the long wall where the boy stopped and indicated he should wait before he pulled mightily at a black iron ring and disappeared though the slender swing of an opening.

Inside the door was a zaguan, a roofed passage connecting the perimeter buildings, and beyond a moonlit yard laid with cobblestones. There were bundles of hay and straw and sacks of animal feed. There was a wagon and beside it a carriage under repair, the rear axle propped on wooden barrels. Somewhere in the darkness, beneath a branchless tree, a bird fluttered in a cage. He could see a candle in a glass faintly burning in the window opening. Then it moved and disappeared and then it appeared again and it was coming in his direction.

He watched from the door shadow as the fragile light came his way across the yard, low to the cobbled ground. Behind his back, sheet lightning illuminated the earth. It was a young woman wearing a veil and she moved with the dreamy motion of drunkenness, sheltering the candle glass with her cupped hand as she wove her steps across the cobbles. The closer she came the younger she became until she was not a woman but a girl whose black hair veiled her face.

When she came abreast of him she looked up at him. She smelled of perfume. Her lips were painted carmine and her complexion pale and whited. Her other hand at the base of her throat, she held up the candle glass that he should recognize her face. In the light he could see her red lips and soft cat eyes, but the light was too thin and he did not recognize her.

She stared at him with a steady gaze and then slowly she reached back and lifted her hair from the nape of her neck.

Then he remembered her. Her screams that night in the cantina. When he heard her cry out he stood so abruptly he overturned his chair and the table and crossed the room and tore back the curtain. There was a short hallway revealed with three curtained cribs on each side. At the end of the hallway he tore back another curtain and there was Preston. He was standing in the corner, naked from the waist down and he was bleeding from the wrist where he’d been cut with a straight razor. He was hysterical, mute and trembling, for what had happened to him. On his face he wore the unnatural smile of the drunk and terrified. He stared at his wrist as if an evil newly attached.

Napoleon remembered her cowering in a corner of the room holding a hand to the side of her head and blood was seeping from between her fingers. She held her other hand to her nose where another source of blood was wetting her hand to the wrist. Her face was bruised and contorted with pain. One eye had closed. He found a white cloth and took her hand away. The round of her ear was missing. It’d been cut away from her head. He held the cloth to her wound and then covered it with her hand and pulled her head against his chest, her hand in between and he held her in his arms.

He could now see the maiming Preston had committed to her. Her cheek on that side and her forehead were still flush with traumatic bruising and this she’d tried to hide with cornstarch. Her face was still bruised and her half ear was rimed black and still crusted with a blood bandage.

She blew out the candle and reached into a pocket sewn to her skirt and removed a package wrapped in butcher paper and tied with string. She handed it to him, but when he went to open it she stayed his hand and shook her head no, he should not unwrap it, not now, and indicated, Take it away. Take it from me.

He went to speak, but she shook her head no. She closed her eyes and pressed a hand against the side of her head. She would not talk to him. There was nothing to say.

He let the package into his trouser pocket as she disappeared behind the massive wooden door and it slowly closed. From there he made his way back through the matrix of paths and alleys to the main street.

It was in front of a cantina he encountered Wheeler. A number of soldiers were lounging and smoking in the shadowy darkness. Wheeler stood in yellow light in the open doorway eating a sausage off the end of a skewer and drinking from a bottle of beer. Sitting against the wall were men perched on the hind legs of their chairs. They were half drunk, smoking, chewing, spitting, digesting. They’d brought out a watermelon and some were eating fat slices and spitting seeds into the dust. It was another night in the army for them, just like any other. They could see him coming and yet there was no sign of respect for his rank.

“Hey there, old-timer,” Wheeler said.

He could taste his blood in his throat. Let it go, his mind repeated. Keep walking, he told himself, but he did not. He thought about the girl. He thought about the grief inside him.

He began walking in Wheeler’s direction and Wheeler waited for him as he came on. He could not tell how much the man had been drinking. It did not seem he was drunk, but he trusted that to be the source of his insolence.

“How are you this evening?” Wheeler inquired.

“Fair. And yourself?”

“Been better. Been worse.”

Wheeler bit off the last of the sausage and threw the skewer aside. The men at the wall kept sucking at the fleshy melon. Swaggering, half-drunken soldiers strolling the streets were stopping to see what was going on. Standing about, sitting in the half shadows were, no doubt, some of the very men they were hunting.

“Tell me something,” Wheeler said. “Every man I ever knew was scared of getting old and dying. Is that true?”

“Dying’s true,” he said. He would not fall back on his rank to deal with this man. He had never done so and was not about to start.

“This country can kill you,” Wheeler said.

“What country won’t?” he said, squaring his shoulders to the man.

“I wouldn’t know that. I haven’t been everywheres else like you have.” Wheeler took on a jolly face and a confident smile.

“Don’t make him mad, sir. He can be mean as a cut snake.” One of the other men had decided to be a part of what was happening.

“I ain’t afraid of you or your brother,” Wheeler said.

“No, I don’t suppose you are,” he said. “But I sense the fear.”

“What have I got to be afraid of?”

He knew he could not make up for what happened in the desert, but he was in the mood to kill this man if he had to and he was cold to the business of it.

“You want to shed your blood?” he asked Wheeler. “You try me and I will kill you for the love of killing you.”

Wheeler’s mouth was finally stopped. He toed the gravel with his boot.

“Look at me when I speak to you,” he said.

Napoleon looked in his eyes and willed that he should make the move to challenge him. There was nothing this fight would wash away. This was nature’s work and the malice he felt was not for this man but was from the time before ancient came.

“You couldn’t fight before,” Wheeler said. “What makes you think you can now?”

Napoleon took one step and swung as hard as he could from the muscle ridged across his shoulders. It was a vicious punch and under his knuckles he could feel the crush of Wheeler’s nose. The man went down on his knees his hands at his face and the red blood blossoming beneath them. He let the man bleed and then he swung again, another vicious blow and felt the man’s jawbone breaking from its hinge and giving way and the man was lying in the street, his broken face torn with agony.

Inside his guts he was dry as horn and was as if he willed the instant of pain the man experienced. He wanted it to be something alive that would never die and the man would feel it forever, even after his death.

Then his blood quieted. He stood over the fallen man in watery moonlight and looked into the shadows of the porch. He took out a bought cigarette and struck a match. Wheeler made a choking sound and then he was hacking up blood from his throat and spitting out the blood. He opened his hand and looked at his teeth and then covered his bloody face again.

Under the shadow of the cantina roof were the sons of bitches of human nature. Look at me, he thought. Take a look. The world’s full of no-good people, he thought, and he included himself. Nothing made sense to him except what was primitive and vengeful.