The Color of Lightning (23 page)

Those are Tissoyo’s horses.

“I know it. I won them at gambling.”

You are a good gambler.

“Yes.”

m a ry c a me wa lk in g
through the tipis with Cherry’s hand held tightly in her own and two men, one on each side of her. Britt looked up but remained seated and didn’t move or change expres- sion. Her familiar face and the lovely wavy dark hair filled his entire vision for a moment and his heart thudded in one loud report that he thought must have been audible to everyone around him. She was dressed in a long, stained buckskin dress without decoration, pieced together, and high moccasins. Her hair was curled into two round knots on each side of her head. She walked with a slightly unsure step and Britt could see a deep white scar like a miniature

lightning strike, forked and unraveling through her hair. Cherry hurried anxiously along at her mother’s side, dressed much the same but with a glass bead necklace. They looked barbaric and comely and terrified. They stopped at a distance from the fire. Mary bent her head and regarded her feet and her hand gripped in Cherry’s was white-knuckled under the brown skin.

“Where is the boy?”

Hears the Dawn lifted a worn hand to his lips and then replaced it on his knee.

Maybe he doesn’t want to come back to you.

“Where is he?”

Somewhere. Maybe he is hunting with the other young men.

Aperian Crow lifted his hand for attention and then laid it in his lap again.
Now, what you have offered, the gold and the necklaces and silk and so on, the two spotted horses, we will take that for this woman and her daughter.

Britt stood up and indicated that Mary and his daughter should come and sit behind him, and they did so, and no one stopped them. Cherry sat very close to her father and said, “Papa, Mama can’t speak very well. She can’t hardly talk anymore.”

“All right,” said Britt in a low voice. “Hush now.”

go n k o n c l i m b e d u p
between the two boulders and twisted and pushed until she was at the top and concealed by a turned ju- niper. Here she could hear more clearly what was being said. She could see them down below, between two tipis, and if the children running loose in the camp would shut up she could hear much better.

“Your father is stupid.” She turned and called down to Jube. “He offered all he had at once. Now they say they will only give back your mother and sister and not you.” Gonkon twisted her hands together as if she would ruin them. Then she pulled at the fringes on her dress. “He has nothing left to offer.”

Fights in Autumn sat and stared ahead of himself at a tarantula fingering its way down a face of stone.

“Now he says he will offer his riding horse, if they will give you too, and if they tell him where Sain-to-odii died. He doesn’t believe she died.” Gonkon was full of hatred and rage for the man who would take her little girl away from her. “So! You will all have to walk all the way back to the Texas country and you will die on the way. Little Cherry will die on the way.”

Jube had passed his tenth birthday somewhere back on the plains. Perhaps when they had passed the Antelope Hills. He was a child of two names, Kiowa and biblical, a descendant of the kings of Be- nin, the coinage of an afternoon and a night and a day of unspeak- able violence. And now he had become a person who was respected among people who did not care about the color of his skin or any- body’s skin. He was a boy on the edge of becoming a warrior among warriors, who had a foster father named Old Man Komah who was kind to him. He remembered Aperian Crow smiling as he tipped a handful of steel arrowheads into his hand and how they flashed with thin, slitting reflections from the fire.

“My husband will take his riding horse for you.” She slid down and smiled. “Aperian Crow told him my daughter had died back there, and your father believes it.” She pressed her long hair out of her eyes. “You can go. We will not miss you.” The tip of her nose reddened as she swallowed noisily.

ap e r ian c r o w tu rn e d
his head toward Britt.
I will ask someone to go and see if they can find him. We will ask him if he wants to go back with you.

“Very well.”

Your horse is that one with your saddle on him?

“Yes.”

He is good-looking. He is young.

Tissoyo listened intently. In low, whispered Spanish he said to Britt, “You have him. You have them all. If the boy will come.”

Jube came walking out between the tipis by himself. No one was with him. On his shaved head he wore a round fox-fur hat with

small tufts of feathers on each side in front of the ears. A knife in a beaded and fringed sheath was at his side. He saw his father and stopped. His father lifted a hand with the palm flat toward him but otherwise Britt did not move.

Jube came up to the fire.

Ah, he is here after all.

“Yes.”

And so, young man, do you wish to go back to Texas and live with your mother and father again?

No. I want to stay here.

Britt shifted his gaze off to the side, and then to the igneous vaulting landscape behind the village of tipis, searching among the crumbled lava stone and juniper and pine for the glint of a rifle bar- rel, for someone who might have Jube in his sights and would fire if he said the wrong thing.

“I don’t want to go back,” said Jube, in English. “I want to stay here for a while anyway. I like it here. They’re pretty good to me.” Then he turned to Aperian Crow and the Mexican trader and said the same in Kiowa.

Britt knew his child. He saw in Jube’s eyes and the way he held himself that he was lying, but Britt did not know about what. The boy made that odd little gesture with his hand, touching his thumb to his little finger as his hand lay alongside his leg. A compulsive small tapping of the fingers together at the tips when he was caught lying or inventing tales.

“Jube. Are you sure?” “I want to stay.”

So.
Aperian Crow smiled and turned to Jube, looking up from where he sat to the boy standing.

Britt said, “I can’t make you come home.” “I know it.”

“Do you want to grow up here? With these people?”

“Yes, I do.” He did not say Pa, or Father, or Daddy. “Go on. Go on without me.”

“They killed your brother. They killed Joe Carter.”

Jube wavered and opened his lips to speak and didn’t say any- thing for a moment and then he said, “I don’t remember it.” He looked at the ground. “Jim and Joe shouldn’t have been fighting with them.”

“All right.”

“Go on without me.” “All right, Jube.”

The boy turned and walked back between the tipis and then dis- appeared. Britt lifted his head to the men across from him. None of them smiled but regarded him with faces wiped clean of all expres- sion. Britt turned slightly in his cross-legged sitting position and said, “Mary, can you understand me?”

“She can understand you, Papa,” said Cherry.

“Be quiet,” said Britt. “Mary, I will figure this out later, how to get Jube back. I will come back for him. And now I am looking at all these men’s faces and I will remember them. When we are gone, I want you to tell me which man laid a hand on you. Which man adopted my son.”

Behind him was only silence.

Tissoyo vanished among the tipis. Britt brought up the two paint horses and Aperian Crow signaled to a boy to take them away. A woman came to fold up the silk cloth. She ran her hand over it and frowned. She poured the flashing jewelry and the gold coins onto it and carried it off. Britt walked away with his wife and daughter. When he lifted Mary with great care to Cajun’s saddle he heard shouting and laughter around a fire somewhere among the lodges. He turned and saw Tissoyo tossing the red-and-blue sticks in the air with a group of young men. He was going to try to win his horses back.

So they set out again to the southeast, striking directly across the red and broken plains toward the Canadian River. Two adults and a child and the packhorse and Cajun. Britt walked beside Cajun with his hand on the lead rope and Cherry turned backward with damp, wide eyes, watching the village of tipis disappear.

W

Ju be s at i n
Gonkon’s tipi the rest of that day with his box of bones and stones and scraps of silver. He slept uneasily that night and woke up several times to listen to Aperian Crow breathing heavily beside Gonkon and then turned and closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. He did not want them to know he couldn’t sleep. The hours went by like a slow drip of water. Finally he heard the night herd coming in with the older boys behind them shouting. Then the camp crier calling out that the people would play the stick game again that night with their Comanche visitor and that some Kiowa-Apache scouts had come in. The scouts would have news and stories and gossip.

Jube ran all that next day with the other boys. They turned over rocks along the thin pools of the Cimarron and found scorpions. Jube showed them how he could pick one up by snatching at its tail and imprisoning the stinger between two fingers. He threw it at Kiisah. Kiisah dodged to one side in a curved motion and fell into the cold water. They took up bows and arrows and shot at a wand. Then the hours passed and the sun threw long shadows across the lava of Black Mesa. Jube heard Gonkon calling his name in a bright and merry voice and he could smell
tamal
and burned feathers and some kind of bird roasting. Aperian Crow walked by him and laid his hand on Jube’s bald head.

“Go tonight with the older boys on night herd,” said Aperian Crow. “Take my black horse.”

Jube looked down at the ground to hide his sudden pride and happiness.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

Jube sat on the black gelding and felt through his thighs and seat how easily the horse handled. This gelding was a man’s horse, a warhorse, powerful and sweet to the hand. Even Jube, a lightweight ten-year-old boy, could make the gelding do as he asked. By dark he and the older boys had the horses grazing and dozing on a grassy flat between two anvil-headed mesas. There was no moon. Jube had his bow and shafts in a quiver at his back and his knife, and buck- led to his belt the ancient Spanish spur. After a while he could tell

he was a distance away from the other young men. He could not smell them, their woodsmoke odor, or hear their short, low whistles that they used when they shivvied the horses. Jube sat silently for a long minute and his breathing tightened like a knot, and then in a sudden motion he turned the black horse southeast, toward a gap between the anvil-headed mesas where the Cimarron had cut its way among them. He kept the horse to a quiet walk for a mile and then he pushed the gelding into a gallop. His father and mother and sister were two days ahead of him and because he had said he would stay with the Kiowa and then run off in the dark of night his father did not have to pay for him with Cajun, his only riding horse. His mother could ride. Jube had stolen himself and Aperian Crow’s best horse.

He rode with the reins taut in his hands because he was afraid the gelding would get away from him, but Aperian Crow had put a severe Spanish ring bit on the bridle. The horse slowed to a skidding walk and threw Jube forward and so he rode with the reins looser. He could barely see where he was going. They galloped through the shallows of the Cimarron River to the south bank and left deep tracks in the sand, but Jube did not know what else to do. He wanted to stay on the north side for a mile or so where he would not leave clear tracks on the stony soil but on the north side cliffs crowded in close to the river with jumbled, broken rock and thick stands of short cedar that were as stiff as fencing. He had to cross to the south bank into the sand. Behind him he left deep tracks. It worried him and made the skin on his back crawl. He had seen what was done to captives who were recovered. He had helped do those things to them.

After half a mile he was out of the sand and then many hours later he came out of the broken country and now the landscape was flatter. It rolled in waves toward the southeast. Toward home. The horse stumbled on a scattered series of rocks and Jube pulled him up, then pressed him into a trot again. Seven miles an hour over this cracked earth and the occasional stands of short grass, the stars above.

By dawn he was falling forward on the horse’s mane. They had come a very long way, and yet he was still afraid. He wanted to be with his father, who carried a Henry repeating rifle and a big Smith and Wesson police revolver. He was only ten and a captive and he had stolen a Koitsenko’s horse. They could well catch him and kill him and his mother and father and Cherry. It was too late to turn back. He was jouncing now on the back of the trotting horse, too tired to swing with the slight jars of the trot. After a while he fell off, holding tight to the reins.

The black horse stopped. He was breathing hard. He moved to- ward Jube’s prone body to ease the pressure of the ring bit. Jube sat up and stared at the horse’s legs. He sat on the ground as dumb as if he had been drugged, tired beyond caring. They had covered dozens of miles. It was not enough. It would never be enough.

Jube crawled to his feet and then threw himself over the horse’s back on his stomach and then righted himself. He pulled out his bow and unstrung it and tied the looped reins to his wrist with the bowstring. They went on at a walk under the flat rays of the rising sun. It was spring and the sun rose more and more to the north. He reckoned that his father would cross the level country between the Cimarron and the Canadian and then when he struck upon the Canadian he would follow it south and east. Jube would catch them somewhere on the Canadian River.

If he tried to remember, it seemed that when he had come north as a captive they had traveled for four days between the two rivers. Now he was alone and could travel faster, but also he had no adult to tell him which way to go. Maybe it was a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred miles between the two rivers. He had forgotten how far a mile was. But he remembered long ago his father saying that even a strong man could not make fifty miles a day, or maybe he had said forty, or thirty or seventy. Jube wobbled and swayed on the horse’s back. If anything happened he would crawl flat-bellied into the grass and lie very still until he could get his bow strung. He would die before they took him again.