Saffire (31 page)

“I cannot help but wonder what it looks like where you live in the Dakotas. I imagine towns with wide dirt streets and men in masks riding horses up to a bank and robbing it at gunpoint.”

“It's not the way that moving pictures portray it.”

“I wish to know more about where you live. Paint a picture for me, please, Mr. James Holt.”

Her voice caressed. Her accent gave a lyrical sound to my first and last name, imbuing it with intimacy that accelerated the beat of my heart. The chance to describe my home made me feel like I had been asked to slay a dragon.

I told her about the blizzards and the temperatures so cold that a man's spit would turn to ice before hitting the snow. I told her about the gray-water floods that tore at the hills of the Badlands in spring, bowing the resilient bankside willows almost horizontal, and how when the waters subsided, dead grass would tuft the tips of the willows and remain a crown all through the summer. I told her about arid winds and the tinkling of a meadowlark's call and the melody of coyotes that seemed so in harmony with huge silver moonrises over the ancient hilltops—hilltops worn to strata that sometimes exposed the fossilized bones of creatures that could only live in the illustrations of the fantastic. And all the while, I watched her face and soaked in a sensation that I had never expected would course through my heart again.

She sighed. “It sounds like a place of poetry. Sometimes this heat and humidity and mountains are cloying, suffocating.”

“I marvel at Panama. Life springs everywhere, hungry for every inch. Every creature possible finds a way to swim, crawl, fly. It is astounding.”

Yet I could not live here, not without far horizon and limitless sky and freedom that some mistook for desolation. I did not voice this.

“You haven't spoken of your daughter,” Raquel said.

“Winona. You only asked about the land.”

“So now I am asking about her. Are you not afraid for her life while you are here and unable to protect her?”

“Afraid?”

“Savages. Raiding your homestead.”

She seemed serious. Of course. She saw the Wild West show in London. Buffalo Bill had sold the image she expressed to the entire world.

“There was a time,” I said, “when the Sioux rightfully defended their land.” I chuckled. “In fact, the United States lost a war to a great Sioux warrior named Red Cloud. But the treaties have since been signed, and it's been decades since anything like that happened.”

“So your daughter is not in danger from savages?”

“Winona is with one right now.”

Those beautiful eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”

“Cetanwakuwa.”

“I don't understand.”

“He's Sioux. Roughly translated into our language, his name is Attacking Falcon. I call him Hawk. Winona calls him Unk Hunk. Started when she was too little to say Uncle Hawk properly.”

Unk Hunk had been in the Wild West Show with his sister. He was the Sioux warrior responsible for the long scar on my ribs. An accident when a stray buffalo had knocked him off his horse, and he'd flailed for balance with his feather-notched spear extended.

“A savage?” Raquel said.

“A Sioux.”

“And you trust her with him?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “As I mentioned, he is Winona's uncle.”

It took her a few moments. “She is…your wife was…your brother-in-law is…”

“Cetanwakuwa is full-blooded Sioux. I married his sister, Ojinjintka, who was also full-blooded Sioux. They were both part of Buffalo Bill's show for years. As for Winona, she carries the blood of two peoples. Those who are cruel call my daughter a half-breed.”

Not for the first time it occurred to me that Roosevelt would have passed this knowledge along to Goethals and that the colonel guessed that seating me beside a girl like my own daughter would have predisposed me to sympathy for the girl.

“Those here who are cruel use the term
mulatto,
” Raquel said. “Saffire…”

Raquel seemed to be letting me fill her silences, but it didn't matter. My regret was that, regardless of whether she enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed hers, this afternoon would end. She would return to her life and I to mine. She to the fecund green vibrancy and color of Panama, a place swelling with the noise of insects and birds and machinery and people. Me to the whites and browns of a Dakota landscape, remarkable at hiding the life it supported.

“Saffire,” I said. “She is an amazing girl.”

“I love her like a sister,” Raquel said. “But I wish she wouldn't come and go with such impunity. I haven't seen her since yesterday afternoon. Have you seen her today?”

“No. Not since Monday afternoon.”

The girl had lived up to her promise to put me out of her life, and I was surprised at how sad it made me, given the short time I had spent with her.

“I won't worry. She always reappears. And such a fierce and smart girl. If women could vote and run for office, she would become president of the republic someday.”

“Her mother,” I said. “Do you believe she ran away? Do you believe the letter she gave to your father was the truth?”

Raquel looked away for a long pause, and then back at me. “I came here to sit with a cowboy who intrigues me and makes me smile. Not for an interrogation by an investigator. Please, let us enjoy this time together. Will that be acceptable to you, Mr. James Holt?”

“Of course,” I said.

She touched the back of my hand with the tip of a finger. “And Mr. Holt?”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps we could correspond by letters after you depart Panama?”

Before I could answer, the moment was burst by a roar of the crowd. The matador had just entered the ring, resplendent in his clothing, bowing to the spectators. And on the other side, from a cattle chute, a massive black bull had stepped onto the sand, bellowing its blind rage at the sticks with nails used to prod it forward to its eventual death.

“We have arrived at the
tercio de muerte.
” Raquel leaned toward me. “This is the final third, the third of death. I am glad we approach the end and I will no longer have to endure the spectacle. If we could have met anywhere else but here, I would have chosen to do so.”

She pointed at the matador, who carried a small cape of red. “There is the reason that I do not like to ever wear a dress of red. People say the color of the cape is to enrage the bull, but that is not so. The animals are color blind. Instead, it is meant to hide the stains of the bull's blood.”

In the first third of the bullfight—the
tercio de varas
—the matador, distinguished by a suit of gold, had orchestrated his three silver-suited banderilleros in a series of passes with the bull to test the animal's skills and quirks. At the end of that stage, a picador, a man on horseback armed with a lance—
vara
—had stabbed the mound of muscle on the bull's neck, drawing the first blood to weaken it. More important, this injury forced the beast to lower its head during subsequent charges.

All this, Raquel had explained with scorn as it unfolded.

Then had come the
tercio de banderillas,
the middle of the bullfight, where the banderilleros tired the bull further, and with formalized moves, each of the three banderilleros planted two sharp barbed sticks—banderillas—into the bull's shoulders. All this was done to prepare for the final third, when the matador, armed with cape and sword, would engage the bleeding animal in a series of passes designed to weaken the animal more and more.

This, too, Raquel had explained, pointing out with derision that for most of the passes in the tercio de muerte, the matador used a fake sword made of wood, much lighter than steel. Thus, the matador could save energy in the heat of the ring, while the bull continued to exhaust itself.

Given that I raised cattle to ship to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago, I knew my shared revulsion of the event playing out below me was hypocritical, but that didn't lessen my distaste of the slow torture and killing of a magnificent beast.

The hundreds of spectators roared approval as the matador swirled his cape, narrowly dodging each thrust of the enraged bull. That mass approval, however, was tinged by the collective unspoken thrill at the possibility of witnessing a man's violent injury or death.

I had heard the same roars in my exile years in the great arenas of Europe and the large cities of the United States while I rode a nimble pony among thundering bison. As one of the Buffalo Bill riders, I was aware that—with the spear accident an exception—the danger was more illusion than reality. While it was possible to die beneath the hooves of a bison, there was more danger at my ranch in trying to rope a calf away from a mother cow. I guessed it happened the same way below, that spectators were sold on the illusion of danger. Because of the lance wound on the bull's neck and the six banderillas still sticking from the bull's shoulders, and the bull's weakness from loss of blood and the dozens of unsuccessful, enraged charges, the matador's greatest feat was likely not in avoiding the horns but in making it look like each sweep was a close miss.

“As you can see, Mr. Holt,” Raquel said, “it is clearly not a fair fight. That is what angers me. Not the animal's death. Death is part of living, is it not? The bull's fate is as certain as the fate of each of us. No, it is the injustice of the fight itself. The bull faces, in turn, the matador, the picador with lance, the three banderilleros, and finally, the matador again. It is a system designed to give the matador all the advantages, a system meant to slowly bleed the animal and exhaust it. Such a system is what the people of Panama face, especially the women. Those at the top have all the advantages, and they are ruthless. The estate owners use their bankers and lawyers and police as swords and lances and banderillas against the people, never deeply enough to kill in one blow, but the end result is the same. It is the poor who suffer, and I am among the wealthy. This country needs to be changed.”

Here it was. Raquel was about to present the reason she had wanted to meet with me—a plea for her band of rebels that she believed I had threatened in a public display of their captured flag.

Earlier, before the bullfight started, when I asked about Saffire's mother, Raquel had looked away for a long pause, then back at me. I found myself doing the same to her.

“Until last night,” Raquel said when our eyes met again, “I believed I was marrying a solid man. I didn't need to love Raoul, but I thought I could live comfortably with him. I thought that becoming his wife would allow me to accomplish some things in this country, to help those poor. I thought that the satisfaction of raising my own children would fill my heart. And then last night—”

She stopped as if I had interrupted her. But I had not. It was the roar from the crowd, a roar with a life of its own, unlike any of the previous roars.

We both turned to the circle of sand, already dotted with brandy stains of blood.

The matador and bull were no longer alone.

A man had staggered from the door that led to the matador's tunnel. I saw the door close, as if he had been pushed into the arena.

By this man's gait, it was clear that he was drunk.

More clear to me, however, was his identity, his distinctive eye patch a marker of confirmation.

Robert Waldschmidt.

He was bedraggled in his suit, and his hands flipped helplessly as he twirled and tried to comprehend the noise and the sand.

Miskimon stood. As did I.

For a moment, it appeared the matador was unaware of Waldschmidt's presence on the sand. But when the bull rushed past the matador, well beyond the swirl of his cape, the matador turned with the bull and froze at the sight of another man with him in the ring.

Waldschmidt staggered, barely keeping his balance.

The bull moved toward him in a great rush of rage.