Far Bright Star (2 page)

3

F
OR MONTHS THEY’D RIDDEN
the stony trails. They’d searched the scattered ranges and barren hills, the dry flat basins, dust and rock to no avail. Every trail they cut was the same story. The bandits were to be found in the next high valley, the next mountain peak, a cave that did not exist. A day ago, an hour ago. The orders they carried were catch in the act and kill on the spot, but the one they sought was as if a wind passed by and his trail ended and cold and all sign disappeared. The bandits knew this broken land and were used to poor food and poor water. They were used to starving.

His brother’s work was with the horses and his was to lead men over country of all kinds and to find the bandits. Between them they were to turn out as many cavalrymen as possible in service to the government. But times had changed and this was the new army of the chaplain, the bookkeeper, the teamster, the mechanic, the factotum.

They were entering the rain shadow desert, thousands of square miles that lay between the Sierra Madre Occidentals to the west and the Sierra Madre Orientals to the east. Briefly it had been wet, but now it was dry and rainless and had been for several weeks and what was green and lush and overrich had lost its verdancy and was now desiccated and the memory of one made no difference to the experience of the other.

“Give those horses breathing space,” he commanded, and each paused until the distance lengthened and they strung along the trail and the only sound was the silent lift and hushed fall of shod hooves.

Bandy rode behind and then Preston, Stableforth, Turner, and Extra Billy in the rear. Extra Billy was most dependable when sober, though he had a talent for sleeping in the saddle, his eyes wide open.

Often Napoleon looked back to the light rising behind them, the sun seeming to resize each new moment, the land shredding into gold, and there was nothing to be seen but weltering shimmer and tangle of glitter and the dazzle inside his eye.

A voice in his head kept telling him something would happen today.

He felt the sweat trickling inside his collar. He thought by now he was so old and dried up to be incapable of sweat, even when bathed in heat inescapable. Already the horses’ hides were shining with sweat. He skimmed the Rattler’s neck and snapped the sweat from his fingers. However ill tempered and unmanageable the horse, its backbone was sunk deep and riding the horse was more pleasant than sitting or standing.

His mind went to the place of thought. He’d long passed the middle life and now faced the last of his years. He thought how a man reaches an age where he’s done a lot and when he looks back he can see it all. He sees what he’s done and can’t imagine doing as much in the years to come.

He felt a momentary trembling and recoil of the Rattler horse beneath him, so complete had their minds become.

His father once told him the day has eyes and the night has ears. He looked back to find the hazy rim made by earth and sky, the barren, borderless, and immense world they’d come to, its fearful and consoling emptiness. The wind was increasing and their dust signature drifted behind them. The still puffs seemed to bloom and fall where they rose, but they did not. The blossoms traveled. There was something different. It drew on his mind and try as he might he could not figure it out.

“It’s the wind,” he said to himself. “The wind has switched.”

For months the prevailing winds came from the east. But the wind had changed directions and was now coming from the west.

“That ain’t all,” the voice said. It was a woman’s voice he heard and the Rattler horse scissored its ears.

He turned in his saddle, half expecting the column vanished, but they were still there, plodding the cracked and calcined earth, drowsy and dodgy, still drunk and about asleep in the saddle.

The expedition had become a stage for so many men to play out their ambitions and imaginations. Preston was tall and young and his was a handsome face. He was lean and still weighed two hundred pounds and was strong through his legs and chest and arms. He had blond hair he wore parted in the middle and greased to the sides where it curled. He was in the first part of being young and comported himself as if immortal. He was from Maryland and often spoke of sailing on the Chesapeake. An avid gambler and consistently unlucky at dice and cards, he owed debts to many of the men and some amounts were not insignificant. He really was a boy and not a man. He was a boy grown up but still not a man.

Riding behind Preston was Stableforth, bright eyed and pink cheeked and attempting a mustache. On the whole, a good stout-hearted fellow, but a scientist, he had no business being where he was.

Next was Turner, who was artistic. He carried pencils, watercolors and brushes, a tablet of paper, and also had no business being where he was.

The three were well fitted, their kit tailored and custom made in Baltimore and London. They were warrior princes who presumed lions in their blood, and having killed a trophy hall of wild animals, they were hunting their first man killing, preferably without much fall of their own blood.

When Preston spoke, which was often, his stories were too earnest to be bragging and too fantastic to be lies and were corroborated by Stableforth and Turner. In the presence of his superiors he exhibited extravagant manners and cloying deference and was liked for how exaggerated his person. He talked unabashedly about becoming a senator one day.

The three of them together spoke of France with mystery and fascination: the machine gun, the flamethrower, the gas. He could not deny them the seductive power of violence. They spoke of the war as if the new God. He didn’t know if they’d get their taste; he supposed they would and he wished for them everything they wanted, the poison and fire, the mud and gut shreds, the invisible streams of lead.

Napoleon didn’t hate anyone, because he didn’t particularly care about anyone enough to hate them. But for these men he held slight regard and for Preston he felt only disdain.

He looked back again and Preston smiled, a tight line his mouth, and touched a gloved finger to the brim of his Stetson. He made no gesture in reply and turned his back to the man. Sooner or later he’d have to be dealt with.

4

M
IDMORNING THE SKY
was blue and shot with spears of light. They came to a rail bed bordering a wide, arid, waterless basin. The rails continued on, winding the mountainside before disappearing into a tunnel. Beneath, the broad plain was covered by sage and mesquite, and crossing it was a tiny figure the field glasses revealed to be an old man leading a mule loaded with pick and pan as well as minimum and necessary provisions.

Napoleon told them to stay put and pointed the Rattler horse toward the old man. He pressed with his legs and light in hand, the Rattler horse crossed the tracks to where the trail bent and fell in switchbacks to the desert floor.

He dismounted and called to the old man. Startled, the old man looked up. A whirlwind ginned and skittered across the desert grassland. A jag of wolf lightning descended from the clear blue sky.

The old man worked his way up through the light pulling a short lead rope attached to the mule’s halter ring. He wore blue denim overalls, an overshirt to match, and a coat stitched from canvas. His other hand was wrapped in a dirty rag. He grew in the shimmer, huffing up the last rise to stand beside him.

He’d heard rumors the man was down here prospecting the last unexplored mountains on the continent. He couldn’t remember when last he’d seen him. Nevada, the Dakotas—he could not remember.

But now, he did not look well. It was more than age and the grim life he lived in the rough wild. There was a smell he carried, of decay.

The mule, roach backed and broken winded, brayed three great honking noises and then went silent. The mule’s ears were tatters and in its head was one fixed eye and one loose sclerotic eye. Its neck was skinny and its legs no more than spindles. The Rattler horse nickered and shook its head, rattling the bit in its mouth and scattering froth, wanting away from the stench of these two.

The old man removed his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead. His red nose was sketched with broken vessels and his dirty gray beard hung down to his chest. He was toad eyed with black and sagging eye pouches and wore a ragged neck cloth, stiff with salt. He rubbed at the swelled veins in his temples and then gave a phlegmy cough that doubled him over. In the east the sun-whitened sky had darkened and there was walking rain. The old man stood gazing into the sky, his bandaged hand clasped behind his back. It’d been months since last it rained and they watched it step cross the land and disappear.

“What are you doing out here?” the old man finally said. “Haven’t you got enough sense to get out of the sun?”

“There’s always one more war to fight.”

“After the war is before the war,” the old man said, his expansive forehead glistening with newly sprung sweat.

“I never did plan on dying of old age.”

“You and me both,” the old man said. He thrust a finger into his ear hole and gave it a jiggle.

“It’s been an age since last I saw you,” Napoleon said. “You have lasted.”

“Yes. I have lasted,” the old man said.

“The last time I saw you,” he started to say, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It was quite a long time ago. Since the war I never know what day it is.”

“The mind is a funny thing.”

“Where’s your brother?” The old man raised his feathery eyebrows as if the question was a delight.

“Back that way,” he nodded. “He’s lasted too.”

“I been down south,” the old man said.

“Were it bad down there?”

“Bad enough.”

“That bad,” he sighed.

“Have you got anything to smoke?”

“Baccy.”

The old man unwrapped a meerschaum pipe from a rag. It had a curved stem and a silver lid. There was a tremble in his hands he could not control.

“How far you think you been?”

“Since when?” the old man said.

“Since you started?”

“Thirty thousand miles give or take a thousand miles.”

“That’s a far way.”

“I saw them shoot Maximillian.”

“My grandfather was here in ’forty-six. And my father after him.”

“There’s a lot to remember in life and too much to forget,” the old man said, packing his pipe with what he did not spill. “One gets tired after seeing so much.”

“What have you seen today?” Napoleon asked, striking him a match.

“You got yourself tangled up in a civil war,” the old man said, accepting the match.

“I hear that.”

“I did too one time. Life’s a hard school.”

The old man drew the soporific smoke deep into his lungs. With his bandaged hand he swabbed the perspiration from his face before he spoke.

“Where’d you find this mean bastard?” the old man said of the Rattler horse.

“Come down from up north. Montana. Wyoming. I don’t really know.”

“You’ll never get to the bottom of that horse.”

“No, I don’t believe I will.”

“How long you been out here?”

“Since day broke.”

The old man nodded and his eyes were as if he’d lost the thread of conversation.

“What do you see?”

“Today?” the old man said. “Why, the devil’s out today.”

The old man closed his eyes and made vague gestures as if infested with the invisible and each time he did he set the air with his stench.

“How many is riding with him?”

“Him who?”

“Him the devil.”

“He’s enough. He’ll set death on you all by himself.”

“He’s trouble that way.”

“He’s a deceiving bastard.”

“Are you hungry?” Napoleon said, the old man’s news settling in his mind.

“Not that I know of,” the old man said. His mouth was lathered in white foam and there was a crust at the corners.

“I’m so hungry I could eat the asshole out of a skunk.”

“Yes, I am hungry then too.”

He led the old man to where the others waited and they could smell him too. They shared with him their biscuit and canned meat. Below them the broken land simmered beneath the hot sun. He found for the old man a can of tuna fish and cut it open. As the old man slurped from the can, fish oil ran from his lips and disappeared into his chin whiskers. He finished off the can and then turned his head and spit in the dust.

“Do you have any coconut pie?” the old man inquired, and they all laughed. Then a change came over him and he told them he had to keep going and hastened to continue on his way without so much as a nod, but he didn’t get far before he staggered and fell, his face awash in sweat and fever. He rolled to his side and began vomiting the tuna and biscuit and canned meat.

Napoleon went down on one knee beside the old man where he lay in the dirt and touched his shoulder.

“You going to let me look inside that rag?” he asked.

The old man fixed his eyes on him and said, “I shall be grateful if you would.” He raised his hand the way a dog would raise its paw.

Beneath the dirty windings the old man’s index finger was black and purplish blue. The skin was split and shriveled. The fingernail was gone and the finger swollen and the discharge was violent to Napoleon’s senses. The old man told how he crushed the finger some days ago. The wound had turned angry and the hurt was fearsome, but now he could feel it very little.

“Gangrene,” Stableforth intoned from over his shoulder.

He touched the old man’s forehead. He was burning with fever. He helped the old man shuck his canvas coat and with his folding knife he opened the sleeve of the old man’s over-shirt. Inside his sleeve the old man’s arm was freckled and goose-white and a faint green streak ran up his forearm. The old man saw it too and closed his eyes in resignation.

Napoleon bent forward and laid his hand carefully upon the old man’s shoulder, and in the touch was their understanding. The old man raised his head slowly and his fear-bright eyes did not waver. They both knew what must happen.

Napoleon told the men he needed their canteens, a piece of soap, the nippers from the horseshoeing outfit. In his bags he found a shirt, a razor and the bottles of medicine he carried. He opened the nippers and with a stone whetted the blades.

“Start a fire,” he said, handing them to Turner, “and burn them.”

“Give him your bottle,” he said to Extra Billy who made no argument.

Napoleon wet his hands and soaped them and then he scrubbed the old man’s stained and dirty hand, but he could not change what the earth and sun had done. He washed the old man’s arm and then his own hands again while the old man drank from Extra Billy’s bottle, his gangrenous arm propped on a rock.

When Turner handed him the red hot nippers, he nodded and the men stepped forward to take hold of the old man’s shoulders.

“Git yore god damn hands off me,” the old man cried.

“Let him have his own way,” he told them, and when they stepped back Napoleon suddenly forced the handles together and the rotted finger fell away from where it joined the hand.

The old man groaned and gave a galvanic start. He held up his hand and looked at it with astonishment. His lip began to tremble. Then his eyes rolled upwards and only the whites were visible. He sighed deeply and collected himself for what was next.

“Whisky him,” he said, and Extra Billy allowed the old man another long pull from the bottle and the old man told him he was ready.

With the razor he laid open the green streak in the old man’s forearm and drenched it with a purgation. He dressed the wound with shirting saturated in carbolic acid, the solution hissing and bubbling.

“It’s time you harbored,” he said to the old man.

The old man’s eyes soured and then they blazed. Then he said, “Some of us, we are condemned to endure life.”

“Ain’t you the wise owl,” Napoleon said.

He lit the old man’s pipe for him and rolled himself a cigarette he placed behind his ear. He told the old man there’d be wagons shortly and if he knew what was good for him he’d hitch a ride.